The google and cnet members’s pers

So Viacom didn’t abandon any of their data rights, but they sure went
out of their way to suggest they did. And anyone who watched the will
know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than
a list of the search terms they entered. Does anyone really believe
that a motivated plaintiff couldn’t identify individuals based on a
user selected ID (mine is “TechCrunch”), IP address and a list of all
watched videos?

Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.

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The Web is now the place to go for news and entertainment. Look here
for the latest on blogs, music, video, virtual worlds, social
networking and more.

The application has a settings screen that is accessible by pressing
the grey circled italic “i” in the upper right corner of
the Apps screen. In the settings pane, you can configure Google to
search your contacts, previous searches or websites. You can turn
Google suggestions on or off and even turn on Safe Search. Safe Search
will not pull up any adult topic returns in the search results.
Finally you can clear your search history.

The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.

Once you’ve logged into the MySpace application you are
presented with your own personalized home screen. You have immediate
access to your mood settings, profile, Friends Status and Mood,
Friends Updates, Comments, bulletins, and the ability to search for
other people. The interface feels a bit cramped on the iPhone’s
screen. Along the bottom you’ll find a row of five buttons that
immediately jump to home, mail, requests, friends, and photos.

The My Friends section allows you to see your top friends, all of
them, those that are online, new friends, and friends with birthdays.
You also have complete access to your MySpace email. You can visit
your inbox, compose messages and even see your sent, saved and trashed
emails. The Mail icon at the bottom of the Apps screen notifies you
when you have new messages by displaying a white plus-sign inside of a
red circle.

The popular auction Web site comes to the iPhone and iPod touch. When
the application is launched and you’ve logged in, you can
immediately search for an item or check the status of your various
activities. You can also check the status of something you are
selling, auctions you are watching or winning, auctions you’ve
were outbid on, or items scheduled or unsold.

The Favorites button opens up a screen that will either display your
favorite streaming radio stations or individual songs you’ve
marked as favorites. Songs are added by touching the magnifying glass
next to the album art. You can find the song in iTunes or on AOL
Music. A “Remember This Song” feature allows you to add a
song to your favorites. Finally, there is a Recents button that does
exactly what it says – tracks your recent stations you listened to.

It’s hardly surprising that Yahoo would reject such an offer,
but the company is also running out of time. Its stockholder meeting
takes place on August 1. That is when and thus, seize control of the
company.

1. Yahoo!’s existing business plus its recently signed
commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less
complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal.

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and
uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that
information, CNET News has learned.

Critics dispute that and point out that records show the judge in the
case only ordered YouTube to hand over information asked for by
Viacom. As for the employee records, Google said Saturday that it
isn’t willing to talk about anything else until that matter of user
privacy is resolved.

“Viacom and other plaintiffs never should have demanded private
viewing data in the first place,” a Google spokesman said in an
e-mail. “They should have agreed a week ago to let us anonymize it. We
are willing to discuss the disclosure of viewing activity of all the
relevant parties. But the simple issue of protecting user information
should be resolved now. Our users’ privacy should not be held hostage
to advance the plaintiffs’ additional litigation interests.”

YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from
uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other
copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing
infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.

It’s safe to say that many copyright owners are skeptical of these
claims. For years, rumors have circulated in the technology sector
that some of YouTube employees salted the site, especially in its
early days, by posting clips from popular TV shows in order to bring
attention to the site. No evidence of this has ever surfaced.

Google has been accused of encouraging massive copyright violations by
Viacom and by a group of copyright holders represented by the
Proskauer Rose law firm. The group in Britain and France, and U.S.
television journalist Robert Tur.

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It’s not easy for a company that sees itself as a modern purist to
admit that it is considering moldy-worldy strategies.

It will find it very hard to expect its devotees to watch an ad before
every video. (tmz offers a series of videos daily. You only have to
watch one ad. And the one I just looked at was for Herbal Essences,
which promised to treat my non-existent hair to a luscious fragrance.)

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Chris Matyszczyk brings a fresh and irreverent perspective to the tech
world in his CNET blog, Technically Incorrect.

Demand for public transit is on the rise and the has taken a step to
simplify the effort of getting from Point A to Point B.

If you are already a Business First subscriber please create or sign
into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid print
subscription and have access to the complete article.

The swastika, the symbol of Nazism, still provokes strong feelings of
fear and anger. So it was something of a shock when late last week the
swastika suddenly hit the top of Google’s Hot Trends list, which
tracks the 100 terms U.S. Google users are searching for most
furiously. It hovered there for several hours. Then the swastika
disappeared from the list.

Meanwhile, there was the other, perhaps thornier issue of why the
swastika suddenly disappeared from Google’s Hot Trends list.
Generally, when a term is searched by enough people to shoot it to the
top spot, it takes hours for it to fade from the list. An initial
inquiry to Google on what might have happened to the swastika was met
with a cagey reply. Instead of saying why it vanished, Google
suggested its own theory of why it had appeared.

An e-mailed statement suggested that the searches had come from “a
popular Internet bulletin board,” many of whose members were trying to
“find out more about this symbol.”

It’s a plausible answer — and if it’s true, it means the
motivations involved were more rascal than racial.

joc1985 writes “An after a few hours of playing around. It seems to be
a bad copy of Second Life. Somehow all the rooms are crowded, and porn
has made its way in there already”

That’d be cool. GoogleMUSH! @desc me=A grue. He is likely to eat
you.;@adesc me=@emit The Grue pours water on your lantern.

Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.

Maybe I’m missing something, but that sounds like an extremely tight
implementation. It sounds to me like “draw the line distinctly and
allow everything up to that line”. You said it yourself: “almost naked
girl” with no actual sex scenes. It looks like they’re allowing
everything up to, but not over, the line.

1) Depict married couples in racey and stimulating scenes.2) Provide a
system that ensures that the actors are not exploited.3) ???4)
Profit!!!

That’s a severe accusation. I tried Second Life. I thought of it as
all the design ‘quality’ and intelligence of myspace, now with 3D
goodness…

Actually, calling it a beta is being generous. There are a lot of
interface quirks and bugs to work out, and the content (as far as
avatars, furniture, clothes, etc.) definitely feels more like a sample
of what will be available. Once they open it up to user created
content, I imagine there will be no shortage of “stuff”. FWIW, I
didn’t really have the connection problems the reviewer had. The whole
thing thing gets a little laggy in a crowded room, especially if the
room is full of junk, but I didn’t have any problems getting in. As
far as the sex themed rooms, they seemed pretty tame to me, at least
for now. (Uh, not that I checked them out or anything.) You’re limited
to streaming videos from YouTube, so you can’t show anything that
wouldn’t pass muster there. You can also display static images in a
“picture frame”, but the frames seems to be pretty broken at the
moment. They seem to only display a small portion of the image,
regardless of the resolution. So, at least for the moment, it’s pretty
much impossible to display anything pornographic. I imagine once they
open it up to user created content, though, it will become yet another
haven for furries.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their
respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest ©
1997-2008 , Inc.

