The google and other inappropriate comments’s that include profanity

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.

Viacom’s first line of defense when the negative press hit was
obfuscation. “Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any
personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The
personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its
users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to
Viacom.”

Sounds good, right? The mentioned it in their article on the issue and
quoted Viacom. A number of other publications then followed, saying
that Viacom wasn’t going to collect all the data they were entitled to
under the order.

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?

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

) 12 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 11, 2008 6:41 PM PDT If an
AT&T-BellSouth could merger could get the OK of the government….
Then so could a Google-Yahoo team up….. Microsoft has no case. Reply
to this comment
by July 11, 2008 8:54 PM PDT It seems pretty ironic for microsoft to
testify against anyone in an antitrust hearing
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing

by July 12, 2008 1:19 AM PDT @JCPayne: Nonsense! AT&T/Bell South don’t
even come close to dominating 90% of the cell phone market ( In fact
Verizon alone has nearly as many phone users as AT&T/Bell South, and
we haven’t even mentioned T-Mobile, Sprint etc). By contrast,
Google/Yahoo will have 90% of the search market. Any pact that ends up
with 90% of any market power, concentrated in the hands of 2
companies, has to be stopped by the DOJ. I don?t care how ?non-
exclusive? the pact is. Who the heck else is Yahoo going to form a
pact with, outside this ?non-exclusive? pact with Google, given that
since Yang is barely on speaking terms with Microsoft, and outside
Microsoft , there is only another 1% or so search market left. Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 8:19 AM PDT Back@Kwasiowusu: For one
thing I wasn’t talking mobile phone service. I was talking the regular
old POTS system. (And fiberoptics system that it is rapidly becoming
instead.) The reason the national system was broken up into regional
units was to remove domination of the whole national telephone system.
Now, to allow Bellsouth and the former parts of SBC to merge together
(albeit changing their name to AT&T) that does very little to preserve
the competitive atmosphere in the United States when it comes to
telecoms and high speed Internet even…As far as Google-Yahoo
cooperation…. What monopoly??? They have a technology that every
other company and individual on the net has access to. **Pixels on a
website** is not proprietary. Anybody can come up with an onlinead
network …. You may have to be creative in getting sites to adopt
yours along with Google or Yahoo but none the less it can be done if
you’re smart enough.Clearly with all the resources Microsoft has–
they are admitting that they aren’t smart enough to put together an ad
network. Hence why they want to buy a ready-made one. (Yahoo’s)…..
So now we basically have Microsoft which launched a battle to take on
Google. They decided they would take Yahoo’s assets and try to
dominate Google, so Google went in cut a deal with Yahoo themselves
and Microsoft ends up as the odd-man out crying all those big
crocodile tears and wants to launch a big court case to win back their
plan of domination. BS I say… Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008
11:09 AM PDT Agreed w/ JCPayne. I strongly suspect that MSFT’s only
role in this is to act as a spoiler. Given that MSFT is mostly on the
defensive nowadays (when they should be busy trying to build core
products that are actually worth something), I suspect that they’ll
lose this one too. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 3:13 PM PDT
If Ballmer gets to address the committee, the company will be doomed.
Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 4:21 PM PDT @JCPayne, It
doesn?t make any difference whether you were talking about POTS or
about wireless. An AT&T hookup with Bellsouth still doesn?t even come
close to controlling 90% of the phone market, POTS or wireless. As at
today, cable companies like Time Warner, offer full phone service , as
well as broadband internet, in direct competition with phone companies
like AT&T, not to mention, millions of Americans don?t even bother to
sign up for wired phones anymore, simply preferring to use their cell
phones for all their phone calls, saving themselves the extra expense
of paying for a wired phone they hardly use. The old POTS phone lines
are increasingly irrelevant. Revenues for both AT&T and Verizon, from
wired POTS lines have been going down sharply for years. You simply
can?t compare the dying POTS business to a Google/Yahoo pact that end
up putting control of 90% of the very fast growing internet search in
the hands of just 2 companies Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 4:31 PM PDT @JCPayne, this bit by you is even more
laughable As far as Google- Yahoo cooperation…. What monopoly???
They have a technology that every other company and individual on the
net has access to?.You clearly have no idea what a monopoly is. Anyone
can use Google/Yahoo search, so therefore its not a monopoly? Will you
excusing me while I laugh? Unless you are gonna tell me that Google
gives away the source code of their highly secret search algorithms to
anyone to use as they like, then you are simply blowing smoke.
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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 My Friends section allows you to see your top friends, all of
them, those that are online, new friends, and friends with birthdays.
You also have complete access to your MySpace email. You can visit
your inbox, compose messages and even see your sent, saved and trashed
emails. The Mail icon at the bottom of the Apps screen notifies you
when you have new messages by displaying a white plus-sign inside of a
red circle.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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.

