The google and other inappropriate comments’s life span

July 13, 2008

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But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users,
who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally
identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do
not refute that the ?login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users
create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube? which without
more ?cannot identify specific individuals?.”

Lawmakers, as well as the , should it team up with the industry’s No.
2 player Yahoo in the third-party advertising agreement.

by July 12, 2008 4:49 PM PDT @JCPayne , you also claim that: ?with all
the resources Microsoft has– they are admitting that they aren’t
smart enough to put together an ad network?Yeah? You mean like how
Google tried their own video sharing network, failed at it, and went
and bought Youtube so they could dominate web video sharing ? Earth to
JCPayne, companies regular buy other companies. Google has bought
plenty of companies even in their short life span as a company. As for
Microsoft launching a strong protest against a Google/Yahoo pact, it
sounds very good to me. After all, Google has virtually taken
permanent residence at the DOJ and at the EU Commission, constantly
whining against non-existent ?crimes? that they claim Microsoft
thinking of committing, its only fair that Microsoft strongly hit back
against the very real danger of Google?s rabid monopolistic maneuvers,
while at the same time giving Google, the same thing Google has been
giving Microsoft in the last 5 years at least. Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 8:27 PM PDT Where is the lock in that keeps customers
dependent and keeps out competitors?All this proves is what everyone
already knew: MS can not succeed on a level playing field. Reply to
this comment

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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 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.

Photo access is accomplished via the Camera Photo icon at the bottom
of the Apps screen. You can touch the “Add Photos” button
and add them directly from the iPhone’s camera or from your
iPhones photo library. Basic editing allows you to delete photos from
your MySpace profile.

The app also features a miniature version of My eBay. It shows you
active items and items where the auctions have ended at a glance that
you are watching, items you are buying or selling.

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.

Yahoo also name drops its new search advertising partner (and major
Microsoft rival), Google, quite prominently. Point number one of why
Yahoo rejected this latest deal reads:

Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.

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.

As part of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s
YouTube, two weeks ago to disclose records, such as IP addresses and
usernames. Google was also supposed to turn over records that included
the viewing and uploading histories of YouTube employees, according to
the sources.

YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees
knew what was uploaded to the site–or posted pirated clips themselves
–YouTube could lose its protection under the .

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.

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.

In countries such as the UK, people used to go to the pictures, as
they so quaintly call it, early just to see the adverts.

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

Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.

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

Google, on the other hand, in the search for something a little more
clever, a little more Google, has slipped into cultural quicksand.

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

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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 tale began Thursday when Web users started to notice that one of
Google’s most intensively searched terms that morning was not a term
at all, but a symbol — the swastika. Often, the terms on the
list reflect a burst of interest in some news- or commerce-related
event, and readers can use the list as a kind of cultural heat map
— for example, when the iPhone 3G went on sale on Friday. Yet
somehow the swastika had ascended to the top of the list without a
single swastika-related news story or blog post.

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.”

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.”

But Christophe Maximin, a 20-year-old French Web developer and
frequent 4chan user, said by phone from his home in London that he was
monitoring 4chan and watched the following scenario unfold:

Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of
[digitalspace.com] from 1996? What’s next, GoogleMUD?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Goatse I guess I can understand, Rick Rolls are damn funny but really,
is there a huge endorphin rush that comes from saying ‘first post’
that I am missing? I would think that after the first thousand times
it really would not be fun for even the most childish of people.

Exactly…. Christian and Unbiased can’t really be said in the same
sentence and with a straight face.

I’m pretty sure slashdoter and unbiased can’t be said in the same
sentence with a stright face either. In fact you have to work pretty
hard to find anyone who is unbiased.

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.

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

But don’t look up: The FBI and the Secret Service, in the form of the
, maintain a regional office in the Hills Plaza building on the floor
above Google.

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.

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.

SPF has recently come under fire for not being effective for users who
redirect all mail to Gmail or other ISPs because the server
verification breaks and Google automatically rejects those forwarded
messages. This wouldn’t apply for DKIM, since DKIM is an encrypted
signature in the data of the message, independent of a server lookup.

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.

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

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.

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

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[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.

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

“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 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.

“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.

The potential for Protocol Buffers could well be large. Google is not
currently using Protocol Buffers as a replacement for XML-based Web
services — at least not yet. In response to a question from
InternetNews.com about whether Protocol Buffers could be leveraged to
create some kind of smaller, faster Web services/SOA alternative,
Google developer Varda noted, “That sounds like a possibility, but we
have no firm plans at this time.”

