My first post on Google+ was a questioning

I’m not sure I like Google Plus?

to which Google+ obliged with

Nice post!

Need I say more?

Just a quick note: TED is coming to Jordan in the form of TEDxDeadSea this Saturday (April 30, 2011), at the Kempinski Hotel in (cue tautology) the Dead Sea, Jordan.

I’ve been honored with the opportunity to speak at this event, and will be discussing my take on entrepreneurship and some of the obstacles of running an international company from the Middle East.

I’m looking forward to all the exciting speakers and performers that will be at TEDxDeadSea and would love to meet anyone interested in engaging in some quality, thought-provoking talk! In the meantime, you can follow me @mqudsi, NeoSmart Technologies at @neosmart, and TEDxDeadSea at @TEDxDeadSea…

A quick search for “git tower” on Twitter returns results limited to the past six days, only. (A quick shout-out: Tower.app for OS X gets our award for best Mac development tool of 2010!) And the same goes for searches for “NeoSmart” or “EasyBCD.” (Unfortunately, none of these topics are anywhere near “trending” on twitter, and the low volume of search results serves to prove the point).

Whether this is a case of Twitter purposely capping duration of search results to cope with high load times (each new search is taking ~.6 seconds, which is rather a lot!) or if somehow this data has been lost due to the server outage, it’s cases like these that really illustrate the need for “Twitter archives” that maintain a persistent, searchable store of Twitter feeds. While 3rd party Twitter search utilities *do* exist, nothing official and guaranteed exists as of yet.

Let’s hope this capping of search results is only temporary and that earlier results will become available as the days go by. It would really suck to lose something as basic as fulltext search for tweets older than a certain amount of time (especially if it’s a low number)!

Follow NeoSmart Technologies @NeoSmart on twitter!

A post on twitpic earlier today asks

Can’t get why #flotilla is not trending; censored, why?

and articles on the web search for explanations, since it’s very clear that flotilla is indeed a trending topic, going by the trendistic results (see below).

Some are saying that twitter needs to manually approve trending topics to prevent abuse, etc. but there’s something that doesn’t add up: why is twitter actively blocking searches for #flotilla?

You can check it out for yourself: for the past hour or so, searching twitter for #flotilla turns up the dreaded “Something is technically wrong” page but searching for any other #topic works!

As they say, the proof is in the pudding (images after the jump):

Update #1 İsrail is now appearing on the Trending Topics list, but the search for it also returns a technical error. Reports indicate that these searches are being blocked from the USA (LA-region), Middle East, Sweden, UK, and more. However, search is working from Germany and Denmark. Check back for more updates.

Update #2 According to twitter PR, it was a technical issue and they’ll "post more info" shortly. No sign of that follow-up info yet though.. makes it hard to believe.

Searches for #flotilla:

Searches for #somethingelse:

Flotilla as a trending topic on trendistic:

• 2.31 years
• 2 years, 3 months, 23 days
• 27 months, 24 days
• 120 weeks, 4 days
• 844 days

Obviously 2 years is a long time… but 2048 is an equally great number.

Thank you!

But Dan Frommer’s allegations in his latest post on BI don’t really add up. Frommer contends that the official twitter app for Android, which only works on Android v2.1 and up, is proof that Google’s mobile OS isn’t as “unified” as the competitors, and that this is a sign of early-onset serious fragmentation that will only get worse down the line. The thing is… it’s not.

It’s true that Android, available for deployment on any device manufacturers are willing to bundle it with, faces certain compatibility issues. With a multitude of devices, each with its own mostly-unique set of hardware and features, creating software that will run the same for everyone isn’t as easy as it is on the iPhone. But it’s nowhere near as much of an issue as Frommer makes it out to be.

For one thing, his “proof in the pudding” example of the official twitter app being unsupported except on v2.1+ has nothing to do with fragmentation. As any platform grows, matures, and gains new APIs, backwards compatibility is never a guarantee (unless you are Microsoft, that is!). It’s only natural that developers will need to set a cut-off point for which devices and platforms will be supported. And this isn’t an Android problem – every device out there, be it a cell phone,  a laptop, or a mainframe suffers from the same problem. Take the iPhone for example. Apple’s own OS 4 will be completely unavailable on the original iPhone. And even on the iPhone 3G, it’ll be there only in a highly-crippled form with no multi-tasking support.

The thing is, minimum OS/hardware specifications are not an indicator of platform fragmentation. They have absolutely nothing to do with it. While Android definitely does have some issues related to the wide range of hardware upon which it’s deployed, even that doesn’t necessarily have to result in fragmentation.

