The Onion’s 9 best bits about Microsoft

Poking fun at the software giant and founder Bill Gates since 1996

Going on two decades of ridicule
The Onion, self-branded "America's Finest News Source," has been making fun of Microsoft -- and, in particular, Bill Gates -- since at least 1996, according to its online archive. Here are nine of what we've judged to be the best efforts.

Bill Gates To Get Half
Publication date: July 23, 1996

Sample: "Don't touch anything until you're sure it's not part of my half," Gates instructed the world's citizenry yesterday via the several million 40-foot-high projection screens he has scattered throughout the globe. "I don’t want anyone messing up stuff in my half."

Bill Gates Spends $56 Million On Amazon In One Night
Published: Sept. 22, 2011

Sample: "The kids were in bed, and I was thinking about how it had been a long time since I'd heard any Yes, so I bought the MP3 for 'Leave It,'" Gates said as he opened one of the 13,846 boxes that had arrived at his house.

Microsoft patents ones and zeros
Published: March 25, 1998

Sample: "Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."

Thousands Wait Overnight At Microsoft Stores For Second Generation Zune
Published: Dec. 17, 2007

Sample: The sleek new Zune, whose record-breaking sales have made the Zune name synonymous with "mp3 player," was so sought-after that thousands formed long lines outside hip, minimalist Microsoft Stores across the country days before the device went on sale. In Midtown Manhattan, the hysteria reached such a fever pitch that some were willing to pay as much as $200 for a spot in line.

Microsoft Signs Justice Dept. Attorney To $350 Million Endorsement Deal
Published: Jan. 21, 1998

Sample: Klein, who will appear in Microsoft TV and print ads, joins a growing list of high-profile government personalities who have signed endorsement deals with the software giant, including solicitor general Seth Waxman, FTC chair Robert Pitofsky, and federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

Microsoft Ad Campaign Crashing Nation's Televisions
Published: Oct. 27, 2008

Sample: The Microsoft ads, which began airing earlier this week, are being blamed for generating critical system errors in more than 70 million televisions. In addition, thousands of frustrated Americans said that the ads have caused their TVs to become unresponsive, their screens to turn blue, and a small box with the message "terminal application error" to suddenly appear.

Bill Gates Finally Getting Into Radiohead's Kid A
Published: Sept. 12, 2001

Sample: "I listened to it a few times when I first got it, but it just wasn't grabbing me," Gates told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Xbox capable of controlling users
Sample from video: "TechBuzz is raving. 'This is the future of gaming. With the Xbox One we are closer than ever to being completely piloted by a console. It's the immersive obedience experience we've been waiting for.' "

Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0
Published: Feb. 27, 2006

Sample: Peters challenged the computer after an interoffice memo announced that Excel's powerful upgraded accounting software would render jobs in the accounts receivable division obsolete and result in sweeping layoffs. Although warned repeatedly by his colleagues in billing, Peters insisted that he could beat the software "to the bottom of a large balance sheet of bedrock-hard figures."

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Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

Open-source creeps into the network from below, but no Red Hat analogues in sight

Open-source software plays an increasingly prominent role in many areas of modern business IT – it’s in servers, databases and even the cloud. Vendors like Red Hat, Canonical and others have managed to graft open-source principles onto a profitable business model. The former company became the first open-source-centered business with $1 billion in annual revenue in 2012.

So what about the network? Why isn’t there an open-source alternative there?

Plenty of reasons, according to experts, including the difficulty of challenging established incumbents, the dangers of getting eaten alive by a large customer and the sheer scale and complexity of managing a heterodox network in an orthodox way.

THE HEAVYWEIGHTS
Obviously, the incumbents in most fields of enterprise technology are formidable enough, but networking hopefuls have to contend with a bona-fide giant of the realm in the form of Cisco – which sells between 65% and 70% of the world’s enterprise switches, 80% of the enterprise routers, and 18% of the security appliances – still good for tops in its category, according to IDC.

More than that, however, they’re actually pleasing their customers, according to 451 Research analyst Peter Christy.

“If you talk to Cisco customers, rather than viewing them as a predatory, monopolistic company they would like to get away from, they view them as the best tech vendor they deal with in terms of helping the customer succeed,” he said.

Companies have to compete with Cisco to do a better job providing a working network, which isn’t easy to do. (Not that it’s stopped some companies from trying – Brocade bought open-source networking software maker Vyatta in 2012 with that end in mind.) And that’s not to say that companies that, like Cisco, depend on branded hardware are going to have it all their own way in perpetuity.

"[Network management] is a freaking hard problem. It’s just a lot of things to try to cover, and the market moves."

John Michelsen, CTO for CA Technologies
Neela Jacques is the executive director of the Open Daylight project, which is a collaborative group that works to create open-source networking software. He argues that some pricey proprietary hardware isn’t worth it.

