The US defence department has banned the giant internet search engine Google from filming inside and making detailed studies of US military bases.
A message sent to all Defense Department bases and installations around the country late last week told officials to not allow the popular mapping website from taking panoramic views inside the facilities.
Close-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a "potential threat" to security, it said.
The move follows the discovery of images of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas on Google Maps.
"Images include 360-degree views of the covered area to include access control points, barriers, headquarters, facilities and community areas," said the defence department in a statement quoted by AFP news agency.
It said such detailed mapping could pose a threat.
Google spokesman Larry Yu said the decision by a Google team to enter the Texas base and undertake a detailed survey, had been "a mistake".He said that where the US military had expressed concerns, images had already been removed.
source: bbc tech news
Pentagon doesn't want Google mapping out their bases
The Story Behind the Google Logo
Ever wondered why they made Google's logo like that? Who made that simple but catchy face logo that has represented the most popular search engine on the internet? And do you have any idea what Google's first logo look like when it was still a Stanford project?
Well some of us probably don't really notice Big G's logo that much unless it was doodled by the creative Dennis Hwang for some special events or holidays. But who really is the brain behind Google's primary logo? It is Ruth Kedar, who was teaching design at Stanford when she was introduced by a friend to Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page.
Google at that time wanted a unique logo that would clearly differentiate them from the other existing search players (Yahoo, Excite, HotBot, etc.), as well as embody their unique vision. But these other websites mentioned were commercial portals first, and search engines second. Google on the other hand wanted to convey that it was as a search provider first and foremost.
On an interview at WebProNews, Kedar explained on how they ended with the now popular Google logo:
* It was playful and deceptively simple. The design subtle as to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless. The colors evoke memories of child play, but deftly stray from the color wheel strictures so as to hint to the inherent element of serendipity creeping into any search results page and the irreverance and boldness of the “I am feeling lucky” link. The texture and shading of each letter is done in an unobtrusive way resulting in lifting it from the page while giving it both weight and lightness. It is solid but there is also an ethereal quality to it.
* Times-Roman was the font of choice for the web at that time, while sans-serif fonts were the darling of the printed world. I wanted the readability of a serifed font, but looked for a typeface that had the same qualities we were looking for – subtly sophisticated, but with some humor and irreverence . The chosen typeface is a based on Catull, an old style serif typeface. Catull borrows elements from traditional writing instruments such as the quill and the chisel with a modern twist. Search, by nature, is an activity that requires we look into the past. Therefore Catull’s historical ties seemed appropriate, as did the bridging between the old analog world and the new emerging digital era.
* Visually, there were two main schools of thought at the time: those wanting to emulate the conventional non-web giants such as Sun and SGI (bold all-caps sans-serifed fonts), and those who viewed the irreverence of Yahoo’s non-designed approach as “the look" for the new medium. This design managed to break with the existing conventions landing Google with the unique visual expression it was looking for.
BackRub:
Does the name scare you? Or is it the hands? Well, that hand right there is of Larry Page. When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed "BackRub" because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site's importance. For more info regarding this, read the BackRub FAQs page. The logo evolved to other designs when they used "Google," here's a demo page of their early Google search engine.
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technorati tags: google logo, ruth kedar, backrub, search engine
No Need for Google to Fret, Says Analysts
So far the most talked about news on the internet lately is about the possible merger of Microsoft and Yahoo!, with the former offering to buy the latter for around $44.6 billion to better compete with Google in the market for online services. "Google doesn't have to do much. It is that far ahead," says Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. Google's share of Internet searches is nearly 60% in the U.S. — about twice the combined total of Yahoo and Microsoft, according to estimates from market researchers. At the same time, Google commands more than 40% of worldwide online ad sales. Combined, Yahoo and Microsoft are less than 25%. Microsoft's Online Services group lost $537 million last year, while increasing ad sales a tepid 7%.
But Analysts says big G can take time responding to 'Yahoosoft,' and that there is no immediate pressure for Google to act boldly.
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technorati tags: google, microsoft yahoo merger
YouTube on Your Boob Tube
As YouTube becomes an ever more popular pastime, major television makers are scrambling to add Internet capabilities to their newest TV models.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world's biggest plasma maker, has lately teamed up with Google to launch new plasma television series that allows users to search and watch videos from YouTube as well as to share and view photos from the online Picasa Web Albums.