So you have a device that has a GPS chip and another that does not. Obviously a mobile map routing solution written for the first won’t work on the second – but who would expect/want it to anyway? A game that relies on the presence of accelerometer? Well, it’s not targeting users without an accelerometer in their device anyway! The point is – so long as the code goes through a single API to access any particular feature – whether or not that feature is actually available isn’t “fragmentation” at all. It’s just economics: you get what you pay for.

What would be fragmentation is if a mapping application for one Android handheld w/ GPS support doesn’t work on another Android handheld that also has GPS support just because the chips are different. Or because it has different drivers. But that’s not the case here! Android gives you a non-fragmented API to access the functionality of the hardware beneath – should your device support those features in the first place.

And that’s just about it. Pointing out that twitter requires OS v2.1 and above is a silly reason to accuse Android of being a fragmented platform – it’s like saying the iPhone is a failed experiment because an application designed to take advantage of multi-tasking 6 months from now won’t run on a device released 3 years prior: who cares!

4Chan, a group of immature script-kiddies that anonymously post online and organize “attacks” against various groups, organizations, and websites, are it again. This time, it’s not the Church of Scientology they’re attacking, but innocent children. As the BBC reports, members of 4Chan have been uploading videos containing explicit sexual content in droves to YouTube today, specifically targeting children.

The videos uploaded by members of 4Chan consisted of children’s clips that start off innocently enough, showing cartoons and other rated-G material usually targeted at children around 5 years old, but soon enough change to videos of adults engaged in sexual activity. 4Chan has the uncanny ability to strike a nerve, driving even the most liberal of internet users to condemn their behavior as pure evil. The problem is, the anonymous 4Chan members are perversely motivated by this sort of response, and cannot be shamed into bringing an end to their disgusting activities.

This isn’t the first time 4Chan does something that can only be described as pure evil. In March of 2008, 4Chan members flooded an internet board for victims of epilepsy with fast-moving and colorful images intending – and succeeding – in bringing about photosensitive seizures in visitors to the site. The last attack was carefully planned to occur just over the Easter weekend, guaranteeing less moderator activity on the forum and giving the attackers a bigger window of opportunity to maximize their damage.

The difference between the behavior that 4Chan engages in and what just about every other script kiddy organization on the web does is that 4Chan doesn’t do it to prove a point. They don’t do it just to prove they can, they do it to hurt. And the malicious intent makes all the difference. The internet isn’t the best place to pride yourself in holding the moral high ground, but in cases like this, it’s near impossible to understand just what it is that makes people like this tick.

Obviously there is no clear solution to bringing about the end of groups like 4Chan, but someone needs to do something, or else we’re all guilty of standing by and letting evil go.

If you’re like most people, the answer is not much. But there are people out there that really care, and with good reason. If you’re the FBI, Oprah Winfrey, or one of the million other celebrities currently on Twitter, you probably don’t want someone out there passing themselves off as yourself while posting fake updates to an account literally millions are watching.

Some people to whom money is not an issue already pay thousands of dollars for meaningless SSL certificates – something tucked away in the corner of your browser window that no one pays much attention to. But imagine if Twitter were to start offering “verified accounts” that have been authenticated as belonging to a particular person or institute… how many of these celebrity accounts would suddenly turn into cash cows for Twitter?

Right now, it looks like that’s what Twitter has in mind. In a recent blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone talks about the upcoming limited release of “verified accounts” in order to curb fraud amongst accounts claiming to belong to celebrities. There is no mention of charging customers for this service, but the way it’s worded, that is pretty much taken for granted as a future step in the process:

The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set.

And later:

When we do start testing Account Verification, we will be sure to provide ample methods for feedback. Initially, verification will not be tested with businesses. However, we do see an opportunity in that arena so we’ll keep you posted when we have something to share.

That’s not to say this isn’t a good idea though. Has Twitter finally found a way to make some serious cash without alienating its userbase, providing “additional features” no one really needs but can make them plenty of cash from the more high-profile accounts currently on the site? God knows Paris Hilton, et. al. would be willing to pay the cash, while the rest of us rely on word of mouth, links back from official websites, and common sense to give our followers the confidence they need to trust the updates we post.

Follow me on Twitter @mqudsi.

And the two companies that have impressed us with their support? Pubmatic and Assembla – both excellent startups that we highly recommend in their individual fields. Pubmatic is an ad-revenue optimization service that intelligently chooses between different ad providers to maximize your ad impressions and CPM rates. Assembla provides quality hosting of SVN and other services that cover all aspects of the software development cycles for teams & small companies.

