Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

A single stalled router is being blamed by Verizon officials for a service outage that impacted customers of its high-speed Internet service, including fiberoptic FiOS, in New York and Massachusetts.

The outage occurred at approximately 3:15 pm EDT, according to a message Friday afternoon from the company’s chief PR executive, Eric Rabe. He acknowledged that routers typically fail over to adjacent ones, but in this instance, this one didn’t.

“The router went into a hung state and did not appear to the rest of the network as though it was having problems,” Rabe wrote, being careful not to name the manufacturer.

According to reporting from Telephony Online’s Ed Gubbins, Verizon’s principal hardware provider for FiOS is Juniper Networks. In fact, Gubbins reports, Verizon contributes 13% of Juniper’s total revenue, and may be the sole reason why that company found black ink again last year.

Juniper’s E-series routers service Verizon’s broadband network. Last October, Juniper announced a major upgrade to its routers’ operating system, adding features that included the capability for service providers to deploy deep packet inspection — the ability to analyze Internet traffic based on its contents. The company marketed this feature as part of its “Intelligent Services Edge” portfolio, which it described as “leverag[-ing] a single, consistent operating system and high-performance hardware to flexibly deliver many service types — including broadband routing, voice, multimedia and integrated security, as well as application-level awareness.”

The rollout schedule for these changes targeted the third quarter of 2009. The latest version of Juniper’s router software for E-series routers, called JUNOSe, began rollout on August 13. While the evidence that Juniper’s router software may have been involved is circumstantial, these facts do tell a curious tale.

As some customers confirmed to Verizon’s support forum, Rabe’s statement that the outage lasted about 40 minutes on Friday afternoon appears accurate. However, other customers, including in Massachusetts, reported poor or no service even after the problem was resolved by 4:00 pm. What’s more, support representatives who diligently worked with customers in an attempt to resolve issues as if their own on-premise equipment were to blame, were apparently not informed of the service outage themselves until after the problem was resolved. One heavy-use customer complained to Verizon, “I have 30 years in networking designing service provider networks and I don’t have a single design that has a single point of failure. It appears Verizon does.”

That provoked another customer to come to Verizon’s defense: “Even with redundancy, there is no way to guarantee 100% availability. That is an impossibility, I don’t care who you are. And that percentage is including regularly scheduled failover testing.”

According to a DigiTimes report today, newcomer to the smartphone market Acer will concentrate on releasing more Android devices. The source said it expects “at least half” of Acer’s new smartphones to launch with the open source mobile operating system next year, even though the company actually showed off mostly Windows Mobile 6.1 devices earlier this year.

Acer first announced support for Android earlier this year, and President and CEO Gianfranco Lanci said it was being tested on several different hardware solutions. Acer’s first Android device, the A1, is expected to come to market next month, but still has not been officially announced or specced.

All in all, it sounds very much like the path Motorola has reportedly chosen. After backing away from Windows Mobile this year, Motorola’s CEO Sanjay Jha made a similarly noncommittal pledge to increase support for Android. Then, at least one analyst made the prediction that the company would be releasing no fewer than ten Android devices by the end of 2010, a number which could be anywhere from one-third to one-half of Motorola’s lineup for the year.

Motorola unveiled its first Android device, the Cliq, earlier this month and is counting down the days until it becomes available for T-Mobile pre-order in the US A second device has long been rumored to be on the way for Verizon.

T-Mobile, Microsoft and Danger have confirmed a major data service disruption affecting an unspecified number of Sidekick users that could last more than three days.

In an official announcement in T-Mobile’s support forum Saturday evening, the network operator said, “We expect data services to begin gradually returning in the next couple of hours (Saturday evening), Web browsing capabilities should be accessible first; additional functions such as IM, social networking applications and email will then follow. While we anticipate a significant portion of data services to be restored by Monday, some richer data services may lag. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as we work hard with Danger/Microsoft to resolve this issue.”

Users are complaining of an almost total loss of service. As one commenter in T-Mobile’s support forum said, “I cannot make or receive calls, texts, IMs, or access the web, or my contacts. I’ve had this problem for about 10 hours now, and I am beyond frustrated. I left AT&T for this!?”

