The google and other inappropriate comments’s personal attacks

July 13, 2008

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other
inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.
Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain “signatures” by
someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will
take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards,
terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this
site. Please review the governing commentaries and discussions. You
are fully responsible for the content that you post.

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

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?.”

Here’s the problem – I don’t know if Viacom will live up to their
promise, or not. The fact that Google is to hand over employee data
tells me they’re not so sure, either. And frankly I shouldn’t have to
care or have to worry about Viacom’s trustworthiness. As a user I
interacted only with Google, and there are implicit and explicit
promised by Google to protect my data. If Google hands my data over to
Viacom, it doesn’t really matter to me if Viacom uses it or not. All I
will remember is that Google gathered and stored information without
my consent, and then handed it over at the first sign of trouble.

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.

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

Log in to submit a comment Don’t have a CNET account yet? Join now,
it’s free and takes just a minute. Log inExisting CNET members log in
here

Comment reply Submit Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity,
or personal attacks is prohibited. Click here to review our .

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.

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

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.

AOL’s Radio App for the iPhone and iPod touch is a native
streaming application that is also location aware. Once you confirm
access to your location it reveals local radio stations that provide
streamed radio programming in your area. In the Houston Bay Area, the
app revealed four stations: 100.3 KILT, CNN 650 Radio News, HOT 95.7
and Sports Radio 610. Other locales like Atlanta, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc. are offered.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 .

CONFIRM YOUR ACCOUNT We have sent an e-mail to your account. If this
is not your e-mail address, click here to resubmit your registration.
Otherwise, please check your e-mail account now: … or log in
manually to your email client and click the link in our email. Once
you have confirmed your registration, please log in.

Even in the last couple of years, I have heard US movie audiences hiss
the very presence of ads, as if by clutching their popcorn and putting
their feet up on the seat in front, they have suddenly become a VIP
audience at the Cannes Film Festival.

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

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

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.)

Send me a copy of this message
Note: Your e-mail address is used only to let the recipient know who
sent the e-mail and in case of transmission error. Neither your
address nor the recipients’s address will be used for any other
purpose.

Hi, I found this user’s comment on CNET and thought you might be
interested in reading it. Send e-mail Cancel

COTA on July 4 put a trip-planning tool developed by on its Web site
that allows users to punch in starting and ending addresses and – with
clicks of a computer mouse – get step-by-step directions for taking
the bus to their destination. The routes are displayed on the popular
Google Maps platform.

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.

Various theories made their way around. A blogger named Dan at a site
called “tdaxp” noticed the strange phenomenon. “The swastika is a
traditional Chinese good-luck character, the Olympics are coming up
and good luck is on the Chinese mind.”

At some point on Thursday, a member of 4chan’s “b” channel posted a
simple two-part instruction. First, Google “卐”. Second, enjoy.

According to Maximin, hundreds or even thousands of 4chan members gave
it a try. “They just wanted to know what it was,” Maximin said. “And
what Googling it would do.”

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

It was slow. It was clunky. The interface was pretty disappointing.
Hell, even the ‘Avatar choosing’ part was badly done. I couldn’t tell
if I was supposed to be designing my own somewhere or just ‘using
someone elses’. It seems to be a half-baked beta indeed.

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

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.

“Second Life is not a game,” Dwight replied authoritatively. “It is a
multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t have points or scores; it
doesn’t have winners or losers.”

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.

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.

Just think: Information sharing between Google and the government can
now be implemented using the shout protocol.

Having set up his answer, Newsom then posed a question: “What makes
Google so much better than its competitors?”

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.

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 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.

Co-founder Brin breathlessly joined Page and Schmidt about half an
hour into the interview. Brin had been riding a bicycle and said he
had a flat. In his remarks, Brin was very emotional about the need for
good teachers and schools in the U.S. He was responding indirectly to
New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein’s earlier presentation
about the state of education in the country. “Another important factor
that nobody talks about is teachers’ salaries,” Brin said. “Teachers
are among the lowest paid professionals. At Google, we’ve been paying
our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they’re among the
lowest paid employees. I think it’s really important to have a living
wage for teachers.”

