Dan's New Blog

After a 3-month hiatus, Google has resurrected google.cn. It only offers music search and text translation, but does sport a big honking link to Google Hong Kong. Six of one, half a dozen of the other as far as I’m concerned, but TechCrunch says Google “flinched“.

The Supreme Court upheld the Fed Circuit in denying patent protection for the Bilski energy hedging business method, but they didn’t, as many people hoped, rule on business method patents as a whole. The NY Times says they stuck to the “middle ground“. (Amazon can finally exhale on this one.)

Dell sold almost 12 million computers from 2003-2005 that they knew were junk. The problem was bad capacitors on the motherboard. The Times says this epitomizes the “decline of one of America’s most celebrated and admired companies“.

Yesterday was Quit Facebook Day, and there are, as I write this, 34,275 brave souls who have declared their intention to live without status updates and wall posts. God bless ‘em. Depending on whoever you believe, they account for anywhere from .007% to .009% of all registered FB users. Certainly not a groundswell, despite all the hoohah in the press. (And I guess I have to include myself in that category.)

In response to the anti-Facebook lynch mob, they’re making privacy controls simpler. (Again.) The changes, in a nutshell, are:

• “One simple control to set who can see the content you post.”

• Friends and pages you’re a fan of are no longer required to be public

• Easy opt-out of applications and/or personalization

All this will roll out over the next few weeks. Here’s the blog post with the announcement. A live-blog with more info is here.

The NY Times is reporting that the “data protection supervisor for the city-state of Hamburg” — impressive job title! — has given Google a week to turn over the hard drive containing 600GB of data from unsecured wifi networks that the Google Street View cars inadvertently collected as they bopped around the city.

You may remember last month Google horrified the German federal commissioner for data protection when they admitted to collecting data from unsecured wifi networks. Last Friday they finally explained what happened:

“… we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products. However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks. So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

With regard to that unwanted data, Google said that they are “currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.” Data captured in Ireland has already been destroyed.

But Johannes Caspar of Hamburg isn’t going to be so accomodating:

“Mr. Caspar, who is leading the government’s discussions with Google, said during an interview that ‘Up until now, all we have to go on at this point is what Google has told us that they have collected. But until we can inspect one of the hard drives ourselves, we will not know to what extent what kinds of data have actually been stored.’”

I’m not a big fan of Jason Calacanis. But he’s written an interesting piece on how he believes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whom he calls “an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur” has overplayed his hand:

“Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially ‘out,’ as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are — simply put — not trustworthy.”

In my house, I’m very wary of FB. My wife, even more so. She’s opted out entirely. (She’d rather obsess about her own blog instead. Ask her how many people from Croatia visited it last week. Go ahead. Seriously.) But my 2 kids are addicted. They don’t care about trustworthiness.

Calacanis provides us with handy lists of (a) the people Zuckerberg has back-stabbed over the past 5 years in his march to world domination, and (b) a dozen articles from last week about how Facebook is the devil. (Or the antichrist. Whatever.) Anyway my favorite quote is this:

“The more we feed the monster that is Facebook, the more we lose.”

Now I’ve heard the same thing said about Google. But it never rang true for Google like it does for Facebook. And as I keep saying to anyone who’ll listen:

“I know Google collects just as much personal data from me — maybe more. At least with Google it’s a quid pro quo. They give me something I value — information — in return for my data. Facebook gives me nothing I care about — hey, if I want to know that you just came in from walking the dog, I’ll call you — in return for personal data that they’re soooo hot to monetize.”

Calacanis mentions that gdgt’s “Peter Rojas and [Google's] Matt Cutts have turned off their Facebook pages, and more intelligent people everywhere are talking about doing so.” I’m not Matt Cutts. Nor am I “more intelligent” — whatever that means. But I’m thinking I’m gonna go that route as well.

We’ll see.

From Wired:

NY Times reporter Nick Bilton: How does [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] feel about privacy?
Unnamed Facebook employee: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.

I hope this quote is apocryphal.

But it rings so true …

VentureBeat reports that Blippy, the social networking site that lets you compare your credit card purchases with other, equally self-absorbed users, inadvertently revealed some credit card numbers via a Google search. One hundred and twenty-seven, to be exact.

Blippy says in response that “it’s a lot less bad than it looks” — only 4 numbers were actually outed — and blames it on a Google cache issue. I tried the query just now; Google blocked it with the following response:

“We’re sorry… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

To reiterate: “Why, oh why?“

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?

The UK’s infamous Digital Economy Bill — otherwise known as DEBill passed the House of Commons last night and appears to be on track for approval in the House of Lords. The bill, which was given the hurry-up treatment so that it would pass ahead of the May 6 general election in the UK, is supposed to combat media pirates. The plan is that content providers will use the nation’s ISPs to police BitTorrenters by “speed blocks, bandwidth shaping, account suspension or other limits.”

(Hmmm … I’ve read something about ISPs throttling-back their customers recently, haven’t I? Oh, yeah.)

Apparently the UK took a page out of Germany’s book and passed an unpopular, unwanted law:

“Heavily lobbied by digital liberties activists, some MPs admit they don’t understand the proposal and many suspect the measures — rather than reduce piracy — will instead punish downloaders’ parents or public WiFi operators, while abusers find workarounds.”

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow provides us with an example of how much the MPs really don’t understand about all those pipes and wires and blinky lights:

“Here’s Mark Todd, Labour MP for South Derbyshire, explaining why you should have your Internet connection cut off without even a written notice: ‘Is my Hon. Friend sure that a postal delivery will suffice? Many people may have chosen to form a contract with an ISP at some stage before moving, and may not have seen any particular reason to notify the ISP of a change of address.’ Yes, the last time I moved, I simply had the movers run a private fiber loop from my old premises to the new place. It took most of the day and they had to dig up nearly all of central London, but it was lots easier, ultimately, than notifying my ISP of my change of address.”

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.