Scroogled - by Cory Doctorow
"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."
— Cardinal Richelieu
"We don't know enough about you."
— Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he'd made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He'd emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he'd left the city a month before, he'd been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin. 
Four hours later in the customs line, he'd slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.
"The marvels of modern technology,"
said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration — Powered by Google.
"I thought that didn't start until next month?"
The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.
Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and "taking some me time" — which turned out to be less rewarding than he'd expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends' PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain 10 pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed 24-hour gym.
He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn't caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.
The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.
"Evening," Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.
"Want to tell me about June 1998?"
Greg looked up from his Departures. "I'm sorry?"
"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, 'Are shrooms really such a bad idea?'"
The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.
"Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?"
"What?"
"Model rocketry."
"No," Greg said, "No, I'm not." He sensed where this was going.
The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."
Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and e-mail?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.
"Sir, calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches," the man said in a mocking whine. "That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I'll give it to you when we're through here."
"But the ads don't mean anything," Greg sputtered. "I get ads for Ann Coulter ring tones whenever I get e-mail from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!"
The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently?"
Greg racked his brain. "Okay, just do this. Search for 'coffee fanatics.'" He'd been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called Jet Fuel. "Jet Fuel" and "Launch" — that would probably make Google barf up some model rocket ads.
They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Halloween photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for "Greg Lupinski."
"It was a Gulf War-themed party," he said. "In the Castro."
"And you're dressed as...?"
"A suicide bomber," he replied sheepishly. Just saying the words made him wince.
"Come with me, Mr. Lupinski," the man said.
By the time he was released, it was past 3 a.m. His suitcases stood forlornly by the baggage carousel. He picked them up and saw they had been opened and carelessly closed. Clothes stuck out from around the edges.
When he returned home, he discovered that all of his fake pre-Columbian statues had been broken, and his brand-new white cotton Mexican shirt had an ominous boot print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. They smelled like airport.
He wasn't going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. There was only one person who would get it. Luckily, she was usually awake around this hour.
Maya had started working at Google two years after Greg had. It was she who'd convinced him to go to Mexico after he cashed out: Anywhere, she'd said, that he could reboot his existence.
Maya had two giant chocolate labs and a very, very patient girlfriend named Laurie who'd put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6 a.m. by 350 pounds of drooling canine.
Maya reached for her Mace as Greg jogged toward her, then did a double take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and trapping them under her sneaker. "Where's the rest of you? Dude, you look hot!"
He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. "Maya," he said, "what do you know about Google and the DHS?"
She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. "Top of the light pole there; don't look," she said. "That's one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk."
In the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn't paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public — there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.
Feeling silly, Greg mumbled, "You're joking."
"Come with me," she said, turning away from the pole.
The dogs weren't happy about cutting their walk short, and expressed their displeasure in the kitchen as Maya made coffee.
"We brokered a compromise with the DHS," she said, reaching for the milk. "They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users."
Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already..."
"No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn't the reason Google went along. You know, Republicans hate Google. We're overwhelmingly registered Democratic, so we're doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn't P.I.I." — Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age — "It's just metadata. So it's only slightly evil."
"Why all the intrigue, then? "
Maya sighed and hugged the lab that was butting her knee with its huge head. "The spooks are like lice. They get everywhere. They show up at our meetings. It's like being in some Soviet ministry. And the security clearance — we're divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn't cleared, but no one knows why. I'm cleared. Lucky for me, being a dyke no longer disqualifies you. No cleared person would deign to eat lunch with an unclearable."
Greg felt very tired. "So I guess I'm lucky I got out of the airport alive. I might have ended up 'disappeared' if it had gone badly, huh?"
Maya stared at him intently. He waited for an answer.
"What?"
"I'm about to tell you something, but you can't ever repeat it, okay?"
"Um...you're not in a terrorist cell, are you?
"Nothing so simple. Here's the deal: Airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a 'person of interest' — and they never, ever let up. They'll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches."
