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IE 8 reaches top browser slot
NEWS
IE 8 reaches top browser slot
Editorial
Internet Explorer 8 is now the world’s most-used browser, according to the latest figures from web analytics company Net Applications. According to the company’s figures for January, the market share for Internet Explorer 8 rose to 22.37% from 20.82% in December. It took most of that market share from other versions of the browser. Internet Explorer 6’s market share fell 0.99% from December to January, now resting at exactly one fifth of the market. Internet Explorer 7 has lost considerable traction since last March, when its share rested at over 35%. It dipped below 20% in September, and in January had slipped to 14.53%. Google’s Chrome has hardly made a dent in the market. It reached its all-time high last month, but still accounted for only 3.85% of all browsers used. And other browsers such as Safari and Opera are unlikely to fare much better; they are lumped into the ‘Other’ category, which has yet to break 17%. However, Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5 is slowly making headway. Its market share has risen steadily since last spring, and reached 17.08% in January. It has just been replaced by version 3.6, which has several new features, including full-screen video, protection against outdated plugins, and the ability for developers to mandate asynchronous scripts to speed up web page load times. It is highly likely that Internet Explorer 6 will lose even more market share following this month’s decision by Google to cease support for the browser. Now, many features in Google applications such as Google Docs and Spreadsheet will not work with Internet Explorer 6. The browser was also the target for the zero-day Operation Aurora attack launched against tens of companies in December, leading both the French and German governments to advise citizens not to use it.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the Panopticon. Conceived by Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century advocate of utilitarianism, this was an architectural design for prisons that enabled the jailers to keep a constant watch on every prisoner. Significantly, Bentham was also an opponent of civil rights. It turns out that Jeremy Bentham has quite a lot in common with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This month, Google caused a stir by releasing Google Buzz, a social networking system tied to its existing Gmail webmail service. Buzz enables users to make micro blog-style updates, mimicking similar services offered by Twitter and Facebook. They can geotag their updates, so that Google knows where they are, and can put their ‘Buzzes’ on a Google map. It’s all very exciting -- but certain aspects of the service have privacy advocates worried. The problem lies with the fact that Google initially set up Buzz to automatically detect which of your email contacts you corresponded with the most via Gmail. It then automatically followed those people, and published that list of contacts for the world to see. This led to some serious problems for some users, including a woman in the Midwest US who suddenly found that her abusive ex-husband -- who was the third most frequent contact on her Gmail list -- was able to see all of the Google Reader items that she had shared with her boyfriend, including information about the area in which she lived and worked. Google insisted that users have always had the option to turn this feature off, but subsequently made it more obvious. Then, it acknowledged that this was not enough, and instead announced that Buzz will no longer automatically set up a list of people to follow. Instead, it will merely suggest potential contacts to follow. In short, it turned the feature into an opt-in choice. That didn’t make the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) feel any better. The privacy advocate complained to the Federal Trade Commission, asking it to investigate Google. It argued that even after two rounds of changes, the search engine giant was still using frequent
February 2010
address book and chat contacts to suggest followers, and that the service still allows people to automatically follow a user, burdening that user with the task of blocking unwanted followers. There are two key issues here. The first is that Google altered the fundamental conditions under which its Gmail service was offered. It did it retrospectively, in a way that confused millions of users and rendered intimate, implicit information about their personal relationships open for everyone to see. Secondly, and perhaps even more worryingly, it shows a marked lack of understanding on the part of Google, and the technocrats that it employs. These people assume that the world thinks in the same way that they do. In December, when CEO Eric Schmidt essentially dismissed the idea of privacy online, he was creating an implicit mission statement for the search engine company. The people that run Google hold a very dim view of privacy. They believe in the power of explicit statistical data, and in the transparency of implicit relationships. Google is building its own Panopticon, but with a significant difference. It sees nothing wrong with granting every resident of that Panopticon equal omniscience. Each prisoner is also a jailer, both empowered by an all-encompassing gaze, and subject to the scrutiny of all their peers. That may sound wonderful in theory. Many may view it as the ultimate in digital democracy. But we are not machines. The woman who has escaped an abusive relationship, the spouse who is carrying on an illicit affair with another, the employee who is being courted by a third-party company -- these people may not agree with Google’s binary outlook. Human beings are organic. Their relationships are messy. Codifying these relationships is an incredibly difficult task. PageRank just won’t cut it. Google started in the late 1990s as the underdog. A company that simply wanted information to be free. But its story now is one of hubris, technocracy, and unbelievable myopia. This won’t be the first time where blind innovation ends up causing the company -- and its users -- significant problems.