Are these people running a Public Corporation or a Charity? The MAIN
job of ANY senior executive running a publicly held corporation is
shareholder value. Period. This comment is invariably received with a
series of protests from the liberal corner but this is a core
assumption of capitalism. Sergei and Larry should use their personal
funds, and direct it to social causes. Education is a fantastic cause,
and yes I vehemently agree that Teachers needs better pay,
opportunities for self-improvement (meaning funding to take classes
themselves), and schools need better facilities and funding. This is
an already huge and yet, growing problem in the US and it would be
thrilling if Sergei and Larry took up the cause with their own funds.
Just not with public funds. Take a leaf out of Bill Gates’ book!

This is what Sergey is really saying: $57,000 Reggio Emilia day care
is for OUR children, and NYC public school day care is for YOUR
children. “At Google, we’ve been paying our teachers 25 per cent
more, but even with that, they’re among the lowest paid employees.”
Public school teachers in the bay area make $70-90k. Sergey’s really
paying them 25% more? BULL—-

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

Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success � and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.

Windows Server Catalog: Certified Servers. Search the Windows Server
2008 catalog to find servers you can deploy with confidence.

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

“We do know that we will be using it ourselves in some of our upcoming
projects,” Google developer Kenton Varda said. “This is not a piece of
software that is unimportant to the company.”

“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.

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

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.

Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One
prime example is the site, which shows the response time for a
Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems
happened, what they affected, and what caused them.

“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”

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

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

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

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

Comment reply Submit Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity,
or personal attacks is prohibited. Click here to review our .

If you believe this comment is offensive or violates the , you can
report it below (this will not automatically remove the comment). Once
reported, our staff will be notified and the comment will be reviewed.

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.”

Trade Deficit
Everyone would agree they see more “Made in
Taiwan/China/Japan/etc…”tags than “Made in the USA” tags for the
past several years. Well, that “Made in _____” tag on your clothing
has an economic term sewn into it: trade deficit. A trade deficit
happens when one country buys more goods than it sells to other
countries.

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.

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.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed. 2008 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Just as David Davies standing on a civil liberties platform, so the
Mail continues to support the Tory leader, David Cameron.

So if Google’s doing it in an organised manner, that’s not terrible as
it’s a genuinely useful service. And they’re putting it on the net for
all to see. If I want to see CCTV footage of myself from the dozens of
cameras that catch sight of me daily, I’m going to have to file a
significant number of Freedom of Information requests to see the
footage.

‘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?

I always get the feeling that only pedos and racists read The Mail.
And I am right. Its a nasty little rag which should be used only to
line the floor of a pig sty. Disgusting.

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

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

But seriously – I agree in part as I am as concerned with how our data
is circulated. That said I have far more fear of the private sector
than the public.

@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.

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!

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

How else could terrorists be apprehended in times of peace or war? How
else would it be possible for the Inland revenue to detect tax fraud?

But it surely belongs to the same unwanted area of invasion as do the
confidence tricksters and the identity thieves.”

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

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?

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

The researchers’ proposal includes mining activity data to make
suggestions for activities, from what to watch on television to
finding your favorite songs on your MP3 player and playing them in the
room with the best acoustics. At the point at which Google is
proposing the idea of thinking for people as well as mining their
data, it might be time to worry about more than whether a link to the
company’s privacy policy is on its front page.

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

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 .

Although adding Google is a coup, it hardly makes San Francisco
unique, given Google’s opening of offices across the globe. These
days, every mayor can say that they’re happy to have Google move in,
Newsom acknowledged in jest.

“I love this company,” Newsom eventually effused before calling Google
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who did not attend Thursday’s
festivities, “just wonderful human beings.”

“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.

Joseph Menn covers technology privacy and security issues, Microsoft,
the wireless industry and L.A.-based tech companies (yeah, he’s busy).
He has handled virtually every tech beat – and a few entertainment
ones – since joining the Times in 1999. Originally from New England,
he wrote “All the Rave,” that book about Napster you’ve been meaning
to read. Before he had kids, he surfed more. joseph.menn @ latimes.com

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

“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.”