Ultimately Google Mobile is more like a first stab at universal
search, because although the contact and web integration is nice, the
only local data it searches at the moment is your Contacts. That
leaves out calendars, notes, music, email, and bookmarks, among many
others. We’d kill to see integration with the rest of the iPhone’s
local data in the future.

The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.

Of course, Google’s brand and business model both count for a lot,
too, nowadays. But the praising people always goes over well when
addressing those very same people.

I mean, how much applause do you think Newsom would have received had
he said its all about patents, servers, lack of competent competitors,
and consumer inertia?

Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.

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According to Google’s official blog, Gmail users will no longer have
to worry about fake messages pretending to be from PayPal or eBay.
Google displays a message to its Gmail users above the email warning
that the message may not be from the sender that it claims. However,
if the message sender claims to be eBay or PayPal, will now
automatically check to see if the message has a DomainKey signature.
If the message doesn’t, the message will just disappear, leaving users
with a clean Inbox and the security of knowing that the ones that did
make it through really are from eBay and PayPal.

It’s about time, though. eBay (which owns PayPal) announced plans for
adopting DKIM in October 2007. Making an announcment and actually
implementing on every single one of its servers is not the same thing,
though, and until there was some assurance that eBay really was using
DKIM, there was no way to accurately and thoroughly figure out what
was fake eBay and what was real. Thanks to this agreement with Google,
other ISPs also scanning DKIM now have a way to get rid of all the
fake eBay and PayPal messages. If only more major companies would do
it from their end. It would be nice to see those Bank of America
messages disappear from my inbox.

Hey nimish — maybe you didn’t read the fine print in google’s
prospectus: your common shares have 1/10th the voting power of those
held by the two founders + the CEO. Google’s “public” offering was a
complete artifice (some might say a fully-disclosed sham), something
barely *ever* reported by the financial press. They can do whatever
they want — there are no pesky shareholders to appease.

As part of a planned UK launch of Street View – a tool which allows
users to navigate using 360-degree street level pictures – the search
engine has deployed a fleet of camera cars to log details.

The spokeswoman added: “The technology isn’t perfect – it will
sometimes miss a face or licence plate, for example if they are
partially covered, or at a difficult angle – but we make it easy
within the product for users to report a face or licence plate for
extra blurring, or to ask for their image to be removed.”

The letter states that unless these fears are addressed, the campaign
group will be forced to lodge a complaint with the UK Information
Commissioner “with a request that Street View deployment be suspended
pending a formal investigation”.

Jul 11, 2008, 8:33 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:30 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:27 am Jul
11, 2008, 8:13 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:04 am Jul 10, 2008, 6:10 am

For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.

This effort has been in since 2001. It’s now available as an open
source project Google hopes others will use and contribute toward.
Protocol Buffers could ultimately replace XML in some cases as a
speedier format for data interchange.

Google’s documentation on Protocol Buffers noted that the new format
has numerous advantages over XML. Among the advantages cited by Google
is the fact that Protocol Buffers could be 3 to 10 times smaller and
20 to 100 times faster than XML for serializing structured data.

“You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can
use special generated source code to easily write and read your
structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a
variety of languages,” Google’s documentation states.

, Google’s program manager for open source, noted Google encodes
almost any sort of structured information that needs to be passed
across the network or stored on disk using this protocol.

Google will release Protocol Buffers under the Apache 2.0 open source
license, and some of the technology involved may well be patented.
That shouldn’t be a concern for potential users, however.

In fact participation in continuing the development of Protocol
Buffers is something Varda hopes will happen now that the technology
is open source.

Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask

“We don’t have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it’s
something we’re moving quickly toward,” said Rishi Chandra, product
manager for Google Apps. Google wants “to get the same level of
reliability for all of Apps,” he said.

Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work
down to the level of of its own. The trend has the potential to
seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.

Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.

“We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than
most organizations with their internal service today,” Chandra said.

) 8 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 11, 2008 1:01 PM PDT If could
computing can be standardized. I believe it will be a great benefit to
Business operating online. Could computing is probably less risky than
managing your own hardware. Especially, if you don’t have resources to
manage large servers and configurations. Google has the talent the
scale like few others do. Reply to this comment by July 11, 2008 1:47
PM PDT It will depend who’s going to own the data and what right the
provider when go out of business be forced to hand over data. Reply to
this comment
by July 11, 2008 3:31 PM PDT What’s the point of having a PERSONAL
computer when you are 100% reliant on a server? Haven’t we gone a full
circle now and arrived right back at the mainframe model that we SO
badly wanted to get away from? Let’s just bring all of the VAX’s out
of retirement and say that the last 15 years were a waste of effort!
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In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?

–S. K., Arlington The cloud is a fancy term for a computer or
server in a data center somewhere other than at your house.
Apple’s new Mobile Me service lets users store files on a server owned
or leased by Apple. Those servers are accessed through any Internet
connected computer. That’s like having a big thumb drive “in the
clouds.”

The term cloud computing started when network architects started
drawing diagrams for their presentations. The architects had symbols
for computers and servers and hard drives and switches, but they
didn’t have a universal symbol that represented “the Internet.”

It became common to talk of pushing data “into the cloud” to represent
using the internet to send files to and from servers and Web sites.

Well, because the U.S. has been buying a lot of stuff from China for
many, many years, China holds a lot of U.S. dollars. If China were to
sell those dollars on the market at some point, well, it wouldn’t be
very good. The U.S. dollar’s value would fall — making imports and
traveling abroad much more expensive.

DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.

Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. is a rising player in the field
of geographic information systems (GIS) and navigation applications.
The Company brings advanced software capabilities to a wide range of
users and devices, previously only accessible to trained professionals
on dedicated devices.

– Innovative, affordable GIS tools easily used in a range of
applications, including businesses, agriculture, surveys, and
government agencies.

Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates

Middle England’s howitzers have turned full force on Google today, as
the finally wanders into the debate about the legal status of Google
Street View.

The paper’s front page is screaming furiously that the arrival of
Street View in the UK could be a privacy-invading nightmare – saying
Google’s cars “WILL PHOTOGRAPH EVERY DOOR IN BRITAIN”.

However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.

Personally, I’m torn. I use the US version of Street View a lot, but
don’t like the idea of a surveillance society. However, given the
number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day, I’m not sure that a
Google car counts as the biggest infringement of my liberties right
now.

I’d trust Google more than most governments, particularly ours and the
US, anyway – which in itself is very worrying. I have big issues with
our surveillance society, but as you say this is a snapshot and not
rolling film like the 300+ CCTV cameras that supposedly capture us
each day. I love using the US one to show people around where I used
to live so although it goes against some of my issues with privacy I
have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this announcement and
can’t wait to use it.

