The google and cnet members’s viacom

Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with
Google.

We and others cried out in protest, since the data being delivered
included username, IP address and identifiers of all videos viewed on
. And the entity it was being delivered to has a penchant for
litigating over copyright infringement (some of their many lawsuits
are mentioned in the original post). The fear is that if data is
turned over to Viacom, any YouTube user who has watched a copyrighted
video would be subject to a lawsuit.

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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With the debut of the AppStore come a number of native applications
that replicate the functionality of already extant iPhone-optimized
Web sites. The impetus for creation of native applications has, thus
far, been driven by the ability to use location sensitivity, access to
the camera, and other iPhone technologies that are conventionally
inaccessible through MobileSafari.

Google’s native search application for the iPhone and iPod touch
is simply an interface to the popular engine with location awareness
— essentially the only advantage this application holds over the
mobile-optimized Web site. Like other location-aware applications,
Google may ask whether or not you wish to allow use of your current
location.

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.

Tapping the stations button displays stations that AOL recommends,
“What’s New,” AOL and CBS Radio, Genres, and
AOL’s spinner.com. Even on an iPhone using EDGE exclusively,
there was no noticeable interruption

When a call is received while audio is streaming in AOL Radio, the
music fades and your call rings through. If you decline to answer AOL
Radio starts up where it left off with out a hitch. However if you
accept the call and subsequently finish that call you have to re-
launch AOL Radio. It does not automatically restart. This follows the
rules Apple has for apps developed for the iPhone.

I’m not sure which classic rock song best describes the latest
in the Microsoft / Yahoo battle: “The Song Remains the
Same” or “Saturday Night’s All Right (For
Fighting)”? Both apply in their own right as yes, yet again.

The latest proposal sent to Yahoo on Friday had a 24-hour time limit
to accept. It would have had Microsoft take over Yahoo’s search
business while putting a new board of directors, as chosen by Icahn,
in place to run the rest of the company.

The company knows this and perhaps that is why it bluntly states that
it counter-offered Microsoft the option to buy the entire company for
$33-a-share or enter re-negotiations to just buy its search business.
It claims Microsoft rejected both offers.

I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.

Since the judge issued the order, Viacom has been . “Viacom suggested
the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to
accept anonymous information since day one,” said a Viacom spokesman.

According to the sources, Google and Viacom were close to reaching a
deal last week about masking user data when Google backed out.

YouTube maintains that the video-sharing site is an Internet service
provider and is protected by the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision, which
removes liability from ISPs for illegal acts committed by users. But
the DMCA requires that ISPs not have knowledge of the illegal acts or
not be able to prevent them.

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.

) 11 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 12, 2008 12:11 PM PDT I did not
follow with detail this V-G affair but it seems to me that it is
following the SCO-IBM Unix affair in which SCO made a complain that
IBM should prove innocent… just the inverse of common law: you are
innocent up to the moment that you are proved guilty.Am I right? Am I
too far in understanding Viacom/RIAA/etc. lawyers? Reply to this
comment by July 12, 2008 1:54 PM PDT This kind of looks like “Viacom”
is scrabbling, a bit, to continue its, unfocused, IP-lawsuit (and
vicarious responsibility for the actions of others) claims.I also
notice that a totally unproven accusation (that Youtube employees,
allegedly, knowingly allowed, and/or encouraged, copyright-
infringement)… is actually being used to further justify an
apparently, otherwise, clearly dubious- attack.Can you say RED-
HERRING..? But, you know how corporations work… once they start down
a path, no matter how insanely-asinine, they will simply NEVER back-
down (even if… it ends-up tearing them apart, and costing their
stock-holders enormously). Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 2:54
PM PDT I’d like to see the reverse, that is, the uploading habits of
anyone from a Viacom IP, or using a Viacom (or viacom property domain,
such as comedycentral.com). Did anyone on The Daily Show, or any
staffer of those shows, or any other Viacom company, ever upload
something copyrighted to YouTube? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 5:11 PM PDT Relax. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:49 PM
PDT Viacom just wants to destroy the progression and the future of the
internet because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media,
like newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop
the new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You
either roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at
Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll
continue to head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the
NEW! Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just
wants to destroy the progression and the future of the internet
because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like
newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the
new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either
roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s
stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to
head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just wants to
dessstroy the progression and the future of the internet because they
have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old
like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new
generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it
rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately.
That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down,
down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment by
July 12, 2008 7:51 PM PDT Viacom just wants to dessstroy the
progression and the future of the internet because they have LOSSST to
the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old like oldy moldy
Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new generation, Web
2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it rolls right over
you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a
reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down, down, down
if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 7:53 PM PDT Viacom will lose to the future of the
internet if they don’t get with the new.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing

by July 12, 2008 11:30 PM PDT Chad and the team knew about SNL content
being on YouTube. It’s what made YouTube popular, showing copyrighted
clips from comedy shows off TV. The whole YouTube thing was based on
being an archive of video from all sources. Viacom, NBC Universal,
Disney, Sony, Fox and others should sue YouTube/Google for every
infraction. Basically YouTube is the Napster of video and should be
accountable for theft of copyrighted material. Reply to this comment