“In some areas, there’s been tremendous innovation and differentiation, where you’re paying $100,000 for a box and it really is solving a problem you couldn’t solve otherwise,” he said. “But especially at the lower end of the market, there’s been very, very high margins for a long time, and the boxes haven’t really changed as much.”

All too often, Jacques said, networking hardware is made by a no-name ODM in China, programmed with a specific vendor’s network operating system, and marked up by a factor of five to 10.

“People have been looking at that and saying ‘wait a second – if we could just create an open-source version of that network operating system, then someone could get the exact same SKU that they’re putting into their environment,’” he added.

Christy noted that three of the four biggest clouds out there – Amazon, Facebook, and Google, with Microsoft the odd company out – build their own networking boxes. Even hardware makers like Riverbed say that commodity hardware is the wave of the future.

“Why should they buy the same thing from Cisco if they can build what they want, somewhat tweaked, by themselves, with the same outside manufacturers?” he asked.

A FREAKING HARD PROBLEM
Even so, CA Technologies CTO John Michelsen said, attempts to create a broad-based performance management framework in an open-source manner, like OpenNMS, haven’t been terribly successful because the issues faced are simply very difficult.

“It’s a freaking hard problem. It’s just a lot of things to try to cover, and the market moves," he said.

The well-known aphorism of UNIX philosophy says to “write programs that do one thing and do it well” – a problematic stance for broad-based network management and performance optimization systems, which are, almost by definition, heavily multi-functional.

Michelsen said that his company’s application performance management product is designed to monitor eight separate aspects of the network.

“It’s very hard to bring an integrated set of very deep-science things in several different areas. Each of these different types of monitoring are their own science project,” he said.

SWALLOWED UP
Despite the philosophical and logistical problems, open-source technology is still a major part of the network – it’s just in there at a very low level, according to 451’s Christy.

Big companies that buy a service from smaller ones impose tough contractual terms around code escrow – meaning that the vendor will have to provide a copy of their offering’s source code for legal safe-keeping, so that the bigger firm will be able to continue to function if the smaller one goes out of business.

Open source obviates a lot of those headaches, in principle. It also offers companies in the same industry a way to collaborate on development without fear of being accused of collusion.

But it also means that open source tends to get swallowed up by big companies in the network space, one way or another. Key early adopters of open-source networking technology have had so much in-house technological expertise that it becomes difficult to offer them a paid service offering – they can simply do that themselves.

“The biggest users always self-support – it’s not a commercial opportunity,” said Christy.

That same open-source code, freely viewed and tinkered with by companies full of top programming talent, helps fuel the aforementioned shift in the direction of commodity hardware.

BIG KIDS ONLY
But, obviously, not every company has Facebook or Google’s battalions of elite developers. It’s because of this that the hands-off, managed service option remains popular.

“In the case of networking, for most customers, there’s a greater motivation to let the vendor sit in the middle and integrate patches and be responsible for the operation of the network as a whole, than it is for, say, the typical use of Linux,” Christy said.

Jacques argues that open-source’s low-level presence on the network is strong, and could eventually diversify to the point at which smaller customers are more attracted to it.

“Open-source is a key underpinning of network management technology, but absent a “core platform,” there’s little chance of open-source making it to the app layer.

“[L]ook at what happened with Linux, for example. It took Linux being credible for running servers … for people to look and turn it into something to run cars and phones and home security systems and all that,” he said. “I think you’ll see the exact same thing in networking, because you can’t have an open-source app that sits on a proprietary platform.”

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Groupware hug: Lotus Notes turning 25

In an interview first published Dec. 2, 2004, Ray Ozzie walks us through the history

This coming Sunday marks the passing of 25 years since the initial release of Lotus Notes, known today as IBM Notes. In marking the 15th anniversary 10 years ago, I spoke with Ray Ozzie about the earliest days of Notes and the subsequent acquisition of Lotus by IBM. Here is a slightly shortened version of that interview.

Do you ever get tired of talking about Notes?
That's funny … I don't get tired of talking about it depending on the conversation and which way it's spinning. … I get a chance to surf off of it into my current passions and what I'm talking about now and I hope it doesn't sound like the song that nobody wants to hear. I'm passionate about computer-supported cooperative work, writ large. I hope when people are asking about Lotus Notes that that is really what they're talking about.

Take us back to the day when you trotted out Notes 1.0.
At the time Notes was launched, Dec. 7, 1989, we had one customer -- Sheldon Laube from PriceWaterhouse -- who shared our vision. He understood enough about it and he's a great communicator, much better than we were about the value of Notes at the time.