"I thought you said the courts wouldn't let them..."
"The courts won't let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you're in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for 'suspicious patterns,' using deviation from statistical norms to nail you."
Greg felt like he was going to throw up. "How the hell did this happen? Google was a good place. 'Don't be evil,' right?" That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of why he'd taken his computer science Ph.D. from Stanford directly to Mountain View.
Maya replied with a hard-edged laugh. "Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to Swift-Boat Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago."
They were quiet for a minute.
"It started in China," she went on, finally. "Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction."
Greg sighed. He knew Google's reach all too well: Every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google maps or Google mail — even if you sent mail to a Gmail account — the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site's search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.
"They were using us to build profiles of people," she went on. "When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they'd come to us and find a reason to bust them. There's hardly anything you can do on the Net that isn't illegal in China."
Greg shook his head. "Why did they have to put the servers in China?"
"The government said they'd block us otherwise. And Yahoo was there." They both made faces. Somewhere along the way, employees at Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the competition was doing than how their own company was performing. "So we did it. But a lot of us didn't like the idea."
Maya sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of her dogs sniffed insistently under Greg's chair.
"Almost immediately, the Chinese asked us to start censoring search results," Maya said. "Google agreed. The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil — we're giving consumers access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn't get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience.'"
"Now what?" Greg pushed a dog away from him. Maya looked hurt.
"Now you're a person of interest, Greg.
You're Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You know the mission statement, right? 'Organize the World's Information.' Everything. Give it five years, we'll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you're — "
"Scroogled."
"Totally." She nodded.
Maya took both labs down the hall to the bedroom. He heard a muffled argument with her girlfriend, and she came back alone.
"I can fix this," she said in an urgent whisper. "After the Chinese started rounding up people, my podmates and I made it our 20 percent project to fuck with them." (Among Google's business innovations was a rule that required every employee to devote 20 percent of his or her time to high-minded pet projects.) "We call it the Googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your Gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it. Greg, I can Googleclean you. It's the only way."
"I don't want you to get into trouble."
She shook her head. "I'm already doomed. Every day since I built the damn thing has been borrowed time — now it's just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh, I don't know. Whatever it is they do to people like me in the war on abstract nouns."
Greg remembered the airport. The search. His shirt, the boot print in the middle of it.
"Do it," he said.
The Googlecleaner worked wonders. Greg could tell by the ads that popped up alongside his searches, ads clearly meant for someone else: Intelligent Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, Terror Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, the Homosexual Agenda, Cheap Toby Keith Tickets. This was Maya's program at work. Clearly Google's new personalized search had him pegged as someone else entirely, a God-fearing right winger with a thing for hat acts.
Which was fine by him.
Then he clicked on his address book, and found that half of his contacts were missing. His Gmail in-box was hollowed out like a termite-ridden stump. His Orkut profile, normalized. His calendar, family photos, bookmarks: all empty. He hadn't quite realized before how much of him had migrated onto the Web and worked its way into Google's server farms — his entire online identity. Maya had scrubbed him to a high gloss; he'd become the invisible man.
Greg sleepily mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted at the flashing toolbar clock: 4:13 a.m.! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour?
He shouted, "Coming!" in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went. At the door, he squinted through the peephole to find Maya staring glumly back at him.
He undid the chains and dead bolt and yanked the door open. Maya rushed in past him, followed by the dogs and her girlfriend.
She was sheened in sweat, her usually combed hair clinging in clumps to her forehead. She rubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined.
"Pack a bag," she croaked hoarsely.
"What?"
She took him by the shoulders. "Do it," she said.
"Where do you want to...?"
"Mexico, probably. Don't know yet. Pack, dammit." She pushed past him into his bedroom and started yanking open drawers.
"Maya," he said sharply, "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on."
She glared at him and pushed her hair away from her face. "The Googlecleaner lives. After I cleaned you, I shut it down and walked away. It was too dangerous to use anymore. But it's still set to send me e-mail confirmations whenever it runs. Someone's used it six times to scrub three very specific accounts — all of which happen to belong to members of the Senate Commerce Committee up for reelection."
