Oliver Roup's Blog » oroup

Bitcasa, snake oil, etc

oroup — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:48:42 +0000

I’ve watched with some amusement the controversy between CrunchFund and TechCrunch and whether Mike Arrington can successfully / fairly cover the startups that he writes about / promotes. On the general question, I have no idea, and I do think Mike has unfairly taken the brunt of the firestorm here when lots of other publications or their parent companies have investments in venture funds. (The NY Times and Giga Om among them.) Also AOL not just approved of the situation, they invested $10m in the fund, so it’s a little disingenuous to give Mike a hard time about it now.

But on the other hand, let’s take a specific case:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/with-bitcasa-the-entire-cloud-is-your-hard-drive-for-only-10-per-month/

Here are some great quotes from the article:

But Bitcasa is not like any of those services. It doesn’t move files around. It doesn’t sync files. It deals in bits and bytes, the 1′s and 0′s of digital data.

I’m sure I shouldn’t make fun of technology reporters who obviously don’t understand anything about technology. Here’s another great quote:

And because the data is encrypted on the client side, Bitcasa doesn’t even know what it’s storing. [...] Even if the RIAA and MPAA came knocking on Bitcasa’s doors, subpoenas in hand, all Bitcasa would have is a collection of encrypted bits with no means to decrypt them.

While this is highly unlikely, it is technically possible. However:

Sharing files via Bitcasa is simple too: just copy and paste a file’s or folder’s link (a URL, available on right-click)

One wonders how Bitcasa can deliver an unencrypted version of the file or a URL that contains one if they don’t have the secret key. And finally there is this:

Using patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques and encryption, Bitcasa keeps costs down (way, way down, but that’s it’s secret sauce)

Oy. “Patented” (I’m guessing they mean patent pending) proprietary encryption algorithms that somehow let you de-dupe files without knowing what files you actually have. This seems almost certainly like snake oil. You could be comparing encrypted files if all your users share the same encryption keys but of course this means that it would be very easy to figure out which files each user was really storing and the benefit of encryption is lost.

That a startup would be making somewhat overblown claims is not so surprising to me, but what bothers me is the breathy press-release quality of the post. And at the end of the post you see it:

Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Bitcasa.

It turns out Sarah Perez claims she didn’t know Bitcasa was an investment of CrunchFund when she did the interview. I’m assuming that’s true. But the optics are certainly bad. Imagine a hypothetical meeting where Mike Arrington says, “Hey Sarah, will you interview these Bitcasa guys? They seem great.” Sarah might get positively biased without even realizing that she’s talking about a company her boss has invested in.

Certainly this kind of situation makes me less likely to take what TechCrunch writes seriously.

Apple + OnLive?

oroup — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:08:47 +0000

Big software companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and even Facebook have a ton of cash on their balance sheet. Whenever investors start pressuring them to dividend some of that cash to shareholders, the ready answer is always that they’re hanging on to it to facilitate major acquisitions. Steve Jobs said recently justified his $51B cash pile by speaking to the possibility of strategic acquisitions.

Here’s an idea: Apple should buy OnLive. If you’re not familiar with it, OnLive was founded by Steve Pearlman, the guy behind WebTV (acquired by Microsoft) and Moxi (acquired by Paul Allen’s Digeo) and a key figure behind General Magic. (IPO in 1995). OnLive offers it’s customers the chance to play cutting edge games on relatively low end hardware without installation by running the game in the cloud. The user software decodes a streaming video of the game action and sends the user input back up to the cloud. The original announcement was met largely with derision, claiming that round trip times would render the games unplayable. That talk has since faded with the launch of the service. Clever engineering and placement of servers at the edge of the network have yielded a completely playable product. Users don’t need modern hardware or to install games, they are immediately playable and booted on-demand in the cloud.

Although the game selection is currently somewhat limited the service has several characteristics likely to be attractive to publishers: Complete immunity from piracy, reduced revenue erosion from the used game market and zero distribution costs. Time-based “PlayPasses” and unlimited subscriptions for older games offer a price-point for everyone.

OnLive recently introduced a “MicroConsole” for $99. Since all it needs to do is decode video and stream USB input back up to the cloud, the hardware is cheap. As games improve and require more sophisticated hardware, consumers will not need to upgrade – all the upgrades happen in the cloud and only for the games that require it. A parent faced with a Microsoft or Sony console in the $300 range or a $99 console from OnLive with games of similar quality will have an easy decision.

