Time traces

Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service.

Reports started streaming into the official Gmail and Google Apps discussion forums on Thursday and continued Friday morning.

It’s the third time in the past two weeks that Gmail users have been locked out of their accounts due to the “502 Server Error” login problem.

In the middle of last week, an undetermined number of individual and Apps Gmail users were hit, and it took Google about 15 hours to restore the service for them.

Then on Monday of this week the problem resurfaced. A broad group of Gmail users, including organizations that use it as part of the fee-based Premier version of Google Apps, were affected.

Now the problem is back, according to multiple reports from users. It’s not clear how many people have been affected by this latest problem, but those who are detailing their troubles in the discussion forums describe the outages as prolonged.

“Still down. 24 hours and counting. This ceased to be funny long ago. Any of the other users here have any recommendations for another e-mail provider? It’s time to start voting with our feet and leaving for greener pastures,” wrote a user identified as Howardf42 on Friday morning in a thread devoted to the 502 problem in the Google Apps discussion forum.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company hasn’t acknowledged this latest outage in any of the forums or company blogs so far.

Google is a major proponent of the idea of delivering applications and computing services via the Internet, popularly known as “cloud computing.”

However,when vendors experience technical problems in their data centers and the performance and availability of the applications is affected, IT and business managers feel helpless, because they can do little to restore the services, while their end-users clamor for solutions.

T-Mobile USA is said to be offering the first Android based handset for presale on Sept. 17, according to TmoNews. The new development contradicts that the mobile platform could be delayed until 2009.

The Android-powered device will be manufactured by Taiwan-based HTC and will carry the name G1. G1 is said to have a large, 5-by-3-inch touchsreen display (larger than iPhone’s 3.5-inch multitouch display) and a sliding Qwerty keyboard for those long e-mails, together with a 3-megapixel camera (iPhone 3G has a 2-megapixel camera). This rumoured handset is previously known as HTC Dream and videos depicting it emerged earlier on the Web.

A curious addition to G1’s specs is the requirement of a working Gmail account in order to use the phone’s features. Though many are already unhappy with this development, there is no need to panic. Anyone can sign up for a Gmail account now by simply visiting the service’s page.

Price-wise, T-Mobile is said to start G1’s pre-sales on Sept. 17 for only $150 with a two-year contract (iPhone 3G has a $199 starting price point). The offer will be open only to current T-Mobile customers for just one week. After this period, in early October, you will be able to grab the device for $250 while the full retail price is slated at $399. Further details on the data plans sold with G1 have not emerged yet.

As expected, G1 is supposed to be a 3G-capable device but T-Mobile’s high-speed coverage is lagging far behind to its competitors. At the moment only New York and Las Vegas benefit from T-Mobile’s 3G coverage. By 2009, the network plans to expand its 3G service to 25 cities.

If the latest rumors are true, we will see on Sept. 17 T-Mobile’s G1 going head to head with Apple’s iPhone and HTC’s Windows Mobile counterparts, the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. Will you be pre-ordering a G1?

Street View allows users of Google Maps and Earth to view street-side photos of the geographic locations they are viewing with the tools. The service has previously been available in the US and several other countries, but Australia only received the additional functionality today.

But a quick survey of the tools this morning revealed substantial gaps in its coverage of locations even in metropolitan Australia. Google’s road survey of the nation — carried out from November by a team of contractors in small vehicles — appeared to focus on major roads first, with side streets receiving less attention.

Patchy coverage … Wagga Wagga example
(Credit: Google Maps)

Local Google Maps product manager Andrew Foster acknowledged the service wasn’t yet complete, saying that Google was not targeting particular areas or streets and that some of the photos that Google had taken were simply still being processed.

“The goal is to cover all streets,” he said. “In certain areas of Australia, we’re still processing some of the imagery, and still driving some of the areas.”

“If you look at the imagery we have processed at the time we’ve launched, it’s extremely broad, covering all the way to a lot of outback areas, such as the Nullarbor and Alice Springs.”

Internationally, Street View has caused controversy amongst groups concerned it could cause privacy issues. In Australia, Google has consulted with privacy experts. The company has provided an option on the site to request images be taken down.

However, Foster said the search giant was currently fielding enquiries from people who wanted more coverage, not less.

“That’s the sort of feedback we’ve had today, people wanting more imagery in Australia on Google Street View, rather than wanting to remove images,” he said.

Foster said the search giant had already seen strong interest in the site from the real estate and tourism industries. In addition, Google anticipated strong demand from educational institutions and the small business sector.

Google planned to update the photos used by Street View “continually”, Foster said, as it did with all other geographical data in Google Maps. He said there wasn’t a specific timetable for taking new photos for the service.

A Trojan horse program that has been around for about six years is now being used to steal system-administrator passwords, including those at banking and brokerage houses, according to security researchers. And it could be that six years from now we’ll still be talking about Microsoft’s aim to buy Yahoo’s search business, which could involve obtaining the entire company and breaking it apart. Meanwhile, early adopters will undoubtedly be out in force on July 11 to be among the first to buy the new iPhone 3G.

