Facebook Camera - the end of Instagram?

I am only speculating here, but the launch of Facebook Camera in the iOS store surely means the end for Instagram. It's a four step process that Facebook is implementing.

1. Buy Instagram
2. Launch Facebook Camera
3. Move Instagram users to Facebook Camera
4. Close Instagram

Facebook Camera is basically the company's version of Instagram. It lets you apply filters and effects to photos, post them to Facebook, share them with friends, see what your friends are posting and so on. Buying Instagram has basically bought the only major competitor.

At the moment this is just an iOS app and there are a lot of Android Instagram users out there. Instagram may be safe until Facebook comes up with an Android version of Facebook Camera, but there must be little incentive to update the iOS app now that there is an alternative. I can't see the company developing two apps that essentially do the same thing.

(Go to the iTunes Store and search for Facebook Camera to download it.)

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Check your website's links

I have just spent the day fixing bad links on my website. Every website has them and over time they build up and become more of an irritation for visitors. Some of them are caused by typing slips when the web page is created, but others are because the web is a constantly changing place. You mention a great program you have discovered or a fantastic service and link to it, then a year later the program or service has been discontinued, the page has moved or even the whole site has gone. You then have a bad link.

It would be an impossible task to manually check every link on every page of a large website and an automated program is the only way to do it. I used Integrity on my Mac, but there are Windows and even Linux link checkers. (I must do a roundup one day and test them all.)

Integrity is a simple, but very useful app. You give it the URL of your home page and it goes and gets it. It checks every link in the page, then gets those pages and checks the links, then checks those pages and so on. It basically crawls your whole site, making a list of the links. There's a button in the toolbar to display just the bad links and then you can work through them and fix each one, updating your website afterwards. It's a great tool and it is free (donations welcome though). Try it if you have your own website.

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The myth of fibre optic broadband

I have a fibre optic broadband internet connection and connect to the internet at an amazing 30Mbit/s, so why is the web so slow?

Let's do a few calculations. If you divide the connection speed in Mbit by 10, you get roughly the speed at which you can download data from the internet in Mb. This means that I should be able to download at 3Mb/sec. This is about right and when downloading big files from the internet they are really fast and 3Mb/s download speeds are definitely possible. It's great for grabbing Linux distros and other big files.

Web pages are much smaller and even a large one might only be 300k. That means a web page should download in one tenth of a second. I have the bandwidth. However, instead of web pages displaying in the blink of an eye, they take 3, 4, 5 seconds or sometimes even longer. Why? In five seconds I should be able to download 15Mb, so why can't I get a tiny web page to display?

The reason is that a web page is composed of many small files. It takes a certain amount of time for the computer and the remote web server to establish a connection and start sending data. With one big file to download the computer only has to make one connection and so the time is insignificant compared to the total time to download the data. With a small file the time to make a connection and start a data transfer is large compared to the time taken to download the data. With lots of small files to download as is the case with a web page, there are lots of delays as each connection is established. This makes web pages slow to load.

Web servers often have multiple visitors all viewing web pages, so it has to make lots of connections with lots of computers and this makes it slow. It's much easier to establish one connection and send one big file.

I went from a 3Mb/s ordinary broadband connection to a 30Mbit/s fibre optic connection. That's 10 times faster, but browsing the web is perhaps just twice as fast. If I could get a 300Mbit/s connection it is likely that I'd still only be able to browse the web twice as fast as my 30Mb/s connection.

A super fast internet connection is really only useful if you download big files or have lots of people sharing it. It doesn't make the web a whole lot faster. It's better, but not by as much as you might expect.

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Goodbye Adobe Flash

Adobe's Flash is yesterday's technology and its use is declining. At one time it was very popular and whole websites were created with it. In fact, some still are and I came across one only yesterday. It had a splash screen too, one of those pointless Flash movies that play before you get to the real home page of the site. Do they not want mobile users to access the site?

My reasons for going Flashless are quite simple. It isn't as essential as it once was and deleting Flash from your computer doesn't mean you can't access Flash content on the web.

The rise in use of mobile devices and their poor or non-existent support for Flash means that a lot of websites are finding alternative ways of delivering their content. Flash is used less than it used to be and this trend will surely continue.