This October has been declared National Cyber Security Awareness Month, a month in which Americans are encouraged to learn more about the “national security priority” that is the US communications infrastructure.

“Cyber attacks and their viral ability to infect networks, devices, and software must be the concern of all Americans,” President Barack Obama said yesterday. “This month, we highlight the responsibility of individuals, businesses, and governments to work together to improve their own cybersecurity and that of our Nation. We all must practice safe computing to avoid attacks. A key measure of our success will be the degree to which all Americans educate themselves about the risks they face and the actions they can take to protect themselves and our Nation’s digital infrastructure.”

But on social networks, there is still a sucker being born every minute. The more new users that sites such as Facebook get, the more opportunity there is for malware to be spread and compromises to be made. In light of President Obama’s grand proclamation yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its own statement, sounding as jaded as could be.

The FBI’s sardonic warning yesterday was entitled, “No, Your Social Networking ‘Friend’ Isn’t Really in Trouble Overseas.”

The statement referred to the common spam/phishing scam where a social network’s account is hijacked and all its linked friends are hit with messages claiming that the owner is in some sort of legal or medical danger and needs money.

Though the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has received reports of nearly 3,200 hijacks since 2006, the FBI yesterday said that there has been a recent increase in reports.

And this surge isn’t attributed to any new threat. Quite the contrary, it’s the same old “please install this plug-in/application/codec” style Trojans that have been used for more than ten years, but they’re just hiding under the friendly face of a social networking buddy. Since a link on Facebook appears to be endorsed by a trusted friend, people are much more likely to click on them.

There’s actually very little that someone can do to prevent someone else from falling victim to a social engineering attack, so what’s the FBI’s advice now that cybersecurity awareness is a national month of observance?

“Be careful what you click on.”

Perhaps the most oft-used defense by defendants charged with the proliferation of unauthorized files — including some which actually belonged to them or were entrusted to their care — by way of P2P file-sharing programs has been, “I didn’t know.” That was the defense invoked by US government employees, and even their direct reports, when classified documents turned up on LimeWire two years ago.

If P2P technology truly can and should be used for legitimate purposes, as many of its engineers and practitioners believe, then the very least it can do for users is inform them of what and where files will be shared. That’s the aim of a House bill re-introduced last March by Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R – Calif.), the widow of entertainer and Congressman Sonny Bono. After over a year’s deliberation (taking the bill’s predecessors into account), Rep. Bono’s bill — the Informed P2P User Act — passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, and is on its way to a full House floor debate.

Up to now, the debate among congresspeople has been whether the bill will “do enough” — specifically, whether the real means to thwarting P2P’s ability to share unauthorized and even confidential files involves prohibiting or limiting the spread of the technology itself. But the Bono bill is a compromise that would hold P2P engineers to their word when they say they can ensure their software is used for legitimate purposes: In simple language, it states that P2P programs must inform users during setup about which files they can possibly share with other users in the network, and must repeat that message during product activation — giving users the opportunity to cancel if they realize they’re exposing documents to danger.

“Imagine all your tax returns, medical records, family photos, your resume, professional records, online bill information, and anything else available to complete strangers,” Rep. Bono posited in a May 5 editorial for The Hill. “Does this frighten you? It should.”

The bill would also make it illegal for any software to install P2P components on a user’s computer without also giving her the obvious means to uninstall it. This may not only be to protect the user’s interests, but also to forestall opportunities for prospective defendants to argue in court that they didn’t even know their file-sharing software was there.

Rep. Bono perhaps inadvertently painted herself as an enemy of the file-sharing community when a member of her staff casually told a member of the press — who passed it on to the Associated Press — that becoming the head of the RIAA would be her “ideal job.” Bono later denied she ever had that sentiment; but in an environment where black and white are the only two colors of paint available, the damage was already done. The office worker’s comments came after Rep. Bono’s formation in 2003 of a congressional caucus representing copyright holders — a caucus where she would not only be the representative but also, as the inheritor of her late husband’s music, one of the represented.

