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And I’ll take any victory whenever and wherever I can: Android has more U.S. Web traffic than the iPhone, according to AdMob.

Item the Firsteth: The WSJ reports that on Monday privacy ministers from 10 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK — sent Google a letter smacking the search giant around for its “disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws.” The letter cited the ill-advised launch of Google Buzz, as well as issues with Google Street View. The letter calls on Google to “incorporate fundamental privacy principles directly into the design of new online services” by:

• Collecting and processing only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service
• Providing clear and unambiguous information about how personal information will be used to allow users to provide informed consent
• Creating privacy-protective default settings
• Ensuring that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use
• Ensuring that all personal data is adequately protected
• Giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honoring their requests in a timely way

(This is not the first time that European countries have clashed with Google over privacy issues. You may remember that back in September 2008 Google announced that it would anonymize search data after 9 months because of EU prodding.)

Anyway, these principles look good on paper, but I can’t see how they’d protect you if the Google Mapsmobile comes down your street and photographs you in your skivvies. And let’s hope that whatever privacy controls Google is forced to implement work a lot better than Facebook’s.

If you have a sub, here are links to the WSJ article and a PDF of the letter.

Item the Secondeth: While we’re talkin’ Google, today the search giant released a government requests tracking tool revealing that Uncle Sam made 3,580 data requests during the last 6 months of 2009. Only Brazil tops us. (Link via Wired.)

Item the Thirdth: Amazon.com has sued the North Carolina Department of Revenue to block its demand to turn over information on about 50 million transactions from 2003-2010. Amazon has no physical presence in NC, so they don’t have to charge the 5.75% state tax. However, NC has a “use tax” that they want to enforce, hence the desire to get full customer data on NC Amazon customers.

Can someone please parse the logic of this quote for me?

“A spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Revenue said she would have to review the lawsuit before answering why the tax agency needed Amazon customer information. ‘Any comment at this time would be premature,’ Beth Stevenson said in an e-mail message.”

I mean, you knew why you wanted the data in the first place, right? Helloooooo?

Security-wise, people are the weakest link, viz:

ITEM 1: John Markoff reports that January’s Chinese Google hack began with one person who clicked when he/she oughtn’t:

“The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. By clicking on a link and connecting to a ‘poisoned’ Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.”

That software, called Gaia, only controls signons to a range of Google services from Gmail to Docs.

ITEM 2: Back in March, Apple software engineer Gray Powell lost a prototype of the next-gen iPhone in a bar not too far from the Apple campus. He was field-testing the device, which was camouflaged to look like your basic, garden-variety iPhone. The phone eventually wound up in the hands of Gizmodo’s Jason Chen — for a mere $5,000 — who publicly dissected it, according to the NY Times, “as if it were an alien from another planet”. Apple politely but firmly asked for it back.

From what I have read about Apple’s security-obsessed culture, right now it sucks to be Gray Powell.

UPDATE, April 27: The authorities have gotten involved.

The Library of Congress announced — actually, they Tweeted — on Wednesday that they will soon archive every public Tweet since March 2006. I’m not sure Jefferson, who donated his collection of books to replace the library that the friggin Brits burned, would approve.

Then again, maybe he would. And maybe I should stop being an info snob. Twitter’s not all that different than Usenet, which Google archives. Somebody’s gotta do it. And, as with Usenet, there are some interesting threads hidden in that ocean of data.

Google is finally talking about one of the real interesting questions wrt Google Chrome OS: how the heck are you gonna print stuff with a Web-based operating system? More specifically, when you click “print”, will your resume pop up on someone’s printer in Bangalore instead?

Not to worry — Google has created Google Cloud Print, which will be “responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.”

It seems so simple, right?

Let’s be real, shall we? I truly believe that my printer was sent from Hell to make me miserable. It is worse than a pampered lapdog. If it runs out of paper during a print job, you’d think that it would simply alert me and wait for me to load more paper before continuing. But nooooooo. I have to stop the job, restart the spooler software, then specify the pages that still need to be printed. If it jams, it’s Armageddon time: I have to kill the print job, shut down the printer — sometimes I have to actually unplug it — then restart and resend the print job. And it won’t print black-and-white if it runs out of, say, cyan. So what makes Google think that they’re gonna do any better with the cloud if I can’t get the printer to work properly when it’s 6 inches away from my iMac?

