What Apple’s Acquisition of AuthenTec Means

Big news: Apple has just scooped up AuthenTecfor nearly $360 million. Why is this important? Because AuthenTec makes fingerprint sensors for use in mobile devices. The implication of this purchase is that future versions of the iPhone and iPad may have a fingerprint reader embedded in them, and that could be a pretty big deal. As Apple goes, so goes the rest of the mobile universe.

In other words, instead of entering an easily hackable or easily forgettable password to unlock your phone or tablet, you’d just stick your thumb on it. Or instead of entering a password on your bank’s Web site – hoping that it’s not really a phishing site in disguise – you’d use a thumbprint, which only the real bank would be able to verify.

Have I mentioned how much passwords suck? I think I have. Biometrics are probably the best solution to avoiding passwords or their clumsy alternatives (like text authentication or RFID fobs), and so Apple’s acquisition of AuthenTec is pretty significant.

Of course, digital fingerprint readers have been around for years, and they haven’t exactly taken off. One reason is that they’ve been kind of wonky. I remember trying out a fingerprint reading device from a company that misfired and being completely locked out of my computer – twice – while on deadline. That was not a pretty phone call to support. I think I chewed out the CEO on that one.

But that was a few years ago. It’s safe to assume they’ve gotten better, and that Apple’s general wizardry with all things tech will make them better still.

There are other problems with fingerprints and other biometrics that are not so easily solved. Two years ago, an Australian high schooler demonstrated you could fool a fingerprint reader using a Gummy Bear. He made a replica of a friend’s fingerprint using the candy, then successfully applied it to a fingerprint reader. It turns out that gelatin – the primary ingredient in Gummy Bears besides sugar – has the same capacitance as human skin.

Fingerprint readers don’t work the same for all people and all ethnicities (really). The drier your skin tends to be, the less reliable they are. If you’ve cut or burned your finger, the print might not be recognizable.

(According to a FAQ on AuthenTec’s site, it uses “sub-surface” technology to evaluate a fingerprint, presumably to detect heat or a pulse, and would not be fooled by the Gummy Bear trick. It also claims to be unaffected by damage or the amount of oil on the skin.)

Let’s assume Apple (or whoever) solves all these problems. The biggest security problem with  biometrics is where the matching information is stored.  Somewhere there needs to be a database that matches up your fingerprint (or voice print, facial ID, iris scan, gait analysis, etc) with your name and other personal information. If someone hacks that database, they can theoretically swap someone else’s name or biometric signatures in place of yours – completely bollixing your identity in a way that would be difficult if not impossible to recover from. So biometric data is only as secure as the database in which it is stored.

The other big problem with biometrics is the same one that comes from any kind of data retention: Once your fingerprint is captured, who else has access to it? Will that data remain local, or will it be stored in the cloud? Who’s responsible for it? By giving your thumbprint to your iPad, are you also effectively giving it to Uncle Sam, if he shows up at the manufacturer’s door with a warrant?

In short: Who owns your fingers?

Got a question about social media? TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan may have the answer (and if not, he’ll make something up). Visit his snarky, occasionally NSFW blog eSarcasm or follow him on Twitter: @tynanwrites. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-to’s, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

Now read this:

Facebook’s ‘man in the middle’ attack on our data

Making Facebook private won’t protect you

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Researcher Creates Proof-of-concept Malware That Infects BIOS, Network Cards

Security researcher Jonathan Brossard created a proof-of-concept hardware backdoor called Rakshasa that replaces a computer’s BIOS (Basic Input Output System) and can compromise the operating system at boot time without leaving traces on the hard drive.

Brossard, who is CEO and security research engineer at French security company Toucan System, demonstrated how the malware works at the Defcon hacker conference on Saturday, after also presenting it at the Black Hat security conference on Thursday.

Rakshasa, named after a demon from the Hindu mythology, is not the first malware to target the BIOS — the low-level motherboard firmware that initializes other hardware components. However, it differentiates itself from similar threats by using new tricks to achieve persistency and evade detection.

Rakshasa replaces the motherboard BIOS, but can also infect the PCI firmware of other peripheral devices like network cards or CD-ROMs, in order to achieve a high degree of redundancy.

Rakshasa was built with open source software. It replaces the vendor-supplied BIOS with a combination of Coreboot and SeaBIOS, alternatives that work on a variety of motherboards from different manufacturers, and also writes an open source network boot firmware called iPXE to the computer’s network card.