If the last two months should be interpreted as Microsoft suggests, with Bing’s gradual ascent in usage share against Google as a sign of Bing’s inevitably catching up, then a similar interpretation of September’s numbers from live analytics firm StatCounter should be taken as a sign of Bing’s ultimate demise. A sampling of five billion or more US page views from Web sites accessed by StatCounter in September reveals that, of the world’s top three search services, Google’s usage share has climbed back just above 80%, and is flirting with last November’s peak of 81.14% — meaning Google is back to serving four out of five US-based general queries.

Bing’s usage share in the US descended by 1.13% to 8.51% for the month of September, while Yahoo’s dove 1.1% to 9.4%. Google’s share among the top three has now climbed above where it stood in May (78.72%), when Microsoft changed the name of Windows Live Search.

While Bing’s ascent worldwide was much more of a crawl since last May, according to StatCounter statistics, its global usage share in September fell about a quarter-point to 3.25%, while Yahoo lost almost half a point globally to 4.37%. Google ate up both services’ loss worldwide, with global usage share now standing at 90.54%.

With the first day of October not even complete, StatCounter’s live assessment of trends for the remainder of the month don’t hold out much hope for recovery for Bing. Only 6.43% of StatCounter’s sampled US queries thus far for the day (as of 2:47 pm EDT) came from Bing, while Yahoo trended up at 9.62% — Google’s share thus far is over 82%. Fewer than 3% of searches sampled worldwide belong to Bing at present.

What’s important to note is that StatCounter’s statistics focus primarily on searches conducted through just those three services, tossing out about 2% of searches as “Other.” Worldwide, Bing is not the world’s #3 search engine — Baidu, based in China, is; and a competitor to StatCounter tracks Baidu’s traffic as somewhat more significant than “Other.”

A live sampling of global searches as assessed by NetApplications (with figures for Baidu recomputed to exclude searches it generates automatically for itself) shows Bing with 3.39% of global search traffic for the first day of October, well above that of #5 provider Ask.com (0.58%). Baidu comes in at 4.38%, with Yahoo at 6.84%.

Sony’s latest handheld game console, the $250 PSP Go hit retail today — the first major video game system that does not support physical media, with games offered only via download.

To kick start the device’s life today, Sony has beefed up the catalog of downloadable games in the PlayStation Store with more than 100 titles ranging from $5 all the way up to $39.99, including the highly hyped Gran Turismo PSP. Sony will be giving away one copy with every PSP Go for the first ten days of its availability.

While all video game consoles today support downloadable games, they all also support removable media such as discs or cartridges (in the case of the Nintendo DS) as their primary method of content delivery. In this way, this generation of consoles has had a sort of hybrid attach rate (number of games sold per console), where both physical media and downloads have to be tracked.

The PlayStation Store is currently the only place where users can get games for the PSP Go, so the attach rate will be singly trackable.

Since no other game systems have made a similar transition, it is uncertain how well titles will sell for the new handheld. The nearest point of comparison is the iPhone/iPod Touch, which has proven to be a breakaway success as a casual and mobile gaming platform. However, with thousands of titles in the free-to-99¢ range, it won’t be an even comparison. Furthermore, Apple has not issued an App Store breakdown that shows how many games sell versus other types of applications. Judging by Apple’s increased emphasis on games (and claims of over 21,000 available titles) iPhone/iPod video gaming looks to be a highly successful category.

With today’s 6.10 PSP firmware update, the Go gains the ability to be tethered to a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone for 100% mobile game, music, and movie downloads, which is more than can be said for the iPod Touch.

As competitive as these new platforms are, they’re still in fundamentally different categories, and the PSP Go is swimming in uncharted waters.

Even though collective analysis shows that the iPhone hasn’t done as well as peer marketers would have us believe, the iTunes App Store undoubtedly has. In the first nine months the App Store existed, more than a billion apps were downloaded. Five months later, another billion were downloaded. Naturally, less than half of this vast quantity is thanks to the iPhone, as Apple combines the tens of millions of iPod Touch users downloading apps with iPhone downloaders.

But regardless of the device doing the downloading, the app store model has proven sound and has created a multi-million dollar business. This “app gold rush” has compelled thousands of developers to try their hands at creating software for the iPhone and iPod Touch in hopes of making a fortune.

