The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It

By CHRISTOPHER MIMS

Tech’s Open Range Is Losing Out to Walled Gardens

The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble that constitutes the Internet—is dying. And the way it’s dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.

Think about your mobile phone. All those little chiclets on your screen are apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the Web does.

Mountains of data tell us that, in aggregate, we are spending time in apps that we once spent surfing the Web. We’re in love with apps, and they’ve taken over. On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry.

This might seem like a trivial change. In the old days, we printed out directions from the website MapQuest that were often wrong or confusing. Today we call up Waze on our phones and are routed around traffic in real time. For those who remember the old way, this is a miracle.

Everything about apps feels like a win for users—they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.

Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting credit cards. WhenAmazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to pay a few percentage points in transaction fees. But Apple takes 30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its app store, and “very few businesses in the world can withstand that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.

App stores, which are shackled to particular operating systems and devices, are walled gardens where Apple, Google , Microsoft and Amazon get to set the rules. For a while, that meant Apple banned Bitcoin, an alternative currency that many technologists believe is the most revolutionary development on the Internet since the hyperlink. Apple regularly bans apps that offend its politics, taste, or compete with its own software and services.

But the problem with apps runs much deeper than the ways they can be controlled by centralized gatekeepers. The Web was invented by academics whose goal was sharing information. Tim Berners-Lee was just trying to make it easy for scientists to publish data they were putting together during construction of CERN, the world’s biggest particle accelerator.

No one involved knew they were giving birth to the biggest creator and destroyer of wealth anyone had ever seen. So, unlike with app stores, there was no drive to control the early Web. Standards bodies arose—like the United Nations, but for programming languages. Companies that would have liked to wipe each other off the map were forced, by the very nature of the Web, to come together and agree on revisions to the common language for Web pages.

The result: Anyone could put up a Web page or launch a new service, and anyone could access it. Google was born in a garage. Facebook was born in Mark Zuckerberg ’s dorm room.

But app stores don’t work like that. The lists of most-downloaded apps now drive consumer adoption of those apps. Search on app stores is broken.

The Web is built of links, but apps don’t have a functional equivalent. Facebook and Google are trying to fix this by creating a standard called “deep linking,” but there are fundamental technical barriers to making apps behave like websites.

The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to sharing above all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for things—something some of its early architects regret to this day, since it forced the Web to survive on advertising.

The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people could exchange information and goods. It forced companies to build technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology. Microsoft’s Web browser had to faithfully render Apple’s website. If it didn’t, consumers would use another one, such as Firefox or Google’s Chrome, which has since taken over.

Today, as apps take over, the Web’s architects are abandoning it. Google’s newest experiment in email nirvana, called Inbox, is available for both Android and Apple’s iOS, but on the Web it doesn’t work in any browser except Chrome. The process of creating new Web standards has slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, companies with app stores are devoted to making those stores better than—and entirely incompatible with—app stores built by competitors.

“In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the way the world reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,” says Mr. Dixon. “If you go to any Internet startup or large company, they have large teams focused on creating very high quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the mobile Web by comparison.”

Many industry watchers think this is just fine. Ben Thompson, an independent tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance of apps as the “natural state” for software.

Ruefully, I have to agree. The history of computing is companies trying to use their market power to shut out rivals, even when it’s bad for innovation and the consumer.

That doesn’t mean the Web will disappear. Facebook and Google still rely on it to furnish a stream of content that can be accessed from within their apps. But even the Web of documents and news items could go away. Facebook has announced plans to host publishers’ work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.

I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance of a powerful new technology going almost directly from a publicly funded research lab to the public. It caught existing juggernauts like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led to the kind of disruption today’s most powerful tech companies would prefer to avoid.

It isn’t that today’s kings of the app world want to quash innovation, per se. It is that in the transition to a world in which services are delivered through apps, rather than the Web, we are graduating to a system that makes innovation, serendipity and experimentation that much harder for those who build things that rely on the Internet. And today, that is pretty much everyone.

Facebook said to plan site to rival Microsoft Office

Laura Mandaro

SAN MATEO — Facebook is secretly working on a new company-focused website that's designed to compete with Microsoft Office, LinkedIn and offerings from Google, reported the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The new product, dubbed Facebook at Work, would allow users to chat with their colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents, wrote the FT on its website late Sunday.

A spokesperson for Facebook (TICKER: FB) didn't immediately respond for a request for comment.

