Computers

“Here at Google, we take our user’s privacy very seriously. In fact, we’re not even allowing ourselves to joke about this topic – yes, it’s that serious. To give you an idea, here is some of the data we don’t pass on to anyone outside our 10,000+ employee company (provided there’s no subpoena making us pass it on, and provided there’s nothing we define as “imminent harm“; and even if we pass something on, we make sure third parties have privacy policies like ours):

• Your registration confirmation containing the information on sites you signed up for, and the password you’ve chosen. It is safe with us in Gmail.
• Your web search history containing your dreams and wishes, and the one time you googled your ex – these are all protected by us.
• The Google Toolbar URL data transmitted to us in case you enabled PageRank checking. We keep this very safe at Google.
• The love messages you sent via Google Talk in June using the off-the-record option. Googlers won’t tell a thing!
• The sites you clicked on in Google results, especially those sites (you know what we mean). Quiet like a fish.
• Your private information which you provided to social network Orkut. It’s completely safe with Google.
• The kind of sites you visit which contain AdSense or (soon) DoubleClick ads. We value your privacy with this data.
• The things you bought using Google Checkout, including that strange DVD from March 14th, 3:30pm. Our employee’s lips are sealed on that one, and your credit card number is safe with Checkout.
• The content of the confidential company memo you saved in Google Docs, the one about the new direction your company wants to take. Trust us, it’s our secret too now.
• The Hotmail email you send to someone who has a Gmail account. We don’t let others read those!
• Your Google Spreadsheet with your income and taxes since 1999. Our employees won’t share with anyone!
• Your Google Presentation containing those hush-hush product releases for next year. No kiss and tell.
• The one time you researched bomb building on Google Groups. We turn a blind eye on that one, perhaps you researched for a friend.
• Your embarrassing party pics of your private Picasa album titled “spring_break”. We understand what it could mean to your future employer, so no word on it from us.
• The content of your Blogspot blog in which you go through great efforts to post anonymously, as the diary-style is quite telling. No sir, no one will find out.
• That email you were typing but then canceled, which we had transmitted to our server thanks to Gmail’s Ajax auto-saving. We know you didn’t want that to share, so we won’t either!
• Every single sentence you translated in the Google Translator. Every single one is safe with us.
• The sites you visited while installing the Google Web Accelerator proxy. We don’t want to share them, really.
• Those random notes you’ve been collecting at our Google Notebook service. Like Fort Knox.
• The one time you searched for “Falun Gong” on Google.cn. Our support person responding to the Chinese government knows that might have just been an accident.
• The restaurant you looked up in Google Maps last night, and the calendar entry you then added, and the subsequent mail you wrote to Susan. Shhh....
• The Google Page Creator draft of your new homepage which you then decided to trash fearing your neighbor would object to your political views. Secret, we promise!

As you can see – and we don’t think we need to offer additional proof for this other than our word, like the time we said we “don’t do evil” and then never did evil – all your data is safe with us and our employees. Again, except for those subpoeanas (and assuming we will not be hacked, and that no service exploits will be found), but to quote from our PDF on the subject of log retention which we linked from our blog ...

... you can see we don’t even share info on what we’re sharing – we’re that privacy aware! In fact, we urge you to increase your trust with us if there’s still a doubt lingering with you. Because, in the words of our chief executive officer Eric Schmidt this year:

<<We are very early in the total information we have within Google.>>

And:

<<We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.>>

Please visit our new Google Privacy Channel at YouTube to find out more. We won’t tell anyone which videos you watched. Unless they’re really funny ones. (Kidding!!!)”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Andy Baio’s Waxy.org contains a super cool link blog. In October/ November 2003, these were some of the Google items linked by Andy (in reverse-chronological order):

• “Making sense of the recent Google update (spam-blocking efforts blow out many commercial sites)”
• “Googlehouse, house built on Google Images (IE-only, I think)”
• “Automated news images (Google News, without the words)”
• “MSN Newsbot (Microsoft’s answer to Google News)”
• “XGoogle, IRC search engine (search channel names, topics, and XDCC files)”
• “Searching for BitTorrents with Google”
• “Google indexing IRC channels? (Google vaguely acknowledges the effort)”
• “Economist on Google’s future”
• “And Microsoft wants to buy Google”
• “Friendster rejects Google’s $30m buyout bid (I can’t believe they turned it down)”
• “Google interested in creating a book database (wants to compete with Amazon?)”
• “eBay affiliates spamming Google (I expect Google to retaliate any day now)”
• “Google considers online IPO auction”
• “New Google feature: “define” (retrieves definitions culled from the web)”

For more Waxy history also see Andy’s link archives and the Waxy cloud.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

When you use the “link” operator in Google Blog Search, you were once able to get a good overview of which backlinks were posted to a given post. This was even useful as a kind of lazy trackback feature, because Google Blog Search allows you to grab an RSS feed of search results, which you could in turn plug-in on any blog page of yours using the Google AJAX Feed API. Not anymore – at least not when I test with this blog. A search for ...