It was a very fortuitous time for Notes to be coming out because people were just using LANs for printer sharing and they could now leverage that simple technology for lightweight processes within the enterprise. By '95 or so the leading-edge companies started to try to use it outside the company, not just inside. We take this for granted now, but it was fairly interesting and it turned out to be difficult because Notes, in particular, was designed for centralized management. It was fairly burdensome from an administrative perspective for good reason: It was the way that you managed the directory, the way that you managed the security was all designed for the data center and for IT, and it was difficult to extend that to an environment of multiple IT organizations.

When did you know you had something big with Notes?
I'll say something that let's you see a little bit about my personality: I knew we had something before we started the company. The two guys who started Iris (Associates) with me -- Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell -- the three of us had been at the University of Illinois in the mid-'70s and had been exposed to a system called Plato, where we first lived the online community experience. We knew what it was like to work with other people at a distance online because we lived it for years.

We lost that when we went into industry. When we graduated from school, they went to DEC and I went to Data General and suddenly we were thrown into this way-back machine of working the old-fashioned way. We had an innate desire to bring back that method of virtual online work that we had experienced before.

In 1989, because of (Lotus founder) Mitch Kapor and a number of other people who believed in us, we finally had the opportunity to start a company and build that vision.

When we came out with the product in '89, we knew what you could do with it and we couldn't understand why we couldn't communicate to others the difference that they could make.

What piece was missing at that point?
People think always in terms of their business problem, their business process, their business pain. You always have to surf off of what you know, and if you are an accountant, you're wrapped up in the accounting procedures that you've dealt with for many years. You might be able to take on incremental things, like a fax machine or a spreadsheet that emulates what you were doing and takes it one notch further, but the concept of going from physical work to virtual work, the concept of processes that cross-cut group boundaries, it required too many things to change.

What really ended up doing it for Notes was nothing that Lotus did, it was the fact that there's a VAR community, a reseller community, which understood their own customers. They understood the context within which collaborative processes would occur. They built solutions on the platform that we built, and then the customers could understand it.

Looking back, were there any aspects of Notes that you had spot-on from the beginning -- or missed?
Absolutely. I'll start with what we missed. We missed -- but I missed clearly -- the immense value in simple publishing. Notes was and is an amazing interactive system around messages and forms and documents and things like that, and in order to use it you have to authenticate yourself to the system so that there's some security and you build these apps and it works really well.

We had a number of people at the time -- early customers like Reuters, who were just trying to get their information out to their customers. They were trying to just publish it to lots of users in an organization.

When I first saw the Web -- Mosaic -- I am ashamed to admit that I said to myself, this is so trivial, it's got no security, you can't authenticate, the server doesn't know who the user is -- so all you can do with this is simple publishing. I should have foreseen earlier on in Notes the value of a simpler, anonymous client/reader that could have been used for a much broader set of applications than it was initially.

One of the things we got right… is the respect for off-line use and mobility. You have to know from day one when you're building a system that you want to treat mobility as a first-class problem. Early on in Notes (we embraced) the concept of putting all of the code that would be on the server on the client so that you could do this replication. Obviously we did that again in Groove Networks, in a different, much more sophisticated way, but it's the same basic idea that you want to empower the user to work whenever, wherever they need to work. I think we got that so right and it amazes me to this day that more people haven't gotten it right.

Why do you think that is?
It's hard. It's hard and you can't add it on, particularly the integration between the storage, communications and security. They all have to be wrapped together from day one in order to get that seamless use between what you do on the client and what you do when you're connected.

Are there milestones through the early years of Notes that you thought particularly important to the development path?
The first big milestone -- and this is not specific to Notes but rather any major commercial end-user software product -- version 3.0 tends to be the first version that hits its mark because it's got a certain level of maturity, a certain level of user feedback plowed back into the product.

The next major milestone -- and this is not widely written about but I think customers understand it -- is there was a thing called "The Nifty 50." It was a set of application templates that were starter apps, so to speak, that were built on top of Notes 3. It bridged a lot of people into understanding and they just started to build more things.

In release 4.5 email and calendaring became world-class. It was concurrent with the release of (Microsoft) Exchange and it suddenly set in motion thousands of companies putting out RFPs for email systems and then picking one, either Exchange or Notes.

The last major event is in '95 when IBM bought Lotus. People don't realize this, but we had shipped about 2.2 million seats of Notes before IBM, and IBM rapidly jacked that up to 100 million-plus. They did so many things right at the start. There was a lot of turmoil because of the Lotus management structure, but they said, 'Do you know what you're doing? If so, we will put resources into it.' They put resources into it and stepped back and let us enable their organization by putting Notes throughout IBM.

What was your reaction when it was first made clear to you that IBM was going to buy Lotus?
(IBM CEO Louis) Gerstner looked me in the eye one-one-one and said, 'Ray, we're not going to spend $3 billion on Notes, $3.5 billion on Lotus, to screw it up, so stick around and we'll let you make it what you wanted it to be.' I was willing to give them a chance because it was extremely genuine. No, I didn't like the fact that Lotus was losing its independence, but so many people had put so much love into that product for so long that we wanted to give it a chance. And they did what they said they were going to do.

