Gadget Quake » Networking

Gmail email FAIL: why Gmail went down. #gonegoogle

Alex — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:11:02 +0000

Gmail, Google’s email service, was down for an hour or two yesterday, causing widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not just the free version, but also the Google Apps email service was affected. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers discover why it happened, as they check their SLAs.

Your humble blogwatcher has selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention more from the 8 Bit Pwny Club…

Sha-ron Gau-din re-ports: [please stop this running joke -Ed.]

After a nearly two-hour outage, Google Inc. is getting its Gmail e-mail service back up and running. … Complaints began appearing on Twitter around 4 p.m. EDT. In a 4:02 p.m. EDT post on its Apps Status page, Google confirmed that Gmail was suffering an outage.

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This isn’t Google’s first big Gmail glitch this year. Gmail suffered well-publicized crashes in both February and May.

Cade Metz tells us what happened:

Google has pinned the breakdown on some recent changes to the request routers that direct queries to the service’s web servers. Ironically, at least some of the changes were meant to improve Gmail’s ability to stay online. But Google underestimated the load these changes would place on the routers when it took a relatively small number of servers offline for upgrades.
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This meant that who knows how many people were unable to access Gmail via the web – though the service was still available via POP and IMAP. Boasting that the Gmail engineering team was alerted to the problem within seconds … the company solved the issue by bringing more request routers online. Service was restored at about 2:10pm Pacific.

Google’s Ben Treynor offers a detailed mea culpa:

I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
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We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. … We have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). … Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.

But Jason Kaneshiro says 99.9%+ isn’t enough:

[The] Gmail outage points out a very obvious … business idea. It’s simply shameful that basic **** still isn’t working right. Hasn’t it been, like, forty years since email was invented? Web-based email with 100% uptime. Promise it. Charge for it (it would be worth paying for). And deliver.
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Perhaps [it would be] extremely technically challenging, but would be wildly successful … In the meantime, I shall continue to use an “old school” email desktop client (Apple’s Mail) to download all myGmail info on a daily basis. The cloud still isn’t reliable enough, and seeing how it took forty years to get here – I figure there’s still at least a decade to go.

Jennifer van Grove mashes Treynor’s apology:

That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.

Danny Sullivan preaches self-sufficiency:

Personally, I use Outlook 2007 to download my email from a Google Apps account. This allows me to have full, dependable offline access. It allows me to periodically backup and archive my mail, protection against the rare case where Google might somehow delete my mail on their servers. It allows me to have easy access to search mail back for half a decade.
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Gmail provides full instructions on how to configure a number of email clients here. … I ideally would like Google to offer its own lightweight email client.

TiVo awarded $200 million in Dish Network patent suit

Alex — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:37:04 +0000

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. district court awarded TiVo Inc, a maker of DVR boxes, nearly $200 million in damages in its long-running patent case with Dish Network Corp and EchoStar Corp.
The U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas ruled to impose contempt sanctions against sister companies Dish and EchoStar for violating a court-ordered permanent injunction from April 2008 through July 1, 2009.
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TiVo had originally asked the court to impose costs of nearly $1 billionon Dish and EchoStar, but the judge ruled that was “unreasonable.”
The court found that contempt sanctions equal to a rate of $2.25 per DVR subscriber per month were appropriate.
TiVo said it was pleased by the court’s ruling, which it said brings the total damages and sanctions in the case to about $400 million through July 1, plus attorney fees.
Judge David Folsom said that while the court found it “distasteful” Dish had advertised that its DVRs were “better than TiVos” while infringing TiVo’s patent, he took testimony from Dish founder Charlie Ergen at face value when Ergen said the company believed it had been successful in its efforts to design around the infringement.
But Folsom warned that if Ergen’s companies are unsuccessful on appeal and continue to disregard the court’s orders the court will “seriously entertain the award of enhanced sanctions.”
In July, Dish and EchoStar won a stay, pending their appeal of the court’s order to disable millions of subscribers’ digital video recorders that infringe on TiVo’s patent for ‘time warp’ technology.
Last month TiVo filed broader patent infringement suits against phone companies AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications. Both companies are both building out pay-TV services in the United States.
Shares in TiVo were up 54 cents or 5.5 percent to $10.34 while DISH shares were up 88 cents or 5.4 percent to $17.18. EchoStar shares were unchanged at $18.00.
“This increases the likelihood of a constructive resolution, which is why both stocks are up,” said Todd Mitchell, analyst at Kaufman Bros. “This is something theoretically that both parties should be able to live with and the market wants to see resolution for both parties.”
DISH and EchoStar said in a statement they will appeal this latest ruling.
“While we disagree that any amount of sanctions was warranted, the decision confirms our belief that we designed around TiVo’s patent in good faith. We believe that we ultimately will prevail on appeal.”

