Terabyte Labs

Looking back at my post after the first iPhone was announced, it’s quite suprising how many of the predictions about the second iPhone were actually realised. Of course when I wrote it, it wasn’t just a matter of guess what would be improved but also a wish list of things I’d have liked to see before actually buying one.

I said the iPhone 2.0 would:

be released 1.5 years after the first – Well that seemed about right.

have 3G – Ok I predicted this would be in the European version. Obviously Apple had more trouble than most phone makers in getting us this feature.

be smaller – Ok so the 3G is actually slightly thicker but without the metal back manages to be 2g lighter. It would still be nice if it could fit in your pocket though.

have all the same features – A slight underestimation here. This was based on my reasoning that Apple would be quickly bringing out a version that fixes all the problems with the old one rather than spending money on new features. Of course the price was the big thing that Apple admitted put a lot of people off – especially outside the US. I also reasoned that they’d want to leave some features for the next generation of their phone rather than do they very best they possibly could right away.

have longer battery life – One thing Apple came through on. Somehow they managed to squeeze more life out of it despite the addition of 3G which is a known battery killer. I suspect that extra width went mostly into a bigger battery.

have more memory – Well we didn’t have to wait for the 3G version for this. They doubled the initial max capacity from 8GB to 16GB back in February this year.

a slightly better camera (maybe with an led flash) – Clearly I underestimated the importance to most people of a decent camera on their phone. It would be nice to have but clearly people are not planning to use it replace their digital point and shoots.

have more custom iPhone internet applications – This was a big focus during the annoucement of the 3G. The SDK is looking very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing what people will come up with with the new hardware.

have reasonable prices for unlimited mobile internet access – I still haven’t seen as much response from phone networks about this point as I’d expected. The unlimited data plans are still pretty dear (about £7.50 / month if I’m not mistaken). Still we’re moving in the right direction.

get an overall price reduction – Apple claims to have made big improvements here by dropping the cost of the initial phone but are actually increasing the overall cost by increasing the data plan costs.

And the biggest improvement that I didn’t expect at all (and I don’t think anyone else did either) is of course A-GPS. I told myself I’d get the phone as soon as they added GPS and now that they have, well, I’m still not going to get one. The monthly plan prices are still way too much (3 times what I’m currently paying). The good thing about these announcements is that a lot more people I know will be getting one now which will give me a chance to play around with it and see what I think. Roll on July 11th!

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Today we heard about an interesting development in P2P file sharing technology from Harvard University researchers and a bunch of geeks in Amsterdam from a company called Tribler. Potentially these guys can come up with what I’d consider the next generation of file sharing technology. Previously we’ve had programs such as eMule and Kazaa which were able to download from multiple sources at once. Then bit torrent came along and showed that it was just as easy to download your file from others even if they haven’t received the complete file. Theoretically, bit-torrent uses close to the most efficient method of transfer possible for getting a file from one box to x number of other boxes.

But bit-torrent is not ideal. The problem lies in the fact that 90% of us have asymmetric connections as for some reason most ISPs think they can get away with giving us 1:16 upload/download ratios. If this is the average ratio within a swarm it means that for a client to receive a file at their maximum possible download speed they need at least 16 people to download 16 different parts of the file from. Or, in other words, for each file you download, you need to spend 16 times the time it took to download uploading it back into the swarm.

The problem with bit-torrent is that it doesn’t reach anywhere near its maximum potential because people are not willing to spend that much time with their PCs running if they can get away with just leeching a file. Private torrent trackers are a good way of solving this problem because everyone has a ratio that they have to maintain. The tracker enforces that you upload at least 70% of what you download. This means you can get some awesome speeds with some popular files. The problem is that the system is centralised and there are only so many users and torrents that it can keep track of and so rare or unpopular files do not get the same benefits.

Tribler appear to be making a lot of effort to defeat the problems of public and private torrents. They are trying to decentralise the user score system. A user will be given points by other users depending on how much they upload. The problem they need to solve however is how many points people give for very popular files and for very rare ones. More points for popular files will mean more and more of the very few people with gigabit connections will be able to max out their download speed. More points for rare files will mean faster transfers for rare files but slower transfers for those with high-speed connections.

