Posts tagged ‘stanton’
The google and yahoo google’s obfuscation
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.”
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?.”
Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.
Top legal counsel for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft will address a
Congressional hearing Tuesday, as lawmakers examine the and its
potential anticompetitive effects on the future of Internet
advertising.
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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The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
Once you’ve logged into the MySpace application you are
presented with your own personalized home screen. You have immediate
access to your mood settings, profile, Friends Status and Mood,
Friends Updates, Comments, bulletins, and the ability to search for
other people. The interface feels a bit cramped on the iPhone’s
screen. Along the bottom you’ll find a row of five buttons that
immediately jump to home, mail, requests, friends, and photos.
AOL’s Radio App for the iPhone and iPod touch is a native
streaming application that is also location aware. Once you confirm
access to your location it reveals local radio stations that provide
streamed radio programming in your area. In the Houston Bay Area, the
app revealed four stations: 100.3 KILT, CNN 650 Radio News, HOT 95.7
and Sports Radio 610. Other locales like Atlanta, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc. are offered.
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.
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.
This dispute is the reason the two companies and lawyers representing
a group of other copyright holders suing Google, have failed to reach
a final agreement on anonymizing personal information belonging to
YouTube users, according to two sources close to the situation.
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.
Critics dispute that and point out that records show the judge in the
case only ordered YouTube to hand over information asked for by
Viacom. As for the employee records, Google said Saturday that it
isn’t willing to talk about anything else until that matter of user
privacy is resolved.
“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.”
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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by July 12, 2008 11:30 PM PDT Chad and the team knew about SNL content
being on YouTube. It’s what made YouTube popular, showing copyrighted
clips from comedy shows off TV. The whole YouTube thing was based on
being an archive of video from all sources. Viacom, NBC Universal,
Disney, Sony, Fox and others should sue YouTube/Google for every
infraction. Basically YouTube is the Napster of video and should be
accountable for theft of copyrighted material. Reply to this comment
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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.
Even in the last couple of years, I have heard US movie audiences hiss
the very presence of ads, as if by clutching their popcorn and putting
their feet up on the seat in front, they have suddenly become a VIP
audience at the Cannes Film Festival.
Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.
Google, on the other hand, in the search for something a little more
clever, a little more Google, has slipped into cultural quicksand.
It will find it very hard to expect its devotees to watch an ad before
every video. (tmz offers a series of videos daily. You only have to
watch one ad. And the one I just looked at was for Herbal Essences,
which promised to treat my non-existent hair to a luscious fragrance.)
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Demand for public transit is on the rise and the has taken a step to
simplify the effort of getting from Point A to Point B.
Google Maps Transit, which is in use at 48 domestic bus systems and in
17 cities outside the United States, is easier to use than COTA’s trip
planning tool and is expected to help conquer a perennial hurdle to
building ridership – confusing routes, said COTA chief Bill Lhota.
“There is no question about it, the Google system is better,” he said.
“It’s got some great features and user-friendliness.”
If you are already a Business First subscriber please create or sign
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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.
Various theories made their way around. A blogger named Dan at a site
called “tdaxp” noticed the strange phenomenon. “The swastika is a
traditional Chinese good-luck character, the Olympics are coming up
and good luck is on the Chinese mind.”
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.
At some point on Thursday, a member of 4chan’s “b” channel posted a
simple two-part instruction. First, Google “卐”. Second, enjoy.
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.
“We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends,” it read. “In rare cases, when such
material is missed, we manually remove these results.
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”
Are you kidding me? Porn the ultimate mark of success. The fact that
Lively has it before it has even taken off properly makes it like an
uber stamp of approval. Yes yes.
Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.
I’ve wondered if there could be a market for “Christian porn” that
addresses all the issues they have with it.
Actually, calling it a beta is being generous. There are a lot of
interface quirks and bugs to work out, and the content (as far as
avatars, furniture, clothes, etc.) definitely feels more like a sample
of what will be available. Once they open it up to user created
content, I imagine there will be no shortage of “stuff”. FWIW, I
didn’t really have the connection problems the reviewer had. The whole
thing thing gets a little laggy in a crowded room, especially if the
room is full of junk, but I didn’t have any problems getting in. As
far as the sex themed rooms, they seemed pretty tame to me, at least
for now. (Uh, not that I checked them out or anything.) You’re limited
to streaming videos from YouTube, so you can’t show anything that
wouldn’t pass muster there. You can also display static images in a
“picture frame”, but the frames seems to be pretty broken at the
moment. They seem to only display a small portion of the image,
regardless of the resolution. So, at least for the moment, it’s pretty
much impossible to display anything pornographic. I imagine once they
open it up to user created content, though, it will become yet another
haven for furries.
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a “Windows
only” service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn’t
investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting
other platforms in future. That’s a non-starter in my book.
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.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
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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
@: not sure if my first msg went thru, jono, are you located in the
US? if not, well, that’s the culprit, didnt see google mobile in the
swiss app store myself, then switched over to the US store, and
presto, there it was
, Jul 11, 2008 07:24 PM
On Thursday evening, Google threw open the doors of its San Francisco
office to members of the media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Though Google’s San Francisco office has been , the dust has cleared
and Google wanted to celebrate.
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?”
Of course, Google’s brand and business model both count for a lot,
too, nowadays. But the praising people always goes over well when
addressing those very same people.
I mean, how much applause do you think Newsom would have received had
he said its all about patents, servers, lack of competent competitors,
and consumer inertia?
According to Google’s official blog, Gmail users will no longer have
to worry about fake messages pretending to be from PayPal or eBay.
Google displays a message to its Gmail users above the email warning
that the message may not be from the sender that it claims. However,
if the message sender claims to be eBay or PayPal, will now
automatically check to see if the message has a DomainKey signature.
If the message doesn’t, the message will just disappear, leaving users
with a clean Inbox and the security of knowing that the ones that did
make it through really are from eBay and PayPal.
It’s about time, though. eBay (which owns PayPal) announced plans for
adopting DKIM in October 2007. Making an announcment and actually
implementing on every single one of its servers is not the same thing,
though, and until there was some assurance that eBay really was using
DKIM, there was no way to accurately and thoroughly figure out what
was fake eBay and what was real. Thanks to this agreement with Google,
other ISPs also scanning DKIM now have a way to get rid of all the
fake eBay and PayPal messages. If only more major companies would do
it from their end. It would be nice to see those Bank of America
messages disappear from my inbox.
Copyright © 2008 Silicon Alley Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our .
Internet giant Google yesterday defended plans to photograph millions
of British homes and publish the snapshots online.
Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.
Windows Server Catalog: Certified Servers. Search the Windows Server
2008 catalog to find servers you can deploy with confidence.
For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.
Currently Google is using Protocol Buffers for its internal Remote
Procedure Calls, or RPC(), protocols and file formats.
, Google’s program manager for open source, noted Google encodes
almost any sort of structured information that needs to be passed
across the network or stored on disk using this protocol.
As to why after years of in-house development Google is now making
Protocol Buffers open source, Varda said it’s just a question of time.
“We have wanted to release protocol buffers for a long time,” he said.
“The only limitation was finding enough engineering time to get it
done.”
The potential for Protocol Buffers could well be large. Google is not
currently using Protocol Buffers as a replacement for XML-based Web
services — at least not yet. In response to a question from
InternetNews.com about whether Protocol Buffers could be leveraged to
create some kind of smaller, faster Web services/SOA alternative,
Google developer Varda noted, “That sounds like a possibility, but we
have no firm plans at this time.”
“We 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.”
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, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
“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.
There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
) 8 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 11, 2008 1:01 PM PDT If could
computing can be standardized. I believe it will be a great benefit to
Business operating online. Could computing is probably less risky than
managing your own hardware. Especially, if you don’t have resources to
manage large servers and configurations. Google has the talent the
scale like few others do. Reply to this comment by July 11, 2008 1:47
PM PDT It will depend who’s going to own the data and what right the
provider when go out of business be forced to hand over data. Reply to
this comment
by July 11, 2008 3:31 PM PDT What’s the point of having a PERSONAL
computer when you are 100% reliant on a server? Haven’t we gone a full
circle now and arrived right back at the mainframe model that we SO
badly wanted to get away from? Let’s just bring all of the VAX’s out
of retirement and say that the last 15 years were a waste of effort!
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing
In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?
The term cloud computing started when network architects started
drawing diagrams for their presentations. The architects had symbols
for computers and servers and hard drives and switches, but they
didn’t have a universal symbol that represented “the Internet.”
It became common to talk of pushing data “into the cloud” to represent
using the internet to send files to and from servers and Web sites.
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.
The big exception is the U.S., which buys vastly more stuff than it
sells, and has done so for decades.
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.
Well, because the U.S. has been buying a lot of stuff from China for
many, many years, China holds a lot of U.S. dollars. If China were to
sell those dollars on the market at some point, well, it wouldn’t be
very good. The U.S. dollar’s value would fall — making imports and
traveling abroad much more expensive.
Trade deficits are usually a good thing, because it shows that the
global economy is working. It’s just when a trade imbalance gets too
high where economists and investors start to become concerned.
LAS VEGAS, July 11, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/
—-Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. (“Columbus”) (Pink Sheets:
CGSE) today announced it has reached an important understanding with
DigitalGlobe, world leader in high-resolution commercial imagery.
DigitalGlobe also supplies the popular Google Earth website with its
images. According to the understanding, Columbus will have access to
DigitalGlobe’s digital image bank for use in the Ranger navigation
system.
Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates
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.
It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say
the site is a ‘burglar’s charter’ that makes it easy for criminals to
check out potential victims.
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.
Also it isn’t perfectly legal to set a camera up on your house and
film anything. If you camera looks onto anothers property you would be
breaching privacy rules and even filming past your own borders and
into the public space could be challenged.
As for the whole Streetview thing – it’s the same thing as Public
Space CCTV as far as I’m concerned. 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?
But the reality is that I can point my camera into the public space in
front of my building and record it to my heart’s content. And I don’t
suppose that there’s anything to stop me putting it online or sending
it in to one of those “People do the funniest things..” type shows.
‘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.
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.
Slander is when you make a wrongful comment about an individual,
defamation is when you make one about a company or organisation, I
believe. Although that might be wrong!
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.
Now the facility has been brought down to street level, and at the
press of a key on your computer, you will be able to summon up the
image of any street. An arrow on the picture will direct you to your
own door – or indeed to anyone else’s door
Aren’t invasions of personal privacy by commercial companies every bit
as indefensible as similar intrusions into our lives by a Big Brother
state?
However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.
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.
And most of us would think that some element of discreet intrusion by
the State was legitimate.
The matter of Google is of a quite different order. This is a computer
company which is spying upon us for the sole purpose of exploiting us,
controlling us and making money out of us.
Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.
. 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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?
Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users
‘sit down’ with one another in a virtual environment
The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.
Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up
While the iPhone’s Safari browser is no doubt a powerful tool, native
applications would be better. Just about every photo-sharing site out
there has a new application for the iPhone, including Flickr and
PhotoBucket. Google’s Picasa? Nowhere to be found.
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.
Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.
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I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long. Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle? Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.
Andy on :
I suppose Lively does have potential, but definitely needs a lot of
work to be the sort of app I’d like it to be. The biggest
problem with it, currently, is all the sexually oriented rooms that
are popping up all over the place, when this is a service meant for
those as young as 13. Either Google needs to do a better job with
blocking, or removing unsuitable content or they need to separate them
out (i.e. have 13 & older rooms and 18 & older rooms that are in a
separate location). For now I’m staying away until they have
some sort of legitimate solution figured out.
In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!
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– Users from more than 120 countries come to learn new skills, share
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4–8, 2008, in San Diego, California.
– September 9-12, 2008, Moscone West, San Francisco, CA – Wireless
Data… it’s how you use it.
Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.
The proxy works passively by analysing existing, user-initiated
traffic, and is particularly tuned for complex Web 2.0 environments,
Zalewski said in a blog post.
“We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because
we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security
community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security
challenges associated with contemporary web technologies,” Zalewski
wrote. He added that Ratproxy is intended to complement active
crawlers and manual proxies, as well as other passive proxies.
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.
He said: “It may mean burglars get a bit fatter because they can
sit at home and scope out people’s houses rather than have to go
walking up and down the street.
“Obviously, it’s not going to make it harder for someone
planning a burglary to have access to this.”
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”
Campaigners fighting plans to build four 335-ft high wind turbines at
Carsington Pasture have criticised claims that they would not affect
local views ,
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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.
On a separate note: Google also clarified that “we were just
speculating” in an earlier statement about the origin of the search.
(That statement said, “In this case, it appears that the html code for
this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led
to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol.”)
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.
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.
“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?
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.
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?
Thank god. Now that that’s out of my system I see I am not alone after
reading others’ opinions on Adina’s comment.
I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.
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.
If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.
The Hindu swastika runs counter-clockwise – facing the left. The
swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the right.
Sounds like this is a lose-lose situation for Google. They shouldn’t
have taken it down. Since they issued a statement anyway, they should
have just explained the many OTHER different (and usually positive)
meanings of the symbol.
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.
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reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul
language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.
It’s about time that a more powerful company steps in to help out with
this fight. BT Throttling is just BS and we all know it. DPI is also
something that shouldn’t be implemented. The number of ways an ISP can
manipulate this technology is too overwhelming.
In 1999, the Internet was largely e-mail and alpha-numeric services.
It was not a world where our telecom, cable and satellite companies
controlled more than 70 per cent of Canada’s Internet service provider
traffic. Moreover, it was not a world with TV distributed by Internet
protocol technology. So the Internet is already being “regulated” – by
boardrooms – except when giants such as Google draw attention.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
Last month, however, the head of the commission said a broad
investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the flow of traffic on
their networks is likely.
“The CAIP complaint is really only the tip of the iceberg,” CRTC
chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told a telecom conference last month.
He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.
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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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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.
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.
While I respect the USA law within the USA, I despise when judges
attempt, often with too much success, to enforce it outside of the
USA. And not just data laws. We enforce US sex laws in other countries
to criminalize behavior completely legal there. This Is Wrong!
And for google to “request all the records” from their separate
company formed to hold the records would be an operation requiring
special permission, extensive justification, and full disclosure,
regarding reasons for the request, which the board of the other
company would have to vote on (after researching to guarantee that
Google is not possibly under any kind of duress in making the request,
to release information).
The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.
If they really wanted to, they could still manage this.. encrypt the
logs with your youtube account password, and then then using the
Ajax/Zero Knowlege App ideas that we had an article about the other
day (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/1416238), ensure
that decryption of that data in done at the user end…
To cover themselves legally. The issue of whether YouTube and other
similar sites are responsible for the gazillion copyright violations
that occur there is legally still up in the air. This Viacom lawsuit
should hopefully clear it up but until then Google’s position is that
they are doing everything they can to prevent copyrighted materials
from being posted. Keeping the logs helps them keep up that pretense –
they can cooperate if need be and identify the violators etc. They
have no legal requirement to g
Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.
I 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?
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.
But the problem isn’t Google, it’s us. We keep using Google, though we
knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant
revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.
Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with
a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they
understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated.
But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can
push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail
accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or
pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland
basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in
any industry that has annoyed them over the years.
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.
I can think of many problems. For example, there are tons of videos on
youtube that are never accessed except by the uploader and a few
friends. Pretty easy to identify who the likely uploader is from the
records, and thus identify a user. Or even if you never upload, a lot
can be learned. For example, somebody looking for my records could
first see what youtube videos have me in them. Most people have
probably searched for their own name, and as such this is a clue as to
which user is probably me.
Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.
My cable IP address doesn’t change often, I had one IP address for
almost 10 years without changing… just when I did a router upgrade
it switched.
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There probably aren’t many people who have made money betting against
Google; the company repeatedly tops Wall Street expectations and
generally knocks the socks off investors. What’s not to love?
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.
The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a
Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.
The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Google
headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View.
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?
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PITY Bombay’s poor billionaires. No sooner have they invested in
an executive jet than the taxman comes knocking for his share.
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, found himself in a
humiliating situation when customs officers impounded two executive
jets belonging to his Reliance Industries, claiming he had failed to
pay an estimated £12m in tax on them.
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 clever banker pitched the idea but Green didn’t much care for
the plan and instead opted to buy a 25% stake in Ask Jeeves —
Google’s punier rival.
The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began
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.
Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.
People who walk places rather than drive tend to be more active,
right? Well why don’t those over-active people who don’t
like to drive to the end of their driveway to get the morning paper
walk down to a gas station and use the money that they saved by
walking on a map. Then they’ll be able to put that map in their
fanny-pack, walk out of the gas station, walk their over-active bodies
home and flip through the map and figure out a route on their own?!
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.
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.
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.
And that means what exactly? Catch a bus at the Metrolink station
that’s going to the Metrolink station?
In addition, Google does not display bus/rail disruptions or other
alerts related to your trip. It does not give users options to plan
trips by Walking Distance or Minimize Trips by Transfer Time, Walking
Distance or Transfers. Furthermore Google doesn’t recognize as many
locations as the transit provider’s tripplanner and may have outdated
data.
Google needs some grown ups who remember when transit systems were not
government funded. They are usually 2-4 generations away from
actualization of producing industrial strength software.
Try communicating with one of them on a personal level they are so
insular it’s incredible. They have receptionists that have graduate
degrees just to swish the public away..
Google Maps is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not Google’s
fault that Apple is dumb and only allows limited bits of AJAX to work
on their phones.
BTW is Google (or Metro) even thinking about a real-time bus/train
locator by GPS, an extension of the marginally-helpful TransiTV?
Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.
Google makes the vast majority of its revenue and profit from
advertisers whose text ads appear next to search results. Advertisers
bid for the words, and their ads appear based on a formula involving
how much they’re willing to pay and the quality of the ads themselves.
As of mid-June, . Advertisers pay only when searchers actually click
on the ads.
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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…
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.
The browser is a bit faster — it took about 25 seconds to load
with three bars of 3G reception showing here in South Lake Union.
Having GPS brings the device up to par with other high-end phones, but
Apple’s interface is a step above.
In the settings menu, you have the option to add a mail account.
Exchange is the top of the list, above Apple’s MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo
mail and AOL.
My tip of the day: Check with your IT department to be sure it has
authorized iPhones. Otherwise, you may get a message saying that it’s
unable to verify a certificate and the sync won’t work.
A few little quirks: Just because the 3G phone uses a faster network,
don’t expect blinding speed over the wireless network.
You also can’t connect to iTunes over the network — you must be
on a Wi-Fi network to connect to the store.
So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?
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.
A range of amazing handheld computers will appear using new mobile
chips from Intel and new software platforms from Google, Microsoft and
Nokia. For instance, the first “Google phone” built on its Android
platform should be available from T-Mobile USA by the end of the year.
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.
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:
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage
in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday,
July 17.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material
from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly
prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.
The owner of “Obama’s Chocolate Nuts” is feeling
like “the luckiest person on Earth” in the wake of the
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks about Sen. Barack Obama.
Jesse Jackson is no more than a vicious Black thug that fantasizes
about castrating other Black Liberal males.
Are we the sexiest blog ever? You better believe it, people. Even Amy
Adams (above) says so. And if she didn’t actually say it, you can bet
she’s thinking it.
SIC WILSON … talk to the hand, cause the volleyball ain’t listening.
THE FITS GIRLS … somebody’s gotta be the brains of this operation.
SIC WILLIE … not sweating but protecting the technique.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
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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.
Well, let’s also not forget that the meaning of the expression “an
order of magnitude” depends strongly from the numeric base you’re
using.
I drink the XML kool-aid plenty — but there are things it’s good for,
and things it’s not. Serializing and parsing truly massive amounts of
data is part of the latter set.
We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too
much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every
news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment — including the
numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures — more than was
intended, but I guess that isn’t surprising.
I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.
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.
both really from the same design sheet, but thrift has been
opensource’d for over a year, and has many more language bindings. its
been in use in several opensource projects (thrudb comes to mind), and
has much more extant articles/documentation.
I’m actually a game developer, not a web developer, so I’ll speak to
XML’s use as a file format in general. Here’s a few points regarding
our use of XML:
* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.
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.
4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.
The advantage of using the protocol buffer format instead of JSON is
that it’s smaller and faster, but you sacrifice human-readability.
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:
You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.
PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it
comes to adding to the library. Genre’s are so unbelievably grey
defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of
the cover. Google would have done better.
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?
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
Whitepaper: Virtualization from the Data Center to the Desktop. Meet
evolving demands more effectively as you transform your IT
infrastructure from a cost center to a strategic business asset.
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.
Q: Were there any real standout projects from Summer of Code that just
made you say “Wow”?
What that means is if you put in cancer or a certain kind of cancer
you can find out what genes in the human genome express that disease.
Or you can put in a gene and find out which proteins and genes it’s
connected to.
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?
Q: Is there any chance that Google would ever use one of the new ,
such as the Community License, that may well be free software-
compatible licenses?
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.
I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.
: woarhex etbdml
: My Lonely Planet book said that if you want to stay with a family
instead of the hotel you need to register…
: No info on that. As far as I heard from friends in Bukhara,
everything seems to be more or less ok now….
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But with your data encrypted, why do you need to trust anyone? For you
it is the state of your browser, passwords etc, but for anyone else it
is random bits.
I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!
Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.
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.
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.
I’m sure there have been other examples, but this is the first and
possibly only example I can think of of a company *actually
responding* to requests for a discontinued product to be open-sourced.
Let alone actually going ahead and doing it.
my settings is set to give trolls +1 and flamebait +2.It’s often some
of the most humerous and insightful comments. At other times it’s just
gay fiction.
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1997-2008 , Inc.
The angle places the user at street level and allows for complete
360-degree panning and zooming. Google said that the aim of the
project was to offer a perspective similar to that of a cyclist in the
race.