Remove Flash from your computer and it will boost security because Flash has been used by malware authors to deliver their viruses, Trojans and so on. It removes an entry point to the system.

The latest version of Flash installs a service (in Windows) that is or will be used to automatically update itself. One of the reasons Windows slows down is because so many programs want to install things on startup and Flash adds to the load on the system, slowing it down. Remove Flash, remove the service and a lighter and leaner OS will run faster. (OK, Flash by itself won't make the PC faster, but the cumulative effect of several apps makes a significant difference.)

Uninstalling Flash does not actually mean you can't access Flash content on the web. Google Chrome has Flash built in. Just run Chrome and the web is the same as it always was. Why have two versions of Flash on the computer? (Three in 64-bit Windows 7 - 32-bit plugin, 64-bit plugin and Chrome).

Both on my Mac and my Windows PC I have removed Flash. A slight irritation is that Firefox displays a warning about missing plugins when Flash content is detected on a web page. One solution is to enter about:config into the address box and then enter plugin into the filter box. Find plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin and double click it to change it from false to true. Of course, this affects all plugins and not just Flash. Plugins aren't that common though and you should be able to tell if a page needs a plugin because it just won't look right.

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The Amazon scam

I have been getting a lot of emails from Amazon recently regarding cancelled orders. They are obviously fakes and you should ignore them. Delete them and don't click any links in them. They are part of some sort of scam that is designed to relieve you of excess money or to spread a virus, Trojan or other malware.  It is probably targeting Windows users, but you can't be sure these days and Macs are under attack too.

There are several ways that you can tell that the emails are fakes and the first is easy for me. The messages try to convince me they are from amazon.com, but since I'm in the UK I always shop at amazon.co.uk. If you normally shop at amazon.com then it won't be this obvious that they are fake emails.

Another way to tell that they are fakes is that the scammer has sent so many that there are several in my inbox. When you get multiple emails that are very similar, you know there's something up. Three different orders cancelled on the same day? I think not.

Click to enlarge

A dead giveaway that emails are fakes is the URL that links point to when the mouse hovers over them. You can see in this screen shot in the bottom left corner that the URL is not an Amazon one. Always mouse-over links and read what it says in the status bar and never click a link that doesn't go to the expected website or page.

It can be difficult to tell sometimes because big companies sometimes use marketing companies or special URLs rather than the usual company email address. However, fake addresses are usually obvious.

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Java for Mac from Oracle fixes flaws

Mac malware reports are becoming increasingly common and although the numbers of Macs infected with viruses, Trojans and other nasties is quite small compared to Windows, in percentage terms it is actually quite large. There aren't as many Macs around as Windows PCs, so when you hear reports of 700,000 Macs infected by the Flashback Trojan (says Kaspersky), it is much more serious than you might think. There is actually more chance of being infected than if you had a Windows PC. Now there's an interesting thought!

There is another type of Mac malware out there in the wild and it has the snappy name of Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a. According to Kaspersky, it is a backdoor program that connects to a server on the internet to get instructions, takes screen shots of the current session and executes commands. It is another Java exploit, so make sure you have used Software Update on the Apple menu to get all the latest updates.

Part of the problem with Java on the Mac is that it's an Oracle product that Apple customises. When a security flaw is found, it may be fixed quite quickly by Oracle and released for Windows and other operating systems, but unfortunately not for Macs. Instead we have to wait for Apple to get around to including the latest fixes in its custom version of Java and including it in Apple Software Update. It can be months before Apple updates its version of Java and this is a window of opportunity for malware authors. They can exploit the unpatched flaw and infect Macs quite easily. This is what happened with Flashback and Oracle fixed it, but Apple was very tardy in passing on the fix to Mac users.

If you go to www.java.com and try to download Java it just tells you to use Software Update on your Mac. You can't download Java directly. However, this situation is changing and Oracle has announced Java SE 7 Update 4 and JavaFX 2.1 for the Mac. This is a Java and JavaFX software development kit, a Mac first from Oracle, and a sign that things are changing. Now you probably don't want the full development kit, but Oracle has announced that a consumer version of Java SE 7 and the Java Runtime Environment will be available later in the year. This will auto-update directly from Oracle as soon as security patches or new versions become available. It's good news for Mac users.

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