Category: Undependable Support

Blogger Michael DeGusta has published an illuminating chart which shows just how bad Google is at pushing out updates to phones running its spyware-laden Android operating system. He writes:

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States¹ up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device – be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch – as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty.

From the chart, he extrapolated some devastating numbers:

• 7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
• 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
• 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
• 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
• 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
• 15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
• In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
• At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.

DeGusta goes on to discuss why Google is unable to match Apple in terms of support for users of older hardware. His piece is definitely worth reading.

Yet another reason why schools and other institutions should avoid Google Apps:

The NFB is asking the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to probe whether New York University and Northwestern University are discriminating against blind employees and students through their use of Google Apps’ Education edition.

Specifically, the NFB alleges that Google Apps applications like Gmail, Calendar and Docs contain “significant accessibility barriers” for blind people using screen access technology, which converts the contents of the computer screen into synthesized speech or Braille.

“The NFB will not tolerate this unconscionable discrimination against blind students and faculty and callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education,” said Marc Maurer, the NFB’s president, in a statement.

The Monster of Mountain View has hoodwinked a number of universities into outsourcing their email and document storage to its datacenters. Tempted by the thought of having lower overhead and less maintenance to worry about, many administrators have accepted the offer without realizing the implications. And this is just one of the ramifications. Contrary to what Google says, Google Apps is not secure. Hackers have broken into corporate or institutional Google Apps accounts on a number of occasions. There was the well-publicized Twitter breach, and more recently, the HBGary Federal scandal. There have been others.

And, of course, there’s also consequences for user privacy. An academic institution that signs a pact with Google is basically surrendering its users’ privacy without their consent. Some institutions have, however, given students a choice of providers (meaning they can use a solution other than Google) and that is certainly appropriate. However, it appears there is no accessible alternative at New York and Northwestern Universities.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that its Blogger “service” would drop support for File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, publishing. Blogger’s FTP publishing option has long been used by people who want to publish a blog as part of their own, non-Google hosted website, but use a hosted service to maintain the blog from the backend. Google has decided to end support for that option:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

It turns out that that point five percent are a vocal, savvy bunch… and they’re mad. Originally, Google was going to shut down FTP publishing on March 26th, but it has backed off and given users an extra month to make the “all or nothing” choice: Either migrate a Blogger blog to Google’s servers, or leave Blogger. Not surprisingly, many people are choosing to leave.

Writes one user:

Cut sleazy “migration” buzzword.

We don’t want to move our content to your servers, since you like to shut down services the moment you decide it’s ‘outdated’ or hurts your bottom line.

I’m done with Blogger forever unless you keep FTP for people who like me who have been using it for years.

Another says:

Putting in my two cents again about the disappointment that Blogger is shutting down the FTP updating. I had spent a lot of time and effort getting my sites working with Blogger, and for me, it was the ideal situation because I could update all of them from one location online.

Since the initial announcement, I tried both Thingamablog and b2evolution. TAMB is based on your computer, b2evo is installed on your server. I wanted to throw both of those out there for the any that are migrating away from Blogger because of this changeover. I tried both of them, and with some configuring, I was able to import all of my posts, with correct dates.

And another:

Unfortunately, I have to take my blog elsewhere – thank you for the free service over the past 6 years. One of the things that would help with my migration is knowing the algorithm you use to generate the URL of a blog post please.

Still another:

FTP is time tested software.

Hard to believe the mighty Google is afraid of FILE TRANFER PROTOCOL.

Still not too late to come to your senses. Not only will I de-Google my Blog but I’ll de-Google everthing — except Gmail I suppose, since that would be too onerous even for me.

And I’ll urge others to do the same.

Because if you screw us once, you’re bound to screw us again and anytime you feel like it.

Michael observes:

So you’re solving problems I might have on my end (i.e. my ISP & FTP) by just eliminating what could cause the problem despite the problem not being on your end. Yeah, thanks.

I’ve moved to WordPress.

Finally, foobarmus points out:

The tragedy of this imminent move is that many blogs currently accessible to readers in China no longer will be.

The great firewall does IP based blocking as well as many other kinds, has been blocking blogspot for years, but they can’t block all the ftp bloggers in one fell swoop, because it simply isn’t technically feasible.

Those blogs are now going to end up on google servers, which means it will be much simpler to block them all – and this will happen in due course, as certainly as our sun will turn into a black dwarf. This means that less information unprocessed by the central government will be available to your average Chinese person, which is basically a bad thing for humanity.

Please rethink this strategy, for the sake of Chinese people who are trying to live informed lives.

All of these comments come from the blog Google set up to focus on the “migration” or “transition”.

FTP publishing users have until May 1st to find a new platform. We recommend WordPress. Other possibilities are Serendipity and Movable Type.