Newsapp Portal

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Developers and product managers from the Gmail team hosted a jam-packed panel at SXSW Interactive yesterday, and talked in a refreshingly honest manner about what they've done and what's coming next—including speed improvements, new features, Buzz, better Contacts, and more.

Here's the quick hits of what else was mentioned during the Gmail team's panel:

    * The team was asked if anything was being done for users struggling with switching between personal Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts for work, and missing out on great features. Braden Kowitz, a user experience designer at Google, said that Google employees feel the same disconnect between their own Gmail and Google.com acounts, and that a "long and complicated process to fix that exact case" was in the works.
    * There are plans to improve the "Contacts experience," and, for at least one panel member, the missing features and ease of use issues "keeps me up at night" and "needs to get better." That same panelist said they couldn't get into details of the fixes, though.
    * Gmail has experimented with placing "fewer, but better ads" inside the web interface, Arielle Reinstein, Gmail product marketing manager, told the crowd. On the whole, Gmail does "a pretty reasonable job of covering (its) costs," Jackson said, despite being one of Google's more expensive services to run, due to the free storage provided and multiple server backups offered.
    * When determining which types of users and Gmail uses to develop features and fixes for, Gmail now tends toward "Five of seven-day users"—those frequent, devoted users who access their Gmail accounts five of seven days of the week.
    * Asked whether Gmail would ever open up an API for developers to code add-ons and plug-ins with more official support and stability, Kowitz suggested it was unlikely. Gmail is based on "hundreds of thousands" of lines of JavaScript, Kowitz said, and it's a code base that "changes so quickly." That said, Jackson said the Gmail team "loves" to see third-party functionality being developed, and the team tries to make developers aware of changes they know will affect those products.
    * Asked why Google Wave wasn't built into Gmail, and if it might one day offer competition for Gmail itself, Jackson said that "We'd much rather cannibalize our own services than have other people do it." Google tries to keep a hand in developing both improvements for its current products and "leap-frog projects." Wave, Jackson said, could be such a leap-frog that "people will be using three, four years down the road."
    * Gmail adoption is growing faster internationally than in the U.S., Reinstein said, and holds the top spot in email usage in India at the moment, and the number three slot in the U.S., behind Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Gmail also changes up its feature list in different countries, so that in Ghana, for example, free SMS through Gmail chat is enabled by default, because text messages are more popular than email in that African nation for text communication.
    * "People complain when we add features, and people complain if we remove features. If we don't do anything to a product, people will complain, after a year or two, that nothing is improving." That was Jackson's smiling response to Gmail's position in adding or taking away Labs or mainstream features. The answer, he said, was developing features that "do the greatest good for the greatest number of users."
    * Gmail team member Jonathan Perlow, capping off the discussion about Gmail's speed with a laugh-getter: "People thought Gmail got faster when we changed the color. That was awesome."

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Sixty percent of virtual servers are less secure than the physical servers they replace, the analyst firm Gartner said in new research Monday.

This state of affairs will remain true until 2012, but security should improve substantially after that point, Gartner said.

Gartner predicted that by 2015, only 30% of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical machines they replaced.

Virtualization itself is not inherently insecure, but "many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the information security team in the initial architecture and planning stages," Gartner said.

Virtualization adoption is growing quickly. Just 18% of enterprise data center workloads that could be virtualized have been converted to virtual servers, but by the end of 2012 more than half of eligible workloads will have been virtualized, Gartner said.

"As more workloads are virtualized, as workloads of different trust levels are combined and as virtualized workloads become more mobile, the security issues associated with virtualization become more critical to address," Gartner said.

Gartner identified six common security risks associated with virtualization deployments. First on the list is that 40% of virtualization projects are undertaken without information security professionals in the initial planning stages, according to survey data from Gartner conferences. "Typically, the operations teams will argue that nothing has really changed -- they already have skills and processes to secure workloads, operating systems and the hardware underneath," Gartner said. "While true, this argument ignores the new layer of software in the form of a hypervisor and virtual machine monitor (VMM) that is introduced when workloads are virtualized."

Secondly, Gartner notes that a threat to the virtualization layer can harm all hosted workloads. The hypervisor, as a new platform, contains new vulnerabilities including ones that have not yet been discovered. "Gartner recommends that organizations treat this layer as the most critical x86 platform in the enterprise data center and keep it as thin as possible, while hardening the configuration to unauthorized changes. Virtualization vendors should be required to support measurement of the hypervisor/VMM layer on boot-up to ensure it has not been compromised. Above all, organizations should not rely on host-based security controls to detect a compromise or protect anything running below it."

Additional risks include the following: Network-based security devices are blind to communications between virtual machines within a single host; workloads of different trust levels are consolidated onto single hosts without sufficient separation; virtualization technologies do not provide adequate control of administrative access to the hypervisor and virtual machine layer; and when physical servers are combined into a single machine, there is risk that system administrators and users could gain access to data they’re not allowed to see.

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The .xxx domain is still being considered, according to reports, with the Global Internet Oversight Agency looking into whether creating the new domain would be a good thing for the web.

Currently, pornographic websites have the same suffix as normal sites – so we are told – but there are calls for porn on the internet to get its own domain, so parents and the like can easier block sites.

The problem with the idea, though, is that it will be voluntary, so sites hosting pornographic content would still be allowed to carry a .com address.

And then there's the fact that adding a .xxx to porn sites would make them easier to find. Not that finding pornographic sites on the internet is too much of a problem at the moment (so we are told).

The porn identity

A 70-day consultation process has been started by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Considering the committee has already said no to the .xxx name three times in the past, it doesn't look to plausible that it will ever happen however.

In rather blunt terms, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstorm said that "there's a lot of complex issues" surrounding the .xxx domain.