The breakdown of those takeover negotiations infuriated many Yahoo
shareholders who fear the company’s stock price would plunge back
below $20 — a threshold reached just before Microsoft made its
initial bid in early January. Yahoo shares finished Friday at $23.57.

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

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

Icahn, who has been challenging corporate boards for more than two
decades, owns a roughly 5 percent stake in Yahoo and hopes to make a
profit by pushing the company’s stock price above $30.

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

Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up

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.

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.

To download Lively, you need Windows XP/Vista with either IE or
Firefox.� Yep, another cloud based application.� We wouldn’t
expect anything else from Google, would we?

Right now, Lively isn’t anything new or revolutionary.� Six
months or a year from now, it could be a totally different animal.
Keep your eyes on this one.

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!

- Users from more than 120 countries come to learn new skills, share
information, and discover best practices, tips, and tricks that they
can use instantly. Be part of this extraordinary experience August
4–8, 2008, in San Diego, California.

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

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.

This extremely short post appeared following a meeting with a decision
maker of a potential client. During the conversation I realized that
this highly respected and well paid top manager…

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.

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.

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

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

The web company has responded by saying faces in the pictures will not
be identified and it will follow British laws on privacy.

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.

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

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

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

“Svasti” is a Hindu (Sanskrit) word that translates as “well being.”
The svastika (swastika) was a sacred symbol to Hindus and Buddhists
alike, and one can find temples and homes adorned with it throughout
South Asia. Sadly, when Hitler appropriated the swastika as the symbol
of his National Socialist (Nazi) Party in the early 1930’s, it came to
represent evil and genocide. Thus, modern Western civilization abhors
it. When a Buddhist temple in LA decorated its fences with wrought
iron swastikas, many people became offended, because average Joe
America is simply not ready for a return to the original, peaceful
meaning of svasti (the memories of WWII and Bergen-Belsen are still
too fresh). The monks wisely decided to remove the symbols rather than
attempt to explain the sacred meaning to the clamoring crowds.
Ironically, the local Jewish community, well aware of the many
meanings of the swastika, came to the defense of the temple, declaring
that they had the right to display the swastika in its context as a
symbol of goodness.

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.

The quest for search shows one thing clearly: It is slowly dawning on
people in the west that swastika IS the HOLIEST SYMBOL in Hinduism and
Buddhism.

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.

Moreover, in antiquity, this symbols was not only found in North
American Indian cultures and Sub-Continental and Buddhist, but also in
Persian, Greeco-Roman, Celtic, Baltic, Germanic and Slavic cultures,
in both left and right facings.

I’m re-posting this comment from the other story because everyone
seems to be ignoring it. I still think it’s the most plausible
explanation. It’s also a reminder that the internet is not something
that occurs exclusively in English…

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.”

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.

In a submission this week to the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunication Commission (CRTC), Google urged that it take action
against Bell Canada’s P2P throttling activities on grounds that the
ISP is violating Canada’s telecommunications law.

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

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.

Does someone need to tell google, canada is a socialist state and
their people ARE subjects of the state do not have rights outside of
what the state allows.

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.

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.

globeandmail.com and The Globe and Mail are divisions of CTVglobemedia
Publishing Inc., 444 Front St. W., Toronto, ON� Canada M5V 2S9Phillip
Crawley, Publisher

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

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

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.

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.

John Beck, founder of Gist Design, shows off his LinkedIn page. He
used the site to find a software developer for his firm.

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

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

, ,
� 2008 , Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. The material on
this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or
otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of
bizjournals.

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 .

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Without JavaScript
enabled, you might want to use , you can remember this preference.

and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.

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

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

For example, the records in the “safe” country would be owned by an
independent subsidiary, such that the related company (Google)
wouldn’t have direct executive authority to force the other company to
release the records.

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

Limiting the volume of records that could be requested at any time,
limiting the allowed uses for every record, and requiring them to be
destroyed a short time after loaded.

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

The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.