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But the cinema companies were very clever in encouraging agencies to
create ads for movie theaters that the TV authorities wouldn’t accept.

But with YouTube, Google has the issue of a dedicated following whose
attention-span rivals that of a hamster having a nervous breakdown.

Those sites that incorporated it early have the benefit of advertising
already being part of their culture.

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.)

When you have accumulated, say, fifty thousand, you could get a prize.
Maybe free child care for a year or something?

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.

Also, the Chinese media had just reported on a scandal: The owners of
a commercial complex in the Xi’an province had adorned their building
with a mural of what was described as “a long black train with a Nazi-
inspired swastika” on the locomotive. Xinhua news agency quoted a
bystander: “If it’s creative, the businessmen were neglecting people’s
feelings; if that wasn’t their intention, then they do not understand
that part of history.”

Google, it turned out, was right — probably. There is no way to
verify the chain of events, as 4chan posts are not archived and
generally cycle out of view within minutes. And a moderator for 4chan
said, “I’ve seen nothing to denote 4chan was involved at all.”

The flurry of searches for the swastika code — most of which, it
seems, were by people who did not know what the code represented
— shot the swastika itself to the top of the Trends list.

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Without JavaScript
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Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of
[digitalspace.com] from 1996? What’s next, GoogleMUD?

He has a point on porn: the terms of service forbid it, much to my
dismay, I must say. But then, it is open for anyone older than 13 so I
see no way Google could get around that.

Are you kidding me? Porn the ultimate mark of success. The fact that
Lively has it before it has even taken off properly makes it like an
uber stamp of approval. Yes yes.

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.

I’ve wondered if there could be a market for “Christian porn” that
addresses all the issues they have with it.

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.

I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a “Windows
only” service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn’t
investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting
other platforms in future. That’s a non-starter in my book.

Direct hit to the nail head. I was truly let down with Second Life. I
will even go back here and there to see if things changed but they
never do. Last time I ventured into second life I searched for ‘Beach’
and was treated to a picture of a girl fingering herself. I had hopes
for Second Life for businesses that I work with to have open house and
virtual tours for lodging. I would not think about suggesting it
anymore.

It could be a good thing if it was an antimatter copy of Second Life,
which was then brought into contact with the original Second Life.

Do you have a lawn, and if so, any particular thoughts on where I
should be in relation to it?

iPhone/iPod touch only: Google’s first offering in the iPhone App
Store comes in the form of Google Mobile, an application that
integrates your local contacts and the web for seamless searching
between the two. Developed in part by one of our favorite programmers
Nicholas Jitkoff (), Google Mobile brings many of the things we love
about Quicksilver to the iPhone—namely universal search. From
one search box, you can look up web sites (I’m Feeling Lucky-style),
entries on Wikipedia, call any contact, or access their contact card.
The app also uses your location data for local search, so searching
for pizza will give you a link to search for pizza places in Google
Maps.

The most innovative feature in the Google Mobile interface is the
auto-suggest, which provides autocompletion of queries and suggestions
in a scrollable bar below the search results. Also, you’ll notice that
the screenshot has a small call icon next to the contact. When you
first search a contact this isn’t available, but after you call
someone once through the Google Mobile interface, it sets that number
as the default for the little call icon. If you don’t want the
universal search, you can limit searches to local, images, news,
shopping, or Wikipedia.

you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was

@: not sure if my first msg went thru, jono, are you located in the
US? if not, well, that’s the culprit, didnt see google mobile in the
swiss app store myself, then switched over to the US store, and
presto, there it was

, Jul 11, 2008 07:24 PM
On Thursday evening, Google threw open the doors of its San Francisco
office to members of the media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Though Google’s San Francisco office has been , the dust has cleared
and Google wanted to celebrate.

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?

DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.

SPF, DKIM, and SenderID are not the cure-all for spam, and they aren’t
intended to be. But they are effective in weeding out spam in some
cases. They don’t work in the same way, but towards the same goal.