At the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Matsushita, which produces Panasonic-branded products, unveiled the latest Panasonic VIERA PZ850 line of plasma Internet-connected high-definition television sets, which will be available to consumers this spring in the United States.
Google and YouTube will provide Matsushita with special servers for transmitting high-quality images for large-screen TVs. The latest Matsushita Net-enabled TVs will allow users to click into the YouTube and Picasa Web sites by pressing a button on the remote control.
{ source: forbes.com }
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technorati tags: youtube, television, google
Microsoft on Google's territory to promote Vista & Live
Would you believe it? Just saw on TechCrunch that Microsoft has taken its marketing push for Windows Vista and Windows Live into enemy territory by offering short demonstration videos on Google's YouTube.
Currently the WindowsVistaAndLive channel has 9 clips uploaded showing different features of Vista and Live which users can take advantage of - like online photo sharing, video calling, management of email accounts etc. This just shows that even Microsoft acknowledges the powerful market position of YouTube on the internet.
MS has even left comments open on all videos so viewers can share their reactions, most comments i've read so far are negative posts like:"Vista sucks hard. Get a mac if you want to get more done without it crashing on you."
"Fix Vista already MS!! Or better yet, make XP look sexier- now that would be a fix."
" i like how vista tried to look all pretty like OSX, but they forgot to actually make it work well first"
" quick TABS in explorer? geee i wish safari had that."
"Vista is just too buggy right now until they fix all the major problems. I'm not an apple fanboy...I'm just saying Vista isn't ready yet and XP SP3 is perfectly fine. Why change something that isn't broken?"
There are also positive comments.. like.. uhmm.. wait, i just saw one right here.. uhmm.. ehrr.. okay.. well, yeah there are also positive comments.
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technorati tags: google, youtube, microsoft, WindowsVistaAndLive Channel
Sightings of new Adsense unit similar to Widgetbucks
As I do my daily blog hopping (and dropping of entrecards at the same time), an article on Problogger caught my attention. A new interactive Adsense unit was reported to have been spotted on several sites.
The picture above was seen on a UK site- Technical Itch. Seems like Google has begun testing new adsense formats that will compete with other popular shopping widgets like Widgetbucks and Chitika's eMinimall. Another test ad was also spotted on freakitude.com.
The widget, i mean gadget, has the usual "Ads by Google" on the right side, and a link with the words "Add the Google Checkout gadget" on the left side. Does this mean ads displayed will only come from sellers of Google's Checkout service, not Adwords? There's actually a gadget similar to this, called "Shop with Google Checkout," which you can only add to your personalized iGoogle homepage.
So, has anyone else seen these test ads? What's your say with this new adsense unit? Do you think Google will still allow publishers to display third party shopping widgets once they officially launch this ad format?
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technorati tags: google, adsense, google gadget ads,google checkout gadget ads
Google tweaking its Reader service regarding Privacy concerns
Amidst a user backlash regarding changes to its Reader application, Google on Wednesday made slight adjustments to the service to enable more control over sharing capabilities. If you're not familiar about this issue, here's a short background: On December 14, Google announced that Reader, its RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed service, would link with contacts from GoogleTalk, the company's instant messenger, and Gmail, its web-based email service. Any feed tagged to "Share" in Reader would be visible to any Talk or Gmail contact.
This resulted to immediate reactions from some users. Others were much harsher in their criticism, including many of those who have posted hundreds of messages to a thread on a Google Reader forum. There's even an instance of a user's holiday being ruined because of this.
If you check out Google's official Reader blog, changes were already made on their sharing feature. You can now set "tags" to private or public. Each tag you share will get its own public page and feed URL, the same way shared items has a public page and feed; these tags will not be shared with anyone unless you send them the public address.
The firestorm over Google Reader is the second controversial attempt to expand social networking in the last two months. In November, Facebook launched an advertising system, dubbed Beacon, that users instantly slammed over privacy issues. Earlier this month, Facebook apologized, also made changes, and announced users could now switch off the system.
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technorati tags: google reader, online privacy, google
The Three Kings (of web search) charged of illegal gambling... ads.
The Three Kings (i'm calling them that in the spirit of the Holiday season) of web search namely - King Microsoft, King Yahoo, and King Google were charged by the US Justice Department of taking money by accepting illegal gambling advertisements from online betting operations between 1997 and 2007.
The companies agreed to pay a total $31.5 million to settle claims by the Justice Department. Being the most generous(?) and oldest among the trio, Micro$oft paid $21 million. Next to seniority is Yahoo contributing $7.5 million. While this "startup" company they called Google gave $3 million.