All of these components have been modified so they don’t display anything that could give their presence away during the booting process. Coreboot even supports custom splashscreens that can mimic the ones of the replaced BIOSes.

Existent computer architecture gives every peripheral device equal access to RAM (random access memory), Brossard said. “The CD-ROM drive can very well control the network card.”

This means that even if someone were to restore the original BIOS, rogue firmware located on the network card or the CD-ROM could be used to reflash the rogue one, Brossard said.

The only way to get rid of the malware is to shut down the computer and manually reflash every peripheral, a method that is impractical for most users because it requires specialized equipment and advanced knowledge.

Brossard created Rakshasa to prove that hardware backdooring is practical and can be done somewhere in the supply chain, before a computer is delivered to the end user. He pointed out that most computers, including Macs, come from China.

However, if an attacker would gain system privileges on a computer through a different malware infection or an exploit, they could also theoretically flash the BIOS in order to deploy Rakshasa.

The remote attack method wouldn’t work in all cases, because some PCI devices have a physical switch that needs to be moved in order to flash a new firmware and some BIOSes have digital signatures, Brossard said.

However, Coreboot has the ability to load a PCI extension firmware that takes precedence before the one written on the network card, therefore bypassing the physical switch problem.

The attack “totally works when you have physical access, but remotely it only works 99 percent of the time,” Brossard said.

The iPXE firmware that runs on the network card is configured to load a bootkit — malicious code that gets executed pior to the operating system and can infect it before any security products start.

Some known malware programs store the bootkit code inside the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the hard disk drive. This makes it easy for computer forensics specialists and antivirus products to find and remove.

Rakshasa is different because it uses the iPXE firmware to download the bootkit from a remote location and load it into RAM every time the computer boots.

“We never touch the file system,” Brossard said. If you send the hard drive to a company and ask them to analyze it for malware they won’t be able to find it, he said.

In addition, after the bootkit has done its job, which is to perform malicious modifications of the kernel — the highest-privileged part of the operating system — it can be unloaded from memory. This means that a live analysis of the computer’s RAM won’t be able to find it either.

Detecting this type of compromise is very hard because programs that run inside the operating system get their information from the kernel. The bootkit could very well fake this information, Brossard said.

The iPXE firmware is capable of communicating over Ethernet, Wi-Fi or Wimax and supports a variety of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. This gives potential attackers a lot of options.

For example, Rakshasa can download the bootkit from a random blog as a file with a .pdf extension. It can also send the IP addresses and other network information of the infected computers to a predefined email address.

The attacker can push configuration updates or a new version of the malware over an encrypted HTTPS connection by communicating directly with the network card firmware and the command and control server can be rotated among different websites to make it harder for law enforcement or security researchers to take it down.

Brossard did not release Rakshasa publicly. However, since most of its components are open source, someone with sufficient knowledge and resources could replicate it. A research paper that explains the malware’s implementation in more detail is available online.

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Can Open Source Save HP?

You seldom hear about it, but Hewlett-Packard has long been a supporter of open source. The company contributes to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and has hired several people who were formerly leaders of the Debian Project, including the redoubtable Bdale Garbee. HP also participates in many smaller projects and invests plenty of effort in governance and community activities. Despite its work engaging the community and ensuring HP printers are usable from Linux, open source seems to have made little impact on HP’s software portfolio (alas, poor WebOS).

At OSCON last week in Portland, I had the chance to speak once again with Phil Robb, the director for HP’s Open Source Program Office. My discussion with him last year was inauspicious; he explained WebOS’s importance to HP, but by the time I published my (suitably sceptical) article, the product was canceled. Since then, Robb has kept his job title but moved from HP Labs to the legal department. He was joined for the discussion by his new boss Eileen Evans, now associate general counsel for open source strategy and intellectual property at HP but once a key lawyer at Sun Microsystems.

HP and the OpenStack CloudThe context for the conversation was HP’s launch of a new cloud service. Back in April, HP announced it was joining OpenStack as a top-level Platinum member, and since then has launched a full implementation of OpenStack under the HP Cloud brand. OSCON saw HP Cloud take two services live into commercial production, together with a $20 free trial offer for three months. HP Cloud mas moved in a matter of months from me-too gesture into a production item. The company seems serious both about competing with Amazon.com at all levels and engaging OpenStack in the true spirit of open source.

