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How is privacy destroyed when, as explained in a previous post I made without login in, no identity data has been requested. http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-01-19-n45 .html which is a pro-google blog even states, at the bottom of the article: According to the motion filed [PDF], Google was first supposed to hand over all queries entered between June 1, 2005, and July 31, 2005 inclusive. This was then narrowed down to a demand for every single search entered into Google over a one-week period (without specific information that could connect the searches to a person). The request made was for search data only. At no point did the DOJ request IP's of users conducting those searches or any other method if identification ( evn though Google almost certainly collects and stores this data ). How is it a breach in privacy if the requested data cannot be linked to an individual? When travel statistics are compiled using data relating to individuals travel patterns, is that also an invasion of privacy? Or CD Charts, compiled using sales figures.

If you feel that using Google is henceforth treason to your government then use Patriot Search!

Thanks, your search has been recorded and will be shared with the governments of the world!

You should really use The Patriot Search. Read their mission for more information: "Instead of letting the government waste tax money by going through complicated procedures to get user and search data from Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves or Google, users of Patriot Search make sure their queries end up right where they belong - in the databases of the government and its various agencies."

Yes you too can be a true Patriot and give your information freely using Patriot Search http://blog.outer-court.com/patriot/

Here
Here
Here
Here
Here

Or you can search for php vulns and worms like Santy... Some of the above are probably dupes.

Yeah, interesting fellow... more nuggets here and here and here...

The google-watch-watch one has a good quote from a Salon article:

When you type "NameBase" into Google, Brandt's site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. "My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site," he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for "Donald Rumsfeld" will bring up NameBase's page for the secretary of defense.

This also adds a little interesting twist to his disdain for wikipedia...

wouldn't it be ironic?

I like the Mechanical Turk service. It's just like my CHI proposal from half a year ago made real.
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-03-25-n43 .html

While most of the comments here seem to focus on the Worker side of this (those getting paid for answering simple questions), there's also the Requester side -- programmers tapping into the power of "fake" (but working!) AI. (Ladies and gentleman, we present you the global brain... it can think for you if you micro-pay!) I think we can implement many new programs/ websites in completely new ways, and there may even be fresh commercial niche programs coming out of this. Maybe in 50 years, we'll include AMT (or similar services) into our software as naturally as we now include, say, SQL.

I wish the site was working better at the moment (even before it has been Slashdotted, it was behaving strangely), and I wish it wouldn't ask me for a US bank account (being from Germany, that kinda hinders me from working with it).

There was an interesting article a while back about a Collaborative Human Interpreter (CHI).

The idea is to harness this kind of thing to develop software for the global brain.

I think the problem is that the MySpace site allows javascript to be uploaded.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-10-13-n73 .html

From the perspective of XMLHttpRequest you cannot call a domain that is not the original HTML page. IE, Mozilla, and Safari implement same domain policy and having experimented it is not possible.

I just saw the Google logo with the birthday and the 7. So I Googled "google birthday" the first hits that come up are a dead link to google.com help support indicating google's b-day is Sept. 7th.

Google: Help Center Google's official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), ... www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=4866&t opic=367 - 8k - Cached - Similar pages

Google's birthday--with no logo?? - Google Blogoscoped Forum Today--september 7th--is google's birthday, but they have no logo to celebrate. isnt that strange? 09/07/05 [X] 12 days ago. XGen Technologies [PersonRank 1 ... blog.outer-court.com/forum/10251.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from blog.outer-court.com ]

So is Google 7 or older? What are the making the decision off and why did they used to indicate they celebrated on the 7th? Any one have any ideas?

what about splogs(spam blogs). Blogspot represents a pretty reasonable sample of blogs. this random analysis puts splogs at 42% for blogger.com blogs.

I played around with the Google translator for a while. I work in Japan and am half-way fluent. Google couldn't even turn my most basic Japanese emails into comprehensible English. Same is true for the other translation programs I have seen.

You haven't seen the Google translator he's talking about. It isn't public yet, I don't believe.

Here was the original article on it.

Old: "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden"
New: "The White House Confirmed the Existence of a new Bin Laden tape"

That's all they called it. A "new communication tool." That in mind, it's more likely that they'll be releasing a new Google Translator. Apparently they've been doing a lot of researching on how to make a translator based on existing translations instead of a per-word dictionary lookup.

or was their choice of Arabic translation text a bit... ummm... odd? Of all the things to choose from, they chose this? Wow.

That should be 200 billion words according to the article

this a pretty neat article about some things to keep in mind when designing a UI with AJAX

It seems that user interaction activities like "saving", can run counter to the way people have been trained to use web sites. People don't believe an action took hold if it happened to quickly. The author of the article linked above actually had to slow down and give lots of visual response to indicate the user's data actually saved (or the user would repeatedly click "save" thinking nothing had happened).