Google may have a tougher time with this issue than the fight to
protect user information. Companies sue each other all the time and
frequently turn over computer records belonging to employees when
pertinent. Often, these records reveal e-mails, memos and other
documents that can shed light on events

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.

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The minute they see a video of an angry woman whose husband is
treating her badly introduced by a cuddly bear selling toilet roll,
will they give YouTube the bum’s rush and decamp to sites unknown?

Strangely, in the US, the nation that has created a whole new plane
for commerce, ads in movie theaters are still something of a surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

So its a new Web 2.0-esque masturbation party where people can chat
with avatars, instead of on AIM or god forbid, calling them on the
phone.

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

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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.

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.

I’ve looked on the App Store in iTunes & on my iPhone but can’t find
it. Can anyone else see it?

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

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

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

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

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 .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We welcome participation from the open source community,” Varda
commented. “Managing broad participation in development of such a
critical piece of Google’s infrastructure will be tricky, but we’re
going to try.”

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

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.

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

Psychologically, it’s well-known in risk analysis circles that people
feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people
are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway
compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of
the relative safety of the two forms of transport.

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.”

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

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

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.

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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.

Users of Google’s Google Docs service are really using the cloud. Not
only are the files stored on Google’s servers, the applications
themselves are stored there.

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.”

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.

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

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

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

‘However, 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.

‘By being in the Public Space you expect to be seen. Does it really
matter if it’s by the bloke selling The Big Issue or a bored office
worker in Arizona?’ Surely one difference is that you expect to be
able to see the people who can see you, or who are photographing you?
Part of the fear surrounding privacy debates – leaving aside actual
losses like identity theft or someone getting your bank details – is
that you just don’t know who’s accessing your details.

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.

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?

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.

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

Finally – thank god they cry – this Information Commissioner doesn’t
take many prisoners. The rules are there – they just need sticking to.

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 Registered
in England and Wales. No. 908396 Registered office: Number 1 Scott
Place, Manchester M3 3GG ·

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

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

Turning civic booster, Newsom called San Francisco a city of dreamers
and entrepreneurs while touting its economic strength amid a
nationwide downturn.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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’s squandered opportunity to sell to Microsoft in May prompted
Icahn to lead a rebellion aimed at removing Yahoo’s entire board so he
could fire Yang and try to revive sales talks with Microsoft.

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.

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

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

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

Of course, there are the browser-based versions of Gmail, Calendar,
Docs, Talk, News, Notebook, and iGoogle. Don’t get me wrong, these are
all usable and work fine … in the browser. I get that Google is all
about the cloud, but having native clients to make accessing some of
these services faster or better would be great.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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login page or to register as a member.

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

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

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.

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

“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.

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

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

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.

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?

Sounds more like one of those viral emails going about that promise
good luck if you send it on to your ten closest friends within the
next five seconds. Maybe it triggers a Google search by having the
recipients click on a link. Have you checked out the serps when you
google for whatever the html code is?

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.

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

Obviously, this symbol became popular in the early 20th century as a
symbol of good luck (often pre WWI air forces would use the symbol for
just that, ie Finland). Then it was high-jacked by the NSDAP for their
international symbol and evil, horrendous crimes against humanity
ensued across Europe under fascism.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

“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.”

