I am Hungarian, and I authoritatively say they did (do) work.
I have used many of them in my daily work, and while I agree that they were not perfect, and often outdated, still served their purpose rather well. Defacing them with a low quality remark, even if officially, is not very government-like behaviour. (It's like replacing the webpage of the parliament by a text "hahaha this site sucks! --regards, your new government". Childish.)
Either replace the sites with an objective explanation (which would be, by my opinion, unacceptably irresponsible behaviour) or rather create the new ones and replace them _after_ they're done. Right now it's what it was: part of the decade old ongoing pissing contest, as the commenter observed.
By the way about cuil indexing trillions of pages vs. it's being just a big lie: check your httpd access log, cos' nobody's gonna fake THAT.
I've got plenty of hits from Twiceler (cuil's bot), but only on some sites. Most were only hit on/robots.txt. Some sites - even large ones - were not indexed at all. But some were thoroughly read, so I cannot really say the number is a lie, they seem to index lots of pages. Finding the content, now, that's another. But the interface seem to be a crap: if there's too much load on servers it returns "not found" instead of "server error". Stupid.
This is why Google has toolbar and desktop. They want to watch all of the sites you visit and what you do on the sites. Using this data they build a detailed behavioral profile of you.
You seem to ignore that such kinds of data collection are by no means Google's invention, and that it's pretty widespread. Think of Alexa and all other webpage popularity toolbars, think of all those free services which offer searching of any kind of data. People are installing them and most of those don't even inform the poor fellas that what kind of data ravels to where. As far as I remember Google tools (and Opera browser someone mentioned) properly informs the user what data will it transfer and when and why, and you have the option not to use it or not to install it if you consider that a danger to your privacy.
It is not a fair way to know that, install it and then complain about invasive privacy policy.
(On the other hand most people on the 'net are ignorant and stupid and they click on anything. That's maybe not Google's fault either.)
Statistics require data. Most of the time anonymised data to some extent, and I believe most of the tools you complain about either sends aggregated/anonymised data or offer the possibility to switch off the tracking (like search history). Google's services are often work on either global or personal statistics: if you want to use those you have to accept that it requires data collection. If you don't use them, no stats gathered.
And as a sidenote: you may be a bit ignorant about how the data hundreds of thousands of internet based companies collect about you (on purpose or just as a part of their working) is available to the governments, agencies and satan knows who... The biggest threat are the politicians and rich businessmen together, no matter where they work...
Just a sidenote: Newsweek [Europe] ran a very well written column about "Winners and losers of the global warming", which tried to show objectively what is most probably going to happen.
Basically the rich countries get richer (like new beaches in scandinavia, lots of income for modern capitalist companies running building and salvage operations on the deserting places) and, guess what, poor countries gonna suffer most. Middle of Africa won't be a nice place to be, small islands going underwater etc. (Niue photos, anyone? Hurry.)
Overall: we won't die. But some of us, the poorer part, definitely will. (And it's not a hoax anymore.)
Suppose you have your car and you don't care about the brakes, and who cares that the tires are a bit flat, and the right door sometimes just open if you take the turn too fast. All in all - you don't maintain it to be safe for others.
"It's my car, dammit. I am not responsible for all of you walking around!"
Maybe you'll be lucky. Maybe you just land in a frontal window of a shop. Maybe you ride over some people.
I would be pleased if people would maintain their system to be safe for the others walking by the internet. No, I don't mean ultimate security, every john doe possessing personal IDS and stuff. But damn those running RH4.2 and 4 years old BINDs and you-name-it-security-obsoletes.
And it's not against YOU, it's against those who don't care, and who think it's not their responsibility. Those who DDoS me or my ISP, cause hundreds or millions $$ of damage then make a dumb face an ask: "who? me?"
Slashdot Mirror
Turntables beginning and finishing "silence" parts sound very distinctive, especially on well used equipment and well used disc.
I am Hungarian, and I authoritatively say they did (do) work.
I have used many of them in my daily work, and while I agree that they were not perfect, and often outdated, still served their purpose rather well. Defacing them with a low quality remark, even if officially, is not very government-like behaviour. (It's like replacing the webpage of the parliament by a text "hahaha this site sucks! --regards, your new government". Childish.)
Either replace the sites with an objective explanation (which would be, by my opinion, unacceptably irresponsible behaviour) or rather create the new ones and replace them _after_ they're done. Right now it's what it was: part of the decade old ongoing pissing contest, as the commenter observed.
By the way about cuil indexing trillions of pages vs. it's being just a big lie: check your httpd access log, cos' nobody's gonna fake THAT. I've got plenty of hits from Twiceler (cuil's bot), but only on some sites. Most were only hit on /robots.txt. Some sites - even large ones - were not indexed at all. But some were thoroughly read, so I cannot really say the number is a lie, they seem to index lots of pages. Finding the content, now, that's another. But the interface seem to be a crap: if there's too much load on servers it returns "not found" instead of "server error". Stupid.
This is why Google has toolbar and desktop. They want to watch all of the sites you visit and what you do on the sites. Using this data they build a detailed behavioral profile of you.
You seem to ignore that such kinds of data collection are by no means Google's invention, and that it's pretty widespread. Think of Alexa and all other webpage popularity toolbars, think of all those free services which offer searching of any kind of data. People are installing them and most of those don't even inform the poor fellas that what kind of data ravels to where. As far as I remember Google tools (and Opera browser someone mentioned) properly informs the user what data will it transfer and when and why, and you have the option not to use it or not to install it if you consider that a danger to your privacy.
It is not a fair way to know that, install it and then complain about invasive privacy policy.
(On the other hand most people on the 'net are ignorant and stupid and they click on anything. That's maybe not Google's fault either.)
Statistics require data. Most of the time anonymised data to some extent, and I believe most of the tools you complain about either sends aggregated/anonymised data or offer the possibility to switch off the tracking (like search history). Google's services are often work on either global or personal statistics: if you want to use those you have to accept that it requires data collection. If you don't use them, no stats gathered.
And as a sidenote: you may be a bit ignorant about how the data hundreds of thousands of internet based companies collect about you (on purpose or just as a part of their working) is available to the governments, agencies and satan knows who... The biggest threat are the politicians and rich businessmen together, no matter where they work...
Just a sidenote: Newsweek [Europe] ran a very well written column about "Winners and losers of the global warming", which tried to show objectively what is most probably going to happen. Basically the rich countries get richer (like new beaches in scandinavia, lots of income for modern capitalist companies running building and salvage operations on the deserting places) and, guess what, poor countries gonna suffer most. Middle of Africa won't be a nice place to be, small islands going underwater etc. (Niue photos, anyone? Hurry.) Overall: we won't die. But some of us, the poorer part, definitely will. (And it's not a hoax anymore.)
Or maybe it was a good analogy indeed.
Suppose you have your car and you don't care about the brakes, and who cares that the tires are a bit flat, and the right door sometimes just open if you take the turn too fast. All in all - you don't maintain it to be safe for others.
"It's my car, dammit. I am not responsible for all of you walking around!"
Maybe you'll be lucky. Maybe you just land in a frontal window of a shop. Maybe you ride over some people.
I would be pleased if people would maintain their system to be safe for the others walking by the internet. No, I don't mean ultimate security, every john doe possessing personal IDS and stuff. But damn those running RH4.2 and 4 years old BINDs and you-name-it-security-obsoletes.
And it's not against YOU, it's against those who don't care, and who think it's not their responsibility. Those who DDoS me or my ISP, cause hundreds or millions $$ of damage then make a dumb face an ask: "who? me?"
...and the exact addresses are in the PDF material on the FTC page side.