Two Slashes

I was shocked to sit down at my computer this morning only to find that AT&T had gone above and beyond the call of duty with their self-imposed 4chan ban.  Now, I’m not a fan or visitor of the site in any way, but I am still a little irked that they thought it was necessary to restrict access to (parts of) the site.  I’m not a fan of censorship, especially because anything “blocked” because it “could be used for ill intent” could also be used for good.  (Of course, the good uses of 4chan are up in the air, but I digress…)

However, having just heard about a new VPN service promising unlimited and unfiltered anonymized access to the Internet at the awesome price of free, I figured it might be good to get an account and look into the service before AT&T decided that there were any more sites they wanted to block access to.

ItsHidden may not be the most creative name I’ve heard for a VPN provider, and the website could use some retooling (and perhaps a proofreader), but they do function exactly as promised, and without requiring the installation of any software to get online.

Taking into account a comparison in performance between my raw DSL line, a tethered connection with my cell phone, and the VPN through both, there is a noticeable loss in the amount of available bandwidth.  Of course, this is expected when the traffic is going to the Netherlands and back (I ran all speed tests against the same server in Chicago), but it’s not unbearably slow.  Of course, this could change once the public gets its hands on it and the word spreads a little (not unlike ImageShack’s torrent downloader).

I do have a slight concern with the privacy you “gain” by using this service, and whether it might be worth looking into, though.  ItsHidden seems to meter your VPN usage.  I don’t know if this is the first hint at a freemium model they might be looking to pursue, or whether they simply think it’s a numbers game, but I question the meaning of its existence.  Furthermore, any user of the VPN should be worried about the decrypted traffic on ItsHidden’s end.  It would be trivial for them to sniff any data off the wire before they pass it along, and, even though they claim they don’t collect any information, I can’t help but wonder whether they’re actually doing so.

Realistically, I can’t say I trust a company that doesn’t run spell-check on their own site enough to think they would be a good idea for any mission critical data (and why you would be allowing yourself to tunnel through something you can’t verify the setup of anyway is beyond me), but if you need a VPN to get at anything unimportant or for your file downloading needs, this might be a reasonable solution for you to look into.  (Read:  This might be a good idea if you’re heading to DEFCON but don’t have any other means available to secure yourself.)

Update (7/29): According to a bunch of news outlets, AT&T was acting on behalf of customers they thought were being targeted by a denial-of-service attack.  While the thought of protecting your customers is a nice one, a heads-up might have made things a little happier and calmer for everyone.  Heck, maybe communicating through the proper channels could have picked up some help from moot and the 4chan crew.  So, AT&T, the gesture was nice, but you really can’t go around trying to pull stunts like that without letting people know.  One giant secret is enough.

I don’t know when, exactly, but a thought came to me at some point this weekend, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.

I find it highly unlikely that anyone has noticed (or, if they have, they haven’t bothered to say anything) that the software on my projects page hasn’t been touched in at least a year, in some cases quite a bit longer than that.

Considering my interests as a computer scientist, I guess I find it kind of funny that I could let such a thing happen.  I must admit that I myself am using some of the current “active” projects less and less.  Since I started using the Windows 7 beta (and now the release candidate), I have little use for SkipTo as I can simply press the Windows key, type a few characters, and away I go with the same application I would have launched with my own tool.  (Admittedly, I could have done this in Vista, too, but I won’t bother beating a dead horse, especially one I refuse to ride.)

Alright, maybe I caused this particular bug. I guarantee that you don't know what the solution was, though.

At heart, my best guess is that this is something of a motivation issue.  After hammering away at code for hours on end at my summer job, and after all of the work I’ve put in over the previous school year, it’s been a little hard as of late for me to come home, sit down, and find the desire to stare at monospaced fonts and locate misplaced semicolons for a few hours in hopes of doing anything productive.