The map will cover all 21 stages of the race, which began on Saturday
in the coastal town of Brest and ends on 27 July in the Champs
Elysées in Paris.
Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?
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.
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.
Institutional investors are mostly not tuned into the Google ()
Creative Suite. For Google and other SaaS-styled companies, it’s
not about product cycles. New products, particularly strategic ones,
do have a role to play and bear watching closely.
In 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.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment
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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.
“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.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers,
Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is
for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this
week.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Amit Agarwal from blog today outlining how anyone can use the service
as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an
increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they’re
happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but
also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too.
Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on
compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like
a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here.
One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work
on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform
likely won’t allow.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
That extra foresight chronicling which stores will soon be going
under, even if their closures have not yet been announced.
The most interesting element of the , a Google fellow who oversees the
area, is a discussion of why the company doesn’t manually elevate
particular search results to obtain the right order. However, the
company does of course hand-tune the algorithm that ranks the results,
so you can consider manual intervention still relevant at a higher
level.
Google gives two reasons for its prohibition against manual
intervention. First is its belief that its own individual judgment is
never as good as the collective judgment of the Internet overall,
whose hyperlink structure forms part of the basis for Google ranking.
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
Though the company has talked earlier about how it doesn’t hand-tune
specific search results, Singhal went into a little more detail. Not a
lot, though: the post is more of a teaser that lays some groundwork,
but Singhal promised more later.
The 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.
This sort of feature can be very useful in cities with lots of one-way
streets, like New York, or with parks and thoroughfares that
accommodate pedestrians but not cars. Currently, Google Maps
directions may suggest an extremely roundabout route when a much more
direct one is possible by walking or biking.
The July 1 date was viewed months ago as a catalyst for the Time
Warner board of directors to speed discussions to spin off or sell AOL
to any interested party, including Yahoo, Microsoft or News Corp.
Renewed hopes for an AOL sale or merger sent Time Warner shares rising
as much as 2.6 percent on Monday after Citigroup named the company its
top pick within large cap media and entertainment stocks on the
conviction that AOL would be sold or merged into either Yahoo or
another company.
Jason Bazinet, a Citigroup analyst, estimated that the merger of AOL’s
advertising business and Yahoo would generate $900 million of annual
cost reductions.
After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.
David Pogue looks at the Eye-Fi memory card, which stamps photos with
the location where they were taken.
David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…
David Pogue on the new $100 movie player from Netflix, which sends
movies from your computer screen to your TV…
The google and other inappropriate comments’s life span
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But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users,
who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally
identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do
not refute that the ?login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users
create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube? which without
more ?cannot identify specific individuals?.”
Lawmakers, as well as the , should it team up with the industry’s No.
2 player Yahoo in the third-party advertising agreement.
by July 12, 2008 4:49 PM PDT @JCPayne , you also claim that: ?with all
the resources Microsoft has– they are admitting that they aren’t
smart enough to put together an ad network?Yeah? You mean like how
Google tried their own video sharing network, failed at it, and went
and bought Youtube so they could dominate web video sharing ? Earth to
JCPayne, companies regular buy other companies. Google has bought
plenty of companies even in their short life span as a company. As for
Microsoft launching a strong protest against a Google/Yahoo pact, it
sounds very good to me. After all, Google has virtually taken
permanent residence at the DOJ and at the EU Commission, constantly
whining against non-existent ?crimes? that they claim Microsoft
thinking of committing, its only fair that Microsoft strongly hit back
against the very real danger of Google?s rabid monopolistic maneuvers,
while at the same time giving Google, the same thing Google has been
giving Microsoft in the last 5 years at least. Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 8:27 PM PDT Where is the lock in that keeps customers
dependent and keeps out competitors?All this proves is what everyone
already knew: MS can not succeed on a level playing field. Reply to
this comment
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With the debut of the AppStore come a number of native applications
that replicate the functionality of already extant iPhone-optimized
Web sites. The impetus for creation of native applications has, thus
far, been driven by the ability to use location sensitivity, access to
the camera, and other iPhone technologies that are conventionally
inaccessible through MobileSafari.
Google’s native search application for the iPhone and iPod touch
is simply an interface to the popular engine with location awareness
— essentially the only advantage this application holds over the
mobile-optimized Web site. Like other location-aware applications,
Google may ask whether or not you wish to allow use of your current
location.
The application has a settings screen that is accessible by pressing
the grey circled italic “i” in the upper right corner of
the Apps screen. In the settings pane, you can configure Google to
search your contacts, previous searches or websites. You can turn
Google suggestions on or off and even turn on Safe Search. Safe Search
will not pull up any adult topic returns in the search results.
Finally you can clear your search history.
The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
Photo access is accomplished via the Camera Photo icon at the bottom
of the Apps screen. You can touch the “Add Photos” button
and add them directly from the iPhone’s camera or from your
iPhones photo library. Basic editing allows you to delete photos from
your MySpace profile.
The app also features a miniature version of My eBay. It shows you
active items and items where the auctions have ended at a glance that
you are watching, items you are buying or selling.
When a call is received while audio is streaming in AOL Radio, the
music fades and your call rings through. If you decline to answer AOL
Radio starts up where it left off with out a hitch. However if you
accept the call and subsequently finish that call you have to re-
launch AOL Radio. It does not automatically restart. This follows the
rules Apple has for apps developed for the iPhone.
I’m not sure which classic rock song best describes the latest
in the Microsoft / Yahoo battle: “The Song Remains the
Same” or “Saturday Night’s All Right (For
Fighting)”? Both apply in their own right as yes, yet again.
The latest proposal sent to Yahoo on Friday had a 24-hour time limit
to accept. It would have had Microsoft take over Yahoo’s search
business while putting a new board of directors, as chosen by Icahn,
in place to run the rest of the company.
Yahoo also name drops its new search advertising partner (and major
Microsoft rival), Google, quite prominently. Point number one of why
Yahoo rejected this latest deal reads:
Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.
I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.
As part of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s
YouTube, two weeks ago to disclose records, such as IP addresses and
usernames. Google was also supposed to turn over records that included
the viewing and uploading histories of YouTube employees, according to
the sources.
YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees
knew what was uploaded to the site–or posted pirated clips themselves
–YouTube could lose its protection under the .
YouTube maintains that the video-sharing site is an Internet service
provider and is protected by the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision, which
removes liability from ISPs for illegal acts committed by users. But
the DMCA requires that ISPs not have knowledge of the illegal acts or
not be able to prevent them.
YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from
uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other
copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing
infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.
Google has been accused of encouraging massive copyright violations by
Viacom and by a group of copyright holders represented by the
Proskauer Rose law firm. The group in Britain and France, and U.S.
television journalist Robert Tur.
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It’s not easy for a company that sees itself as a modern purist to
admit that it is considering moldy-worldy strategies.
In countries such as the UK, people used to go to the pictures, as
they so quaintly call it, early just to see the adverts.
But with YouTube, Google has the issue of a dedicated following whose
attention-span rivals that of a hamster having a nervous breakdown.
Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.
Those sites that incorporated it early have the benefit of advertising
already being part of their culture.
Google, on the other hand, in the search for something a little more
clever, a little more Google, has slipped into cultural quicksand.
When you have accumulated, say, fifty thousand, you could get a prize.
Maybe free child care for a year or something?
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Demand for public transit is on the rise and the has taken a step to
simplify the effort of getting from Point A to Point B.
If you are already a Business First subscriber please create or sign
into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid print
subscription and have access to the complete article.
The tale began Thursday when Web users started to notice that one of
Google’s most intensively searched terms that morning was not a term
at all, but a symbol — the swastika. Often, the terms on the
list reflect a burst of interest in some news- or commerce-related
event, and readers can use the list as a kind of cultural heat map
— for example, when the iPhone 3G went on sale on Friday. Yet
somehow the swastika had ascended to the top of the list without a
single swastika-related news story or blog post.
Also, the Chinese media had just reported on a scandal: The owners of
a commercial complex in the Xi’an province had adorned their building
with a mural of what was described as “a long black train with a Nazi-
inspired swastika” on the locomotive. Xinhua news agency quoted a
bystander: “If it’s creative, the businessmen were neglecting people’s
feelings; if that wasn’t their intention, then they do not understand
that part of history.”
An e-mailed statement suggested that the searches had come from “a
popular Internet bulletin board,” many of whose members were trying to
“find out more about this symbol.”
But Christophe Maximin, a 20-year-old French Web developer and
frequent 4chan user, said by phone from his home in London that he was
monitoring 4chan and watched the following scenario unfold:
Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of
[digitalspace.com] from 1996? What’s next, GoogleMUD?
That’d be cool. GoogleMUSH! @desc me=A grue. He is likely to eat
you.;@adesc me=@emit The Grue pours water on your lantern.
He has a point on porn: the terms of service forbid it, much to my
dismay, I must say. But then, it is open for anyone older than 13 so I
see no way Google could get around that.
Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.
1) Depict married couples in racey and stimulating scenes.2) Provide a
system that ensures that the actors are not exploited.3) ???4)
Profit!!!
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a “Windows
only” service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn’t
investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting
other platforms in future. That’s a non-starter in my book.
Goatse I guess I can understand, Rick Rolls are damn funny but really,
is there a huge endorphin rush that comes from saying ‘first post’
that I am missing? I would think that after the first thousand times
it really would not be fun for even the most childish of people.
Exactly…. Christian and Unbiased can’t really be said in the same
sentence and with a straight face.
I’m pretty sure slashdoter and unbiased can’t be said in the same
sentence with a stright face either. In fact you have to work pretty
hard to find anyone who is unbiased.
iPhone/iPod touch only: Google’s first offering in the iPhone App
Store comes in the form of Google Mobile, an application that
integrates your local contacts and the web for seamless searching
between the two. Developed in part by one of our favorite programmers
Nicholas Jitkoff (), Google Mobile brings many of the things we love
about Quicksilver to the iPhone—namely universal search. From
one search box, you can look up web sites (I’m Feeling Lucky-style),
entries on Wikipedia, call any contact, or access their contact card.
The app also uses your location data for local search, so searching
for pizza will give you a link to search for pizza places in Google
Maps.
you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was
But don’t look up: The FBI and the Secret Service, in the form of the
, maintain a regional office in the Hills Plaza building on the floor
above Google.
Of course, Google’s brand and business model both count for a lot,
too, nowadays. But the praising people always goes over well when
addressing those very same people.
I mean, how much applause do you think Newsom would have received had
he said its all about patents, servers, lack of competent competitors,
and consumer inertia?
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InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
According to Google’s official blog, Gmail users will no longer have
to worry about fake messages pretending to be from PayPal or eBay.
Google displays a message to its Gmail users above the email warning
that the message may not be from the sender that it claims. However,
if the message sender claims to be eBay or PayPal, will now
automatically check to see if the message has a DomainKey signature.
If the message doesn’t, the message will just disappear, leaving users
with a clean Inbox and the security of knowing that the ones that did
make it through really are from eBay and PayPal.
SPF has recently come under fire for not being effective for users who
redirect all mail to Gmail or other ISPs because the server
verification breaks and Google automatically rejects those forwarded
messages. This wouldn’t apply for DKIM, since DKIM is an encrypted
signature in the data of the message, independent of a server lookup.
Indoctrination into the socio-liberal philosophy can be very
expensive. Just look at the high cost in California, and they aren’t
providing any basic education at all.
Copyright © 2008 Silicon Alley Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our .
As part of a planned UK launch of Street View – a tool which allows
users to navigate using 360-degree street level pictures – the search
engine has deployed a fleet of camera cars to log details.
Jul 11, 2008, 8:33 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:30 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:27 am Jul
11, 2008, 8:13 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:04 am Jul 10, 2008, 6:10 am
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[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.
Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask
“You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can
use special generated source code to easily write and read your
structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a
variety of languages,” Google’s documentation states.
Google will release Protocol Buffers under the Apache 2.0 open source
license, and some of the technology involved may well be patented.
That shouldn’t be a concern for potential users, however.
“There is some patent activity around Protocol Buffers, but I’d like
to point out that we use the Apache license, which grants permission
to use any applicable patents,” DiBona told InternetNews.com.
The potential for Protocol Buffers could well be large. Google is not
currently using Protocol Buffers as a replacement for XML-based Web
services — at least not yet. In response to a question from
InternetNews.com about whether Protocol Buffers could be leveraged to
create some kind of smaller, faster Web services/SOA alternative,
Google developer Varda noted, “That sounds like a possibility, but we
have no firm plans at this time.”
“We would love for there to be PHP support for Protocol Buffers, and
we hope that the open source community will take this up,” Varda said.
“We would be happy to provide whatever assistance we can.”
In fact participation in continuing the development of Protocol
Buffers is something Varda hopes will happen now that the technology
is open source.
Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)
Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.
So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.
Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers,
Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is
for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this
week.
Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.
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The term cloud computing started when network architects started
drawing diagrams for their presentations. The architects had symbols
for computers and servers and hard drives and switches, but they
didn’t have a universal symbol that represented “the Internet.”
It became common to talk of pushing data “into the cloud” to represent
using the internet to send files to and from servers and Web sites.
Why does this matter? Well, in order to buy those shirts, you need
money. And if you are buying more shirts than you’re selling shirts,
you’re losing money. If you’re a business, you won’t be in business
much longer.
But, countries aren’t businesses. They are, well, countries, and can
print all the money they want. People who deal with currencies, or
each country’s version of money, look at trade deficits as one way to
find out how much each country’s currency is worth. If you have to
print more money, each dollar you print can possibly lower the value
of the other dollars out there. Like stocks, you can buy and sell
currencies on what’s called the foreign-exchange market (or, if you
want a buzzword for the office, say Forex market).
Trade deficits are usually a good thing, because it shows that the
global economy is working. It’s just when a trade imbalance gets too
high where economists and investors start to become concerned.
DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.
The market has become increasingly aware of the advantages of
navigation and Global Positioning System (GPS) tools, especially for
vehicle navigation systems. These tools include both built-in systems
and Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs), which are handheld devices
that users can carry with them and use in their vehicles. Industry
analysts estimate that sales of PNDs will grow from approximately 14
million units in 2006 to approximately 56 million units in 2011. As
the demand for these personal navigation devices continues to grow, so
does the need for better quality images covering more parts of the
world.
Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. is a rising player in the field
of geographic information systems (GIS) and navigation applications.
The Company brings advanced software capabilities to a wide range of
users and devices, previously only accessible to trained professionals
on dedicated devices.
— Highly-effective off road, outdoor GPS navigation tools, working on
a full range of devices including Car PC, PDA, and Personal Navigation
Devices (PND), with options for 3D imaging.
— Innovative, affordable GIS tools easily used in a range of
applications, including businesses, agriculture, surveys, and
government agencies.
The paper’s front page is screaming furiously that the arrival of
Street View in the UK could be a privacy-invading nightmare – saying
Google’s cars “WILL PHOTOGRAPH EVERY DOOR IN BRITAIN”.
However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.
‘However, given the number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day,
I’m not sure that a Google car counts as the biggest infringement of
my liberties right now.’ It’s not a zero-sum game, is it? You don’t
just pick the things that seem the most threatening now and *ignore*
the rest, if only because it’s easier to sort out privacy implications
before they become huge problems. Maybe, for example, if a little more
attention had been paid to Google’s hoarding of data – or its
statements on the privacy of IP addresses – recent hoohas could have
been avoided. It’s this sort of attitude that makes me distrust so
many of the campaign groups who claim to be protecting me but who roll
over depending on who the threat comes from – and to value the ones
who don’t take no prisoners even when I think they’re being a little
creepy, intense or insane. By the way, would it really be better if
the feeds from all CCTV cameras were publically available?
adambowie1 – sorry to be pedantic but hey it’s Friday afternoon. As a
Public Space CCTV manager I can tell you that any number of Freedom of
Information requests would be rejected as CCTV footage falls outside
of FOI as it is a Data Protection issue. So my advice is ask for a DP
form and save yourself some time.
Also it isn’t perfectly legal to set a camera up on your house and
film anything. If you camera looks onto anothers property you would be
breaching privacy rules and even filming past your own borders and
into the public space could be challenged.
I must admit that I find it more scary that people stop me taking
photos outside in public places rather than me stopping Google from
doing the same. We all have cameras on our mobiles and happily snap
away anywhere.
As you say, if you’re in a public place, then by the very nature of
that place, you can be seen, photographed and videoed.
I think it’s a terrible invasion of privacy, which is why I’m going to
render their photo of my house useless by standing naked in the front
window at all times.
@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.
@CharlesArthur. Daily Mail have removed it, but it is still available
in a cache form, if you type “invasion almost criminal” into Google,
and click the second, indented link.
Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t have thought that the best way, as
a commercial company, of responding to accusations that you might be
complicit in reduction of civil liberties would be to indulge in a
little bit of libel tourism.
@lb001 @Charles. Bizarley the Mail seems to have left a text version
of the “almost criminal” (almost insane?) words of AN Wilson. So just
to ensure they are not lost for posterity:
Now the facility has been brought down to street level, and at the
press of a key on your computer, you will be able to summon up the
image of any street. An arrow on the picture will direct you to your
own door – or indeed to anyone else’s door
We are surely entitled to ask by what right Google is intruding into
our lives to this degree?
However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.
But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because of
the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by cold-
call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.
Google thereby builds up a profile of your range of interests. This
profile is of great marketing value.
Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.
But that is an argument about the power of the state to interfere in
the lives of citizens.
Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.
Want to upgrade your iPhone? Only via O2’s site, which is wavering in
and out of reality… (updated) (and now they’re “gone”!)
. Schilit, Yang, and McDonald propose something called activity
monitoring, in which a smart home would watch your movements, helping
with such mundane tasks as reminding you to take medication that you
missed, or feed the cat. That’s a level of making life easy that I
just don’t want Google to be involved in.
San Francsico Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) with Google co-founder Larry
Page at event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last year
On Thursday night, the mayor spoke at the official opening of Google’s
San Francisco office (never mind that the office has been ). He was in
fine form in welcoming the company’s employees, who occupy a few
floors in a building on the Embarcadero with stunning views of the
Bay.
“I didn’t know there was this much drinking,” Newsom told the crowd of
Googlers, leaving unsaid his own .
Google is already thinking of easing the commutes within the office. A
slide is planned that will whisk workers between floors, in what is
perhaps the ultimate throwback to the Internet bubble years.
The open house was attended by employees from all facets of Google’s
massive organization, including Google.org and the newbies from the
Doubleclick acquisition. Headlining the event was one of Google’s top
executives and public faces, Marissa Mayer.
“This is a city of doers and dreamers,” overflowing with technology
and new-media companies drawn to a place that celebrates, not just
tolerates, diversity, Newsom said, drawing applause.
Newsom is internationally known for his controversial stand on gay
marriage. “Gayglers” — gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
employees at Google — organize a presence in pride parades around the
world, including San Francisco.
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Alex Pham covers consumer electronics and video games (no, she doesn’t
get to play World of Warcraft all day). She has been a business
reporter for nearly two decades, writing for the Oregonian, the
Washington Post, USA Today and the Boston Globe before joining the
Times in 1999 at the peak of the dot.com bubble. When not chewing on
SEC filings, Alex enjoys mixing up Lego bricks with her son. alex.pham
@ latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.
Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an
earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning
over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment late
Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were unsuccessful.
Yahoo has estimated that it can boost its annual revenue by about $800
million by relying on Google’s superior technology to show some ads
alongside the search results on its Web site.
Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program
that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars
with teen appeal for socialising. It’s a pretty simple: it’s about
chatting in rooms that can be customised to reflect your taste, and is
nothing like as grandiose as something like Second Life or There. It’s
not a single persistent world, but a bunch of ad hoc virtual spaces
that let people come together and show off their avatar identity
through chatting and flirting.
One thing Google doesn’t do is bet against the web, and as you’d
expect Lively is firmly web-based: it runs in your browser after
you’ve downloaded an applet (if you’re lucky – it keeps crashing
my browsers). The idea of a 3D experience that can be easily built and
accessed via the web, rather than some huge downloadable client is a
solid one. It’s one of the principles behind virtual world heavy-
weight Ralph Koster’s company, Metaplaces. However, Metaplaces has
much grander ambitions, and wants to provide web-based tools that will
scale from simple games to rich virtual worlds: according to its
website, “We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play
everything, from anywhere.”
Google’s Lively team seem to want you to, uh, hang around in some cool
online chat rooms and exchange virtual hugs. To be honest, the whole
thing seems a bit underwhelming. Its launch reminds me a bit of
Google’s social network site, Orkut. This was another project, like
Lively, that was developed by a Google employee in part of the
“20 per cent time” devoted to individual pet projects, and
another one that has not really set the world alight. Orkut is a
perfectly respectable online community, but of course something of an
also-ran in a world now dominated by My Space and Facebook.
For now, Lively is what we’ve got: that’s the science fact. However,
given Google’s extraordinary scale and the immense possibilities
created by its huge web audience, I can’t help thinking more along the
lines of science fiction, imagining where Google could take this
technology and do something really interesting with it.
The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.
TypePad rolled out its blogging application for the iPhone. Google’s
Blogger received no such special treatment. There was at least one RSS
product available from the App Store, but Google’s Reader wasn’t one
of them. The list could go on.
Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long. Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle? Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.
With no native application to install, it would likely not be a drain
on your battery. Having an always available connection like 3G or Wi-
Fi would ensure that you can hop in and out of rooms at your leisure.
To top it all off, location based chat rooms and hangouts would be
sure to go over well. Imagine a room full of high school students
talking to each other in front of a landmark. Or virtual tour guides
to answer questions from visitors and tourists. I could see virtual
movie or television sets where you can meet your favorite stars for
some Q&A.
