Innovation in Software

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before – and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be – I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own – an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

I have a running battle with Yahoo! in terms of their “foreign markets policies”, but not with their core design and tech teams. I think then, the news that comes to me via Information Aesthetics that they’ve shut down their entire design innovation team is utter lunacy.

Yahoo! is struggling to keep up. Innovation and creativity is how you leap-frog and out-Google Google. It would seem they’re no longer that keen on doing that.

As such I have to say if you’re holding onto Yahoo! stock, consider selling: I think this is the first step to them going bust about four or five years from now. They’d best just hope that Microsoft still want them.

Chris Morrison writes up some conclusions on a story suggesting that when Yahoo! told Congress last year that they didn’t know Shi Tao was a dissident and not really a spy, they might have been a bit disingenuous if not outright lying.

The truly exceptional part of his post is the knuckle-dragging moronic comments that Chris has been subjected to. Stuff like this:

“You spoiled brats need to understand that China is not USA. They don’t enjoy the freedoms and rights we do. The police/gov can arrest anyone at anytime with little or no evidence. Many are still wrongfully executed today.

So if you were Yahoo and the police and gov. agencies are knocking at your door what can you do? You either comply or you’re in violation of some bogus law.

As Ven stated, the Chinese Gov. is the problem here. You think any other company would have done something different/morally responsible?”

Superb proof that comments are completely futile if you needed it, but this content is just so astonishingly unintelligent I’m almost lost for words.

It seems to suggest that Yahoo! found themselves playing the part of victim here, that they were just ambling through China one day innocently scooping up buckets full of cash minding their own business and then found themselves being subject to an attack by the Government smashing batons over their heads.

We’re facing an uphill struggle against this kind of idiocy. People appear to have problems understanding that technology companies – the most globalised of all companies in today’s World – have moral responsibilities and instead prefer to blame it all on technocrats getting in the way of good ‘ole capitalist fun.

Yes, Yahoo! has to comply with local laws. That’s why they should be careful about which countries they decide to work in. If I throw an application out the door this afternoon, there is nothing stopping somebody in China using it until the Great Firewall team decide it’s “dangerous”. If I actively set up an office in Beijing and do the paperwork so that I have to comply with state police requests I’m agreeing to step over a line that has certain consequences.

My argument is that we should be careful about making that step with some countries.

Imagine if this were the 1980s and Yahoo! had been asked to help the South Africans track members of the ANC. Would we have said they were perfectly OK to comply with local laws, or would we be screaming that they should get the hell out of Dodge and just accept they aren’t going to make some money there whilst the people in charge are incapable of understanding human rights?

In the same way that IBM has been criticised for its role in 1930s Germany (it is alleged they helped the Nazis identify and round up Jews using their patented card index system) Yahoo! is going to find itself on the wrong side of history until they just accept that running a mail service in China is dangerous as hell. Google might censor search, but they don’t store anything of interest to the police because they tread that line carefully: Yahoo! just want market share no matter what.

It’s not just Yahoo! and Google who have to think about this: it’s something all software companies need to consider in the modern era. If we truly are the people responsible for this iteration of civilisation, do we not have a responsibility to have guide our decisions with a moral or political framework that guarantees certain basic rights to our users? And does running a service in China that requires personal information to be collected put that framework in jeopardy?

Now it looks like the morality at Yahoo! could be so warped that it might involve being less than honest with Congress. And don’t think this is all the fault of the management – they hired an ethics officer but at the last shareholder meeting, they were told by shareholders they couldn’t commit to not proactively censor content or create a committee on human rights in relation to their business: the shareholders are starting to look like the real scum bags here. Given that Yahoo! is having serious business problems with this strategy, perhaps it’s time for a change of direction. Interesting times indeed…

I received an invitation to Hack Day in London this weekend. I’ve been mulling it over since I applied, and I’ve made the decision I won’t be making the trip to London. I thought I’d explain here what those reasons are. I’m not suggesting anybody else not go, I just thought I’d like to explain my own reasons: if you’re going, I hope you have a great time and I can’t wait to see what you produce.