Though it would look a lot like the Facebook site used by more than 1 billion people, Facebook at Work would allow users to keep their personal profile separate from their work identity. Facebook staff, many of whom use the site in their daily work, have long kicked around the idea of spreading it to other companies, wrote the FT. The new site is now being tested with some companies.

A site that would allow users to chat in select groups and collaborate over shared projects would be a direct competitor to Microsoft (MSFT). Microsoft's Office 365 offering, which operates off the cloud, includes Yammer — an internal corporate chat service that it bought in 2012 — as well as OneDrive and SharePoint for document sharing. Google GOOG is also a fierce competitor in the shared documents space with Google Drive. LinkedIn's LNKD main selling point is its ability to connect users with future jobs, employees and clients. And several private companies also compete in this space, including cloud file-sharing site DropBox and corporate chat site Slack.

Facebook updated its privacy policy, but do consumers care? Jefferson Graham went to the "Let's Make a Deal," set to ask contestants, as they waited to get into the show.

Facebook is unlikely to charge for the service initially, reported the FT. It may try to appeal to companies that have tried to cut down on the time their employees spend on personal social media by an outright Facebook ban.

Amazon Moves to Extend Cloud-Computing Dominance

By QUENTIN HARDY

James Hamilton, a senior executive overseeing Amazon Web Services, at a company conference in Las Vegas last week. CreditAmazon Web Services

LAS VEGAS — Most people know about Amazon’s ambitions to sell you everything from books and movies and smartphones to power tools and auto parts.

Less understood outside the technology industry is just how aggressively the company is also trying to become an important technology provider to other organizations, its aspirations just as big as those of Microsoft, IBM and Google.

Amazon Web Services already provides so-called cloud computing services at low prices for customers including the Central Intelligence Agency and Netflix. At a conference here last week for the web-services unit, company officials explained that Amazon was now trying to get more tech dollars from business customers by also offering services and processes that make it a competitor to traditional suppliers of business technology like Oracle.

Offering more capabilities to customers is a big deal for Amazon. A report last month by the Synergy Research Group said Amazon’s web-services unit has about a 27 percent share of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services. Microsoft is second with about a 10 percent share.

But there are indications that a pricing war and more focus from competitors could dig into Amazon’s lead. There are even concerns that the unit’s revenue growth has stalled in recent quarters.

What makes Amazon unique in the fight to own the computing cloud is what it’s not — a traditional tech company with a long history of providing products and services to business customers. Finding a way to deliver services over the Internet that behave like databases and other traditional software products will be critical to keeping its lead because older tech companies like Microsoft are already capable of doing it.

Amazon Web Services is banking on help from its customers to make its ambitions work. “Ninety percent of our development is deep, sophisticated corporate users telling us what to build next,” said Adam Selipsky, the unit’s vice president for products.

On Wednesday, the unit announced that in 2014 it had released 442 new products for its global network of computers and software, a 60 percent rise from all of 2013. It later raised that number to 449, including faster ways to write and publish software.

The lower number “was so this morning,” said James Hamilton, the enthusiastic executive who oversees the development of A.W.S. “This is a different world,” said Mr. Hamilton, a veteran of decades in companies like IBM and Microsoft before he joined the unit in 2008. “The speed is unbelievably different. We don’t slow down as we get bigger.”

But the unit could face challenges in its efforts. It has already had to deal with embarrassing system failures and changed its policies to suit national governments. Moreover, its parent company, Amazon, has returned less in profits in its 17-year life as a public company than cloud competitors like Google and Microsoft earn in a single quarter. If Wall Street grows tired of Amazon’s continued losses, it could also pinch A.W.S.

Amazon is not the only big tech company trying to lure businesses to the cloud. Microsoft, Google and IBM are all trying to get business customers to rent their cloud services rather than buy software, servers and networking gear.

Just a few years ago, public clouds like Amazon’s were considered experimental turf for tech start-ups. Today, companies like Johnson & Johnson, Intuit and General Electric are among the unit’s customers. In the past year, A.W.S. says, the amount of data it stores has grown 137 percent. It sells twice as much of its basic computing as a year ago.

And analysts believe the pace is picking up across the handful of big tech companies providing cloud services. “Two years ago, public clouds were maybe 2 percent of all computing workloads,” said Lydia Leong, a senior analyst at Gartner. “Now they are more than 10 percent. By 2018, it will be more than 50 percent.”

In addition to parading mainstream companies across the stage at its conference, Amazon released a type of database aimed straight at the core business of Oracle, the world’s largest database company. Oracle declined to comment on Amazon Web Services.