1. Trojan lurks, waiting to steal admin passwords : The Coreflood Trojan horse program lurks until a system administrator logs on to an infected computer and then steals the password, using a Microsoft administration tool to spread malware on the network. The malware is being used to swipe banking- and brokerage-account usernames and passwords. So far, criminals have infected hundreds of thousands of computers with Coreflood, including more than 14,000 in one global hotel chain.

2. Update: Report says Microsoft readying new try for Yahoo: Bill Gates said on his way out of his full-time gig at Microsoft that he thought a deal for his company to buy Yahoo was unlikely, but a couple of days later the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft is looking for partners — Time Warner and News Corp. were named — to help it obtain Yahoo’s search business. So, to quote baseball legend Yogi Berra, “it ain’t over ’til it’s over.” And this one clearly ain’t over yet.

3. iPhone 3G set for 8 a.m. debut on July 11 and AT&T dishes on iPhone rate plans: AT&T announced prices for iPhone 3G service, which are, of course, more costly than plans for earlier iPhones. The carrier also announced that the new iPhones will be on sale at 8 in the morning, local time, on July 11. That’s earlier than Apple retail stores open, though someone who answered the phone at the flagship San Francisco Apple Store wouldn’t say if the opening will be moved up two hours and suggested that a reporter ring back later. (There has to be some element of the launch that maintains an air of secrecy, eh?)

4. Microsoft eases hardware terms for XP on low-cost PCs: Although June 30 marked the end of Microsoft offering most licenses for its Windows XP operating system, the company is still pushing the OS for use in low-cost PCs and it has eased hardware restrictions. Low-cost PCs with touchscreens, larger screen sizes and bigger hard drives now are eligible to use XP.

5. Google in brouhaha with anti-Obama bloggers: Google’s Blogger subsidiary pulled the plug on political bloggers who are not supporters of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama after a mass mailing mentioned an anti-Obama blog network. Apparently, Google’s system blocked the addresses in those mailings after deciding they must be spammers. When bloggers pointed out the error of Google’s ways, the company restored posting rights.

6. Long-awaited JBoss AS 5.0 moves closer to release date: The release candidate of the long-awaited JBoss Application Server 5.0 will be out soon, according a blog posting from the chief technology officer of Red Hat’s JBoss division. Product development started three years ago and stretched out as the company decided to make more changes to the next version.

7. DOJ continues probe of Yahoo-Google partnership The U.S. Department of Justice continues to investigate the proposed advertising partnership between Yahoo and Google, a DOJ spokeswoman said this week. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the DOJ had just initiated a formal antitrust investigation around the proposed deal, but the spokeswoman said that the probe under way was begun June 16. Regulatory scrutiny was widely expected.

8. Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife: McAfee recruited 50 hardy souls to endure its Spammed Persistently All Month experiment, which involved having the spam recipients reply to every single spam message and pop-up ad they got for a month. The volunteers created aliases for the experiment, which found that they received an average of 70 spam messages daily, with men getting about 15 more than women (with all those promises of enlargement). The idea was to underscore the dangers of spam and pop ups and how linked those have become to malware and other online misbehavior. “I was horrified,” said volunteer Tracy Mooney. “It’s all snake oil. I’m amazed at what true junk is out there when you’re clicking through on e-mail.”

9. Mozilla’s Firefox 3 sets geeky world record: The 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours after the browser’s release made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in that time period. Mozilla set out to achieve the first-ever such record. “Our community members came together and not only spread the word, but also took the initiative to help mobilize millions of people to demonstrate their belief that Firefox gives people the best possible online experience,” said Mozilla Vice President of Marketing Paul Kim. Or maybe they just wanted to be part of setting the record …

10. Gartner: Seven cloud-computing security risks: Cloud-computing customers need to ask hard questions about security and should think about getting a third-party security assessment before choosing a vendor, analyst firm Gartner recommends. A Gartner report, “Assessing the Security Risks of Cloud Computing,” lays out the areas of security concern.

If there’s one place where Microsoft and Google have reversed reputations, it’s at a search marketing conference.

When asked who they consider to be “the man,” the vast majority of the assembled crowd of search engine marketers at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle voted for Google, over Microsoft.

That’s probably the opposite result that a group of consumers would give if asked generally about which company represents the establishment, noted Andy Lohr, a conference attendee and Web marketing manager for Expresscopy.com who was amused by the show-of-hands poll.

Because Google has the largest search market share, its rules for what constitutes acceptable search marketing techniques have a heavy influence over what search marketers can do. That doesn’t always sit well with the marketers.

“Stop being afraid of this guy,” said Jay Young, owner of Link Fish Media, while displaying a photo of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team, during a presentation. Cutts is almost legendary in the search marketing industry because he helps set the rules at Google about what constitutes Web spam and unaccepted practices for driving traffic to Web pages. Marketers that use methods Google deems unacceptable to drive traffic can get their Web pages removed from Google’s index.

“They aren’t the police, they aren’t a government agency,” Young said. “You do what makes sense for your company or your clients. If that means you have to buy links to do it, do it.”

While many of the marketers in the room clearly also feel Google’s influence on their practices, many of them probably don’t agree with everything that Young promoted during a presentation.

He praised a marketer who drove traffic to his site by posting a made-up story about a boy who used his dad’s credit card to hire a prostitute. Young called that idea brilliant. “We’re not in this for morality,” Young said. “We’re in this for marketing.”