Fuck! Yahoo is shutting Delicious down!

People everywhere all over twitter are arguing if Mark Zuckerberg deserves to be named Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2010 or not. But on the other hand, I am sure we all have to agree who really deserves to be the arse of the year. Or may be the arse of the decade if you want.

Yahoo was an internet search company ages before the birth of Google. And now, they sold their soul to Microsoft and Yahoo Search is just an interface for Bing! Yahoo created GeoCities ages before the real blogging hype. Blogs came, then came micro-blogs, and GeoCities stood stand still. And recently GeoCities was discontinued. Yahoo 360 and MyBlogLog were there when Zuckerberg was still using nappies. They were there before Facebook Connect and Google Friend connect, and guess what, the two services are discontinued now. FireEagle is such a brilliant idea, it's the mother of all Gowalla/Foursquare thing, and now it's been more than a year with no significant development there and seems that it will be shut-down soon. Yahoo's Webring and Briefcase are also dead now. And finally my most beloved services that Yahoo ever had are Delicious and Flickr, and today I heard that Delicious is to be shut-down soon, and God only knows when Flickr will be shut-down too.

Every company has its failures, and there is a rule of thumb that roughly 50% of acquisitions fails. Google had its failures too. Google's Wave and Buzz suck a big time. But the difference here is that Yahoo doesn't give its product the chance to succeed or fail, they just shut them down blindly. Only a looser can have a service as successful as Delicious and shut it down, and it requires a huge amount of dumbness to turn successful services like GeoCities, Yahoo Search, and MyBlogLog into failures.

A few months ago Yahoo made - AFAIK - the first acquisition ever of an Arab company in the field of technology. The target of their multi-million acquisition was one of the crappiest Arab companies ever, Maktoob! I've encountered few of their products, such as their blog-hosting service, and it was so 1990's.

Delicious! I really can't believe it! So what the heck is really left out of Yahoo? Their email!? Ok, this one really sucks, and it sure should have been discontinued ages ago instead of Delicious.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I used to be a big Yahoo fan. I used create accounts in almost all of their services, even those obscure ones. Yet now, it's sad to admit that it looks like Yahoo is dying.

Finally, I need your recommendations now for migrating my bookmarks. Meh, should I migrate to those crappy service that I used to hate, such as Diigo and StumbleUpon :(

Update: Apparently they are going to spin Delicious off instead of shutting it down.

Juniper Networks to acquire Trapeze Networks

Today, Juniper Networks announced a definitive agreement to acquire Trapeze Networks, a technology leader in enterprise wireless local area network (WLAN) systems and management software. Read more here.

P.S. Original photo copyrights goes to DailyInterview.net

Tags: Juniper Networks, Trapeze Networks, Gr33n Data

GIF Image 1x1 Pixels Error and Kaspersky

It's been a while, and I wasn't able to access my blogs statistics service, SiteMeter. Every time I go there, I receive the weirdest error message ever, "GIF Image 1x1 Pixels". I go the feeling that they quit business, or something.
Today, I was accessing the following link on Global Voices Online, and guess what, I got the same error message again.
I went googling, and it came out that both SiteMeter and GVO are innocent, it's Kaspersky that is messing out the web pages there.
So, in case you have Kaspersky Antivirus installed, go to the Anti-Spy settings, and either uncheck the "Enable Anti-Banner" altogether, or go to the Anti-Banner settings and add the sites you have problems with to the white-list there.

Tags: Kaspersky, Web Filtering, Gr33n Data

VEPA - Let the Switch switch again

Virtual Servers are cool, everybody is going virtual now. But we (Networking guys) hate them sometimes. The vSwitches inside the Virtual Servers are now responsible for moving the packets between the different Virtual Machines in there, hence the packets never touch the wire, and the physical switches and security devices become more and more blind and can never QoS or secure that traffic.

Now it seems that the IEEE is planning to let the switches do their switching again. VEPA (Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator or IEEE802.1Qbg) are meant to let the vSwitch handle the packets to the adjacent edge switches. Or as HP ProCurve's CTO, Paul Congdon, described it here:

On a bridge, if the port it needs to send a frame on is the same it came in on, normally a switch will drop that packet, but VEPA enables a hairpin mode to allow the frame to be forwarded out the port it came in on. It allows it to turn around and go back.