In many respects I’m all for consideration of how our civil liberties
are perhaps being eroded. Yet in this instance I think the value of
the service outweighs anything against it.

‘However, given the number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day,
I’m not sure that a Google car counts as the biggest infringement of
my liberties right now.’ It’s not a zero-sum game, is it? You don’t
just pick the things that seem the most threatening now and *ignore*
the rest, if only because it’s easier to sort out privacy implications
before they become huge problems. Maybe, for example, if a little more
attention had been paid to Google’s hoarding of data – or its
statements on the privacy of IP addresses – recent hoohas could have
been avoided. It’s this sort of attitude that makes me distrust so
many of the campaign groups who claim to be protecting me but who roll
over depending on who the threat comes from – and to value the ones
who don’t take no prisoners even when I think they’re being a little
creepy, intense or insane. By the way, would it really be better if
the feeds from all CCTV cameras were publically available?

Also it isn’t perfectly legal to set a camera up on your house and
film anything. If you camera looks onto anothers property you would be
breaching privacy rules and even filming past your own borders and
into the public space could be challenged.

As for the whole Streetview thing – it’s the same thing as Public
Space CCTV as far as I’m concerned. By being in the Public Space you
expect to be seen. Does it really matter if it’s by the bloke selling
The Big Issue or a bored office worker in Arizona?

I must admit that I find it more scary that people stop me taking
photos outside in public places rather than me stopping Google from
doing the same. We all have cameras on our mobiles and happily snap
away anywhere.

I think it’s a terrible invasion of privacy, which is why I’m going to
render their photo of my house useless by standing naked in the front
window at all times.

If you search for a homeopathic cold cure, for example, on the Google
search engine then you will soon be bombarded by every quack medicine
man in California. Every single time you ‘Google’ something, the fact
is automatically recorded.”

Since the Peck case (http://www.out-law.com/page-3290) Authorities
have become very nervy about what is released and how. I personally
have had several complaints from people about how hard it is to get
their images but none from any about how they have been given out.

@CharlesArthur. Daily Mail have removed it, but it is still available
in a cache form, if you type “invasion almost criminal” into Google,
and click the second, indented link.

Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t have thought that the best way, as
a commercial company, of responding to accusations that you might be
complicit in reduction of civil liberties would be to indulge in a
little bit of libel tourism.

@lb001 @Charles. Bizarley the Mail seems to have left a text version
of the “almost criminal” (almost insane?) words of AN Wilson. So just
to ensure they are not lost for posterity:

You are being watched. Not by the KGB, or by the Inland Revenue, or
even by one of those strange vans parked in your street, which purport
to know whether or not you own a television licence.

You are being watched, rather, by Google, which wants to take a
photograph of every single front door in this country.

Aren’t invasions of personal privacy by commercial companies every bit
as indefensible as similar intrusions into our lives by a Big Brother
state?

However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.

But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because of
the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by cold-
call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.

Google thereby builds up a profile of your range of interests. This
profile is of great marketing value.

Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.

The Conservative MP David Davis has put the taxpayer to very great
expense by forcing a by-election on the issue of personal liberty.

His arguments are based on what he perceives to be the dangers of the
State keeping ever more watchful-tabs upon us. His fears ranged from
the potentially very serious – the holding of suspects without trial
for 42 days – to the comparatively trivial – local councils spying on
what rubbish we put into our wheely bins.

In between there lay the balancing act which we would probably all
wish to play when it comes to surveillance cameras in car parks and
streets: Not so good if it catches us harmlessly parking the car in a
forbidden zone. Perhaps very useful if it alerts us to the identity of
a rapist or an armed robber.

There are probably two sides to the arguments which political
libertarians such as David Davis attempt to raise. I would admit, as
would most people, to a good deal of uncertainty about the issue.

Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.

I am always very suspicious about people who do not like security
cameras etc…. What are they doing that they do not want the rest of
us to know about? These people need investigating.

Don’t worry if you aren’t getting an O2 iPhone – nobody else is
either. Especially if they haven’t sent their passport. (Updated;
again)

Want to upgrade your iPhone? Only via O2’s site, which is wavering in
and out of reality… (updated) (and now they’re “gone”!)

Comment: *
Respectful debate is welcome, but comments that are defamatory,
indecent, abusive, or in violation of any law will be removed.

On Thursday night, the mayor spoke at the official opening of Google’s
San Francisco office (never mind that the office has been ). He was in
fine form in welcoming the company’s employees, who occupy a few
floors in a building on the Embarcadero with stunning views of the
Bay.

In opening an office in the city, Newsom said that Google has saved
some its workers from a long commute down the 101 to the company’s
Mountain View headquarters. Granted, he conceded that San Francisco’s
public transit system faces challenges, ticking off several MUNI lines
that frequently run late or not at all.

Google is already thinking of easing the commutes within the office. A
slide is planned that will whisk workers between floors, in what is
perhaps the ultimate throwback to the Internet bubble years.

So, it’s only natural that Google should eventually open an office
here, the mayor and proclaimed Thursday night in officially welcoming
to his city the company with the “don’t be evil” slogan.

After all, nearly every other mayor in the country boasts a Google
office, Newsom joked. And Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin are the .

“This is a city of doers and dreamers,” overflowing with technology
and new-media companies drawn to a place that celebrates, not just
tolerates, diversity, Newsom said, drawing applause.

Gavin Newsom is a fruitcake and an embarrassment to America, as is San
Francisco. Google should be ashamed of itself to ally itself with a
guy like this.

Alex Pham covers consumer electronics and video games (no, she doesn’t
get to play World of Warcraft all day). She has been a business
reporter for nearly two decades, writing for the Oregonian, the
Washington Post, USA Today and the Boston Globe before joining the
Times in 1999 at the peak of the dot.com bubble. When not chewing on
SEC filings, Alex enjoys mixing up Lego bricks with her son. alex.pham
@ latimes.com

Chris Gaither oversees technology coverage as an assistant business
editor. He joined the Times in 2004 as a reporter covering the big
Internet companies and the changes they wrought on traditional media.
Before that he covered Silicon Valley, general technology news and the
occasional Southern California wildfire for the Boston Globe as its
only West Coast correspondent. He also has written for the New York
Times, the Miami Herald and Wired.com. He is still grappling to
comprehend a world in which his Red Sox have won two recent World
Series. chris.gaither @ latimes.com

Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.

Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less
than 24 hours to respond.

Backed into a corner, Yahoo lashed out in a blunt manner likely to
inject even more bad blood into its already venomous relationship with
Microsoft and Icahn.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment late
Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were unsuccessful.

Since it dropped its bid to buy all of Yahoo, Microsoft had focused
its overtures on Yahoo’s search engine — the second most used
on the Internet behind Google Inc.’s.

Yahoo said the proposal that Microsoft submitted Friday “contains a
number of improvements,” but insisted it still wasn’t good enough.