HP Cloud is still emerging but already offers production-quality object storage and content delivery, and it has compute, block storage, and a relational database in beta (derived from MySQL; I am told it uses Percona). The cloud has come to production amazingly quickly, thanks largely to using open source code — rather than inventing almost everything, as was the case with the pioneering Amazon. The SLAs offered by HP will reflect a good deal of confidence in the offering, with instant credit for any loss of availability, and the company has staffed up to make those SLAs real — notably hiring open source veteran Brian Aker as a senior fellow on the cloud services team.

But the most important aspects of the offering come from open source. The fact that HP is implementing OpenStack means customers will have an open choice of provider as public clouds grow, which quells fears of lock-in. Better, the eventual growth of compatible vendors in the market allows the risk of the failure of one provider to be mitigated; it’s even possible to blend multiple providers using the likes of Canonical’s JuJu cloud provisioning and control tool, demonstrated by Mark Shuttleworth in his OSCON keynote.

This is corporate open source done the right way. HP has benefited hugely from software freedom, bringing a highly capable and comprehensive product offering to market in a very short time. But unlike “open core” providers where the freedom stops with the vendor, HP seems to be leaving open source’s four freedoms intact to benefit customers.

Restructuring Around Open Source
That’s why the changes I discovered from Robb and Evans were significant. In the past, the Open Source Program Office at HP has been distant from software product activity. Robb told me his role remains unchanged: coordinating open source engagements internally, representing HP in public activities, and ensuring a consistent approach from the various parts of HP’s business that engage open source.

But the move into the legal team, together with the arrival of Evans, both seem to signal change led by HP CEO Meg Whitman. Perhaps because of her experiences using the flexibility and cost control that software freedom delivered to create eBay, Whitman is far more of an advocate of open source than her predecessors. That means Evans and Robb have executive cover to accompany their more central location in the company.

For such a historically conservative company, HP has suffered more than its share of unhappiness. The fall of Mark Hurd followed swiftly by the amazing misappointment of Léo Apotheker and the seemingly random strategic changes he attempted have all dented confidence in HP’s survival. While the marketing around HP Cloud wants us to believe the open source story, the way Whitman has overseen the rapid construction of a strong bench for open source leadership gives me far more confidence that there’s real change afoot that may actually rescue HP.

This article, “Can open source save HP?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

For more IT analysis and commentary on emerging technologies, visit InfoWorld.com. Story copyright © 2011 InfoWorld Media Group. All rights reserved.

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Microsoft Admits Its Risks with Surface

Microsoft last week confirmed what most analysts and company watchers had concluded last month when the firm unveiled its own tablet, that it risks alienating the computer makers which account for the bulk of Windows sales.

In a document submitted Thursday to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft acknowledged the potential problem.

“Our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform,” Microsoft said in the 10-K filed for the second calendar quarter of 2012.

The New York Times’ Bits blog first reported on Microsoft’s SEC filing.

The statement appeared in the section dedicated to risk factors, where Microsoft also noted that smartphones and tablets — device categories dominated by rivals Google and Apple — threatened its business.

“Users may increasingly turn to these devices to perform functions that would have been performed by personal computers in the past,” the filing stated. “Even if many users view these devices as complementary to a personal computer, the prevalence of these devices may make it more difficult to attract applications developers to our platforms.”

It was the first time Microsoft described the competitive hazards of mobile devices in such blunt language.

We’ve Already Noticed

Some might see Microsoft’s statement as an after-the-fact admission of reality.

PC sales have stagnated — IDC and Gartner recently said second quarter numbers were down 0.1 percent from the same period in 2011 — and the consensus is that the flat sales can be partly attributed to buyers shifting their dollars to tablets and smartphones.

Although Microsoft has publicly sidestepped the chance that the Surface might antagonize OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), analysts assumed as much almost immediately.

Surface and a choice of covers.

How OEMs will react, however, has remained mostly a mystery.

On the day Microsoft unveiled the Surface, Carolina Milanesi of Gartner said, “With Surface, Microsoft has just made it even harder for every ODM [original design manufacturer) out there to compete in the tablet market — except for Apple, that is.”

But other analysts, like IDC’s Tom Mainelli, said an estrangement was unlikely. “Partners aren’t going anywhere,” said Mainelli in a June interview. “Most of them have tried Android tablets, but without any success. So although this might irritate them, Microsoft knows that [the OEMs] need them.”

