Tag: google

Microsoft and News Corp: strange bedfellows at their worst

FT.com reports on a very troubling development. Microsoft and News Corporation are forming an alliance against Google (if you believe them) or against all of us (if you don't). In essence, News Corporation will "de-index" its content from Google in exchange for payment from Microsoft.

At best, this deal is dubious. At worst, it's anti-competitive and forces the users of search engines into a chess game as unwilling pawns. My argument here is not in favor of Google any more than it is in favor of choice of the users and against underhanded tactics on the part of Microsoft.

I can't see the US Department of Justice just letting this go unchecked. I'll just say there's never been a better time to boycott Microsoft than now.

To be fair about it, we do need more choices than Google or Bing. Cuil showed some promise at first (once their bot became better behaved). Several others have come and gone before the age of Google (I still miss many of the searches AltaVista let you do that Google simply does not have functionality for).

In a way, I had hoped Bing would become a serious alternative to Google, just to keep Google honest. I should have known better than to think honesty and anything related to Microsoft belonged in the same thought pattern. Shame on you, Microsoft.

The evil Side(wiki) of Google

It took me a while to get to this one (most of a month), but I finally did. And I’m wishing I had dropped a few things to get to it sooner.

A recent Talkbiz.com blog entry details the dark side of Google’s new Sidewiki application. This real life example is perhaps the most shocking abuse of a technology with Google’s name on it ever recorded (and yes, this quote is a bit long):

A gentleman I know is a really hard working guy, who’s busted his butt for more hours in a day than I ever want to work, for years, to provide a good living for his wife and daughter. I mean, 14 hours a day in the long term, building a business that’s based on providing value to his customers.

This guy has a medical condition that results in one eye pointing off at an angle that’s not even with the other. The picture he uses on some sites makes this obvious.

Some ignorant, malicious, psychopathic, deranged, bored, sadistic bastard of a man-child (sorry, but that’s the most polite description I can use and still convey the merest surface of my contempt) used that as the basis for a “wiki-note” implying that this guy was a pedophile.

On Sidewiki, right next to the guy’s own business web site.

If there’s any lie a person can tell online that warrants having a 6-inch hole put in them that the sun will shine through, that’s the one.

This… mindless, soulless, stupid creature told that lie for nothing more than his own amusement. Because his victim has one eye that didn’t track right in a photograph.

Google got rid of that one pretty quickly, but how much will their response time slow down as the service grows?

Lessons to be learned from this:

  • I would opt all of my domains out of Sidewiki were such a thing possible.

  • That not being possible (yet), I believe my readers are intelligent enough to realize that Sidewiki is a separate site which I do not control.

  • Since this was written, it’s now possible to use a bookmarklet to view Sidewiki entries. So, at least you don’t actually need to install Google’s toolbar and thus agree to the obnoxious EULA. That said, I still may not be aware of some or even most Sidewiki comments. I may soon take advantage of the comment from the site owner which stays on top. (Though, I shudder at the implication that indeed, in order to do even this, one must have a Google account and register the Web site with Google. This really should be opt-out at minimum, and it should not require the creation of a Google account to do so.)

To be fair, the bookmarklet does make it a bit more obvious that the comments are not hosted on the same site. Google needs to make this clearer to the toolbar users of Sidewiki. It’s one thing to allow someone to post comments about other sites; it’s another entirely to not make it obvious the comments are in fact on a third party site. I don’t think Google is the first to implement something like this, but Google’s implementation is clearly the most dangerous of all.

The article goes on to express grave, perhaps deserved, concern that Google Wave will fuel widespread adoption of Sidewiki. The only reason I am remotely excited about Google Wave is that I have been told this will not remain proprietary to Google, that one can set up their own Wave server instead of using Google’s. Of course, this may be like Microsoft telling us that .NET is cross-platform, when the reality is it’s completely portable across any OS Microsoft makes, and if one wants .NET for anything else one must port it themselves. But, that’s another rant for another day.

I’d like to think Google is a little less evil than Microsoft or Apple, if only because the thought of a truly evil Google is terrifying. I’m not sure how much benefit of the doubt is left.

