Posts Tagged ‘google’

Google Collected Personal Data Sent Over Open WiFi Networks

May 15th, 2010

We already know that Google collects every bit of info it can about its users, and stores it for unknown uses.

Now it’s been revealed that for 3 years, Google has collected personal information from unknowing people. This data was collected during the Google Street View mapping process. Google claims the data collection happened due to an error in programing.

This admission is the result of regulators in Europe started asking Google some serious questions about Street View. The European Regulators wanted to know what data Google collects in the mapping process, and what it does with that data.

About two weeks ago Google posted a blog post and claimed that “Google does not collect or store payload data” – which is the actual information being transmitted by users over unprotected networks.

That was a lie. A more recent post admits to that lie and says: “…it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.”

Now Google could be accused of intercepting private communications and violating wiretap laws in the United States. A legal shit-storm is bound to happen.

In the mean time,  remember: Trust No One, and password-protect your WiFi. You never know who might be looking through your data.

Gmail is Slow; Delicious is Spammed

May 9th, 2010

If you are a Gmail user, you might have experienced the horrors of awful slowness in your inbox lately. Gmail problems include: extremely long load times (we are talking 10 minutes in some cases), messages that are late to arrive, problems downloading attachments and problems with sending messages.

These issues arise in all browsers and all operating systems.

This situation has been going on for a while. Users are complaining all over the so-called Google help forums – and to no avail. Google says nothing, and the only help these poor users get is a link to the unhelpful Gmail is Slow page. Trust me guys – you can’t blame Norton Anti-Virus for this one! Twitter, too, is full of complaints about Gmail, and still no official word from Google.

The rumors say that Google has been compromised by hackers and that their servers took a real hit – but they won’t admit it. Since Google has no customer service to speak of, it seems that we will just have to wait for this mysterious situation to resolve itself.

Delicious Spam Attack

No, this is not a funky name for an even funkier recipe – this ain’t no cooking blog, fellas. Anyway, on a more serious note – Delicious, the social bookmarking site (which I love deeply) has fallen victim to a vicious spam attack. If you take a peek at the Popular Bookmarks page, which is usually a great place to see what’s hot on the web, you’ll see that it’s filled with filthy spam articles in all languages.

At first, this also affected aggregators like Popurls and Oursignal, but they seem to be filtering out the crap right now.

There’s no official response from Delicious/Yahoo on this matter.

Something is rotten in the state of the interwebs, my friends. First it’s disgusting “Like” buttons – now a slow/hacked Gmail and a spammed Delicious. Thank God there are still funny cats around!

Hacker News Prevents Search Engines from Spidering the Site

March 16th, 2010

Hacker News are making a point, or so it seems. The site tweeted a few hours ago that it now “bans Google and all other search engines”.

Here is the site’s Robots.txt. The reasons for this move are rather unclear at the moment. It might have been triggered by the site’s slowness, in an effort to decrease server loads.

Not all users of Hacker News think that this is a clever move. Quite a few of them complained that now they can’t search for older articles that were submitted to the site.

Hacker News doesn’t really rely on Google and other search engines for traffic. It’s a flourishing community that shows no signs of wanting to expand and becoming the new Digg or something similar. Will the user’s protest change anything? Remains to be seen.

Google Personalizes 20% of Searches

March 3rd, 2010

One in five searches performed in Google’s search engine are tailored to the user’s particular location, web history, or online contacts , according to software engineer Bryan Horling, who works on the Google personalized search team.

Search results are different from country to country – that much is known. Now, Google goes into the more specific details and data known about the user, and is tweaking results based on the individual user’s behavior. Horling states, though, that the differences are minor – results may move a few spots up or down, but Google is not changing the entire character of the page.

You don’t have to be signed in to a Google account to be subject to this personalization. Google will attempt to deliver personalized results to any user using its search engine, depending on their web history and cookies. If you are signed in, the results will even vary according to your Gmail contacts or people you follow on Buzz. Google calls this “Social Search”.

SEO companies, of course, aren’t happy. This personalization process by Google also means that soon every user will get different results, and it will be very hard to determine whether SEO efforts are successful and efficient. The fact that even logged-out users are getting personalized results is a real problem for SEO people.

Google urges site owners to start making sites for users, not for Google – a lesson that a lot of sites will learn the hard way as time passes.

Google Buys Picnik

March 2nd, 2010

Google continues its latest shopping spree. This time it’s Picnik, an online services that offers photo editing tools.

Picnik is integrated with photo-sharing services like Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket and the photo album components from Facebook and MySpace. Google intends to preserve and advance those partnerships. Picnik users will be glad to hear that the service continues to be free, and that no changes have been made to their accounts.

Here’s what Picnik’s blog had to say about it:

…we’ve just been acquired by Google! What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.

Picnik was founded in 2006 and has about 20 employees. It will remain in Seattle but move to Google’s offices in that city.

Picnik’s site attracts almost 40 million visits per month, with each visit lasting an average of 17 minutes.

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