So you were relatively happy with how things went in the subsequent two years before you left?

Sure, absolutely. In any environment, particularly in a big-company environment, there are frustrations, but it's surely in the noise, it's nothing to dwell on. The bottom line is that they invested in Notes and brought it to a much broader base than ever could have been exposed to it, and they used it as the basis for building a big services organization within their own company.

I read the "history of Notes" on the IBM site and couldn't help but notice that you were not quoted in it. Is there anything to be read into that?
I don't think so. The history of Notes that is up there is largely accurate, and it's in any company's best interests to focus on the more recent stuff, and I didn't have any involvement in the more recent stuff. We've had a great relationship and I left on very good terms.

What's your sense as to whether Notes will continue on as an independent product?
IBM has a history of never forcing its customers through tremendous changes; there are S/360s out there that are still cranking along, and I'm sure you'd find a few PROFS systems that are still out there. So I don't see that they would do something so reckless as to stop something. I just don't think that's in the cards.

What's very clear is that Notes has transitioned into a cash cow; it's not at the leading edge of their initiatives. Workplace is at the leading edge, and they would like to, for very pragmatic business reasons, sell more DB2 and sell more Websphere and the things that they regard as more contemporary technologies than Notes. So I think you'll see a lot of marketecture that unifies two architectures, and you'll see active selling efforts on the newer stuff. The older stuff will gracefully stabilize.

You've been doing this kind of work a long time. It still gets you excited?
Yes, sir. I thrive on two things: interesting technology challenges and interesting business challenges.

I'll just pick one thing (to illustrate): Look what's going on in the government post-9/11. The 9/11 Commission, the president's directives, have all said 'you must learn to do joint operations more effectively; you must learn to share information more effectively for some very important reasons.' That gives me a lot of opportunities to help customers understand what they can use technologies for to solve some really important problems, and that's fascinating to me.

From a technology perspective, I couldn't get more excited by what's gone on in the Internet. Groove is a product that lives at the edge of a network; it's a PC-based network, it's based on peer technologies and if you look at all of the exciting trends that are happening in technology, it's all happening at the edge. There are a lot of things that can be done that are intriguing from a technology perspective involving mobile devices, involving wireless, that haven't been done before … and it frankly turns me on.

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Employee-owned PCs are scaring enterprise IT

IT departments are worried about security risks when employees use their PCs for work purposes, but employees aren’t going to stop anytime soon.

Largely ignored in the enterprise mobility craze of the last few years, which saw the acceptance of bring-your-own device (BYOD) policies, were the risks incurred when employees use their personal computers to access business data. Now, with PCs designed to operate more seamlessly with smartphones and tablets, enterprise IT could soon face new consumerization challenges.

A recent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by software company 1E found that more than 25% of responding IT decision makers said their organizations do not have a formal policy regarding the use of employee-owned PCs for work purposes. Even the organizations that do impose a policy tend to be loose with their restrictions – 84% of respondents allow employees to access corporate email from their PCs, and 52% allow access to corporate apps. Another 11% of those that don’t allow PCs to be used for work purposes said employees don’t abide by the rule anyway.

This kind of behavior likely has network managers cringing. Among survey respondents who forbid BYOPC among employees, 86% cited security as the primary reason.

At the same time, however, businesses in general are embracing the overall BYOD approach to the tools their employees use for work. A Gartner report from 2013 predicted that half of all employers will not only permit employees to use their own devices for work, but will require them to choose those which will make them the most productive.

So there’s a conflict here – employees are more productive when given the ability to access work information from their personal devices, but they also present a risk to the network when they use the same device to access sensitive corporate data that they use to browse and download content from the web.

In the changing consumer device ecosystem, it may take some time for IT to adapt to this trend. As Galen Gruman pointed out in InfoWorld last year, the rush to create BYOD-focused management and security tools for smartphones outpaced such progress in the PC market. Furthermore, consumer smartphones were relatively new to enterprise IT, making it easier for the culture to adapt to new ways of handling them. But businesses have held control over the PCs used by their employees for two decades, and the policies for managing them are deeply entrenched within IT departments.

Further complicating the issue is the recent push from Apple and Microsoft to make it easier for users to take advantage of the growing acceptance of BYOD policies in the workplace. Apple’s recently released OS X Yosemite has been largely praised for its many features that bridge the gap between iOS devices and Mac PCs. A feature called Handoff, for example, allows users to sync their iOS devices and their Mac. CITEWorld’s Ryan Faas credited the feature for its usability, but warned that it could lead to headaches for enterprise IT:

"The concern, however, is that the functionality, like many Apple technologies, appears to be largely managed by your Apple ID. That means that in addition to handoff working on your work devices, it's almost certain to work from your work or BYOD devices like your iPhone and your family iMac at home, or an iPad shared by you and your kids. Simply put, it's another core Apple feature that makes it easy for work and personal data to mix on both work and personal devices, creating data sprawl, security, and accountability challenges."