I’ve also noticed that whatever efforts I’ve put into any form of development (outside of work) as of late have been for personal use with no intent of making them public, or helping other people with their own unique problems.  I’ve hacked together a tool to help me rename and reorganize my MP3 library, butchered the Last.fm plugin I use for WordPress into something that displays my application-usage statistics from Wakoopa, and made minor tweaks to various tools to enhance my own productivity.  I’ve modified WordPress themes, helped design a new one from scratch, and experimented lightly with Blogger (for 20SB, of course, as I have no intention of leaving WordPress anytime soon).  This lack of sharing and public utility isn’t something I’m completely proud of, and I hope to rectify it at some point, but (as any regular well knows) I have an odd habit of promising things here and then not delivering, so a promise this is not.

The best way I see to motivate myself at this point is to scrap the “crap” I’ve got sitting in my projects page (honestly, Visual Basic 6 is dying, anyway), and start working on a few fresh projects.  What I need, however, are the ideas for the replacement projects, things people like you might actually have a use for or that might be useful as a proof-of-concept.  I’ve picked up a few decent suggestions over the past few days from a handful of people, but I’d be more interested in working on things that more than one or two people would ever find useful.

If you have a suggestion, leave a comment.  In the meantime, I’ll be staring at that blinking line trying to decide what I’ll be making it run away from.

Caution:  This post includes gratuitous amounts of speculation about web services and the Internet in general.  If you prefer to deal in the world of concretes, I suggest you read yesterday’s newspaper instead.  Or send me a cement mixer.

Almost a year ago, we had Cuil.  Claiming to be an instant success over Google, and even grabbing up some of the behemoth’s staff, Cuil ultimately did exactly what most people expected to happen:  it flopped.  Earlier this year, Wolfram released Alpha and came to the realization that, while people are looking for the facts, their approach isn’t one that applies universally.  And at the beginning of June, Microsoft decided that they wanted to “Bing it on” and found that renaming your search engine might earn them a place above Yahoo!, but it doesn’t really get anywhere near the top, especially when marketed as a “decision engine.”  And now, I think someone’s going to try again.

To be honest, none of the major tech outlets have anything to say about them (yet), and the only reason I know of their plan is through their increasingly-common spidering of this blog.  Bear with me a moment, because I’m sure you’re just as confused as I was.

A quick glance at Apnoti’s home page doesn’t tell you much about their intentions.  In fact, all you really find out is that they seem to have been playing a variation of the product search game for more than a year, and they’ve differentiated themselves by offering the ability to watch prices on Amazon for the things you want.  To the best of my knowledge and examination, there’s no explanation for or mention of any other projects they’re working on available for consumption.

Beneath the shopping lies hopes and dreams of being something more, though.  The page hosted on the subdomain that keeps showing up in my statistics (smart.apnoti.com) is simple enough, bearing only a countdown to August and the suggestion that real-time search is coming.  But what’s left to search in real time?  My guess:  blogs and other sites refreshed with new content at semi-regular rates.  Think about it.  Google Blog Search might exist, but it’s far from showing you what’s happening in real time (unless you enjoy hitting refresh repeatedly, that is), and scraping Twitter only gets you so far, especially when there are already so many variants.

If what I envision is true, imagine being able to type in a recent event, like Michael Jackson’s death, and watch as the blogosphere fills up with reports and commentaries about the event.  Not trivial-length blurbs and “I can’t believe this happened!”-type posts, but posts of a reasonable length and with some backing to them.  It’s a niche that I have yet to see filled, and I think it has the potential to be a great service, provided the sites they index maintain some level of credibility.  (If you need a description, imagine something along the lines of Twitter Search, Facebook’s timeline, or Profilactic as your search results page, sorted with the newest posts first, and the ability to click a link and have any new results that have shown up populate into your present view.

Whether there’s a market for this sort of thing is another question altogether.  There’s no doubt that everyone and everything is moving toward real-time information sharing, so it makes sense to me that this is a logical step along that route.  On the other hand, such a move is a costly risk; one false move, one mistake, and all that hard work becomes a black hole for money.  There’s also the massive resource requirement to consider, as it’s no easy task to index the countless blogs available online and come away with even a decent index of all the content they offer.  Add to that the load required to keep their results fresh and relevant, and the requirement shoots up even further.

Of course, I’ve proven that I have a mediocre track record when it comes to predictions, so I might just be further cementing myself as a crackpot when Apnoti decides to open up the site as some sort of gadget guide.  However, even if I’m far off, I would still like to see this idea.  One day.