So they can suggest youtube videos based on what we watched before.
That and I bet they’re gonna figure in to the suggested videos what
we’ve searched for in the past through the regular google search
engine, which btw is A HORRIBLE IDEA. Plus, duck and cover if the
executives don’t get pretty statistics reports with colorful graphs
that show what people watched from different locations determined by
IP. I guess you could somewhat anonymize the stats needed to generate
that but that’s just extra work for

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.

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

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.

It is a mistake to think you can anonymize this data. Sure, you could
strip everything out of the data, but then you would just have public
information, since youtube will tell you how many views each video has
already. So I presume the people who want to “anonymize” think they
will, like the AOL logs, give pseudonyms to people.

Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

This dream nearly happened. You see, another Michael — Green,
the former head of Carlton, which with Granada formed ITV in 2004
— had a chance to buy Google for a mere £400m (it was a
long time ago).

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

The luxury hotel group wants to buy Island off Guernsey that spent
much of the Second World War under German occupation

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

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.

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.

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

Metro has been talking with Google for months and the blog even
reported in April that Google Transit was imminent. Well, not so fast.
“We’re still talking to them,” Marc Littman, a Metro spokesman, told
me yesterday afternoon. “There is no contract.”

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Remote worked, it was fantastic, but it dropped the connection a
few times even though I was within 5 feet of my wireless router and
iTunes host laptop. It was usually pretty responsive, but there were a
few lags when choosing songs, especially if I tried to select a song
with Remote after starting one at the laptop.

Maybe the applications I was using were slammed by all the new users
Friday, but it took longer than expected to connect to the news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times.

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

Think carefully before taking the plunge. Not because of any
shortcomings with the phone. It’s lovely, and continues to define a
well-designed phone/mobile Web device.

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.

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.

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

FITSNews – July 11, 2008 – Ever since the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he
wanted to “,” the nation’s interest in the testicles
of the Democratic presidential nominee has apparently gone through the
roof.

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 …

He’s right … who would have thunk it. Of course,
Obama’s nuts will never be as famous as .

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

Are we the sexiest blog ever? You better believe it, people. Even Amy
Adams (above) says so. And if she didn’t actually say it, you can bet
she’s thinking it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Since they’re Google people will clamor over this (as we’re doing
here) and the result will be at least a handful of folks will learn
and use it. Google’s key to success has always been finding fresh
talent and removing barriers from their contributing and advancement
so what I’ve seen they’ve done is A) help train potential employee’s
on how they’re tech and thought process works, and B) provide
themselves a filter by which to gauge the ability for a potential
employee to understand they’re system.
And as a bonus, they help undermine opponents who use competing
technologies by helping train the workforce away from their practices.
Overall I think it’s very intelligent and well done strategic move.

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.

… 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.

It’s easy to make a binary JSON format that is fast and also small, so
there is little advantage to protocol buffers there. It’s also easy
and ridiculously fast to compress JSON text using say character-based
lzo (Oberhumer).

Perl is to programming languages what English is to natural languages:
easy to fool around with, hard to learn well, but when you do, the
expressive power is incredible. And when you mess it up, nobody
understands what you’re trying to say.

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

Everything Has Changed See how Intel developed the cure for deskside
help visits in this video directed by Christopher Guest of Spinal Tap
fame. Click here. Cross-client�Centrino� and��Core™2 processor
with�vPro™ Processor Technology Technical White Paper A deeper
technical dive on how vPro usage models work�on both desktop and
notebook PCs. Click here. Intel� vPro Technology ROI Estimator Intel�
Core2™ Duo and Centrino� with vPro™ Processor technology
cross-client ROI estimator. Click here. WiPro Intel� Centrino� Pro
with vPro™ Processor Technology The Benefits of Intel� Centrino�
Pro Processor Technology in the Enterprise. Click here. Workstations
Products Platforms Brief Intel’s family of workstation platforms
gives you the tools to move from serial to parallel workflows and
enables you to iterate through alternatives faster and innovate more.
Click here. Itanium Solutions Learn how Itanium�-based solutions are
changing the way enterprises do business. Click here.

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.

The point of the program wasn’t just to create software that everyone
could immediately use and that would change the world, but to create
developers that later on could create software that could develop that
kind of wonderful software. And we think it did that.

