Paul O'Flaherty

Should Google say Good Bye to GBuy?

There’s a lot of chatter about the new online-payment service from Google. It’s rather predictably called GBuy.

I’m not going to talk about the impact the new service will have. Instead I’ve got something else on my mind.

While I believe this will be good move and will introduce some much needed competition into the market, don’t you think that Google should reconsider the name of their service?

GBuy just sounds wrong. My first impression was that it sounded like a bad attempt at an Australian accent. My next was that it doesn’t instil trust.

GBuy. It’s more like an abbreviated “Good Bye”, even though I’m sure someone in Google marketing thinks it sounds like “Good Buy”. Good bye money, good bye!

Add my first two impressions together and you almost get a bad beer commercial.

Picture it. Australian guy (or gal) sitting in front of his computer using GBuy. He buys something expensive online. Later a UPS guy girl arrives with package. Australian open said package to find the wrong, inferior or broken goods.

He looks at the camera, picks up a can of beer and says “GBuy money”. He takes a drink. Then you get the voice over “Australians couldn’t give a Castlemine XXXX about anything else!”

For those of you who don’t know, Castlemine XXXX (4x) is an Australian beer. I’m not sure how many Aussies actually drink it, but they’ve had some funny ads for it here in Europe.

What do you guys think? Should Google say goodbye to the “GBuy” name.

-UPDATE- I’ve just read on Google Operating System that GBuy might be known as “Google Purchases”. The name still sucks, and lacks the appeal of something as customer friendly as “PayPal”. But then again it’s Google, so people will still use it, right?

-UPDATE  29-06-2006- Google launched the service last night under the final name of “Google Checkout“. I haven’t tried the service yet myself, but will later on today. Steve Rubel has more on it.

coComment coolness!

Damn that’s a lot of  co’s in one title. Anyway, as you may already have noticed I integrated coComment into this blog yesterday.

If you don’t know what coComment let me enlighten you. It’s essentially a comment tracking service, that allows you to have centralized access to the comments you make on other people’s blogs and on some services such as Flickr.

coComment provides you with customizable boxes you can add to your blog which include recent comments, most users and a tag cloud. You also can have your output in RSS format as well.

One thing that is lacking form the service is decent forum support. At the moment it appears only to work with their own forums. I must admit to not having researched this extensively, but I have done a quick Google search, and searched the support sections of some of the forums I use to see if anybody has made a mod or hack to integrate it.

Still, even lacking forum support (which would be killer!), I think this is a great service.

Oh, almost forgot to mention that there’s a Firefox extension too!

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V Umm???

One of the things you notice when you regularly use multiple operating systems is how some of the things we take for granted such as copying and pasting are implemented with tiny little differences.

I’ve had an old mp3 player hanging around for the past year or so. It’s one of those cheap 256mb ones, but it works quite well allowing me to listen to podcasts as I go down to the office, which is a mere 18 minutes walk. (I think the iPod is over kill for this little trip!)

Instead of syncing this thing with my home Windows PC, I simply copy the files over manually, as it’s treated as a regular usb disc, and this is where things get interesting. If I select all the songs in the folder and try to past them in, they don’t copy in the same order as they are in the folder. Invariably, the last track in the list gets copied first.
You can see how that can get annoying on a cheap mp3 player, that only plays tracks in the order they’re added in.

Strangely enough this behaviour does not occur in Linux, or at least UBUNTU (running 6.06 LTS), when I update the player using my office computer. They copy over in the same order as they are in the original folder. Strange eh?

Also, and I can’t verify this, but it appears that the transfer (over usb) of tracks to the player noticably faster on the Linux box than it is with Windows.

-UPDATE 15 06 2006-

I just noticed that this behaviour does not occur, if you are viewing your folder in “details” mode on Win XP. Things then copy as they should!

The Good Worm of the West

I’m finally back at the office today, and thumbing through my mail, when I spotted an issue of Oracle magazine. I’ve never read it before, but I think this was one of those free online offers, and considering the price tag (free), it was worth having a gander at.

One small article in particular caught my attention, and raised some red flags for me. The article was called “The Good Worm of the West” (link to online version), and essentially touts using worms to combat security issues by having them hunt down and fix software and network security issues. (PDF presentation on Nematodes Jan 26, 2006, from www.immunitysec.com)

Why not create a worm that actually finds and fixes software and network flaws, proposes security company Immunity. “We’re talking about fighting fire with fire,” says programmer David Aitel, who developed controlled worms called Nematodes that can be used for beneficial purposes and can make networks self-protecting. Nematodes can be programmed to invade a computer by exploiting the same weaknesses that bad worms target. But instead of delivering malicious software, the worms close up weak spots and render the computer impervious to further attack.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the fundamental flaw in this approach on a large scale.

On a controlled network, where all necessary and unnecessary ports for all applications are know in advance, then this could function. You could have the worms actively “patrol” your network like little soldiers and close off everything that needs to be, without causing any hassle. Of course you’d need to be able to kill off your little worm soldiers and release updated ones when a new attack vector is discovered, but that shouldn’t pose any problem.

On an uncontrolled network, such as the internet, these little soldiers could potentially do as much damage as good. In an ideal world, everybody computer would be set up the same way, with the same ports open and closed and security would be so much simpler. But different people have different applications running, which require different ports open. Some users, like myself, actively change the ports used by certain applications, such as email for example, because it makes many of the default attacks redundant because they are aimed at specific ports.

Now if one of these little worms came along and deliberately shut off , say, port 2525 (hypothetical) on my email server, then I wouldn’t be able to retrieve my email via smtp. To say this would be annoying is an understatement, and I’m sure there are many people running networks where all sorts of services from Email to VPN and beyond are on non standard ports. And that’s just talking about ports.

One way to avoid these kind of problems would be to have the worms actively ask permission from the user to implement changes. Unfortunately most users aren’t knowledgeable enough to correctly answer these questions.

Another problem is that malicious hackers are undoubtedly the masters of adapting or hijacking existing technology to achieve their goals. These worms would prove to be a veritable gold mine for them, as they would conceivably be preprogrammed with all(or most) known attack vectors, and be capable of exploiting them. So all some nefarious little git would have to do is reverse engineer the worm, and embed his own code instead of the worms default behavior.

The ability of a hacker to do this is my major concern with this approach. I know the article doesn’t specifically mention it, by these worms are designed to be run within specific closed company networks. Now, you know, just as well as I do, that these worms will get into the wild. If not by design, then by some unscrupulous hacker working at one of these corporations (and yes hackers have real jobs to!) will move it outside of it’s intended zone, and/or recode it for his own purposes.

Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

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Time, I need more time!

Work! It’s such a horrible four letter word that I don’t even like to utter it in polite company. But it’s also an unavoidable fact of life that I’ve not been able to get away from, even now while I’m ill!

I’ve just finished a redesign of this blog! Hope you all like it, it’s the Prebuilt theme from Devlounge, with a few modifications by yours truly, but even though it’s Sunday, there’s plenty of work to be done.

As some of you may have noticed, we’ve taken Blog Resource down while we rebuild the site (more info here), and that is proving to be a bigger challenge than I anticipated. Also, I’ve still got a redesign of AMCP to finish for Alex which I promised him literally ages ago.

It’s a long weekend here in Denmark (Pinse – link in Danish), which makes me very happy because now I have an extra day to work on these projects and get them hammered out before I go back to work on Tuesday and get stuck into working for my clients.

Things would be better if that bloody sunshine turned to rain! Then I’d feel like being indoors and working!

-UPDATE-

Thanks to Alex for pointing out that Permalinks weren’t working! The problem is now fixed!