Learn to address security risks in wireless handheld computing systems
with a solution that provides end-to-end security
… where retail meets industry – The fourth edition of the No. 1
European Navigation Event will take place in the inspiring environment
of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.
Ratproxy is an audit system written internally and introduced last
week by Michal Zalewski, a respected security researcher hired by
Google almost a year ago to help lock down the company’s own websites.
The tool has been used at Google for unearthing problems such as
cross-site script inclusion threats, insufficient cross-site request
forgery defences, caching issues, cross-site scripting candidates,
potentially unsafe cross-domain code inclusion schemes and
information-leakage scenarios, according to Zalewski.
The proxy works passively by analysing existing, user-initiated
traffic, and is particularly tuned for complex Web 2.0 environments,
Zalewski said in a blog post.
Google has come under increasing pressure in recent months to tighten
its security strategy. Last month StopBadware.org, a site sponsored by
Google, found that Google itself was one of the top five networks
hosting malicious web pages, largely due to the popularity among
attackers of Google-owned networks such as Blogger. The other four
top-five networks were based in China.
What was achieved there is recognised to be of fundamental importance
to both winning the war (Churchill visited to say ‘thank you’ to them)
and the development of the computer. Maybe Bill Gates doesn’t want to
support this museum because it underlines where electronic computing
started i.e. here, not the U.S.
It was not so long ago, April 1, 2004, when Google mail first
appeared. In 2005 there were 5.4 mln subscribers and 51 mln in early
2007. Do you know how many Gmail accounts were registered…
Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.
A DERBY academic believes criminals will be getting
“fatter”, sitting at home planning burglaries, thanks to a
controversial new website.
“Obviously, it’s not going to make it harder for someone
planning a burglary to have access to this.”
South Derbyshire MP Mark Todd said: “Taking photos of people
outside their homes leaves an opportunity for those images to be
misused.
Labour colleague Bob Laxton, MP for Derby North, said: “If there
is a way the Government can control it, they should.”
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”
But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.
Story published at magicvalley.com on Saturday, July 12, 2008Last
modified on Saturday, July 12, 2008 12:24 AM MDT
By Cassidy FriedmanStaff writerThe people at Google first felt obliged
to capture images of the boring U.S. cities in their virtual tour of
America.Places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.But Twin
Falls locals say they’ve spotted the Internet company’s distinctive
camera car in their town, a sign the company must be planning to add
this town to the ranks of the big cities.The company can’t actually
say for sure – the cars now traversing the nation operate
independently. But a Google spokeswoman said it’s likely the car –
which shoots 360-degree street-level photographs of all public roads
where it travels – cruised through Twin Falls earlier this
month.Chances are, the car spotted in Twin Falls was first deployed to
a larger metropolitan area like Boise, before it expanded its trip
east through Twin Falls, said spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.”We have
over 60 metropolitan areas,” Filadelfo said. “And within each of those
metropolitan areas we really try to include the surroundings. We think
everywhere can benefit from this. We think everybody, whether they
live in New York or Twin Falls can benefit.”Filadelfo said each car in
Google’s large fleet is armed with a sophisticated camera mounted on
its roof that shoots still photographs at and between
intersections.The photos, to be added to Google Maps at some
unspecified date in coming months, allows an on-screen visual tour.One
reason for the StreetView effort is to allow users the novelty of
taking a virtual drive through most American cities and a dozen or so
national parks. But the program also satisfies practical needs,
Filadelfo said.In one Midwestern state, department of transportation
officials use the program to identify dilapidated roads they need to
pave, Filadelfo said. It saves gas and time, they said. Viewers can
check out a restaurant’s ambience – at least exterior – before they
dine there. They can see a neighborhood before they rent a home on the
block.”We’ve seen a lot of really great uses of it and heard some
great feedback,” the spokeswoman said.It’s unclear how long the photos
will be of use, however. The company is unclear on when it might make
subsequent passes and update the street scenes.Google hit a patch of
rough road when some members of the public caught in StreetView’s
frames complained the photographs posted online invaded their
privacy.Viewers could request their face or private property be
blotted out.When shooting Manhattan in May, Google blurred all the
faces in its imagery, Filadelfo said.By June, despite having the clear
legal upper hand to shoot photographs of what takes place in public,
Google began blurring faces in all its shots. So don’t expect to be
famous for anything but your shirt and shoes, Twin Falls.”We thought
the focus was on business and geography and it just seemed a way to
preserve that,” Filadelfo said.Cassidy Friedman may be reached at
208-735-3241 or .
We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is
missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We
apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.
Obviously the swastika carries hateful connotations. But if a service
purports to accurately represent people’s searches, who gets to decide
what counts as offensive? The swastika isn’t a derogatory term or
obscene word; it’s a symbol with a history.
Update(10:14 p.m.): Google has refused to comment on whether their
position is that a swastika is offensive. They would also not say if
it was an Israel-based employee who made the decision to remove the
entry from Hot Trends, though earlier a spokesperson stated that
delays in getting a comment on the situation were in part due to the
Google Trends team’s being based in Tel Aviv.
Why not post something educational which links to the “offensive”
image for the dingbats concerned, rather than kowtowing to “politcally
correct” outrage that only serves to reinforce the empowerment of a
symbol that shouldn’t be given such impact any more?
Google is evil. They’ve never been a neutral arbiter of anything.
Money is all that matters. Get over it.
I am surprised and dismayed that Google removed swastika from Google
Trends. After all, people will continue to search for swastika, trends
or no trends.
Thank god. Now that that’s out of my system I see I am not alone after
reading others’ opinions on Adina’s comment.
I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.
Censorship is generally evil. Censoring information about what is
being censored and who the censors are is particularly egregious.
Let’s not let Google keep mum about what precisely happened, because
by censoring the Hot Trends data, Google can mislead the people
concerning what they are thinking. After that, it is a tiny step for
most to be told what to think. Who made Google the world’s Ministry of
Propaganda?
If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but
you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.
Not Canadian, But its interesting to watch this particular story. So
goes the north, so will follow the rest IMHO… so this seems to be
the thing to watch and learn from.
It’s about time that a more powerful company steps in to help out with
this fight. BT Throttling is just BS and we all know it. DPI is also
something that shouldn’t be implemented. The number of ways an ISP can
manipulate this technology is too overwhelming.
Idiot. You really shouldn’t comment on something you obviously don’t
have a clue about….. You seem to have missed this section, or did
you actually bother to read the article? “As previously reported in
BetaNews, in May, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Internet
Clinic (CIPPIC) asked another agency, the Canadian Privacy Commission,
to investigate whether Canadian privacy law is being broken in Bell’s
use of deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to find and limit the
use of P2P applications.” Its NOT the government, but a corporation
that is limiting rights, like what is happening even more so in
America right now…. Canadians have more rights and freedoms than the
average American does now. We have better privacy laws. Canada is a
democracy. The USA isn’t and never has been. Its a Constitution-based
federal republic with a strong democratic tradition.
Toronto — Re Google Raises Fuss Over Bell’s Speed Bumps (Report on
Business, July 9): Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
have been slowing, shaping and restricting Internet traffic for some
time. In addition, the line between traditional television and new
media has been getting blurrier every day. Because of this, the CRTC
is set to revisit its 1999 decision to exempt the Internet from
regulation.
A Canadian Internet policy that ignores the electronic-screen impact
of allowing the Web to be fully “regulated” by conglomerates that
would kill the Canadian Television Fund, shut down the CBC and bump
Canadian services to bring us more Fox News and Turner Movie Classics
would truly be a Quisling fox in the True North chicken coop.
Google Inc. says Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
that slow or restrict certain types of Internet traffic are violating
Canadian law and is calling on federal watchdogs to put a stop to the
process.
Google’s comments, which were filed with the commission on July 3 and
made public by the CRTC over the weekend, were submitted in support of
a complaint made by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers
(CAIP), a group of independent Internet service providers (ISPs) that
lease network access from Bell.
Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.
Bell and other ISPs that shape Internet traffic argue that if they
didn’t employ such techniques, peer-to-peer file sharers would clog
their networks, leading to slower speeds for all consumers.
“This proceeding offers the commission an opportunity to start to draw
a line against telecom measures that are not technologically and
competitively neutral – protecting consumers, competition and
innovation.”
He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.
For immediate access to this article, as well as the most recent
edition of Pittsburgh Business Times online, become a print
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769 comments
, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing
Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning
over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the .
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Google could then request the records, but the data storage company
could refuse to approve the request, and there would be no way for
Google to force the other company to provide the information.
Because the use and manner which the records could be accessed would
be spelled out by some binding agreement.
And for google to “request all the records” from their separate
company formed to hold the records would be an operation requiring
special permission, extensive justification, and full disclosure,
regarding reasons for the request, which the board of the other
company would have to vote on (after researching to guarantee that
Google is not possibly under any kind of duress in making the request,
to release information).
To cover themselves legally. The issue of whether YouTube and other
similar sites are responsible for the gazillion copyright violations
that occur there is legally still up in the air. This Viacom lawsuit
should hopefully clear it up but until then Google’s position is that
they are doing everything they can to prevent copyrighted materials
from being posted. Keeping the logs helps them keep up that pretense –
they can cooperate if need be and identify the violators etc. They
have no legal requirement to g
Personally, I like to be able to find a video which I watched
yesterday to send link to a friend.
Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way. The problem is that we I.T. people
are Data Hoarders. Even if the data isn’t useful today, or at all
useful into the foreseeable future, we still hang on to it. And we
save every detail we can just to prove how clever we are to have been
able to discover it in the first place. (Note: P2P program writers are
the same, and that’s how Media Sentry can tell you so much about
filesharers they discover on the Internet right down to the full
directory paths of files.) Now if storage wasn’t so d@mn cheap we
wouldn’t have this habit, but Moore’s Law applied to disc drives means
we no longer have to store 2-digit years and have Y2K problems. We
have these problems now instead.
This is why the RIAA is able to use IP addresses combined with
timestamps to identify ISP account holders. It doesn’t identify any
actual copyright infringers, but they don’t care as long as they have
somebody to sue. If these logs were deleted after 3 days this whole
RIAA mess would have been a non-starter.
Don’t be evil at Google seems to mean don’t destroy data you never
needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to
keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than
just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.
I would also like to know how the judge has completely ignored the
[privacilla.org]? If it’s on the Internet suddenly all privacy concern
automatically goes away, even if you’re engaged as a customer of a
company with a published privacy policy offering you many protections?
> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way.
But the problem isn’t Google, it’s us. We keep using Google, though we
knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant
revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.
Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with
a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they
understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated.
But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can
push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail
accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or
pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland
basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in
any industry that has annoyed them over the years.
Why would the **AA sue me? I’ve never uploaded, downloaded, or
sideloaded any of their stuff. They have nothing I want. If they sue
me it will be because they fucked up and confounded me with someone
else.
just say they were ‘lost’ and that the backups were destroyed or lost
due to shady backup practices. works for the White House.
And this is what I can think of in 2 minutes. With more time a lot of
other things can leak.
If privacy is to have any meaning, then we need a right to protect our
personal information. Well, actually we already have the right, though
it’s a bit scattered around the Bill of Rights. (Speaking for
Americans, and only in theoretical terms as regards the current
administration.)
So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.
Only when there is centralized control of Internet usage is there a
privacy issue. Imagine being part of a cooperative with 34 connections
to various ISPs, and all of the 12000 users in the cooperative using
something like TOR. Standard Internet browser usage would be
anonymized completely. The idea that you should be identifiable comes
from the fact that there is a way currently to identify you. If your
packets arrived to the greater Internet backbone from more than one
source and more than one IP, it would be anonymous, and the ‘grid’
would be truly that. If you and 14999 of your friends decide to make a
mesh network using wireless and landline connections at each node, it
would be impossible for anyone to identify your network habits. It
would also be nearly impossible to cause a network-only outage. Power
loss could still be catastrophic. My point is this, if you truly want
anonymity, you have to work hard for it. Most people don’t want to.
Consequences of that are inevitable, unavoidable, costly.
I believe that this *IS* the answer to the problems of network
neutrality. Force the powers that be to accept that they cannot
regulate private networks by building our own outside of their useless
understanding of how things work. When they finally discover that they
cannot regulate, things will change a bit. I’m all for calling it a
patriot network… might be over the top a bit, but we all need to
start creating them.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
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There probably aren’t many people who have made money betting against
Google; the company repeatedly tops Wall Street expectations and
generally knocks the socks off investors. What’s not to love?
“We expect Google’s second-quarter results to be inline or slightly
better than consensus estimates, driven by: a) continued gains in
U.S.-search market share, b) international growth and c) monetization
improvements,” said Youssef Squali, a financial analyst for Jefferies
& Co.
One of them was a £30m executive Airbus bought as a birthday
gift for his wife on her 44th birthday. (He is said to be planning to
give her a $1 billion 27-storey home on her next birthday complete
with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking — which
goes to show that you can top a £30m jet as a present.)
A clever banker pitched the idea but Green didn’t much care for
the plan and instead opted to buy a 25% stake in Ask Jeeves —
Google’s punier rival.
Mr. Smith asks that the feature take into account bicycle lanes from
the area being mapped. The says that such a feature would:
Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.
Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.
If you’re going to bike somewhere, you’d imagine that it
wouldn’t be much more than 40 kms (24.85 miles or a little over
an hour bike ride) away, right? Cause any more than that and
you’ll have a 3+ hour bike ride there and back. So why
wouldn’t you know how to get to a destination on your bike
that’s only an hour bike ride away? Get a life.
A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is
nobody’s idea of a good time. It’s clear to anyone who is paying
attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green
covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an
environmentally sustainable future.
First, the news: Google Transit and Metro are still in talks to bring
the popular online service to Los Angeles County. but a feature that
some people say Google does better.
Several large agencies in California have signed up with Google,
including OCTA in Orange County, the largest transit agencies in the
Bay Area including BART and Caltrain and the MTS in San Diego. The
Burbank bus system is also featured on Google Transit.
“We’re continually working with several transit agencies across the
country (and internationally) to bring their schedules to Google
Transit. Our goal is ultimately to provide schedules and stop/station
data for every transit agency; basically, whenever a user searches for
(driving) directions, we want a “Take Public Transit” link to appear
to show the alternative options available. Being able to find an
agency’s stops and schedules via Google Maps helps introduce the
convenience of public transportation to people who did not previously
consider it a viable option. Having a major city like Los Angeles
participate would be a great benefit for both residents and
tourists/visitors. Elsewhere in the region, we currently provide trip-
planning for Burbank Bus and OCTA.”
Some quibbles: I thought the directions were sometimes less than
clear. For example, I asked the site to provide bus directions from
Magnolia Boulevard and San Fernando Road in downtown Burbank to the
Burbank airport. The directions were to take one bus to the Burbank
Metrolink station and switch to the “Empire Building” bus line, which
was followed by this odd note: “Direction — Arrive at Metrolink
station.”
I was also underwhelmed by Google Transit on my beloved and highly
intelligent iPhone. There is a simplified version of Google Transit
for phones, but the directions I asked for did not include a map. Yes,
I could have switched over to the phone’s Google map feature, but I
shouldn’t have to go to two different places on the phone, particulary
two places powered by Google.
I asked the Google press office about this also and they replied that
Google Transit is currently available for Blackberry and Java-based
phones (here’s a from Google) and that Google is working to bring it
to more platforms. Note to Google: the 2.0 version of the iPhone comes
out next week and is expected to sell like hotcakes.
In addition, Google does not display bus/rail disruptions or other
alerts related to your trip. It does not give users options to plan
trips by Walking Distance or Minimize Trips by Transfer Time, Walking
Distance or Transfers. Furthermore Google doesn’t recognize as many
locations as the transit provider’s tripplanner and may have outdated
data.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Google Transit is great, but for more
detailed itineraries I will use the transit companies trip planner.
Try communicating with one of them on a personal level they are so
insular it’s incredible. They have receptionists that have graduate
degrees just to swish the public away..
Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.
Metro’s bus and rail schedules are “proprietary”? Huh? Last I checked
they are distributed on paper, over the phone, on the web, and created
from start to finish, including the software systems used to maintain
the data, with taxpayer money. That doesn’t seem like something that
can be defined at “proprietary”. Move into the current century Metro,
and hand it over to Google. A transit agency so proud of its poor
product that it is frightened of someone else offering to improve it
for free? Yeah, sure, that’s what we pay them for….one can only
shake their head at yet another brilliantly dumb notion, public
transit information is “proprietary”. Metro gives away real time
traffic data for free – why should Google Transit be any different?
Guess car drivers still outrank bus riders – must be that sales tax
income from the high price of gas clouding their vision.
Yes, it does the job, mostly, but it’s flaky as hell and almost
impossible for a newbie to use. You have to learn all sorts of stupid
tricks, like knowing that for some reason the Universal City subway
stop is called “University City Sta” in the planner. It also does a
shoddy job of telling you how long a commute is gonna take.
I say bring on Google. Yes Google’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s
essentially free and would let metro save money on bandwidth, upkeep,
and a bunch of other web costs while offering superior service.
Google Maps is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not Google’s
fault that Apple is dumb and only allows limited bits of AJAX to work
on their phones.
While I’m mostly appreciative of this transit system from Google
(thank you Google), I too have a couple peeves to point out…
2. While the approximations are usually close to the reality, there
have been many times that arrival time Google provides is incorrect
(result = missed bus). It would be nice if they could show (in
addition to their own?) the official arrival times provided by the
respective public transits
In the early days of Google Maps, my frustration chiefly arose from
the bizarre and sometimes nonsensical driving routes that the system
mapped out – with no option in place to test alternate routes. This
improved greatly with the click-and-drag feature Google Maps now uses,
although the traffic layer is still rather slow on the uptake.
I don’t bother with the map feature at Metro.net; it’s a joke. The
trip planner also suffers from constant crashes, something I don’t
*think* would carry over into Google (in the long term). I think that
Google’s interface promises a lot more user-friendliness, but I’d want
to know its flexibility: to option for Metro-only or bus-only routes,
for example. Click-and-drag for multiple-stop trips? If either Google
or Metro.net can manage that… HOT.
“Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to
include in your keyword list, you’ll be able to see the approximate
number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on
Google and the search network,” said Trevor Claiborne of Google’s
AdWords group in a Tuesday. (See an image of the tool in action
below.)
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(AT&T, the phone’s service provider, loaned me a pre-activated phone
to test. This meant I wasn’t caught in Friday’s activation nightmare
caused by Apple’s server problems.)
It’s an absolute breeze to install applications such as news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times, or the restaurant finder from
Seattle’s . You can load them from the phone, but it’s slow —
even with the faster network speeds. Or you could just click to add
them in iTunes, like a song.
Apple is heavy-handed with software developers writing iPhone
applications, but it pays off for consumers who get a consistent
experience downloading, finding and using the applications.
I also spent a long lunch tinkering with Remote, a cool and free
application from Apple that lets you use an iPhone or iPod Touch as a
wireless remote control for iTunes. This is something I’ve been
waiting for, ever since Wi-Fi came to MP3 players.
So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?
The iPhone software will continue to get better and it may stay ahead
of the competition, but the phone hardware may seem dated soon,
especially the wimpy 2 megapixel camera that can’t take video.
In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun
events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May,
to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.
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The owner of “Obama’s Chocolate Nuts” is feeling
like “the luckiest person on Earth” in the wake of the
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks about Sen. Barack Obama.
“Who would have thought anybody would use ‘Obama’
and ‘nuts’ in an actual news story?” said David
Feingold, a 30-year-old San Diego resident …
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by at
I tried it and had to disable it because it ruins Google Reader’s best
feature: its speed. It’s painfully slow. It would take something
awfully amazing for me to put up with an add-on that tanks GR
performance.
“Google protocol Buffers” is cooler than the OMG terminology, but this
kind of thing has been around for 20 years.
Technically, you are correct – platform-agnostic data transfer has
been possible since Sun’s earliest RPC implementations. However, this
seems to be considerably lighter-weight (although so is Mount Everest)
and because order is specified, it’s going to be much simpler to pluck
specific data out of a data stream. You don’t need to have an order-
agnostic structure and then an ordering layer in each language-
specific library.
There have been all kinds of attempts to produce this sort of stuff.
RPC, DCE, Corba, DCOM, etc, are programmatic interfaces and handle
function calls, synchronization, etc. OPeNDAP is probably the closest
to Google’s architecture in that it is ONLY data. It’s more
sophisticated, as it handles much more complex data types than mere
structures, but it has its own overheads issues. It isn’t designed to
scale to terabyte databases, although it DOES scale extremely well and
is definitely the preferred method of delivering high-volume
structured scientific data – at least when compared to the RPC family
of methods, or indeed the XML family. I wouldn’t use it for the kind
of volume of data Google handles, though, you’d kill the servers.
Yeah, I mean XML didn’t earn its reputation for being lightning fast
and byte efficient for nothing…
The example they give is for a small set of data, and percentages vary
more dramatically as sample sizes decrease.
We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too
much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every
news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment — including the
numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures — more than was
intended, but I guess that isn’t surprising.
I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.
In any case, I’m hoping that some independent source conducts some
tests because I think anything we produced would probably have
unintentional biases in it. Of course, I’ll update the numbers in the
docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.
Just wait for the XML zealots to come crashing and not believing that
XML is not the fastest, best, solution to all the world’s problems
(including cancer) and of course people at Google are amateurs and
id10ts and WHY DO YOU HATE XML kind of stuff.
Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn’t work well for them. They
have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it.
And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as
long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no
biggie. Good for them, I don’t begrudge that decision.
I’m actually a game developer, not a web developer, so I’ll speak to
XML’s use as a file format in general. Here’s a few points regarding
our use of XML:
* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.
2. Verification in situations when it’s impossible to devise a
meaningful reaction to a failure (other than either “everything
failed, turn off the computers and go home” and “assume the data to be
valid anyway because ALL of it will have the same formatting error
because the same program generates it”)
4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.