Google’s Colonization of E-Book Devices Continues Apace

Alex — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:26:13 +0000

With more deals to make digitized public-domain books available for free, Google seems intent on being a part of as many non-Kindle e-book readers as possible.

The U.K.’s Interead on Tuesday announced an agreement with Google (GOOG) to make more than a million titles from the search giant’s vast library of digitized public-domain books available for free on its Cool-er e-book readers via the Coolerbooks.com Web site.
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It was Google’s first e-book partnership with a company based outside the U.S. (although the $249 Cool-er e-reader has been available here since May). But it was hardly Google’s first e-book flag-planting. Why is that important if Google is only giving the books away anyway? Because it doesn’t plan to always be giving books away for free.
Planting the Free Flag

Google announced a similar deal with Sony last month, to bring its library of public-domain e-books to Sony’s (SNE) new Reader. In July, it partnered with Barnes & Noble (BKS) to make the free collection available through B&N’s relaunched eBookstore. The Barnes & Noble deal also plants Google’s free e-books API (application programming interface) on Plastic Logic’s e-book reader, which is slated to launch early next year and will feature an exclusive e-book sourcing deal with B&N.

Google, in fact, seems bent on planting its API on as many non-Kindle e-book readers as possible, which is not good news for Amazon.com (AMZN).

Apart from providing ammunition to potential Kindle-killers, the spread of Google’s million-title-strong library across non-Kindle devices seems designed to encourage consumers to see their e-book reader as yet another device for accessing free stuff from the Internet. Google has also embraced the open ePub standard for distributing its free e-books, which Sony and Interead support but Amazon does not. Over time, that can only erode the perceived value of Amazon’s Kindle service. At the same time, Google’s library of free books serves as a kind of Trojan horse to get its e-book API onto as many devices as possible.
The Paid Plan

It’s all part of a grander plan. Google announced in June that it will launch an e-book e-commerce platform by the end of 2009 that will allow publishers to sell e-books directly to consumers. While Google will take a commission on the sales, it will be nothing like the 70% cut Amazon claims on the sale of Kindle books.

In order to make its platform attractive to publishers, Google needs to have access to as many devices as possible. Colonizing those devices now with “free” is a way to build out the platform and train consumers to look to Google for e-books.

The real pay-off for Google, though, will come if its settlement agreement with publishers in the Google Book Search case is ultimately approved by the court. Under the terms of that proposed agreement (which is being opposed by everyone from Amazon to the German government, Google would be given a blanket license to digitize and sell so-called “orphan works”—books that are still under copyright but whose rights owners are either unknown or cannot be located. Monies from the sales of those titles—minus Google’s take—would be held in escrow by a new collection society called the Book Rights Registry to be disbursed to the rights owners should they ever turn up. Because the settlement stems from private litigation, however, Google alone would be able to rely on its blanket license. Anyone else—including and particularly Amazon—would either have to negotiate individually for those rights (not so easy when the rights owner is unknown) or risk litigation should the rights owner ever show up.

There have been millions of such books published over the decades from U.S. publishers alone. Google’s effectively exclusive license to exploit that vast library commercially could be an enormous competitive advantage over other e-book providers, including Amazon.

A decision from the court on whether to approve the terms of the deal is expected before the end of this year. Is it any wonder that Google is anxious to get its API onto as many devices as possible before that happens?

Facebook Connect Goes Mobile

Alex — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:04:04 +0000

Facebook is extending its Connect data portability technology to developers of mobile sites and applications, following its launch six months ago for iPhone developers, the company announced Thursday in an official blog.
Connect creates a link between Facebook and external sites to let people use their previously created Facebook accounts to sign in to these other Web sites.

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At sites that have implemented Connect, Facebook can also port content from user Facebook accounts, like profile information, photos, notes, lists of contacts, comments, status updates and the like.
“Facebook Connect for Mobile Web has the same rich features you find on Facebook Connect websites and iPhone apps,” wrote Michael Eyal Sharon, a Facebook product manager, in the blog posting.
In a related announcement, Facebook said that 65 million people access its Web site from mobile devices, up from 20 million eight months ago.

Connect creates a link between Facebook and external sites to let people use their previously created Facebook accounts to sign in to these other Web sites.

At sites that have implemented Connect, Facebook can also port content from user Facebook accounts, like profile information, photos, notes, lists of contacts, comments, status updates and the like.

“Facebook Connect for Mobile Web has the same rich features you find on Facebook Connect websites and iPhone apps,” wrote Michael Eyal Sharon, a Facebook product manager, in the blog posting.

In a related announcement, Facebook said that 65 million people access its Web site from mobile devices, up from 20 million eight months ago.