Yahoo offered no concrete details about what Icahn had proposed to do
with the rest of the business, but indicated part of the plan included
selling the company’s Asian operations. The Sunnyvale-based company
pooh-poohed the notion of entrusting its business to Icahn, noting his
inexperience in the Internet industry.

But Yahoo’s alliance with Google is being closely vetted by antitrust
regulators because the two companies together control more than 80
percent of the U.S. search advertising market. To accommodate the
review, Yahoo and Google have voluntarily agreed to wait until late
September to begin working together.

Google’s Lively team seem to want you to, uh, hang around in some cool
online chat rooms and exchange virtual hugs. To be honest, the whole
thing seems a bit underwhelming. Its launch reminds me a bit of
Google’s social network site, Orkut. This was another project, like
Lively, that was developed by a Google employee in part of the
“20 per cent time” devoted to individual pet projects, and
another one that has not really set the world alight. Orkut is a
perfectly respectable online community, but of course something of an
also-ran in a world now dominated by My Space and Facebook.

The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.

Google Earth comes alive because it’s a living, breathing online
community which uses the power of social networks to layer value onto
a planet simulation. You enter a 3D space but can then easily locate
and activate 2D web information, such as pictures or Wikipedia
entries. It’s this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and
Google, which dominates the world’s text-based information and has
hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to
create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will
be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don’t need
another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when
these worlds start to collide.

While the iPhone’s Safari browser is no doubt a powerful tool, native
applications would be better. Just about every photo-sharing site out
there has a new application for the iPhone, including Flickr and
PhotoBucket. Google’s Picasa? Nowhere to be found.

Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.

It could be that Google is reserving its best for Android, and it
probably should. Given Google and Apple’s love affair with each other,
though, I was expecting more.

Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.

I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long.  Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle?  Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.

is a former sales rep with a cellular provider. With around 10 years
worth of tech industry experience, he knows a thing or two. But
definitely not three.

Learn to address security risks in wireless handheld computing systems
with a solution that provides end-to-end security

- September 9-12, 2008, Moscone West, San Francisco, CA – Wireless
Data… it’s how you use it.

… where retail meets industry – The fourth edition of the No. 1
European Navigation Event will take place in the inspiring environment
of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Separately, Google also released Browser Sync, a product designed for
keeping multiple versions of Firefox synchronised, under an open-
source licence.

The main advantage of Ratproxy is its focus on Web 2.0 applications,
drawing on Google’s experience with such applications, Zalewski said.
For instance, it offers a number of advanced and unique checks,
content-sniffing functions capable of distinguishing between
stylesheets and Javascript code snippets, and the ability to take into
account particular browser-related quirks and content-handling
oddities, according to Zalewski’s documentation for Ratproxy. The
proxy can be used in a chain with third-party security testing
proxies, he said.

Google has come under increasing pressure in recent months to tighten
its security strategy. Last month StopBadware.org, a site sponsored by
Google, found that Google itself was one of the top five networks
hosting malicious web pages, largely due to the popularity among
attackers of Google-owned networks such as Blogger. The other four
top-five networks were based in China.

Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.

South Derbyshire MP Mark Todd said: “Taking photos of people
outside their homes leaves an opportunity for those images to be
misused.

“No doubt they would have to fuzz out the faces but that doesn’t
mean criminals won’t be able to see when there is a fancy BMW in the
driveway. But I don’t see how you could ban it. There isn’t an
international internet law.”

Labour colleague Bob Laxton, MP for Derby North, said: “If there
is a way the Government can control it, they should.”

“I suspect there may be a lot of complaints about this, as there
were about Google Earth.

Story published at magicvalley.com on Saturday, July 12, 2008Last
modified on Saturday, July 12, 2008 12:24 AM MDT

By Cassidy FriedmanStaff writerThe people at Google first felt obliged
to capture images of the boring U.S. cities in their virtual tour of
America.Places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.But Twin
Falls locals say they’ve spotted the Internet company’s distinctive
camera car in their town, a sign the company must be planning to add
this town to the ranks of the big cities.The company can’t actually
say for sure – the cars now traversing the nation operate
independently. But a Google spokeswoman said it’s likely the car -
which shoots 360-degree street-level photographs of all public roads
where it travels – cruised through Twin Falls earlier this
month.Chances are, the car spotted in Twin Falls was first deployed to
a larger metropolitan area like Boise, before it expanded its trip
east through Twin Falls, said spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.”We have
over 60 metropolitan areas,” Filadelfo said. “And within each of those
metropolitan areas we really try to include the surroundings. We think
everywhere can benefit from this. We think everybody, whether they
live in New York or Twin Falls can benefit.”Filadelfo said each car in
Google’s large fleet is armed with a sophisticated camera mounted on
its roof that shoots still photographs at and between
intersections.The photos, to be added to Google Maps at some
unspecified date in coming months, allows an on-screen visual tour.One
reason for the StreetView effort is to allow users the novelty of
taking a virtual drive through most American cities and a dozen or so
national parks. But the program also satisfies practical needs,
Filadelfo said.In one Midwestern state, department of transportation
officials use the program to identify dilapidated roads they need to
pave, Filadelfo said. It saves gas and time, they said. Viewers can
check out a restaurant’s ambience – at least exterior – before they
dine there. They can see a neighborhood before they rent a home on the
block.”We’ve seen a lot of really great uses of it and heard some
great feedback,” the spokeswoman said.It’s unclear how long the photos
will be of use, however. The company is unclear on when it might make
subsequent passes and update the street scenes.Google hit a patch of
rough road when some members of the public caught in StreetView’s
frames complained the photographs posted online invaded their
privacy.Viewers could request their face or private property be
blotted out.When shooting Manhattan in May, Google blurred all the
faces in its imagery, Filadelfo said.By June, despite having the clear
legal upper hand to shoot photographs of what takes place in public,
Google began blurring faces in all its shots. So don’t expect to be
famous for anything but your shirt and shoes, Twin Falls.”We thought
the focus was on business and geography and it just seemed a way to
preserve that,” Filadelfo said.Cassidy Friedman may be reached at
208-735-3241 or .

Copyright © 2006, Lee Publications Inc. Magicvalley.com is an on-
line division of the Times-News, published daily at 132 W. Fairfield
St., Twin Falls, Idaho 83301 by Lee Publications, Inc., a subsidiary
of .

Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links.
We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google’s
Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will
provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which
queries visitors used to reach your site.

We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is
missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We
apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.

I’ve requested additional comment on who decided to remove the symbol
and why. It may bear mentioning that Google Trends team members are
based in Tel Aviv, Israel (see an unrelated post by team members ),
though it’s not clear they did the removing.

Obviously the swastika carries hateful connotations. But if a service
purports to accurately represent people’s searches, who gets to decide
what counts as offensive? The swastika isn’t a derogatory term or
obscene word; it’s a symbol with a history.