“We would love for there to be PHP support for Protocol Buffers, and
we hope that the open source community will take this up,” Varda said.
“We would be happy to provide whatever assistance we can.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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).

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.

– Highly-effective off road, outdoor GPS navigation tools, working on
a full range of devices including Car PC, PDA, and Personal Navigation
Devices (PND), with options for 3D imaging.

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

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.

‘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?

adambowie1 – sorry to be pedantic but hey it’s Friday afternoon. As a
Public Space CCTV manager I can tell you that any number of Freedom of
Information requests would be rejected as CCTV footage falls outside
of FOI as it is a Data Protection issue. So my advice is ask for a DP
form and save yourself some time.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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:

Now the facility has been brought down to street level, and at the
press of a key on your computer, you will be able to summon up the
image of any street. An arrow on the picture will direct you to your
own door – or indeed to anyone else’s door

We are surely entitled to ask by what right Google is intruding into
our lives to this degree?

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.

But that is an argument about the power of the state to interfere in
the lives of citizens.

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.

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

. Schilit, Yang, and McDonald propose something called activity
monitoring, in which a smart home would watch your movements, helping
with such mundane tasks as reminding you to take medication that you
missed, or feed the cat. That’s a level of making life easy that I
just don’t want Google to be involved in.

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

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.

“I didn’t know there was this much drinking,” Newsom told the crowd of
Googlers, leaving unsaid his own .

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.

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.

Newsom is internationally known for his controversial stand on gay
marriage. “Gayglers” — gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
employees at Google — organize a presence in pride parades around the
world, including San Francisco.

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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

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.

Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an
earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning
over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.

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

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.

Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program
that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars
with teen appeal for socialising. It’s a pretty simple: it’s about
chatting in rooms that can be customised to reflect your taste, and is
nothing like as grandiose as something like Second Life or There. It’s
not a single persistent world, but a bunch of ad hoc virtual spaces
that let people come together and show off their avatar identity
through chatting and flirting.

One thing Google doesn’t do is bet against the web, and as you’d
expect Lively is firmly web-based: it runs in your browser after
you’ve downloaded an applet (if you’re lucky – it keeps crashing
my browsers). The idea of a 3D experience that can be easily built and
accessed via the web, rather than some huge downloadable client is a
solid one. It’s one of the principles behind virtual world heavy-
weight Ralph Koster’s company, Metaplaces. However, Metaplaces has
much grander ambitions, and wants to provide web-based tools that will
scale from simple games to rich virtual worlds: according to its
website, “We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play
everything, from anywhere.”

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.

TypePad rolled out its blogging application for the iPhone. Google’s
Blogger received no such special treatment. There was at least one RSS
product available from the App Store, but Google’s Reader wasn’t one
of them. The list could go on.

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.

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.

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.

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

… 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.

Ratproxy is an audit system written internally and introduced last
week by Michal Zalewski, a respected security researcher hired by
Google almost a year ago to help lock down the company’s own websites.
The tool has been used at Google for unearthing problems such as
cross-site script inclusion threats, insufficient cross-site request
forgery defences, caching issues, cross-site scripting candidates,
potentially unsafe cross-domain code inclusion schemes and
information-leakage scenarios, according to Zalewski.

The proxy works passively by analysing existing, user-initiated
traffic, and is particularly tuned for complex Web 2.0 environments,
Zalewski said in a blog post.

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…

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.

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

“Obviously, it’s not going to make it harder for someone
planning a burglary to have access to this.”

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

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

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.”

But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.

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 .

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.

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.

Update(10:14 p.m.): Google has refused to comment on whether their
position is that a swastika is offensive. They would also not say if
it was an Israel-based employee who made the decision to remove the
entry from Hot Trends, though earlier a spokesperson stated that
delays in getting a comment on the situation were in part due to the
Google Trends team’s being based in Tel Aviv.

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?

Google is evil. They’ve never been a neutral arbiter of anything.
Money is all that matters. Get over it.

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.

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

I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.

Censorship is generally evil. Censoring information about what is
being censored and who the censors are is particularly egregious.
Let’s not let Google keep mum about what precisely happened, because
by censoring the Hot Trends data, Google can mislead the people
concerning what they are thinking. After that, it is a tiny step for
most to be told what to think. Who made Google the world’s Ministry of
Propaganda?