None of the above even remotely applies to anything practical except
UI/display formats — this is why XHTML and ODF (and because of that
at some extent XSL) are usable, SOAP is a load of crap, and for the
rest of purposes XML is used as a glorified CSL with angle brackets.
XML is widespread because monumentally stupid standard is still better
than no standard.
… now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as
protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention
like “@WORK” for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse
the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access
classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the
types. I don’t see that ‘required’ and ‘optional’ keywords help
much… imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But
this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.
They open sourced the compiler (for C++, Java, and Python) that lets
you actually use the data interchange format. If you follow the link
you can download the code and start using it today. The code is open
source.
Seems like you are missing the code they released that allows you to
implement this in a number of languages from the ‘get-go’.
You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.
PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it
comes to adding to the library. Genre’s are so unbelievably grey
defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of
the cover. Google would have done better.
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Live Ask
Google’s recent Summer of Code (SoC) initiative, which DiBona led,
pumped $2 million into more than 400 different open source project
spread across 41 organizations.
I don’t know if we’ll deal with them in a different way, but I think
we’ll be a lot more clear.
We have it structured very carefully so that we can include people in
other countries and also not invalidate the visas of students here in
the U.S. that took part. I think that next time should we do this it
will be a lot clearer up front that this is kind of complicated.
Q: Were there any real standout projects from Summer of Code that just
made you say “Wow”?
What that means is if you put in cancer or a certain kind of cancer
you can find out what genes in the human genome express that disease.
Or you can put in a gene and find out which proteins and genes it’s
connected to.
Q: One of the most widely used open source security tools, Nessus,
recently closed its source. There is now apparently a fork under
development. Is that something that Google would help to support?
Q: Is there any chance that Google would ever use one of the new ,
such as the Community License, that may well be free software-
compatible licenses?
We’re really happy with the Apache Software Foundation license and I
don’t think that it gets enough attention.
It’s good for us when we want to release software because it gives a
good amount of indemnification, which is what companies look for when
they release software. When we use software externally, the demands
that are put on us from a compliance point of view are pretty easy to
track.
For instance, when we release code we often just want people to be
able to use it and we don’t really care how. We just want them to see
the code and get out of it what we do, and the ASF license lends
itself quite well for that.
: woarhex etbdml
: My Lonely Planet book said that if you want to stay with a family
instead of the hotel you need to register…
Earlier, I about the explosions in ammunition storage in Kagan town
that is located in 12 km from Bukhara city. The explosions were the
result of a fire in the ammunition storage, which originally used to
be an ammunition storage for shells and warheads for Soviet military
operations Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from
Afghanistan in 1989, the ammunition supplies were left in Uzbekistan.
Here are the photos of Kagan and the ammunition storage in its
suburbs. The database of Google Earth pictures is old, as of last
winter, it seems.
Dan Berlin writes “After announcing that was being discontinued, a lot
of people asked for Google to open source the code so development
could continue. Well, they’ve done just that. The code for browser
sync is now available on ”
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Without JavaScript
enabled, you might want to use , you can remember this preference.
Thats a good point. With Google you knew where you stood. They might
use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the
government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to
spammers or pass on lists of people who bookmark anti-Islamic sites to
an Al-Qaeda operative. Without google hosting it you need to host your
own or find someone you can trust.
But with your data encrypted, why do you need to trust anyone? For you
it is the state of your browser, passwords etc, but for anyone else it
is random bits.
Might it be part of the reason they’re shutting down and releasing
source?They don’t want a judge to release the data to Corporation X.
I don’t understand people. You could send your sync data to _any_
server, even your own, it will *never* be totally safe. Just *_don’t_*
send data that can potentially harm you if it’s intercepted.
Personally, I sync only my bookmarks, and I don’t give a damn if
anyone ever gets access to them.
Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.
Google is built on software, some of which comes from the world of
open soruce, and most of which was written here. To give back, we both
release code from the company (a significant amount >1m lines per
year), fund external code (uncountable, really) and through the summer
of code, create new developers and even more code still (2.1m+ last
year, at least 3m this).
That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.
Open source their abandonware. The world would be a much better place,
and the companies wouldn’t get hurt.
Dang! First Reiserfs, now THIS…. I hope Linus checks criminal
records on patch submitters, or I’m TOTALLY switching to Vista;)
Is Amazon no longer a third party? Granted I trust them as much as I
trust Google (and from an advertising perspective, they probably have
better data about me as they have actual data points for my purchases,
not just my purchase-related searches) but that still seems like a
rather dumb statement.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
The map will cover all 21 stages of the race, which began on Saturday
in the coastal town of Brest and ends on 27 July in the Champs
Elysées in Paris.
“I am always amazed when I hear about the long, steep climbs through
mountains or the blistering speeds of the cyclists as they pass
through the French countryside,” wrote Google product manager Stephen
Chau.
The service generated controversy when it debuted in the US and has
been cause for concern with UK privacy groups.
© Incisive Media Ltd. 2008. Incisive Media Limited, Haymarket
House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4RX, is a company registered in
the United Kingdom with company registration number 04038503
Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?
You also can set e-mail notifications through Yahoo Calendar, although
I haven’t been able to get one to stick using Firefox.
When you’re adding an event in Internet Explorer, scroll down to the
reminders tab to send a reminder to your e-mail inbox, mobile phone or
Yahoo Messenger. You can schedule reminders from five minutes to two
weeks before the event.
Q: I earn my living as a writer, and years of material I would love to
retrieve is on floppy disks down in my basement. The problem is, the
disks are 5.25-inch floppies. The only thing I can do, as far as I
know, is print every page and scan it into my computer. Can you help
me find an easier, quicker, high-tech fix? Everyone I have consulted
about this problem has been stumped, including some world-class geeks.
However, the California outfit does offer a solution that’s probably
your best bet. For $5 per floppy, the company will transfer your data
from your 5.25-inch disk to CD. The turnaround is two business days,
and bulk discounts are available.
One caveat: The Web site warns that some data might be unrecoverable,
and that you’re paying for the attempt, not necessarily the results.
ANNE KRISHNAN, (RALEIGH) NEWS & OBSERVER
Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.
But while this might (might!) be interesting TV, we get the feeling
it’s going to be more Kabuki than anything else: The only way this
pact is relevant is if Yahoo keeps its existing management, or if it
isn’t eventually sold off/broken up. And while we’d like to see Yahoo
kept alive as a standalone company, and returned to its previous
glory, we’re sadly skeptical that we’re going to see that happen.
Institutional investors are mostly not tuned into the Google ()
Creative Suite. For Google and other SaaS-styled companies, it’s
not about product cycles. New products, particularly strategic ones,
do have a role to play and bear watching closely.
with a BSD-style license. The code is extensive – in addition to all
the required bits to hook it up to Firefox, you’ll find dozens of
Javascript files involved. Fortunately, the source is reasonably well-
commented, so it’s at least clear what’s happening where, if not how
to move it forward to the current version of Firefox.
One way or another, releasing this code should ultimately satisfy
those users who have missed the project – either some enterprising
developer will bring things up to scratch for Firefox 3.0, or the best
ideas can be melded into Weave or other projects.
In fact, one might speculate as to whether this sort of closed-to-open
strategy could become more formalized and popular. Suppose Google knew
in advance that this was their plan: they could have escrowed a copy
of the source code with some reliable third party, along with a
covenant to release on a certain date unless the covenant was revoked.
Such a plan might ultimately bring us more open source software, by
encouraging innovation with slightly lower risk.
In any case, it’s good to see this particular project out in the open,
and as a Firefox user I’d love to see someone pick up the ball and run
with it.
© 2008 OStatic. Design by . Built on fine Open Source Software
from projects like , , , , and .
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment
A large number of . But the glitch illustrates not just the troubles
with cloud computing, but also the gradual progress in making the
concept palatable.
Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)
Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
“With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative
console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the
phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it,” Chandra
said.
Applications include wide-area surveillance systems such as those at
military bases, airports, railroad stations, borders, coastlines,
harbors, and power plants, .
The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.
The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing Safari’s initial
loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.
Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on
compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like
a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here.
One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work
on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform
likely won’t allow.
Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool,
there are some things to note about the embed option that some might
consider shortcomings.
For one thing it will auto-publish any changes when it auto-saves
(something you can turn off, but having it on takes some effort out of
the equation). This might be troublesome for some users who are simply
jotting down ideas and don’t want them to go live yet. Also, whatever
you write might not get picked up so well in your RSS feed, or for
mobile readers. The post nearly locked up Safari when viewed on an
iPhone.
I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply
the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).
Google Autos or Google Music are the guesses that Hitwise hazarded
Wednesday. “Our thinking was that Google might want to fill natural
gaps in its portfolio of offerings based on the interests of its
users. We looked at which categories are receiving the most traffic
from Google in which Google does not have its own property,” .
“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
Google it is now using an e-mail authentication technology to keep
phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal Web pages in
order to steal usernames and passwords.
The technology, , uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender
of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from
which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of
phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.
Google Maps, which recently , notes to “use caution when walking in
unfamiliar areas,” which is Googlespeak for “don’t blame Larry and
Sergey if you get mugged.”
Analysts and investors also say that Google is enjoying the estimated
$70 million to $80 million it receives annually from AOL by providing
search advertising services, and is unlikely to want to risk AOL’s
taking its business to rivals.
AOL emerged as one of the most attractive alternatives for a deal with
either Microsoft or Yahoo after Microsoft walked away from its buyout
offer in May, but potential buyers have been wary of its history of
strategic missteps and of sluggish growth in its advertising business.
Google’s “deal with Yahoo muddies the waters,” said Larry Haverty, a
portfolio manager at the Time Warner investor, Gabelli & Co.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he said of Google exercising its option
on AOL.
But “it’s looking increasingly less likely,” Lindsay said, that Time
Warner will find a taker for AOL. “There’s less incentive to take it
public now, and less likely that AOL will have a deal with either
Yahoo or Microsoft. It’s back to status quo with much lower energy.”
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Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with
Google.
But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users,
who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally
identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do
not refute that the ?login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users
create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube? which without
more ?cannot identify specific individuals?.”
Here’s the problem – I don’t know if Viacom will live up to their
promise, or not. The fact that Google is to hand over employee data
tells me they’re not so sure, either. And frankly I shouldn’t have to
care or have to worry about Viacom’s trustworthiness. As a user I
interacted only with Google, and there are implicit and explicit
promised by Google to protect my data. If Google hands my data over to
Viacom, it doesn’t really matter to me if Viacom uses it or not. All I
will remember is that Google gathered and stored information without
my consent, and then handed it over at the first sign of trouble.
Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.
by July 12, 2008 4:49 PM PDT @JCPayne , you also claim that: ?with all
the resources Microsoft has– they are admitting that they aren’t
smart enough to put together an ad network?Yeah? You mean like how
Google tried their own video sharing network, failed at it, and went
and bought Youtube so they could dominate web video sharing ? Earth to
JCPayne, companies regular buy other companies. Google has bought
plenty of companies even in their short life span as a company. As for
Microsoft launching a strong protest against a Google/Yahoo pact, it
sounds very good to me. After all, Google has virtually taken
permanent residence at the DOJ and at the EU Commission, constantly
whining against non-existent ?crimes? that they claim Microsoft
thinking of committing, its only fair that Microsoft strongly hit back
against the very real danger of Google?s rabid monopolistic maneuvers,
while at the same time giving Google, the same thing Google has been
giving Microsoft in the last 5 years at least. Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 8:27 PM PDT Where is the lock in that keeps customers
dependent and keeps out competitors?All this proves is what everyone
already knew: MS can not succeed on a level playing field. Reply to
this comment
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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 “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
Once you’ve logged into the MySpace application you are
presented with your own personalized home screen. You have immediate
access to your mood settings, profile, Friends Status and Mood,
Friends Updates, Comments, bulletins, and the ability to search for
other people. The interface feels a bit cramped on the iPhone’s
screen. Along the bottom you’ll find a row of five buttons that
immediately jump to home, mail, requests, friends, and photos.
Photo access is accomplished via the Camera Photo icon at the bottom
of the Apps screen. You can touch the “Add Photos” button
and add them directly from the iPhone’s camera or from your
iPhones photo library. Basic editing allows you to delete photos from
your MySpace profile.
The app also features a miniature version of My eBay. It shows you
active items and items where the auctions have ended at a glance that
you are watching, items you are buying or selling.
AOL’s Radio App for the iPhone and iPod touch is a native
streaming application that is also location aware. Once you confirm
access to your location it reveals local radio stations that provide
streamed radio programming in your area. In the Houston Bay Area, the
app revealed four stations: 100.3 KILT, CNN 650 Radio News, HOT 95.7
and Sports Radio 610. Other locales like Atlanta, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc. are offered.
Tapping the stations button displays stations that AOL recommends,
“What’s New,” AOL and CBS Radio, Genres, and
AOL’s spinner.com. Even on an iPhone using EDGE exclusively,
there was no noticeable interruption
When a call is received while audio is streaming in AOL Radio, the
music fades and your call rings through. If you decline to answer AOL
Radio starts up where it left off with out a hitch. However if you
accept the call and subsequently finish that call you have to re-
launch AOL Radio. It does not automatically restart. This follows the
rules Apple has for apps developed for the iPhone.
The Favorites button opens up a screen that will either display your
favorite streaming radio stations or individual songs you’ve
marked as favorites. Songs are added by touching the magnifying glass
next to the album art. You can find the song in iTunes or on AOL
Music. A “Remember This Song” feature allows you to add a
song to your favorites. Finally, there is a Recents button that does
exactly what it says – tracks your recent stations you listened to.
I’m not sure which classic rock song best describes the latest
in the Microsoft / Yahoo battle: “The Song Remains the
Same” or “Saturday Night’s All Right (For
Fighting)”? Both apply in their own right as yes, yet again.
Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.
I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.
As part of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s
YouTube, two weeks ago to disclose records, such as IP addresses and
usernames. Google was also supposed to turn over records that included
the viewing and uploading histories of YouTube employees, according to
the sources.
Since the judge issued the order, Viacom has been . “Viacom suggested
the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to
accept anonymous information since day one,” said a Viacom spokesman.
“Viacom and other plaintiffs never should have demanded private
viewing data in the first place,” a Google spokesman said in an
e-mail. “They should have agreed a week ago to let us anonymize it. We
are willing to discuss the disclosure of viewing activity of all the
relevant parties. But the simple issue of protecting user information
should be resolved now. Our users’ privacy should not be held hostage
to advance the plaintiffs’ additional litigation interests.”
According to the sources, Google and Viacom were close to reaching a
deal last week about masking user data when Google backed out.
YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees
knew what was uploaded to the site–or posted pirated clips themselves
–YouTube could lose its protection under the .
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Even in the last couple of years, I have heard US movie audiences hiss
the very presence of ads, as if by clutching their popcorn and putting
their feet up on the seat in front, they have suddenly become a VIP
audience at the Cannes Film Festival.
Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.
Google, on the other hand, in the search for something a little more
clever, a little more Google, has slipped into cultural quicksand.
It will find it very hard to expect its devotees to watch an ad before
every video. (tmz offers a series of videos daily. You only have to
watch one ad. And the one I just looked at was for Herbal Essences,
which promised to treat my non-existent hair to a luscious fragrance.)
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COTA on July 4 put a trip-planning tool developed by on its Web site
that allows users to punch in starting and ending addresses and – with
clicks of a computer mouse – get step-by-step directions for taking
the bus to their destination. The routes are displayed on the popular
Google Maps platform.
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The tale began Thursday when Web users started to notice that one of
Google’s most intensively searched terms that morning was not a term
at all, but a symbol — the swastika. Often, the terms on the
list reflect a burst of interest in some news- or commerce-related
event, and readers can use the list as a kind of cultural heat map
— for example, when the iPhone 3G went on sale on Friday. Yet
somehow the swastika had ascended to the top of the list without a
single swastika-related news story or blog post.
Various theories made their way around. A blogger named Dan at a site
called “tdaxp” noticed the strange phenomenon. “The swastika is a
traditional Chinese good-luck character, the Olympics are coming up
and good luck is on the Chinese mind.”
At some point on Thursday, a member of 4chan’s “b” channel posted a
simple two-part instruction. First, Google “卐”. Second, enjoy.
According to Maximin, hundreds or even thousands of 4chan members gave
it a try. “They just wanted to know what it was,” Maximin said. “And
what Googling it would do.”
Maybe I’m missing something, but that sounds like an extremely tight
implementation. It sounds to me like “draw the line distinctly and
allow everything up to that line”. You said it yourself: “almost naked
girl” with no actual sex scenes. It looks like they’re allowing
everything up to, but not over, the line.
It was slow. It was clunky. The interface was pretty disappointing.
Hell, even the ‘Avatar choosing’ part was badly done. I couldn’t tell
if I was supposed to be designing my own somewhere or just ‘using
someone elses’. It seems to be a half-baked beta indeed.
That’s a severe accusation. I tried Second Life. I thought of it as
all the design ‘quality’ and intelligence of myspace, now with 3D
goodness…
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a “Windows
only” service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn’t
investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting
other platforms in future. That’s a non-starter in my book.
Direct hit to the nail head. I was truly let down with Second Life. I
will even go back here and there to see if things changed but they
never do. Last time I ventured into second life I searched for ‘Beach’
and was treated to a picture of a girl fingering herself. I had hopes
for Second Life for businesses that I work with to have open house and
virtual tours for lodging. I would not think about suggesting it
anymore.
“Second Life is not a game,” Dwight replied authoritatively. “It is a
multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t have points or scores; it
doesn’t have winners or losers.”
iPhone/iPod touch only: Google’s first offering in the iPhone App
Store comes in the form of Google Mobile, an application that
integrates your local contacts and the web for seamless searching
between the two. Developed in part by one of our favorite programmers
Nicholas Jitkoff (), Google Mobile brings many of the things we love
about Quicksilver to the iPhone—namely universal search. From
one search box, you can look up web sites (I’m Feeling Lucky-style),
entries on Wikipedia, call any contact, or access their contact card.
The app also uses your location data for local search, so searching
for pizza will give you a link to search for pizza places in Google
Maps.
But don’t look up: The FBI and the Secret Service, in the form of the
, maintain a regional office in the Hills Plaza building on the floor
above Google.
Just think: Information sharing between Google and the government can
now be implemented using the shout protocol.
Having set up his answer, Newsom then posed a question: “What makes
Google so much better than its competitors?”
Of course, Google’s brand and business model both count for a lot,
too, nowadays. But the praising people always goes over well when
addressing those very same people.
I mean, how much applause do you think Newsom would have received had
he said its all about patents, servers, lack of competent competitors,
and consumer inertia?
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.
SPF has recently come under fire for not being effective for users who
redirect all mail to Gmail or other ISPs because the server
verification breaks and Google automatically rejects those forwarded
messages. This wouldn’t apply for DKIM, since DKIM is an encrypted
signature in the data of the message, independent of a server lookup.
Co-founder Brin breathlessly joined Page and Schmidt about half an
hour into the interview. Brin had been riding a bicycle and said he
had a flat. In his remarks, Brin was very emotional about the need for
good teachers and schools in the U.S. He was responding indirectly to
New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein’s earlier presentation
about the state of education in the country. “Another important factor
that nobody talks about is teachers’ salaries,” Brin said. “Teachers
are among the lowest paid professionals. At Google, we’ve been paying
our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they’re among the
lowest paid employees. I think it’s really important to have a living
wage for teachers.”
Are these people running a Public Corporation or a Charity? The MAIN
job of ANY senior executive running a publicly held corporation is
shareholder value. Period. This comment is invariably received with a
series of protests from the liberal corner but this is a core
assumption of capitalism. Sergei and Larry should use their personal
funds, and direct it to social causes. Education is a fantastic cause,
and yes I vehemently agree that Teachers needs better pay,
opportunities for self-improvement (meaning funding to take classes
themselves), and schools need better facilities and funding. This is
an already huge and yet, growing problem in the US and it would be
thrilling if Sergei and Larry took up the cause with their own funds.
Just not with public funds. Take a leaf out of Bill Gates’ book!
This is what Sergey is really saying: $57,000 Reggio Emilia day care
is for OUR children, and NYC public school day care is for YOUR
children. “At Google, we’ve been paying our teachers 25 per cent
more, but even with that, they’re among the lowest paid employees.”
Public school teachers in the bay area make $70-90k. Sergey’s really
paying them 25% more? BULL—-
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Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success – and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.
Windows Server Catalog: Certified Servers. Search the Windows Server
2008 catalog to find servers you can deploy with confidence.
For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.
“We do know that we will be using it ourselves in some of our upcoming
projects,” Google developer Kenton Varda said. “This is not a piece of
software that is unimportant to the company.”
“You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can
use special generated source code to easily write and read your
structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a
variety of languages,” Google’s documentation states.
Google will release Protocol Buffers under the Apache 2.0 open source
license, and some of the technology involved may well be patented.
That shouldn’t be a concern for potential users, however.
Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)
So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.
Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One
prime example is the site, which shows the response time for a
Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems
happened, what they affected, and what caused them.
“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
Asked whether Google plans its own status dashboard, Chandra wouldn’t
share details but promised better help for users. “We’re trying to
find even more ways to be more transparent about reliability,” he
said.
Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.
“We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than
most organizations with their internal service today,” Chandra said.
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In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?
The term cloud computing started when network architects started
drawing diagrams for their presentations. The architects had symbols
for computers and servers and hard drives and switches, but they
didn’t have a universal symbol that represented “the Internet.”
Trade Deficit
Everyone would agree they see more “Made in
Taiwan/China/Japan/etc…”tags than “Made in the USA” tags for the
past several years. Well, that “Made in _____” tag on your clothing
has an economic term sewn into it: trade deficit. A trade deficit
happens when one country buys more goods than it sells to other
countries.