Johnson & Johnson announced from the stage that it would install 25,000 cloud-connected A.W.S. computers that offer a range of standard software, like Microsoft’s Office suite.

Mr. Selipsky said J&J had helped Amazon shape its desktop product, which was initially announced a year ago. Although A.W.S. is known mostly for selling basic computing services, he said that future products would include sophisticated software around managing user behavior, software for compliance in regulated industries like finance and migration of existing software running on corporate computers to the cloud.

By running the customers’ software within their own data centers and listening closely to their needs, cloud companies learn more quickly about customer behavior, figuring out which incremental improvement they can immediately deploy across their networks. And then they can turn around and give those customers exactly what they want.

At least, that’s what the cloud tech companies like to argue.

“The cloud is cheaper, but that isn’t really what is driving companies into it,” said Greg De

Michillie, the director of Google’s cloud business for corporations. “They want to be more experimental, faster, data driven. This is part of a larger change inside companies.”

Facebook new ‘Data Use Policy’: 5 important things worth knowing

By Josh Durso

Facebook has taken a lot of criticism over the years for the privacy of their users on the site. It stemmed from users having a lot of information used that technically belonged to them – which they shared, and the way Facebook executed the notification of that collection. In simple terms, many of those individuals who felt Facebook went too far with their reach for information, or data collection, were even more outraged by the way Facebook explained themselves, or how frequently privacy policies were updated.

This week, Facebook took a step to quell some of the frustration from users in the privacy policy. In a policy that many felt was over-complicated and far longer than necessary, Facebook cut it down dramatically and restructured the entire interface of how users read the privacy policy. The company created a “Privacy Basics” page that explains the basic nuts and bolts of privacy on Facebook. It begins to define what privacy is, explains what information is being collected and used, and then who is using that information.

That being said, there are still a lot of questions, and at the end of the day – a few areas of focus that users should keep a close-eye on moving forward. Some of them are more basic, but others show just how far reaching Facebook truly is.

First off, remember – Facebook – much like real estate is focused on “location, location, location.” Recently, the social network began allowing businesses and companies to advertise depending on your location – instead of just targeting general ads at users based on things they do on their computer. That being said, Facebook made it clear in their old and new privacy policies that anything with a locating device inside of it – related to your computer, or mobile device – will be used to track your location. This includes the GPS on your smartphone, Bluetooth devices, and Wi-Fi signals.

Second, Facebook is collecting information from the other sites you visit as well. Essentially, any site that allows you to use Facebook – as a login method – is fair game. That means Facebook is collecting a lot of user information from third-party sites as well that aren’t affiliated with the company beyond login credentials. Don’t forget about Instagram, and the other apps that Facebook owns and operates, too.

Third, is related to ad targeting. Basically, Facebook can and will – unless you opt out – target ads based on your browser history, and will use what are called “cookies” to make that happen.

See Also: Facebook Messenger for iOS tracks more private data than you expect

Fourth, Facebook is monitoring and collecting everything. Messages, status updates, anything you create, share, comment, like, link, or otherwise while using the social network adds up to one thing: Information that Facebook has no shame about collecting and using for their own benefit.

See Also: Facebook simplifies Privacy Basics with skeptical elements

Lastly, is a new tool that Facebook has been working on for a while. The tool gives users the opportunity to buy things from other websites right on the site. Participants in this new shopping and buying system should keep in mind that their information is being held by the giant that is Facebook. That includes your credit card information and spending history.

Source: Facebook

Facebook: You post it, we can see it, and that's that

By Zach Miners

Facebook lets its users control whether other people can see the information they post, but when it comes to controlling what Facebook itself gets to see, privacy-conscious users are out of luck.

In fact, Facebook doesn't think it would make sense to let users do that.

“With most online services, there’s an understanding that when you use those services to share information, you’re also sharing information with the company providing the service,” said Matt Scutari, manager of privacy and public policy at Facebook.

“For users who are truly concerned with sharing their information with a particular platform, honestly, you might not want to share information with that platform,” he said, speaking during a conference on digital privacy in Palo Alto, California, on Friday.

“I don’t think there are many services out there who could claim they’re not using your information that you’re sharing with them for any purpose. They have to at least use that information to provide the service,” he added.

Scutari was responding to a question from the audience about what tools, if any, Facebook might provide to people who want to post and share information but keep it from Facebook itself.