For instance we have an article in there from a fellow who is applying
the concepts behind open source into biology. It’s sort of like,
here’s this core open source advance on how it’s been done over the
last six years, and then there are also people who have learned from
open source and what they’re doing, too.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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…

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

There’s no clear reason given as to why it’s being discontinued, but
if it’s due to lack of interest, it was probably lack of advertising;
I wasn’t even slightly aware of this project, and it sounds like
something I would have been very interested in. I use Foxmarks
religiously and have trouble functioning without it.

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

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

“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.

“But 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 you already have a Google account for e-mail, you have a Google
calendar, too. Just click on the link for “calendar” at
the top left of the screen, and a new window or tab will open to the
calendar. If you don’t already have a Google account, go to
calendar.google.com and click the button to create an account.

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.

Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.

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

Google gets Second Life. The no. 1 search engine company has launched
a 3D virtual space, called Google Lively, that aims to give
competition to the popular virtual world hangout Second Life. The free
service which requires no registration and can be accessed through a
user’s Google account enables people to congregate in fantasy rooms
and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. Lively’s users
will be able to create an avatar for themselves that can be male,
female or even a different species. This avatar can assume a new
identity, change clothes or convey emotions with a few clicks of the
mouse. Lively also enables users to create different digital
environments to roam, from a child’s room to an exotic island. Here’s
how users can find there way into the Lively world.

Developing a good feel for Google as an investment requires an ability
to make more “doesn’t matter” decisions than we have seen with
any technology company in the past.

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.

In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.

) 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

Log in to submit a comment Don’t have a CNET account yet? Join now,
it’s free and takes just a minute. Log inExisting CNET members log in
here

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.

Comment reply Submit Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity,
or personal attacks is prohibited. Click here to review our .

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.

“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.

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

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

A company called Sentinel, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, has
posted a that shows the viewer flying through 3D cityscapes with live
videos embedded in them.

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

This screenshot shows a live USB camera and 18 live TV feeds projected
onto monitors in a lab in Hong Kong.

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

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.

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

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,” .

In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.

Although it has disclosed that 600 of its coffee shops will be ,
Starbucks will be unveiling only a small selection of closures per
month.

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.

As part of , the company on Wednesday detailed some of the process it
uses to order the results its search engine produces.

The most interesting element of the , a Google fellow who oversees the
area, is a discussion of why the company doesn’t manually elevate
particular search results to obtain the right order. However, the
company does of course hand-tune the algorithm that ranks the results,
so you can consider manual intervention still relevant at a higher
level.

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.

Though the company has talked earlier about how it doesn’t hand-tune
specific search results, Singhal went into a little more detail. Not a
lot, though: the post is more of a teaser that lays some groundwork,
but Singhal promised more later.

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.

The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web
applications play in business use, as well as how Google’s free
document services have come to replace software solutions such as
Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google’s real-time
collaboration features.

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

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.

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

The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo.
The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the
companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License
(GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to
approve it as a proposed Internet standard.

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.

A clause in Google’s 2005 purchase agreement for the AOL stake gives
the Web search leader the right, but not the obligation, to force a
public offering of the shares or a repurchase at fair market value as
of July 1, 2008.

“Under the current market and strategic conditions, Google is unlikely
to rock the boat,” Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst for Bernstein Research,
said.

That is because a similar scenario played out when Comcast sought to
resolve its 21 percent stake in Time Warner Cable in 2003. The two
agreed to buy and divide the assets of the bankrupt cable operator
Adelphia, and the deal eventually led to the partial spinoff of Time
Warner Cable.

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

David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…

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

Entry Filed under: News. Tags: commentaries, comments that include profanity, google, litigation, other inappropriate comments, personal attacks, privacy policies, pseudonym, signatures, southern district of new york, stake, stanton, states district court, that include profanity, true character, trustworthiness, united states district, united states district court, viacom, youtube.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed

Harrr!

The google and other inappropriate comments’s personal attacks

Leave a Comment

Tags

Spam Blocked

Blog Stats