Why does this matter? Well, in order to buy those shirts, you need
money. And if you are buying more shirts than you’re selling shirts,
you’re losing money. If you’re a business, you won’t be in business
much longer.
But, countries aren’t businesses. They are, well, countries, and can
print all the money they want. People who deal with currencies, or
each country’s version of money, look at trade deficits as one way to
find out how much each country’s currency is worth. If you have to
print more money, each dollar you print can possibly lower the value
of the other dollars out there. Like stocks, you can buy and sell
currencies on what’s called the foreign-exchange market (or, if you
want a buzzword for the office, say Forex market).
Well, because the U.S. has been buying a lot of stuff from China for
many, many years, China holds a lot of U.S. dollars. If China were to
sell those dollars on the market at some point, well, it wouldn’t be
very good. The U.S. dollar’s value would fall — making imports and
traveling abroad much more expensive.
Trade deficits are usually a good thing, because it shows that the
global economy is working. It’s just when a trade imbalance gets too
high where economists and investors start to become concerned.
The market has become increasingly aware of the advantages of
navigation and Global Positioning System (GPS) tools, especially for
vehicle navigation systems. These tools include both built-in systems
and Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs), which are handheld devices
that users can carry with them and use in their vehicles. Industry
analysts estimate that sales of PNDs will grow from approximately 14
million units in 2006 to approximately 56 million units in 2011. As
the demand for these personal navigation devices continues to grow, so
does the need for better quality images covering more parts of the
world.
Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. is a rising player in the field
of geographic information systems (GIS) and navigation applications.
The Company brings advanced software capabilities to a wide range of
users and devices, previously only accessible to trained professionals
on dedicated devices.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed. 2008 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
Just as David Davies standing on a civil liberties platform, so the
Mail continues to support the Tory leader, David Cameron.
So if Google’s doing it in an organised manner, that’s not terrible as
it’s a genuinely useful service. And they’re putting it on the net for
all to see. If I want to see CCTV footage of myself from the dozens of
cameras that catch sight of me daily, I’m going to have to file a
significant number of Freedom of Information requests to see the
footage.
‘However, given the number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day,
I’m not sure that a Google car counts as the biggest infringement of
my liberties right now.’ It’s not a zero-sum game, is it? You don’t
just pick the things that seem the most threatening now and *ignore*
the rest, if only because it’s easier to sort out privacy implications
before they become huge problems. Maybe, for example, if a little more
attention had been paid to Google’s hoarding of data – or its
statements on the privacy of IP addresses – recent hoohas could have
been avoided. It’s this sort of attitude that makes me distrust so
many of the campaign groups who claim to be protecting me but who roll
over depending on who the threat comes from – and to value the ones
who don’t take no prisoners even when I think they’re being a little
creepy, intense or insane. By the way, would it really be better if
the feeds from all CCTV cameras were publically available?
I always get the feeling that only pedos and racists read The Mail.
And I am right. Its a nasty little rag which should be used only to
line the floor of a pig sty. Disgusting.
I must admit that I find it more scary that people stop me taking
photos outside in public places rather than me stopping Google from
doing the same. We all have cameras on our mobiles and happily snap
away anywhere.
I think it’s a terrible invasion of privacy, which is why I’m going to
render their photo of my house useless by standing naked in the front
window at all times.
But seriously – I agree in part as I am as concerned with how our data
is circulated. That said I have far more fear of the private sector
than the public.
@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.
I would have thought this was clear cut defamation of a company – and
they are very likely to sue in a case where they have been accused of
misusing personal data and selling it to spam companies. Or at least
they should!
You are being watched. Not by the KGB, or by the Inland Revenue, or
even by one of those strange vans parked in your street, which purport
to know whether or not you own a television licence.
You are being watched, rather, by Google, which wants to take a
photograph of every single front door in this country.
This is good news for snoopers, stalkers, peeping Toms and burglars.
But are its advantages to the rest of us really going to outweigh the
obvious disadvantages?
If you are used to European habits of shopping, it is a vaguely
threatening experience, and it is nice to get home, and to feel that
shopping in the ‘civilised’ world is all a little different.
However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.
If you search for a homeopathic cold cure, for example, on the Google
search engine then you will soon be bombarded by every quack medicine
man in California. Every single time you ‘Google’ something, the fact
is automatically recorded.
In between there lay the balancing act which we would probably all
wish to play when it comes to surveillance cameras in car parks and
streets: Not so good if it catches us harmlessly parking the car in a
forbidden zone. Perhaps very useful if it alerts us to the identity of
a rapist or an armed robber.
How else could terrorists be apprehended in times of peace or war? How
else would it be possible for the Inland revenue to detect tax fraud?
But it surely belongs to the same unwanted area of invasion as do the
confidence tricksters and the identity thieves.”
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signed in for guardian.co.uk blogs.
Don’t worry if you aren’t getting an O2 iPhone – nobody else is
either. Especially if they haven’t sent their passport. (Updated;
again)
After a piece here in April suggesting advertising is waning, Thinkbox
is here to tell you it isn’t. But do you agree?
Want to upgrade your iPhone? Only via O2’s site, which is wavering in
and out of reality… (updated) (and now they’re “gone”!)
The researchers’ proposal includes mining activity data to make
suggestions for activities, from what to watch on television to
finding your favorite songs on your MP3 player and playing them in the
room with the best acoustics. At the point at which Google is
proposing the idea of thinking for people as well as mining their
data, it might be time to worry about more than whether a link to the
company’s privacy policy is on its front page.
Comment: *
Respectful debate is welcome, but comments that are defamatory,
indecent, abusive, or in violation of any law will be removed.
San Francsico Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) with Google co-founder Larry
Page at event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last year
On Thursday night, the mayor spoke at the official opening of Google’s
San Francisco office (never mind that the office has been ). He was in
fine form in welcoming the company’s employees, who occupy a few
floors in a building on the Embarcadero with stunning views of the
Bay.
“I didn’t know there was this much drinking,” Newsom told the crowd of
Googlers, leaving unsaid his own .
Although adding Google is a coup, it hardly makes San Francisco
unique, given Google’s opening of offices across the globe. These
days, every mayor can say that they’re happy to have Google move in,
Newsom acknowledged in jest.
“I love this company,” Newsom eventually effused before calling Google
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who did not attend Thursday’s
festivities, “just wonderful human beings.”
“I have been beating on Larry and Sergey for years” to open an office
in San Francisco. City-dwelling employees who traded city fog for the
sun that beams over Google’s Mountain View headquarters seemed pleased
with their shorter, commutes.
The open house was attended by employees from all facets of Google’s
massive organization, including Google.org and the newbies from the
Doubleclick acquisition. Headlining the event was one of Google’s top
executives and public faces, Marissa Mayer.
“This is a city of doers and dreamers,” overflowing with technology
and new-media companies drawn to a place that celebrates, not just
tolerates, diversity, Newsom said, drawing applause.
Joseph Menn covers technology privacy and security issues, Microsoft,
the wireless industry and L.A.-based tech companies (yeah, he’s busy).
He has handled virtually every tech beat – and a few entertainment
ones – since joining the Times in 1999. Originally from New England,
he wrote “All the Rave,” that book about Napster you’ve been meaning
to read. Before he had kids, he surfed more. joseph.menn @ latimes.com
Backed into a corner, Yahoo lashed out in a blunt manner likely to
inject even more bad blood into its already venomous relationship with
Microsoft and Icahn.
“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”
The breakdown of those takeover negotiations infuriated many Yahoo
shareholders who fear the company’s stock price would plunge back
below $20 — a threshold reached just before Microsoft made its
initial bid in early January. Yahoo shares finished Friday at $23.57.
Yahoo said the proposal that Microsoft submitted Friday “contains a
number of improvements,” but insisted it still wasn’t good enough.
Yahoo offered no concrete details about what Icahn had proposed to do
with the rest of the business, but indicated part of the plan included
selling the company’s Asian operations. The Sunnyvale-based company
pooh-poohed the notion of entrusting its business to Icahn, noting his
inexperience in the Internet industry.
Icahn, who has been challenging corporate boards for more than two
decades, owns a roughly 5 percent stake in Yahoo and hopes to make a
profit by pushing the company’s stock price above $30.
Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?
Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up
Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.
Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.
This week saw yet another Google product hit the virtual streets.
This one, Lively, is one of those 20 per cent time projects. You know,
the pet projects that Google encourages their employees to work on.
So what is it? It’s basically virtual rooms or locations that
you can create for chatting with friends. It reminds me a lot of the
days when chat rooms started offering avatars. Only now, they move
and look a whole lot more like actual people.
To download Lively, you need Windows XP/Vista with either IE or
Firefox. Yep, another cloud based application. We wouldn’t
expect anything else from Google, would we?
Right now, Lively isn’t anything new or revolutionary. Six
months or a year from now, it could be a totally different animal.
Keep your eyes on this one.
Andy on :
I suppose Lively does have potential, but definitely needs a lot of
work to be the sort of app I’d like it to be. The biggest
problem with it, currently, is all the sexually oriented rooms that
are popping up all over the place, when this is a service meant for
those as young as 13. Either Google needs to do a better job with
blocking, or removing unsuitable content or they need to separate them
out (i.e. have 13 & older rooms and 18 & older rooms that are in a
separate location). For now I’m staying away until they have
some sort of legitimate solution figured out.
In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!
– Users from more than 120 countries come to learn new skills, share
information, and discover best practices, tips, and tricks that they
can use instantly. Be part of this extraordinary experience August
4–8, 2008, in San Diego, California.
Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.
The proxy works passively by analysing existing, user-initiated
traffic, and is particularly tuned for complex Web 2.0 environments,
Zalewski said in a blog post.
This extremely short post appeared following a meeting with a decision
maker of a potential client. During the conversation I realized that
this highly respected and well paid top manager…
Google will no longer forward eBay and PayPal phishing emails to
recipients using its (DKIM) standard. The protocol provides for simple
signing of outgoing email using a key which is valid for the relevant
domain and can be queried by the recipient via the domain and matched
with the incoming email.
Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.
A DERBY academic believes criminals will be getting
“fatter”, sitting at home planning burglaries, thanks to a
controversial new website.
“No doubt they would have to fuzz out the faces but that doesn’t
mean criminals won’t be able to see when there is a fancy BMW in the
driveway. But I don’t see how you could ban it. There isn’t an
international internet law.”
Labour colleague Bob Laxton, MP for Derby North, said: “If there
is a way the Government can control it, they should.”
The web company has responded by saying faces in the pictures will not
be identified and it will follow British laws on privacy.
But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.
“I suspect there may be a lot of complaints about this, as there
were about Google Earth.
Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links.
We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google’s
Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will
provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which
queries visitors used to reach your site.
On a separate note: Google also clarified that “we were just
speculating” in an earlier statement about the origin of the search.
(That statement said, “In this case, it appears that the html code for
this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led
to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol.”)
“Svasti” is a Hindu (Sanskrit) word that translates as “well being.”
The svastika (swastika) was a sacred symbol to Hindus and Buddhists
alike, and one can find temples and homes adorned with it throughout
South Asia. Sadly, when Hitler appropriated the swastika as the symbol
of his National Socialist (Nazi) Party in the early 1930’s, it came to
represent evil and genocide. Thus, modern Western civilization abhors
it. When a Buddhist temple in LA decorated its fences with wrought
iron swastikas, many people became offended, because average Joe
America is simply not ready for a return to the original, peaceful
meaning of svasti (the memories of WWII and Bergen-Belsen are still
too fresh). The monks wisely decided to remove the symbols rather than
attempt to explain the sacred meaning to the clamoring crowds.
Ironically, the local Jewish community, well aware of the many
meanings of the swastika, came to the defense of the temple, declaring
that they had the right to display the swastika in its context as a
symbol of goodness.
Who, exactly, are “most folks”? Obviously Adina is being a bit racist
herself to discount the views of over a billion people (Indians), and
others, whose primary association of a swastika is not murderous
racism but something quite the opposite. Why does the negative
association that white western culture has with the Swastika
(presumably what is meant by “most people”) trump the beautiful
symbolic meaning held by southeast Asians?
I am surprised and dismayed that Google removed swastika from Google
Trends. After all, people will continue to search for swastika, trends
or no trends.
The quest for search shows one thing clearly: It is slowly dawning on
people in the west that swastika IS the HOLIEST SYMBOL in Hinduism and
Buddhism.
If “most” people fail to realise that it is an integral part of
Hinduim, then they are clearly ignorant. Worse, they are not prepared
to learn either.
Moreover, in antiquity, this symbols was not only found in North
American Indian cultures and Sub-Continental and Buddhist, but also in
Persian, Greeco-Roman, Celtic, Baltic, Germanic and Slavic cultures,
in both left and right facings.
I’m re-posting this comment from the other story because everyone
seems to be ignoring it. I still think it’s the most plausible
explanation. It’s also a reminder that the internet is not something
that occurs exclusively in English…
Here’s a more likely explanation. If you do a (Baidu is the Chinese
equivalent of Google), you’ll find that there was a swastika-related
story recently in the Chinese press that has gotten widespread
coverage over the past week. apparently there was a big mural-type
advertisement on a wall somewhere in xi’an (ancient capital of China,
geographically speaking it’s roughly in the center). the mural
contained a painting of a long black train with a nazi-inspired
swastika painted on the train’s head. judging from the baidu news
results, this story was literally reproduced in hundreds of online
news outlets. my sense of the article is that it’s meant to inspire
shock (as in, how could they not know this looks like a nazi
swastika?!), but also to provide the general lesson that the swastika
has negative connotations outside of buddhism (for those who don’t
know anything about the nazis? also remember: Buddhism comes from
India too). i’d say this story is what inspired all those google
searches, and not the simple fact that “good luck is on their minds.”
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In a submission this week to the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunication Commission (CRTC), Google urged that it take action
against Bell Canada’s P2P throttling activities on grounds that the
ISP is violating Canada’s telecommunications law.
BetaNews reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any
reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul
language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.
It’s about time that a more powerful company steps in to help out with
this fight. BT Throttling is just BS and we all know it. DPI is also
something that shouldn’t be implemented. The number of ways an ISP can
manipulate this technology is too overwhelming.
Does someone need to tell google, canada is a socialist state and
their people ARE subjects of the state do not have rights outside of
what the state allows.
Idiot. You really shouldn’t comment on something you obviously don’t
have a clue about….. You seem to have missed this section, or did
you actually bother to read the article? “As previously reported in
BetaNews, in May, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Internet
Clinic (CIPPIC) asked another agency, the Canadian Privacy Commission,
to investigate whether Canadian privacy law is being broken in Bell’s
use of deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to find and limit the
use of P2P applications.” Its NOT the government, but a corporation
that is limiting rights, like what is happening even more so in
America right now…. Canadians have more rights and freedoms than the
average American does now. We have better privacy laws. Canada is a
democracy. The USA isn’t and never has been. Its a Constitution-based
federal republic with a strong democratic tradition.
A Canadian Internet policy that ignores the electronic-screen impact
of allowing the Web to be fully “regulated” by conglomerates that
would kill the Canadian Television Fund, shut down the CBC and bump
Canadian services to bring us more Fox News and Turner Movie Classics
would truly be a Quisling fox in the True North chicken coop.
globeandmail.com and The Globe and Mail are divisions of CTVglobemedia
Publishing Inc., 444 Front St. W., Toronto, ON Canada M5V 2S9Phillip
Crawley, Publisher
TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.
Internet giant says large carriers shouldn’t be slowing certain
traffic and is calling for a halt to the practice
Google’s comments, which were filed with the commission on July 3 and
made public by the CRTC over the weekend, were submitted in support of
a complaint made by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers
(CAIP), a group of independent Internet service providers (ISPs) that
lease network access from Bell.
Last month, however, the head of the commission said a broad
investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the flow of traffic on
their networks is likely.
“Sooner or later – hopefully later – this is going to evolve into a
major consultation … It seems to be inevitable,” Mr. Finckenstein
said.
Google’s 15-page complaint lauds the Internet as an open platform that
should be accessible to anyone and “facilitates unparalleled social,
political, cultural and economic innovation.”
“The commission should make clear in this proceeding that at least
blocking or degrading applications of consumers’ choice is prohibited
in Canada because it is not technologically and competitively
neutral,” Google says in the filing.
John Beck, founder of Gist Design, shows off his LinkedIn page. He
used the site to find a software developer for his firm.
He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.
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769 comments
, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing
Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning
over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the .
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and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.
While I respect the USA law within the USA, I despise when judges
attempt, often with too much success, to enforce it outside of the
USA. And not just data laws. We enforce US sex laws in other countries
to criminalize behavior completely legal there. This Is Wrong!
Because it doesn’t matter where the logs are housed as long as Google
does business in the U.S.. Housing them elsewhere does not make them
immune to a court order.
For example, the records in the “safe” country would be owned by an
independent subsidiary, such that the related company (Google)
wouldn’t have direct executive authority to force the other company to
release the records.
Because they’re independent companies and Google has no legal
authority to force an outside company to do anything.
Limiting the volume of records that could be requested at any time,
limiting the allowed uses for every record, and requiring them to be
destroyed a short time after loaded.
Also, the company in the foreign country could be prevented from
illicitly disclosing records, by having each log line independently
encrypted.
The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.
So they can suggest youtube videos based on what we watched before.
That and I bet they’re gonna figure in to the suggested videos what
we’ve searched for in the past through the regular google search
engine, which btw is A HORRIBLE IDEA. Plus, duck and cover if the
executives don’t get pretty statistics reports with colorful graphs
that show what people watched from different locations determined by
IP. I guess you could somewhat anonymize the stats needed to generate
that but that’s just extra work for
Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way. The problem is that we I.T. people
are Data Hoarders. Even if the data isn’t useful today, or at all
useful into the foreseeable future, we still hang on to it. And we
save every detail we can just to prove how clever we are to have been
able to discover it in the first place. (Note: P2P program writers are
the same, and that’s how Media Sentry can tell you so much about
filesharers they discover on the Internet right down to the full
directory paths of files.) Now if storage wasn’t so d@mn cheap we
wouldn’t have this habit, but Moore’s Law applied to disc drives means
we no longer have to store 2-digit years and have Y2K problems. We
have these problems now instead.
This is why the RIAA is able to use IP addresses combined with
timestamps to identify ISP account holders. It doesn’t identify any
actual copyright infringers, but they don’t care as long as they have
somebody to sue. If these logs were deleted after 3 days this whole
RIAA mess would have been a non-starter.
Don’t be evil at Google seems to mean don’t destroy data you never
needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to
keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than
just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.
I would also like to know how the judge has completely ignored the
[privacilla.org]? If it’s on the Internet suddenly all privacy concern
automatically goes away, even if you’re engaged as a customer of a
company with a published privacy policy offering you many protections?
> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way.
Much, *MUCH* worse is that the judge has imposed on Google a legal
ruling that the RIAA must be wetting themselves to obtain. And of
course, these records will go straight to the MPAA, despite the
contraints placed on their use.
As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge
“Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google’s duty to
protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal
ruling.” Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they
are.
just say they were ‘lost’ and that the backups were destroyed or lost
due to shady backup practices. works for the White House.
It is a mistake to think you can anonymize this data. Sure, you could
strip everything out of the data, but then you would just have public
information, since youtube will tell you how many views each video has
already. So I presume the people who want to “anonymize” think they
will, like the AOL logs, give pseudonyms to people.
Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.
My cable IP address doesn’t change often, I had one IP address for
almost 10 years without changing… just when I did a router upgrade
it switched.
If privacy is to have any meaning, then we need a right to protect our
personal information. Well, actually we already have the right, though
it’s a bit scattered around the Bill of Rights. (Speaking for
Americans, and only in theoretical terms as regards the current
administration.)
I believe that this *IS* the answer to the problems of network
neutrality. Force the powers that be to accept that they cannot
regulate private networks by building our own outside of their useless
understanding of how things work. When they finally discover that they
cannot regulate, things will change a bit. I’m all for calling it a
patriot network… might be over the top a bit, but we all need to
start creating them.
That’s fine, but the signs are on the wall that the company is in
retrenchment mode: Last month, with the city, but we suspect timing
was an issue, too — why would a technology company fork over billions
of dollars for a hotel just as the economy slips into recession?
Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.
If you want to give your kids a little more exposure to cooking and
nutritious food, and you’d enjoy the chance to snoop around Google’s
Headquarters, you might want to head to Mountain View this Saturday
for .
This is a “big piece of chicken” question…but what are those
children holding? I think I see legs and fur… but beyond that I
can’t identify the mystery meat. I can only assume, at such a food
event, that the “petting zoo” comes with a very realistic ending?
Back to those pesky taxes, though. Also believed to be on the
taxman’s hit list are brewing and airline boss Vijay Mallya, the
Tata family and property billionaire KP Singh.
We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.
I DON’T wish to spoil Michael Grade’s Sunday, but imagine
how different his job would be if ITV owned Google.
This dream nearly happened. You see, another Michael — Green,
the former head of Carlton, which with Granada formed ITV in 2004
— had a chance to buy Google for a mere £400m (it was a
long time ago).
A clever banker pitched the idea but Green didn’t much care for
the plan and instead opted to buy a 25% stake in Ask Jeeves —
Google’s punier rival.
The luxury hotel group wants to buy Island off Guernsey that spent
much of the Second World War under German occupation
* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world. *
Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the
challenges of global climate change. * Help Google realize its core
mission of “organizing the world’s information and making
it universally accessible and useful.”
Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.
Google Maps already offers a check box for those who wish to avoid
highways, but as Smith points out in his site’s FAQ, the feature
that are unpleasant for cyclists.
A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is
nobody’s idea of a good time. It’s clear to anyone who is paying
attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green
covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an
environmentally sustainable future.