On a separate note: Google also clarified that “we were just
speculating” in an earlier statement about the origin of the search.
(That statement said, “In this case, it appears that the html code for
this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led
to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol.”)

It’s truly pathetic that David Sarno believes that the question of
whether or not a swastika is offensive is “debatable”. Despite the
ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t recognize it as
a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been its association
with the murderous racism of the Nazis. When Sarno brightly refers to
the swastika as a symbol with a “multifacted history”, you’d think he
was referring to the peace sign.

The Hindu ( and American Indian, etc.) swastika runs counter-clockwise
- facing the left. The swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the
right. In addition, the swastika has been used as a graphic
representation of positive energy by numerous cultures for centuries.
I’m sure there are now links here, via Google or elsewhere that make
this info redundant, and I don’t mean for my input to be condescending
or insensitive, but since I remember a few things from high school I
leave the research to the bleeding hearts. Swastikas for Dummies,
anyone?

Why not post something educational which links to the “offensive”
image for the dingbats concerned, rather than kowtowing to “politcally
correct” outrage that only serves to reinforce the empowerment of a
symbol that shouldn’t be given such impact any more?

Thank god. Now that that’s out of my system I see I am not alone after
reading others’ opinions on Adina’s comment.

“Despite the ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t
recognize it as a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been
its association with the murderous racism of the Nazis”

If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.

Sounds like this is a lose-lose situation for Google. They shouldn’t
have taken it down. Since they issued a statement anyway, they should
have just explained the many OTHER different (and usually positive)
meanings of the symbol.

BetaNews reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any
reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul
language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Idiot. You really shouldn’t comment on something you obviously don’t
have a clue about….. You seem to have missed this section, or did
you actually bother to read the article? “As previously reported in
BetaNews, in May, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Internet
Clinic (CIPPIC) asked another agency, the Canadian Privacy Commission,
to investigate whether Canadian privacy law is being broken in Bell’s
use of deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to find and limit the
use of P2P applications.” Its NOT the government, but a corporation
that is limiting rights, like what is happening even more so in
America right now…. Canadians have more rights and freedoms than the
average American does now. We have better privacy laws. Canada is a
democracy. The USA isn’t and never has been. Its a Constitution-based
federal republic with a strong democratic tradition.

TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.

Google’s comments, which were filed with the commission on July 3 and
made public by the CRTC over the weekend, were submitted in support of
a complaint made by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers
(CAIP), a group of independent Internet service providers (ISPs) that
lease network access from Bell.

A spokesman for Bell declined to comment, saying the company would be
filing its response with the CRTC tomorrow.

Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.

Net neutrality supporters argue that all Web traffic must be treated
equally and that slowing down any data is both undemocratic and should
be illegal.

Bell and other ISPs that shape Internet traffic argue that if they
didn’t employ such techniques, peer-to-peer file sharers would clog
their networks, leading to slower speeds for all consumers.

Last month, however, the head of the commission said a broad
investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the flow of traffic on
their networks is likely.

“This proceeding offers the commission an opportunity to start to draw
a line against telecom measures that are not technologically and
competitively neutral – protecting consumers, competition and
innovation.”

Some businesses are beginning to leverage social networking sites for
more than just connecting with old friends. They’re being used for
leads, referrals and recruiting.

“It’s becoming more of a front-line resource for us,” Beck said. “Our
(online) network has proven to be very valuable.”

For immediate access to this article, as well as the most recent
edition of Pittsburgh Business Times online, become a print
subscriber.

The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.

769 comments
, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing
Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning
over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the .

That didn’t mean much to one European BitTorrent tracker site who was
ordered by U.S. judges to turn over all access logs where the site
didn’t even keep logs to start with. The judge said in his infinite
wisdom that because the data existed in RAM at some instant that the
logs were required to be created and then turned over.

While I respect the USA law within the USA, I despise when judges
attempt, often with too much success, to enforce it outside of the
USA. And not just data laws. We enforce US sex laws in other countries
to criminalize behavior completely legal there. This Is Wrong!

Because it doesn’t matter where the logs are housed as long as Google
does business in the U.S.. Housing them elsewhere does not make them
immune to a court order.

Also, the company in the foreign country could be prevented from
illicitly disclosing records, by having each log line independently
encrypted.

If they really wanted to, they could still manage this.. encrypt the
logs with your youtube account password, and then then using the
Ajax/Zero Knowlege App ideas that we had an article about the other
day (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/1416238), ensure
that decryption of that data in done at the user end…

To cover themselves legally. The issue of whether YouTube and other
similar sites are responsible for the gazillion copyright violations
that occur there is legally still up in the air. This Viacom lawsuit
should hopefully clear it up but until then Google’s position is that
they are doing everything they can to prevent copyrighted materials
from being posted. Keeping the logs helps them keep up that pretense -
they can cooperate if need be and identify the violators etc. They
have no legal requirement to g

Personally, I like to be able to find a video which I watched
yesterday to send link to a friend.

We just have this compulsion to hang onto everything because we can,
and perhaps with the faint hope that somewhere down the line we’ll be
able to show extreme cleverness to our PHB’s when they ask some inane
question like, “Duh, how many unique IP addresses have accessed our
website since 1991?” and we’ll be able to say, “Give me 10 minute and
I’ll let you know (wag tail).”

Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.

I would also like to know how the judge has completely ignored the
[privacilla.org]? If it’s on the Internet suddenly all privacy concern
automatically goes away, even if you’re engaged as a customer of a
company with a published privacy policy offering you many protections?

Much, *MUCH* worse is that the judge has imposed on Google a legal
ruling that the RIAA must be wetting themselves to obtain. And of
course, these records will go straight to the MPAA, despite the
contraints placed on their use.

Google clearly should have anticipated this. Governments have
requested/required info on individual users before, as has been posted
many times to/. For some countries, Google even moved user data off-
shore, to protect it. Privacy advocates warned of this problem
happening.

oh yes, exactly. Google is zee devil. They are out to kill us all.
Seriously, do people thrive on having enemys? Do they find no
happyness simply in a group being what they are? Protip; “The Man”
isn’t out to get you, and all the companys aren’t working for him. And
shall we stop using every service out there, because somewhere, deep
down in their closet, is something we disagree with? If so, I’m going
to assume you’re posting to/. from your wooden cottage on a privatly
owned island that you fo

My cable IP address doesn’t change often, I had one IP address for
almost 10 years without changing… just when I did a router upgrade
it switched.

If privacy is to have any meaning, then we need a right to protect our
personal information. Well, actually we already have the right, though
it’s a bit scattered around the Bill of Rights. (Speaking for
Americans, and only in theoretical terms as regards the current
administration.)

