Gmail hit by message delivery delays, close to 50 percent of users affected

A bug bit Gmail Monday and almost half of the webmail service’s users are experiencing email delivery delays and problems downloading attachments.

Google first acknowledged the problem shortly before 7:30 a.m. PDT and has been wrestling with it ever since, according to information on the Google Apps Status page.

In an update posted at around 2 p.m. PDT, the company disclosed that “less than 50 percent” of users had been impacted, which can safely be assumed to mean that at least 49 percent of users got hit.

Gmail has more than 425 million active users.

The Google Docs word-processing application and Presentation slide-creation application have also been experiencing a disruption during the same timeframe, but the company hasn’t disclosed the nature of that problem and the scope of users impacted.

In the latest update, posted at 1 p.m. PDT, Google said Gmail service had been restored "for most affected users" and that it expects to have the problem solved for everyone affected by 4 p.m. PDT. That's three hours longer than the previous resolution estimate.

"We expect a small and declining number of messages to still be affected for the next 3 hours as the remaining delivery backlog is cleared. We are working on several options to accelerate the process and will provide more information when we have an updated time estimate," the note reads.

The Google Docs word processing application and Presentation slide creation application also had a service disruption that started about 7:30 a.m. PDT and lasted until 1 p.m. PDT. The company hasn't disclosed the nature of the problem that affected those cloud applications nor the scope of affected users.

The duration of the outage and the number of people affected make this incident a very significant one for Google, which is involved in a brutal fight with Microsoft in the market for enterprise cloud email and collaboration apps.

Monday's outage is affecting not only individuals who use Gmail for free but also businesses, schools, and government agencies that use it as part of the fee-based Google Apps suite, as evidenced by multiple Twitter posts and discussion forum threads.

Google Apps competes directly with Microsoft's Office 365, and the two rivals are constantly trumpeting customer wins and sniping at each other's product suites.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter beyond what's been posted on the Apps Status site.

 Updated 9/23/2013 at 2:20 p.m. PDT 

Juan Carlos Perez covers e-commerce, Google, web-application development, and cloud applications for the IDG News Service.
More by Juan Carlos Perez

View the original article here

Survey: Almost 90 percent of Internet users have taken steps to avoid surveillance

A majority of U.S. Internet users polled in a recent survey report taking steps to remove or mask their digital footprints online, according to a report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and Carnegie Mellon University.

While 86 percent of the Internet users polled said they made some attempt hide what they do online, more than half of the Web users also said they have taken steps to avoid observation by organizations, specific people or the government, according to the survey.

The survey’s findings are based on telephone interviews among a sample of 1002 adults, age 18 or older in July, with 792 Internet users among the respondents.

People use a variety of measures to decrease their online visibility, the study showed. The most popular one is clearing cookie and browser history, which 64 percent of Internet users polled said they did. Forty-one percent said they deleted or edited something they had posted in the past and 41 percent said they disabled or turned off their browsers’ use of cookies, Pew said.

Other measures taken to cloak online activity were not using websites that asked to disclose a user’s real name (36 percent of users polled), using a temporary user name or email address (26 percent), posting comments without revealing who you are (25 percent). Twenty-one percent of the Internet users polled said they had asked others to remove something that was posted about them.

Some Internet users also use public computers to browse and give inaccurate information about themselves, while 14 percent said they at times encrypt email and 14 percent said they use services like virtual networks or proxy servers such as Tor anonymity software, which allow them to browse without being tied to a specific IP address, the survey found.

Beyond general measures taken to go online more or less anonymously, the majority of Internet users polled (55 percent) have tried to avoid observation by specific people or groups. “Hackers, criminals and advertisers are at the top of the list of groups people wish to avoid,” Pew said.

But a minority of Web users said they tried to hide their online activities from certain friends, people form their past, family members or partners as well as their employers, coworkers, supervisors, companies, people that might want payment for downloaded files and to a lesser extent the government (5 percent) and law enforcement (4 percent).

However, despite these precautions 21 percent of the online adults polled said they have had an email or social media account hijacked and 11 percent said they have had vital information like Social Security numbers, bank account data, or credit cards stolen.

Discovering that many Internet users have tried to conceal their identity or their communications from others was the biggest surprise to the research team, they said in a news release. Not only hackers, but almost everyone has taken some action to avoid surveillance and despite their knowing that anonymity is virtually impossible, most Internet users think they should be able to avoid surveillance online, they said.

Most U.S. citizens would like to be anonymous and untracked online, at least every once in a while, but many think it is not possible to be completely anonymous online, Pew said. “This reinforces the notion that privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition for internet users. People choose different strategies for different activities, for different content, to mask themselves from different people, at different times in their lives,” the researchers wrote.

One of the most revealing contradictions in the results of the survey is that those who have taken steps to try to avoid observation by others and those who have taken more general steps to be anonymous are more likely than others to have personal information posted online, the researchers said.

Internet users surveyed said they have a photo of themselves online (66 percent), while about half of those polled said their birth date was available online. A minority said that their email address, home address, mobile number or political affiliation was available.