Metro, the largest transit provider in Los Angeles County, has for
several years had a trip planner on its website. In fact, it’s the
most popular feature on the website, according to the agency. There’s
also a stripped down version of the planner that works on cell phones.
Metro has been talking with Google for months and the blog even
reported in April that Google Transit was imminent. Well, not so fast.
“We’re still talking to them,” Marc Littman, a Metro spokesman, told
me yesterday afternoon. “There is no contract.”
As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.
I was also underwhelmed by Google Transit on my beloved and highly
intelligent iPhone. There is a simplified version of Google Transit
for phones, but the directions I asked for did not include a map. Yes,
I could have switched over to the phone’s Google map feature, but I
shouldn’t have to go to two different places on the phone, particulary
two places powered by Google.
What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….
Don’t get me wrong, I think Google Transit is great, but for more
detailed itineraries I will use the transit companies trip planner.
Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.
BTW, if you are ever dismayed to find that the timetables on OCTA
signs don’t match what you were given on Google maps, don’t worry; the
signs are what’s wrong.
If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but
you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.
Google makes the vast majority of its revenue and profit from
advertisers whose text ads appear next to search results. Advertisers
bid for the words, and their ads appear based on a formula involving
how much they’re willing to pay and the quality of the ads themselves.
As of mid-June, . Advertisers pay only when searchers actually click
on the ads.
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 8:18 AM PDT Google trends
looks a lot like thatNath Reply to this comment by July 9, 2008 8:18
AM PDT Wow. Targeting? Reply to this comment
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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 really cool advances this time around are more subtle, and
they’ll be harder for other phone makers to copy. They’re in the
software used to add applications and synchronize the phone with
Exchange, Microsoft’s dominant corporate e-mail, calendar and contact-
management system.
When Remote worked, it was fantastic, but it dropped the connection a
few times even though I was within 5 feet of my wireless router and
iTunes host laptop. It was usually pretty responsive, but there were a
few lags when choosing songs, especially if I tried to select a song
with Remote after starting one at the laptop.
Maybe the applications I was using were slammed by all the new users
Friday, but it took longer than expected to connect to the news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times.
So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?
Think carefully before taking the plunge. Not because of any
shortcomings with the phone. It’s lovely, and continues to define a
well-designed phone/mobile Web device.
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart
this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before
or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.
In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun
events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May,
to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re
looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk,
have at it:
FITSNews – July 11, 2008 – Ever since the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he
wanted to “,” the nation’s interest in the testicles
of the Democratic presidential nominee has apparently gone through the
roof.
The owner of “Obama’s Chocolate Nuts” is feeling
like “the luckiest person on Earth” in the wake of the
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks about Sen. Barack Obama.
“Who would have thought anybody would use ‘Obama’
and ‘nuts’ in an actual news story?” said David
Feingold, a 30-year-old San Diego resident …
He’s right … who would have thunk it. Of course,
Obama’s nuts will never be as famous as .
Are we preheating the oven to “three fiddy” and giving
that spoon a lick? Awwwww yeah, baby …
Are we the sexiest blog ever? You better believe it, people. Even Amy
Adams (above) says so. And if she didn’t actually say it, you can bet
she’s thinking it.
SIC WILSON … talk to the hand, cause the volleyball ain’t listening.
THE FITS GIRLS … somebody’s gotta be the brains of this operation.
SIC WILLIE … not sweating but protecting the technique.
Technically, you are correct – platform-agnostic data transfer has
been possible since Sun’s earliest RPC implementations. However, this
seems to be considerably lighter-weight (although so is Mount Everest)
and because order is specified, it’s going to be much simpler to pluck
specific data out of a data stream. You don’t need to have an order-
agnostic structure and then an ordering layer in each language-
specific library.
There have been all kinds of attempts to produce this sort of stuff.
RPC, DCE, Corba, DCOM, etc, are programmatic interfaces and handle
function calls, synchronization, etc. OPeNDAP is probably the closest
to Google’s architecture in that it is ONLY data. It’s more
sophisticated, as it handles much more complex data types than mere
structures, but it has its own overheads issues. It isn’t designed to
scale to terabyte databases, although it DOES scale extremely well and
is definitely the preferred method of delivering high-volume
structured scientific data – at least when compared to the RPC family
of methods, or indeed the XML family. I wouldn’t use it for the kind
of volume of data Google handles, though, you’d kill the servers.
The example they give is for a small set of data, and percentages vary
more dramatically as sample sizes decrease.
I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.
In any case, I’m hoping that some independent source conducts some
tests because I think anything we produced would probably have
unintentional biases in it. Of course, I’ll update the numbers in the
docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.
It looks like Google has taken some of the good elements of CORBA and
IIOP into its own interchange format.While CORBA certainly is bloated
in a lot of ways, the IIOP wire protocol it uses is vastly faster and
more efficient than any XML out there.. and yes it is just as “open”
(publicly documented and Freely available for use in any open source
application) as any XML schema out there. J2EE uses IIOP as well and
its is technically possible to interoperate (although the problem with
CORBA is that different implementations never really interoperated as
they were supposed to). As a side note, I’d rather write IDL code than
an XML schema any day of the week too, but that’s another rant.
Just wait for the XML zealots to come crashing and not believing that
XML is not the fastest, best, solution to all the world’s problems
(including cancer) and of course people at Google are amateurs and
id10ts and WHY DO YOU HATE XML kind of stuff.
I’ll make a concession that I’ve heard of some pretty awful uses of
XML. But those who dismiss XML as a valuable tool in the toolchest are
equally as foolish as those who believe it’s the end-all and be-all of
programming (I’m not saying that’s true of you, just pointing out
foolishness on both sides). Like any tool, it’s most valuable when
used in it’s optimal role, not when shoehorned into projects as a
solution to everything.
Since they’re Google people will clamor over this (as we’re doing
here) and the result will be at least a handful of folks will learn
and use it. Google’s key to success has always been finding fresh
talent and removing barriers from their contributing and advancement
so what I’ve seen they’ve done is A) help train potential employee’s
on how they’re tech and thought process works, and B) provide
themselves a filter by which to gauge the ability for a potential
employee to understand they’re system.
And as a bonus, they help undermine opponents who use competing
technologies by helping train the workforce away from their practices.
Overall I think it’s very intelligent and well done strategic move.
2. Verification in situations when it’s impossible to devise a
meaningful reaction to a failure (other than either “everything
failed, turn off the computers and go home” and “assume the data to be
valid anyway because ALL of it will have the same formatting error
because the same program generates it”)
3. Dealing with data that arrives in neatly packaged “documents” and
“requests”, as opposed to being constantly produced and consumed.
… now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as
protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention
like “@WORK” for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse
the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access
classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the
types. I don’t see that ‘required’ and ‘optional’ keywords help
much… imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But
this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.
It’s easy to make a binary JSON format that is fast and also small, so
there is little advantage to protocol buffers there. It’s also easy
and ridiculously fast to compress JSON text using say character-based
lzo (Oberhumer).
Perl is to programming languages what English is to natural languages:
easy to fool around with, hard to learn well, but when you do, the
expressive power is incredible. And when you mess it up, nobody
understands what you’re trying to say.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
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What that means is if you put in cancer or a certain kind of cancer
you can find out what genes in the human genome express that disease.
Or you can put in a gene and find out which proteins and genes it’s
connected to.
The point of the program wasn’t just to create software that everyone
could immediately use and that would change the world, but to create
developers that later on could create software that could develop that
kind of wonderful software. And we think it did that.
For instance we have an article in there from a fellow who is applying
the concepts behind open source into biology. It’s sort of like,
here’s this core open source advance on how it’s been done over the
last six years, and then there are also people who have learned from
open source and what they’re doing, too.
Q: One of the most widely used open source security tools, Nessus,
recently closed its source. There is now apparently a fork under
development. Is that something that Google would help to support?
It’s good for us when we want to release software because it gives a
good amount of indemnification, which is what companies look for when
they release software. When we use software externally, the demands
that are put on us from a compliance point of view are pretty easy to
track.
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Live Ask
: Yeah, I think you’re right. Plus, from some of the
descriptions I’m getting it sounds like rockets…
I will be checking for updates in the Google Earth and whenever they
come, I will put both old and new pictures of Kagan, so that readers
can see the damage and changes caused by explosions.
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Your comments about manipulation are weirdly paranoid. The original
list that Greg posted was 20+ companies long, and originally didn’t
include us, as he didn’t count Andrew to us. He fixed that, and the
post I sent to you was from his talk at Google. It’s part of his
presentation to call out the company he visits, which is one of the
reasons we invited him out.
That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.
Whereas Browser Sync is in the interest of technology/simplicity, I’d
see the source code of Windows ME being released in the interest of
tragic comedy more than anything…
Foxmarks is OK for syncing bookmarks, but GBS also synced your
history, open tabs, passwords (if you were brave enough) and cookies.
Having a synced history and cookies was very useful because you could
stay logged in to the same sites across any GBS’d computer.
There’s no clear reason given as to why it’s being discontinued, but
if it’s due to lack of interest, it was probably lack of advertising;
I wasn’t even slightly aware of this project, and it sounds like
something I would have been very interested in. I use Foxmarks
religiously and have trouble functioning without it.
And I have to say that it works much better than browsersync ever did,
with the added bonus that I can host my own data.
Dang! First Reiserfs, now THIS…. I hope Linus checks criminal
records on patch submitters, or I’m TOTALLY switching to Vista;)
“I am always amazed when I hear about the long, steep climbs through
mountains or the blistering speeds of the cyclists as they pass
through the French countryside,” wrote Google product manager Stephen
Chau.
“But since most of us can’t head over there to watch it in person,
we’re giving you the next best thing.”
The map also serves as a promotion to kick off Street View in the
European version of Google Maps.
Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?
If you already have a Google account for e-mail, you have a Google
calendar, too. Just click on the link for “calendar” at
the top left of the screen, and a new window or tab will open to the
calendar. If you don’t already have a Google account, go to
calendar.google.com and click the button to create an account.
When you’re adding an event in Internet Explorer, scroll down to the
reminders tab to send a reminder to your e-mail inbox, mobile phone or
Yahoo Messenger. You can schedule reminders from five minutes to two
weeks before the event.
Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.
If the data were stuck on 3.5-inch disks, you could order an external
3.5-inch floppy USB drive for $19.95 from FloppyDisk.com. The store
mentions on its site that it can’t find equivalent drives for
5.25-inch disks.
One caveat: The Web site warns that some data might be unrecoverable,
and that you’re paying for the attempt, not necessarily the results.
ANNE KRISHNAN, (RALEIGH) NEWS & OBSERVER
Google gets Second Life. The no. 1 search engine company has launched
a 3D virtual space, called Google Lively, that aims to give
competition to the popular virtual world hangout Second Life. The free
service which requires no registration and can be accessed through a
user’s Google account enables people to congregate in fantasy rooms
and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. Lively’s users
will be able to create an avatar for themselves that can be male,
female or even a different species. This avatar can assume a new
identity, change clothes or convey emotions with a few clicks of the
mouse. Lively also enables users to create different digital
environments to roam, from a child’s room to an exotic island. Here’s
how users can find there way into the Lively world.
Developing a good feel for Google as an investment requires an ability
to make more “doesn’t matter” decisions than we have seen with
any technology company in the past.
In any case, it’s good to see this particular project out in the open,
and as a Firefox user I’d love to see someone pick up the ball and run
with it.
If you are a member, Sign in to have your comment attributed to you.
If you are not yet a member, and help the Open Source community by
sharing your thoughts, answering user questions and providing reviews
and alternatives for projects.
In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.
) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment
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There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.
“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.
A company called Sentinel, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, has
posted a that shows the viewer flying through 3D cityscapes with live
videos embedded in them.
The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.
This screenshot shows a live USB camera and 18 live TV feeds projected
onto monitors in a lab in Hong Kong.
The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing Safari’s initial
loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.
For one thing it will auto-publish any changes when it auto-saves
(something you can turn off, but having it on takes some effort out of
the equation). This might be troublesome for some users who are simply
jotting down ideas and don’t want them to go live yet. Also, whatever
you write might not get picked up so well in your RSS feed, or for
mobile readers. The post nearly locked up Safari when viewed on an
iPhone.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
Google Autos or Google Music are the guesses that Hitwise hazarded
Wednesday. “Our thinking was that Google might want to fill natural
gaps in its portfolio of offerings based on the interests of its
users. We looked at which categories are receiving the most traffic
from Google in which Google does not have its own property,” .
In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.
Although it has disclosed that 600 of its coffee shops will be ,
Starbucks will be unveiling only a small selection of closures per
month.
Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.
As part of , the company on Wednesday detailed some of the process it
uses to order the results its search engine produces.
The most interesting element of the , a Google fellow who oversees the
area, is a discussion of why the company doesn’t manually elevate
particular search results to obtain the right order. However, the
company does of course hand-tune the algorithm that ranks the results,
so you can consider manual intervention still relevant at a higher
level.
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
Though the company has talked earlier about how it doesn’t hand-tune
specific search results, Singhal went into a little more detail. Not a
lot, though: the post is more of a teaser that lays some groundwork,
but Singhal promised more later.
The service, Google’s online productivity suite, went from having some
features not working, like the log-out button and the document
creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.
The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web
applications play in business use, as well as how Google’s free
document services have come to replace software solutions such as
Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google’s real-time
collaboration features.
Update 2: Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells us the problem
stemmed from the servers that control the view of the document
workspace as well as the home document listing. The data where your
documents were stored suffered no down time.
Google it is now using an e-mail authentication technology to keep
phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal Web pages in
order to steal usernames and passwords.
Last October, that it was protecting Yahoo Mail users with eBay and
PayPal accounts from phishing attempts using the same technology.
The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo.
The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the
companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License
(GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to
approve it as a proposed Internet standard.
It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.
A clause in Google’s 2005 purchase agreement for the AOL stake gives
the Web search leader the right, but not the obligation, to force a
public offering of the shares or a repurchase at fair market value as
of July 1, 2008.
“Under the current market and strategic conditions, Google is unlikely
to rock the boat,” Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst for Bernstein Research,
said.
That is because a similar scenario played out when Comcast sought to
resolve its 21 percent stake in Time Warner Cable in 2003. The two
agreed to buy and divide the assets of the bankrupt cable operator
Adelphia, and the deal eventually led to the partial spinoff of Time
Warner Cable.
After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.
David Pogue looks at the Eye-Fi memory card, which stamps photos with
the location where they were taken.
David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…
Central and Eastern Europe has quietly become a hub of innovation for
start-ups and top tech companies alike.
The google and cnet members’s viacom
Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with
Google.
We and others cried out in protest, since the data being delivered
included username, IP address and identifiers of all videos viewed on
. And the entity it was being delivered to has a penchant for
litigating over copyright infringement (some of their many lawsuits
are mentioned in the original post). The fear is that if data is
turned over to Viacom, any YouTube user who has watched a copyrighted
video would be subject to a lawsuit.
Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.
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With the debut of the AppStore come a number of native applications
that replicate the functionality of already extant iPhone-optimized
Web sites. The impetus for creation of native applications has, thus
far, been driven by the ability to use location sensitivity, access to
the camera, and other iPhone technologies that are conventionally
inaccessible through MobileSafari.
Google’s native search application for the iPhone and iPod touch
is simply an interface to the popular engine with location awareness
— essentially the only advantage this application holds over the
mobile-optimized Web site. Like other location-aware applications,
Google may ask whether or not you wish to allow use of your current
location.
The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.
Tapping the stations button displays stations that AOL recommends,
“What’s New,” AOL and CBS Radio, Genres, and
AOL’s spinner.com. Even on an iPhone using EDGE exclusively,
there was no noticeable interruption
When a call is received while audio is streaming in AOL Radio, the
music fades and your call rings through. If you decline to answer AOL
Radio starts up where it left off with out a hitch. However if you
accept the call and subsequently finish that call you have to re-
launch AOL Radio. It does not automatically restart. This follows the
rules Apple has for apps developed for the iPhone.
I’m not sure which classic rock song best describes the latest
in the Microsoft / Yahoo battle: “The Song Remains the
Same” or “Saturday Night’s All Right (For
Fighting)”? Both apply in their own right as yes, yet again.
The latest proposal sent to Yahoo on Friday had a 24-hour time limit
to accept. It would have had Microsoft take over Yahoo’s search
business while putting a new board of directors, as chosen by Icahn,
in place to run the rest of the company.
The company knows this and perhaps that is why it bluntly states that
it counter-offered Microsoft the option to buy the entire company for
$33-a-share or enter re-negotiations to just buy its search business.
It claims Microsoft rejected both offers.
I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.
Since the judge issued the order, Viacom has been . “Viacom suggested
the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to
accept anonymous information since day one,” said a Viacom spokesman.
According to the sources, Google and Viacom were close to reaching a
deal last week about masking user data when Google backed out.
YouTube maintains that the video-sharing site is an Internet service
provider and is protected by the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision, which
removes liability from ISPs for illegal acts committed by users. But
the DMCA requires that ISPs not have knowledge of the illegal acts or
not be able to prevent them.
YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from
uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other
copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing
infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.
It’s safe to say that many copyright owners are skeptical of these
claims. For years, rumors have circulated in the technology sector
that some of YouTube employees salted the site, especially in its
early days, by posting clips from popular TV shows in order to bring
attention to the site. No evidence of this has ever surfaced.
) 11 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 12, 2008 12:11 PM PDT I did not
follow with detail this V-G affair but it seems to me that it is
following the SCO-IBM Unix affair in which SCO made a complain that
IBM should prove innocent… just the inverse of common law: you are
innocent up to the moment that you are proved guilty.Am I right? Am I
too far in understanding Viacom/RIAA/etc. lawyers? Reply to this
comment by July 12, 2008 1:54 PM PDT This kind of looks like “Viacom”
is scrabbling, a bit, to continue its, unfocused, IP-lawsuit (and
vicarious responsibility for the actions of others) claims.I also
notice that a totally unproven accusation (that Youtube employees,
allegedly, knowingly allowed, and/or encouraged, copyright-
infringement)… is actually being used to further justify an
apparently, otherwise, clearly dubious- attack.Can you say RED-
HERRING..? But, you know how corporations work… once they start down
a path, no matter how insanely-asinine, they will simply NEVER back-
down (even if… it ends-up tearing them apart, and costing their
stock-holders enormously). Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 2:54
PM PDT I’d like to see the reverse, that is, the uploading habits of
anyone from a Viacom IP, or using a Viacom (or viacom property domain,
such as comedycentral.com). Did anyone on The Daily Show, or any
staffer of those shows, or any other Viacom company, ever upload
something copyrighted to YouTube? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 5:11 PM PDT Relax. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:49 PM
PDT Viacom just wants to destroy the progression and the future of the
internet because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media,
like newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop
the new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You
either roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at
Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll
continue to head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the
NEW! Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just
wants to destroy the progression and the future of the internet
because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like
newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the
new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either
roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s
stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to
head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just wants to
dessstroy the progression and the future of the internet because they
have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old
like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new
generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it
rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately.
That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down,
down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment by
July 12, 2008 7:51 PM PDT Viacom just wants to dessstroy the
progression and the future of the internet because they have LOSSST to
the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old like oldy moldy
Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new generation, Web
2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it rolls right over
you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a
reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down, down, down
if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 7:53 PM PDT Viacom will lose to the future of the
internet if they don’t get with the new.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing
by July 12, 2008 11:30 PM PDT Chad and the team knew about SNL content
being on YouTube. It’s what made YouTube popular, showing copyrighted
clips from comedy shows off TV. The whole YouTube thing was based on
being an archive of video from all sources. Viacom, NBC Universal,
Disney, Sony, Fox and others should sue YouTube/Google for every
infraction. Basically YouTube is the Napster of video and should be
accountable for theft of copyrighted material. Reply to this comment
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purpose.
But the cinema companies were very clever in encouraging agencies to
create ads for movie theaters that the TV authorities wouldn’t accept.
But with YouTube, Google has the issue of a dedicated following whose
attention-span rivals that of a hamster having a nervous breakdown.
Those sites that incorporated it early have the benefit of advertising
already being part of their culture.
It will find it very hard to expect its devotees to watch an ad before
every video. (tmz offers a series of videos daily. You only have to
watch one ad. And the one I just looked at was for Herbal Essences,
which promised to treat my non-existent hair to a luscious fragrance.)
When you have accumulated, say, fifty thousand, you could get a prize.
Maybe free child care for a year or something?
If you are already a Business First subscriber please create or sign
into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid print
subscription and have access to the complete article.
Also, the Chinese media had just reported on a scandal: The owners of
a commercial complex in the Xi’an province had adorned their building
with a mural of what was described as “a long black train with a Nazi-
inspired swastika” on the locomotive. Xinhua news agency quoted a
bystander: “If it’s creative, the businessmen were neglecting people’s
feelings; if that wasn’t their intention, then they do not understand
that part of history.”
Google, it turned out, was right — probably. There is no way to
verify the chain of events, as 4chan posts are not archived and
generally cycle out of view within minutes. And a moderator for 4chan
said, “I’ve seen nothing to denote 4chan was involved at all.”
The flurry of searches for the swastika code — most of which, it
seems, were by people who did not know what the code represented
— shot the swastika itself to the top of the Trends list.
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Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of
[digitalspace.com] from 1996? What’s next, GoogleMUD?
He has a point on porn: the terms of service forbid it, much to my
dismay, I must say. But then, it is open for anyone older than 13 so I
see no way Google could get around that.
Are you kidding me? Porn the ultimate mark of success. The fact that
Lively has it before it has even taken off properly makes it like an
uber stamp of approval. Yes yes.
Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.
I’ve wondered if there could be a market for “Christian porn” that
addresses all the issues they have with it.