It's not a bad thing, it's just an example of some of the new user design challenges AJAX presents at the same time it gives us a new approach to getting near synchronous web-UI response.

And just for giggles get your AJAX pixel fight on

e.

Where you will find a guide on how to embed Google Maps, a guide on How to get Slashdotted, details of the Google Translator and numerous other goodies.

del.icio.us/popular - Your source for all slashdot stories before the rush starts!

More coverage at Google Blogoscoped.
I submitted this story about 30 mins ago but it looks like someone beat me to it.

One of the most interesting (and obvious) effects of Google's changes: The company which once ranked first for the phrase "search engine optimization", SEOinc, is now nowhere to be found -- even a search for the company's name doesn't bring up the company's website. SEOincs response has been a -- somewhat ineffective -- try to bring those reporting on its fall to "cease and desist".

This is a step in the right direction conceptually, but giving a smaller number of "seed sites" more rank influence increases the potential fallout from any rank cheats that may be found in the future (see Google Bomb and Google 302 exploit.

Google may be better off as they are currently leaving all sites initally equal in influence before the Pagerank calculation.

Then again, Google has a great track record for testing their ideas before committing them to general service...

Well, that depends on if you've been caring for your big, wonderful, high performance brain...

It isn't. This one was before he removed it when it was way too late.

The offending message was:

"they started off the day with a financials presentation, which was actually quite interesting. of course, i understand that they obviously will put a positive spin on everything, but the weight of the raw numbers is undeniable. both google's profits and revenue are growing at an unprecedented rate even while they are increasing their expenditures on capital and human resources. not to mention that google has been primarily focused on the u.s. market and is now turning their full attention to the global marketplace.
so after the interesting financials, the products team gave presentations reviewing product performance in 2004 and giving sneak peeks of the products we'll unveil in 2005. if you guys thought g**il and google groups were cool, you ain't seen nothing yet!"

Which was replaced with:

"they started off the day with a financials presentation, then the products team gave presentations reviewing product performance in 2004."

Linkage

It hasn't been updated since January 27th.

He was fired on the 28th

Actually it's not fud, taken from http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-02-08-n55 .html

"Update 2: Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo had a talk with Mark Jen and says: "Yes, he was fired from Google. It was directly related to his blog.""

Here's the link from Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo: http://battellemedia.com/archives/001248.php

... And I don't think this is a free speech issue; this is more of a lesson in learning when and where it is and isn't appropriate to say certain things ...

How else would you define a free-speech issue? Free speech only becomes a problem when the right is exercised in the wrong places. A government with draconian policies doesn't mind if you use your right to free speech to support it, but it surely does when you use those same rights to oppose it. If someone gets to choose what's free speech, and what isn't, it's NOT FREE SPEECH ANYMORE.

I'm as much a google supporter as the next slashdotter, but if what I read is true, and they have fired him ("let him go") for writing about negatives in working at Google, provided that stuff doesn't come under the NDA, then this is ethically wrong. Like this blog entry says:

Whatever happened, it's a sad day when you can't speak openly about both the good and bad at your chosen place of work without getting silenced.

Once again, Slashdot gives no credit to whoever actually did all the research, or if the anonymous poster actually did it, which blog told him about the site. Quite a respectable news organization you've got here, what with anonymous users posting plagiarized research and non-credited links. So, who did he not credit?

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005_01_03_ind ex.html#110478296722920293
http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archiv es/2005/01/03/what-search-engines-do-search-engine -companies-use/
http://demiliani.com/blog/archive/2005/01/03/2024. aspx
http://blog.comego.net/2005/01/visitorville-intell igence.html
http://www.uneasysilence.com/index.php?p=1876

Heh, char limit prevented me from making it like this: Recursion. I was just mucking about. It would be a ironic Googlebomb though, to put another search website in there. (nice site about them here)

> Could someone please show me where Google made it clear
> they specifically don't want 3rd party email account checkers?
No, because they haven't. :-)

> Second, assume this does happen, maybe its not intended to specifically block 3rd party apps.
And it won't anyway, the authors just need to display the Captcha to the user & deal with it that way.

> Obviously, gmail's beta check has its own method to get email,
> it is likely more effcient than pulling down the html with each check
Actually the Official Gmail Notifier uses pretty standard HTTP(S) interaction with the server, except it retrieves a binary format. I've reversed most of the protocol (except some date stuff) and it's a bit more efficient, but not a *huge* amount.