There is an interesting tie in here to something I’ve promoted all
along: If the last mile was owned by cooperative groups (meaning NOT
ISPs) then they could pool the IP addresses assigned in a random, and
meaningless way. That is to say that if 237 people in a housing
association were sharing DHCP IP addresses through a server system
with enough bandwidth that many ISPs could hook up and serve out email
and other services by user, it would be possible to hide the end user
IP. Then any stats by Google or others would apply to the group, not
an individual. Share that cooperative environment out amongst all the
people of your neighborhood or town where the number is now thousands
or tens of thousands and the problem of privacy becomes less of a
concern.

Only when there is centralized control of Internet usage is there a
privacy issue. Imagine being part of a cooperative with 34 connections
to various ISPs, and all of the 12000 users in the cooperative using
something like TOR. Standard Internet browser usage would be
anonymized completely. The idea that you should be identifiable comes
from the fact that there is a way currently to identify you. If your
packets arrived to the greater Internet backbone from more than one
source and more than one IP, it would be anonymous, and the ‘grid’
would be truly that. If you and 14999 of your friends decide to make a
mesh network using wireless and landline connections at each node, it
would be impossible for anyone to identify your network habits. It
would also be nearly impossible to cause a network-only outage. Power
loss could still be catastrophic. My point is this, if you truly want
anonymity, you have to work hard for it. Most people don’t want to.
Consequences of that are inevitable, unavoidable, costly.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their
respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest ©
1997-2008 , Inc.

That’s fine, but the signs are on the wall that the company is in
retrenchment mode: Last month, with the city, but we suspect timing
was an issue, too — why would a technology company fork over billions
of dollars for a hotel just as the economy slips into recession?

The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a

Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.

If you want to give your kids a little more exposure to cooking and
nutritious food, and you’d enjoy the chance to snoop around Google’s
Headquarters, you might want to head to Mountain View this Saturday
for .

Part of a promotion and fundraising benefit for (food spelled
backwards), an upcoming PBS children’s show that will be devoted to
cooking, nutrition and sustainable food issues, this second-annual
event is expected to attract thousands of families to Google’s
Mountain View campus.

Local cookbook authors and chefs will be there to guide kids through
hands-on cooking activities, and there will be live music from Banana
Slug String Band. Included in the entry price ($20 for adults, $12 for
ages 5-17, little guys free), are food tastings prepared by Google’s
chefs, smart folks that have figured out that working in a high-end
Silicon Valley cafeteria is a better deal than slaving away in a
restaurant.

The event and show premise are intriguing but I wonder how many
“regular” folks will be able to attend for the reasons mom3 mentioned.
————————Charles Siegel (of Charles Chocolates) may be
busy that day! If he’s at this Doof event, he’ll have to race back
over to his Chocolate Bar and factory in Emeryville, for a free open
house. http://www.charleschocolates.com/events.php

Ironic that this comes just days after the NY Times article blasting
Google for their decision to raise the prices of their in house
daycare by 75%! Its a shame that a trailblazing company like Google
chooses to make something as important as a childcare the realm of
only the very wealthy. Apparently Sergey Brin was quoted as saying
he’s tired of people getting so many perks like free food and
otherwise. Since when has childcare fallen on the same level as free
M&Ms;?

PITY Bombay’s poor billionaires. No sooner have they invested in
an executive jet than the taxman comes knocking for his share.

A clever banker pitched the idea but Green didn’t much care for
the plan and instead opted to buy a 25% stake in Ask Jeeves —
Google’s punier rival.

The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began

A bike activist has collected more than 35,000 signatures on an online
petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” feature to .

* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world. *
Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the
challenges of global climate change. * Help Google realize its core
mission of “organizing the world’s information and making
it universally accessible and useful.”

A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is
nobody’s idea of a good time. It’s clear to anyone who is paying
attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green
covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an
environmentally sustainable future.

Andrew Brown, founder and CEO of New Amsterdam Project, a Cambridge
company that hauls cargo via industrial tricycles.

One of the most fascinating ongoing stories in the world of
transportation, I think, is the use of technology to relay real-time
information to users. This runs the gamut from trying to give
motorists immediate information on freeway accidents to using cell
phones to tell someone the bus he’s waiting for has broken down.

Metro, the largest transit provider in Los Angeles County, has for
several years had a trip planner on its website. In fact, it’s the
most popular feature on the website, according to the agency. There’s
also a stripped down version of the planner that works on cell phones.

The web search and advertising giant Google has recently jumped into
the game with a feature called Google Transit. In some areas, if you
do a search for directions on Google maps, you will also get
directions to reach your destination via mass transit.

As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.

Some quibbles: I thought the directions were sometimes less than
clear. For example, I asked the site to provide bus directions from
Magnolia Boulevard and San Fernando Road in downtown Burbank to the
Burbank airport. The directions were to take one bus to the Burbank
Metrolink station and switch to the “Empire Building” bus line, which
was followed by this odd note: “Direction — Arrive at Metrolink
station.”

I asked the Google press office about this also and they replied that
Google Transit is currently available for Blackberry and Java-based
phones (here’s a from Google) and that Google is working to bring it
to more platforms. Note to Google: the 2.0 version of the iPhone comes
out next week and is expected to sell like hotcakes.

Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.

I say bring on Google. Yes Google’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s
essentially free and would let metro save money on bandwidth, upkeep,
and a bunch of other web costs while offering superior service.

Google Maps is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not Google’s
fault that Apple is dumb and only allows limited bits of AJAX to work
on their phones.

To give the OC perspective, I only use Google transit if I plan to
take the bus somewhere; the OCTA trip planner is vastly inferior. I
have also used Google transit with great results when in the bay area
on business.

While I’m mostly appreciative of this transit system from Google
(thank you Google), I too have a couple peeves to point out…

2. While the approximations are usually close to the reality, there
have been many times that arrival time Google provides is incorrect
(result = missed bus). It would be nice if they could show (in
addition to their own?) the official arrival times provided by the
respective public transits

In the early days of Google Maps, my frustration chiefly arose from
the bizarre and sometimes nonsensical driving routes that the system
mapped out – with no option in place to test alternate routes. This
improved greatly with the click-and-drag feature Google Maps now uses,
although the traffic layer is still rather slow on the uptake.

I don’t bother with the map feature at Metro.net; it’s a joke. The
trip planner also suffers from constant crashes, something I don’t
*think* would carry over into Google (in the long term). I think that
Google’s interface promises a lot more user-friendliness, but I’d want
to know its flexibility: to option for Metro-only or bus-only routes,
for example. Click-and-drag for multiple-stop trips? If either Google
or Metro.net can manage that… HOT.

If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but
you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.

Google makes the vast majority of its revenue and profit from
advertisers whose text ads appear next to search results. Advertisers
bid for the words, and their ads appear based on a formula involving
how much they’re willing to pay and the quality of the ads themselves.
As of mid-June, . Advertisers pay only when searchers actually click
on the ads.

) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 8:18 AM PDT Google trends
looks a lot like thatNath Reply to this comment by July 9, 2008 8:18
AM PDT Wow. Targeting? Reply to this comment

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But the rest of the world’s really going to wonder what the big deal
is this time around.

