Google, 10 years in: big, friendly giant or a greedy Goliath?

Google, 10 years in: big, friendly giant or a greedy Goliath?

Every day, all over the world, millions of us use Google. Founded 10 years ago by two students, it is now so powerful that it threatens to swallow up all other media while global leaders queue for its blessing. But just as we seek knowledge from Google, so Google gleans secrets from us. Has the cool baby grown up into a sinister corporate threat to privacy? David Smith reports

Google, 10 years in: big, friendly giant or a greedy Goliath? | Media | The Observer.

Another Google First

Google can now take it’s own pictures from space.

clipped from gizmodo.com Google Military-Controlled Satellite Reaches Orbit, We Don’t Feel Lucky Of course, there’s nothing new here until you notice the huge Google logo on the rocket, signaling the fact that Sergei and Larry own the exclusive rights to the GeoEye-1 images. Yes, no other company will be able to access this information, only Google. And they will be there, available for the public in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Comcast to cap online use

The cap will be set at 250gb. If you go over that, you get a courtesy call from Comcast as a first warning. The second time that you go over, your account will be immediately suspended for an entire calendar year. People that watch movies or video’s online are going to be hit hard because you can go over your daily limit in minutes.

And don’t forget that companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are offering online (cloud) storage. Some applications such as Google’s http://docs.google.com/ are online and would be completely inaccessible to small business’s or home offices.

Plus there are X-box, Playstation, Nintendo and many other consumer boxes that require the internet to access online games, calenders, address books, and even clocks.

clipped from news.cnet.com Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband Comcast notes that the median usage for most residential customers falls somewhere between 2GB and 3GB, a number that is regularly broken within a matter of hours and sometimes minutes by customers taking advantage of streaming HD video and online backup services. The company breaks down basic usage numbers similar to what’s seen on the marketing materials on a consumer hard drive: * Send 50 million e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-mail) * Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song) * Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie) * Upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)

YouTube Hands over User Histories including user’s names and IP Address’

In March Viacom, filed suit against Google for more that $1 Billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of copyrighted material.

“threatens to expose deeply private information,” says The Electronic Frontier Foundation.

clipped from blog.wired.com Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

The web knows way too much about us

Very compelling web site that is based in Denmark. It shows you exactly what web servers know about you, just by surfing onto a web page. It shows weakness’s and vulnerability in even the most secure web browsers. Some of this information is needed, such as; do you have Quicktime or AcitiveX installed; does your browser support cookies; what version of Google toolbar (if any and what version) is installed; plus various software and firmware updater’s.

Some information I am not so clear on. Why would an internet web site need to know; Can your C Drive be shown? Number of CD ROM drives and drive letter; Certificates installed; host name or network name.

http://gemal.dk/

People’s lives are interrupted due to Website instability

Some people have begun to depend on websites like Facebook and MySpace, or YouTube or Skype. There are a lot of people that spend more time watching video’s and listening to music in online chat and blogs. There are more and more of these service’s and more weight on the servers. What happens when YouTube stops working, or Clipmarks hasn’t updated in 4 days. Twitter has been utterly crushed because of problems with updates and losing data.
There are more and more companies that are beginning to combine services on the same server setup. So when those servers go down, ALL of the services go down.

clipped from www.cio-today.com Hey, Is This Site Down? The Toll of the Shaky Web Companies like Google want us to store not just e-mail online but spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data and nearly every other piece of personal and professional information. That cloud-stored data is supposed to be more accessible and reliable than information tucked away in the office computer. Or at least, that’s the idea.