Ballmer Emphasizes Partnerships

In fact, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has continued to praise OEMs and their role rather than to admit any fear that they may shun either Windows or the Windows tablet market because of the Surface.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

At the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto two weeks ago, Forbes publisher Rich Karlsgaard conducted a staged interview with Ballmer where the chief executive claimed Surface was simply a “design point,” or guide for OEMs, not a replacement for what they might design and sell themselves.

“Surface is just a design point. It will have a distinct place in what’s a broad Windows ecosystem,” Ballmer said. “And the importance of the thousands of partners that we have that design and produce Windows computers will not diminish.”

Microsoft has not yet disclosed important facts about the Surface tablets, notably the price of the two models it will sell, one powered by Windows RT, another by Windows 8. The Surface RT, as many have come to call the former, will rely on an ARM processor and will launch the same day as Windows 8, Oct. 26. The Windows 8 Surface, based on an Intel processor, will ship in late January 2013.

In the WPC presentation earlier this month, Ballmer said the company “may sell a few million” Surface tablets, but did not put that into a timespan context.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com.

Read more about tablets in Computerworld’s Tablets Topic Center.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2011 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.

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Does Apple Rely Too Much on the iPhone?

Last week Apple’s disappointing financial results announcement sent shockwaves through the stock markets in both the U.S. and Asia, with the lower than expected sales of the iPhone being a matter of concern for some.

The latest filing in the Samsung versus Apple case shows why the iPhone is so important to Apple’s bottom line. It appears that Apple’s gross margins from iPhone sales are a lot higher than the gross margins it makes from sales of its other wonder-product, the iPad.

Apple can see as much as 58 percent profit margin on sales of the iPhone, while the iPad can see as much as 32 percent profit margin, according to the filing.

Apple doesn’t typically disclose profit margin information, notes Reuters in its report.

It’s the high profit margin that Apple is able to make on the iPhone that has made the companies meteoric rise in value possible, Apple is the biggest company by market cap (currently $538.81 billion). It is the importance of the iPhone on Apple’s bottom line that has analysts and investors concerned.

Related:

Apple stock falls, is Apple too reliant on the iPhone?

Apple results won’t impress, slow iPhone sales blamed

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Social Networks Join in Olympic Games

As Olympic athletes take to a global stage in London this week, participants, coaches, and fans are expected to take to their favorite social networks in record numbers.

Whenever something big happens — tornadoes, political unrest, the World Cup — people turn to sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to voice protest, share their excitement and connect with their friends.

And with more people than ever using social networks, the 2012 London Olympics are expected to light up the major social networks over the next few weeks. (See also “10 Great Apps for the London 2012 Olympics: Bask in the Glory of Sport.”)

The athletes and contests in these games are expected to be pinned, liked, tweeted, plussed and uploaded more than in any other Olympic Games.

“If there’s intrigue or when there are big moments, sure, you’ll see some stupendous traffic,” said Brad Shimmin, an analyst with CurrentAnalysis. “But I don’t expect to see these sites explode under the weight of the traffic. They are very versed at scaling for extra load.”

And that’s the message coming from Google. A spokeswoman told Computerworld that Google was not concerned about the weight of the increased traffic caused by the Olympics overcoming either their search engine or their social network, Google+. Actually, increased traffic has already begun.

The Google+ page for NBC Olympics already is in more than 1.3 million circles, the Google spokeswoman noted. And searches for the word “Olympics” on Google are two and a half times greater leading into the Games than they were before the last Olympics.

“Google’s data centers are designed to handle massive amounts of data every day, so we don’t expect to see much of an impact due to increased traffic during the Olympics,” the spokeswoman said.

Tweeting Up a Storm

At Twitter, which has seen some of its greatest traffic spikes connected to sporting events, the company is already seeing increased traffic related to the Olympic Games. A representative said Twitter was seeing 100 times more tweets about the Games than they did in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

Twitter is taking a more active role than usual with this year’s Olympic Games.

The site has teamed up with NBC Olympics, which is an arm of the NBC Sports Group, to aggregate the best of all the tweets from Olympic athletes, coaches, family members, journalists and commentators on a dedicated Olympics page.

Twitter is trying to highlight the best of its Olympics-related content and help people tell great stories about their experiences, the representative said.

CurrentAnalysis’ Shimmin said it’s smart for NBC, which is airing the Olympic games this summer, to reach out to social networks, like Twitter and Google+.