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.

Not Canadian, But its interesting to watch this particular story. So
goes the north, so will follow the rest IMHO… so this seems to be
the thing to watch and learn from.

It’s about time that a more powerful company steps in to help out with
this fight. BT Throttling is just BS and we all know it. DPI is also
something that shouldn’t be implemented. The number of ways an ISP can
manipulate this technology is too overwhelming.

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 — Re Google Raises Fuss Over Bell’s Speed Bumps (Report on
Business, July 9): Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
have been slowing, shaping and restricting Internet traffic for some
time. In addition, the line between traditional television and new
media has been getting blurrier every day. Because of this, the CRTC
is set to revisit its 1999 decision to exempt the Internet from
regulation.

A Canadian Internet policy that ignores the electronic-screen impact
of allowing the Web to be fully “regulated” by conglomerates that
would kill the Canadian Television Fund, shut down the CBC and bump
Canadian services to bring us more Fox News and Turner Movie Classics
would truly be a Quisling fox in the True North chicken coop.

Google Inc. says Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
that slow or restrict certain types of Internet traffic are violating
Canadian law and is calling on federal watchdogs to put a stop to the
process.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.

For immediate access to this article, as well as the most recent
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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 .

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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.

Because the use and manner which the records could be accessed would
be spelled out by some binding agreement.

And for google to “request all the records” from their separate
company formed to hold the records would be an operation requiring
special permission, extensive justification, and full disclosure,
regarding reasons for the request, which the board of the other
company would have to vote on (after researching to guarantee that
Google is not possibly under any kind of duress in making the request,
to release information).

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.

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.

Don’t be evil at Google seems to mean don’t destroy data you never
needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to
keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than
just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.

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?

> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way.

But the problem isn’t Google, it’s us. We keep using Google, though we
knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant
revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.

Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with
a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they
understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated.
But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can
push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail
accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or
pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland
basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in
any industry that has annoyed them over the years.

Why would the **AA sue me? I’ve never uploaded, downloaded, or
sideloaded any of their stuff. They have nothing I want. If they sue
me it will be because they fucked up and confounded me with someone
else.

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

And this is what I can think of in 2 minutes. With more time a lot of
other things can leak.

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.)

So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.

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.

I believe that this *IS* the answer to the problems of network
neutrality. Force the powers that be to accept that they cannot
regulate private networks by building our own outside of their useless
understanding of how things work. When they finally discover that they
cannot regulate, things will change a bit. I’m all for calling it a
patriot network… might be over the top a bit, but we all need to
start creating them.

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

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There probably aren’t many people who have made money betting against
Google; the company repeatedly tops Wall Street expectations and
generally knocks the socks off investors. What’s not to love?

“We expect Google’s second-quarter results to be inline or slightly
better than consensus estimates, driven by: a) continued gains in
U.S.-search market share, b) international growth and c) monetization
improvements,” said Youssef Squali, a financial analyst for Jefferies
& Co.

One of them was a £30m executive Airbus bought as a birthday
gift for his wife on her 44th birthday. (He is said to be planning to
give her a $1 billion 27-storey home on her next birthday complete
with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking — which
goes to show that you can top a £30m jet as a present.)

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.

Mr. Smith asks that the feature take into account bicycle lanes from
the area being mapped. The says that such a feature would:

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.

Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.

If you’re going to bike somewhere, you’d imagine that it
wouldn’t be much more than 40 kms (24.85 miles or a little over
an hour bike ride) away, right? Cause any more than that and
you’ll have a 3+ hour bike ride there and back. So why
wouldn’t you know how to get to a destination on your bike
that’s only an hour bike ride away? Get a life.

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.

First, the news: Google Transit and Metro are still in talks to bring
the popular online service to Los Angeles County. but a feature that
some people say Google does better.

Several large agencies in California have signed up with Google,
including OCTA in Orange County, the largest transit agencies in the
Bay Area including BART and Caltrain and the MTS in San Diego. The
Burbank bus system is also featured on Google Transit.