Indoctrination into the socio-liberal philosophy can be very
expensive. Just look at the high cost in California, and they aren’t
providing any basic education at all.

Campaigners have attacked the move as an invasion of privacy but
Google defended its actions, stating that it employs face-blurring
technology.

Street Map already allows people in the US to navigate using the
innovative tool. In addition, cycling enthusiasts can currently trace
the Tour de France route.

Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.

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.”

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, wrote to Google outlining his
concern that claims of protection are being made that cannot be
upheld.

With petabytes of data floating around, Google developed its own
protocol for data interchange and now it’s open sourcing it.

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.

According to Google’s documentation, protocol buffers were initially
developed at Google to deal with an index server request/response
protocol.

“There is some patent activity around Protocol Buffers, but I’d like
to point out that we use the Apache license, which grants permission
to use any applicable patents,” DiBona told InternetNews.com.

So far, Google has included support for C++, Java, and Python for
protocol buffers, though other languages are welcome.

Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers
but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap
of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move
must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else’s computing
infrastructure, and that can be scary.

Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)

There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.

Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.

“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she 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.

by July 12, 2008 7:05 AM PDT 99.9% available? What’s the use of online
storage when it’s not available? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 8:18 AM PDT Interesting that we don’t hear reporting about the
daily or weekly brief outages at most of the fortune 1000 companies.
The Amazon cloud is running at 99.9993 from the time we started using
it at DigitalChalk in 2006. I’d like to see that beat in a do-it-
yourself data center. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 5:14 PM
PDT Maybe. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:37 PM PDT If you
ask me, the scariest part of the growing trend of cloud computing and
storage is that if a big part of the system shuts down for long time,
it could be catastrophic to more than just individuals, or companies,
or even industries, but entire economies and whole populations. If we
ALL depend on the cloud, which in time I think we will, we will all be
at risk of cyber-terrorism, super-viruses, or just a simple breakdown
(ok, not simple, but old fashioned I guess). Reply to this comment

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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?

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.

For example, if the entire United States (all 300 million of us) made
only 100 shirts this year, and if all of China made 100 shirts, some
of those shirts would be traded between us- we would sell a few to
China, and vice versa. But a trade deficit happens when one country
sells more shirts than another. China, in this example, could sell 85
shirts to America. The U.S. could sell 55 shirts to China. So, in this
trade, China sold more shirts to the United States, 30 more in
fact.Most businessmen and economists believe that most trade deficits
aren’t a bad thing; it’s just part of trade, and at some point trade
between two countries should balance out eventually.

Why does this matter? Well, in order to buy those shirts, you need
money. And if you are buying more shirts than you’re selling shirts,
you’re losing money. If you’re a business, you won’t be in business
much longer.

But, countries aren’t businesses. They are, well, countries, and can
print all the money they want. People who deal with currencies, or
each country’s version of money, look at trade deficits as one way to
find out how much each country’s currency is worth. If you have to
print more money, each dollar you print can possibly lower the value
of the other dollars out there. Like stocks, you can buy and sell
currencies on what’s called the foreign-exchange market (or, if you
want a buzzword for the office, say Forex market).

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.

Trade deficits are usually a good thing, because it shows that the
global economy is working. It’s just when a trade imbalance gets too
high where economists and investors start to become concerned.

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.

The market has become increasingly aware of the advantages of
navigation and Global Positioning System (GPS) tools, especially for
vehicle navigation systems. These tools include both built-in systems
and Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs), which are handheld devices
that users can carry with them and use in their vehicles. Industry
analysts estimate that sales of PNDs will grow from approximately 14
million units in 2006 to approximately 56 million units in 2011. As
the demand for these personal navigation devices continues to grow, so
does the need for better quality images covering more parts of the
world.

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.

Certain statements in this news release may contain ‘forward-looking’
information within the meaning of the Federal securities laws. All
statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release
may include forward-looking statements that may involve risks and
uncertainties.

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 internet giant’s StreetView website will allow anyone in the world
to type in a UK address or postcode and instantly see a 360-degree
picture of the street.

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

But in this case, Cameron has very close links with Google – - and
it’ll be interesting to see if the Mail gets the Tory front bench to
take a stand on this issue, or if it just slides into history as
another one of the paper’s moments of fury.

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.

Please note: In order to post a comment you need to be registered and
signed in for guardian.co.uk blogs.

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.

I’m happy to be corrected and to remember in future to ask for a Data
Protection form when I’m next asking some organisation or business for
their footage of me.

But the reality is that I can point my camera into the public space in
front of my building and record it to my heart’s content. And I don’t
suppose that there’s anything to stop me putting it online or sending
it in to one of those “People do the funniest things..” type shows.

