Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Google to become yet another unstoppable, all-knowing force governments will have to reckon with…

Thanks to data you’re voluntarily giving up to a private company based on your Web searches, photos, Gmail messages, and more.

After spending three days at I/O this week, it became more apparent than ever that unless millions (billions?) of people suddenly change their mind and start using alternative tech tools, or unless the government steps in waving the anti-trust banner, our lives, our history, and our personal wealth could be managed by one company –– Google.

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Google Now scans your email and knows when your Amazon package is arriving. It knows what sports scores to show you based on the teams you’ve searched for. It knows what stock prices to show you based on the companies you search for. It scans your calendar and reminds you when to leave to make your appointment on time. And all that data is delivered to you without you having to ask.

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The question to ask now is, are we OK with this? Does the benefit of faster search, better transportation, and automated news updates outweigh giving up so much of our lives to a computer run by a private company that mines our data?

They’re issues we’d have to tackle gradually, but hopefully not before Google advances faster than we can adapt.

More:
http://www.infowars.com/googles-plan-to-take-over-the-world/

A FORMER Google executive has blown the whistle on a massive and “immoral” tax avoidance scheme that has “cheated” British taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of pounds over the past decade.

Barney Jones, 34, who worked for the internet search giant between 2002 and 2006, has lifted the lid on an elaborate structure which diverts British profits through Ireland to the Bermuda tax haven.

Although Google’s London sales staff would negotiate and sign contracts with British customers, and cash was paid into a UK bank account, deals were technically booked through its Dublin office to minimise its liabilities here. Jones, a devout Christian and father of four, is ready to hand over a cache of more than 100,000 emails and documents to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), detailing the “concocted scheme.”

More:
http://www.infowars.com/google-insider-exposes-immoral-tax-scam/

A stellar example is the popular website Google. Since there is a long line of useful Google products available, they are able to collect all of your information and store it in one spot. Google also analyzes everything you do to determine what ads pertain to you specifically. Syncing Google chrome is an example of how your information is saved on the Internet: Google Syncing remembers history, bookmarks, and pretty much everything else you do on the Internet. In the event someone obtained your login they could scroll through your browser history very easily. When using Google to search the Internet, the search engine logs everything you search in order to give you the “best possible experience,” by targeted advertising. There is a link where Google will list all of your likes and dislikes. Any employee or person with the intent to get your private information can retrieve it. The popular company Windows logs every file that is ever on a computer for “security purposes.” Another instance of this type of blatant and public privacy invasion is Carrier IQ. During this scandal Android, Blackberry, and other companies pre-install programs on all devices that logs everything the devices do, essentially, built-in spyware. May it be noted that they still use this technology today.

Corporate enterprise can even justify releasing such information to private interest groups around the world, because the average American consumer is forced to sign a contract and play ball at a rigged game to use common gadgets and tools. Carrier IQ comes with the ability to log everything you type on a phone, even bank pins, passwords, and more information that is crucial to keep private. CISPA allows the legal transaction of anyone’s information, regardless of warrants, to the government or corporate enterprise. So, how does corporate enterprise get away with this? Ignorance, and because Uncle Sam only has the knack of following those with the most resources, voting power, and most importantly, money. So, what can a non-violent consumer do besides playing with an aristocratic government dominated by capitalistic enterprise? Adults have the voting power and can petition. Kids are sitting ducks to be abused by enterprise. An aristocracy runs the government via legal or illegal means such as lobbyists and bribes.

More:
http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/articleid/600001/newspaperid/5348/Internet_Invasion_of_Privacy_and_Legal_Presence.aspx

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/17/quotw_ending_may_17/

http://www.infowars.com/google-knows-when-youre-home/

The same judge who handed Viacom another defeat in its copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube last month has denied class-action status to a huge population of video copyright owners whose works were posted on YouTube without their permission.

In a case running parallel to the infamous Viacom v. YouTube suit the English Premier League, French Tennis Federation, and various music publishers sued the Google-owned YouTube in 2007 “on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated,” and in 2010 formally asked to be certified as a class. The proposed class would contain people or entities whose copyrighted work was posted on YouTube on or after April 15, 2005 without their permission.

More:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/earths-population-of-video-copyright-owners-denied-class-action-status/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/congress-sends-google-a-list-of-questions-about-privacy-and-glass/

The court said that it has referred a case about YouTube embeds to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg for an opinion, and has not reached a final ruling.

The court found that embedded YouTube videos don’t infringe the copyright of the rights holder because an embedded video is a link to content on another website.

This doesn’t violate the German Copyright Act because it is the owner of the website that originally posted the video who has responsibility for making it accessible to the public.

More:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038892/german-case-on-embedding-youtube-videos-referred-to-eu-court.html

http://gizmodo.com/you-can-now-upload-your-own-ebooks-up-to-1-000-epub-or-507289644

http://gizmodo.com/google-and-nasa-are-building-the-future-of-ai-with-a-qu-507376295

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/google-tells-microsoft-to-cease-and-desist-its-ad-free-youtube-app/

Google has greater access to No. 10 Downing Street than the government’s own ministers, one such minister has admitted. Viscount Younger of Leckie, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Intellectual Property – the third copyright minister in a year – made the candid confession before the Media, Culture and Sport parliamentary Select Committee on Tuesday.

Leckie was asked by Labour MP Jim Sheridan about the multi-layered and close relationship between No. 10 and Google.

“I’m very aware of [Google's] power, put it that way,” Leckie replied. “I’ve also very aware that they have got access, for whatever reason, at higher levels than me at No. 10.”

Asked to elaborate on this fascinating insight, Leckie responder:

“They are a vociferous action group and a big company to put it bluntly, and are quite powerful”.

