Not Being Evil?

More on Google; for the first time it is going into direct competition with Microsoft, launching its own range of office software, going so far as to host it itself. And the company, in contrast to AOL, as mentioned yesterday, has been holding onto search information for its MySpace equivalent, Orkut (which is the market leader only in Brazil) resisting pressure from the Brazilian government, which says the website is being used by child pornography rings.

Don't Be Evil

An interesting, and alarming, piece in today's Guardian concerning Google's use of search information. Somebody at AOL, which uses Google as its search engine, thought it would be a good idea to gather detailed search information and post it on an online database. It was taken down within a week and the person responsible sacked (just like in Monty Python). The worrying thing is that people, both on the side of the watching and that of the watched, do not seem to see the problem with such expansive access to information. Google likes to set itself up as a benign, philanthropic counter-culture company, but it is also the fastest growing company in history, and is likely to overtake Microsoft within the next ten years. There is not any great reason to trust Larry Page and Sergei Brin any more than any other, less sophisticated or culturally inclined capitalist. Page and Brin have an ambition to catalogue and map every form of information and knowledge, hence the prolific cross-pollination of information contained in their services. Of course the real secret of Google's success lies in their selling small ads, and I find it disturbing that, when I use Gmail, the ads in the sidebar are all specifically linked to keywords in my mail text. Maybe it might be time for government intervention to rein the company in before they get too strong.

Not that the present US government is terribly worried about people's right to privacy, what with its fondness for illegal phone-tapping. I have been wondering for quite some time about those ubiquitous ads for the Green Card lottery that flash every time I use a Yahoo account. They are genuine US government placements as far as I know, and a journalist friend of mine claims that they are there for the purpose of information gathering (presumably, to 'help fight against terrorism'). It sounds a bit paranoid but they have started to appear in Metro cars here in Paris and one poster claimed, quite improbably, that 70% of successful applicants have been either born in France or have lived there. There is a story to be written on this.

The Heat Is On

Further to my post yesterday on my iBook's underperformance, it appears that Apple are recalling 1.8 million laptop batteries issued between 2003 and 2006, which includes mine, due to over-heating. Not that I have ever noticed my computer overheating. What should I do? Is it connected to my problem?

Computer Addiction

I have been trying to curtail my time spent online of late as it is generally the least productive environment for getting anything done and I have the annoying habit of whiling away the hours exploring meaningless avenues and adding to my already bulging store of useless knowledge. But even offline computers can be consuming companions. My current obsession is trying to improve the performability of my iBook; it's a G4 so it has still got a good bit of whoomph. I have tried regular defragging, ridding applications of superfluous languages to free up space, moving to the trash all those unused widgets that I thought would be a great idea to download a year ago, sacrificing the Mac interface's cool animations such as the magnifiable dock and the genie effect so as to speed things up. And still I see that spinning beach-ball where the cursor should be.

But secretly I like spending all this time on the damn thing as it prevents me from doing other stuff and allows me to put things off. Anybody who uses a computer regularly will know exactly what I'm talking about. Apologies to the lay men and women for a boring computer post but I have little else to write about today. I may go and see The Wind That Shakes The Barley later on; it just got released over here. As they said in that awful Guinness ad of a couple of years back, now we'll have something to talk about.

This Will Get You Sacked

I've been using the open-source Firefox browser since soon after its appearance in late 2003. In those days I was still labouring away with the PC albatross around my neck so Firefox was an indispensable replacement for the porous, universally decrypted defences of Internet Explorer.

Though Firefox, in recent versions, has had some issues, such as slowness and a tendency to freeze, not to mention one or two security problems, the latest update has steadied things again. There are other good browsers available free of charge, such as Opera and Safari for Mac, but there is nothing as comprehensive, nor as visually attractive as Firefox. Anyone who persists with Internet Explorer, particularly PC users, is asking for trouble. 83% of computer users still do.

The plug-ins are the big bonus on Firefox, particularly its search options that integrate various search engines (and reference sites such as Wikipedia and IMDB) in the toolbar, and another favourite is the control bar for iTunes. Possibly the greatest and simplest innovation is now available as a plug-in, something that surprisingly took so long to be thought of. It is called Stumble-Upon, a plug-in with its own toolbar, which allows you to summon random web pages, according to criteria you enter when you configure your account. All it does is introduce you to page after page of sometimes obscure, sometimes famous, sometimes amazing, sometimes dull stuff. And it gives you the option too of rating the pages, thereby banishing them forever if they are not to your liking. It's great fun, and of course, a terrible distraction. You'll never work again. As for cache history, cookies and other things, there is a concern there but I assume that the good Open Source people at MozillaDev are not doing anything remiss with one's information.

The Next Last Broadcast

I have only recently discovered Last.fm, and having tried numerous other music resources of a similar type, such as Pandora and radioblogclub.com, I will say that this is the best so far. Easy to install and use, it plays you streams according to the criteria that you have entered at log-in. Unlike Pandora, which feeds off a central database and often throws the worst types of approximations of your taste at you, Last.fm is peer-supported, so you can rely upon the past choices and gradings of like-minded people to guide you serindipitously towards nuggets that you might otherwise never hear of. And even stuff that you have known well for many years sounds different when bracketed by unknown bands from North Dakota. Be careful to refine your search criteria though; I picked 'folk' and folk only and the first two tracks thrown at me were Ben Harper and Alanis Morrisette. Computers are only 0's and 1's after all.