Google

There’s only one thing worse than a person who spends all their time on Facebook. The person who spends all their time on Facebook bagging it out.

You know the ones. Well, how could you not. They’re always on the damn thing. Posting riveting status updates such as: “I hate you Facebook” and “Grrr, what’s with all the changes?”

Fact is, nobody forced you to join up in the first place. Second fact - it’s actually really easy to quit Facebook. You just delete your account, end of story. But still they stay. Moaning, posting and updating.

Continue reading "Festival of Obvious Ideas #6: Dump Facebook" »

For the first time, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States will conduct an inquiry into Google which will not be limited to mergers and acquisitions, or violations of privacy, but fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search advertising business model.

This follows the European Commission probe which commenced late last year. The European Commission stated that it “will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialised in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so‐called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services.”

Google has argued over the years that it does not manipulate search results and that its algorithms are designed solely to deliver the most relevant results to search queries; however it has fiercely protected its algorithm or secret black box.

Continue reading "Google’s license to print money is under siege" »

I always wanted to be Indiana Jones.

In addition to being the quintessential whip-cracking he-man, Indy got to dig up ancient relics and shiny physical memories of glories past.

Archaeology has always had a magical appeal to me. There’s a real romance to it that few other pursuits can match.

Continue reading "What would Indy think of Facebook?" »

In today’s society, most Australians are pretty comfortable with sharing personal information, with at least one major caveat – that we clearly know what our information is being used for.

Understanding how the information that organisations collect from us is used is the key guiding principle of our Privacy laws. Our privacy regime is consent-based – if you understand why private and personal information is being collected and consent to the purpose for which it is being collected then that information can be used for that purpose.

Social media and the more successful Internet business models fundamentally challenge this notion – because commercial success is often predicated on knowing as much as you can about your individual users and being less than upfront about how that information will be used.

Continue reading "What is Google really doing with your personal details?" »

Google was founded today in 1998…that’s right, there was actually life before Google.

It’s Monday at The Punch. What’s on your mind? Share it here.

I was interested to see that the Australian Electoral Commission has received complaints about political parties buying Google adwords in each other’s names: thus, when someone was searching on Google for “Julia Gillard” they would be served an ad for Tony Abbott.  And vice versa, someone searching “Tony Abbott” was served a Julia Gillard ad.

Of course, under these “sponsored links” the usual “relevant” search results would appear.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Google’s response: “Both the Liberal and Labor parties have been savvy in adapting their search advertising tactics throughout the campaign including bidding on other politicians’ names.”

Continue reading "Google’s tidy profit from the political keyword" »

It seems that Google’s continued mishandling of the wi-fi snooping incident means it has a different interpretation of the phrase “cooperating with authorities” than what the rest of us would reasonably expect.

The New York Times recently reported that Google has given European investigators only remote access to data now stored in Mountain View, California. 

Data those investigators need to determine if Google breached various tough privacy laws.

Continue reading "Google should be made to tell us what it knows about us" »

What is it about our love affair with Google that we let them take wholesale liberties with our privacy, and sit back and watch what might be one of the largest data breaches in history go by without so much as a whimper?

After some prodding, Google recently admitted to European Privacy Commissioners that they had “mistakenly” collected the contents of communications between some computer users, as part of their “Street View” activities.  Mistakenly.  All around the world. For four years.

It goes something like this: specially equipped “Street View” vehicles criss-cross entire nations, taking photographs of our houses and streets, geo-tagging the location with both a GPS and also by “sniffing” for WI FI connections in the area.  That way, when a person uses a Google product to locate themselves (like Google Maps), and there are WI FI networks detected nearby, Google can triangulate the device and give you an approximate location.  Pretty cool, and nothing really too scary about that, even though there were privacy concerns raised at the time.  We trusted Google.

Continue reading "Google, the pot and the kettle" »

This graph shows the number of people searching the term “delete facebook account” on Google was up to five times higher than usual last week.

The new wave of concern over Facebook’s privacy settings is mainly being driven from the US, after some high-profile technology commentators quit the social networking site.

However the next graph (over the jump) shows over the past year Australia has led the pack among English-speaking countries on searches for the same term. The spectacular spike at the end shows the more recent volume against the trend.

Continue reading "The world is… trying to find out how to quit Facebook" »

While visiting Google headquarters outside of San Francisco I saw a rather strange thing.

Out in the rain there was a man in one of those single person wave pools that gives the physical illusion of swimming laps. Perched over him was another man in a puffy red life savers jacket, complete with white cross on the back, sitting on a miniature life guard’s chair watching the swimmer.

I would have taken a photo but you’re not allowed to take photos inside Google, in fact, you’re not allowed to do much at Google.

Continue reading "Google doesn’t do evil, but it is creepy" »

If we were cavemen and we came across a sabre tooth tiger, what would we do? Let’s hope we’d run.