Computer Fraud & Security
3
IE 8 reaches top browser slot
Editorial
Internet Explorer 8 is now the world’s most-used browser, according to the latest figures from web analytics company Net Applications. According to the company’s figures for January, the market share for Internet Explorer 8 rose to 22.37% from 20.82% in December. It took most of that market share from other versions of the browser. Internet Explorer 6’s market share fell 0.99% from December to January, now resting at exactly one fifth of the market. Internet Explorer 7 has lost considerable traction since last March, when its share rested at over 35%. It dipped below 20% in September, and in January had slipped to 14.53%. Google’s Chrome has hardly made a dent in the market. It reached its all-time high last month, but still accounted for only 3.85% of all browsers used. And other browsers such as Safari and Opera are unlikely to fare much better; they are lumped into the ‘Other’ category, which has yet to break 17%. However, Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5 is slowly making headway. Its market share has risen steadily since last spring, and reached 17.08% in January. It has just been replaced by version 3.6, which has several new features, including full-screen video, protection against outdated plugins, and the ability for developers to mandate asynchronous scripts to speed up web page load times. It is highly likely that Internet Explorer 6 will lose even more market share following this month’s decision by Google to cease support for the browser. Now, many features in Google applications such as Google Docs and Spreadsheet will not work with Internet Explorer 6. The browser was also the target for the zero-day Operation Aurora attack launched against tens of companies in December, leading both the French and German governments to advise citizens not to use it.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the Panopticon. Conceived by Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century advocate of utilitarianism, this was an architectural design for prisons that enabled the jailers to keep a constant watch on every prisoner. Significantly, Bentham was also an opponent of civil rights. It turns out that Jeremy Bentham has quite a lot in common with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This month, Google caused a stir by releasing Google Buzz, a social networking system tied to its existing Gmail webmail service. Buzz enables users to make micro blog-style updates, mimicking similar services offered by Twitter and Facebook. They can geotag their updates, so that Google knows where they are, and can put their ‘Buzzes’ on a Google map. It’s all very exciting -- but certain aspects of the service have privacy advocates worried. The problem lies with the fact that Google initially set up Buzz to automatically detect which of your email contacts you corresponded with the most via Gmail. It then automatically followed those people, and published that list of contacts for the world to see. This led to some serious problems for some users, including a woman in the Midwest US who suddenly found that her abusive ex-husband -- who was the third most frequent contact on her Gmail list -- was able to see all of the Google Reader items that she had shared with her boyfriend, including information about the area in which she lived and worked. Google insisted that users have always had the option to turn this feature off, but subsequently made it more obvious. Then, it acknowledged that this was not enough, and instead announced that Buzz will no longer automatically set up a list of people to follow. Instead, it will merely suggest potential contacts to follow. In short, it turned the feature into an opt-in choice. That didn’t make the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) feel any better. The privacy advocate complained to the Federal Trade Commission, asking it to investigate Google. It argued that even after two rounds of changes, the search engine giant was still using frequent
February 2010
address book and chat contacts to suggest followers, and that the service still allows people to automatically follow a user, burdening that user with the task of blocking unwanted followers. There are two key issues here. The first is that Google altered the fundamental conditions under which its Gmail service was offered. It did it retrospectively, in a way that confused millions of users and rendered intimate, implicit information about their personal relationships open for everyone to see. Secondly, and perhaps even more worryingly, it shows a marked lack of understanding on the part of Google, and the technocrats that it employs. These people assume that the world thinks in the same way that they do. In December, when CEO Eric Schmidt essentially dismissed the idea of privacy online, he was creating an implicit mission statement for the search engine company. The people that run Google hold a very dim view of privacy. They believe in the power of explicit statistical data, and in the transparency of implicit relationships. Google is building its own Panopticon, but with a significant difference. It sees nothing wrong with granting every resident of that Panopticon equal omniscience. Each prisoner is also a jailer, both empowered by an all-encompassing gaze, and subject to the scrutiny of all their peers. That may sound wonderful in theory. Many may view it as the ultimate in digital democracy. But we are not machines. The woman who has escaped an abusive relationship, the spouse who is carrying on an illicit affair with another, the employee who is being courted by a third-party company -- these people may not agree with Google’s binary outlook. Human beings are organic. Their relationships are messy. Codifying these relationships is an incredibly difficult task. PageRank just won’t cut it. Google started in the late 1990s as the underdog. A company that simply wanted information to be free. But its story now is one of hubris, technocracy, and unbelievable myopia. This won’t be the first time where blind innovation ends up causing the company -- and its users -- significant problems.
Computer Fraud & Security
3