Actually, calling it a beta is being generous. There are a lot of
interface quirks and bugs to work out, and the content (as far as
avatars, furniture, clothes, etc.) definitely feels more like a sample
of what will be available. Once they open it up to user created
content, I imagine there will be no shortage of “stuff”. FWIW, I
didn’t really have the connection problems the reviewer had. The whole
thing thing gets a little laggy in a crowded room, especially if the
room is full of junk, but I didn’t have any problems getting in. As
far as the sex themed rooms, they seemed pretty tame to me, at least
for now. (Uh, not that I checked them out or anything.) You’re limited
to streaming videos from YouTube, so you can’t show anything that
wouldn’t pass muster there. You can also display static images in a
“picture frame”, but the frames seems to be pretty broken at the
moment. They seem to only display a small portion of the image,
regardless of the resolution. So, at least for the moment, it’s pretty
much impossible to display anything pornographic. I imagine once they
open it up to user created content, though, it will become yet another
haven for furries.
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a “Windows
only” service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn’t
investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting
other platforms in future. That’s a non-starter in my book.
Direct hit to the nail head. I was truly let down with Second Life. I
will even go back here and there to see if things changed but they
never do. Last time I ventured into second life I searched for ‘Beach’
and was treated to a picture of a girl fingering herself. I had hopes
for Second Life for businesses that I work with to have open house and
virtual tours for lodging. I would not think about suggesting it
anymore.
It could be a good thing if it was an antimatter copy of Second Life,
which was then brought into contact with the original Second Life.
Do you have a lawn, and if so, any particular thoughts on where I
should be in relation to it?
iPhone/iPod touch only: Google’s first offering in the iPhone App
Store comes in the form of Google Mobile, an application that
integrates your local contacts and the web for seamless searching
between the two. Developed in part by one of our favorite programmers
Nicholas Jitkoff (), Google Mobile brings many of the things we love
about Quicksilver to the iPhone—namely universal search. From
one search box, you can look up web sites (I’m Feeling Lucky-style),
entries on Wikipedia, call any contact, or access their contact card.
The app also uses your location data for local search, so searching
for pizza will give you a link to search for pizza places in Google
Maps.
The most innovative feature in the Google Mobile interface is the
auto-suggest, which provides autocompletion of queries and suggestions
in a scrollable bar below the search results. Also, you’ll notice that
the screenshot has a small call icon next to the contact. When you
first search a contact this isn’t available, but after you call
someone once through the Google Mobile interface, it sets that number
as the default for the little call icon. If you don’t want the
universal search, you can limit searches to local, images, news,
shopping, or Wikipedia.
you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was
@: not sure if my first msg went thru, jono, are you located in the
US? if not, well, that’s the culprit, didnt see google mobile in the
swiss app store myself, then switched over to the US store, and
presto, there it was
, Jul 11, 2008 07:24 PM
On Thursday evening, Google threw open the doors of its San Francisco
office to members of the media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Though Google’s San Francisco office has been , the dust has cleared
and Google wanted to celebrate.
I mean, how much applause do you think Newsom would have received had
he said its all about patents, servers, lack of competent competitors,
and consumer inertia?
DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.
SPF, DKIM, and SenderID are not the cure-all for spam, and they aren’t
intended to be. But they are effective in weeding out spam in some
cases. They don’t work in the same way, but towards the same goal.
Indoctrination into the socio-liberal philosophy can be very
expensive. Just look at the high cost in California, and they aren’t
providing any basic education at all.
Campaigners have attacked the move as an invasion of privacy but
Google defended its actions, stating that it employs face-blurring
technology.
Street Map already allows people in the US to navigate using the
innovative tool. In addition, cycling enthusiasts can currently trace
the Tour de France route.
Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.
The spokeswoman added: “The technology isn’t perfect – it will
sometimes miss a face or licence plate, for example if they are
partially covered, or at a difficult angle – but we make it easy
within the product for users to report a face or licence plate for
extra blurring, or to ask for their image to be removed.”
Simon Davies, of Privacy International, wrote to Google outlining his
concern that claims of protection are being made that cannot be
upheld.
With petabytes of data floating around, Google developed its own
protocol for data interchange and now it’s open sourcing it.
Google’s documentation on Protocol Buffers noted that the new format
has numerous advantages over XML. Among the advantages cited by Google
is the fact that Protocol Buffers could be 3 to 10 times smaller and
20 to 100 times faster than XML for serializing structured data.
According to Google’s documentation, protocol buffers were initially
developed at Google to deal with an index server request/response
protocol.
“There is some patent activity around Protocol Buffers, but I’d like
to point out that we use the Apache license, which grants permission
to use any applicable patents,” DiBona told InternetNews.com.
So far, Google has included support for C++, Java, and Python for
protocol buffers, though other languages are welcome.
Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers
but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap
of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move
must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else’s computing
infrastructure, and that can be scary.
Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)
There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.
Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.
by July 12, 2008 7:05 AM PDT 99.9% available? What’s the use of online
storage when it’s not available? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 8:18 AM PDT Interesting that we don’t hear reporting about the
daily or weekly brief outages at most of the fortune 1000 companies.
The Amazon cloud is running at 99.9993 from the time we started using
it at DigitalChalk in 2006. I’d like to see that beat in a do-it-
yourself data center. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 5:14 PM
PDT Maybe. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:37 PM PDT If you
ask me, the scariest part of the growing trend of cloud computing and
storage is that if a big part of the system shuts down for long time,
it could be catastrophic to more than just individuals, or companies,
or even industries, but entire economies and whole populations. If we
ALL depend on the cloud, which in time I think we will, we will all be
at risk of cyber-terrorism, super-viruses, or just a simple breakdown
(ok, not simple, but old fashioned I guess). Reply to this comment
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In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?
The term cloud computing started when network architects started
drawing diagrams for their presentations. The architects had symbols
for computers and servers and hard drives and switches, but they
didn’t have a universal symbol that represented “the Internet.”
It became common to talk of pushing data “into the cloud” to represent
using the internet to send files to and from servers and Web sites.
For example, if the entire United States (all 300 million of us) made
only 100 shirts this year, and if all of China made 100 shirts, some
of those shirts would be traded between us- we would sell a few to
China, and vice versa. But a trade deficit happens when one country
sells more shirts than another. China, in this example, could sell 85
shirts to America. The U.S. could sell 55 shirts to China. So, in this
trade, China sold more shirts to the United States, 30 more in
fact.Most businessmen and economists believe that most trade deficits
aren’t a bad thing; it’s just part of trade, and at some point trade
between two countries should balance out eventually.
Why does this matter? Well, in order to buy those shirts, you need
money. And if you are buying more shirts than you’re selling shirts,
you’re losing money. If you’re a business, you won’t be in business
much longer.
But, countries aren’t businesses. They are, well, countries, and can
print all the money they want. People who deal with currencies, or
each country’s version of money, look at trade deficits as one way to
find out how much each country’s currency is worth. If you have to
print more money, each dollar you print can possibly lower the value
of the other dollars out there. Like stocks, you can buy and sell
currencies on what’s called the foreign-exchange market (or, if you
want a buzzword for the office, say Forex market).
Well, because the U.S. has been buying a lot of stuff from China for
many, many years, China holds a lot of U.S. dollars. If China were to
sell those dollars on the market at some point, well, it wouldn’t be
very good. The U.S. dollar’s value would fall — making imports and
traveling abroad much more expensive.
Trade deficits are usually a good thing, because it shows that the
global economy is working. It’s just when a trade imbalance gets too
high where economists and investors start to become concerned.
DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.
The market has become increasingly aware of the advantages of
navigation and Global Positioning System (GPS) tools, especially for
vehicle navigation systems. These tools include both built-in systems
and Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs), which are handheld devices
that users can carry with them and use in their vehicles. Industry
analysts estimate that sales of PNDs will grow from approximately 14
million units in 2006 to approximately 56 million units in 2011. As
the demand for these personal navigation devices continues to grow, so
does the need for better quality images covering more parts of the
world.
Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. is a rising player in the field
of geographic information systems (GIS) and navigation applications.
The Company brings advanced software capabilities to a wide range of
users and devices, previously only accessible to trained professionals
on dedicated devices.
— Innovative, affordable GIS tools easily used in a range of
applications, including businesses, agriculture, surveys, and
government agencies.
Certain statements in this news release may contain ‘forward-looking’
information within the meaning of the Federal securities laws. All
statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release
may include forward-looking statements that may involve risks and
uncertainties.
Middle England’s howitzers have turned full force on Google today, as
the finally wanders into the debate about the legal status of Google
Street View.
The internet giant’s StreetView website will allow anyone in the world
to type in a UK address or postcode and instantly see a 360-degree
picture of the street.
However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.
But in this case, Cameron has very close links with Google – – and
it’ll be interesting to see if the Mail gets the Tory front bench to
take a stand on this issue, or if it just slides into history as
another one of the paper’s moments of fury.
Personally, I’m torn. I use the US version of Street View a lot, but
don’t like the idea of a surveillance society. However, given the
number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day, I’m not sure that a
Google car counts as the biggest infringement of my liberties right
now.
Please note: In order to post a comment you need to be registered and
signed in for guardian.co.uk blogs.
I’d trust Google more than most governments, particularly ours and the
US, anyway – which in itself is very worrying. I have big issues with
our surveillance society, but as you say this is a snapshot and not
rolling film like the 300+ CCTV cameras that supposedly capture us
each day. I love using the US one to show people around where I used
to live so although it goes against some of my issues with privacy I
have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this announcement and
can’t wait to use it.
I’m happy to be corrected and to remember in future to ask for a Data
Protection form when I’m next asking some organisation or business for
their footage of me.
But the reality is that I can point my camera into the public space in
front of my building and record it to my heart’s content. And I don’t
suppose that there’s anything to stop me putting it online or sending
it in to one of those “People do the funniest things..” type shows.
As you say, if you’re in a public place, then by the very nature of
that place, you can be seen, photographed and videoed.
I think it’s a terrible invasion of privacy, which is why I’m going to
render their photo of my house useless by standing naked in the front
window at all times.
If you search for a homeopathic cold cure, for example, on the Google
search engine then you will soon be bombarded by every quack medicine
man in California. Every single time you ‘Google’ something, the fact
is automatically recorded.”
Since the Peck case (http://www.out-law.com/page-3290) Authorities
have become very nervy about what is released and how. I personally
have had several complaints from people about how hard it is to get
their images but none from any about how they have been given out.
Oh and it really isn’t like Enemy of the State. Most systems are so
underfunded that we cheer when we can get a copy off within the
confines of our own room never mind having the infrastructure to allow
MI5 to hack in.
@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.
@CharlesArthur. Daily Mail have removed it, but it is still available
in a cache form, if you type “invasion almost criminal” into Google,
and click the second, indented link.
I would have thought this was clear cut defamation of a company – and
they are very likely to sue in a case where they have been accused of
misusing personal data and selling it to spam companies. Or at least
they should!
Slander is when you make a wrongful comment about an individual,
defamation is when you make one about a company or organisation, I
believe. Although that might be wrong!
@lb001 @Charles. Bizarley the Mail seems to have left a text version
of the “almost criminal” (almost insane?) words of AN Wilson. So just
to ensure they are not lost for posterity:
You are being watched. Not by the KGB, or by the Inland Revenue, or
even by one of those strange vans parked in your street, which purport
to know whether or not you own a television licence.
This is good news for snoopers, stalkers, peeping Toms and burglars.
But are its advantages to the rest of us really going to outweigh the
obvious disadvantages?
Aren’t invasions of personal privacy by commercial companies every bit
as indefensible as similar intrusions into our lives by a Big Brother
state?
If you are used to European habits of shopping, it is a vaguely
threatening experience, and it is nice to get home, and to feel that
shopping in the ‘civilised’ world is all a little different.
If you search for a homeopathic cold cure, for example, on the Google
search engine then you will soon be bombarded by every quack medicine
man in California. Every single time you ‘Google’ something, the fact
is automatically recorded.
And most of us would think that some element of discreet intrusion by
the State was legitimate.
The matter of Google is of a quite different order. This is a computer
company which is spying upon us for the sole purpose of exploiting us,
controlling us and making money out of us.
Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.
I am always very suspicious about people who do not like security
cameras etc…. What are they doing that they do not want the rest of
us to know about? These people need investigating.
Don’t worry if you aren’t getting an O2 iPhone – nobody else is
either. Especially if they haven’t sent their passport. (Updated;
again)
After a piece here in April suggesting advertising is waning, Thinkbox
is here to tell you it isn’t. But do you agree?
San Francsico Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) with Google co-founder Larry
Page at event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last year
I don’t know. He never seems to miss a chance to celebrate with the
Internet colossus and its founders, with whom he is close friends.
“I have been beating on Larry and Sergey for years” to open an office
in San Francisco. City-dwelling employees who traded city fog for the
sun that beams over Google’s Mountain View headquarters seemed pleased
with their shorter, commutes.
The open house was attended by employees from all facets of Google’s
massive organization, including Google.org and the newbies from the
Doubleclick acquisition. Headlining the event was one of Google’s top
executives and public faces, Marissa Mayer.
“This is a city of doers and dreamers,” overflowing with technology
and new-media companies drawn to a place that celebrates, not just
tolerates, diversity, Newsom said, drawing applause.
Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.
Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less
than 24 hours to respond.
“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”
Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.
Microsoft in May offered to buy Yahoo’s search operations for $1
billion and to spend another $8 billion to acquire a 16 percent stake
in Yahoo’s remaining operations.
Instead of selling its search engine to Microsoft, Yahoo opted to
forge an advertising partnership with rival Google Inc. That
represented a bit of irony because Google’s dominance of the Internet
search advertising market is the primary reason that Microsoft is
pursuing Yahoo.
Yahoo has estimated that it can boost its annual revenue by about $800
million by relying on Google’s superior technology to show some ads
alongside the search results on its Web site.
Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?
Google’s Lively team seem to want you to, uh, hang around in some cool
online chat rooms and exchange virtual hugs. To be honest, the whole
thing seems a bit underwhelming. Its launch reminds me a bit of
Google’s social network site, Orkut. This was another project, like
Lively, that was developed by a Google employee in part of the
“20 per cent time” devoted to individual pet projects, and
another one that has not really set the world alight. Orkut is a
perfectly respectable online community, but of course something of an
also-ran in a world now dominated by My Space and Facebook.
For now, Lively is what we’ve got: that’s the science fact. However,
given Google’s extraordinary scale and the immense possibilities
created by its huge web audience, I can’t help thinking more along the
lines of science fiction, imagining where Google could take this
technology and do something really interesting with it.
The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.
However, imagine if Google Earth became a portal to other virtual
spaces. If you were in business mode, you could fly in via Google
Earth to check the name of that company whose building you keep
driving past, find its real-world buildings, use them to launch its
webpage, and then enter its Lively virtual space to interact with some
real employees. As a tourist, you could fly into New York, check out
the hotels in the area near where your friends live, and then fly your
avatar into the hotel’s Lively space to talk to someone about getting
a deal on a weekend break.
Google Earth comes alive because it’s a living, breathing online
community which uses the power of social networks to layer value onto
a planet simulation. You enter a 3D space but can then easily locate
and activate 2D web information, such as pictures or Wikipedia
entries. It’s this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and
Google, which dominates the world’s text-based information and has
hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to
create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will
be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don’t need
another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when
these worlds start to collide.
Thomas Claburn for the iPhone in his post from earlier today. He also
points out that the application points you to other Google products.
But they are browser-based applications, and not on-board native
applications. I was hoping for much more.
This week saw yet another Google product hit the virtual streets.
This one, Lively, is one of those 20 per cent time projects. You know,
the pet projects that Google encourages their employees to work on.
So what is it? It’s basically virtual rooms or locations that
you can create for chatting with friends. It reminds me a lot of the
days when chat rooms started offering avatars. Only now, they move
and look a whole lot more like actual people.
I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long. Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle? Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.
With no native application to install, it would likely not be a drain
on your battery. Having an always available connection like 3G or Wi-
Fi would ensure that you can hop in and out of rooms at your leisure.
To top it all off, location based chat rooms and hangouts would be
sure to go over well. Imagine a room full of high school students
talking to each other in front of a landmark. Or virtual tour guides
to answer questions from visitors and tourists. I could see virtual
movie or television sets where you can meet your favorite stars for
some Q&A.
Andy on :
I suppose Lively does have potential, but definitely needs a lot of
work to be the sort of app I’d like it to be. The biggest
problem with it, currently, is all the sexually oriented rooms that
are popping up all over the place, when this is a service meant for
those as young as 13. Either Google needs to do a better job with
blocking, or removing unsuitable content or they need to separate them
out (i.e. have 13 & older rooms and 18 & older rooms that are in a
separate location). For now I’m staying away until they have
some sort of legitimate solution figured out.
In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!
Learn to address security risks in wireless handheld computing systems
with a solution that provides end-to-end security
Serves the decision makers responsible for networking, voice data, and
video communications technologies at enterprise and service provider
… where retail meets industry – The fourth edition of the No. 1
European Navigation Event will take place in the inspiring environment
of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.
“We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because
we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security
community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security
challenges associated with contemporary web technologies,” Zalewski
wrote. He added that Ratproxy is intended to complement active
crawlers and manual proxies, as well as other passive proxies.
Google has come under increasing pressure in recent months to tighten
its security strategy. Last month StopBadware.org, a site sponsored by
Google, found that Google itself was one of the top five networks
hosting malicious web pages, largely due to the popularity among
attackers of Google-owned networks such as Blogger. The other four
top-five networks were based in China.
What was achieved there is recognised to be of fundamental importance
to both winning the war (Churchill visited to say ‘thank you’ to them)
and the development of the computer. Maybe Bill Gates doesn’t want to
support this museum because it underlines where electronic computing
started i.e. here, not the U.S.
It was not so long ago, April 1, 2004, when Google mail first
appeared. In 2005 there were 5.4 mln subscribers and 51 mln in early
2007. Do you know how many Gmail accounts were registered…
Hello, I’m a PC. I’m a Handheld. Author: Eric Everson,
Founder MyMobiSafe.com I have said it before and I am sure I’ll
say it again, mobile devices are simply replacing computers….
Google will no longer forward eBay and PayPal phishing emails to
recipients using its (DKIM) standard. The protocol provides for simple
signing of outgoing email using a key which is valid for the relevant
domain and can be queried by the recipient via the domain and matched
with the incoming email.
A DERBY academic believes criminals will be getting
“fatter”, sitting at home planning burglaries, thanks to a
controversial new website.
Internet giant Google has now deployed a fleet of camera cars in
Britain, where critics are branding the site an invasion of privacy.
A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”
Campaigners fighting plans to build four 335-ft high wind turbines at
Carsington Pasture have criticised claims that they would not affect
local views ,
By Cassidy FriedmanStaff writerThe people at Google first felt obliged
to capture images of the boring U.S. cities in their virtual tour of
America.Places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.But Twin
Falls locals say they’ve spotted the Internet company’s distinctive
camera car in their town, a sign the company must be planning to add
this town to the ranks of the big cities.The company can’t actually
say for sure – the cars now traversing the nation operate
independently. But a Google spokeswoman said it’s likely the car –
which shoots 360-degree street-level photographs of all public roads
where it travels – cruised through Twin Falls earlier this
month.Chances are, the car spotted in Twin Falls was first deployed to
a larger metropolitan area like Boise, before it expanded its trip
east through Twin Falls, said spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.”We have
over 60 metropolitan areas,” Filadelfo said. “And within each of those
metropolitan areas we really try to include the surroundings. We think
everywhere can benefit from this. We think everybody, whether they
live in New York or Twin Falls can benefit.”Filadelfo said each car in
Google’s large fleet is armed with a sophisticated camera mounted on
its roof that shoots still photographs at and between
intersections.The photos, to be added to Google Maps at some
unspecified date in coming months, allows an on-screen visual tour.One
reason for the StreetView effort is to allow users the novelty of
taking a virtual drive through most American cities and a dozen or so
national parks. But the program also satisfies practical needs,
Filadelfo said.In one Midwestern state, department of transportation
officials use the program to identify dilapidated roads they need to
pave, Filadelfo said. It saves gas and time, they said. Viewers can
check out a restaurant’s ambience – at least exterior – before they
dine there. They can see a neighborhood before they rent a home on the
block.”We’ve seen a lot of really great uses of it and heard some
great feedback,” the spokeswoman said.It’s unclear how long the photos
will be of use, however. The company is unclear on when it might make
subsequent passes and update the street scenes.Google hit a patch of
rough road when some members of the public caught in StreetView’s
frames complained the photographs posted online invaded their
privacy.Viewers could request their face or private property be
blotted out.When shooting Manhattan in May, Google blurred all the
faces in its imagery, Filadelfo said.By June, despite having the clear
legal upper hand to shoot photographs of what takes place in public,
Google began blurring faces in all its shots. So don’t expect to be
famous for anything but your shirt and shoes, Twin Falls.”We thought
the focus was on business and geography and it just seemed a way to
preserve that,” Filadelfo said.Cassidy Friedman may be reached at
208-735-3241 or .
Obviously the swastika carries hateful connotations. But if a service
purports to accurately represent people’s searches, who gets to decide
what counts as offensive? The swastika isn’t a derogatory term or
obscene word; it’s a symbol with a history.
“Despite the ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t
recognize it as a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been
its association with the murderous racism of the Nazis.”
Who, exactly, are “most folks”? Obviously Adina is being a bit racist
herself to discount the views of over a billion people (Indians), and
others, whose primary association of a swastika is not murderous
racism but something quite the opposite. Why does the negative
association that white western culture has with the Swastika
(presumably what is meant by “most people”) trump the beautiful
symbolic meaning held by southeast Asians?
