Don't Look Now, but You're Being Followed

Mozilla has developed a new add-on for Firefox that will enlighten the curious and terrify the paranoid. When you visit a website, information about the visit will almost certainly be shared with other sites. TechByter Worldwide uses Google Analytics and StatCounter, both of which gather only information about the number of visitors, operating systems, browsers, and screen resolution. No personally identifiable information is gathered. Other sites use many more trackers and some of them might not be so friendly.

Some sites have 30 or more external connections. These range from advertising servers to typeface management sites, from traffic analyzers to add-ons such as JQuery. Next year, instead of serving typefaces from the TechByter server, I plan to hand typface management over to Google or possibly to Adobe. In either case, the result will be a faster and better website that has one additional external connection.

If you install Lightbeam for Firefox, you can see all of these links either as a graph or in a list. For the curious, this is a worthwhile service. For those who fear cookies and believe that everyone is spying on them, it's likely to add to the paranoia.

Mozilla's Alex Fowler describes the new add-on by starting with non-governmental information tracking and calling it "another area of online data collection with its own complicated transparency challenges." Fowler says a diverse range of third-party companies shape our online experiences. "Third parties are an integral part of the way the Internet works today." Fowler says that Lightbeam's objective is to provide information that will allow people to make informed choices about their data sharing practices. Without this information, Fowler says the result will be a steady erosion of trust for all stakeholders.

Lightbeam allows you to see the first- and third-party sites you interact with. As you browse, Lightbeam reveals the interconnections between sites, including parts that are not obvious to most users.

Lightbeam makes it possible to examine individual third parties over time and space, identify where they connect to your online activity, and choose whether to allow or block the connection.

That third function is what may be problematic for some users. Turning off certain connections may cause the website not to load, not to operate properly, or not to display the correct typefaces.

In the graph view, the main site will be shown as a circle and third-party sites appear as triangles, connected to the main site by lines.

The graph is constantly moving and changing, a feature that I find very distracting. Because it's constantly rotating, the graph view is harder to use than it should be. There should at least be an option to turn off the animation so that the user can drill down. The scroll wheel on the mouse makes it possible to zoom in, but in some ways this makes the problem even worse because the site you want to examine can move off screen.

An option called "Recent Site" displays only the last site that has interacted with the browser and then the user can hover the mouse cursor over the triangles to examine the third-party connections. This isn't completely successful, though, because many sites regularly push updated information to your browser. When this happes, that site becomes the last site to interact with the browser and replaces the one you're trying to examine.

A separate list view identifies all of the sites either as "visited" or "third party". For example, Lightbeam tells me that Weather Underground has 19 connected sites and PC Magazine has 27. It doesn't tell me which of the 128 listed third-party sites are used by any given visited site, though. The only way to determine that involves using the animated graph page.

Fowler compares Lightbeam to a scene in "The Wizard of Oz", writing that users can "collectively provide a way to pull back the curtain see [the Web's] inner-workings." Mozilla encourages users to contribute their data to the Lightbeam database. The plan is to make the overall data available publicly.

Lightbeam is a joint project developed by Mozilla and the Social + Interactive Media (SIM) Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. SIM created the data visualizations for Lightbeam.

A First Look at Adobe's Newest "Elements" Applications

Adobe released a new version of its Elements applications this week -- Photoshop Elements 13 for photos and Premiere Elements 13 for videos. So far, I've had time only to glance at the new applications and it appears that they include a variety of new and improved features. You can expect more complete reviews in coming weeks, but I've seen enough to provide a decent first impression.

After installing Photoshop Elements, I grabbed a photo from the Columbus Zoo to see what I might be able to do with it. A few minutes later, I had what I thought was a pretty cool image that looked like a high-quality pencil sketch. I showed it around and received some "WOW!" responses. This isn't the time or place to explain how I achieved the effect, but I can say that it really did take just a few minutes to examine several effects, find one that I liked, and fine tune it to create the resulting picture.