The money collected will be used as a fund by the US government for various public awareness programs. Now the (31.5 million dollar) question is, how much money did these three search giants earned when they placed those illegal ads for ten years? <*wink*><*wink*>
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technorati tags: illegal gambling ads, microsoft, yahoo, google, illegal ads
Google 'powerless' to stop AdSense theft
I personally encountered this before, I was checking one of my sites on an internet cafe months ago and was shocked when I saw porn site ads displayed on my adsense spots. I know it can't be from Google, coz if it's from them then they are already violating their own TOS. I was using Internet Explorer then so I tried checking it on Firefox, and there the regular adsense text ads can be seen. Found out that it was some kind of a malware that infected IE on the pc i was using. There I realized what if other users also have the same trojans on their pc, knowing that majority of web surfers are still using IE (w/c is more vulnerable to spywares), there is indeed a big possibility that this can affect not only mine but also other publishers' adsense earnings.
Unfortunately, according to Nishad Herath, senior researcher at McAfee's AvertLabs, Google is powerless to stop the Trojan stealing Google's space on third-party sites."There's nothing a search vendor can do to protect against the problem since it works by locally modifying content that's being displayed on the browser. There's absolutely nothing that Google or any ad vendor can do about that."
Google said its policy is to remove sites that redirect users to malicious pages, but this approach will not prevent the Trojan from damaging its revenue since it sits on the user's PC and causes the browser to bypass the AdSense network completely. So my suggestion to all internet users out there, always keep your computers safe by frequently updating your anti-virus/spyware programs, and try using safer browsers like Firefox. ^_^
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technorati tags: google, adsense trojan, malware, porn sites
Are you a moron? Click here now!
Ah, what a dumb year it was! And with that Fortune created the "101 Dumbest Moments in Business" for the year 2007.
This particular adsense unit shown below just brought Google into the said list:
To test Google's ability to block harmful advertising, Belgian IT security consultant Didier Stevens posts an ad that reads "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" It is accepted by Google and displayed 259,723 times; 409 web surfers actually clicked on the ad.
Other tech groups also included on the list were Apple, Sony and Intel. One group I noticed missing on the list is Bill Gates and co. Does this mean Microsoft didn't do anything stupid this year?
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technorati tags: dumbest moments, business, google, adsense
2008 is coming.. is it the year of the worms?
Is 2008 the year of the worm? Of course it's not, but the latest buzz on the social networking scene is about a worm spreading on Orkut with the message "2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc." This translates to "2008 is coming…I wish that it begins quite well for you".
For those who are not familiar with Orkut (and there's a lot of those), it's a social network owned by Google similar to MySpace and Facebook. Though it is not popular in the US, it's a big hit in Brazil (also India), in the same way that Friendster is like the national website of us pinoys here in the Philippines.
According to an alert from anti-virus specialist Trend Micro, infection starts when an Orkut user is sent an e-mail telling them that they have a new Scrapbook entry.. you know, wall posts? comments? testi(monials)?. Logging into Orkut, the victim is greeted with that Portuguese-language message above. Once a user becomes infected, the infected account downloads and executes an embedded Javascript that sends a copy of the original Scrapbook post to all the victim's contacts.
There are jokes saying that "Google has responded quickly. Too bad. If Google had let the worm rampage, maybe some American users might actually hear about Orkut for the first time."
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technorati tags: orkut, worm, google
Have you tried googling yourself?
I'm just curious since i read this study on cnn, saying that more americans are googling themselves.. meaning they type their names on Google search engine and find out what the results will be.
About 60 percent of Internet users said they aren't worried about the extent of information about themselves online, despite increasing concern over how that data can be used.Privacy on the internet has been a serious issue lately. People can learn a lot about a certain person just by searching at their friendster, myspace, or facebook accounts. That's why others are very careful on whatever information they are posting on the net, especially nowadays with companies also doing this online checking to know more about certain job applicant's background.
53 percent of adult Internet users admit to looking up information about someone else, celebrities excluded. Often, it's to find someone they've lost touch with. But looking up information about friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbors also was common.
Last time I checked myself on google, top result pointed to my very old gaming site on geocities. The next were from pc game strategy guides i made for gamefaqs. How about you? Have you tried googling yourself lately? Is it really you that came on the top result or just someone with the exact same name.
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technorati tags: tagname Read more...