As you say, if you’re in a public place, then by the very nature of
that place, you can be seen, photographed and videoed.

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.

Oh and it really isn’t like Enemy of the State. Most systems are so
underfunded that we cheer when we can get a copy off within the
confines of our own room never mind having the infrastructure to allow
MI5 to hack in.

@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.

@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.

I would have thought this was clear cut defamation of a company – and
they are very likely to sue in a case where they have been accused of
misusing personal data and selling it to spam companies. Or at least
they should!

Slander is when you make a wrongful comment about an individual,
defamation is when you make one about a company or organisation, I
believe. Although that might be wrong!

@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.

This is good news for snoopers, stalkers, peeping Toms and burglars.
But are its advantages to the rest of us really going to outweigh the
obvious disadvantages?

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

If you are used to European habits of shopping, it is a vaguely
threatening experience, and it is nice to get home, and to feel that
shopping in the ‘civilised’ world is all a little different.

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.

And most of us would think that some element of discreet intrusion by
the State was legitimate.

The matter of Google is of a quite different order. This is a computer
company which is spying upon us for the sole purpose of exploiting us,
controlling us and making money out of us.

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)

After a piece here in April suggesting advertising is waning, Thinkbox
is here to tell you it isn’t. But do you agree?

San Francsico Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) with Google co-founder Larry
Page at event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last year

I don’t know. He never seems to miss a chance to celebrate with the
Internet colossus and its founders, with whom he is close friends.

“I have been beating on Larry and Sergey for years” to open an office
in San Francisco. City-dwelling employees who traded city fog for the
sun that beams over Google’s Mountain View headquarters seemed pleased
with their shorter, commutes.

The open house was attended by employees from all facets of Google’s
massive organization, including Google.org and the newbies from the
Doubleclick acquisition. Headlining the event was one of Google’s top
executives and public faces, Marissa Mayer.

“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.

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.

“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”

Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.

Microsoft in May offered to buy Yahoo’s search operations for $1
billion and to spend another $8 billion to acquire a 16 percent stake
in Yahoo’s remaining operations.

Instead of selling its search engine to Microsoft, Yahoo opted to
forge an advertising partnership with rival Google Inc. That
represented a bit of irony because Google’s dominance of the Internet
search advertising market is the primary reason that Microsoft is
pursuing Yahoo.

Yahoo has estimated that it can boost its annual revenue by about $800
million by relying on Google’s superior technology to show some ads
alongside the search results on its Web site.

Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?

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.

For now, Lively is what we’ve got: that’s the science fact. However,
given Google’s extraordinary scale and the immense possibilities
created by its huge web audience, I can’t help thinking more along the
lines of science fiction, imagining where Google could take this
technology and do something really interesting with it.

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.

However, imagine if Google Earth became a portal to other virtual
spaces. If you were in business mode, you could fly in via Google
Earth to check the name of that company whose building you keep
driving past, find its real-world buildings, use them to launch its
webpage, and then enter its Lively virtual space to interact with some
real employees. As a tourist, you could fly into New York, check out
the hotels in the area near where your friends live, and then fly your
avatar into the hotel’s Lively space to talk to someone about getting
a deal on a weekend break.

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.

Thomas Claburn for the iPhone in his post from earlier today. He also
points out that the application points you to other Google products.
But they are browser-based applications, and not on-board native
applications. I was hoping for much more.

This week saw yet another Google product hit the virtual streets. 
This one, Lively, is one of those 20 per cent time projects. You know,
the pet projects that Google encourages their employees to work on. 
So what is it?  It’s basically virtual rooms or locations that
you can create for chatting with friends.  It reminds me a lot of the
days when chat rooms started offering avatars.  Only now, they move
and look a whole lot more like actual people.

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.

With no native application to install, it would likely not be a drain
on your battery.  Having an always available connection like 3G or Wi-
Fi would ensure that you can hop in and out of rooms at your leisure. 
To top it all off, location based chat rooms and hangouts would be
sure to go over well.  Imagine a room full of high school students
talking to each other in front of a landmark.  Or virtual tour guides
to answer questions from visitors and tourists. I could see virtual
movie or television sets where you can meet your favorite stars for
some Q&A.

Andy on :
I suppose Lively does have potential, but definitely needs a lot of
work to be the sort of app I’d like it to be. The biggest
problem with it, currently, is all the sexually oriented rooms that
are popping up all over the place, when this is a service meant for
those as young as 13. Either Google needs to do a better job with
blocking, or removing unsuitable content or they need to separate them
out (i.e. have 13 & older rooms and 18 & older rooms that are in a
separate location). For now I’m staying away until they have
some sort of legitimate solution figured out.