Also another extension (IEEE802.1Qbh) was required to allow remote switches and security devices - instead of just those adjacent ones - to handle such traffic and perform whatever switching, QoS, or policy inspection tasks on it.

The below presentation is really good in describing the VEPA pre-standard.
http://www.ieee802.org/1/files/public/docs2009/new-dcb-hudson-tagless-vepa-0109.pdf

Tags: IEEE802.1Qbg, VEPA, Virtualization, Gr33n Data

Sorry Nokia, but you deserve to die.

I am not a big fan of Apple's business model. And may be that's why I kept resisting the temptation to buy a new iPhone. Nowadays, no one cares about the mobile phone's hardware, or even software, it's all about the applications that run on it. And Apple was clever enough to create a huge ecosystem around their iPhones, Nokia on the other hand failed to do any proper actions. Their Ovi store sucks, and all the cool startups now such as Gowalla, Foursquare, et al consider Nokia as if it doesn't exist. They make application for iPhone, iPad, Android, and even Blackberry, but nothing for Nokia phones.

So I was forced to develop my own applications in order to be able to make use of the new web applications on my Nokia phone. Nokia then asked me to fill lengthy forms in order to give me access to their beta SDK. And they totally ignored me and never received anything from their site. And now that their QT SDK is publicly available I downloaded it yesterday, and guess what, the installer gave me nothing but errors although there is nothing on their site that says that my system doesn't meet their requirements.

I guess Nokia made it clear to me now that they have lost the battle against Apple and Google, and they have no plans to fight back. And for sure my next phone most probably will not be a Nokia.

Update: It finally worked now, yet I'm still not convinced Nokia is doing any effort to save its own butt.

Tags: Nokia, iPhone, Android, Gr33n Data

PAN - Cloud is Overrated

I like how those Palo Alto Network guys come out with new ideas every now and then. Many times their new ideas aren't more than a marketing buzz, yet I like them. But this time I do not get their point at all.

Ok, they said that they came out with End Point security solution where agents on the end points will not inspect the traffic there but rather send it to the nearest PAN Firewall/UTM to inspect it!

"The Palo Alto endpoint protection takes a novel approach to overcoming this problem. Palo Alto is developing a small agent that will operate persistently on the host, detecting whenever the client connects to a public or private network. Rather than doing the traffic inspection on the client, the agent will compel all traffic to route through the closest home network. This means that all traffic will be inspected and passed through the existing network-based next-generation firewall", Channel Insider - Secure Channel Blog.

And this makes me wonder, how many Megas - if not Gigs - do we need to have on our PC's? Will it send every single executable I touch on my PC over the wire to inspected regardless of its size, whether it is few kilos or multiple Gigs? Why should a network device be bothers for inspecting activities than happen on hosts? I really don't get it. May be I am missing some points here, so would someone please help me understand their new approach.

Tags: PAN, Cloud, Gr33n Data

Is Skype really blocked in Egypt!?

There are rumors here, here, and here that the Egyptian government is blocking Skype.

This morning, a call placed to Vodafone’s customer service indicated that Telecom Egypt is going to block Skype in Egypt, and that it’s out of their hands. After repeated calls from various people to Vodafone’s customer service, they were told “Skype is being blocked since 13th March based on an order from Telecom Egypt.”, The Next Web.

As you can see, the source of the news are Vodafone users who are not able to use Skype when they are connected to the internet via their 3G USB Modems. And since many of the ADSL home users are reporting that Skype is working fine at their places. Then I have strong feeling that the Egyptian government has nothing to do with this. I believe it is just Vodafone's DPI that is blocking Skype in order not to harm their revenues.

Update [16 March 2010]: It's official now, the NTRA - the government - is the one responsible for this and not the mobile operators. However I have strong feelings that the operators are the one who pushed the NTRA to take such decision in the first place as Skype harms their - as well as Telecom Egypt's - revenues.

Tags: Skype, Vodafone, Gr33n Data

Safe Position Updates

Brightkite - our nice competitors - have published a very good post about "The Best Practice for Safe Position Updates", or if you prefer their own jargon, then it's "Safe Check-In's".

http://blog.brightkite.com/2010/02/17/practicing-safe-check-in/

Beware of this Phishing Email

If you receive an email like this one, http://pic.im/g75. Most probably it's a phishing attack, and they are going to fool you in order to get your Facebook password.

Tags: Phishing, Facebook, Gr33n Data