“People aren’t just sitting in front of their televisions,” Shimmin added. “Why not reach them when they’re waiting for a bus or waiting for dinner? The information needs to be packaged so it’s digestible in a more sporadic way. People want to get their information and cheer for their favorites throughout the day, not just in the evening when they’re in front of the TV.”

By using Facebook to give people updates on specific sporting events, videos of the competition and clips of athlete interviews, social networks allow fans to create moments of spontaneous camaraderie, he gave as an example.

“It might be akin to what you’d experience if you were sitting in a bar with people are watching a sport,” Shimmin said. “Someone stands up and cheers and you feel that. With social networks, it’s the same, only virtually. It’s that sense of belonging.”

Athletes Take to Twitter

However, for the athletes who are tweeting and posting updates to their social pages during the games, there are some big risks involved.

Just ask Paraskevi Papahristou, a 23-year-old triple-jump athlete from Greece. After making what was considered a racist tweet, she was kicked off her Olympic team on Wednesday.

So far, though, most athletes are having better luck with their social networking.

U.S. hurdler Lolo Jones has more than 172,000 followers on Twitter. And she’s keeping them entertained with tweets like this, “Notify Olympics: I can’t run. Injury:BroKeN heart RT @LonaPete RT @eonline Prince Harry is off the market! Sorry,ladies”.

U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps, who won 16 Olympic medals in previous Games, has his own Facebook page with nearly 5.5 million “likes,” as well as 277,000 followers on Twitter.

The International Olympic Committee realizes how important social networking is this year so it created a social media hub to help fans keep track of their favorite athletes and events.

“We’re in uncharted territory to some extent,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “The last Summer Olympics was four years ago — before the massive global surge in social networking. It’ll be interesting to see if the Olympics spurs significantly more interactions or if it’s on par with what we’d see with other major sporting events.”

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+ or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed. Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com. See more by Sharon Gaudin on Computerworld.com.

Read more about social media in Computerworld’s Social Media Topic Center.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2011 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.

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Anatomy of an Internet Death Spiral

Today I got an e-mail from Travelocity, begging me to return as a “valued customer,” after I had unsubscribed about three months ago.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to get Travelocity’s e-mail alerts for the better part of a decade. I’d set up a bunch of cities where I like to travel and tell Travelocity to alert me if the fares changed by $25 or more. More than once, I used those alerts to snag truly impressive airfares — like coast-to-coast flights for under $200.

At some point, that changed. I’d see an alert for a great fare, immediately go to the website to check it out, and find it was inevitably “sold out.” Other, more expensive flights were available on those same dates, however — a classic bait-and-switch. Lately Travelocity has been sending me emails about bogus price drops, like “New York to San Francisco $450 — save $62 today,” when I know damned well the price for NYC to SFO was $400 last week. The price went up, not down. How stupid does Travelocity think I am?

To be honest, I haven’t used Travelocity to book travel for a few years. Why? Because I found a better alternative. Kayak.com is faster, easier to use, gives me way more search filters, and — oh yeah — alerts me to actual price drops, not fictional ones.

Why am I going on about my favorite travel sites? Because there’s a bigger story here. It’s about the perils of taking your customers for granted and trying to squeeze more revenue out of them, while at the same time degrading their experience.

I see this happening over and over again on the InterWebs. You know what happens then? As soon as there’s a reasonable alternative within easy reach of their browsers, your customers leave.

Take Digg, for example. A few years ago, Digg was the king of the world when it came to driving Web traffic. The company was valued at an estimated $60 million (or $200 million, if you believed TechCrunch). It was hailed as the next great publishing model: Build a site and let your users contribute all the content. I know one editor who expected his writers to spend five to six hours a day on Digg, building up a posse of friends and followers to promote their posts. (As if.)

What happened? Digg became controlled by a cabal of adolescent power users who dictated which stories were popular and which got buried. Digg tried a redesign in part to remove some power from that cabal, and users fled en masse — mostly to Reddit and StumbleUpon.

Earlier this month Digg was sold for $500,000 to Betaworks. Digg’s tech team and patents were acquired separately by the Washington Post and LinkedIn, respectively. Buh-bye Digg, don’t let the browser window hit you as it’s closing.

Today’s instructive example is Zynga. The social gaming giant was flying high a couple of years ago on the strength of its absurdly popular Facebook games: Farmville, Cityville, Mafia Wars — so high, in fact, it went public last December, raising more than $1 billion in capital.