We’d know to run if we possessed important information - big cats have big teeth. Cavemen who didn’t have that information wouldn’t have run and wouldn’t have propagated. Information is fundamental to survival and well-being.

Today we live in an incredible era of information. A quarter of the world is online. This number is growing quickly and the amount of information we consume is ballooning. The openness of the Internet gives extraordinary access to information and this is a powerful force for good.

Continue reading "Google: An open web helps keep the bastards honest" »

IF you’ve been following the tech media this week, you’ll know that Google is in hot water over one of the most serious privacy breaches in its history.

You’ll likely have heard that Google launched a new product, called Google Buzz,  that was meant to create a social network out of its email users.

And that major privacy flaws in the product led to abusive men getting access to the details of their ex wives, political activists finding their contacts made public for investigators to peruse and journalists having their sources “outed”. I’m one of those journalists.

Continue reading "How Google managed to reveal my sources" »

Another week, another internet service that needs joining to see what the hype’s about. The web was supposed to make life easier, but all it seems to be doing lately is inventing more ways to bombard people with babble.

Google Buzz‘s launch last week was wrapped in an increasingly familiar aura. As with the iPad launch, there was huge excitement from some nerdy types but a resounding verdict from much of the public has been a sigh and a shrug.

Instead of capitalising on excitement, new products have to overcome fatigue. There’s the effort setting up yet another profile, then somehow remembering to check back on it in between reading the news, monitoring tweets, Facebook status updates, doing the footy tipping, watching that Hitler video everyone’s talking about and getting to your reading recommendations all while trying to manage your phone and email inbox.

Continue reading "I’m sorry but the internet is starting to suck" »

The hottest story in the Information Security world right now is the much publicised hacking of Google’s corporate network in China.

If you were skimming the headlines, you might think this story is somehow related to Google blocked searches and Chinese Government censorship. That is how it is being presented in much of the mainstream press, both locally and internationally.

For those who missed the initial story: Early last week Google suddenly announced that it may suspend its operations in China due to a highly sophisticated attack against its corporate network. Within days, it was revealed that up to 30 other tech companies (including Adobe) had been targeted by the same attackers.

Continue reading "China vs Google, a thrilling tale of IT espionage" »

This simple graphic illustrates one way the internet can be used to get an insight into a person, by analysing publicly available information associated with a name. I’ve chosen, for no particular reason, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull. Through the rest of this post are similar profiles of a range of Australian public identities.

You can enter your own details into the Personas tool here. If you feel uncomfortable watching the process of this tool scouring the web for information about you, that’s the idea. It was designed to show you have a publicly available profile which you cannot control.

Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s intended to highlight not just how you are seen on the web, but “for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories.”

Continue reading "What does the web think of you?" »

This is on news.com.au today:

If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years.

This is based on information from Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. It adds that to actually read the entire internet, you would need six hundred thousand decades - six million years - of nonstop reading to read through the information. I guess that’s before you start watching stuff like this or this.

So, Punchers, let’s help each other out. In the comments below post links to the pages you think are the absolute must-sees of the web. I’ll kick it off with this, just because it’s top-of-mind: Joe Hildebrand’s review of Tango & Cash.

Continue reading "If you could share one page on web, what would it be?" »

On Wednesday night China’s censors temporarily blocked Google and Gmail, an essential part of my communication with friends and family in Australia and used more than 20 million Chinese.

It was perhaps naive and even a little old fashioned of me to rely on just one e-mail account in Beijing. I know that the country’s net nanny is unpredictable and have been watching the escalating feud between the government and the world’s most popular search engine, which is being accused of containing excessive links to pornography.

The outage happened at about 9.30pm. A friend telephoned me and said that Google had been blocked. I tried several times to open Google.com and Gmail but the pages either timed out or I received a message that the connection was interrupted. China-based site Google.cn was also down.

Continue reading "When China pulls the plug on the Internet" »

So the other night a friend and I were trying to suss out some directions using Google.  My aim was to get from my home, in Erskineville, in Sydney, to Orange, NSW.

So I typed in From: Erskineville. To: Orange.

Seems Google thought I meant directions to Orange, California.

Continue reading "Google, you are amazing" »

Arnie Schwarzenegger first appeared as the terrifying killing machine the T800 in the original Terminator movie (1984), before reappearing in Judgement Day (1991) and Rise of the Machines (2003), proving the prophetic nature of his character’s infamous phrase, ‘I’ll be back.’

The fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, directed by John McGinty Nichol (of Charlie’s Angels fame), opens today sans Arnie (except in a CGI moment), signalling not the closure some hoped for, but rather the start of a new trilogy.

Like its predecessors (and the television series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles – 2008), the film, set in a post-apocalyptic 2018, where the machines have not only risen but triumphed, explores the ways in which the surviving humans do their utmost to destroy that which they created.

Continue reading "We are robot: how you’re turning into the Terminator" »