The goal Tribler have at the moment is to develop a fast and efficient file transfer process but geared specifically towards streaming video. The reason for this of course is that they can then sell the technology for millions to TV companies or video distribution services such as YouTube. But TV and video on demand is quite a specific use case. Files must be transfered head first rather than in random chunks; most files are unlikely to remain popular after a few weeks and most of the time people will be wanting the same relatively small set of video files. Tribler will have to tailor their system to be most efficient for this particular kind of usage.

Ideally we’d have a completely universal file transfer system which would work equally well with streaming video as with distributing rare random files. Perhaps it might even be possible for each user to tailor how they want their bandwidth to be used based on what services they desire. That way people with similar interests would automatically form their own mini swarm of files. In any case I can see a very interesting future in the field of file sharing. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with our increasingly speedy broadband connections.

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Since its beginning, Google Maps has always been the best web mapping program out there. Everyone was amazed when Google introduced draggable maps that actually filled your screen rather than some tiny portion of your browser that was enclosed by ads. Then shortly after they wowed us again by introducing Satellite images. Then a great thing occurred on the 19th March 2005 when Great Britain was added to the Google World. Of course since then Google have done a fantastic job of improving the parts of the world covered, the road data in more countries, the improved driving directions, better local business listings, traffic info etc. But one thing that I’ve always thought was missing ever since I started to use Google Maps was being able to save customised data to your maps. The most obvious example is storing a collection of saved locations. Other programs have been able to do this long before Google Maps introduced it a few months ago. Finally, more recently we’ve seen the addition of stored routes along with detailed HTML descriptions and also the ability to share your custom mapping information publicly. This makes a welcome improvement as a lot more information can now be given by allowing people to write about their local area and share the information via a map. As an example, I’ve created a map showing the route I take to cycle to work.

But I believe there are still many improvements I’d like to see from Google maps. One thing is the ability to see the length or a route. At least that way I could actually see how fast I cycle when I go to work. It would also be nice to be able to list all the businesses on a particular street and see where they are. That way you could go browse the high street shops without having to walk along it.

The profusion of 3rd party programs based on the Google Maps API demonstrates the capabilities that the Google Maps technology has. I hope we haven’t seen the last of the new developments to this great program.

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Well I’ve started a blog so I may as well start blogging. Yesterday Apple announced the much hyped iPhone. Interestingly very little was known about it before Steve Job’s official announcement. Anyway as a follower of all things new and geeky I dutifully watched the 100 minute long keynote presentation at this year’s Macworld event. I have to say I was quite impressed. Apple have got almost all the features you might want for a phone – but there are still some criticisms to be made.

• Something that will obviously need to be improved upon is the camera feature. It’s supposed to have a 2 megapixel camera but Steve mentioned almost nothing about it. No doubt it will be of terrible quality as we have seen in all too many mobile phones so far.
• Another feature we didn’t see any sign of was video calling. That would of course require another camera on the screen side of the phone. Not many people use this feature but this is of course supposed to be a phone that is “five years ahead of anything else”.
• No 3G will of course make internet surfing difficult in Europe. 3G will probably replace Edge in the European version however.
• The wifi feature is a really great feature and the seamless transfer between mobile internet and wifi will be very nice but even so, the internet pages which Steve claimed were being loaded over wifi still seemed to load pretty slowly. Maybe it was just the massive presence of hacks’ macbooks that caused the wifi to slow the connection down a bit.
• Web pages and maps could probably render a little quicker too. Hopefully this will improve with faster and more advanced chips powering these devices.
• Steve didn’t mention standby time for the device. I suspect it won’t be that great though. The 5 hours of talk/video/browsing doesn’t seem that great. Also does watching a video drain the phone battery or the music battery?
• Lastly, the killer criticism is of course the price. It was funny how somehow Steve Jobs managed to convince his almost hysterical audience of around 2000 mac fans that the price was reasonable. He claimed that the new BlackBerry 8100 Pearl cost $299 in addition to a 2 year contract. Over here I can get an 18 month contract for £30 a month and get this phone for free. In fact I just checked the cingular website and found that for $60 a month (£30) for a 2 year contract you still end up paying $199! That’s $100 less than what Steve Jobs claimed but still quite an outrageous price considering you’ve agreed to give them your money for 2 years. Steve then considered that because this phone effectively includes an iPod, its $499 price was more than reasonable. I can’t really be sure until the UK version appears but on the face of it, it seems that will be way above what most reasonable people are willing to pay.

