The google and other inappropriate comments’s search terms

July 13, 2008

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

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?.”

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

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

The 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.

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.

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

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

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.

“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.”

Google balked over the issue of turning over information that would
include data about videos employees watched or uploaded to YouTube,
according to the sources. If Chad Hurley, one of YouTube’s co-
founders, uploaded a copyright video or viewed them, Viacom’s lawyers
believe they have a right to know about it, the sources said.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Enter 4chan, one of the Internet’s most trafficked “image boards”
— a place where members congregate to chat and swap photos and
images — many of them related to Japanese anime cartoons. One
particularly well-known section of 4chan is called “b” — a rowdy
back channel filled with obscene images and profanity-riddled
discussion.

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

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:

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.”

Obviously, there is no character for the swastika on the standard
keyboard. But Internet browsers can display many, many characters
— the trick is knowing the short code (called html) that
represents each. In this case, the code a 4chan member posted was the
shorthand for the swastika. Once the code is processed by a browser,
it shows up as the symbol.

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

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
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Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of
[digitalspace.com] from 1996? What’s next, GoogleMUD?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their
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1997-2008 , Inc.

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

UPDATE: After spending some time with it I’m also frustrated with the
local search. Right now the local search only provides Search for “x”
near me in the results when the word matches common local search terms
in a whitelist. If I want to use the app to find a place by name, I
have to switch specifically to a Local search only search to get the
“near me” option—and ultimately that’s about two clicks too many
to make it as useful as it could be.

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

Hey barbino. No, I’m not in the US, I’m in the UK. Thanks for pointing
that out. Have you managed to download the app? I went to the US store
& found it, but when trying to download it I entered my Apple ID & it
recongnised I wasn’t in the US, so wouldn’t let me download it

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

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—-

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

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

A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure that our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched. Google Maps Street View is
no exception.”

[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.

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

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

“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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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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.

Companies like Apple that sell storage “in the cloud” might not even
own the storage servers. They can lease the storage from large data
centers in more than one place. That way, adding more capacity is
quite easy. All those storage facilities can be combined into one
“virtual” server that grows as demand dictates.

You can open a word processor in your Web browser, create, edit and
save the text file and copy it to your computer all without installing
any software. It all happens over the Internet “in the cloud.”

The big exception is the U.S., which buys vastly more stuff than it
sells, and has done so for decades.

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.

“High-quality mapping images are an essential component of any
effective navigation system. Access to DigitalGlobe’s advanced images
will enable us to dramatically improve the scope and quality of the
Ranger,” says Columbus CEO, Tsvika Freidman. “We are determined to
maintain our position as a leading player in the world of navigation
systems and are very excited to partner with DigitalGlobe to enable us
to maintain and enhance this position.”

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.

It’s an issue we’ve been following for months, of course: with stories
like along the way, among others.

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

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

It’s thoroughly legal for anyone to take photos of anything or anybody
in the street. Lots of Community Support Police Officers might think
otherwise, but it is. Likewise, anybody can put a CCTV camera on the
front of their building and video what they like. So it’s a quid pro
quo.

Does Northcliffe House in Kensington, home of the Mail, have CCTV
cameras on the front? In it an infringement of our civil liberties
that anybody walking past the front of their building should be
recorded?

Those UK burglars are just getting too lazy now. The Mail suggests
that they are using Google to ‘case the joints’ they are going to
break in to? Why can’t they have a bit of pride in their work and go
to those houses and break in like the good old days?

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

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

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

For some time the facility known as Google Earth has allowed us to
call up our own address – or anyone else’s address, for that matter -
and to home in on a photograph of our – or their – house.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

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

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

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.

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

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

“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.”

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

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.

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

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

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

As Google has become more successful, both Yahoo and Microsoft have
been regressing, a dynamic that many analysts believe make it
imperative for the two companies to put aside their differences and
combine forces.

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

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.

Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users
’sit down’ with one another in a virtual environment

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

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

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

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

I immediately start thinking of Second Life, There, and The Sims when
I peruse . It’s probably not going to end up being a Second Life
killer or anything else killer.� It’s simply just another option
for people, but from Google and people generally warm to them pretty
easily.� I looked through some of the rooms already created and saw
plenty with between 4,000 and 10,000 visitors.� One of the advantages
I see Lively having is that you can embed your room into websites.�
You just know Google will promote that through their millions of free
Blogger sites.