"Googlers are blackwashing senators?"
"Not Googlers. This is coming from off-site. The IP block is registered in D.C. And the IPs are all used by Gmail users. Guess who the accounts belong to?"
"You spied on Gmail accounts?"
"Okay. Yes. I did look through their e-mail. Everyone does it, now and again, and for a lot worse reasons than I did. But check it out — turns out all this activity is being directed by our lobbying firm. Just doing their job, defending the company's interests."
Greg felt his pulse beating in his temples. "We should tell someone."
"It won't do any good. They know everything about us. They can see every search. Every e-mail. Every time we've been caught on the webcams. Who is in our social network...did you know if you have 15 Orkut buddies, it's statistically certain that you're no more than three steps to someone who's contributed money to a 'terrorist' cause? Remember the airport? You'll be in for a lot more of that."
"Maya," Greg said, getting his bearings. "Isn't heading to Mexico overreacting? Just quit. We can do a start-up or something. This is crazy."
"They came to see me today," she said. "Two of the political officers from DHS. They didn't leave for hours. And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions."
"About the Googlecleaner?"
"About my friends and family. My search history. My personal history."
"Jesus."
"They were sending a message to me. They're watching every click and every search. It's time to go. Time to get out of range."
"There's a Google office in Mexico, you know."
"We've got to go," she said, firmly.
"Laurie, what do you think of this?" Greg asked.
Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. "My parents left East Germany in '65. They used to tell me about the Stasi. The secret police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotic joke, whatever. Whether they meant it or not, what Google has created is no different."
"Greg, are you coming?"
He looked at the dogs and shook his head. "I've got some pesos left over," he said. "You take them. Be careful, okay?"
Maya looked like she was going to slug him. Softening, she gave him a ferocious hug.
"Be careful, yourself," she whispered in his ear.
They came for him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he'd imagined they would.
Two men arrived on his doorstep shortly after 2 a.m. One stood silently by the door. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sport coat with a stain on one lapel and a American flag on the other. "Greg Lupinski, we have reason to believe you're in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," he said, by way of introduction. "Specifically, exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. Ten years for a first offense. Turns out that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies as a felony. And oh, what will come out in the trial...all the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile, for starters."
Greg had played this scene in his head for a week. He'd planned all kinds of brave things to say. It had given him something to do while he waited to hear from Maya. She never called.
"I'd like to get in touch with a lawyer," is all he mustered.
"You can do that," the small man said. "But maybe we can come to a better arrangement."
Greg found his voice. "I'd like to see your badge," he stammered.
The man's basset-hound face lit up as he let out a bemused chuckle. "Buddy, I'm not a cop," he replied. "I'm a consultant. Google hired me — my firm represents their interests in Washington — to build relationships. Of course, we wouldn't get the police involved without talking to you first. You're part of the family. Actually, there's an offer I'd like to make."
Greg turned to the coffeemaker, dumped the old filter.
"I'll go to the press," he said.
The man nodded as if thinking it over. "Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle's office in the morning and spill everything. They'd look for a confirming source. They won't find one. And when they try searching for it, we'll find them. So, buddy, why don't you hear me out, okay? I'm in the win-win business. I'm very good at it." He paused. "By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first? Takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?"
Greg watched as the man silently took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid his cuffs and carefully rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. He poured the beans out of the grinder and into Greg's colander, and rinsed them in the sink.
He was a little pudgy and very pale, with the social grace of an electrical engineer. He seemed like a real Googler, actually, obsessed with the minutiae. He knew his way around a coffee grinder, too.
"We're drafting a team for Building 49..."
"There is no Building 49," Greg said automatically.
"Of course," the guy said, flashing a tight smile. "There's no Building 49. But we're putting together a team to revamp the Googlecleaner. Maya's code wasn't very efficient, you know. It's full of bugs. We need an upgrade. You'd be the right guy, and it wouldn't matter what you knew if you were back inside."
