thebaldgeek

Most people don’t know what goes on behind the curtain when you click a link while surfing the web.
And nor should they.
Know or care.

I guess its clear that I am not exactly normal, but in my humble opinion, everyone should have a smattering of knowledge of something they spend so much time doing….. But most of all, I want people to know just how much of their life is leaking online.

So, this might be worth a read;
http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/12/how-browsers-get-to-know-you-in-milliseconds.html

A small technological marvel occurs on almost every visit to a web page. In the seconds that elapse between the user’s click and the display of the page, an ad auction takes place in which hundreds of bidders gather whatever information they can get on the user, determine which ads are likely to be of interest, place bids, and transmit the winning ad to be placed in the page.

What follows is somewhat technical, but thats the guts of what I wanted to point out. Every time you click a link, a LOT of stuff happens in the background and without the knowledge of the clickee.

Please keep in mind that this happens even if you run an ‘ad blocker’ in your browser. All that does is stop the ads from showing up, it does not stop the auction, it does not stop information about who or where you are from going to the ad company(s). It does not stop the ad from being downloaded through your Internet connection. It just stops them from being displayed. Thats all.

Ok, with that basics out the way, let’s dive in a little and see what’s going on.

How can all that happen in approximately 100 milliseconds? Let’s explore the timeline and find out what goes on behind the scenes in a modern ad auction. Most of the information I have comes from two companies that handle different stages of the auction: the ad exchange AppNexus and the demand side platform Yashi. Both store critical data in an Aerospike database running on flash to achieve sub-second speeds.

First up, it’s interesting that the whole database is running on flash memory… Here speed is king and trumps even cost.
This is something that is going to become more common I suspect, the right sort of memory for the data and speed required is going to be balanced against cost.

Let’s set a bit of context for the magic of ad displays by looking at how much time a web page takes to load.

Steve Souders’s classic High Performance Web Sites (released seven years ago) reported that the top ten U.S. web sites in 2007 required download times that ranged from 1.7 to 22.4 seconds. Things have certainly improved since then — although it’s hard to say how much resulted from faster Internet connections and how much from performance tuning.

Rolling forward to this year, Akamai recently released its quarterly State of the Internet Report. Akamai does Real User Monitoring (RUM) through a product called Aqua Ion it released last year. Average page load time is not very impressive, although of course it varies widely among regions. Typical load times are 3 or 4 seconds for broadband, and 5 to 10 seconds for mobile networks. (I’m making gross generalizations from the table on p. 57 of the report.)

I have taken the highest of glances at this topic and would love to have the time to do a deep dive on it. I once sat enthralled for a full half hour and watched a video of a guy giving a tech talk on how to get a web page to load in under one second.
That video started a curiosity for knowing what goes on behind the curtain every time a link is clicked (that and it being a major part of my day job to build web pages that display different (aka oddball) content and to write code to scrape data off webpages and reformat said data for consumption in other processes).
I have to admit that my Dad getting off dial up in the past ‘little while’ has also given me some context – that fact impacted (in a good way) my personal website design and construction for the past many years.

That will do for the topic of speed for now, how about privacy.

Andy McConaghie and Larry Nolan of Yashi explained to me that the browser passes the user’s IP address, the user agent string, and available cookies to the exchange (which shares this information ultimately with the DSP). The browser also passes information on the web page being visited and characteristics of the desired ad. These characteristics include whether it’s banner, pop-up, video, etc.; the size of the area where it will be displayed (which gives a good indication where it will appear on the screen); and whether a video will auto-play when loaded.

Each party in the auction (the exchange and DSP) tries to identify users, normally through cookies. Here, of course, is where so many privacy advocates see risks to the user. Indeed, both exchanges and DSPs try to find out as much about our preferences as possible by sharing their knowledge of the user with third-party sites that collect demographic data about us, information on our shopping habits, etc. However, none of these companies really wants to identify who we are — they just want to get us the sports equipment or gadget we like. In short, the exchanges and DSPs are uninterested in personally identifying information such as your name.

Pretty crazy the lengths they will go to. I find it fascinating that so much can be gleaned by simply having big data sets to work with.
Just simple things like knowing the version of the browser you are using can tip off what sort of person you are – geeks are more likely to be up to date – an IE 6 user… never mind….

If you are not aware, the users (thats you) IP address gives a pretty good indication about your location. There is not a lot you can do about that unless you want to jump through some hoops (like use a VPN – Virtual Private Network) which will put you on the web as if from a different location – in some cases, as if you were in a different country!)
So what I said about your information leaking online. Yeah. I was not kidding. By just surfing the web, you are screaming to all sorts of people ‘exactly’ where you live.

Uh, Im over 1000 words on this one. Sorry BA. I will stop now.

Long blog long. It’s really really really interesting what goes on behind the curtain every time you (or I) click a link.

Bluetooth is gaining a lot of traction.
The main breakthrough came last year with the wide adoption of Bluetooth low energy or BLE.
It makes wearables viable in that the range is a lot (lot) better and the battery life is a lot (lot) better.