Now Zynga’s stock is in the toilet, and the future for the social gaming king looks a lot dimmer than it did a year ago. I can’t say I’m shedding any tears over this. I’ve loathed Zynga from the first moment I started getting pummeled by Facebook invites from friends who were playing these games and boasting about their achievements. Zynga wisely stopped sending these by default a few years ago, but it remained one of the spammiest Facebook app makers on the planet.

RELATED: 7 Tech IPOs that Flopped

If you’ve ever played a Zynga game, you’ll know what I’m talking about; the pages are festooned with more ads than a stock car, and they’re constantly trying to get you to download new games and spam your friends with invitations. I tried playing Words With Friends once for about five minutes, then realized if I continued, I’d be left with Words But No Friends.

Business Insider’s Henry Blodget points out that back in April, when the company’s share price was four times higher than it is today, Zynga insiders — including CEO Marc Pincus — issued a “secondary stock option” and cashed out. Pincus alone made more than $200 million on the deal; other executives and individual investors made from $4 million to $8 million apiece.

Blodget adds: “I know many of these folks personally … and like and respect them. I think the last thing they would intentionally do is unload stock when they thought it was about to crash.”

I don’t know any of these folks personally, but to me that move says they could clearly read the writing on the wall, and it said, “Get out now, while you still can!”

Now Facebook appears to be tottering, just a bit. Wall Street is hammering it hard, in part because Facebook truly has screwed the pooch in mobile. Again, if you’ve ever used a Facebook mobile app, you’ll know what I’m talking about: They suck. They’re almost useless, compared to the website, and they crash routinely. (Your mileage may vary, but I doubt it.)

Now rumors have surfaced yet again about a “Facebook phone.” Like that will solve anything — if it can’t make a decent mobile app, how will Facebook design an entire phone?

The lessons here are obvious: When you ignore your users and pay more attention to revenues and growth projections, you’re going to be in for a world of pain — but not for long. Because soon after that, you won’t be around to feel any more pain.

What other once successful companies are blowing it big time? Post your harangues below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Anatomy of an Internet death spiral,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.

For more IT analysis and commentary on emerging technologies, visit InfoWorld.com. Story copyright © 2011 InfoWorld Media Group. All rights reserved.

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Google Fiber: Pros and Cons

Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, wants Google Fiber. And who wouldn’t?

Its service, with 1000 Mbps download and upload speeds, is 100 times faster than the Internet connection that most people have today. That means no more buffering videos, cloud gaming that doesn’t slow down the entire house, and the genesis of HD videoconferencing for the average Joe.

And it’s cheap. The lucky citizens of Kansas City—the first U.S. city to get it from Google—will only pay $120 or $70 for their gig of Internet access. And for those Midwesterners who are happy with a regular old 5Mbps connection, they can get it for free for seven years after paying a $300 construction fee.

[See more: Google’s Lightning-fast Fiber Network Now Live in Kansas City]

Google Fiber has so much beauty, people are literally begging Google to bring it to their cities. Yet fiber doesn’t come without caveats. Here’s a look at some pros and cons.

Pro: ISPs Will Have to React

Competition is good for consumers and it means the cable companies are going to have to switch things up, or die.

For $100 a month, Comcast’s premium Internet connection offers downloads up to 50 Mbps and uploads up to 10 Mbps and that’s with no TV whatsoever. ISPs are going to have to get faster and cheaper, which is good news for consumers.

Pro: No Bandwidth Caps

To its credit, Comcast, which is the leading ISP in the U.S., doesn’t count streaming from its own streaming video service against caps. But check this: Google doesn’t have any caps at all and even includes Netflix in its service when it could have given preferential treatment to its own YouTube and Fiber TV products.

This is huge, especially for people who live in places where cable hasn’t yet arrived (still true in many rural areas) and can only get high speed Internet access through a cellular carrier. In such cases, most of these folks can forget about streaming anything, unless the exorbitant cost of blasting through data caps doesn’t bother them.

Pro: A Super Cool Remote and Option for a Chromebook

The Google Nexus 7 tablet is so hot, you can’t even find one in a store now—at least the 16GB version. But not only is Kansas City the envy of every other metropolis in the U.S., people there who ante up for the Google Fiber with TV get a free Nexus 7 that they can use as a remote, or for consuming media all on its own. While there’s no word on if the free tablet is the 8GB model or 16GB version, does it really matter?