"Unbelievable," Greg said, laughing. "If you think I'm going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you're crazier than I thought."
"Greg," the man said, "we're not smearing anyone. We're just going to clean things up a bit. For some select people. You know what I mean? Everyone's Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. Standing for office is like a public colonoscopy." He loaded the cafetière and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. Greg retrieved two coffee cups — Google mugs, of course — and passed them over.
"We're going to do for our friends what Maya did for you. Just a little cleanup. All we want to do is preserve their privacy. That's all."
Greg sipped his coffee. "What happens to the candidates you don't clean?"
"Yeah," the guy said, flashing Greg a weak grin. "Yeah, you're right. It'll be kind of tough for them." He searched the inside pocket of his jacket and produced several folded sheets of paper.
He smoothed out the pages and put them on the table. "Here's one of the good guys who needs our help." It was a printout of a search history belonging to a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to in the past three elections.
"Fella gets back to his hotel room after a brutal day of campaigning door to door, fires up his laptop, and types 'hot asses' into his search bar. Big deal, right? The way we see it, for that to disqualify a good man from continuing to serve his country is just un-American."
Greg nodded slowly.
"So you'll help the guy out?" the man asked.
"Yes."
"Good. There's one more thing. We need you to help us find Maya. She didn't understand our goals at all, and now she seems to have flown the coop. Once she hears us out, I have no doubt she'll come around."
He glanced at the candidate's search history.
"I guess she might," Greg replied.
The new Congress took 11 working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America's Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of intelligence and analysis work to private contractors. Theoretically, the contracts were open to competitive bidding, but within the secure confines of Google's Building 49, there was no question of who would win. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet they would have caught them — governments just aren't equipped to Do Search Right.
The next morning Greg scrutinized himself carefully as he shaved (the security minders didn't like hacker stubble and weren't shy about telling him so), realizing that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent for the U.S. government. How bad would it be? Wasn't it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted DHS desk jockey?
By the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike racks, he had convinced himself. He was mulling over which organic smoothie to order at the canteen when his key card failed to open the door to Building 49. The red LED flashed dumbly every time he swiped his card. Any other building, and there'd be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that.
Swipe, swipe, swipe. Suddenly he heard a voice at his side.
"Greg, can I see you, please?"
The rumpled man put an arm around his shoulders, and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It smelled like what his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Greg couldn't remember his name. Juan Carlos? Juan Luis?
The man's arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the herb garden outside the kitchen. "We're giving you a couple of days off," he said.
Greg felt a sudden stab of anxiety. "Why?" Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail?
"It's Maya." The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless gaze. "She killed herself. In Guatemala. I'm sorry, Greg."
Greg seemed to hurtle away, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, where he looked down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep.
From a long way away, he heard himself say, "I don't need any time off. I'm okay."
From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist.
The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49, and the door swung shut behind them.
./EOF
Scroogled – Google Tracks Spies your Privacy | Amazing Story by Cory Doctorow | Google Big Brother
copyright 2007 Cory Doctorow, Radar Magazine
One of the things that have been pesking me since the time I moved on to Android Cyanogenmod 7 was that I was not able to sync Facebook Calendar with Google Calendar or Outlook. Also since I was unable to sync Facebook Calender with Google Calendar hence the I was not able to sync Facebook birthdays on Android . That make me thinking and I got some nifty methods to do the same.
Method 1 (Sync Facebook Birthdays on Google)
Install Ebobirthday application on Android
Open it and click on
menu – > Import – > Facebook
and let it connect to it.
Once connected enter your username and password, and allow it to access data. The it will start importing birthdays. Once done, click on
menu –> settings
and then choose calendar which you want to update.
then go to
menu –> export –> update calendar
and then it will connect and will update your google calendar :)
Once done, sync your Android and Google. Alternatively you can sync outlook calendar with Google
Congrats..you have synced Facebook calendar with Google and Outlook !