In other words, it is a low power way to connect things to things.
It’s popping up ‘everywhere’, wearables, watches, cars, lights, speakers, switches, thermostats…. the list is long and getting longer by the day.

The Bluetooth standard, or specification was bumped from 4.1 to 4.2 in December 2014 (when I wrote this blog). Not a big deal number wise, but a big deal as far as laying the groundwork for Bluetooth to become more robust and even more widely adopted in the future.

http://betanews.com/2014/12/03/bluetooth-4-2-is-here-chock-full-of-new-features/

“Bluetooth 4.2 introduces industry-leading privacy settings that lowers power consumption and builds upon the government-grade security features of the Bluetooth specification. The new privacy features put control back into the hands of the consumer by making it difficult for eavesdroppers to track a device through its Bluetooth connection without permission. For example, when shopping in a retail store with beacons, unless you’ve enabled permission for the beacon to engage with your device, you can’t be tracked”, says The Bluetooth Special Interest Group.

Added security is always good. (Remember, when it comes to security, its very simple to work out if something is secure or not…. “If it’s easy, its not secure”).

I am interested in beacons a great deal and will be watching this space closely to see if its any better to manage them as a user than with version 4.1

The group further explains, “building on the capabilities released earlier with Bluetooth 4.1 and the new features released in 4.2, the Internet Protocol Support Profile (IPSP) will allow Bluetooth Smart sensors to access the Internet directly via IPv6/6LoWPAN. IP connectivity makes it possible to use existing IP infrastructure to manage Bluetooth Smart ‘edge’ devices. This is ideal for connected home scenarios that need both personal and wide area control. This profile will be ratified by the end of the year”.

This internet connectivity is a big deal.
In the past you have had to use your phone as a gateway device to get your Bluetooth devices connected to the Internet. This means that once your phone is out of range, your Bluetooth device is pretty much a paper weight.
I’m not exactly sure how this update will work in this regard.
If there is some sort of connection option where I can control and monitor my Bluetooth devices at home while I am at work, then it’s going to be a game changer…. I am really excited about this one!

Of course, increased speed is also on board; Bluetooth 4.2 is 250 percent faster than the previous version. This is a much welcomed improvement, as Bluetooth transfer rates have historically been slow.

Speed is always good. I personally have not come up against any speed limits.
Most Bluetooth transactions for me have always been snappy enough.
But, like I said, if it comes for free (no extra power drain), then who am I to knock it.

All in all, this is great news.
The one bit that is missing that I (and every other Bluetooth fan / hacker out there) am disappointed is not in the new spec is mesh. The ability for Bluetooth devices to figure out the best route to take to get a signal to where it needs to go, hopping through multiple devices if necessary.
Once mesh networking makes to Bluetooth, we are going to see small, cheap, low power sensors and devices all over the place.

Exciting times ahead!

Got coverage issues with Wifi?
Need more range?

These guys might have a solution for you;

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/eero-takes-a-crack-at-pushing-mesh-wi-fi-through-your-whole-house/

Just about everyone’s got their own wireless LAN in their home, but coverage can still be a problem—and wireless extenders aren’t always a solution, since you can typically only use one extender per WLAN. San Francisco startup Eero thinks they have the answer: a mesh of wireless access points that can have as many or as few nodes as needed to cover your whole home.

Looks good and the price is not too super scary.
They are smallish white boxes and three of them will set you back around 300 US bucks.
The one thing this article does not mention is if your throughput will take a hit like most extenders do.

Still, if (like us) you really need wifi out the back deck, these are tempting (but before I pull the trigger, I am going to continue to wait for some new firmware for my Kickstarter router in the hope that it has more range than my current setup).

I really need to get to seeing about either cloning myself or getting an intern, or apprentice – granted, I can’t afford any of them, but… I just need more time and help.

Here is what triggered all that……

http://www.limpkin.fr/index.php?post/2014/11/27/A-Development-Board-for-the-ESP8266-03

A Wifi platform for $3… who wouldn’t want to play with it?
For the last few weeks we have been seeing a lot of awesome projects built around ESP8266 Wifi modules:
These modules come in different shapes and colours and can be purchased from the internet for 3 dollars only.
They are therefore cheap enough to enable many Internet of Things applications like monitoring your home temperature and activity all year round (if you ever need to do that).

What we are talking about is a small module that can hook to a Wifi network and then communicate with a serial device like a small cheap microcontroller.
It’s a major breakthrough that has opened lots of doors for different projects.
Not just the price, but the size and the low power aspects are important…. The most exciting aspect is the fact that it takes the load of the Wifi off the micro.
Wifi has been hard to put into small devices because it’s complicated. It takes some messing about to connect with a Wifi network, for the most part, more than a typical small computer can handle. (This by the way, is a solid reason why SBC’s (Single Board Computer) like the Raspberry Pi are popular and capable. They have enough computing power to run Linux and so can connect to more than one network at a time).
By offloading the whole Wifi thing to a dedicated micro, the other micro is free to do it’s job of whatever it needs too.

I really want to tinker with, oh, I don’t know, about 30-50 of these things… But the time, oh the time that I don’t have to get them up and running.