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Entries in General (20)
March Madness
It's still slow going over here but we've finally come up with a release date. Expect the next release of Netizen by the end of March 2008. The new desktop client will be launched with our new web service as Netizen Express.
This Ain't the Internet, It's An Arms Race
And I am an arms dealer, fitting you with weapons in the form of software. But while most broadband customers don't care which side of the Net Neutrality debate wins, ISPs are continuing to discriminate data based on the type of traffic flowing on their network. The latest move by Comcast is one of the firsts by a large US based ISP. Instead of investing in network upgrades to keep up with broadband demand, they have decided that it would be more "Comcastic" to start deploying expensive and sophisticated technology to slow down p2p traffic. Though the Wired article points out that they are within their legal rights to discriminate data based on the type of traffic (as opposed to its origin), by not acknowledging that they are indeed implementing this practice they are knowingly doing their customers a disservice.
Ok, back to weapons development. No more blogging while listening to pop music for me.
Chasing Vista and Leopard
As a desktop software developer, I get a heart attack every time there is a new operating system on the horizon. There is always a flurry of debugging and testing activity just to ensure that the application runs as expected on the new OS. It takes a lot of time to check if any existing APIs have changed and to determine what can be done to support any modified behaviors. It takes even more time to ensure that an application still behaves the same across all versions of the operating system. It’s necessary for ensuring quality but it most definitely gets in the way of writing new features.
With Windows Vista’s release earlier this year, we have been spending the last few months modifying and testing the application to run on the new platform. Though the next version of Netizen should run without the need for the Windows XP compatibility setting, it will be another version before we get all the Windows Vista UAC issues sorted out. I think our Auto-Update mechanism will be the first to experience some problems, even with the next release.
Mac OS X Leopard is set for release this month and I have yet to try Netizen on a developer preview release of that OS. I don’t have enough test machines for that. I wish Apple would just let me run their OS on a virtual machine. But until I get another Mac Mini with the new OS, expect inconsistent behavior from Netizen. Actually, I just hope Netizen launches on the new OS. I’m not sure how the updated Finder and the new Stacks and Time Machine feature will affect the application. The new Leopard features are really exciting, but I hope the API changes and feature work required to get Netizen to shine on the new platform doesn’t send me into shock. I think I was actually happy when Apple announced earlier this year that they were delaying the release of Leopard. Anyway, if anyone gets a chance to try Netizen on Leopard, please let me know how it goes.
Rogers Cable Degrading All Encrypted IP Traffic
For those critics that say net neutrality regulation is “a solution in search of a problem”, then I present you with this. After spending months trying to help Netizen users in Canada troubleshoot their network performance problems, I’m declaring that the Rogers Cable network is crap. Rogers Cable customers have some of the highest incidents of network connectivity and performance problems in our user base. It only lends credence to the “truemors” that Rogers Cable in Canada has escalated their packet shaping practices to the outright degradation of all encrypted IP traffic. Rogers Cable is really treating their customers like idiots if they think that the Internet is just for web browsing. Customers using legitimate encrypted services such as Netizen, VPN, Skype, Joost, SFTP, secure IM, SMTP/TLS and even Xbox Live will continue to suffer until they make their wallets heard and switch to another ISP. I hope that this is not going to be a trend among ISPs.
But I haven’t given up on Rogers Cable customers, though. We’ve never counted on the ISPs to do us any favors, but this has helped us identify specific problems and make some improvements to the next version of Netizen (yes, we’re still working on it) so that we can better serve users that may have less than stellar ISP connectivity. We have started improving Netizen’s resiliency and overall experience to minimize the pain and interruption that busted connectivity has on our users’ workflow. Maybe I should juice Netizen up with some intelligent AS-level routing for good measure. The fight has just begun; because who’s to say that this won’t happen with my own ISP.
Shout Out to Abhinav the Intern!
Hi, Netizens. I wanted to save my first post to the Netizen Newsfeed to send out a special thanks to someone who has devoted a lot of time to help get Netizen off the ground.