I will discussing the method 2 on my next post :)
copies it & uses the information to improve its own results. Of course Microsoft denies it.. but what was novel was the spy hunt by Google to caught Bing red handed. It all started with “tarosorraphy” which is a medical term for a rare surgical procedure on eyes, which was Googled in the summer of 2010 & was quirky enough to get Google’s attention. They corrected it , but what was peculiar was that Bing displayed the first correct result of Google without even a correction of spelling. As the official Google blog states - Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.
The cycle continued with Bing displaying all types of unusual queries from Google. The Google started a hypothetical experiment to catch Bing in the act. This involved Google to insert 100 synthetic queries with random results in the Google search engine & then testing whether they appear in the Bing results or not. For example – “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” they inserted a credit union website link.
Then they issued fresh laptops with IE8 installed with toolbar & searched for them. And voila, the results started to appear in Bing, which confirms the suspicion that -
- Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
- The Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program
which as Google states is a cheap imitation & encourages to use Google as a primary search provider.
Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.Also, they expect to have a fair competition.. with Microsoft..
So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop.
source
I never imagined that this can happen , this morning, Yahoo brought me pleasant surprise of connecting my Gmail 
account with my Gmail one, & even my Facebook id. Wow !!! Think about one world theory :) Yahoo states that the transition will take some time.Like the hell I care..
I quickly connected my Gmail account to check if it works, voila it worked seamlessly, now you can sign in into one ID & can enjoy the benefits of Gmail & Yahoo simultaneously. Here is how you can do that.
Go to Yahoo mail & click on the respective Gmail button.
Once done, Google will prompt you if you want to grant access to Yahoo, click Allow to do that.
Once done, you will be prompted to enter username password & other fields, click on top link to sign in if you already have a Yahoo Id. Enter your Yahoo Id & click sign in..
Voila.you are done :) Now you have all the goodies of your social world at one place :)
Why Yahoo did that ?
Seeing that it has dropped down to 4th rank worldwide according to Alexa, yahoo quickly had to make a move..First Google, then Facebook & Youtube. Seems like everybody was trampling it over & getting ahead. So it was a tactical move to entice the the Google followers to have a piece of Yahoo :)
(click on image to see the top sites)
as the old adage says,
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em ..
A tactical move by Yahoo :)
Like This post ? You can buy me a Beer :)
You might have heard of Google street view, heck, some of you might be avid users of Google street view, which is a
service that allows you that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world. Google managed to pull up that by using its elite squadron of sophisticated technocars to capture both imagery and 3D geometrical data for Google Maps and data about Wi-Fi networks that it uses in its geolocation-enabled applications. The practice of mapping and gathering data has always been a controversial practice (giving too much of power in Google’s hand, or in any techno firm is a bad omen.). It was on April 27 when Google tried to clear up misconceptions in a blog post which can be easily summarized as -
- We are not invading anyone’s privacy &
- Take a look around folks, other people have been collecting data even longer then we have.
Nevertheless, cars have been temporarily grounded and the data has been isolated till someone figures out what do do with it. Google intents to hire a third party to examine the software is "profoundly sorry for this error" and will try to learn from it. Quoting from the official blog post
The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.
Inner thoughts -
I am glad German authorities are competent enough to sniff and dig facts and give an earful to Google.
Data collection is a scary thing anyways..we need to be paranoid of what data we are allowing to be public and private considering the vast attempts of world to catch us with our pants down :P Who knows that data might be jacked up with folks at CIA/FBI/NSA to track some sucker down (there's always a chance…remember FBI carnivore ? anyone ?).
Before the screw up, Google insisted what they were doing was nothing wrong. Frankly speaking, NO company ever admits to invading anyone's privacy. It's always "your privacy is important to us" blah blah blah…skepticism is the key to protect ourselves anyways.
In the end,
if privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy
(sorry if I sound corny.. but I couldn't think better)
From – PCWORLD
Last night when I was at Facebook, suddenly it stopped responding and the server requests just timed out.