I am surprised and dismayed that Google removed swastika from Google
Trends. After all, people will continue to search for swastika, trends
or no trends.
If “most” people fail to realise that it is an integral part of
Hinduim, then they are clearly ignorant. Worse, they are not prepared
to learn either.
If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.
The Hindu swastika runs counter-clockwise – facing the left. The
swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the right.
Here’s a more likely explanation. If you do a (Baidu is the Chinese
equivalent of Google), you’ll find that there was a swastika-related
story recently in the Chinese press that has gotten widespread
coverage over the past week. apparently there was a big mural-type
advertisement on a wall somewhere in xi’an (ancient capital of China,
geographically speaking it’s roughly in the center). the mural
contained a painting of a long black train with a nazi-inspired
swastika painted on the train’s head. judging from the baidu news
results, this story was literally reproduced in hundreds of online
news outlets. my sense of the article is that it’s meant to inspire
shock (as in, how could they not know this looks like a nazi
swastika?!), but also to provide the general lesson that the swastika
has negative connotations outside of buddhism (for those who don’t
know anything about the nazis? also remember: Buddhism comes from
India too). i’d say this story is what inspired all those google
searches, and not the simple fact that “good luck is on their minds.”
This week, Google jumped into the battle against Bell Canada’s anti-
BitTorrent practices, this time through the country’s equivalent of
the FCC, and on different legal grounds than privacy advocates.
Idiot. You really shouldn’t comment on something you obviously don’t
have a clue about….. You seem to have missed this section, or did
you actually bother to read the article? “As previously reported in
BetaNews, in May, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Internet
Clinic (CIPPIC) asked another agency, the Canadian Privacy Commission,
to investigate whether Canadian privacy law is being broken in Bell’s
use of deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to find and limit the
use of P2P applications.” Its NOT the government, but a corporation
that is limiting rights, like what is happening even more so in
America right now…. Canadians have more rights and freedoms than the
average American does now. We have better privacy laws. Canada is a
democracy. The USA isn’t and never has been. Its a Constitution-based
federal republic with a strong democratic tradition.
Internet giant says large carriers shouldn’t be slowing certain
traffic and is calling for a halt to the practice
“Protecting end user choice is the central issue in this proceeding,
but also a much larger issue. It goes to the heart of the Internet and
how it acts as an extraordinary platform for innovation and fair
competition.”
A spokesman for Bell declined to comment, saying the company would be
filing its response with the CRTC tomorrow.
Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.
Last month, however, the head of the commission said a broad
investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the flow of traffic on
their networks is likely.
“Sooner or later – hopefully later – this is going to evolve into a
major consultation … It seems to be inevitable,” Mr. Finckenstein
said.
Google’s 15-page complaint lauds the Internet as an open platform that
should be accessible to anyone and “facilitates unparalleled social,
political, cultural and economic innovation.”
“The commission should make clear in this proceeding that at least
blocking or degrading applications of consumers’ choice is prohibited
in Canada because it is not technologically and competitively
neutral,” Google says in the filing.
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Publishing Inc., 444 Front St. W., Toronto, ON Canada M5V 2S9Phillip
Crawley, Publisher
The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.
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bizjournals.
Because they’re independent companies and Google has no legal
authority to force an outside company to do anything.
Google could then request the records, but the data storage company
could refuse to approve the request, and there would be no way for
Google to force the other company to provide the information.
Personally, I like to be able to find a video which I watched
yesterday to send link to a friend.
Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way. The problem is that we I.T. people
are Data Hoarders. Even if the data isn’t useful today, or at all
useful into the foreseeable future, we still hang on to it. And we
save every detail we can just to prove how clever we are to have been
able to discover it in the first place. (Note: P2P program writers are
the same, and that’s how Media Sentry can tell you so much about
filesharers they discover on the Internet right down to the full
directory paths of files.) Now if storage wasn’t so d@mn cheap we
wouldn’t have this habit, but Moore’s Law applied to disc drives means
we no longer have to store 2-digit years and have Y2K problems. We
have these problems now instead.
This is why the RIAA is able to use IP addresses combined with
timestamps to identify ISP account holders. It doesn’t identify any
actual copyright infringers, but they don’t care as long as they have
somebody to sue. If these logs were deleted after 3 days this whole
RIAA mess would have been a non-starter.
Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.
I personally cannot comprehend how a judge ruled that privacy issues
resulting from this are “speculative”. You are essentially handing
over information on millions of people on what content they watched,
uploaded, commented on, rated, tagged, etc. to a media company,
without need. This information is also the foundation for YouTube’s
business being handed over to a competitor.
As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge
“Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google’s duty to
protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal
ruling.” Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they
are.
just say they were ‘lost’ and that the backups were destroyed or lost
due to shady backup practices. works for the White House.
I can think of many problems. For example, there are tons of videos on
youtube that are never accessed except by the uploader and a few
friends. Pretty easy to identify who the likely uploader is from the
records, and thus identify a user. Or even if you never upload, a lot
can be learned. For example, somebody looking for my records could
first see what youtube videos have me in them. Most people have
probably searched for their own name, and as such this is a clue as to
which user is probably me.
My cable IP address doesn’t change often, I had one IP address for
almost 10 years without changing… just when I did a router upgrade
it switched.
(However, some people would no doubt trade away their privacy for
coupon discounts or whatever–but right now we have no choice. Lots of
companies (and of course including Google) collect lots of our
personal information and treat it like *THEIR* property when it should
belong to *US*.)
But as an economic downturn looms, deteriorating ad spending will
likely cramp Google’s style — if it hasn’t already. While Wall Street
largely anticipates a dandy second-quarter — the — we suspect the
economy has finally caught up with the search monstrosity.
“We’ve been wondering about [spending reductions] since the first
quarter,” says Jeffrey Lindsay, a Bernstein Research analyst. “I don’t
think the new CFO has really taken up his role just yet, but there’s a
growing body of evidence that Google is cutting back on wasting money.
They’re not quite at the point where they’re saving money, but at the
very least, they’re not wasting as much. And that’s probably a very
positive sign.”
Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.
This is a “big piece of chicken” question…but what are those
children holding? I think I see legs and fur… but beyond that I
can’t identify the mystery meat. I can only assume, at such a food
event, that the “petting zoo” comes with a very realistic ending?
To protect our readers from malicious comments SFGate asks that you
login or register to post a comment.
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, found himself in a
humiliating situation when customs officers impounded two executive
jets belonging to his Reliance Industries, claiming he had failed to
pay an estimated £12m in tax on them.
Back to those pesky taxes, though. Also believed to be on the
taxman’s hit list are brewing and airline boss Vijay Mallya, the
Tata family and property billionaire KP Singh.
We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.
I DON’T wish to spoil Michael Grade’s Sunday, but imagine
how different his job would be if ITV owned Google.
A bike activist has collected more than 35,000 signatures on an online
petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” feature to .
Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.
Google Maps already offers a check box for those who wish to avoid
highways, but as Smith points out in his site’s FAQ, the feature
that are unpleasant for cyclists.
Andrew Brown, founder and CEO of New Amsterdam Project, a Cambridge
company that hauls cargo via industrial tricycles.
The web search and advertising giant Google has recently jumped into
the game with a feature called Google Transit. In some areas, if you
do a search for directions on Google maps, you will also get
directions to reach your destination via mass transit.
What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….
Don’t get me wrong, I think Google Transit is great, but for more
detailed itineraries I will use the transit companies trip planner.
Google needs some grown ups who remember when transit systems were not
government funded. They are usually 2-4 generations away from
actualization of producing industrial strength software.
Try communicating with one of them on a personal level they are so
insular it’s incredible. They have receptionists that have graduate
degrees just to swish the public away..
Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.
Metro’s bus and rail schedules are “proprietary”? Huh? Last I checked
they are distributed on paper, over the phone, on the web, and created
from start to finish, including the software systems used to maintain
the data, with taxpayer money. That doesn’t seem like something that
can be defined at “proprietary”. Move into the current century Metro,
and hand it over to Google. A transit agency so proud of its poor
product that it is frightened of someone else offering to improve it
for free? Yeah, sure, that’s what we pay them for….one can only
shake their head at yet another brilliantly dumb notion, public
transit information is “proprietary”. Metro gives away real time
traffic data for free – why should Google Transit be any different?
Guess car drivers still outrank bus riders – must be that sales tax
income from the high price of gas clouding their vision.
Yes, it does the job, mostly, but it’s flaky as hell and almost
impossible for a newbie to use. You have to learn all sorts of stupid
tricks, like knowing that for some reason the Universal City subway
stop is called “University City Sta” in the planner. It also does a
shoddy job of telling you how long a commute is gonna take.
BTW, if you are ever dismayed to find that the timetables on OCTA
signs don’t match what you were given on Google maps, don’t worry; the
signs are what’s wrong.
I don’t bother with the map feature at Metro.net; it’s a joke. The
trip planner also suffers from constant crashes, something I don’t
*think* would carry over into Google (in the long term). I think that
Google’s interface promises a lot more user-friendliness, but I’d want
to know its flexibility: to option for Metro-only or bus-only routes,
for example. Click-and-drag for multiple-stop trips? If either Google
or Metro.net can manage that… HOT.
If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but
you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.
Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.
“Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to
include in your keyword list, you’ll be able to see the approximate
number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on
Google and the search network,” said Trevor Claiborne of Google’s
AdWords group in a Tuesday. (See an image of the tool in action
below.)
The move is probably smart: advertisers love quantitative analysis,
and this gives them more hard data immediately.
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Excerpts from the blog After spending Friday morning playing with an
iPhone 3G, I can see why Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve…
(AT&T, the phone’s service provider, loaned me a pre-activated phone
to test. This meant I wasn’t caught in Friday’s activation nightmare
caused by Apple’s server problems.)
Most people won’t be able to tell whether you’re using version 1.0 or
2.0, although the new one feels more svelte with its rounded, plastic
back.
What appears even better is the process to synchronize the phone with
Exchange. However, I couldn’t complete this task because my employer
hasn’t tweaked its servers to accept iPhones yet, so I was unable to
finish the last step.
My tip of the day: Check with your IT department to be sure it has
authorized iPhones. Otherwise, you may get a message saying that it’s
unable to verify a certificate and the sync won’t work.
A few little quirks: Just because the 3G phone uses a faster network,
don’t expect blinding speed over the wireless network.
You also can’t connect to iTunes over the network — you must be
on a Wi-Fi network to connect to the store.
So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart
this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before
or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage
in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday,
July 17.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.
The owner of “Obama’s Chocolate Nuts” is feeling
like “the luckiest person on Earth” in the wake of the
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks about Sen. Barack Obama.
Jesse Jackson is no more than a vicious Black thug that fantasizes
about castrating other Black Liberal males.
SIC WILSON … talk to the hand, cause the volleyball ain’t listening.
THE FITS GIRLS … somebody’s gotta be the brains of this operation.
SIC WILLIE … not sweating but protecting the technique.
You can use the form below to send a link to this post to a friend,
just fill our their details and click send!
A number of readers have noted Google’s , with which it is most
comparable. Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast
— at least an order of magnitude faster than XML.”
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Looks like Google just invented the [wikipedia.org] wire protocol,
which is also platform agnostic and an open standard.
I guess the main difference here is that their “compiler” can generate
the actual language-domain classes off of the descriptor files, which
is a definite advantage over “classic” IDL.
“Google protocol Buffers” is cooler than the OMG terminology, but this
kind of thing has been around for 20 years.
“Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast — at least an
order of magnitude faster than XML.” That is just because they aren’t
using enough XML!
The example they give is for a small set of data, and percentages vary
more dramatically as sample sizes decrease.
I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2’s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.
Just wait for the XML zealots to come crashing and not believing that
XML is not the fastest, best, solution to all the world’s problems
(including cancer) and of course people at Google are amateurs and
id10ts and WHY DO YOU HATE XML kind of stuff.
The point of this isn’t so much that it’s faster than XML (so is
everything else), it’s that google took everything that a real person
needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious
case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody
uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that
(have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a
DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)? I’d use
it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this,
and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design
anyway. That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self
documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a
lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary
complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain
instead of simpler.
2. Verification in situations when it’s impossible to devise a
meaningful reaction to a failure (other than either “everything
failed, turn off the computers and go home” and “assume the data to be
valid anyway because ALL of it will have the same formatting error
because the same program generates it”)
3. Dealing with data that arrives in neatly packaged “documents” and
“requests”, as opposed to being constantly produced and consumed.
4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.
So here is your example of how superior can be ANY format that is not
based on this stupid idea.
… now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as
protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention
like “@WORK” for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse
the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access
classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the
types. I don’t see that ‘required’ and ‘optional’ keywords help
much… imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But
this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.
Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn’t seem like protocol buffers
really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is
effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs
they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator
is nice, but this is like a day’s work max. Maybe I’m not
understanding google’s problems, but I’ll stick with JSON since it
actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format… and you
can always optimize it if actually needed.
You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.
PS. Your format stinks and is horribly slow and unscalable when it
comes to adding to the library. Genre’s are so unbelievably grey
defined that you might as well just sort them by the dominate color of
the cover. Google would have done better.
Whitepaper: Virtualization from the Data Center to the Desktop. Meet
evolving demands more effectively as you transform your IT
infrastructure from a cost center to a strategic business asset.
Google has emerged as one of the leading proponents of open source
software development, as a user of open source technologies and as a
developer of open source code. And as a funding source, Google’s open
source commitment is well known.
Leading the open source charge at Google is Chris DiBona, open source
program manager. DiBona was well known in the open source community as
a former editor at the popular Slashdot Web site, as well as the co-
editor of the landmark 1999 book called Open Sources, which discusses
the open source revolution and included essays from Linus Torvalds,
Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bob Young and other notables.
Q: At the beginning of the Summer of Code there was some chatter in
Google’s public boards about participants having trouble with getting
forms in and other such legal issues. Are some of those issues going
to be addressed next year in a different way if you go ahead with
another Summer of Code?
We had 49 different countries represented in the student body that we
had and some of the tax issues were pretty vexing for them. I think
that next year will be a little easier. The fact of the matter is
taxes are complicated. This isn’t a typical scholarship because it’s
based on performances measured by an external body.
What that means is if you put in cancer or a certain kind of cancer
you can find out what genes in the human genome express that disease.
Or you can put in a gene and find out which proteins and genes it’s
connected to.
This sort of thing had been done commercially before but nobody had
ever done it in an open source way. It was one of those projects that
we took and thought, “Well I don’t know if he can possibly succeed in
the time frame to complete the project,” but he did and it is pretty
remarkable.
Q: What was the experience like revising your landmark book Open
Sources some six years after first publication?
It’s been in the works for awhile. We wanted to show how open source
has changed over the last six years and how its ideas have reached
into different realms.
Q: One of the most widely used open source security tools, Nessus,
recently closed its source. There is now apparently a fork under
development. Is that something that Google would help to support?
The OSI-approved slate is really the way to go. We don’t want to cause
any market confusion around creating yet another license. I’ve been
pretty cheered by Sun and Intel pulling back their particular licenses
— and reducing the number of OSI-approved licenses. I think it’s a
pretty good thing.
I haven’t done a deep reading of them. If they’re OSI-approved I would
consider them, but I would have to read them.
We’re really happy with the Apache Software Foundation license and I
don’t think that it gets enough attention.
I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.
: woarhex etbdml
: My Lonely Planet book said that if you want to stay with a family
instead of the hotel you need to register…
: No info on that. As far as I heard from friends in Bukhara,
everything seems to be more or less ok now….
: The 5th microregion in Bukhara has already been evacuated.
What’s going on, that’s 15 km away from…
Earlier, I about the explosions in ammunition storage in Kagan town
that is located in 12 km from Bukhara city. The explosions were the
result of a fire in the ammunition storage, which originally used to
be an ammunition storage for shells and warheads for Soviet military
operations Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from
Afghanistan in 1989, the ammunition supplies were left in Uzbekistan.
Officials stated 3 people were killed and 21 injured. However,
eyewitnesses [ru] and the city has returned to its normal life again
I will be checking for updates in the Google Earth and whenever they
come, I will put both old and new pictures of Kagan, so that readers
can see the damage and changes caused by explosions.
Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where
readers can share and discover new web pages.
Dan Berlin writes “After announcing that was being discontinued, a lot
of people asked for Google to open source the code so development
could continue. Well, they’ve done just that. The code for browser
sync is now available on ”
Might it be part of the reason they’re shutting down and releasing
source?They don’t want a judge to release the data to Corporation X.
I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!
Whereas Browser Sync is in the interest of technology/simplicity, I’d
see the source code of Windows ME being released in the interest of
tragic comedy more than anything…
I use a bunch of machines all over the place (mostly for
development/personal interest). I use old machines, dial-up, new
machines, servers – having browser sync was a god-send. It was great
to be able to reference everything regardless of architecture and O/S.
I agree that there are concerns about what Google would/could reveal
to legislative bodies, but that’s only because they are so huge that
other factors come into play. Maybe this is their way of extricating
themselves (somewhat) from the liabilities associated with having that
much info about a person’s real interests. That said, I feel that I
was never ‘targeted’ as a result of their handling of my data, nor was
there ever any ‘push’ marketing as a result. I think that’s where you
draw the line between good corporate citizen and spammer. I hope that
someone who has the time can re-incorporate it into FireFox 3.x
I’m sure there’s better examples, but off the top of my head I know
that a few years ago, there was a petition started to release the
source code to [wikipedia.org], an old (yet brilliant) 3D RTS game
that still stands out amongst the crowd today. After a few months
(possibly a couple of years), Eidos scrambled together the source code
and released it to the community.Since then, the Warzone resurrection
project has come leaps and bounds – fixing bugs, improving what
platforms the game runs at, allowing higher resolutions, improving the
AI, etc.The only slight catch (that I’m aware of) is that the Video
CODEC used in the original game was proprietary, so Eidos couldn’t
release the source to that and the company that owns the CODEC
wouldn’t allow it to be distributed any more.
He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”
Since most of us can’t head over there to watch it in person, we’re
giving you the next best thing
The map also serves as a promotion to kick off Street View in the
European version of Google Maps.
Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?
If the data were stuck on 3.5-inch disks, you could order an external
3.5-inch floppy USB drive for $19.95 from FloppyDisk.com. The store
mentions on its site that it can’t find equivalent drives for
5.25-inch disks.
One caveat: The Web site warns that some data might be unrecoverable,
and that you’re paying for the attempt, not necessarily the results.
ANNE KRISHNAN, (RALEIGH) NEWS & OBSERVER
But while this might (might!) be interesting TV, we get the feeling
it’s going to be more Kabuki than anything else: The only way this
pact is relevant is if Yahoo keeps its existing management, or if it
isn’t eventually sold off/broken up. And while we’d like to see Yahoo
kept alive as a standalone company, and returned to its previous
glory, we’re sadly skeptical that we’re going to see that happen.
Institutional investors are mostly not tuned into the Google ()
Creative Suite. For Google and other SaaS-styled companies, it’s
not about product cycles. New products, particularly strategic ones,
do have a role to play and bear watching closely.
In any case, it’s good to see this particular project out in the open,
and as a Firefox user I’d love to see someone pick up the ball and run
with it.
If you are a member, Sign in to have your comment attributed to you.
If you are not yet a member, and help the Open Source community by
sharing your thoughts, answering user questions and providing reviews
and alternatives for projects.
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”
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Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)
Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.
Taking the plunge into the cloud Service level agreements are the kind
of contractual guarantees that appeal to CIOs making cost-benefit
analyses. But there’s a gut-level factor at play here, too.
So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.
Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.
“With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative
console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the
phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it,” Chandra
said.
That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.
With so much fairy dust in the air over Apple’s day-early for a ride
to test out some of these apps. Be forewarned that the firmware has
not yet been Apple-approved for wide release and cannot be vouched
for.
More than 500 applications are already clustered in the App Store,
many of them tiny apps and widgets that have been custom-built to run
natively on the upgraded iPhone firmware. Most of these early entrants
are nearly identical to the iPhone-optimized versions previously
released by publishers to work with the iPhone Classic.
The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing Safari’s initial
loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.
I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply
the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).
By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?
“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”
Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.
Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.
The service, Google’s online productivity suite, went from having some
features not working, like the log-out button and the document
creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.
“For a short period this morning, our users had difficulty accessing
Google Docs. Some Google Apps users were also affected … We have now
resolved the problem. We know how important Google Docs is to our
users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”
has not been updated with any additional notes, or an explanation of
what exactly went wrong, although Google Docs’ help section has some
small notes first acknowledging the problem, along with a note to say
it was fixed.
Interestingly enough, of the three services offered in Google Docs,
only the word processor and presentation tool were truly down. If you
had a link to a spreadsheet you could apparently view and edit it just
fine.
The technology, , uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender
of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from
which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of
phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.
Last October, that it was protecting Yahoo Mail users with eBay and
PayPal accounts from phishing attempts using the same technology.
It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.
: Google, which has a 5 percent stake in Time Warner’s AOL, now has
the right to force the media conglomerate to bring its Internet
division to the market.
Renewed hopes for an AOL sale or merger sent Time Warner shares rising
as much as 2.6 percent on Monday after Citigroup named the company its
top pick within large cap media and entertainment stocks on the
conviction that AOL would be sold or merged into either Yahoo or
another company.
AOL and companies like News Corp’s MySpace have been driven to conduct
deal talks since Microsoft revealed its pursuit of Yahoo in February,
a takeover attempt that threatened to redraw the Internet landscape by
creating a more viable rival to Google.
After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.
David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…
David Pogue on the new $100 movie player from Netflix, which sends
movies from your computer screen to your TV…
strmvlt 
The google and other inappropriate comments’s search terms
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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.
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.
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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.
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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;)
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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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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.
“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.
July 13, 2008 at 4:56 pm Leave a comment