A couple of days ago, Kaspersky antivirus began flagging the ad-frames from Pubmatic as possible attempts to download a virus. Kaspersky is, of course, famous for its high false-positive counts (though it’s protection is great, nothing is without its cost). Pubmatic support staff were incredibly quick to respond to our queries, and immediately contacted all the involved parties to resolve the problem in a timely fashion.

As for Assembla – we’d been using their SVN hosting for a couple of years now. It’s thanks to them that we were able to develop software efficiently back before we had our infrastructure and development set up and going. They’ve recently overhauled their accounts system and have suspended free accounts, and they’ve been nothing short of wonderful helping us migrate our data to our own servers (data portability is a sensitive topic these days – but Assembla clearly knows how finicky developers are when it comes to ownership!) and helped us wrap everything up nice and clean.

Thanks to both these great companies for their wonderful customer service and their dedication to their userbase. If you’re looking to outsource your development services or for a better ad management system, there’s no one we recommend more than Assembla and Pubmatic.

Facebook recently conducted a poll which showed up on the homepage newsfeed, and asked Facebook members just how exactly did they think Facebook’s “friend finder” worked when it prompted them for their email address & password in order to get a list of contacts. The numbers pretty much speak for themselves, here’s what they looked like near the end of the campaign:

Now ignore the dark blue bar: it’s a red herring and doesn’t contain any interesting info. The real juicy bit is the “Yes” option, and its 20% response.

20% of Facebook’s 80 Million active users (give or take) believe that the passwords for their email addresses are being stored when they use the Friend Finder…. and that doesn’t bother them in the least. That’s sixteen million people who don’t give a damn about their privacy, the contents of their email, or who has control of their entire online personas.

This is a subject that’s been chewed half to death already countless times by people far more in the know than myself; Jeff Atwood’s excellent article on the topic covers the dangers of sites asking for users’ email addresses & passwords, and – far more importantly – presents several more secure alternatives for web application developers looking to expand their social networks.

To put things in perspective, take a look at this downright horrifying tale on ReadWriteWeb about software that prompted users for their email addresses & passwords, then proceeded to save them for malicious use… then realize that 16 million Facebook users out there don’t care if this happens to them. Think about all the private, sensitive, confidential information available on your email account and just how truly terrible it would be for that info to fall in the wrong hands.

Of course all this begs the question: who’s to blame for this bout of end-user stupidity (for lack of a more politically-correct term)? Is it naïveté/trust in the goodwill of others that gets users to give out such sensitive data to people (Facebook has 500 employees!) they don’t know from Adam? Or is it that they just don’t get how dangerous it can be (see the ReadWriteWeb article for proof)? Or is it, maybe, that they’ve simply gotten accustomed to being asked for their email address and corresponding password by “trusted” sites they love to visit, too caught up in the “gather as many friends as you can” game to give a second thought to identity theft and fraud?

Personally, I can recall a time when most “normal people” I know would refuse flat-out to share such sensitive data with a site (phishing, tech support, etc. obviously excluded); but in the wake of “Web 2.0” it’s become so normal to ask for email addresses and passwords that no one ever gives it a second thought.

And it’s not just Facebook. To be totally frank, even if Facebook were to store end users’ passwords in their database, the access to that info would probably be very highly guarded… but when every new social network on the block is suddenly doing the same thing – you can get a good picture of just how easy it would be to steal users’ passwords.

MQ’s 3 Steps for World Domination

1. Send out an email purporting to be from “the hottest new social network around” informing the recipient that their “friends” want them to join: “Click here to show Peter you’re a real friend!”
2. Get the user to register a new account – make the procedure as pain-free and simple as possible… and right then and there on the registration page ask for the user’s email address and password so as to “make it easy to tell all your friends you care and get popular really fast…”
3. Profit.

As soon as it’s OK for one person to do it, it’ll be OK for everyone to… and then we’ll be in too deep to do anything about it.

So why does Facebook – after polling their end users and seeing just how dire the situation is – continue to use the same flawed mechanism of harvesting email addresses… especially when better, safer alternatives exist?

And this is your internet on drugs bandwidth meters:

Cartoon originally published by Toles for The Washington Post.
[source]

Richard Stallman: legendary founder of the Free Software Foundation, purveyor of the GPL, defender of open source. And – as of today – expert FUD manipulator.