I wondered if it was a problem with my ISP or the king of social networking was down at the moment. With nothing to do, I googled and stumbled across Downrightnow , a service that monitors your favorite websites. It compiles the status by combining
- Reports from users who visit downrightnow
- Public messages on Twitter from users who are having service trouble
- Official company announcements and status reports
- Other third-party web sites that monitor service status
As soon as I opened the website, I came to know that Facebook was having some problems at that time
Mission Successful :P I guess you will find it interesting.
Like This post ? You can buy me a Beer :)
Posted by XERO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Gmail is now even more customizable as folks at Google provided the facility to arrange labels hierarchically. Now emails 
can be arranged even more intuitively by making a label child of another label. This highly requested label setting can be enabled by going to
settings-> labs –> Nested labels –> enable it –> save
Once you enable it, you can then name your labels with slashes (/) to make it a child of another label. 
For example, if you want to create a simple label hierarchy with a "Social networking" label, and inside it a "Digg" and a "Facebook" label,then you just need to create three labels with the following names:
Social networking
Social networking/Digg
Social networking/Facebook
You can then create “Social networking/twitter” etc to get something like the screenshot on the right. Also, if the parent label doesn't exists then you have to create it before hand.Here you can see above that I have even started to use it and have arranged my labels accordingly.
Another feature to preview emails have been added to Gmail. You can now preview messages by right clicking the mail. this feature is known as Message Sneak-Peek.
You can enable this feature by going to -
settings-> labs –> Message Sneak Peek –> enable it –> save
Experiment and get the max out of your gmail :)
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Posted by XERO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
When I logged into Gmail last evening, I found it peculiarly interesting. It looked as it was texted out and all the vowels 
were missing from the home page of Gmail. Combine it with the TEXTp mode of YouTube, I guess all the vowels and text were used in the TEXTp mode (that's one of my most obnoxious guesses,but I guess that works :P ). As the official Gmail blog commented -
At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter 'a' for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters 'a,' 'e,' 'i,' 'o,' and 'u.' As a result, we're experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter 'y' is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)
Bullshit ! The link Gmail was redirecting in the URL (on close inspection) was of Gmail mobile,and redirected to normal Gmail Inbox. I tried changing user agents but none worked. Also the text on the homepage made sense, like it was SMS’d out of some Gmail freak.
Any guesses ? My most concrete one will be it was one of Google's April Fool Jokes :)
Posted by XERO . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Google competing with other social-networking-media and sharing services (Read Facebook..) has launched its new 
platform of sharing,named Buzz.Buzz is a social integration and messaging tool by Google, which is designed to integrate into Gmail and focuses on integrating photos, videos, and links as part of the "conversations" aspects of Gmail.Shared links and messages show up in the user's inbox and it allows users to choose to share content publicly with the world or privately to a small group of friends each time they post.Currently Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and Twitter are integrated. Buzz has seemingly copied several interface and interaction elements from websites like FriendFeed, such as the ability to Like someone's message.
Google Buzz feature will be rolled out to Gmail accounts in the coming weeks and it will be possible to access the service from the Gmail inbox. A mobile version of the site optimized for Android phones and iPhones has also been launched.
You can checkout Google buzz here
PS : Like this article ? You can always support me by buying me a coffee or You can always try some of the cool merchandize from PROHACK.
POSTED BY XERO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
A recent presentation confirmed the existence of the proprietary distributed technology that will automatically move 
and replicate the load between Google’s mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. Perhaps this was done to counter the issues of lagtime when Gmail was down..who knows? The platform is known as Spanner.
Google fellow Jeff Dean hinted about Spanner in the classic Google manner during a conference this summer and has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month. .Dean’s presentation calls it a “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.” This includes issues and constraints related to bandwidth, packet loss, power, resources, and “failure modes”.
Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (1013) directories and a quintillion (1018) bytes of storage. And all this would be spread across “100s to 1000s” of locations around the world.
Thats a hell lot of data and power granted to a single corporation which will be housing an exabyte of the world's data across thousands of custom-built data centers.