See these forum postings for more details I documented:

Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented

Although note that I've done a lot more research since the those initial notes, and they aren't entirely accurate. Will end up posting some Python code soon.

--Phil.

> Though from what I can tell from the HTTP GET string it's protected to high hell.
Nah, it's not really protected--there are actually similarities between it and the existing HTML method.

The login occurs via HTTPS, then everything else is straight HTTP (which I would think would be a security hole).

> GMail notifier sends an HTTP GET query to the GMail server,
> the GMail server sends back the number (and almost only the number)
> of messages
It actually sends back a binary data block, the content of which depends on whether you have new messages or not.

Try using Ethereal when you have new messages and you'll see sender/subject/message snippets in plain ASCII within the data block retrieved.

See these forum postings for more details I documented:

Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented

--Phil.

> Perhaps they're worried about coders going to next level,
> and coding up entire gmail readers--or incorporating gmail account readers
> into something like Thunderbird.
That sort of thing has already been done for months--there's POP & SMTP proxies for Gmail already. And if one of them doesn't work on your platform you can use the Gmail Python binding project `libgmail` to write one of your own.

> Adding that word-identification script filter to the login process
> would certainly prevent something like that
It wouldn't really prevent that because the proxies could just start presenting the image for verification if it encountered one. This approach doesn't stop individual users, it just stops fully automated approaches, such as the apparent brute force attacks were using. (And the much more feasible reason for the addition.)

> Which leads me to wonder how google's own system tray email
> notification program can still work.
The official Gmail notifier simply uses standard http/https requests to do its work. The only difference between it and the "unofficial" method is that it retrieves a binary encoded data block and processes that.

This might mean that if you encounter the Captcha after multiple bad logins via IE the official notifier may not work either.

See these forum postings for more details I documented:

Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented

--Phil.

> The big deal is that they want third party apps to stop actually logging in
> and pulling the full HTML for the main page, and start copying what the notifier does,
> which is to pull down something much smaller, simpler, and less CPU intensive for google.

The official Gmail notifier simply uses standard http/https requests to do its work. The only difference between it and the "unofficial" method is that it retrieves a binary encoded data block and processes that.

There's no reason for existing clients to be pulling down particularly huge amounts of data, the data retrieved isn't really in HTML anyway.

For more on exactly what the official notifier retrieves see these forum postings for details I documented:

Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented

--Phil.

> The 3rd party scenario is relatively CPU and network intensive. [snip]

> Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up.

The official Gmail notifier simply uses standard http/https requests to do its work. The only difference between it and the "unofficial" method is that it retrieves a binary encoded data block and processes that.

See these forum postings for more details I documented:

Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented

--Phil.

-l

Um, no, he came in 2nd

He does a real nice job describing his experience with it in an article titled "A Postcard from VisitorVille" which includes some nifty pictures - highly recommended viewing.

I decided to stop posting backlinks in Wiki sandboxes, the SEO strategy previously explained. [...] In the meantime I'm asking developers and those hosting Wikis of their own to please exclude sandboxes from search engine results (via the robots.txt file). Doing so would shield the sandbox from backlink-postings, and there is no need for it to turn up in search results in the first place.

This sure makes sense, and who knows, maybe future wiki distributions do it by default. (If

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Check this out, a screenshot of a Beta version of the post-IPO google.com page has been leaked!
Leaked screenshot.

(Note: Yes, I am trolling and flamebaiting. Take that, Karma.)

If I were you, I'd go for it! Remember you have to do a few things per the contest rules per the link above, but in case you are wondering, I have ZERO issues with you taking the credit and walking off with the prize(s) if you win - after all, it is YOUR web site! ;-) You have a good chance of taking it - unless someone gets a link from a Page Rank 100 page - after my article submission, I realized this is a pretty funny link that I forgot to add.

I would totally mod-up your post, but I'm a schmuck ... so hopefully someone else will for you (although obviousely you can do so yourself) as I bet a buncha Slashdott'ers would also say go for it!

alek

P.S. Actually Timothy, if you do win, can I ask a favor and get a couple hours heads-up if you guys Slashdot my Christmas Lights again? I'd like to warn the neighbors before the lights go beserko, and also monitor things when the deluge hits - X10 is a bit squirrly, so even with some multi-threading, I'm going to be pushing it with the 1 (versus 5) second throttle this year ... and it's hard to test this. BTW, if you haven't tried it, you might get a chuckle out of the Javascript pop-ups if you click from Slashdot on my Christmas Webcam link.

It's old news. Philipp Lenssen had the same idea at FindForward. FindForward also lets users comment on sites and encloses the site's thumbnails (captured from Thumbshots).