Having said all that, I can’t fault Apply for trying their best to come up with a device which is as good as they can possibly make it even if it ends up pricing out most of their target youth market. I really like a lot of the features such as the music and video players and the internet applications. The Google maps application is of course a brilliant thing to have on a phone. So many times I’ve needed to simply find a map of where I’m going while I’m away from a PC.

So am I going to buy one? Well, probably not right now. I think I’ll wait a year and a half or so for the iPhone 2.0. This will be smaller, have all the same features, longer battery life, more memory, a slightly better camera (maybe with an led flash), more custom iPhone internet applications, and with the surge in sales of the iPhone 1.0, everyone will be demanding reasonable prices for unlimited mobile internet access (£15 a month is just too much at the moment). That’s what I think the most important thing yesterday’s announcement has done. It’s awakened the mobile industry to the possibilities and more importantly the mobile users’ demand for the kinds of decent mobile applications we’ve been waiting to see. It will be interesting to see how things change over the next couple of years.

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I’ve just thought of an interesting method of tackling spam. One thing that almost all unwanted emails have in common (almost all; I’ll get to the rest in a bit) is that they will point you towards a website of some sort so that you can purchase their products or so that they can steal your credit card details. Spammers are getting around current filtering methods by hiding the intention of their email within random bits of text (often from well known books or other documents) which fool filters looking out for common words and phrases. Others will not even put much text in their email at all but will attach an image with their advert which when clicked will link to their website.

One tactic filters could use (and probably do) is to mark messages with links as having more probability of being spam. But this doesn’t cover the short messages loads of people send saying something like “Hey check out this funny link…” etc.

A more effective method would be to analyse the link itself. With an email service such as Google Mail they are able to keep lots of information about spam to improve the spam filtering. For example it would be quite easy to keep a list of links that appear in messages that people have marked as spam. If lots of people mark the same links as being in spam messages then it provides an easy identifier for any future spam from that company.

However this method is likely to be evaded by using anonymous looking links. It would be fairly easy to use a service such as tinyurl.com which redirects you to a website given an identifier. The spammer could then create a new redirecting url for every message that was sent meaning no two urls would look the same.

A better method would be for the spam filter to follow the links given in spam messages. If a link redirects to lead to a blacklisted url then that message is most likely to be spam. All the filter would need to do is check the header of the url being pointed to to find the redirection link. To get round this method the spammer would have to keep changing the address of their website which could be quite costly for them and would limit the number of potential visits to their site.

An even better and more reliable method would be for the filter to follow the link and download the actual webpage. Analysing the words on the webpage would be far more effective than analysing the words from the email. It would also be possible to identify the website from the content rather than by its address which would make it a lot easier to blacklist against.

The problem with this of course is the resources required to download a webpage every time someone links to a website through email. To limit this the standard methods of spam filtering should be used as well. If a message looks like it might be spam then the link should be analysed. If the link is blacklisted then the message should be marked as spam. If the domain of the link is whitelisted then it should be marked as not spam. Otherwise the link should be followed. If the domain of the webpage is blacklisted then the message should be marked as spam. If the domain or address is whitelisted then it should be marked as not spam. Otherwise the content of the webpage should be downloaded. The webpage should then be analysed. It should then be added to the blacklist or whitelist based on its content.

Of course the process would probably be a little more complex than that but that’s the basic idea. The whitelist and blacklist should be effective in reducing the amount of traffic and unnecessary downloading.

I mentioned earlier that there were some spams that didn’t include links. As far as I know the only ones of this type I’ve seen are those related to the stock market which are intended to cause a stir among investors and drive the price of shares up. This seems to be a relatively new type of spam but of course once spam filters adjust to block messages with words such as st0ck or invest0r we should see fewer and fewer of them.

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