Your humble blogwatcher's 2009 roundup (part 2)

It's time for the second part of my roundup of 2009's most popular stories. This time, July to December. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers yell, "HUMBUG!"

By Richi Jennings. December 28, 2009.

You'll find January-June here.

Your humble blogwatcher has selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention keeping an idiot occupied...
 
 
In July, our patience was rewarded as Mozilla finally released Firefox 3.5. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols knows what he's talking about:

Sorry Opera; too bad about what happened to you, Netscape; and Internet Explorer, please, don't make me laugh. The best Web browser on the planet is Firefox 3.5... for now.
...
The new Firefox is fast, filled with new features, and solid as a rock ... [on] Windows or Linux, Firefox, and its extensions worked like a charm. Unfortunately, while Firefox is back to being a fast browser, it's not the fastest browser. First place continues to go to Google's Chrome ... [which] still leaves Firefox eating its dust ... when it comes to rendering JavaScript heavy pages.

In August, we discovered some iPhone applications are phoning home with some scarily detailed information about you and your usage patterns. Over to the anonymous gnomes on the Dev Team:

Although we have yet to find an application by Apple that tracks your location, there are certainly a number of “free” applications in the official AppStore that are designed to do just that. Case in point: there’s this rather cute/gimicky app that lets you determine the tip for your waiter or waitress by tilting your phone as you pass it around the restaurant table. But ... it uses a library by Pinch Media that is specifically designed to track your geographical location through time, then upload that data to Pinch Media. (Oh and it also shows you an ad, as an extra bonus).
 
Being an approved app, it must first ask you for permission to use your location. If you tap “Don’t Allow”, it will ask you again in about a minute, the next time its ad changes. So you either stop using this app (because it pesters you so much about the location question), or you finally submit and tap “OK”. From that point on, your location and path info (your actual physical path through your area each time you launch the app) belongs to Pinch Media, Inc. We think that’s a Pinch too much.

September's egg-on-face award went to Google, which suffered a big Gmail outage during its Gone Google campaign. Google's Ben Treynor offered a detailed mea culpa:

I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
...
We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. ... We have concluded that request routers don't have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there's a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn't affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). ... Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity.

Come October, Verizon was touting its "iPhone killer", the Motorola Droid. Chris Smith was bewitched:

Believe it or not the Droid has impressed us a lot and we’re not the only one to praise it. Everyone is talking about the phone and many people are really envious to see that only Verizon Wireless customers are going to get it. But what lies behind Motorola’s new found success?
...
There’s only one answer for that. The company has hired Sanjay Jha as co-chief executive in 2008 and he managed to pull off a miracle. ... The engineering team behind the Droid did a remarkable job at assembling a phone capable of fighting the iPhone. ... It looks like all you need is vision and guts to pull a stunt like this.

In November, we looked at Facebook games such as Farmville, which stood accused of employing "unethical" monetization strategies. Michael Arrington was as mad as hell, and he wasn't not going to take this anymore:

The real story ... is the completely unethical way that ... games like Farmville and Mobsters ... are going about achieving that success. ... A wide variety of “offers” are available where [Users] can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers.
...
I asked Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla to explain the ethics of her business. ... Shukla went on a tirade, calling my points “****, double****, and bull****” (yes, really), but never really addressed the points.

Which brings us to this month and the latest in a running story, as Joel Tenenbaum's court-awarded payment to the RIAA was signed off. Mike Masnick said it was a "shame":

It's no secret that almost all of the observers of Charles Nesson's defense of Joel Tenenbaum -- no matter where you stood on issues related to file sharing and copyright -- felt that Nesson's plan was a complete and total disaster, doing himself, his client, and all copyright reformers a huge disservice. It was a complete disaster that made it that much harder for those with reasonable arguments to be heard. And, to date, he's done nothing but continue to suggest that he has no clue how badly he screwed up.
...
Once again, we're left wondering what Nesson was possibly thinking, and what would have happened if a competent litigator was actually in charge of his case.

 
And finally...

• Number Puzzle
  [hat tip: b3ta]

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter, or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.

Don't miss out on IT Blogwatch:

• Subscribe to the Computerworld Blogs and IT Blogwatch newsletters
• Catch up with posts from the previous few days