Google services survive if they make money, aren’t social | Ars Technica
Some good analysis and observations from Casey Johnston at Ars Technica.
Posts in Category ‘Google’
“Emasculating”
According to Google’s Sergey Brin, smartphones are emasculating. But, apparently, swiping the side of your head repeatedly to do smartphone things is not.
Electronic Frontier Foundation – Who Has Your Back? 2013
When you use the Internet, you entrust your conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T and Facebook. But what do these companies do when the government demands your private information? Do they stand with you? Do they let you know what’s going on?
In this annual report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of major Internet companies — including ISPs, email providers, cloud storage providers, location-based services, blogging platforms, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about how data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy whenever it is possible to do so.
I’m surprised to see Apple and Amazon among the worst ranked (though AT&T and Verizon aren’t surprising). Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and Dropbox go to bat most often. I’ve never seen this EFF report before, but I’m glad I have now.
Google’s latest Transparency Report: “More government removal requests than ever before”
Google has released its latest transparency report, a regular summary and set of statistics on the number of requests from governments and court orders to remove content or review it for adherence to the company’s community guidelines. In short, government requests … Read more →
James Whittaker, former Engineering Director at Google, offers a first-person diagnosis of the infection making its way through Google, originating in the brain:
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
Rene Ritchie at iMore invited me to square off about Google Glass, default iOS apps, Chromebook Pixel, multitasking, my old G5 iMac, and more.
If you’re wondering why I sip my beer so much, I’m trying to take a drink for every stupid ‘um’.
When Apple, Microsoft, and Google took on touch
When Apple took on touch, it created a new OS (though, yes, based on OS X) with entirely new UI conventions. It threw out everything end users knew about getting around in software and started building anew with the finger … Read more →
Let me get this straight
Pre-iPad rumors just a few months before announcement peg it with a price of up to $999 Outrage ensues because ‘Apple’ and ‘dollars’ are part of a conversation iPad debuts at $499 and goes on to become the bestselling PC … Read more →
The Verge: WSJ: Google developing plans to launch retail stores in the US
Plan is to make everything in the store free to everyone who walks in, as long as you sit through a 30 minute timeshare pitch, sign the guestbook, and fork over a blood sample.
AppleInsider: Google asks journalists to tone down story of "massive" Google Play security flaw
Daniel Eran Dilger:
One risk to the undisclosed sharing noted by Nolan was that, "with the information I have available to me through the checkout portal I could track down and harass users who left negative reviews or refunded the app purchase."
A greater risk its that, with millions of names being distributed to every vendor of paid apps on Google Play, the likelihood of a security breach through malware becomes very high. Customers who entrusted their details to Google are now having their information spread across a variety of developers who may not even have a security policy.