I want to personally congratulate and thank our marketing intern, Abhinav Prathivadi, for all the hard work that he did for us last semester!! Abhinav is a freshman at Berkeley, and during the Fall semester, he dedicated his time and energy to help us ideate on marketing and promotion ideas for college-aged Netizen users. There’s no doubt that the kid is bright and has a great future ahead of him. Abhinav also helped get the word out about Netizen on Berkeley’s campus. As an east-coast company, this west-coast exposure was fantastic, and everybody here at Civil Engines really appreciates all his hard work. Anyway, thanks Abhinav! Good luck to you for the rest of you career and have fun in school!
Netizen Makes Sharewood Picnic 64
Netizen was featured this week on Robin Good’s Sharewood Picnic 64. No, there is no food involved, and it has nothing to do with the hottest new N64 games. Sharewood Picnic is a “weekly collection of some of the most interesting new media tools and resources hand-picked by Robin Good and Livia Iacolare during their daily online explorations.”
Robin’s blog has a good mix of interesting tech news and commentary and his Sharewood Picnic lists always have an interesting array of cool new websites and tools that I recommend you check out. We’re certainly honored to have made the list and hope you take a moment to check out some of the sites that they review.
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Meet us at nextNY tonight
We are going to be at nextNY's "July Social: Drinkin’ in the Sun" tonight. The event is going to be held on the rooftop of Bar 13 (Citysearch link) from 6 to 9 pm.
Looks like there are going to be some interesting folks there. For those of you in NYC and interested in learning more about Netizen, come and join us for a drink. We will be there to spew some secrets we can't post here.
Get to Know Your Fellow Netizens...The Finale
(Read Part I, Part II, and Part III here)
And now the conclusion of our four part series...
So how often do people actually use Civil Netizen?
Since our application is distributed, we see very little direct traffic from our users. It's quite a blessing and a curse. We'd love to know every detail about how often CN is used, but in the end, that would entail violating our own rules about privacy mentioned at our parent site, www.civilengines.com.
What are we most proud of with respect to the Civil Netizen project?
I think we’re most proud of the simply seeing the evolution of our ideas into a real-world working product. Seeing and knowing that people out there in the world are using our product certainly makes us quite proud of what we’ve done. We also take great pleasure in hearing from and helping our users, whether it’s a complaint or a compliment.
Given all the changes on the web, how would we describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?
We would say that power and control of the Web is rapidly shifting from big corporations to individuals. However, we would caution that the architecture of the Web still to this day favor service providers with big IT budgets. YouTube is rumored to be spending more than $1 million per month on bandwidth.
Netizen as an Alternative to PGP?
Glenn Fleishman, a columnist for The Seattle Times who co-writes the periodic Practical Mac, covered Civil Netizen in today's column, "Keep files private by encrypting". It seems the Times has found the proverbial needle in a haystack and reviewed us alongside PGP Desktop Home 9. Besides its noteworthiness for being our first ever mention in a traditional print periodical, the article itself brings up some very important points about privacy and encryption which we here at Civil Engines take quite seriously. Glenn writes in his article:
"Paranoia is a condition for those who only imagine that there are forces arrayed against them. Encrypting files can be an effective cure against reality."
It is nice to see another voice of paranoia in this my-life-is-in-the-open-at-myspace-flickr-del.icio.us world.
Get to Know Your Fellow Netizens...Part III
(Read Part I and Part II here)
We're back for the third and almost, but not final installment of "Get to Know Your Fellow Netizens". Here, we continue the in-depth look behind the scenes of Civil Netizen. It's like a Connie Chung interview, without all the singing and rolling on the floor.
Who are our primary users?
Our user base is quite geographically distributed. Most of our early alpha users were from New York City since that’s where we are based and where many of our friends live. But we broke out of the five boroughs real quick. Besides having users throughout the US, we’ve seen lots of usage in other countries throughout Europe and Asia. Secure, simple file transfer is a universally needed function, and we hope and believe our solution is the most effective and most secure for all Netizens.
What are some of our greatest challenges with this project?
Increasing and nurturing our user base is a big challenge right now. File transfer is not the most popular or hippest topic around, but reliable file transfer is a long standing problem plaguing the Internet and is a fundamental service we need to perfect before we can layer sexier capabilities like peer transactions and semantic queries. As for what actual user-centric features we will build on top these capabilities, we hope to show those off on our blog.
David
in General, New Features, Get to Know
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