In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!

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

Serves the decision makers responsible for networking, voice data, and
video communications technologies at enterprise and service provider

… 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.

Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.

“We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because
we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security
community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security
challenges associated with contemporary web technologies,” Zalewski
wrote. He added that Ratproxy is intended to complement active
crawlers and manual proxies, as well as other passive proxies.

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.

What was achieved there is recognised to be of fundamental importance
to both winning the war (Churchill visited to say ‘thank you’ to them)
and the development of the computer. Maybe Bill Gates doesn’t want to
support this museum because it underlines where electronic computing
started i.e. here, not the U.S.

It was not so long ago, April 1, 2004, when Google mail first
appeared. In 2005 there were 5.4 mln subscribers and 51 mln in early
2007. Do you know how many Gmail accounts were registered…

Hello, I’m a PC. I’m a Handheld. Author: Eric Everson,
Founder MyMobiSafe.com I have said it before and I am sure I’ll
say it again, mobile devices are simply replacing computers….

Google will no longer forward eBay and PayPal phishing emails to
recipients using its (DKIM) standard. The protocol provides for simple
signing of outgoing email using a key which is valid for the relevant
domain and can be queried by the recipient via the domain and matched
with the incoming email.

A DERBY academic believes criminals will be getting
“fatter”, sitting at home planning burglaries, thanks to a
controversial new website.

Internet giant Google has now deployed a fleet of camera cars in
Britain, where critics are branding the site an invasion of privacy.

A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”

Campaigners fighting plans to build four 335-ft high wind turbines at
Carsington Pasture have criticised claims that they would not affect
local views ,

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 .

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.

“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.”

Who, exactly, are “most folks”? Obviously Adina is being a bit racist
herself to discount the views of over a billion people (Indians), and
others, whose primary association of a swastika is not murderous
racism but something quite the opposite. Why does the negative
association that white western culture has with the Swastika
(presumably what is meant by “most people”) trump the beautiful
symbolic meaning held by southeast Asians?

I am surprised and dismayed that Google removed swastika from Google
Trends. After all, people will continue to search for swastika, trends
or no trends.

If “most” people fail to realise that it is an integral part of
Hinduim, then they are clearly ignorant. Worse, they are not prepared
to learn either.

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.

The Hindu swastika runs counter-clockwise – facing the left. The
swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the right.

Here’s a more likely explanation. If you do a (Baidu is the Chinese
equivalent of Google), you’ll find that there was a swastika-related
story recently in the Chinese press that has gotten widespread
coverage over the past week. apparently there was a big mural-type
advertisement on a wall somewhere in xi’an (ancient capital of China,
geographically speaking it’s roughly in the center). the mural
contained a painting of a long black train with a nazi-inspired
swastika painted on the train’s head. judging from the baidu news
results, this story was literally reproduced in hundreds of online
news outlets. my sense of the article is that it’s meant to inspire
shock (as in, how could they not know this looks like a nazi
swastika?!), but also to provide the general lesson that the swastika
has negative connotations outside of buddhism (for those who don’t
know anything about the nazis? also remember: Buddhism comes from
India too). i’d say this story is what inspired all those google
searches, and not the simple fact that “good luck is on their minds.”

This week, Google jumped into the battle against Bell Canada’s anti-
BitTorrent practices, this time through the country’s equivalent of
the FCC, and on different legal grounds than privacy advocates.

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.

Internet giant says large carriers shouldn’t be slowing certain
traffic and is calling for a halt to the practice

“Protecting end user choice is the central issue in this proceeding,
but also a much larger issue. It goes to the heart of the Internet and
how it acts as an extraordinary platform for innovation and fair
competition.”

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.

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.

“Sooner or later – hopefully later – this is going to evolve into a
major consultation … It seems to be inevitable,” Mr. Finckenstein
said.

Google’s 15-page complaint lauds the Internet as an open platform that
should be accessible to anyone and “facilitates unparalleled social,
political, cultural and economic innovation.”

“The commission should make clear in this proceeding that at least
blocking or degrading applications of consumers’ choice is prohibited
in Canada because it is not technologically and competitively
neutral,” Google says in the filing.

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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.

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bizjournals.

Because they’re independent companies and Google has no legal
authority to force an outside company to do anything.

Google could then request the records, but the data storage company
could refuse to approve the request, and there would be no way for
Google to force the other company to provide the information.

