Ties That Bind

One of the throwaway remarks I sometimes make at conferences is that "Google knows you're pregnant before you do". I can say this because the things you search for will change as your life changes, and search engine providers may well be able to spot the significance of these changes because they aggregate data from millions of people. Now Google's philanthropic arm, google.org, has shown just what it can do with the data it gathers from us all by offering to predict where 'flu outbreaks will take place in the USA. more»

Coming to Grips with an Internet that Never Forgets

My weekly technology law column discusses the implications of an Internet that never forgets. I note that the most significant Internet effect during the current election campaign in Canada has not been any particular online video, website or Facebook group. Instead, it has been the resignation of eight Canadian candidates based on embarrassing or controversial information unearthed online. more»

Google's Eric Schmidt: Internet Becoming a Cesspool Where Brands Are Increasing Important

Internet is a "cesspool," a festering sea of bad information, said Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, yesterday while speaking to a group of visiting magazine executives at the company's Mountain View, California Campus during the American Magazine Conference. Schmidt suggested that "brands" are more important than ever and key solution for this problem is brands. "Brands are the solution, not the problem," said Schmidt. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." Branding, on the other hand, may be an essential element that helps people navigate the world, he continued. "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." more»

GNU Founder Richard Stallman Warns Against Cloud Computing

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, says cloud computing is essentially a trap that will eventually pressure more people into buying locked, proprietary systems that will continue to cost them more over time. "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," says Stallman. Bobbie Johnson, Guardian's technology correspondent says 'his comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticized the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".' more»

Google Predicting Next Ten Years of the Internet

While celebrating its 10th year anniversary this month, Google reflects on the "enormous impact" that the Internet has had on people's lives around the world. "It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of," says Google in its recent blog postings related to "Google at 10". In today's blog post, Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube (acquired by Google) says: "Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call..." more»

Mapping Google

Byte Level Research has released a new version of its world map illustrating country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) in use by Google for its local search engines. Using information available on Google's Language Tools page, the new map shows over 160 ccTLDs that Google has currently in use including Andorra, Kenya, Ukraine, and Ghana. Why pick Google? John Yunker president of Byte Level Research says that he knows of no other company that hosts localized websites across so many different ccTLDs. Countries the Google currently serves even include Cuba — "I doubt many Americans are aware of that."... more»

Berners-Lee Announces Creation of World Wide Web Foundation

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, on Sunday announced the launch of World Wide Web Foundation to fulfill a vision of the Web as humanity connected by technology. "The Web is a tremendous platform for innovation, but we face a number of challenges to making it more useful, in particular to people in underserved communities," said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and co-Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). "Through this new initiative, we hope to develop an international ecosystem that will help shape the future Web. A more inclusive Web will benefit us all." more»

Georgians Use Spam to Explain Their Situation

Call it outreach, call it propaganda or call it brilliance or even desperate measures, spammers (people) who favour the Georgian side in the recent conflict have been spamming using email, to get their point across. Depending on where in the world you are from, your ideological standpoint on Russia and your beliefs, when it comes to what email should be like, can be different and you may judge the action as you will. I call it spam. An Estonian colleague Viktor Larionov was quoted saying that whether there is a cyber war in Georgia or not, we know there is in fact a media war in play... more»

OneWebDay: More Important Than Ever

I first heard about OneWebDay in the summer of 2006, when Susan Crawford, whom I have the utmost respect for, talked to me about the importance of having an equivalent of Earth Day for the Internet. Her explanation of the project made absolute sense to me then -- and even more so today. And I couldn't think of a better and more passionate person to be leading this mission. Next month OneWebDay will be celebrated for the third time around the world and the level of participation is phenomenal! more»

U.S. Lawmakers Demand Telcos and Internet Companies to Disclose Web Tracking Practices

U.S. lawmakers have broadened their investigation of Internet advertising, asking nation's largest telecommunications and Internet companies whether they target ads based on consumers' Web surfing habits. Companies receiving the letter include Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and AOL among others. According to Joelle Tessler of the Associated Press, the "letters seek details on how many consumers have been tracked, whether those people have been notified and whether they were given the option to 'opt out' of it. The committee also wants to know how the collected information is used and how it is gathered -- for example, whether the companies aggregate data from different online applications." more»

Study Finds 75% of Malicious Websites from Legitimate, Trusted Sources

New report released today finds 75 percent of malicious websites are from legitimate, trusted sources with "Good" reputation scores. According to the report, 60 percent of the top 100 most popular websites either hosted malicious content or contained a masked redirect to lure unsuspecting victims from legitimate sites to malicious sites. more»

Amazon's S3 Cloud Service Goes Down for Several Hours

Amazon's S3 system, which provides a pay-as-you-use processing service, died briefly at the weekend, and with it went many services that had hung their hat on it -- such as the organize-your-business company 37Signals, image caching by Twitter, and many iPhone apps, reports Charles Arthur of the Guardian. One of the things that makes the online storage service, Amazon S3, particularly useful for start-ups and heavy users is that it ties in with other Amazon Web Services like the elastic computing cloud and its SimpleDB service. Using all three services relieves start-ups from some of the tasks that generally would require significant time and money up front. more»

The Patent That Justifies Microsoft's Interest in Yahoo!

I've watched coverage of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! and the related maneuvering between Google and Yahoo!. The explanations are not very convincing. Microsoft doesn't need Yahoo's search technology or their morale-impacted work force. Yahoo's search market share continues to decline and there's little of strategic relevance in the rest of their business. What's the attraction? more»

Google Sued for Selling Ads on Parked Domains and Error Pages

Google on Friday was sued for fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment, claims arising from the company's alleged sale of low-quality ads, reports Thomas Claburn, of InformationWeek. The class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., by lawyers from San Francisco-based Schubert Jonckheer Kolbe & Kralowec. The plaintiff is attorney Hal K. Levitte, who advertised his legal services though a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign last year. Should the lawsuit move forward as a national class action and succeeds in claming that all Google's AdWords advertisers have spent a similar percentage of their ad budgets on low-quality ads, Google could be liable for a significant sum. more»

Why New TLDs Don't Matter

Lost amid the furor about ICANN's rule change that may (or may not) lead to a flood of TLDs is the uncomfortable fact that almost without exception, the new TLDs created since 2000 have been utter failures. Other than perhaps .cat and .mobi, they've missed their estimates of the number of registrations by orders of magnitude, and they haven't gotten mindshare in the target community. So what went wrong? more»