Obviously someone was seriously pissed off at the abundance of (largely positive) press coverage Bill Gates has been receiving as he stepped down from his final roles at Microsoft.. and it appears Mr. Stallman just couldn’t bear to let the man he hates more than any other step down without getting that last word in.

In an article by Richard Stallman published on BBC today, Stallman pulled back no punches bashing not only Bill Gates, Microsoft, and makers of proprietary software everywhere but also took the incredibly cheap shot of accusing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of working to ruin the very countries they’re trying to help:

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

Never mind the fact that those are unsubstantiated rumors following money trails several-hundred pockets deep – what does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have to do with Free Software? Is Stallman so desperate to make Mr. Gates out to be the bad guy that he’d sink this low?

Stallman, one of first people to accuse people of spreading FUD to further their opinions, doesn’t stop there:

Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

It said, in effect, "If you don’t let me keep you divided and helpless, I won’t write the software and you won’t have any. Surrender to me, or you’re lost!"

Here Stallman is referring to Gates’ now-famous letter asking people illegally copying, distributing, and using Altair Basic to stop. Stallman somehow neglects to mention that – regardless of whether morally acceptable or not – Microsoft had the legal right to demand payment in exchange for their software. Ignore for a second whether or not Bill Gates and Microsoft were in the right or in the wrong to ask for payment in exchange for their work – is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?

It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying. Gates chose to ask for money, users (as Richard Stallman himself has advocated on many occasions in the past) should be looking for an alternative if they don’t want to front the cash.

Who Richard Stallman thinks he’s kidding, we don’t know. But he’s obviously crossed that line that shouldn’t be crossed; apparently desperate enough to stop Microsoft the minute he senses an opening… even if it means spreading FUD, making pointless accusations, and generally talking nonsense to get his point across. This isn’t any way for a respected figure in the open source community to act, especially not when it comes to someone who has – whether Stallman likes it or not – contributed as much to the tech community as Bill Gates has.

You’ve got to hand it to the Facebook team though, they have scaling and uptime perfected down to an art. For instance, when servers are due for updates, the maintenance is performed in a staggered manner, updating one set of servers at a time as attested to by the unavailability of certain Facebook accounts while others can still be accessed.

If your account is on one of he servers being serviced/maintained/upgraded, you’ll see a message like this:

If you have another account or a friend nearby, it’s quite likely that a different login attempt will work just fine.

In our opinion, the latest wave of downtime for Facebook accounts is due to the upcoming “major overhaul” to the way Facebook profiles and pages are displayed and interacted with… at least, we hope that’s the reason; because it would royally suck if Facebook were to go the way of some other once-popular services that became victims of their own popularity and lack of scalability.

This morning I came across such an event that penetrated that virtual suite of armor when I read this Wired.com article about a recent script-kiddy attack on a web forum run by The Epilepsy Foundation – the news is so bad it makes one’s blood boil. A group of crackers launched a bone-chillingly cold-blooded and thoughtless attack on the members of the epilepsy forum. They weren’t looking for money, private info, fame, or acknowledgement — they were merely searching for a way to cause as much physical and mental harm as possible.

Epilepsy, as defined by Wikipedia:

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder that is characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms due to abnormal, excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy at any one time.

This particular attack focused on hacking the forum to display images that triggered epileptic attacks in visitors; invoked by a series of images flashing at pre-determined intervals showing certain shapes and patterns that are known to cause seizures to people suffering from epilepsy.

Everyone has seen the photosensitive seizure warning on video games at one point in time or the other – they’re there for a reason. Epileptic attacks are not a joke, and purposely invoking such an attack on innocent website visitors as some sick person or persons’ sick idea of a joke must not be tolerated.

What’s even worse is that the first round of attack was not enough for the perpetrators. Instead, a second attack followed which used javascript exploits to redirect visitors to more-complex images and animations; affecting even more people.

The compromised forum posts and code were available for approximately 12 hours:

But she’s satisfied with the Epilepsy Foundation’s relatively fast response to the attack, about 12 hours after it began on Easter weekend. "We all really appreciate them for giving us this forum and giving us this place to find each other," she says.

While that may not seem like too long of a time, if you consider the fact that these are human beings being attacked and not machines or web-browsers then 12 hours turns into a lifetime – after all, for some people this really is a matter of life or death.

At the moment evidence suggests that "Anonymous," a group of crackers recently come to fame for their web-cracking endeavors; the true identity of the perpetrator(s) remains unknown. But whoever it is, this kind of ridiculous, immature, and down-right evil attacks most not be tolerated by the tech community at large.