Lately, the company has been trying to improve its controls for sharing among friends. In September it introduced a “privacy checkup” feature. And just this week it released arevamped privacy policy designed to be easier to use. The company also gives users information about how their data is used for advertising. But it has never offered users tools to limit what data Facebook can ingest when they share.

Data collection—what companies collect, and how it’s used—is an area of concern for Internet users in general, highlighted by some dramatic findings in a recent Pew survey.

Facebook does have a team of employees tasked with looking at privacy issues related to its products, features and tools. The team has a number of programs in place, including daily surveys of users and talks with people in other countries to get their views on privacy, Facebook said on Friday.

U.S. PLANS TO BUILD WORLD’S FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTERS WITH $425 MILLION

By WSKG

The U.S. Department of Energy will spend $425 million to research and construct supercomputers, such as NASA’s “Discover” machine seen here. Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The U.S. government wants to take back the crown for world’s fastest supercomputer, and they’re willing to spend the money to do it — twice.

The Department of Energy announced a $425 million budget Friday that will be allocated towardsresearch and construction of supercomputers. A $325 million deal with IBM and Nvidia will see the creation of two new supercomputers that would each claim the title of fastest in the world; with $100 million going towards the research into the future of supercomputer science.

The two supercomputers, “Sierra” and “Summit,” will be built to work at almost double and triple the speed, respectively, of China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Sierra, which will be used for nuclear weapons simulations, will clock in at 100 petaflops, while Summit, which will be stationed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee for civilian research, will perform at 150 petaflops. Tianhe-2, currently the world’ fastest, operates at 55 petaflops.

The rest of the budget will go towards research into “extreme scale supercomputing” technology, that aims to prepare for future supercomputer construction. The program, named FastForward2, looks to develop chips, memory and other technology that would allow the next generation of machines to operate at more than 20 to 40 times faster than today’s models.

“High-performance computing is an essential component of the science and technology portfolio required to maintain U.S. competitiveness and ensure our economic and national security,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said in a release. “DOE and its National Labs have always been at the forefront of HPC and we expect that critical supercomputing investments like CORAL and FastForward 2 will again lead to transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research that rely on simulations of complex physical systems and analysis of massive amounts of data.”

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Cellphone data may be feds' air raid targets

By USA Today

Using devices mounted on aircraft flying high overhead, the federal government is gathering data from the mobile phones of thousands of innocent Americans in “a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects,” according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The program, run by the Justice Department's U.S. Marshals Service since about 2007, operates Cessna aircraft equipped with devices that mimic the cellphone towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information, reported the newspaper, citing people familiar with the operations.

The program operates from at least five metropolitan-area airports, and the flying range of the planes covers most of the population. The airports were not identified in the Journal story.

The technology is aimed at locating cellphones linked to people under investigation by the government, including fugitives and drug dealers, but it collects information on cellphones belonging to individuals who are not criminal suspects, said people familiar with the program. The device determines which phones belong to suspects and “lets go” of the non-suspect phone.

Calling it “a dragnet surveillance program,” Christopher Soghoian, chief technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “It's inexcusable, and it's likely — to the extent judges are authorizing it — they have no idea of the scale of it.”

The technology used in the planes are 2-foot-square devices that can scoop the identifying information and general location from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight. The paper's sources wouldn't discuss the frequency or duration of the flights but said they occur on a regular basis.

A Justice Department official neither would confirm nor deny the existence of the program, saying that discussion of such matters would allow criminal suspects or foreign powers to determine America's surveillance capabilities. The official said Justice Department agencies comply with federal law, including by seeking court approval.

The program is similar to a National Security Agency program that collects millions of Americans' phone records, in that it scoops up large volumes of data to find a single person or a few people, the Journal reports. The government has justified the NSA phone records collection program as a minimally invasive way to hunt terrorists.

Some of the devices on the Cessnas are known to law enforcement officials as “dirtboxes” because of the initials of the Boeing Co. subsidiary that produces them — Digital Receiver Technology Inc.

Cellphones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device used by the Marshals Service falsely identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, thus forcing all phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information.

Having encryption on a phone, such as that on Apple Inc.'s iPhone 6, does not defeat the process.

Phone companies are cut out in the search for suspects. Law enforcement has found that asking a company for cell tower information to help locate a suspect can be slow and inaccurate. This program allows the government to get that information.

People familiar with the program told the Journal that they do get court orders to search for phones, but it isn't clear whether those orders describe the methods used because the orders are sealed.