Tag: google

At your own risk, indeed

Mashable recently reported on a Google Maps user that was injured while following walking directions from the site, and later sued Google and both the driver of the vehicle that hit her.

Lauren Rosenberg used her Blackberry to get this set of directions in Park City, UT which include an 0.6 mile stretch on Deer Valley Drive, also known as highway 224. The Blackberry’s Google Maps application apparently does not give the standard warning about walking directions being in beta, which is the focus of Lauren’s lawsuit against Google.

I would imagine the Blackberry application also does not show the choice of two to four different routes, as the third choice as of the time I ran the directions uses Park Avenue for most of the distance and only requires one to walk 279 feet (or just over 1/20 of a mile) down the apparently pedestrian-hostile Deer Valley Drive. There is no route that completely avoids Deer Valley Drive (every street in the area which intersects Deer Valley Drive does not go through to the other side, probably due to geography). The Google Street View pictures show a speed limit of 35 mph for this stretch of the road, probably about the only pedestrian-friendly thing about it.

I’m not sure the lawsuit against Google is entirely deserved; the directions are about the best that can be managed, though Google was sloppy to not include the warning in the Blackberry app. There is no question that the driver who hit Lauren deserves to be sued, of course. However, I am wondering why the government responsible for maintaining the roads isn’t being sued as well, as the roads could be made somewhat more pedestrian friendly than they are. I understand the limits of geography and our motor-vehicle-centric society (and thus the assumption that “everyone has a car” in a small town like this). However, cars do break down, and sometimes the only way to get to the auto parts store is on foot. Sometimes civil engineers forget this simple fact of life.

Illogical beyond words: Italy vs. Google

Normally I relish the opportunity to roast large companies like Google and hold them accountable. In this case, however, no sane person can possibly side with Google’s opponent, the Italian government, in this case.

This TechCrunch story links to a post on the official Google blog which describes a situation where three Google employees were found criminally responsible for failing to comply with the Italian privacy code in relation to a video uploaded by a YouTube user in Italy. A fourth Google employee was acquitted. From the Google blog post:

To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

… In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

This is paramount to holding employees of an automobile manufacturer such as Ford or GM criminally liable for a drunk driver’s actions (or for that matter, someone at, say, a Budweiser or Coors plant). It’s crazy. It’s dumb. In fact “galactically stupid” and “box of rocks dumb” don’t really do it justice at all.

I’m not even sure the wording used to describe the intelligence of a computer in a book I read as a kid would do it. That book described a computer as having the intelligence of a very stupid worm. To compare this judge’s intelligence to the stupidest of the worms would be an insult to the worms.

I feel compelled to drag out the quote from the FSF’s “Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases That Are Worth Avoiding” yet again:

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

Never has this been clearer than this instance. If the judge is applying the law correctly, then the law is more broken than the result of dropping a grand piano from an airliner. If not, then this should be reversed on appeal and the judge stripped of his authority.

If allowed to stand, this is a horrifying threat to the Internet as we know it, and it may not remain confined to Italy and Italian law. I concur with this quote later in the post:

[W]e are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming.

Indeed, common sense isn’t so common anymore. Remember this if you’re travelling to Italy.

Google, On2, and the future of video codecs

As summarized in FSF’s open letter to Google, there is a strong case for Google releasing the VP8 video codec acquired from their purchase of On2 Technologies.

I agree with most of what is in this open letter from the FSF. However, I have some doubt that VP8 will be a better choice than Theora (itself a derivative of On2’s earlier VP3 codec) in the short term. The more likely path is something along the lines of the following:

  • VP8 is liberated (released under a free software license and with full royalty-free patent licenses, similar to how On2 released VP3 to Xiph.org.
  • Xiph.org, other organizations, and/or the free software community at large steps up to clean up and improve the VP8 codebase.
  • The result is some successor to Theora, whatever it may be called, and probably won’t reach “1.0 release status” until 2013 at least.

From the open letter:

This ability to offer a free format on YouTube, however, is only a
tiny fraction of your real leverage. The real party starts when you begin to encourage users’ browsers to support free formats. There are lots of ways to do this. Our favorite would be for YouTube to switch from Flash to free formats and HTML, offering users with obsolete browsers a plugin or a new browser (free software, of course). Apple has had the mettle to ditch Flash on the iPhone and the iPad — albeit for suspect reasons and using abhorrent methods (DRM) — and this has pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages. You could do the same with YouTube, for better reasons, and it would be a death-blow to Flash’s dominance in web video.

I’ll go into detail on Apple’s suspect reasons since these are well-known to computing freedom and free software advocates, but probably less known to most “Joe Average” iPhone users.

Apple runs an App Store for the iPhone and this is, according to Apple, the only “blessed” method of getting applications onto the iPhone. It is possible to “jailbreak” an iPhone such that alternative third-party application repositories can be used. However, Apple has maintained this voids the iPhone’s warranty in addition to violating the DMCA, and at least one update has “bricked” (rendered completely inoperative) jailbroken iPhones.