“Library of future” initiative becomes corporate battleground

Wired reports on Sony’s decision to side with Google in a highly contentious lawsuit between Google and rivals Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon.

The lawsuit centers around privacy concerns and the fact it would give Google monopoly-like status on book rights that would be impossible for other companies to acquire without their own lawsuit.

Worse for Google, the Department of Justice is also investigating the settlement–a rather ominous and foreboding development.

I have never been all that positiviely impressed with Sony; they are probably the only company with a hand in consumer electronics and entertainment (the latter through their acquisition of Columbia Tri-Star in 1989 and CBS Records in 1987). The second DVD player my mom ever bought was a Sony, and it was the first to fail; the RCA player purchased a few months before still works today as far as I know. It has always seemed to me that Sony built up a good reputation in its early days, and somehow managed to keep it afloat enough to justify some kind of premium pricing even though the reputation it has is probably less deserved today.

Still, today, I’d really like to give Sony the benefit of the doubt. Yes, even though this is the same Sony known for the doomed Betamax and Digital 8 videotape formats, and the XCP and MediaMax copy protection scandal of 2005.

I don’t know much of the details and motivation behind why Sony would back Google. I do know that it’s Very Bad to let any one company grow to an effective monopoly; there is a reason we have the Sherman Anti-Trust act in the US and why similar legislation and oversight exists in the EU and elsewhere. And this does smell like something Sony would do not out of concern for its customers, but for its own corporate interests. I also believe we, as a society, should not reward a company that puts shareholders above customers when filing amicus briefs in these legal chess games.

Maybe my instinct is off the mark yet again, but it is what it is.

Apple’s squabble over Google’s user interface

The Blade has a recent entry on the Google Voice application for the iPhone. The FCC inquired about the rejection to all three companies involved: Apple, Google, and AT&T (which has an exclusivity arrangement with Apple for the iPhone in the US market). The interesting part here is the reaction from each company.

AT&T denies any involvement in the rejection of the application.

Apple claims they have not actually rejected the application, and is “still pondering at this time.” What is surprising–or not, if you read this blog on a regular basis–is the following quote from the letter:

The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail.

I gather that that’s almost the entire point of the Google Voice application. What I take away from this: If Apple can do this to Google, they can damn sure do it to any other iPhone developer–and in fact, in a couple of cases, they pretty much already have.

Ron Schenone (author of The Blade) certainly signs off with a telling question
or three:

When I first read this I wondered why the FCC even cared? Why did the FCC even ask the companies to comment? Doesn’t Apple have the right to accept or reject any application that runs on their iPhone?

In an ideal world, Apple would let anyone write any application they wanted to run on the iPhone without having to play a high-stakes game of “Mother, May I.” It’s entirely backwards to take hundreds of dollars from a customer, and then still claim some kind of ownership on the item being sold to that customer. If Apple still considers the iPhone theirs after it leaves the factory, there needs to be a warning label to that effect on each box.

I’d like to think that would do some good. In the end those warning labels may be scarcely more effective than the ones on cigarette cartons. But that is a whole ‘nother rant for a different day.

How creepy can Google get?

An article on Wired.com Epicenter reports on Google’s latest move: behavioral profiling ads. In a nutshell, anything you do on Google sites (including YouTube), combined with the info from DoubleClick (which Google recently acquired), can now be used to target your preferences on any sites using Google’s AdSense banners.

Most telling is this quote from the article:

Google says its mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google often says that it believes ads are information.

What it doesn’t say, but clearly believes, is that you are information to be indexed, made accessible and useful.

This is why Google fought government regulators who wanted search engines to limit how long they stored personal data on users.

If this wasn’t real, it would make one heck of a great horror movie.

Until recently, I declined all cookies from Google, due mainly to their previous practice of setting a cookie which did not expire until 2038. (Some may even know the quite infamous words of google-watch.org: “Yikes! Too many preservatives.”) Even today, I only accept cookies from Google for the session (thankfully Firefox and its derivatives have this great feature) and when feasible, access Google via Tor and/or use alternative search engines.

It’s one thing for Google to index and archive content available on the Web. It’s another entirely for Google to indefinitely index me or you.

[Edit 2023-07-03: removed now-dead link not available via Wayback Machine]