Dan Ros

Two search requests on the internet website Google produce as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7823387.stm

This “Harvard University academic”, Alex Wissner-Gross, has also created this highly dubious service:

http://www.co2stats.com/about.php

CO2Stats is very smart, and is able to capture a large amount of data about your site’s total energy consumption. For example, it can tell what make and model of computer your visitor is using, what its electrical consumption is, and even what types of fossil fuels are being burned in order to power that computer. Likewise, it is able to detect how much and what type of energy your server is using, and even how much and what type of energy is being used to power the networks that are connecting your visitors’ computers with your servers. 

Errrm, ok. This is plainly completely made up. I’m all for reducing energy consumption but that kind of snake oil environmentalism actually hinders more than it helps, by clouding the issue with myths and untruths.

As for detecting the means of generation of the electricity used, contrary to the laughable “CO2Stats” claim, this is largely impossible. In the vast majority of countries, electricity is provided by a grid which aggregates all generation sources.

Funnily enough, the oft-lampooned Bill Thompson had a interesting idea  in http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7300403.stm  -  

Perhaps we should develop a Network Energy Protocol that lets servers and services report their electricity consumption in real time, so I can change my usage patterns. 

Wolf’s Spoor » Blog Archive » IRC in aber

RCS on IRC.

Any remaining Bitternet users may be dismayed to discover that they have been formally declared dead. Much like North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, the secretive and hostile IRC network has thus far been reluctant to provide any evidence of whether they are are alive, or in fact, dead.

While writing about moving domains to google apps, I got a little worried when I realised that Google owns my soul.

For example, yesterday I noticed that google had recorded 8,600 web searches performed by myself, going back who know how many months or years. I must have ticked a box somewhere and forgotten about it. It not only had the searches from home, it had all my work related searches. They know which links I choose out of the search results, they know which blogs I read, they know what newsgroups I like, and now, with email, they know who I write to, who writes to me, and what we say. They know who I work for, whether I’m looking for a new job, what I drive, what I eat and where I live. They could literally SEE YOU right now, especially if you live in a Street View area.

Given that the company was founded on data mining algorithms (also known as ’search’), it would seem safe to assume that Google are using some of their 500,000 + servers to map out people’s innermost thoughts and desires in a way which the most ambitious megalomaniac - or marketer could scarcely imagine, outside of a fictional 1984 esque dystopia where the government enforces monitoring and surveillance on its citizens, allowing them to flag up subversive tendencies.

The task is made immeasurably easier by providing their own neatly organised databases for us to populate. A conspiracy theorist might say that realising that coercion is far too messy, voluntary surveillance has been found to be far easier for Those In Charge, who created the shady organisation known as google in order to carry out their sinister plans. Indeed, users flock to google in droves, all too eager to hand over yet more control to the big G, myself included. Not a big deal, you may say. Perhaps, until the Thousand-year Military Reich of New America (est. 2020) nationalizes Google and rebrands it the World Ministry of Information and Knowledge.

Privacy

Whoops, I drifted into a little dramatised fiction there. As anyone with any sense knows, to fully maintain your online ‘privacy’, if I may use that twee term, you need to build everything from the ground up. No cheating by using a server hosting company, either. I’m talking about getting your own routers and your own AS and your own cables if need be, and hosting everything privately, preferably in a country without a history of cooperating with foreign armies. Full crypto, booby trapped filesystems, the works.

I might have just convinced myself to keep at least a few email domains off the G. Their motto may be ‘Don’t be evil’, but I don’t think you’d like Google as an enemy.

Over the last week I have started migrating my domains to Google Apps.

Google Apps is google’s package of services to essentially host an organisation’s entire IT setup. This is a completely full service offering, from email hosting, to webhosting, including office apps like word processor, spreadsheet and shared calendaring, which are of course all (nearly) perfectly integrated with each other. Did I also mention that it’s free?

You can sign up for them as different types of organisation (school, small business, corporate, family/groups) and each is free for up to a certain number of users, and with a certain level of features However, unlike most free versions, they haven’t been greedy and made the free versions a crippled, broken version that no one is expected to actually use.

Paying extra will let you access their API to integrate your existing databases with the google apps.

Why switch?

For me, email is the only real compelling reason to use google apps. I run my own mail servers, and have done so for many years. It’s not a bad setup, with multiple domains, mailboxes, antispam, etc. A number of my friends have accounts on them. The reason I set up the mail system in the first place was the same as why I set up a lot of other things, to figure out how it worked, and for the novelty. After running them for over half a decade and looking after an isp’s email too, the novelty had decidedly worn off. Now, they are merely a liability. Cost is an issue, but I also have to worry about backups, security, performance, etc. Losing everyone’s email is not really an option. Having said all that, Postfix has been faultless as ever, and together with MySQL, amavis, spamassassin, postgrey (for greylisting) and courier-imap, the system has the same level of features as any I could mention, and I never really need to worry about it. I haven’t had to do any maintenance at all in the last 6 months.

The switch

I switched a test domain first. You sign up and you get given a list of MX servers to put into your DNS records for that domain. That done, you have to verify your domain, by putting a magically named CNAME record in the zone file too. For me this was straightforward but I can imagine that someone who doesn’t spend all day working with dns and email might find this bit tricky. Google has a bit of a difficult situation here, in that people who register a domain tend to leave it with the registrar and this kind of thing is generally not done. Not sure what they can do to smooth the process. If you don’t have a domain, those smart hordes at google have a solution. You buy your domain through google, via godaddy.com. After signing up with the strangely named dns registrar, they will take care of all of that.

After that dns faff, it went extremely smoothly. You can set up the users you want, you set up aliases, etc. You can even make one domain mirror the setup of another, so user@foo is also user@bar. That’s pretty useful. After you switch the MX records, the email starts flowing into google instantly, without any fuss. Having never really used gmail before, it took me a couple of days to get used to it’s approach to email, but its growing on me. With IMAP access too, I could simply use it as I have used my previous email system. Nice.