(AT&T, the phone’s service provider, loaned me a pre-activated phone
to test. This meant I wasn’t caught in Friday’s activation nightmare
caused by Apple’s server problems.)

Most people won’t be able to tell whether you’re using version 1.0 or
2.0, although the new one feels more svelte with its rounded, plastic
back.

The browser is a bit faster — it took about 25 seconds to load
with three bars of 3G reception showing here in South Lake Union.
Having GPS brings the device up to par with other high-end phones, but
Apple’s interface is a step above.

But the really cool advances this time around are more subtle, and
they’ll be harder for other phone makers to copy. They’re in the
software used to add applications and synchronize the phone with
Exchange, Microsoft’s dominant corporate e-mail, calendar and contact-
management system.

It’s an absolute breeze to install applications such as news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times, or the restaurant finder from
Seattle’s . You can load them from the phone, but it’s slow —
even with the faster network speeds. Or you could just click to add
them in iTunes, like a song.

Think about what’s going to happen over the next two years: The
economy aside, it’s going to be a golden era for advanced phones and
mobile Internet devices.

A range of amazing handheld computers will appear using new mobile
chips from Intel and new software platforms from Google, Microsoft and
Nokia. For instance, the first “Google phone” built on its Android
platform should be available from T-Mobile USA by the end of the year.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re
looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk,
have at it:

Are we preheating the oven to “three fiddy” and giving
that spoon a lick? Awwwww yeah, baby …

SIC WILSON … talk to the hand, cause the volleyball ain’t listening.
THE FITS GIRLS … somebody’s gotta be the brains of this operation.
SIC WILLIE … not sweating but protecting the technique.

You can use the form below to send a link to this post to a friend,
just fill our their details and click send!

Looks like Google just invented the [wikipedia.org] wire protocol,
which is also platform agnostic and an open standard.

I guess the main difference here is that their “compiler” can generate
the actual language-domain classes off of the descriptor files, which
is a definite advantage over “classic” IDL.

Well, let’s also not forget that the meaning of the expression “an
order of magnitude” depends strongly from the numeric base you’re
using.

Yeah, I mean XML didn’t earn its reputation for being lightning fast
and byte efficient for nothing…

We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too
much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every
news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment — including the
numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures — more than was
intended, but I guess that isn’t surprising.

It looks like Google has taken some of the good elements of CORBA and
IIOP into its own interchange format.While CORBA certainly is bloated
in a lot of ways, the IIOP wire protocol it uses is vastly faster and
more efficient than any XML out there.. and yes it is just as “open”
(publicly documented and Freely available for use in any open source
application) as any XML schema out there. J2EE uses IIOP as well and
its is technically possible to interoperate (although the problem with
CORBA is that different implementations never really interoperated as
they were supposed to). As a side note, I’d rather write IDL code than
an XML schema any day of the week too, but that’s another rant.

I’m actually a game developer, not a web developer, so I’ll speak to
XML’s use as a file format in general. Here’s a few points regarding
our use of XML:

* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.

I’ll make a concession that I’ve heard of some pretty awful uses of
XML. But those who dismiss XML as a valuable tool in the toolchest are
equally as foolish as those who believe it’s the end-all and be-all of
programming (I’m not saying that’s true of you, just pointing out
foolishness on both sides). Like any tool, it’s most valuable when
used in it’s optimal role, not when shoehorned into projects as a
solution to everything.

The point of this isn’t so much that it’s faster than XML (so is
everything else), it’s that google took everything that a real person
needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious
case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody
uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that
(have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a
DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)? I’d use
it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this,
and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design
anyway. That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self
documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a
lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary
complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain
instead of simpler.

4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.

None of the above even remotely applies to anything practical except
UI/display formats — this is why XHTML and ODF (and because of that
at some extent XSL) are usable, SOAP is a load of crap, and for the
rest of purposes XML is used as a glorified CSL with angle brackets.
XML is widespread because monumentally stupid standard is still better
than no standard.

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”

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Leading the open source charge at Google is Chris DiBona, open source
program manager. DiBona was well known in the open source community as
a former editor at the popular Slashdot Web site, as well as the co-
editor of the landmark 1999 book called Open Sources, which discusses
the open source revolution and included essays from Linus Torvalds,
Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bob Young and other notables.

We had 49 different countries represented in the student body that we
had and some of the tax issues were pretty vexing for them. I think
that next year will be a little easier. The fact of the matter is
taxes are complicated. This isn’t a typical scholarship because it’s
based on performances measured by an external body.

What that means is if you put in cancer or a certain kind of cancer
you can find out what genes in the human genome express that disease.
Or you can put in a gene and find out which proteins and genes it’s
connected to.

Q: So there isn’t going to be a Google open source license? It’s just
the GPL and OSI-approved licenses for Google?

Q: Is there any chance that Google would ever use one of the new ,
such as the Community License, that may well be free software-
compatible licenses?

For instance, when we release code we often just want people to be
able to use it and we don’t really care how. We just want them to see
the code and get out of it what we do, and the ASF license lends
itself quite well for that.

I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.

Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask

: Yeah, I think you’re right. Plus, from some of the
descriptions I’m getting it sounds like rockets…

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where
readers can share and discover new web pages.

Thats a good point. With Google you knew where you stood. They might
use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the
government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to
spammers or pass on lists of people who bookmark anti-Islamic sites to
an Al-Qaeda operative. Without google hosting it you need to host your
own or find someone you can trust.

But with your data encrypted, why do you need to trust anyone? For you
it is the state of your browser, passwords etc, but for anyone else it
is random bits.

Might it be part of the reason they’re shutting down and releasing
source?They don’t want a judge to release the data to Corporation X.

I don’t understand people. You could send your sync data to _any_
server, even your own, it will *never* be totally safe. Just *_don’t_*
send data that can potentially harm you if it’s intercepted.
Personally, I sync only my bookmarks, and I don’t give a damn if
anyone ever gets access to them.

I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!

Your comments about manipulation are weirdly paranoid. The original
list that Greg posted was 20+ companies long, and originally didn’t
include us, as he didn’t count Andrew to us. He fixed that, and the
post I sent to you was from his talk at Google. It’s part of his
presentation to call out the company he visits, which is one of the
reasons we invited him out.

I use a bunch of machines all over the place (mostly for
development/personal interest). I use old machines, dial-up, new
machines, servers – having browser sync was a god-send. It was great
to be able to reference everything regardless of architecture and O/S.
I agree that there are concerns about what Google would/could reveal
to legislative bodies, but that’s only because they are so huge that
other factors come into play. Maybe this is their way of extricating
themselves (somewhat) from the liabilities associated with having that
much info about a person’s real interests. That said, I feel that I
was never ‘targeted’ as a result of their handling of my data, nor was
there ever any ‘push’ marketing as a result. I think that’s where you
draw the line between good corporate citizen and spammer. I hope that
someone who has the time can re-incorporate it into FireFox 3.x

Foxmarks is OK for syncing bookmarks, but GBS also synced your
history, open tabs, passwords (if you were brave enough) and cookies.
Having a synced history and cookies was very useful because you could
stay logged in to the same sites across any GBS’d computer.