This business is poised to mushroom in the coming days.

On October 6, Microsoft will unveil its new Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, which will be equipped with the brand new Windows Mobile Marketplace. This will finally provide a convenient outlet for the Windows Mobile environment, which already has thousands of apps at its disposal. Granted, this number of apps is also taking into account software developed for former versions of Windows Mobile, which won’t have access to the Marketplace until November, but it’s still a heck of a starting point.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s odd Brix said in the Windows Mobile Blog yesterday that Tuesday is just the beginning, “We’re targeting November for phase two…This second phase will bring the PC-based catalog and shopping experience, user generated app reviews, advanced key-based anti-piracy protection and other enhancements that expand your business opportunity and make it easier for a larger number of customers to find and buy your application.”

Google’s Android is expected to get its updated market very soon as well, and will likely preempt the Windows Mobile Marketplace launch by a couple of days, if reports are to be believed. Rumors surfaced last night that an over-the-air update to Android will push out the 1.6 “Donut” firmware, which contains a fully revamped Android Market. Recently, developers got their hands on the Donut SDK, and subsequently the ARM-related NDK (Native Developers Kit,) and a number of owners of the Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1) have reported successful Donut upgrades.

Rounding out the Fall app store updates will be Palm’s App Catalog, which will soon start carrying paid application downloads. Last week, the company rolled out the 1.2 webOS update which included the ability to tie credit card information to Palm Profiles, but did not include any for-pay applications.

As first reported by TechFlash’s Eric Engleman, Amazon has elected to settle out of court with a Michigan high school student, who sued the Kindle maker last July after having remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from his and about 2,000 other users’ Kindles. The electronic publisher in that instance did not actually have the rights to those works from Orwell’s estate; but as Amazon acknowledged in its published settlement order (PDF available here, courtesy Puget Sound Business Journal), deleting those works from their systems was a violation of Amazon’s own Terms of Service.

The settlement is unique in that Amazon was willing to let its terms be known. Student Justin Gawronski’s attorneys will receive $150,000, on the stipulation that the attorneys’ portion will be donated to a charity that promotes literacy, educational, or children’s causes. Amazon will continue to honor its plan to give purchasers a $30 gift card.

But the settlement also contains a promise from Amazon never to remotely delete e-books installed on customers’ Kindles, except in certain circumstances: “For copies of Works purchased pursuant to [the Terms of Service] granting ‘the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy’ of each purchased Work and to ‘view, use and display [such Works] an unlimited number of times, solely on the [Devices]…and solely for [the purchasers'] personal, non-commercial use,’ Amazon will not remotely delete or modify such Works from Devices purchased and being used in the United States unless (a) the user consents to such deletion or modification; (b) the user requests a refund for the Work or otherwise fails to pay for the Work (e.g., if a credit or debit card issuer declines to remit payment); (c) a judicial or regulatory order requires such deletion or modification; or (d) deletion or modification is reasonably necessary to protect the consumer or the operation of a Device or network through which the Device communicates (e.g., to remove harmful code embedded within a copy of a Work downloaded to a Device),” the settlement order reads.

The promise only applies to e-books, the order goes on, and not to system software or to periodicals or newspapers to which the customer subscribes — issues of those items may possibly be deleted when they “expire.”

By all definitions, Apple’s iTunes App Store is a massive success, with sales numbers that would make McDonald’s franchisees green with envy. Two billion applications — half a billion in the last quarter alone — have been downloaded since the store went live just over 14 months ago. With over 85,000 apps, it puts every mobile platform competitor to shame. The 125,000-strong iPhone Developer Program and successive evolutions of iPhone and iPod touch devices should keep driving growth for a while.

This is all obviously good for Apple, because a vibrant online App Store naturally drives demand for its high-margin hardware. And in the case of the iPhone, AT&T and other partner-carriers benefit from carrying a device whose sales are driven not only by desirable hardware, but by the ability to easily turn the device into pretty much anything the end user wants. The paltry few-thousand choices on Research In Motion’s BlackBerry App World, or Palm App Catalog’s even paltrier few dozen apps, end up serving as inadvertent advertisements for the iPhone.