Microsoft, on the other hand, appears to have taken these concerns into consideration for Windows 10, which is still in beta. Calling Windows 10, "The BYOD Windows," Simon Bisson explained in a CITEWorld post that the OS is designed to divide and store corporate and personal data separately.

"That's the heart of Microsoft's enterprise sales pitch for Windows 10,” Bisson wrote. “IT departments can apply all the controls they want to corporate applications and information, while users can install all the Minion Rush and Twitter apps they want. CIOs will know the information they're entrusted with securing won't leak across into those games and social media, while users will know that an IT admin can't flick a switch and delete all their photographs of their kids."

Whether Microsoft is successful remains to be seen. But given that Microsoft is collecting an unprecedented amount of user feedback on the Windows 10 beta, the company is likely to hear about corporate IT’s employee-owned PC conundrum.

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What giant companies WON’T put in the cloud

In our interviews with CIOs at large enterprises, we found that adoption levels vary from simple experimentation to heavy use of cloud apps and infrastructure in public and private settings. Yet even among the most cloud-focused businesses, there are resources CIOs won’t consider migrating to the cloud – at least not yet.
giants cloud primary

Certain tactical capabilities can easily be acquired in the public cloud, but not everything falls into that category. Some enterprise systems aren’t ready to be run in the public cloud because of safety and reliability concerns, says Joe Spagnoletti, CIO at Campbell Soup.

Spagnoletti emphasizes that Campbell’s is not trying to do everything in the cloud. Projects are "highly targeted to the things we're trying to change. Double entry bookkeeping hasn't changed for a long time," Spagnoletti says.

At Dow Chemical, IT has built a cloud-based infrastructure that includes systems hosted by vendors as well as its own private cloud. On the applications side, while the majority of its applications are in a cloud environment, only about 10% are in the public cloud. Looking ahead, about 30% to 40% of applications are expected to be in the public cloud within three years, says Paula Tolliver, CIO and corporate vice president, business services.

Dow’s private cloud delivers a lot of the benefits of cloud, and it positions the company for future public cloud migrations. As the company does its lifecycle planning and weighs future investments, it starts with a cloud mindset. What likely won’t go to the cloud? ERP. Dow doesn’t have any plans to move its core SAP systems to the cloud. Doing that would mean major upheaval, Tolliver says. “What’s the financial incentive for us to go?”

Neither is Family Dollar rushing to move its core business systems to the cloud.
Family Dollar runs a variety of cloud set-ups, including SaaS applications and infrastructure-as-a-service through Amazon. Systems that have been moved to the cloud include HR applications for training, hiring and screening of new employees; SharePoint, through Amazon, for store operations; and the Familydollar.com website, which is run through Amazon. In general, the systems that lend themselves to cloud need to be used most of the day, don’t have a batch processing cycle, and aren’t terribly data intensive, says Family Dollar CIO Josh Jewett.
josh jewett

Josh Jewett
Still, most of the company’s core IT resides on premises. ERP and data warehousing, for example, are internal largely because so much data runs through these systems that “there isn’t a good business case” for passing it in and out of the company continuously, Jewett says. “You have to move it through a skinny pipe. That takes a lot of time, and partners may charge by the megabyte or terabyte. If you’re talking about close to a petabyte of data, not only is it hard to move but it’s cheaper to keep it on premises,” he says.

Jewett doesn’t anticipate having to do a major upgrade of his ERP system for a few years, and at that time, he’ll revisit its cloud potential.

Legacy investments are also keeping Progressive Insurance from a broad move to the public cloud.

Progressive today relies on the cloud mainly for SaaS applications that aren’t core to running the business, such as HR management and expense reporting, says CIO Ray Voelker, who estimates that 20% of the company’s business process applications are hosted and run in a SaaS model. On the infrastructure side, Progressive uses IaaS largely for experimentation at this point. “Given the highly regulated industry within which we operate, we need to keep our data private,” Voelker says.

More widespread use of the public cloud is a ways off, if ever, at Progressive. “We’re likely to continue to watch the move toward hybrid clouds very closely as that technology continues to develop and mature,” Voelker says. He could envision a hybrid cloud architecture that combines public cloud resources – such as weather data in the public domain -- with internal Progressive data such as usage-based driving records.

But Progressive is in no rush to move its data into a public cloud setting. Voelker says it would be “a whole new ballgame” if Progressive were some midsized business that didn’t have an extensive data center footprint. “We already have assets we own that we can leverage.”