I’m sure there have been other examples, but this is the first and
possibly only example I can think of of a company *actually
responding* to requests for a discontinued product to be open-sourced.
Let alone actually going ahead and doing it.

And I have to say that it works much better than browsersync ever did,
with the added bonus that I can host my own data.

Google has posted a new feature to its Maps service which allows users
to view the entire route of the Tour de France.

The map will cover all 21 stages of the race, which began on Saturday
in the coastal town of Brest and ends on 27 July in the Champs
Elysées in Paris.

The service generated controversy when it debuted in the US and has
been cause for concern with UK privacy groups.

Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?

You can set a reminder e-mail at the same time that you’re adding an
event to your calendar. Just look for the gray box titled
“options.” Click “add a reminder” to schedule
an e-mail or pop-up reminder from five minutes to one week before the
event. By going through the “settings” link at the top
right of the screen, you can set up your mobile phone to receive
calendar notifications.

Q: I earn my living as a writer, and years of material I would love to
retrieve is on floppy disks down in my basement. The problem is, the
disks are 5.25-inch floppies. The only thing I can do, as far as I
know, is print every page and scan it into my computer. Can you help
me find an easier, quicker, high-tech fix? Everyone I have consulted
about this problem has been stumped, including some world-class geeks.

The issue, as I’m sure you and the geeks you enlisted know, is that
external 5.25-inch floppy drives don’t appear to exist nowadays. As a
quick reminder, we’re talking about the large disks with holes in the
middle that flopped when you shook them.

If the data were stuck on 3.5-inch disks, you could order an external
3.5-inch floppy USB drive for $19.95 from FloppyDisk.com. The store
mentions on its site that it can’t find equivalent drives for
5.25-inch disks.

But while this might (might!) be interesting TV, we get the feeling
it’s going to be more Kabuki than anything else: The only way this
pact is relevant is if Yahoo keeps its existing management, or if it
isn’t eventually sold off/broken up. And while we’d like to see Yahoo
kept alive as a standalone company, and returned to its previous
glory, we’re sadly skeptical that we’re going to see that happen.

Copyright © 2008 Silicon Alley Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our .

Institutional investors are mostly not tuned into the Google ()
Creative Suite. For Google and other SaaS-styled companies, it’s
not about product cycles. New products, particularly strategic ones,
do have a role to play and bear watching closely.

The problem is that many mainstream investors have a hard time sorting
out the important aspects of what’s going on at Google from the
unimportant ones. Offsetting the difficulty in separating the wheat
from the chaff is a blissfully short memory that generally means any
Google weak launches or eventual failures are forgotten quickly.

Google remains an essential portfolio holding as they are perhaps the
best technology architecture for modern computing although they
occasionally put out some stinkers. (Requires Windows XP and Internet
Explorer?!)

In fact, one might speculate as to whether this sort of closed-to-open
strategy could become more formalized and popular. Suppose Google knew
in advance that this was their plan: they could have escrowed a copy
of the source code with some reliable third party, along with a
covenant to release on a certain date unless the covenant was revoked.
Such a plan might ultimately bring us more open source software, by
encouraging innovation with slightly lower risk.

By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?

) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment

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Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.

Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work
down to the level of of its own. The trend has the potential to
seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.

So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.

Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers,
Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is
for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this
week.

Asked whether Google plans its own status dashboard, Chandra wouldn’t
share details but promised better help for users. “We’re trying to
find even more ways to be more transparent about reliability,” he
said.

Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.

Applications include wide-area surveillance systems such as those at
military bases, airports, railroad stations, borders, coastlines,
harbors, and power plants, .

The AVE Video Fusion software seamlessly blends five video streams
onto a 3D model of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington,
D.C., in this screenshot.

The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing Safari’s initial
loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.

Other small things to note are that your blogging tool might not pick
up your byline or give the post a time stamp. Agarwal suggests you use
Google Docs’ inline comment system (hitting CTRL + M), which will add
a timed notation. Also, your readers will need to manually refresh the
page to see any updates since there’s no way to set your individual
post to do that automatically.

“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”

That extra foresight chronicling which stores will soon be going
under, even if their closures have not yet been announced.

Google gives two reasons for its prohibition against manual
intervention. First is its belief that its own individual judgment is
never as good as the collective judgment of the Internet overall,
whose hyperlink structure forms part of the basis for Google ranking.

As a reminder, outages for Google Results should not result in data
loss. Google’s GFS (Google File System) backup method is one of the
most rigorous systems used by any data host. As I , a lost copy of
your data on one server is backed up in a dozen other places, so you
won’t even notice.

Update 2: Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells us the problem
stemmed from the servers that control the view of the document
workspace as well as the home document listing. The data where your
documents were stored suffered no down time.

Interestingly enough, of the three services offered in Google Docs,
only the word processor and presentation tool were truly down. If you
had a link to a spreadsheet you could apparently view and edit it just
fine.

As for any reimbursement or discounts to paying (who were also
affected), we’re waiting to hear back if any such thing will be
offered. Freidenfelds says Google is serious about keeping all of its
services, both free and paid running at all times and that the problem
in question should not happen again. If anything, this blip should
give any business using these Web-only tools some idea of having a
backup solution on hand in case the service goes down again.

But Time Warner investors should not hold their breath if they think
this is an opportunity for the media company to finally rid itself of
the legacy of its disastrous 2001 Internet merger, once hailed as the
deal of the century.

But at current market valuations, Google stands to lose an estimated
$500 million if AOL is taken to market, analysts estimate. The $20
billion valuation of AOL, established at the time by Google’s $1
billion investment, has been cut to as low as half of that in some
projections.

Renewed hopes for an AOL sale or merger sent Time Warner shares rising
as much as 2.6 percent on Monday after Citigroup named the company its
top pick within large cap media and entertainment stocks on the
conviction that AOL would be sold or merged into either Yahoo or
another company.

AOL and companies like News Corp’s MySpace have been driven to conduct
deal talks since Microsoft revealed its pursuit of Yahoo in February,
a takeover attempt that threatened to redraw the Internet landscape by
creating a more viable rival to Google.

If Google takes no action on AOL, it gives Time Warner more time to
seek a partner for the division, which has undergone several
restructurings and now focuses its efforts on being a one-stop shop
for advertisers.

David Pogue looks at the Eye-Fi memory card, which stamps photos with
the location where they were taken.

Central and Eastern Europe has quietly become a hub of innovation for
start-ups and top tech companies alike.