Link via TechCrunch.

They’re falling like dominoes at the annual Pwn2own event this year in Vancouver. Some really smart scary guys have managed to hijack Windows 7 PCs via Firefox and IE8 (snort) and a MacBook using Safari. Two of ‘em even hacked an iPhone and downloaded its database of SMS messages. (Yoikes!)

Google Chrome is the last browser standing. It’s not perfect, but has proved once again much harder to exploit. Having said that, I do agree with PC World’s article, Security Lessons Learned from Pwn2Own Contest:

“… the browser is the new Achilles heel of security regardless of the hardware or software platform.”

UPDATE, March 26: Nobody even tried to hack Chrome on day 2 of Pwn2own.

Actually that’s not quite right — google.cn now redirects to www.google.com.hk, the uncensored version of Google based in Hong Kong:

“We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced — it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.”

For those of you who are indeed waiting for that other shoe to drop, Google has created a China service availability dashboard.

It was Weekend Update time a couple of days early yesterday as YouTube-Google and Viacom fired point-counterpoint blog posts at each other in their ongoing (never-ending?) copyright infringement suit.

Viacom opened with a pithy statement about the facts of the case:

“YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement … Google bought YouTube because it was a haven of infringement … The law is clear that Google and YouTube are liable for their infringement. The Supreme Court unanimously held in Grokster that a service that intends infringement is liable for that infringement. No case has ever suggested that the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] immunizes rampant intentional infringement of the sort Google and YouTube have engaged in.”

(Could you say “infringement” one more time, please, in case somebody out there didn’t get it?)

YouTube’s counterpoint can be boiled down thusly:

“With some minor exceptions, all videos are automatically copyrighted from the moment they are created, regardless of who creates them … The issue in this lawsuit is not whether a video is copyrighted, but whether it’s authorized to be on the site. The DMCA (and common sense) recognizes that content owners, not service providers like YouTube, are in the best position to know whether a specific video is authorized to be on an Internet hosting service. Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices. For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately ‘roughed up’ the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom … Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself. Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube — and every Web platform — to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.”

(Both Viacom and YouTube have figured out that in the legal biz, if the other side does something more than once, you call it “countless”.)

Now over to Viacom for the last word:

“The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case.”

Here’s the good news: the Droid took off faster than the iPhone. What I mean to say is that it took the iPhone 74 days after it hit the streets in June 2007 to reach 1 million units sold. Droid sales over the first 74 days of its life were 1.05 million units. Congrats!

Now about the other thing. Um, the Nexus One appears to be a bust — only 135,000 sold in the first 74 days.

Link via Flurry.

Web Domains

Today’s the 25th anniversary of the first .com registration. And no, the registrant wasn’t IBM (March 19, 1986), Apple (February 19, 1987) or even Microsoft (May 2, 1991). It was Boston-area AI firm Symbolics.

According to Wired, only 5 domains were registered in 1985. Once the Web was invented, domain registrations skyrocketed. And a mere 22 years later icanhascheezburger.com was born.

Fandango Mobile Tickets

Airlines have been testing cellphone-based paperless tickets for a couple of years now. Now Fandango’s testing mobile movie tickets in 8 U.S. markets — all of ‘em *not* Philly, btw. (What’s so special about Houston? They were the first city in which mobile airline boarding passes were tested. Now they’re in the first Fandango test group. Sheesh.)

Google vs. Apple

The NY Times gives us a good overview of the deteriorating relationship between Apple and Google. The following quote …

“It’s World War III. Amazing animosity is motivating two of the most powerful people in the industry. This is emotional. This is the biggest ego battle in history. It’s incendiary.”

… pretty much sums up the tone of the piece. (So does the URL for the story: 14brawl.html.) Anyway, it’s all about the mobile market.

Google vs. China

Not content with merely taking on a company that qualifies as a small country, the Big G has also decided to take on #3 on the world list. I refer to China. After calling them out on spying charges back in January, Google is real close to deciding to pull the plug on Google.cn. That means Chinese users who manage to circumvent the Great Firewall will get unfiltered content. And that makes the Chinese authorities real twitchy.