The sum total is, as far as deciding what actually gets to run on the iPhone, it’s really less like a purchase than a rental. One is effectively renting the iPhone from Apple for a term of the iPhone’s useful life, and Apple retains the true ownership of the iPhone. If this seems just a bit absurd to you, that’s because it is. Most other phones will let you run any Java-based application and download almost any ringtone or wallpaper, giving you a warning that the download is not guaranteed by the wireless carrier or phone manufacturer. But Apple steps in and plays nanny. Anyway, that’s getting off the topic a bit.

The move from Flash-based video to free formats is inevitable. We don’t know what shape the VP8 code is in as far as cross-platform compatibility, and it took a great deal of hacking on VP3 to produce Theora.

The conclusion of the FSF’s open letter to Google is a commendable call to action:

You owe it to the public and to the medium that made you successful to solve this problem, for all of us, forever. Organizations like Xiph, Mozilla, Wikimedia, the FSF, and even On2 itself have recognized the need for free formats and fought hard to make it happen. Now it’s your turn. We’ll know if you do otherwise that your interest is not user freedom on the web, but Google’s dominance.

We all want you to do the right thing. Free VP8, and use it on YouTube!

I’d like to think Google has honorable intentions. However, just because Google decides not to free VP8 and immediately use it on YouTube does not necessarily mean Google intends to sit on VP8 or use it as a bargaining chip. It has already been shown that the argument against Theora on YouTube is FUD. If there’s a difference between Theora and H.264 at a similar bitrate, I’ll be damned if I can see it. The opinion is damn near unanimous that Vorbis blows away MP3 at a similar bitrate and is at least competitive with most everything else.

Google already has access to a free, unencumbered alternative to Flash for YouTube, and did before buying On2. If liberated, VP8 is the future for unencumbered video formats, but it may be too early to just jump in and use it now.

The Iranian treatment

A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicles the Iran government’s attempt to block access to Google’s Gmail service and in turn introduce its own email service for its citizens. From the article:

A Google spokesman said in a statement, “We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail. We can confirm a sharp drop in traffic, and we have looked at our own networks and found that they are working properly. Whenever we encounter blocks in our services we try to resolve them as quickly as possibly because we strongly believe that people everywhere should have the ability to communicate freely online.”

I have never been a huge fan of Google; they are a prime example of a corporation starting out and gaining trust during its startup period, then betraying that trust after growing far enough beyond the “small company” phase. I have even put up a video, on Google-owned YouTube no less, which mentions “don’t be evil” becoming a “[beep]-damn joke.” (Said sort of in the heat of the moment, and yes, I even did my own beep-out.) And it was in a different context (a YouTube partner getting hung out to dry), but I still don’t think “don’t be evil” as a Google motto holds much credibility at all. (If you want to cut to the chase, it’s at 1:42 to 2:13.)

It’s not surprising at all that Google will work to restore Gmail access to the Iranian citizens; it’s in Google’s business interest to do so. I definitely would not expect Google to take it lying down.

One thing worse than Google having carte blanche to snoop on the emails of Iranian citizens, however, would be for the Iranian government to have that same carte blanche. It’s also troubling from an anti-censorship standpoint any time a government–at any level, whether national, state/province, or local–tries to stop or reroute the flow of information. If the Iranians want to use Gmail, they should have the choice. There are better choices out there.

It also has occured to me the Iranian government, having become used to its power thirst being quenched by control of “old media (radio, TV, and newspapers), is quite possibly hostile towards the entire concept of the Internet. Technology has marched on, and the era of state-controlled media is rapidly becoming obsolete. There are ways around even the Great Firewall of China. As said by John Gilmore in a 1993 TIME magazine interview, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

So yes, I applaud the opposition of the Iranian government’s pathetic attempt at censorship, but I understand the reasons why Google is doing so as well. Yes, Iranians should be allowed to choose Gmail, however, they should also be aware of the alternatives and the rationale for choosing something else.

Taking down the weasels: Google sues the scam artists

Better late than never. Credit goes to ReadWriteWeb for being the first place where I read about this recent development.

It’s rare I find something a large corporation does that is worthy of praise, but this is one such situation. The official Google blog reveals that, finally, the corporate behemoth has decided it’s time to drag the weasels into court. Yes, weasels. Anyone remember those posts? (It’s a three-part series, in case you weren’t around in April when I first posted them.)

I lament that it took Google at least eight months to catch on to what was obviously dubious appropriation of their trademark. In fact, with the inclusion of “Google” in the dictionary, the company has already come dangerously close to losing its trademark.

At least, we hope, a few scam artists will be bankrupt shortly, and the sunlight from Google’s official blog will probably scare the rest of them into hiding for a while.