1. It’s a marketing event

   I made this comment on a mailing list the other week, and one correspondent expressed surprise at this statement. In his own words it was “just a chance to hang out with other geeks”. I know where he is coming from, but the thing is, it’s not. They are shoving Yahoo! and BBC Backstage APIs down people’s throats in return for free food and drink. They’re entitled to do that, of course. However, their terms and conditions (which have to be signed on entry to the hall) state that you may not in any way be “disparaging towards the event sponsors”. They are very clearly keeping the reigns on the event and it belongs to them. It’s like somebody has told a traditional academic conference organiser about Web 2.0 and they’ve got confused…

   Like it or not, this is going to be more about selling APIs to developers than it is developers being able to do what they want. That’s up to the organisers, but I’m not sure I can handle 2 days in Alexandra Palace just for a marketing gig – no matter how cool a marketing gig it is. If they were running something like BarCamp and wanted to run a side-competition, it’d be a different proposition: it’d be the developer’s event, not the sponsor’s. I don’t begrudge them wanting something for their marketing money, I just don’t want – on careful reflection – to let them think I support their business or services just because I attended.

2. Yahoo!

   People who know me well, know I can be a bit of a political animal at times. The simple truth is Yahoo! are doing things that make me feel sick and as I’ve explained before I don’t think they’re doing much to fix the underlying problems.

   Given that I already have a problem with this being a marketing gig, the fact that I now consider it to be a marketing gig for a company doing as much harm in the World as Yahoo! just compounds my objections to being involved. I’ve boycotted all Yahoo! services for two years now: I would be a hypocrite for taking their beer and pizza and telling the World how swell their APIs are (which, incidentally, compared to Google’s they’re not).

   I did consider doing something a tad naughty: I was going to build an application that took a non-Yahoo! API of historical share prices, and show on the dateline of the graph a mapping of news stories from the BBC Backstage News Search API to see correlation. You’d be able to graphically see if certain news stories had an impact on share price, in other words.

   My demo would have been Yahoo’s share price correlated with stories on dissidents being locked up in Chinese jails.

   I expect it would have been a demonstration of depressing indifference however. I might still spend my weekend doing this project, but doing it from the comfort of home and not under fear of that “disparaging towards the sponsors” clause in the T&Cs (section 9, paragraph “c” if you care).

3. It’s in London

   I suspect I’ll get flamed more for this one than I will any other point. However, I want to let you in on a little secret:

   All the interesting web and digital media stuff going on in the UK right now is in the North.

   Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds: they’ve all got interesting people doing interesting things. I know because I’ve met some of the people involved and I’m constantly impressed by the ideas I see coming out of the Northern Quarter and the SMEs in the North in general.

   You know who is going to be at an event in London? Mostly Londoners. That means large, corporate agency types. That’s fine, they’re happy, they’re great at what they do, and it might be interesting to see what their thinking is these days. However I’m thinking they’re going to be somewhere behind where the North is right now – large agencies can’t afford to be right on the edge, because that’s not where their customer base want them to be. The North is small companies doing stuff that is edgier because they have to get noticed. In my book, risk-taking and being prepared to fail gets merit.

   This isn’t just me being North-vs-South-ist here, I watch the industry pretty carefully and I really do think that the leading edge stuff in the UK right now, whilst still behind the US, seems to be happening in my backyard. Most of the cool kids aren’t going to London. I know it takes bravery for Yahoo! UK (London based) and the BBC (still mostly London based – for now at least), to think about running an event “up North”, but I think it would have been a better event.

4. My laptop is fux0red

   And I can’t be bothered getting another one sorted out before Friday. I could have gone out and picked up something from one of the Mancunian resellers tomorrow, and be up and ready for the event, but I’ve got more interesting things to do than try and get a development environment onto fresh hardware for a one-off.

And that’s it really. They might seem like stupid reasons to some people, but they all swing things in favour of staying in Manchester. I was really looking forward to meeting up with people down there and have a laugh, but I’d rather wait until a more interesting and local event happens around here. One friend suggests that by Saturday morning I’ll be regretting not going, but I think I would have regretted going a little more.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Tom Coates involved in the organisation of the Hack Day event. The important points are that he’s had the T&C’s changed so you can now disparage the sponsors. Please feel free to do so. He also explained the London location as being because it’s a “pan-European event” and apparently London is a better transport hub. That to me just suggests he doesn’t know a lot about Manchester, alas.

I’m still not going, but he tells me that means the ticket gets opened up for somebody else who might appreciate the huffing and puffing of the Yahoo! UK staff protesting that they’re lovely people really.

Meanwhile, I decided to go to the pub this Saturday and invite some friends. We’re going to call it AntiHackDay and that link takes you to the wiki page where we work out what to do with our afternoon. So, if you’re in Manchester, can’t make it to Hack Day (or weren’t invited), sign up.

Right now, I’m quite an angry man. I’ve just read The GIFT of Giving at Yodel Anecdotal, where Michael Samway gives us an account of his trip to the State Department, to talk about Yahoo! is really ‘doing the right thing’. The only comment that he makes about the huge problem human rights protestors have with Yahoo! is this:

The tense moment on the first panel arrived when an Amnesty International representative opened his remarks by directly accusing Yahoo! and the other companies of cooperating with repressive regimes, including handing over information on political dissidents and limiting the free flow of information.