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

Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way. The problem is that we I.T. people
are Data Hoarders. Even if the data isn’t useful today, or at all
useful into the foreseeable future, we still hang on to it. And we
save every detail we can just to prove how clever we are to have been
able to discover it in the first place. (Note: P2P program writers are
the same, and that’s how Media Sentry can tell you so much about
filesharers they discover on the Internet right down to the full
directory paths of files.) Now if storage wasn’t so d@mn cheap we
wouldn’t have this habit, but Moore’s Law applied to disc drives means
we no longer have to store 2-digit years and have Y2K problems. We
have these problems now instead.
This is why the RIAA is able to use IP addresses combined with
timestamps to identify ISP account holders. It doesn’t identify any
actual copyright infringers, but they don’t care as long as they have
somebody to sue. If these logs were deleted after 3 days this whole
RIAA mess would have been a non-starter.

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 personally cannot comprehend how a judge ruled that privacy issues
resulting from this are “speculative”. You are essentially handing
over information on millions of people on what content they watched,
uploaded, commented on, rated, tagged, etc. to a media company,
without need. This information is also the foundation for YouTube’s
business being handed over to a competitor.

As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge
“Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google’s duty to
protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal
ruling.” Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they
are.

just say they were ‘lost’ and that the backups were destroyed or lost
due to shady backup practices. works for the White House.

I can think of many problems. For example, there are tons of videos on
youtube that are never accessed except by the uploader and a few
friends. Pretty easy to identify who the likely uploader is from the
records, and thus identify a user. Or even if you never upload, a lot
can be learned. For example, somebody looking for my records could
first see what youtube videos have me in them. Most people have
probably searched for their own name, and as such this is a clue as to
which user is probably me.

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.

(However, some people would no doubt trade away their privacy for
coupon discounts or whatever–but right now we have no choice. Lots of
companies (and of course including Google) collect lots of our
personal information and treat it like *THEIR* property when it should
belong to *US*.)

But as an economic downturn looms, deteriorating ad spending will
likely cramp Google’s style — if it hasn’t already. While Wall Street
largely anticipates a dandy second-quarter — the — we suspect the
economy has finally caught up with the search monstrosity.

“We’ve been wondering about [spending reductions] since the first
quarter,” says Jeffrey Lindsay, a Bernstein Research analyst. “I don’t
think the new CFO has really taken up his role just yet, but there’s a
growing body of evidence that Google is cutting back on wasting money.
They’re not quite at the point where they’re saving money, but at the
very least, they’re not wasting as much. And that’s probably a very
positive sign.”

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

This is a “big piece of chicken” question…but what are those
children holding? I think I see legs and fur… but beyond that I
can’t identify the mystery meat. I can only assume, at such a food
event, that the “petting zoo” comes with a very realistic ending?

To protect our readers from malicious comments SFGate asks that you
login or register to post a comment.

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, found himself in a
humiliating situation when customs officers impounded two executive
jets belonging to his Reliance Industries, claiming he had failed to
pay an estimated £12m in tax on them.

Back to those pesky taxes, though. Also believed to be on the
taxman’s hit list are brewing and airline boss Vijay Mallya, the
Tata family and property billionaire KP Singh.

We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.

I DON’T wish to spoil Michael Grade’s Sunday, but imagine
how different his job would be if ITV owned Google.

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

Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.

Google Maps already offers a check box for those who wish to avoid
highways, but as Smith points out in his site’s FAQ, the feature
that are unpleasant for cyclists.

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

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.

What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….

Don’t get me wrong, I think Google Transit is great, but for more
detailed itineraries I will use the transit companies trip planner.

Google needs some grown ups who remember when transit systems were not
government funded. They are usually 2-4 generations away from
actualization of producing industrial strength software.

Try communicating with one of them on a personal level they are so
insular it’s incredible. They have receptionists that have graduate
degrees just to swish the public away..

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.

Metro’s bus and rail schedules are “proprietary”? Huh? Last I checked
they are distributed on paper, over the phone, on the web, and created
from start to finish, including the software systems used to maintain
the data, with taxpayer money. That doesn’t seem like something that
can be defined at “proprietary”. Move into the current century Metro,
and hand it over to Google. A transit agency so proud of its poor
product that it is frightened of someone else offering to improve it
for free? Yeah, sure, that’s what we pay them for….one can only
shake their head at yet another brilliantly dumb notion, public
transit information is “proprietary”. Metro gives away real time
traffic data for free – why should Google Transit be any different?
Guess car drivers still outrank bus riders – must be that sales tax
income from the high price of gas clouding their vision.

Yes, it does the job, mostly, but it’s flaky as hell and almost
impossible for a newbie to use. You have to learn all sorts of stupid
tricks, like knowing that for some reason the Universal City subway
stop is called “University City Sta” in the planner. It also does a
shoddy job of telling you how long a commute is gonna take.