Similarly, Western Union has selectively deployed cloud apps, including Salesforce.com, Workday for human resources, and several from Adobe for online customer experience, data management and analytics. “We’ve made some reasonably safe bets with vendors who are recognized leaders,” says Sanjay Saraf, CTO at Western Union.


The company is taking a prudent approach in terms of how it leverages cloud for infrastructure. Western Union is wary of moving too fast because it must comply with hundreds of local, national and international financial regulations. “Money movement is complex,” Saraf says. “I’m not so hell-bent on cutting costs but on modernizing the technology.”

For analytics, Western Union wanted to ramp up quickly on Hadoop last year and tested some cloud scenarios with Cloudera and Amazon. Ultimately, the company decided to keep analytics in-house with an internal Hadoop ecosystem. “Data is so core to what we’re about, we decided to bring it in,” Saraf says.

Editor’s Note: Giants in the Cloud was written by Network World assistant managing editor, features, Ann Bednarz, based on interviews conducted by CIO Magazine managing editor Kim S. Nash, CIO.com senior editor Brian Eastwood, Network World senior writer Brandon Butler and Computerworld technologies editor Johanna Ambrosio. This package, based on an idea from CIO executive editor Mitch Betts, was edited by Network World executive features editor Neal Weinberg, designed by Steve Sauer and illustrated by Chris Koehler.

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Six browser plug-ins that protect your privacy

Want to avoid ads and keep your Web wanderings private? One of these six browser apps could do the trick.

It's no stretch to say that ads are what make the Web go 'round. The content you're reading right now? Paid for by ads. Google, Facebook, Pandora, YouTube? Driven by ads. This is not a new concept: TV and radio have relied on commercials since their earliest days. Because, let's face it, something has to pay for all the free programming and services.

Data integration is often underestimated and poorly implemented, taking time and resources. Yet it

Of course, there are ways that users can quell the seemingly endless stream of buttons, banners, video interstitials and more. All you need is an ad blocker: a browser plug-in designed to filter out those unwanted distractions and interruptions.

For many users, though, there's another concern that is more important than simple annoyance: privacy. Some sites do more than just plaster their content with digital billboards. They log your visits (usually via IP addresses) and even track your movements to other destinations. Although the driving motivator is usually just broad-based data-gathering, it can be unsettling to realize you're being followed online.

In response, some plug-ins go beyond mere filtering, promising full-on privacy protection against cookies, trackers, third-party scripts and widgets, and other unwanted invasions.

In this roundup I chose six products: AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery and Privacy Badger. There are dozens of other, similar, tools, but these represent a good cross-section of what's available. They're also among the most popular picks in the Chrome and Firefox extensions libraries.

While a few of these plug-ins have companion apps designed to extend protection to mobile devices, for purposes of this roundup I focused on desktop browsers. I concentrated on two browsers, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, which have a combined market share of nearly 80%, according to Netmarketshare.

I installed one plug-in at a time, then visited a wide range of sites -- including, but not limited to, Crackle, Facebook, Giveaway of the Day, Huffington Post, Hulu, TMZ, Tucows Downloads and YouTube. These sites represent both mainstream and lesser-known destinations -- some notoriously ad-heavy, others focused expressly on video or downloads. Certainly different sites will be affected differently by different ad-blockers, but overall I got a good picture of what day-to-day browsing looks like with each one.

I looked at these sites with each plug-in toggled on, then again with it toggled off. The idea was to make sure none of them were overzealous in filtering, messing with either the content or page layout.

What about speed? In theory, ad blockers and privacy filters should make pages appear faster, as they cut down the amount of content that needs to load. However, this can be difficult to gauge in real-world testing, as there are so many variables that determine how quickly a Web page appears. And if the difference boils down to just a half-second or so, does that really matter? In any case, I looked for any major anomalies, such as pages that were especially fast or especially slow with or without a particular plug-in running.
A few considerations

Keep in mind that a blocker may not always be able to distinguish invasive Web elements from benign ones. For example, some can prevent social-media buttons from appearing, thus thwarting your attempts to "like" or tweet about something.

There's one other consideration, and that's the funding behind the blocker. While most of the apps that I looked at are free or open-source, supported exclusively by donations, at least one, DoNotTrackMe, employs a freemium model (charging a subscription fee if you want advanced features), while Ghostery asks you to provide usage data. Of the six tools reviewed here, only Adblock Plus has an "acceptable ads" feature that allows advertising from Google and other paying companies, and it's turned on by default. But you can easily disable it if you want a totally ad-free experience.

Speaking of which, it's one thing to protect your privacy, but should you really turn off the ads that pay for so much good online stuff? It's food for thought, and if you want a big-picture discussion of ad-blockers and how they may or may not impact the Web as a whole, you may want to read Robert Mitchell's Ad blockers: A solution or a problem?.