One feature that I've seen demonstrated, but haven't yet tried on my own, is called Photomerge Compose. It's intended to allow Photoshop Elements users to extract a person (or object) from one picture and composite it into another image. For example, a family gathering. The photographer wouldn't be in a group picture, but could be inserted later. This is not the kind of feature that one expects to find in an application that is aimed at and priced for the consumer market.

Adobe product manager Bob Gager says that the most frequently used function in Photoshop Elements always has been cropping an image for better composition. Cropping is an art, though. The software designers at Adobe have tried to turn the art into a science by analyzing an image and then suggesting 4 potential crops to improve it. Users can, of course, ignore the suggestions and create their own crops.

Guided Edits isn't a new function, but each new version of Elements attempts to improve the guidance. That seems to be true with this version and I'm looking forward to experimenting with this part of the program.

Adobe says that sharing has been improved for both photos and videos so that users can easily post their creations on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and other services or send them directly to friends. Another feature I'm looking forward to trying is one that automatically creates and uploads a banner photo and individual photo for Facebook. This is a task that until now required users to know the dimensions and ratios used by Facebook and it's been something has frustrated no small number of people. This new feature should help.

The previous version of Premiere Elements included technology designed to smooth videos that suffered from camera movement. Adobe says that the feature has been significantly improved in version 13 and I'll assess that claim in a later program once I've had a chance to test it.

A new Video Story feature offers templates for events such as birthday parties and weddings. This is another feature that I've seen demonstrated and want to examine it in a real-life situation. Users should be able to drop video clips into specific "buckets" that are common to these events ("birthday", for example, includes a cake bucket). Premiere Elements is then expected to handle all of the transitions.

There's no cat rating at this time because this has been just a quick first look. I'll have more on the Elements 13 packages in later programs starting in 2 or 3 weeks.

Short Circuits

Apple Says it Will Refuse (Some) Police Requests for Data

Apple will no longer turn over data from Iphones and Ipads even if police have a legitimate search warrant. In fact, the new mobile operating system, IOS 8, makes it impossible for Apple to gain access to the data because the encryption process has been modified. But some conditions apply.

In some ways, this is reasonable, but I suspect the move will be controversial in cases where the owner of the phone may have been abducted or when police want information from the phone of a homicide victim.

The new encryption process depends on the user's passcode, which is something that Apple will not have access to. Apple describes it this way: "Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access [your] data." This means that it is not technically feasible for Apple to respond to government warrants for the extraction of IOS 8 data from devices in their possession.

All new Iphones and Ipads will run IOS 8 and some earlier models will be upgraded to the new version.

The policy does not apply to data stored on Apple's ICloud service and that's usually where data from Iphones and Ipads is backed up. So one might reasonably say that the policy change is more of a marketing and PR ploy than a real change.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a search warrant in most cases to obtain information from phones.

The "Bash Bug" Could Be even Worse than Heartbleed

There's a "serious" new security threat, but it doesn't affect Windows. Instead, the targets of what's being called the "Bash Bug" are systems that run Apple's OSX or Linux, the very operating system whose users point at Windows and laugh.

How bad? This bug affects systems that run Unix-like operating systems and that means more than just BSD-based OSX and all the various Linux variants. The bug has the potential to cause problems with millions of Internet servers, banks, businesses, and even medical equipment. Are you frightened yet?

Let's get serious: Although this illustrates the point that there is no perfect operating system when it comes to security, the Bash Bug is certainly not worse than Heartbleed. And Heartbleed was made to sound a lot more serious than it really was.

The Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team notes that what's essentially a perfect storm of faults need to be present for the bug to be exploited. To take advantage of the bug, the attacker needs to gain access to the what's called the shell and nobody who understands even the basics of security would allow that to happen. The organization that discovered the bug says there's no evidence yet that the bug has caused any data loss.

If an attacker could gain access to the shell, then the bug would open the computer to what's called "remote code execution" so that the attacker could take over the affected computer, install programs, and run commands. Security flaws are rated on a 10-point scale by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. This one is rated 10 in terms of how serious it could be, but if a serious flaw cannot be exploited, just how serious is it really?