BTW, if you are ever dismayed to find that the timetables on OCTA
signs don’t match what you were given on Google maps, don’t worry; the
signs are what’s wrong.

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.

Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.

“Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to
include in your keyword list, you’ll be able to see the approximate
number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on
Google and the search network,” said Trevor Claiborne of Google’s
AdWords group in a Tuesday. (See an image of the tool in action
below.)

The move is probably smart: advertisers love quantitative analysis,
and this gives them more hard data immediately.

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Excerpts from the blog After spending Friday morning playing with an
iPhone 3G, I can see why Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve…

(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.

What appears even better is the process to synchronize the phone with
Exchange. However, I couldn’t complete this task because my employer
hasn’t tweaked its servers to accept iPhones yet, so I was unable to
finish the last step.

My tip of the day: Check with your IT department to be sure it has
authorized iPhones. Otherwise, you may get a message saying that it’s
unable to verify a certificate and the sync won’t work.

A few little quirks: Just because the 3G phone uses a faster network,
don’t expect blinding speed over the wireless network.

You also can’t connect to iTunes over the network — you must be
on a Wi-Fi network to connect to the store.

So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?

As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart
this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before
or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage
in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday,
July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.

The owner of “Obama’s Chocolate Nuts” is feeling
like “the luckiest person on Earth” in the wake of the
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks about Sen. Barack Obama.

Jesse Jackson is no more than a vicious Black thug that fantasizes
about castrating other Black Liberal males.

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!

A number of readers have noted Google’s , with which it is most
comparable. Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast
— at least an order of magnitude faster than XML.”

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Without JavaScript
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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.

“Google protocol Buffers” is cooler than the OMG terminology, but this
kind of thing has been around for 20 years.

“Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast — at least an
order of magnitude faster than XML.” That is just because they aren’t
using enough XML!

The example they give is for a small set of data, and percentages vary
more dramatically as sample sizes decrease.

I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.

Just wait for the XML zealots to come crashing and not believing that
XML is not the fastest, best, solution to all the world’s problems
(including cancer) and of course people at Google are amateurs and
id10ts and WHY DO YOU HATE XML kind of stuff.

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.

2. Verification in situations when it’s impossible to devise a
meaningful reaction to a failure (other than either “everything
failed, turn off the computers and go home” and “assume the data to be
valid anyway because ALL of it will have the same formatting error
because the same program generates it”)

3. Dealing with data that arrives in neatly packaged “documents” and
“requests”, as opposed to being constantly produced and consumed.

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

So here is your example of how superior can be ANY format that is not
based on this stupid idea.

… now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as
protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention
like “@WORK” for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse
the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access
classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the
types. I don’t see that ‘required’ and ‘optional’ keywords help
much… imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But
this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.

Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn’t seem like protocol buffers
really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is
effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs
they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator
is nice, but this is like a day’s work max. Maybe I’m not
understanding google’s problems, but I’ll stick with JSON since it
actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format… and you
can always optimize it if actually needed.

You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.

PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it
comes to adding to the library. Genre’s are so unbelievably grey
defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of
the cover. Google would have done better.

Whitepaper: Virtualization from the Data Center to the Desktop. Meet
evolving demands more effectively as you transform your IT
infrastructure from a cost center to a strategic business asset.

Google has emerged as one of the leading proponents of open source
software development, as a user of open source technologies and as a
developer of open source code. And as a funding source, Google’s open
source commitment is well known.

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.

Q: At the beginning of the Summer of Code there was some chatter in
Google’s public boards about participants having trouble with getting
forms in and other such legal issues. Are some of those issues going
to be addressed next year in a different way if you go ahead with
another Summer of Code?

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.

This sort of thing had been done commercially before but nobody had
ever done it in an open source way. It was one of those projects that
we took and thought, “Well I don’t know if he can possibly succeed in
the time frame to complete the project,” but he did and it is pretty
remarkable.

Q: What was the experience like revising your landmark book Open
Sources some six years after first publication?

It’s been in the works for awhile. We wanted to show how open source
has changed over the last six years and how its ideas have reached
into different realms.

Q: One of the most widely used open source security tools, Nessus,
recently closed its source. There is now apparently a fork under
development. Is that something that Google would help to support?

The OSI-approved slate is really the way to go. We don’t want to cause
any market confusion around creating yet another license. I’ve been
pretty cheered by Sun and Intel pulling back their particular licenses
– and reducing the number of OSI-approved licenses. I think it’s a
pretty good thing.