“We’re continually working with several transit agencies across the
country (and internationally) to bring their schedules to Google
Transit. Our goal is ultimately to provide schedules and stop/station
data for every transit agency; basically, whenever a user searches for
(driving) directions, we want a “Take Public Transit” link to appear
to show the alternative options available. Being able to find an
agency’s stops and schedules via Google Maps helps introduce the
convenience of public transportation to people who did not previously
consider it a viable option. Having a major city like Los Angeles
participate would be a great benefit for both residents and
tourists/visitors. Elsewhere in the region, we currently provide trip-
planning for Burbank Bus and OCTA.”

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 was also underwhelmed by Google Transit on my beloved and highly
intelligent iPhone. There is a simplified version of Google Transit
for phones, but the directions I asked for did not include a map. Yes,
I could have switched over to the phone’s Google map feature, but I
shouldn’t have to go to two different places on the phone, particulary
two places powered by Google.

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.

In addition, Google does not display bus/rail disruptions or other
alerts related to your trip. It does not give users options to plan
trips by Walking Distance or Minimize Trips by Transfer Time, Walking
Distance or Transfers. Furthermore Google doesn’t recognize as many
locations as the transit provider’s tripplanner and may have outdated
data.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.)

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(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.)

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.

Apple is heavy-handed with software developers writing iPhone
applications, but it pays off for consumers who get a consistent
experience downloading, finding and using the applications.

I also spent a long lunch tinkering with Remote, a cool and free
application from Apple that lets you use an iPhone or iPod Touch as a
wireless remote control for iTunes. This is something I’ve been
waiting for, ever since Wi-Fi came to MP3 players.

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

The iPhone software will continue to get better and it may stay ahead
of the competition, but the phone hardware may seem dated soon,
especially the wimpy 2 megapixel camera that can’t take video.

In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun
events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May,
to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

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

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material
from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly
prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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.

“Who would have thought anybody would use ‘Obama’
and ‘nuts’ in an actual news story?” said David
Feingold, a 30-year-old San Diego resident …

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

by at
I tried it and had to disable it because it ruins Google Reader’s best
feature: its speed. It’s painfully slow. It would take something
awfully amazing for me to put up with an add-on that tanks GR
performance.

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

Technically, you are correct – platform-agnostic data transfer has
been possible since Sun’s earliest RPC implementations. However, this
seems to be considerably lighter-weight (although so is Mount Everest)
and because order is specified, it’s going to be much simpler to pluck
specific data out of a data stream. You don’t need to have an order-
agnostic structure and then an ordering layer in each language-
specific library.
There have been all kinds of attempts to produce this sort of stuff.
RPC, DCE, Corba, DCOM, etc, are programmatic interfaces and handle
function calls, synchronization, etc. OPeNDAP is probably the closest
to Google’s architecture in that it is ONLY data. It’s more
sophisticated, as it handles much more complex data types than mere
structures, but it has its own overheads issues. It isn’t designed to
scale to terabyte databases, although it DOES scale extremely well and
is definitely the preferred method of delivering high-volume
structured scientific data – at least when compared to the RPC family
of methods, or indeed the XML family. I wouldn’t use it for the kind
of volume of data Google handles, though, you’d kill the servers.

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

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

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.

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.

In any case, I’m hoping that some independent source conducts some
tests because I think anything we produced would probably have
unintentional biases in it. Of course, I’ll update the numbers in the
docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.

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.

Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn’t work well for them. They
have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it.
And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as
long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no
biggie. Good for them, I don’t begrudge that decision.

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.

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”)

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.

… 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.

They open sourced the compiler (for C++, Java, and Python) that lets
you actually use the data interchange format. If you follow the link
you can download the code and start using it today. The code is open
source.

Seems like you are missing the code they released that allows you to
implement this in a number of languages from the ‘get-go’.

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.

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

Google’s recent Summer of Code (SoC) initiative, which DiBona led,
pumped $2 million into more than 400 different open source project
spread across 41 organizations.

I don’t know if we’ll deal with them in a different way, but I think
we’ll be a lot more clear.

We have it structured very carefully so that we can include people in
other countries and also not invalidate the visas of students here in
the U.S. that took part. I think that next time should we do this it
will be a lot clearer up front that this is kind of complicated.

Q: Were there any real standout projects from Summer of Code that just
made you say “Wow”?

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: 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?

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?

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

It’s good for us when we want to release software because it gives a
good amount of indemnification, which is what companies look for when
they release software. When we use software externally, the demands
that are put on us from a compliance point of view are pretty easy to
track.

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.

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

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.