That’s undercutting it a bit. For those of you unaware of the story, you may want to catch up on some background reading

I’m a supporter of Amnesty International. I believe we need to be responsible with the data that we hold as companies working across international borders. Michael goes on to defend Yahoo! by stating that in the second panel:

… we each raised some of the vexing questions we all wrestle with in the field of business and human rights. Partly in response to comments from the first panel, I explained that we condemn the punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression and that the relationship between law enforcement entities and technology companies around the world is more complex than commonly understood. Rarely, if ever, will a company know the name, identity, or occupation of an individual connected to a user ID demanded by a law enforcement agency, whether in Munich, Mexico City, or Mumbai. What we do know is we protect user privacy through rigorous compliance practices and careful adherence to law governing government demands for user information.

Vexing questions, eh? The only ‘vex’ is “Do we sacrifice human rights and work with repressive regiemes in order to gain market share?” to which Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google all answer a resounding “YES PLEASE!”. As for not knowing all the details, Yahoo! know as well as I do that you don’t need all the details. An IP address is often more than enough to track down a user if you need to – I know this, because when I worked for a major multinational ISP, it was one of my jobs to work with the Police in order to catch paedophiles, and all I needed to help them get their man was an IP address and a date/time.

Yahoo’s atttitude is not atypical of the industry wanting to break into China right now, but it is typical of the flagrant disregard that they have for human beings, and certain values we consider in a civilised society to be universally true. They claim that they take a stand, but the moment that stand looks like China will lock them out of the market, they buckle. Their reasoning?

…the presence of companies like Yahoo! in markets abroad can have a transformative effect on peoples’ lives and on local and national economies. Information is power. Access to information, especially through the Internet, has changed what people know about the world around them and about events, people, and issues that directly impact their lives day-to-day. People know more about local public health issues, environmental causes, politics, consumer choices, and job opportunities. They communicate and interact like never before with family, friends, neighbors, and people locally, regionally, and even globally with similar interests. And the Internet drives innovation across sectors, including in science, medicine, business, and journalism to name a few.

That would be true, but for one simple fact. The information Yahoo shows to their Chinese audience is regulated in its entirety by the Chinese government, and the moment there is something truly powerful on the net – say, a website suggesting democracy would be a better way to run the World’s most populous nation – Yahoo! calmly assist the Chinese government in making sure nobody sees it, and if the poster of the content was using a Yahoo! mail account, well here, have the IP address they last used when logging in to check their mail, our pleasure.

What really sickens me about this, is Yahoo! just refuses to accept they’re doing anything morally objectionable. They just sit around humming and hawwing and making noises of “difficult questions… it’s a tough one to call… lot of factors to consider…” without once stopping, and thinking to themselves “We’re responsible for people being persecuted, jailed and possibly tortured”, and doing the one thing that any civilised human would do: get the hell out of Dodge.

I doubt my comment on that post making a direct attack will ever get approved, so I’ll just post it here:

I’ll bet a large wedge of cash that this never gets approved, but if somebody at Yahoo! reads this and tries to change internal policy, that would be “nice”

I’m glad you had a nice day out, and that you think Yahoo! is doing something important in helping people change their view of the World.

It doesn’t, however, change the fact that Yahoo! are responsible for handing over information on several dozen democratic reformers in China, who are now rotting to death in jail.

The line “we were just complying with a legitimate governmental request” doesn’t cut it – you guys know you were in the wrong to do it, but you don’t care about doing wrong as long as you are able to keep, and grow, market share.

Yahoo! in China is no different to IBM in Nazi Germany – “we’re not involved, we’re just doing business, our shareholders expect it of us” – but history will judge that Yahoo! were involved in a disgusting chapter of Chinese history and didn’t do a thing to get in the way if it meant it would hurt the bottom line.

I hope you enjoy more cups of coffee with important people, but if you want to make a difference, you have to club together with the rest of civilised society and make a stand that you’re not going to hand over data on people who just want to be able to vote – and take the consequences of loosing market share, or being thrown out of the market. Your shareholders will have more belief in you for doing the right thing, then they will for you doing anything to make a buck.

Until then, I, and many others like me, refuse to use Yahoo! services of any form unless I have no choice. As people hear what it is you guys have done in the past, our numbers will grow. I only hope one day you will realise that helping the Chinese government find and torture democratic ‘dissidents’ hurts your share price more than not being in China.

As ever, opinion and thoughts invited in the comments.