When numbers overwhelm

The real issue for software developers is whether any of this is good for them. While all of them would likely give their eye teeth to develop for the hottest platform, there is such thing as being too hot. At a certain point, hugely popular ecosystems like Apple’s App Store become a liability for developers who don’t want to get lost in the crowd.

Precisely where that point lies is a great unknown. Was it at 25,000 apps? Or will Apple cross the threshold at 200,000 titles? No one really knows, but in the still solidifying world of online software sales and delivery, I’ll venture that at some point, too much success for the hardware/online app store vendor translates into weaker prospects for the little guys just trying to get their piece of the action.

A quick comparison with traditional retailers might help. In the typical big-box retail store, shelf space is everything. Vendors fight tooth-and-nail to get as much visibility as possible, brutally negotiating for every linear foot of exposure. In this ultra-competitive landscape, physical positioning drives sales numbers. Large store footprints offer more opportunities for large vendors to display their wares. Lose the battle and you’re shunted to the bottom shelves. Or worse.

Clawing for space and visibility

While the strategy of clawing away for space and visibility scales rather nicely in any physical retail space of any size, it tends to fall apart when you try to transition it to the virtual space of app stores. There on the palm-sized screens of smartphones, there’s a finite limit to the amount of visibility any one product can have. Customers will only scroll through so many screens before they elect either to buy or bail out.

So as Apple’s download numbers soar toward that magic three billion mark, the customer’s ability to find the one app that he needs becomes a hit-and-miss proposition. And if you’re the developer of that one app, you come to realize that as the app store customer base scales up, the ratio of misses to hits scales with it.

An approval process that can be charitably described as opaque, or not-so-charitably called unfair and glacially slow, doesn’t help. While it’s a safe bet that Apple has beefed up the teams handling the crush of inbound app submissions, it’s also clear that the company is far from quelling the chorus of complaints and making the process as streamlined as it needs to be. Even if the wildest optimists among us believe that the company will soon address every last complaint, the sad truth for developers is that it’s harder to stand aside from the crowd when you’re selling yet another GPS-enabled local business finder into an App Store that already counts two dozen similarly featured offerings.

Apple’s App Store may be desirable because it has tons of traffic, but its interface leaves much to be desired when you’re trying to figure out which one of these near-identical choices is the right one for you. It’s one thing when they’re free, as you can simply download them all and try them before making a final choice. But commercial apps don’t always offer a free trial. So you cross your fingers and hope you’ve made the right call.

Going the way of the shopping mall?

Dilemmas like these may cause some developers to rethink whether they want to be in the busiest virtual space at all. As many real-world retailers have discovered, the local mall — once revered as the temple of retailing — is under threat. Relatively high rental costs, often restrictive limits on what vendors can and cannot do with their stores, and a gradual shift away from one-stop-shopping toward distinct, more specialized big box retailers, have turned many malls into gap-toothed shadows of their former selves. The mall model, once touted as inviolable, is now obsolete.

As some online app store competitors offer developers better deals than Apple’s 70/30 split, and as they move to make their approval processes faster and more transparent, Apple risks becoming characterized as the modern counterpart to the arrogant mall owners of the 1970s. These people once believed there would never be an alternative to their ultra-busy centers of suburban retail life — they named their malls with words like “Village” and “City” because that’s what they thought they were building.

As their experience has proven, nothing lasts forever, especially in the fickle world of consumerism. More ominously for dominant players like Apple, a less-than-ideal deal for developer-retailers hardly compensates for the hoops they often have to jump through to go to market. At some point, some developers may become unhappy with the deal they’re forced to take, and may start looking to competing platforms’ app stores to fulfill their marketing needs.

In such cases, their relatively small size could be seen as an advantage.

The current numbers obviously don’t show a torrent of defections just yet. But the bigger and more distant Apple becomes, the easier it becomes for the seeds of doubt to be planted. As competing mobile vendors watch Apple run away with the app store prize, it’s their best hope to remain in the game. As developers continue to wonder whether a compromised deal with Apple — in a store whose overwhelming size makes it ever more difficult to break through and connect with buyers — is worth it, alternative delivery channels offer similar hope that they won’t get lost in the crowd.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.