A majority of Web users polled, 66 percent, said they think current privacy laws are not good enough to provide reasonable protections for people’s privacy on their online activities.

“Interestingly, there are not noteworthy differences in answers to this question associated with political or partisan points of view. Tea Party supporters, conservative Republicans, self-described moderates, and liberal Democrats are not statistically significantly different in their answers,” the researchers wrote.

Loek Essers focuses on online privacy, intellectual property, open-source and online payment issues.
More by Loek Essers, IDG News Service

View the original article here

Study: 70 percent of US residents have broadband access

As of this past May, 70 percent of U.S. residents ages 18 and older access the Internet via high-speed broadband, although the rate of broadband adoption has been sluggish, according to survey results released Monday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Just 3 percent of U.S. residents access the Internet via dialup, which is unchanged since August 2011, Pew found.

The Pew Research Center and American Life Project says that 70 percent of U.S. residents 18 years and older access the Internet via broadband.

But while the number of people zipping along the “information superhighway” may be high at 70 percent, the percentage does not constitute a major shift in online behavior. Compared to the 66 percent of adults who said they had home broadband in April 2012, Monday’s results show only “a small but statistically significant rise,” the report said.

Access rates were more or less stagnant in previous years too. In August 2011, 62 percent of adults had high-speed access. In May 2010, it was 66 percent.

The report points to several socioeconomic factors to explain the trend toward home broadband access.

“We’ve consistently found that age, education and household income are among the strongest factors associated with home broadband adoption,” said Kathryn Zickuhr, the report’s lead author, in a statement.

In keeping with previous research findings, groups with the highest rates of home broadband adoption continue to be college graduates, adults under age 50, adults living in households earning at least $50,000, and white people and adults living in urban or suburban areas, the report said.

The gap in broadband adoption rates between younger and older adults is large: 80 percent of adults ages 18-29 have high-speed broadband compared to 43 percent of seniors 65 and older.

The study includes data going as far back as 2000, showing that broadband adoption rates first surpassed dialup rates between 2004 and 2005.

The study also took a look at smartphones, which have helped to provide an alternative form of home Internet access as their popularity has grown in recent years, authors said.

If the devices are included in the definition of broadband, they are also exacerbating the broadband gap between older and younger people, the report said.

Adding smartphone ownership to the mix, the percentage of young adults with broadband increases to 95 percent, while the access rate for seniors rises only moderately to 46 percent.

Smartphones are narrowing the gap, however, between some racial and ethnic groups. While black people and Latinos are less likely to have home broadband than white people, their use of smartphones nearly eliminates that difference, the report said.

Today, 56 percent of U.S. adults own some kind of smartphone, the report said.

The report is based on data from telephone interviews conducted between April and May of this year, among more than 2,200 adults, Pew said.

View the original article here

Dell profit slides 72 percent as privatization battle drags on

Dell reported a 72 percent drop in profit on Thursday, a month before an expected shareholder vote that could shape the future of the company.

Dell is in the midst of a battle between founder and CEO Michael Dell, who wants to take Dell private, and a group of discontented shareholders who say he must pay more money in order to do so.

Michael Dell and his investment partner increased their offer slightly last month, to about $24.7 billion, and on Sept. 12 Dell’s shareholders are due to vote on whether to accept the proposal. The opponents, led by investor Carl Icahn, still want more money, and it’s unclear if the privatization plan will go through.

In the meantime, Dell is fighting to improve its financial performance against the backdrop of a declining PC market, a lackluster economy and uncertainty about its future.

On Thursday it reported revenue for its second quarter, ended Aug. 2, of $14.5 billion, about level with the same quarter last year. Net income declined 72 percent to $204 million.

Sales in its PC business fell 5 percent to $9.1 billion, Dell said. But operating profits from that group declined more steeply, by 71 percent, as Dell cut prices to win business and grow its market share.

“Our efforts to improve growth have improved our share position at the expense of profitability,” CFO Brian Gladden said in a letter to investors.

Results were better in its Enterprise Solutions Group, which sells servers, storage and network gear, where revenue was up 8 percent to $3.3 billion, Dell said. Services revenue was also up slightly, to $2.1 billion.

Using nonstandard accounting methods, which excludes certain costs and charges, Dell reported a profit of $433 million for the quarter, or 25 cents per share. On that basis, profits were in line with analysts’ expectations, according to Thomson Reuters.

Dell’s expenses in the quarter also included $125 million related to the privatization effort, the integration of acquisitions and layoffs, the company said.

Dell released the results a few days ahead of schedule, because of the “heightened interest in the company,” spokesman David Frink said. It opted to forgo the usual conference call with financial analysts, publishing instead a letter from its CFO and other materials.

Michael Dell announced his plan to take Dell private back in February. He’s trying to grow the data center side of Dell’s business, which is more profitable than the PC side, and says he can do it more effectively if Dell is private, away from the scrutiny of Wall Street.

View the original article here