I haven’t done a deep reading of them. If they’re OSI-approved I would
consider them, but I would have to read them.

We’re really happy with the Apache Software Foundation license and I
don’t think that it gets enough attention.

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

: woarhex etbdml
: My Lonely Planet book said that if you want to stay with a family
instead of the hotel you need to register…

: No info on that. As far as I heard from friends in Bukhara,
everything seems to be more or less ok now….

: The 5th microregion in Bukhara has already been evacuated.
What’s going on, that’s 15 km away from…

Earlier, I about the explosions in ammunition storage in Kagan town
that is located in 12 km from Bukhara city. The explosions were the
result of a fire in the ammunition storage, which originally used to
be an ammunition storage for shells and warheads for Soviet military
operations Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from
Afghanistan in 1989, the ammunition supplies were left in Uzbekistan.

Officials stated 3 people were killed and 21 injured. However,
eyewitnesses [ru] and the city has returned to its normal life again

I will be checking for updates in the Google Earth and whenever they
come, I will put both old and new pictures of Kagan, so that readers
can see the damage and changes caused by explosions.

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

Dan Berlin writes “After announcing that was being discontinued, a lot
of people asked for Google to open source the code so development
could continue. Well, they’ve done just that. The code for browser
sync is now available on “

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

Whereas Browser Sync is in the interest of technology/simplicity, I’d
see the source code of Windows ME being released in the interest of
tragic comedy more than anything…

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

I’m sure there’s better examples, but off the top of my head I know
that a few years ago, there was a petition started to release the
source code to [wikipedia.org], an old (yet brilliant) 3D RTS game
that still stands out amongst the crowd today. After a few months
(possibly a couple of years), Eidos scrambled together the source code
and released it to the community.Since then, the Warzone resurrection
project has come leaps and bounds – fixing bugs, improving what
platforms the game runs at, allowing higher resolutions, improving the
AI, etc.The only slight catch (that I’m aware of) is that the Video
CODEC used in the original game was proprietary, so Eidos couldn’t
release the source to that and the company that owns the CODEC
wouldn’t allow it to be distributed any more.

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

Since most of us can’t head over there to watch it in person, we’re
giving you the next best thing

The map also serves as a promotion to kick off Street View in the
European version of Google Maps.

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?

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.

One caveat: The Web site warns that some data might be unrecoverable,
and that you’re paying for the attempt, not necessarily the results.
ANNE KRISHNAN, (RALEIGH) NEWS & OBSERVER

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.

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.

In any case, it’s good to see this particular project out in the open,
and as a Firefox user I’d love to see someone pick up the ball and run
with it.

If you are a member, Sign in to have your comment attributed to you.
If you are not yet a member, and help the Open Source community by
sharing your thoughts, answering user questions and providing reviews
and alternatives for projects.

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

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

Register to submit a comment Already have an account? Log in now Join
the CNET communityTo continue, we ask that you first complete the free
registration.

Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)

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.

Taking the plunge into the cloud Service level agreements are the kind
of contractual guarantees that appeal to CIOs making cost-benefit
analyses. But there’s a gut-level factor at play here, too.

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.

Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.

“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.

“With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative
console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the
phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it,” Chandra
said.

That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.

With so much fairy dust in the air over Apple’s day-early for a ride
to test out some of these apps. Be forewarned that the firmware has
not yet been Apple-approved for wide release and cannot be vouched
for.

More than 500 applications are already clustered in the App Store,
many of them tiny apps and widgets that have been custom-built to run
natively on the upgraded iPhone firmware. Most of these early entrants
are nearly identical to the iPhone-optimized versions previously
released by publishers to work with the iPhone Classic.

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

I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply
the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).

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

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

Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.

Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.

The service, Google’s online productivity suite, went from having some
features not working, like the log-out button and the document
creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.

“For a short period this morning, our users had difficulty accessing
Google Docs. Some Google Apps users were also affected … We have now
resolved the problem. We know how important Google Docs is to our
users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

has not been updated with any additional notes, or an explanation of
what exactly went wrong, although Google Docs’ help section has some
small notes first acknowledging the problem, along with a note to say
it was fixed.

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.

The technology, , uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender
of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from
which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of
phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.

Last October, that it was protecting Yahoo Mail users with eBay and
PayPal accounts from phishing attempts using the same technology.

It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.

: Google, which has a 5 percent stake in Time Warner’s AOL, now has
the right to force the media conglomerate to bring its Internet
division to the market.

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.

After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.

David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
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David Pogue on the new $100 movie player from Netflix, which sends
movies from your computer screen to your TV…