The Google Fiber site also shows the Chromebook as an option for $299. Even though some people have criticized the web-centric laptop, Google recently announced some important improvements to the device. And let’s be honest—you’re not going to find a laptop much cheaper.

Pro: Storage Galore

The DVR box that comes with Google Fiber TV lets users record up to eight shows at one time. Its 2TB hard drive also means you can store as much as 500 hours of HD video. That’s a lot of episodes of “30 Rock” you can have at your beck and call.

And people who opt for the Internet-only version get 1TB of cloud storage on Google Drive. That means a user’s every digital asset can be accessible from any Internet-connected device or computer whenever he or she needs it.

Con: No ESPN

Sports fanatics won’t like this. A lot of people can probably live without some of the channels not currently included in Google Fiber TV, such as Disney, AMC, TBS, TNT, and HBO; but the exclusion of ESPN might be a deal killer for some. 

Apparently Time Warner’s channel is too rich for Google’s taste. “ESPN charges cable providers around five times more than the average network,” reports Time.

The good news is Google appears to be negotiating with some networks so as to get a more complete offering. By the time Fiber goes live, maybe some of these big guns will be on board.

Con: Don’t Expect it Anytime Soon

Speaking of the rollout of Fiber in Kansas City, it’s not going to happen overnight. After September 9, Google will announce a calendar that shows which neighborhoods will get it when.

The neighborhoods toward the top—based upon which ones have demonstrated their longing for Fiber the most by preregistering the most homes—likely won’t be flying around on the Internet like lightning until mid-2013. As for the rest of the world . . . well, there’s no telling.

Con: Now Google Will Really Know Everything

Google already knows a lot about its users—where we go online, what kinds of things we buy, where we take our Android phones. Some people don’t have a problem with this, and—like Google—feel it helps the search and advertising giant better serve them.

But Google’s track record on privacy is far from spotless. Some people aren’t going to be comfortable with Google also having their TV and movie consumption data, on top of everything else. If that concerns you, check out the Google Fiber Privacy Notice.

Con: For Now, A Gigabit Connection Can be Underwhelming

Fiber users with less-than-stellar equipment or those trying to communicate with others on the Internet not blessed with a great connection aren’t going to hugely impressed with what they’ll get. If you’ve ever tried to Skype with someone working with either of these scenarios, you know what I mean.

As GigaOm points out, “the Internet is reciprocal so it’s no fun if you have the speeds to send a holographic image of yourself but no one on the other end can receive it.” In fact, “underwhelming” describes the experience in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where for the past two years the public utility has offered customers a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection for about $300 a month.

Still, considering the alternatives—comparably slow and expensive offerings from cable companies—Kansas City getting Google Fiber is akin to the city winning a digital lottery. 

Follow Christina on Twitter and Google+ for even more tech news and commentary and follow Today@PCWorld on Twitter, too.

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Akram Khan miffed that NBC cut his Olympics opening ceremony tribute to 7/7 bombing victims

So, first NBC decided not to live broadcast the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.

When they finally did air Danny Boyle’s uber-British extravaganza — during the US primetime, after the rest of the world had already seen it — NBC ruined the show with inane commentary from Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer.

And what’s more, they cut out choreographer Akram Khan’s tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombings, instead airing an interview with Ryan Seacrest and swimming star Michael Phelps.

Khan told the Associated Press he felt “disheartened and disappointed” that NBC edited out his segment about mortality, which featured Khan himself, a 9-year-old boy, and 50 dancers in an apparent tribute to the 52 victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London.

More from GlobalPost: Twitter users unite to tell NBC’s Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera to “shut up”

“I am really sad that I couldn’t show the work in America, and that really upsets me, because I don’t think it’s any less or more than any of the other pieces,” he told the AP.

“Is it not accessible enough? Is it not commercial enough?” Khan wondered.

NBC said the dance performance was not presented to them as a 7/7 tribute, noting that the opening ceremony’s program described the segment as dramatizing “the struggle between life and death using such powerful images of mortality as dust and the setting sun.”

While NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 opener was widely panned, it still managed to set viewership records.

The Nielsen Company said it was the most-watched opening ceremony of any summer or winter Olympics, with a record 40.7 million Americans tuning in.

More from GlobalPost: Olympics: NBC sets opening ceremony records

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/world-at-play/akram-khan-miffed-nbc-cut-olympics-opening-ceremony-tribute-7-7-bombing-victims

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