Here are the photos of Kagan and the ammunition storage in its
suburbs. The database of Google Earth pictures is old, as of last
winter, it seems.

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 “

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.

Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.

Google is built on software, some of which comes from the world of
open soruce, and most of which was written here. To give back, we both
release code from the company (a significant amount >1m lines per
year), fund external code (uncountable, really) and through the summer
of code, create new developers and even more code still (2.1m+ last
year, at least 3m this).

That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.

Open source their abandonware. The world would be a much better place,
and the companies wouldn’t get hurt.

Dang! First Reiserfs, now THIS…. I hope Linus checks criminal
records on patch submitters, or I’m TOTALLY switching to Vista;)

Is Amazon no longer a third party? Granted I trust them as much as I
trust Google (and from an advertising perspective, they probably have
better data about me as they have actual data points for my purchases,
not just my purchase-related searches) but that still seems like a
rather dumb statement.

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

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.

“I am always amazed when I hear about the long, steep climbs through
mountains or the blistering speeds of the cyclists as they pass
through the French countryside,” wrote Google product manager Stephen
Chau.

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

© Incisive Media Ltd. 2008. Incisive Media Limited, Haymarket
House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4RX, is a company registered in
the United Kingdom with company registration number 04038503

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 also can set e-mail notifications through Yahoo Calendar, although
I haven’t been able to get one to stick using Firefox.

When you’re adding an event in Internet Explorer, scroll down to the
reminders tab to send a reminder to your e-mail inbox, mobile phone or
Yahoo Messenger. You can schedule reminders from five minutes to two
weeks before the event.

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.

However, the California outfit does offer a solution that’s probably
your best bet. For $5 per floppy, the company will transfer your data
from your 5.25-inch disk to CD. The turnaround is two business days,
and bulk discounts are available.

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

Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.

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.

with a BSD-style license. The code is extensive – in addition to all
the required bits to hook it up to Firefox, you’ll find dozens of
Javascript files involved. Fortunately, the source is reasonably well-
commented, so it’s at least clear what’s happening where, if not how
to move it forward to the current version of Firefox.

One way or another, releasing this code should ultimately satisfy
those users who have missed the project – either some enterprising
developer will bring things up to scratch for Firefox 3.0, or the best
ideas can be melded into Weave or other projects.

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.

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.

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

A large number of . But the glitch illustrates not just the troubles
with cloud computing, but also the gradual progress in making the
concept palatable.

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

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.

“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.

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

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.

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

Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on
compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like
a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here.
One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work
on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform
likely won’t allow.

Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool,
there are some things to note about the embed option that some might
consider shortcomings.

For one thing it will auto-publish any changes when it auto-saves
(something you can turn off, but having it on takes some effort out of
the equation). This might be troublesome for some users who are simply
jotting down ideas and don’t want them to go live yet. Also, whatever
you write might not get picked up so well in your RSS feed, or for
mobile readers. The post nearly locked up Safari when viewed on an
iPhone.

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

Google Autos or Google Music are the guesses that Hitwise hazarded
Wednesday. “Our thinking was that Google might want to fill natural
gaps in its portfolio of offerings based on the interests of its
users. We looked at which categories are receiving the most traffic
from Google in which Google does not have its own property,” .

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

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.

Google it is now using an e-mail authentication technology to keep
phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal Web pages in
order to steal usernames and passwords.

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.

Google Maps, which recently , notes to “use caution when walking in
unfamiliar areas,” which is Googlespeak for “don’t blame Larry and
Sergey if you get mugged.”

Analysts and investors also say that Google is enjoying the estimated
$70 million to $80 million it receives annually from AOL by providing
search advertising services, and is unlikely to want to risk AOL’s
taking its business to rivals.

AOL emerged as one of the most attractive alternatives for a deal with
either Microsoft or Yahoo after Microsoft walked away from its buyout
offer in May, but potential buyers have been wary of its history of
strategic missteps and of sluggish growth in its advertising business.

Google’s “deal with Yahoo muddies the waters,” said Larry Haverty, a
portfolio manager at the Time Warner investor, Gabelli & Co.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he said of Google exercising its option
on AOL.

But “it’s looking increasingly less likely,” Lindsay said, that Time
Warner will find a taker for AOL. “There’s less incentive to take it
public now, and less likely that AOL will have a deal with either
Yahoo or Microsoft. It’s back to status quo with much lower energy.”

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The google and other inappropriate comments’s life span

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