More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/16/govt_ministers_candid_google_confession/

Nintendo has started claiming ad revenue on user-created Youtube videos featuring its games, according to reports from Youtube users.

Nintendo does not want to block videos containing content that it owns from appearing on Youtube (as many film and music publishers have), but it wants to place ads at the beginning and the end of videos featuring Nintendo games, such as Let’s Plays, with that revenue going to Nintendo as opposed to the creator of the video.

Prolific Youtube channel owner Zack Scott has posted on Facebook about the demands. “I think filing claims against LPers is backwards,” he writes. “Video games aren’t like movies or TV. Each play-through is a unique audiovisual experience. When I see a film that someone else is also watching, I don’t need to see it again. When I see a game that someone else is playing, I want to play that game for myself! Sure, there may be some people who watch games rather than play them, but are those people even gamers?”

Nintendo has issued the following statement to GameFront on the matter: “As part of our on-going push to ensure Nintendo content is shared across social media channels in an appropriate and safe way, we became a Youtube partner and as such in February 2013 we registered our copyright content in the Youtube database. For most fan videos this will not result in any changes, however, for those videos featuring Nintendo-owned content, such as images or audio of a certain length, adverts will now appear at the beginning, next to or at the end of the clips. We continually want our fans to enjoy sharing Nintendo content on Youtube, and that is why, unlike other entertainment companies, we have chosen not to block people using our intellectual property.”

More:
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

Previously:

YouTube has a special deal with Universal which sees content taken down at the record label’s request and DMCA counter notices blocked with no chance of appeal
http://vrritti.com/2013/04/05/youtube-has-a-special-deal-with-universal-which-sees-content-taken-down-at-the-record-labels-request-and-dmca-counter-notices-blocked-with-no-chance-of-appeal/

“We started to joke that we could tell the AdWords people, ‘We want to kill baby seals,’ and they’d tell us how to do it”

At one point during a meeting with Whitaker and his lawyer, the Feds asked him how he had grown his online enterprise. Whitaker’s answer was immediate: He had used Google AdWords. In fact, he claimed, Google employees had actively helped him advertise his business, even though he had made no attempt to hide its illegal nature. It was reasonable to assume, Whitaker said, that Google was helping other rogue Internet pharmacies too.

If true, this would be a bombshell. This was Google, after all. Since its founding, the search giant had prided itself on being a different kind of corporation, the “don’t be evil” company. And for almost as long, its open-to-all-comers ad policy had come under scrutiny.

Online pharmacies were a particular sticking point; in 2003, three separate congressional committees initiated inquiries into the matter. On July 22, 2004, a month before Google went public, Sheryl Sandberg—at the time Google vice president of global online sales and operations—testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Legislators had proposed two bills that would regulate online pharmaceutical sales, but Sandberg argued that the measures would be unduly burdensome. She said that Google employed a third-party verification service to vet online pharmacies. She also described Google’s own automated monitoring system and the creation of a team of Google employees dedicated to enforcing all of the company’s pharmaceutical ad policies.

“Google has taken strong voluntarily [sic] measures—going beyond existing legal requirements—to ensure that our advertising services protect our users by providing access to safe and reliable information,” she testified. Neither bill made it out of committee. (Sandberg, now Facebook’s chief operating officer, declined to comment or be interviewed for this story.)

The agents seemed skeptical of Whitaker’s claims and spent the next 10 months following up on them. But they apparently found the story plausible, because now Whitaker was being driven to a Providence, Rhode Island, postal inspector’s office to launch the US government’s undercover investigation into one of the world’s most admired, profitable, and powerful companies.

“The culpability went far higher than the sales reps (…) We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on”

Much more:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/15/larry_page_voice_paralysis/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/15/google_autocomplete_defamatory_ruling_germany/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584305-93/google-search-scratches-its-brain-500-million-times-a-day/ 

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/05/report-google-aims-to-take-on-spotify-seals-a-deal-with-sony-and-universal/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/14/google_proposal_to_eu_criticised_by_foundem/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584018-93/googles-vp9-video-codec-nearly-done-youtube-will-use-it/

The decision comes after a Reuters investigation claimed there were “inconsistencies” in how Google portrays its activities in Britain.

More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/google_tax_date/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57583843-38/apple-deluged-by-police-demands-to-decrypt-iphones/

David Bowie’s latest video, which stars Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard, was temporarily pulled from YouTube over its graphic content.

More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22463845

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/amazon-stealing-search-from-google/

In a German case that could have broader antitrust implications in Europe, Google defeated a petition for an injunction brought by a German online weather trade group, Verband Deutscher Wetterdienstleister. The case is interesting because it involves a private antitrust action against Google and directly addresses the “search bias” argument made by Google critics.

More:
http://searchengineland.com/google-wins-vertical-search-antitrust-case-in-germany-158544

And where’s the transparency report on YouTube bans?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/media-blog/2013/may/09/youtube-bans-ad-porn-website-disabled-people

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-picture-of-earth-through-time.html

The 643-page tome, called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf), was just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others.

The book was published by the Center for Digital Content of the National Security Agency, and is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled “Google Hacking.”

More:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/nsa-manual-on-hacking-internet/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/08/flass_google_glass_alternative/

And – shock – it phones home to the cuddly ad giant

More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/08/google_glass_update/

http://www.hotforsecurity.com/blog/yahoo-mail-blocked-by-browsers-in-malvertising-chain-reaction-6124.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57583461-93/google-authors-wrangle-in-court-again-over-digital-books/

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/7/4309936/spotify-nightmare-chrome-extension-lets-users-download-any-song

http://cylance.com/techblog/Googles-Buildings-Hackable.shtml

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57583022-93/googles-schmidt-the-internet-needs-a-delete-button/