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

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

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create or sign into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid
print subscription and have access to the complete article.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Viacom, as I understand, want to show what percentage of YouTube
content views are of Viacom content. In order to accomplish this all
they need to do is provide Google with a list of content IDs, which
they would need to have if they themselves were to perform the
analysis anyway, and then to allow Google to provide a count of views
for each of these pieces of content versus the total of all other
content views for the same period.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Concretely in Google’s case, they should offer privacy options whereby
all of your personal information would be stored only on your machine.
They could still access it, but they’d have to respect your privacy
preferences–and you could always change your mind. (Of course the
data should be signed to prevent you from tampering with it, but
that’s a relatively trivial aspect.) I feel like this approach is the
only thing that would really give meaning to privacy in the computer
age.

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

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

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.

WOW! Sounds like a great time. WOW! The cost of admission. With gas,
and admissions we would be looking at a cost of over $150 for our
family. We’ll just wait for the show,and in the mean time visit the
local farmers market ( met the farmers, food samples, education
stations, and shopping for the weeks meals at far less than $150).

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?

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.)

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.

And, who knows, he might even be in sunny California right now playing
with a new Google toy rather than fretting about the next instalment
of Dancing on Ice.

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

In February, Austin cyclist Peter Smith launched a website, to promote
a petition requesting that Google allow users to search for safe
bicycle routes along with driving routes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

And that means what exactly? Catch a bus at the Metrolink station
that’s going to the Metrolink station?

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

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

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

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

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

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

BTW is Google (or Metro) even thinking about a real-time bus/train
locator by GPS, an extension of the marginally-helpful TransiTV?

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you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.

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.

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

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After spending Friday morning playing with an iPhone 3G, I can see why
Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve Job’s latest wonderful
device.

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.

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

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

But the first four steps were impressive and super-simple — so
simple that those familiar with Outlook Web Access should have no
trouble syncing an iPhone to their office’s Exchange system. I’d be
relieved if I were a corporate IT person dreading a bunch of support
calls from iPhone users.

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

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

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

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

In other words, before your two-year iPhone contract ends, your techie
friends will probably be carrying phones with 5-plus-megapixel video
cameras and monthly rates subsidized by Google and Microsoft —
if they haven’t already bought an iPhone 3G.

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.

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

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.

“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 …

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

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

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

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.

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.

* 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.

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.

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

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

Structurally Protocol Buffers are similar to JSON, yes. In fact, you
could use the classes generated by the Protocol Buffer compiler
together with some code that encodes and decodes them in JSON. This is
something some Google projects do internally since it’s useful for
communicating with AJAX apps. Writing a custom encoding that operates
on arbitrary protocol buffer classes is actually pretty easy since all
protocol message objects have a reflection interface (even in C++).

The advantage of using the protocol buffer format instead of JSON is
that it’s smaller and faster, but you sacrifice human-readability.

… 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).

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

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

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

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?

As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such
as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it
sounds to me like they’re simply addressing a gap in the industry…
after all, XML and SOAP aren’t the end-all and be-all of generic
object-passing protocols.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Q: What has your time at Google been like and has it been a positive
experience for you to work at Google?

It’s a remarkable environment for a computer scientist. Not just for
the amazing code that there is, either. Some of the code that we have
internally is just shockingly good.

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

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

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

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

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

If they’re not going to develop it any further, they might as well let
someone else have a go. Now all we have to do is convince Microsoft to
release the source code to Windows ME.

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

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

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

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

“But since most of us can’t head over there to watch it in person,
we’re giving you the next best thing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

But beyond that, it’s worth noting what Google has done here. For
years, open source advocates have pointed to the availability of
source code as protection against an uncertain future; if your open-
source vendor goes out of business or drops a project, you can pick up
the code where they left off (or hire someone to do so, depending on
your software skills). Google has modified this model for Browser
Sync: the project started off as proprietary code (the JavaScript in
the shipping version was compressed to the point of obfuscation, and
the license was closed). This gave Google the chance to decide whether
the project was commercially viable. But having decided that it
wasn’t, they broke with closed-source thinking and released the code
into the wild.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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…

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