April 2005 Archives

The health care industry got a shot in the arm today with IBM's announcement of an 8-year, $402 million partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The company claimed that this will be a model for how the health care industry can use new technology. The news comes on the heels of poor earnings announcement by IBM earlier this month. While IBM is licking its fresh wounds, it is aggressively pursuing and expanding into lucrative sectors to breathe life into its ailing earnings.

This is good news indeed. Technology has already had a great impact on the health care industry and that is wonderful for patients. There is no doubt that this new initiative would further enhance how patients' vital data is handled. Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR) are nothing new. Plainly stated, they are patients' records on computer databases. But as new frontiers are explored, EMRs will become precariously closer to falling into wrong hands.

Consider the spate of news about stolen data from a number of prominent companies lately. LexisNexis, Polo Ralph Lauren, HSBC, NCR, and a number of renowned universities around the nation have had security breaches with customer data stolen. These are not fly-by-night companies with half-baked products. They are brands that most consumers trust and rely on.

If we are doomed to repeat past mistakes, then companies must be prepared to defend the EMR data with everything they have. But going a step further, they had better have plans in place for when security is breached and data is stolen. Because, let's face it, it is inevitable.

The announcement was made today of the $3.4 billion take-over of Macromedia by Adobe. I was a bit surprised at how expensive Macromedia was, but then again this is one of the success stories of the Internet age.

 Interestingly enough, these companies have crossed paths of sorts before. Nearly a decade ago, Adobe had a chance and declined to acquire FutureWave, which later on merged with Macromedia and its flagship product, FutureWave, became what is know as Flash today.

 Besides Flash, Macromedia has a full spectrum of Web products to offer Adobe. There's ColdFusion, a mature server-side Web application product, DreamWeaver, a superb Web page design and layout product, and FireWorks, a versatile image creator and editor geared mostly for the Web. It remains to be seen how FireWorks will be positioned against Photoshop which is a competing product from Adobe. It is possible for the two products to merge into one.

 The acquisition, while an expensive venture, will bolster Adobe's presence on the Internet and Web arenas as it jostles for a bigger market share. Is all this activity getting Apple's attention? With the iPod market nearing saturation, Apple could be on the prowl for areas of expansion. Both Adobe and Macromedia have products with Mac roots and almost all of their current products and their Web sites have that special clean and polished look most associated with Apple. One wonders.

A few days ago I had a discussion with our managing editor for our company's Web site about how crawlers discover and index pages. He was convinced that search engines can somehow find hidden pages on a Web site even if there are no links to those pages. I, on the other hand, wouldn't be persuaded. How could search engines crawl a page if they don't know the page's name and location, i.e. its path? Turns out we were both wrong – and right, depending on how you look at it.

In order for search engines to crawl a Web page, they must first be directed to it. The process of page discovery is generally a hyperlink on another page that the crawler can follow. I'm not sure if search engines also follow plain text URLs, but it is a possibility. A site that wants to publicize a new page would normally have links to the new page from other pages, or the page will be in a directory index which lists all files in a directory when accessed (Web sites normally disable this option though for security reasons). In the absence of a link to a Web page's URL, crawlers would have no idea about the existence of that page (referred to as a hidden or orphaned page). I suppose they could engage in name-guessing, but that's an expensive proposition I suspect most search engines shun.

Then a few days ago I ran into an anomaly that disproved my belief about hidden pages and crawler discovery. I was working on a fairly popular page (Browser Simulator/Emulator) on my personal site. Due to the nature of the page, it has the potential of becoming a tool in the hands of abusers, so it is monitored for abusive activity patterns. I began to notice that the page was being accessed excessively by Googlebot with specific parameters as if a human was commandeering the page. Respecting the privacy of users however, I only monitor general patterns on that page, so I didn't have detailed information about Googlebot's activity.

With my curiosity piqued, I constructed a similar but hidden page in the same folder and switched on full monitoring. Then I began hitting the page, entering various data in the form fields. Sure enough, Googlebot began accessing that page with the same data as I had specified. How could Googlebot discover the hidden page so fast (if at all) and specify the same data as I was? A glance near the top of my Internet Explorer browser found the culprit. It was the Google toolbar, the seemingly innocuous toolbar that most people have installed on their browsers and are oblivious to its operation.

I am certain the Google toolbar comes with a privacy disclosure detailing how and what it gleans from the user's activity. I never bothered to read this and chances are most people ignore it as well. I am also not sure what Google does with the data. I suppose they do use it for ranking purposes, but I am now certain that it crawls the pages surfed on by users. I am, however, still unsure whether the crawled pages ever make it to the Google's index to be displayed as search results. I am also unsure if what the browser displays to the users is sent to Google along with the URLs (this could have potentially disastrous privacy repercussions).

There you have it. If you place hidden pages on your Web folders, don't be too confident about their secrecy, even if those pages are only accessed internally by you and a few trusted people. Anyone with a Google toolbar (or any other toolbar such as Alexa or A9) would be unwittingly sending the URLs of those hidden pages to Googlebot (or other robots/spiders), and potentially exposing the location of those pages to the world.

It's a classic tit-for-tat. In a move that is nothing short of an act of reprisal, GM announced today that it will indefinitely suspend advertising in Los Angeles Times. GM cited "factual errors and misrepresentation" for its decision.

 The move comes two days after an LA Times columnist criticized the auto-maker for pushing its gas-guzzling SUVs rather than investing in hybrid technologies. Perhaps the columnist went too far by calling for the impeachment of two GM executives, but GM's action is just plain childish.

 It's a free press. People express a lot of opinions about a lot of subjects. Some may get a bit scathing, others a bit risqué perhaps, but advertisers should take criticism in stride and understand that the separation between the editorial and advertising departments is what keeps a publication vibrant. An uncontaminated editorial process can only help the credibility of its publication which leads to more interested readers which in turn translates to more eyeballs seeing the ads.

 If GM hadn't jumped the gun, they could have used their advertising space to subtly challenge the columnist's position. Instead they decided on this immature action, possibly handing the columnist even more credibility.

I wasn't sure if this was an April fool's joke when I logged in to my Gmail account and saw my total storage at 1324 MB. It had been 1000 MB (which by the way, is not exactly 1GB) since its inception. But then something stranger kept happening. The next couple of times that I logged in during the day, I noticed that the storage limit was increasing. It's like it was a moving target. Right now it's sitting at 1627 MB and I surmise I'll see a higher number late tonight.

I'm not sure what to attribute to this strange behavior. Google already had its April fool's fun with Google Gulp. But I just saw this story and  it appears that Gmail is indeed marching towards the 2 GB storage limit. It was only a few days ago that Yahoo! announced plans to augment their email storage to 1 GB.

So it seems that the storage wars are once again heating up between the email titans. Personally I can't see how anyone would exceed the 1 GB capacity, but I suppose there is some value in bragging rights here. Having the highest capacity in the industry is great PR after all.

Meanwhile Hotmail has been quiet during all this. I wonder if they're planning a 1 TB storage offer after the smoke has cleared. That should settle the race, or does it?