Lets see how this unfolds..
Google has made quite an impact by announcing the Chrome OS and its indeed sending waves though the tech world with some saying the OS signals the 
beginning of the end for the reign of Microsoft and there are others who say that Google will fall flat on its face and fail. Without more specifics only time will say for sure how big of a splash the OS will really make. Google pledges to release more information regarding the OS later this summer.
This leaves us with lots of questions and few answers. Until Google decides to share more, we'll try to make the best of what we've got in this FAQ.
What is Chrome OS?
Chrome OS is a Linux-based operating system developed by Google which promises to focus on Web applications while integrating a fast and simple interface, based off Google's existing Chrome browser.
Who will use it?
Chrome OS is initially targeted at the netbook market, but Google plans to offer the OS for computers all the way up to full-size desktops. Chrome supports both x86 and ARM architectures, which means that most computers and possibly some mobile devices will be able to run Chrome OS.
What will it look like?
As Google says Chrome OS will run a heavily modified version of Chrome browser so it may resemble chrome with a dock full of apps.
What will become of my computer's desktop?
Nothing..period. When it releases,dual boot it :P The Linux kernel is flexible, so anything's possible.
How will my computer stay secure?
Google claims that it will design Chrome OS's security infrastructure so users "don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates." It may or may not be possible since protection measures are itself built into Chrome OS itself.But still flaws are always there.
No computer is truly virus-proof. What will happen if mine gets one?
Good question. Its a common perception that Linux doesn't gets viruses but its only because its a low profile OS and its not targeted as much as Windows,but Chrome will make it an attractive target for virus makers. It's not known what security measures will be in place to save a compromised computer. Probably Linux based Anti-viruses will surface from AV giants like Norton and Kaspersky exclusive to Chrome.
Should I be worried about privacy when entrusting my OS to Google?
This issue has already raised eyebrows by some privacy advocates. Earlier, the company took heat for the way it collected data from Chrome users, and had to make concessions. Until Google can explain how an entire operating system won't be any more intrusive than its existing data-collection practices on the Web, privacy is a valid concern.
Will Chrome OS computers resemble Macs or Windows-based PCs at all?
As Google truly intends for Chrome OS to be a Web-centric OS and their official statement states that Google is "working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year." We could see a new line of computers built exclusively for Chrome OS.
Will we see applications exclusive to Chrome OS?
Nah..as the operating system stresses Web apps above all (think it like addons for Mozilla Firefox). Furthermore, Google itself says Web apps "will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."
Will we see applications that won't run on Chrome OS?
Without a doubt. If Chrome OS could perform every task, it'd be another Windows or OS X, and that's not what Google is trying to do. Don't expect to run Crysis, or Minesweeper.
Will "Favorite Application X" run on Chrome OS?
Depends upon the software dev if it supports the OS or if Google is interested in the program.It's conceivable (till date) that Microsoft won't support a Chrome OS-compatible Office suite, but Google could make things going by building out its Docs suite to match.
When will Chrome OS be released?
It will become available later this year, first for outside programmers to begin tinkering. It'll reach the netbook market in the second half of 2010, according to sources quoted in The New York Times.
I m keeping my fingers crossed..Period
POSTED BY XERO.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Google has been sprucing up its services (like it always does) and has added the support for viewing PowerPoint files 
(.ppt) and TIFF files (compressed image files) to its services,enabled in Google apps. A few months ago, it had added the support for viewing PDFs files in your browser,the same viewer now supports the TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too.Now you can view TIFF and PPT files online ,directly in your browser,without needing hefty software packages to start things up.
The default Google viewer earlier had "View as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while; but now they have integrated the conversion technology into the same viewer that they used for PDFs and TIFFs.
Powered up with a richer set of features,the new viewer enables you to zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and "print" the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, you no longer require to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser.
Stay tuned for more Google innovations..
Keep Reading..
POSTED BY XERO . SOURCE .ALL RIGHTS RESERVED .