Question: Which company totally dominates mobile gaming? If you answered Nintendo or Sony, you’re a few years out of date. The answer is Apple. The iPhone and iPod touch enjoy huge penetration, a massive library and an easy payment mechanism. Steve Jobs recently claimed that Apple owns 50% of the mobile gaming market. (A figure disputed by Nintendo.)

However in the “living room game market” (what we once might have called the “console game market”), Apple has no solution at all. In theory, they could do what Microsoft did, burning billions of dollars making custom hardware, but why would they? Apple already introduced an inexpensive living room device that decodes video and retails for $99. It’s called the AppleTV. Customers rent videos through the device and stream them over the net. 10s of millions of customers already purchase games and other digital goods from Apple for their iPhone and iPod Touch. Adding games to AppleTV would only require the addition of USB ports or wireless. Certainly OnLive is going to make the move in the other direction – the console controller conspicuously sports video controls even though OnLive doesn’t currently offer video.

Might Apple try to just build something like OnLive themselves? Sure. But OnLive has built some seriously impressive technology, including tough-to-duplicate leases for space at the network edges, not to mention some fearsome looking IP.

Another interesting tidbit: Steve Pearlman’s employer from 1985-1990? Apple Computer.

Credit: Christian Romming, a co-worker of mine helped develop a number of the ideas above.

Keyboard modified clicks

oroup — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:36:03 +0000

In case you’re ever wondering, here is a full list of the “key modified clicks” that the major browsers look for:

(Note that on Windows, “cmd” is “ctrl”)

Chrome, Firefox:
shift: new active window
cmd: new tab
cmd-shift: new active tab

Safari:
cmd: new tab
cmd-shift: new active tab
cmd-opt: new window
cmd-opt-shift: new active window

IE:
shift: new active window
ctrl-shift: new active tab

Note that you also need to deal with right clicks and “open in new window”, “open in new tab”, etc….

Shared Items – March 2, 2010

oroup — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:20:44 +0000

Wash. man electrocuted by urinating on power line

March 2, 2010 – Possibly the most gruesome way to go that I can imagine.

Shared Items – February 26, 2010

oroup — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:23:23 +0000

Vancouver Now – Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes – Post Sports

February 26, 2010 – Canada is awesome!

Shared Items – February 19, 2010

oroup — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:01:00 +0000

Ex-Goldman programmer indicted over HFT code theft | Reuters

February 18, 2010 – Who wants to bet that this case never goes to trial? There will be a settlement involving the perpetrator agreeing to never describe what this code actually does.

Shared Items – February 18, 2010

oroup — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:26:05 +0000

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home Boing Boing

February 18, 2010 – This is pretty creepy and fits in to my “hypothetical attacks we talked about in Grad school are very real” theme. Yikes.

Shared Items – February 17, 2010

oroup — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:56:54 +0000

Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA | Freedom to Tinker

February 17, 2010 – It’s amazing when these esoteric technical issues we talked about in grad school turn out to be real-life issues. What if the certificate authority is working in concert with your attacker? How do you know you’re really talking to GMail and not the Chinese Government? It’s still amazing to see this go from grad-student theory to real-life issue.

Shared Items – February 10, 2010

oroup — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:17:27 +0000

BBC News – Warner retreats from free music streaming

February 10, 2010 – Surprise, Surprise. Just as streaming music sites like Pandora look to be turning the corner, here come the music labels to move the goal posts. Again.

In theory Pandora is protected under the DMCA but expect posturing and perhaps litigation over what exactly constitutes an “interactive” stream.

Shared Items – February 8, 2010

oroup — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:03:37 +0000

How Facebook uses Erlang for real-time chat – Off the Grid!!

February 8, 2010 – This is a somewhat old blog post from a Facebook engineer describing how they engineered the chat system in Erlang. It’s notable because it contains a description of a scale testing technique I’ve never heard of before – they did a “dark launch” where real users pages were simulating status update connections and even fake message sending without ever drawing a single element on screen. This seems like a very novel way to get realistic load testing (realistic because it’s real people with real data) but without exposing your users to a system with bugs. Clever!