Google

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" »