... for instance returns 4 backlinks in Google Blog Search. In Technorati, the same result obtains 174 hits. Admittedly, some of these may be spam that Google decides to filter, but that seems to be a much more relevant result than the one Google ends up displaying.

Am I doing something wrong, does anyone know more about this? Has Google Blog Search started to hide a portion of backlinks, similar to Google web search (perhaps to disable tools utilizing that info), or is it just broken?

On another note, I’m now also running into trouble with Google’s AJAX Search widget... as it contains much, much less far, far fewer pages than I can find with a normal Google web search. As an example, searching for ["A Blogger’s Code"] on this site only returns an archive overview page, but not the post itself. The same search on Google.com yields the right page (as long as the parameter isn’t “safe=on”, strangely enough). And I only switched to this Google AJAX search widget in the first place because the Google SOAP API was broken some of the time...

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

TechCrunch reports that Google will soon publicly launch a project named OpenSocial. To be hosted at code.google.com/apis/opensocial, according to TechCrunch OpenSocial is “a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called ’hosts’) that choose to participate”. Mike Arrington adds:

<<Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.>>

Mike adds that the core functions the API will be able to access are profile information, information on the friends someone has, and information on the social network user’s activities. At the moment, Mike says the participating social networks are Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Friendster and more (but not Google-competitor Facebook, though who knows, peer pressure might get them to join).

Also, John Battelle of Searchblog posted a press release on the subject. From that release (I linked the Orkut sandbox, though it doesn’t work here yet):

<<Developers will have access to:
- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
- A live developer sandbox on Orkut at sandbox.orkut.com

Websites will have access to:
- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites
>>

On a related note, in August this year Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick released a manifesto called Thoughts on the Social Graph. Brad said the goal should be to “Ultimately make the social graph [social network] a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as ’the’ central graph owner.” Brad adds that the goal is specifically not to create another social networking site, or to replace Facebook, saying “Early talks with Facebook about participating in this project have been incredibly promising.”

However, as the New York Times argues, OpenSocial may still mean trouble for Facebook. “The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users.” A person who remains anonymous but is associated with the “alliance,” as the NYT names it, is quoted to have said, “Facebook got the jump by announcing the Facebook platform and getting the traction they got. This is an open alternative to that.”

ZDNet blogger Garett Rogers already shares his first impressions on OpenSocial from a developer perspective:

<<For the past several weeks, I’ve been using Google’s OpenSocial platform to develop a gadget that will work in the Orkut “container”. I have developed several applications for Facebook in the past, so I can say from experience that compared to Facebook, this new platform has some very cool features. For example, developers have access to store shared data right on Google’s servers – that means you can build scalable applications that require no infrastructure of your own.>>

[Thanks Colin Colehour and TomHTML!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Ah! What a wonderful day, It is time for dwarfs, tombs, ghosts, sweets,pumpkins and of course malware.

We, at Panda Security, are getting used to be reminded of these special dates, when malware tries to benefit from a social event like this. In this case, a quite infamous malware already known as "Storm worm" aka "Nuwar" aka "Nurech" aka "Alanchum" wishes a good halloween by sending the usual lot of spam.

These messages carries different subjects:

If your in your office, keep the speakers low, lol
Happy Halloween
Dancing Bones
Halloween Fun
Watch him dance
This will make you laugh
You'll laugh your but off
Man this is funny
I am sending this to everyone
Have a Happy Halloween everyone
Party on this Halloween
Nothing is funnier this Halloween
Make him dance
Dancing skeleton
The most amazing dancing skeleton
For people with a sense of humor only
If your in your office, keep the speakers low, lol
To much fun I played with this for hours
Show this to the kids
Send this to your friends
Man this rocks

Inside the mesage we will find a link to a website, and a dosis of social engineering. You know, the usual "This is great", "Great fun","This is cool". We have seen several different messages, with different links to different sites.

If you navigate to the site you will see a...Dancing Skeleton. Funny isn't it? The site provides a download link, just in case you want the skeleton in your desktop.

If you follow the link, you will find a file called "Halloween.exe", guess what? It's MALWARE! If you run it, you will transform your beloved pc into a zombie one. To make your infection more entertaining a song will be playing on the background...[Update "Boom Boom Boom"(Venga Boys)]

Please be careful and Happy halloween!. Thanks to Xabier Francisco for gathering the information.