Posts by brycec 7 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2009
Does mobile Internet run over NAT? i.e. when I use my iphone I don't get a public IP allocated from O2 temporarily just for my own handset right (like I do with my home broadband)?
If so that would seem to cancel off the mobile device growth argument as the market can grow massively without any impact on public address space.
@Captain Thyratron et al,
Analytics are very useful for webmasters and the foundation for UI design on most popular websites that you use and enjoy every day. Without them, they would be harder to use as the designers wouldn't have basic user flow patterns to analyze in detail.
This move will not reduce the net amount of analytics in any way, it merely grabs dramatically more analytics market share for Google.
Shop sites especially really must use analytics or they don't do very well. By analogy, it would be like running a high street shop with a blindfold on - you have no idea what your customers are looking at or which in store presentations are working well etc.
This move has a small benefit for consumers and a big one for Google.
@E2, yes, if you're Verisign. The people suggesting sites use self signed certs are delusional. Want a massive warning box every time a new user visits your site? Yes, that's great for user confidence. So better get the wallet out and hand over some more dosh to the American corporates.
This whole move is a consolidation of power.
Like everything G does, there's an upside and a downside. They're clever that way, but ultimately we are surrendering more and more clickstream and therefore power to them.
@jlocke, yes you're right that Google has pant loads of money. The primary reason for this change IMHO is to extend its reach yet further onto other websites (all those using alternative analytics solutions and who have so far resisted surrendering your page view data to the power of G).
The SSL implementation cost in absolute terms is clearly significant, but perhaps not in relative terms too. Google is very efficient at data center management and we can conclude that its search servers are pretty much near capacity. Google reportedly has in excess of 1.5 million "servers". This probably includes a variety of device classes (network devices such as load balancers etc).
Let's group it all together as a big compute hardware cloud. SERPs are G's core business (without that it would have only a tiny fraction of its current power) but clearly only a fraction of those servers are dedicated to real time SERPs generation (the rest are doing maps, search indexing, crawling, hosted apps etc), but let's say it's 10% for the sake of argument. That's approx 150k nodes.
Now if Google rolled out SSL across all search globally, even if the Google system architects optimize the cost of adding SSL acceleration to say a modest 10% increase in compute resource, you're looking at adding 15k new nodes.
I guess the cost could only be in the low tens of millions then.
Not loose change for most companies, but as you say not majorly significant for the king of text ads.
I think Google's ambition is not to organize all the world's information, but more accurately, to capture everything every individual does on the web.
You really think Google have put this massive extra load on their servers (with massive financial cost for the SSL acceleration to process tens of thousands of queries per second) for the sake of your privacy?
Wake up. This move brilliantly consolidates their dominance of the web analytics market.
That they have dressed this up as a beneficial move for consumers and you have bought it is tragic. If even El Reg readers think this is good move then God help us.
Google Analytics tracks you, as does their search engine. They know everything in your click stream as you progress from search terms on their site to external sites which load their analytics code.
The reported comment from Google about them being in the same boat is ludicrous and disingenous. Their JS code tracks you by cookie, irrespective of SSL. Simple IP and user agent time series analysis from their data silo would easily reveal your true offsite clickstream in any case, irrespective of cookies.
The only change is that now they have stopped third parties being able to access this useful information, and therefore forced them to give up even more of your data by signing up to analytics on their site.
The net effect is:
- increased knowledge by Google Inc of your behaviour on general non-Google websites
- increased revenue for SSL certificate providers
Both of these are bad.
Doh.
What kind of morons buy software that is apparently critical for their business without even trying it out or reading the manual?
Presume they can't be bothered to read the contract either - they signed a contract which explicitly said the vendor liability was limited.
If they had wanted more comeback in the event of a failing, they could have either negotiated the damages clause or chosen another vendor with more generous contractual liability terms.
When the purchaser dipshit whines "but they said it would work" to his boss, his boss goes whining to the lawyers who ultimately produce an absurd and dangerous ruling which says its ok to not do any due diligence when purchasing a product.
Hopefully the ruling was based on a technicality as it appears to be, and should not set a dangerous precedent.
You sold me some reading glasses. They weren't right for me and I couldn't read my winning lottery ticket before the deadline. You owe me £1 million. It's your fault.
Yeah right.
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