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?

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

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

- 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.

… 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.

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

Last month, Google said it would terminate support for Browser Sync,
and this week the company open sourced the code for the product’s
client software in order to allow the developer community to continue
to use and improve it, said Google developer Aaron Boodman in a blog
post. “It would be great to see the server ported to Google App
Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented,” Boodman wrote.

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.

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

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.

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.

Google’s apology illustrates how sensitive the issue is. The
implication is that someone at Google judged the swastika
“inappropriate or offensive.” (Pornographic or profane terms rarely
appear on the trends list.)

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.

And yes, David, please update us in your keen investigation into those
nefarious Israeli Google employees and their insistence on considering
the swastika offensive. I’m sure you’d happily wear it on your
t-shirt, but most people have a slightly less ambivalent view of
symbolized evil.

Gosh Adina, are you serious? You might as well just say “white people
are all honkies”. You know, because some of them are, therefore they
all are. The symbol known as a “swastika” has a deeper history that
what you seem capable of recognizing. Its a bunch of lines in a
pattern. It wasn’t just a part of Hindi culture and German oppression.
Heck, it was even represented in some Native America tribes. But that
doesn’t mean folks have to “wear it on their t-shirt” to acknowledge a
simple fact – symbols can be easily distorted by groups of people.
Regardless…they are still symbols, meaningless to many as their the
cultural significance isn’t readily translatable. But they are still
symbols, and have different meanings.

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.

Google has refused to comment on whether their position is that a
swastika is offensive. They expected to be honest. Why don’t they
comment if swastika is obscene, or objectionable and HOW.??

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.

Go to H-E-double hockey sticks, Adina. Some of us are quite aware of
the Hindu meaning and prefer to think of that symbolism rather than
the atrocity that the swastika received in the early 20th century. And
unlike you some of us prefer not to continue that atrocity by looking
for the good where it exists and expunge the bad. Rather than, oh, I
don’t know, continue to give some ugly concept any more publicity. So,
again, Go to H-E-double hockgy sticks, Adina.

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.

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

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

Since 1999, more than half of Canadians have downloaded video from the
Web, and about a quarter of Canadians do so at least once a week. So
the CRTC’s “broad investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the
flow of traffic” is extremely timely. Better to have some Internet
oversight urging Canadian content on the Web. The alternative is to
have our telephone, cable and satellite bills subsidizing commercial
appetites that hope to bypass the Canadian system altogether.

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.

Subscribe to The Hollywood Reporter and see the entertainment industry
from its best angle: the inside looking out. Complete access to real-
time news and exclusive analysis that goes behind the scenes from film
to television, home video to digital media.

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

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.

“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 says in its filing.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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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 .

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

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.

And there could be more than two pieces: there could be more than 1
subsidiary that has to agree to any massive information release
request.

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

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

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?

This is either a case of extreme naivete on the part of the judge in
ignoring the privacy ramifications in his incredible ruling, or quite
possibly a simple case of corruption. Such naivete would be so
incredible in a judge that isn’t senile, that corruption has to be far
more likely.

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.

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

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.

…if you don’t have a Google login name. Google search works just
fine without one. It even works fine without any Google cookies.

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.

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

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.

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.

We may THINK there’s no reason for Google to have to keep logs for 18
months, but these days I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s some
hidden provision of the Patriot Act, or possibly some law we’ve never
heard of, which it’s illegal for us to hear of or read in the first
place. So maybe there IS a law requiring them to keep it for 18
months, it’s just not one the public is allowed to know of until it’s
used to prosecute them.

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.

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?

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

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

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

The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Google
headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View.

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

Hmm I read the nytimes article too. It seems that the highly paid
Google employees were asked to pay $2500/mo, up from some $1400.
Outrageous, except that the company was still kicking in over $3000/mo
per child. That’s $66,000/yr per child just for daycare. Apparently,
the cheaper daycare Google was providing before wasn’t good enough for
the Google parents who demanded and got the highest quality care
possible – the best food, the best teachers, the most teachers, the
best facilities – for pretty much whoever needed it at whatever cost.
For those who find the inhouse childcare too pricey, Google is
apparently going to also subsidize outside childcare. There’s some
controversy that Brin compared childcare to free food, but I wonder
how the childless employees feel about their coworkers getting the
equivalent of a Stanford education for less than half price while they
are being offered free M&M;’s. As someone who gets no subsidized
childcare, watching the Google drama is like watching people taking
turns at beating the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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.)