The Bash Bug gets its name from Bash, a Unix shell that was released in 1989. Brian Fox wrote the Bourne Again Shell (BASH) as a replacement for the Bourne shell (SH). In Unix land, the shell is where commands are executed. Bash is the default shell for Linux systems and Apple's OSX. It can run inside Windows as Cygwin or MinGW. Versions are also available for DOS, Novell Netware, and Android.

The current vulnerability was discovered by Stephane Chazelas of Akamai Technologies. When Akamai said that it had identified no known data breaches attributable to the bug, the company qualified that statement by noting that there is a difference between known breaches and breaches.

If you have any device that runs OSX, Linux, or Unix, expect a bunch of patches. Soon. Many Linux systems were patched within hours of the announcement, so don't expect much in the way of attacks.

What a Strange Way to Use a Phone

I've been amused to watch the way people use smart phones. Both of my daughters, for example, post to Facebook or Pinterest or any of several other services. They send instant messages. They view websites. But phone calls? Never. Why make a 10 second phone call when you can spend 10 minutes texting back and forth? Maybe there's a bit of hyperbole in there somewhere. But not much.

Ray Ozzie has a radical suggestion: Let's use phones for voice communications. (Obsesrvant readers will note that I did not write "phone calls".) If this works out, I could be on the leading edge. My cell phone is so old that all it can do is make phone calls. Ozzie says words and numbers are fine, but hearing someone's voice brings things closer to home. Maybe that's why some people prefer the TechByter Worldwide podcast to reading it on the website.

If the name Ray Ozzie seems familiar to you, it should. For several years, he was the chief technical officer and chief software architect at Microsoft. Before that he had a big part in the creation of Lotus Notes and was a key player at Groove Networks. He went to work for Microsoft when Microsoft acquired Groove in 2005. In his first year at Microsoft, Ozzie wrote a 5000-word memo that was distributed througout the company. He called it "The Internet Services Disruption" and in it he wrote about the importance of responding quickly and decisively. "It's clear," he wrote, "that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk."

So Ozzie is well known and respected as someone whose opinions matter.

Ozzie is now involved with an app that's been released for Iphones. Called "Talko", it's an app that designed to send spoken words via phones. [Stop laughing!] A version for Android phones will follow later.

Here's how it works: It's not quite a phone call. Instead the user records a message and sends it like an instant message to anyone who's using the service. Maybe it's better than a phone call because, unlike a phone call, the message can simply wait until the recipient has time to listen.

Talko will store messages for 10 days, but subscriptions will be available to store recordings permanently. That's expected to cost less than $10 per month. Initially, though, Talko will store all messages permanently and without charge.

Also unlike phone calls, the recorded messages can be sent to several people simultaneously.

Maybe it could be compared to a slow-speed, non-real-time walkie talkie.

What's Apple Going to Do with Beats?

Apple bought Beats, the headphone manufacturer and online music service in May. Since then, nothing. It's enough to make people wonder what Apple plans to do with Beats and why it has done nothing for four months with with $3 billion purchase.

The expectation was that Apple would launch an online music service based on Beats technology. If so, there's no sign of it yet. This week TechCrunch caused a stir when it reported that Apple would shut down Beats. Apple, which rarely comments on rumors, was quick to reply to this one and the response was a complete and unequivocable denial.

Beats Music originated in January and it's thought to have around a quarter of a million subscribers. This compares to 10 million paying users for Spotify and another 30 million who subscribe to Spotify's advertising-supported service.

Apple already has Itunes, of course, but it's not a streaming service. Apple announced at the time of the acquisition that Beats and Itunes would coexist, at least for a time. You may recall that Apple acquired another music service, Lala, in 2009, shut it down, and absored the operation into the Itunes division.

Despite the fact that Apple CEO Tim Cooke said in a TV interview with Charlie Rose that he sees a great future for music subscription programs, Apple did not include a pre-loaded Beats app on the new Iphone models released a week ago. And if $3 billion seems like a lot of money, maybe it is to you. It certainly would be to me. To public citizen Apple, though, it's not much more than pocket change. The company shows a cash balance of $150 billion.