Price: Free; accepts user contributions

Compatible with: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari

Not to be confused with Adblock Plus (which originated as a Firefox extension), AdBlock currently works with Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera browsers.
Adblock Rick Broida AdBlock offers some useful toggles from its toolbar pull-down menu.

What it does: Blocks ads, of course. With AdBlock running, you shouldn't encounter any banners, pop-ups or video ads. However, the plug-in makes no claim to prevent tracking.

How it performed: Because AdBlock isn't compatible with Internet Explorer, I confined my testing to Chrome. The tool offers some useful toggles from its toolbar pull-down menu, including options to pause the plug-in, disable it for just the current page or disable it for the entire domain. This last could come in handy if you discovered a compatibility issue with, say, a site's comment system. I never encountered any such issues.

Rather, AdBlock worked exactly as advertised, keeping ads at bay virtually everywhere I went. It made for a blissfully ad-free viewing experience at Crackle and YouTube. Hulu actually detected the presence of AdBlock and flashed a message asking me to enable ads for the site. After about 30 seconds, however, the message disappeared and the show began playing. So while I didn't have to actually watch the commercial, I didn't enjoy uninterrupted viewing.

Also, AdBlock tallied just five blocked items at TMZ.com, while Adblock Plus counted 14. Why the difference? It's tough to say, because neither program indicates exactly what's been filtered. The only visible difference was that, while AdBlock reformatted the page content to compensate for eliminated ads, Adblock Plus left a few empty spaces.

Bottom line: If you want a mostly ad-free online experience, this does the trick. But AdBlock isn't quite as privacy-minded as Adblock Plus, and Internet Explorer users will have to look elsewhere.

Don't let the name fool you; Adblock Plus is not a "pro" version of AdBlock. Rather, it's a very similar tool that just happens to have a very similar name. (In fact, the former predates the latter by a few years.) It's somewhat controversial because it accepts money from some large companies to allow their advertising through as part of its "acceptable ads" policy.
Adblock Plus Rick Broida Adblock Plus (commonly known as ABP) eliminates banners, pop-ups and videos from the sites you visit.

What it does: Adblock Plus (commonly known as ABP) eliminates banners, pop-ups and videos from the sites you visit. It also disables tracking, though not by default.

How it performed: It's easy to understand ABP's popularity, as it performed extremely well on virtually every site I visited. However, though slightly prettier than AdBlock (at least when you pull up its action menu), ABP lacks a couple of the handy tools found in its competitor. For example, you can't fully disable ABP without venturing into the settings, while AdBlock lets you "pause" it with a simple click.

ABP effectively filtered the ads from the videos I played at Crackle and YouTube, but when I tried to stream an episode of "Party Down" from Hulu, ABP left me staring at a blank window. No ads played, but neither did the episode. After a refresh, it played the episode -- but didn't filter out the ads.

It's curious that one of ABP's most highly touted capabilities, tracking protection, must be enabled manually. In fact, it was only by accident that I discovered it wasn't active: A link on the Features page directed me to the options screen where you add the protection.

Bottom line: Though perhaps not the best add-on with "Adblock" in its name, ABP is definitely the best choice for Internet Explorer users. It keeps ads and commercials away, and optionally stops trackers as well.

Disconnect aims to keep you in control of your personal info and does so primarily by blocking all tracking requests. It has the slick design of a commercial product -- and in fact comes from a commercial software developer -- but relies on a pay-what-you-want model (and lets you portion your contribution to charity if you wish). The developer also offers apps for Android and iOS.

Disconnect's visualization view shows a nifty interactive graph of the relationships between the current site and the various trackers.

What it does: Though positioned as a privacy tool, Disconnect also blocks ads. But it won't do anything about the commercials that appear in, say, YouTube videos.

How it performed: Once installed, Disconnect treats you to a treasure-trove of information via its drop-down window. For any given page you visit, you get a summary of all the advertising, analytic, social and content requests made (and blocked) while it loads. For each of the categories you can click to reveal a list of the actual companies or sites that made those requests. It's informative and interesting, to say the least, but probably superfluous for most users.

Likewise, Disconnect's visualization view shows a nifty interactive graph of the relationships between the current site and the various trackers. It's neat, but not something you're likely to use (or need) often. Of greater use, the status window shows how much time and bandwidth you've saved by using Disconnect.

Instead of an on-off toggle, Disconnect gives you the option of "whitelisting" the site you're currently viewing, effectively permitting all the ads and other stuff -- though it still keeps a running tally of all those items, which is cool. Also, you can manually allow individual sites and services, assuming you'd want to for some reason.

Bottom line: Disconnect insulates you from pretty much every site except the one you're viewing and filters out ads to boot. Even if you never bother with its pretty interface, you can take comfort knowing it's working behind the scenes.