Hi friends,I m one of those guys who always sign in as invisible in my IM’s because if I set my status to “Online” or 
available, at least 6 (unwanted) chat windows will open and pest me up. However recently one good friend of mine tracked my status (both on Gmail and Yahoo),slightly baffled I asked him how he did that,and here I m sharing with you how he tracked my status on both IM’s. You can use the given methods to find your friends who try to hide from us,the lesser mortals.
TRACK INVISIBLE USERS ON YAHOO
Yahoo Messenger is a bit cryptic when it comes to tracking users,so we can track their status by these 2 methods -
- Yahoo Invisibility Detection sites
- Using Yahoo’s URL Resources
I’ve found many sites which helps you to see which of your buddies are hiding online,some of these sites are:
YDetector.comThese site are very easy to use and self explain themselves. Just enter the ID you want to trace and get the status.
Invisible-Scanner.com
DetectInvisible.com
YahooScan.net
Invisible.ir
Yahoo URL Resources
Here are a bunch of URLs that can be used to detect invisible users, just replace “[username]” with the username you want to detect :
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=g&t=0remember,You have to replace the text in RED color in the given URL with the Yahoo ID you want to detect,
(Shows up a yellow smiley if the person is online and gray if the person is offline or invisible)
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=g&t=1
(Shows up a button with “Online Now” or “Not Online”)
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=g&t=2
(Shows an image with “I am Online send me a message” or “Not Online right now”)
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=a&t=0
(Shows a text with “[username] is ONLINE or NOT ONLINE”)
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=a&t=1
(Shows “00” if person is offline and “01” if he is online)
for eg - my YahooID is “iamrdx” ,the first URL is :
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=g&t=0After the replacement it would appear as :
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=iamrdx&m=g&t=0
TRACE INVISIBLE USERS ON GTALK
Tracing Gtalk users is rather easy,you only have to use the following method -
- Login to Gtalk using your Google id.
- Go to IM window of user you want to trace for invisible.
- You will see a drop-down list on right top side,click on it.
- Click on "go off the record".
- Now give any message.
- If the "xyz@gmail.com is offline and can't receive messages right now" message appears in red color it means your friend is really offline.
- If no message comes means your friend is online and invisible for all.
Good Luck :)
Posted by XERO . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Recently Google launched their Google SMS service and I have been using it to full potential as of now. I have 3 sms 
channels,one for this website which you can join here . Being a technogeek (sarcasm) I get loads of emails everyday,no its not like I m spammed by my fans (sarcasm again..) but still,sometimes i wish that I can check my mails as soon as they come,anywhere,anytime. Of course I use GPRS/EDGE to surf net on my handset,but that costs me money which I don't have. SO I got the brilliant idea of using Google sms service in order to receive email alerts on my cell phone for free. Interested ? Read on then..
Here is How to do that -
Google tends to put everything as a feed,secure and unsecure. Your emails are also published as Atom feeds by google by the syntax of -
first formulate your URL as a feed by replacing your username and password with the above given one.
Then go to feed burner,create an account (if you don't have one),log into it and enter this feed address which you created and burn a new feed.
It will ask for Feed name and Feed Title,and then click next and burn a feed right now by clicking next and next one more time.
Now you will be at your feed management menu,click on Publicize and then at bottom corner,click on NOINDEX option (since you don't want your email and pass to be discovered y every other guy on this planet) and uncheck all options and click Activate.
Congrats,you have created a feed channel for your email. Copy your Feedburner Feed address which you created above.
Now go to Google SMS channels,and create a new account there,enter your cell phone number ,go through usual mombo-jumbo (you know the drill) and make a new sms channel.
and enter information about your SMS channel. Enter Feed URL into RSS/ATOM feed option (the feed burner URL you copied earlier) and choose invitation only and publishing by Only me.
Click on create channel and Voila,your are done. You will now get Email alerts of your Gmail account on your mobile.
Keep Learning.
POSTED BY XERO.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