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

The share price, I suspect, would be a touch healthier. That whole
decline in TV advertising would be nicely offset by the surge in
digital spending.

* 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.

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.

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

As part of that effort, transit agencies around the world have been
trying to create web-based tools that help riders — and potential
riders — figure out how to get from Point A to Point B using buses
and trains. It’s a big deal, especially in big regions such as the
Southland where many people (including me) couldn’t begin to tell you
exactly which buses go where.

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.”

Two sources, speaking on background, said there are several issues
that need to be resolved. One is boring and involves data formatting.
The other is not and involves whether Google intends to make money
from advertising placed on the maps. Like all transit agencies, Metro
is cash-strapped and looking for new revenue and apparently doesn’t
want to give proprietary information to a firm that may profit.

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.

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 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.

Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that
advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the
ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those
terms.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their
commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at
the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out
to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to
intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

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:

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.

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.

“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 …

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.

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

Being 10x faster than XML to work with is entirely believable: If
you’re serializing directly to binary structures, those structures can
be directly manipulated without any parsing at all… and if you need
to do some byte-swapping and alignment adjustments to get them into
and out of native form for your current processor, those are still
operations which can be performed in a matter of a few CPU
instructions, rather than through a few hundred KB of libraries.

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.

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.

* 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.

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

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

Modify JSON so unquoted attributes are ‘type labels’ and define the
type of an attribute by giving a label or a default value. For
instance:

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

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

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.

You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘”a sparse,
distributed multi-dimensional sorted map”, sharing characteristics of
both row-oriented and column-oriented databases’. Sounds, to me, like
a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that,
I presume, didn’t fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS.
After all, do you really think they didn’t evaluate existing solutions
before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem?
Do you really think they’re that stupid?

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.

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The company also recently donated $350,000 to Oregon and Portland
State Universities in support of open source development. Google open
source projects and efforts are documented at the Web site.

Internetnews.com recently had the opportunity to chat with DiBona
about the SoC and Google’s view on open source development.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Most managed stock mutual funds have underperformed the market, as
measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500, an index that tracks 500 of
America’s leading companies. The problem is partly size.Imagine
running a $40 billion mutual fund. That might sound exciting, but it’s
difficult. You might keep 5 percent or so of the fund’s value in cash,
to cover people’s withdrawals. Those dollars won’t grow much. With
what’s left, you probably won’t be permitted to invest more than 5
percent of the fund’s value in any one stock. So you’ll have to own at
least 20 stocks. (Mutual funds typically invest in 50 to 200
companies.)To appreciate this overdiversification, consider Fidelity’s
mammoth Contrafund, valued at more than $75 billion. As of the end of
2007, its biggest holding was would be a great investment. Oops. Its
entire market value is just over $1 billion. You can’t buy entire
companies. If you’re limited, as many managers are, to not buying more
than 10 percent of any one company, you can spend only about $120
million on it. It’s hard to avoid spreading yourself too thin when
$120 million is merely a drop in your mutual fund’s bucket.

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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“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.”

“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.

The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.

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

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

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

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

is a prime example. It opens with a blinking search bar and with the
keypad already engaged. Like the optimized Web app version, suggested
matches are displayed as the search begins; this time they are listed
below the search field. Below the search space is a shortcut bar for
seeing the array of Google apps, including Gmail, Maps, Docs, and
Reader. These icons are themselves quick links for launching the Web-
optimized versions of Gmail and clan.

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

We’ve covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe’s
favorite is . Both offer live updating, and options to let your
readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will
begin.

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.

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,” .

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.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t check if your favorite coffee
watering hole (or office) is going the way of $2 gas. According to The
Seattle Times, employees at stores that are facing closure have been
given some extra heads-up to either find new jobs or transfer
elsewhere.

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

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

The 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.

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

The 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.

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

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.

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