The only straight-up commercial product in the group, DoNotTrackMe (DNTM) takes a freemium approach to privacy: You get the basic anti-tracking features for free, while a more robust Premium subscription, which adds features such as password management, costs $5 monthly. The developer also offers apps for Android and iOS.
DoNotTrackMe Rick Broida DoNotTrackMe not only blocks ads and trackers, but also provides basic password management and disposable email addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers.

What it does: DoNotTrackMe's name undersells its capabilities, as this plug-in not only blocks ads and trackers, but also provides basic password management and aliases (or "masks") for email addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers. (These last two options require DNTM Premium.)

How it performed: More features can mean more complexity, and DNTM has the steepest learning curve of any of the tools in the group. But it's worth the effort.

For starters, you must register for an account, even for something as basic as accessing the status menu in your browser's toolbar. Once you do, you're presented with four basic options: Accounts (the password/auto log-in manager), Wallet (storage of credit/debit card info), Masking (creation of aliases of personal info) and Tracking (or, rather, tracker blocking). This last is obvious enough, but the other features require a bit of exploring -- and probably some visits to the online help guides.

If all you want is the tracking and ad blocking, DNTM works well enough behind the scenes. Once you click through to the Tracking area of the options window, you'll see a list of the trackers blocked for that site -- with the option to turn off blocking for individual trackers or the entire site.

Then there's a link to the Tracking Dashboard, which opens in a new tab and shows a graph with the total number of trackers blocked over the past 10 days. Interesting info, but I feel that it should have been integrated into the tool rather than requiring a visit to a whole new tab.

I briefly tested the other features, such as password management, and they worked as advertised.

Bottom line: Though a capable ad- and tracker-blocker with some nice extras, DoNotTrackMe feels unnecessarily complex. Even so, the credit-card alias option makes a strong case for subscribing to Premium.






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Dear Google: It's not you, it's me

I've become too dependent on Google's services for storing my data. I think it's time we start seeing other people.

Dear Google,

I stand before you today a broken man, beholden to the whims and wiles of a distant, faceless corporate master. In case it wasn't clear – that's you, Google. You broke me.

You see, 10 years ago I was the master of my own destiny. My data was my own. When I checked my email it was downloaded to whatever computer I was using and stored locally... until I needed to format my drive and reinstall my OS (at which point I usually lost my mailbox file because I, of course, forgot to back it up first). When I took a picture, I stored it on my hard drive until I either burned it to a CD/DVD or accidentally deleted it.

Did I lose my data on a regular basis? Yes. Yes, I did. Text files with notes and to-do lists. Contacts. Calendar data. Save games. The MP3s of my entire CD collection that I had just finished ripping. Even source code. I lost it all, over and over again.

Sometimes it was my fault. OK. Usually, it was my fault – I simply either forgot to back up my files or I was too damned lazy and, somehow, believed that the magical backup fairy would take care of everything. Sometimes it was the fault of a failing backup drive... or a Zip disk that started clicking at me maniacally like some sort of demonic cicada.

But whatever the cause, I felt in control. My data was right there (hopefully). I never needed an Internet connection. I never relied on the 24/7 operation of some remote servers running in the cloud. I felt... powerful. My files were my own and I could, quite literally, reach out and touch whatever disk they were stored on.

Those days are long gone. Now, if my Internet connection drops out, I'm dead in the water. Dear heavens, Google, without an active connection to your servers I am lost, adrift in a sea of nothingness.

I don't have a local MP3/Ogg collection anymore – now I just use Google Play Music. Because it's easy.

I don't keep local backups of my contacts or email anymore – again... Google services. Because of that "easy" thing I was talking about earlier.

Hell, I don't even have a normal phone anymore, opting to use Google Voice and Hangouts for all my phone calling (and even texting) needs. Guess why? Easy.

All of which means I have traded control over my own data for a boost in simplicity. And you know what they say – "those who would give up essential data control to purchase a little temporary simplicity deserve neither data control nor simplicity." Or something like that.

The worst part of it? I saw this coming. I even warned myself – and others – about this very thing. And yet... here I am, a slave to the sweet, sweet Google fruits. Unable to break myself free of chains of convenient online data and services.

I'm not sure how. Maybe I'll setup a server with Own Cloud – or possibly something similar – so that I can still have a server, but with more control. Or perhaps I'll simply start using a wider variety of services so all of my eggs aren't piled into the Google-Basket-O-Eggs quite so highly.

Either way, Google and Google's services... I'm putting you on notice. Your days in my computing life are numbered. Yes. This my way of saying, "we should start seeing other people."

Except for Google Voice and Hangouts. I'm keeping those forever. That stuff is just too good to give up.

Hugs and kisses,

Bryan Lunduke

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