I just read this rant on Google by Whil, it's a bit true but something itches me.

What happened is that Whil surfed the Internet while not logged into his Gaccount and realised that normal people cannot "like" or vote on videos posted to Youtube without upgrading their accounts to G+. What an outrage ! He seemed really outraged.

Whil, I have news for you, but you should sit down before reading this: Some people don't even have any kind of Google account to begin with, they can see the thumbs up and down icons, but they can't action them... Imagine all the upvotes you are potentially losing on your show ! Because from what I got, it's mostly about how your show might lose ratings because your core audience are tech-savvy and may not want to "upgrade".. right ?

Then the interesting part, Whil's website, powered by Typekitpad or whatever, doesn't allow regular humans to post comments without signing up via Facebook or Twitter or at least an OpenID. Some brave person made a comment though: On a slightly related note, Typepad forced me to register or to use my Facebook login if I wanted to "Favorite" this post. Whil's reply is: If I don't require some kind of sign up for blog comments, I am overrun by spammers and anonymous asshat trolls. That is probably why Google is now forcing people to upgrade to G+ accounts, because of "asshat trolls". The reality is that Whil, just like Google are both part of the same problem, they both require users to go sign up somewhere in order to take part of the the interaction they offer.

Yesterday (or still today in certain time zones) was Data Privacy Day.. I was made aware of this by a doodle on DuckDuckGo.

Of course I opened a new tab and rushed to see what the search engine that I used to use before they became evil had drawn for the event... And well, funny story, Google has totally avoided the subject and instead put up a doodle celebrating the 125th birthday of the biggest recorded snowflake.. p.s. please install Chrome.. Like WTF right ?

As you may know, if you have a Gaccount (Google account), Google has changed their terms of service so that now everything "G" is unified, and what you do in Youtube directly impacts the adverts in your emails, and things you search for.. . etc etc.. And all this with the magic wandish words like "simple", "easy" and "yada yada".

So why has Google omitted Data Privacy Day ? Maybe because data privacy is irrelevant in a system where your personal data lives across over 60 different services.. .. Perhaps I am wrong and it is just an innocent obsession with snowflakes..

BTW, this does not affect you if you do not have any account with Google, so for those rare people out there, bravo. : ]

The short version is: "Take the time to read the blog post from Mocality about how Google does evil.

In even shorter, a company based in Kenya called Mocality has created a Kenya based business directory, the entries are provided by locals who would call in and then be financially rewarded by Mocality for their efforts.

A few months ago Mocality noticed some strange web traffic which after investigation turns out to be coming from Google. The juicy part is that Google employees was scraping the website to get business numbers and then cold call these companies to sell them services. Even worse, they claimed to be working with Mocality !

You should read the Mocality's blog post as it explains in detail what, how, etc, and it's quite interesting.

One more thing about those who relentlessly defend Google with arguments such as "it was a separate team" and such (and we are not talking about a rogue employee here, this was coordinated work), please note that if Google is not responsible and it is only the fault of the groups of teams involved, should it also be the other way around when it comes to innovations ?

I am guessing that it is Google that introduced the idea of changing their site's presentation according to various events (I can be wrong of course). Today, Father's Day (if it weren't for search engines I wouldn't know this kind of thing) is no exception and I just noticed something funny.

It seems like DuckDuckGo and Google have the same idea of a modern day father, it is someone who wears a tie, preferably brown/yellow. They are both retro 60'sish as well. Mad Men, is that you ?

Meanwhile, at Bing, things are very different. For Microsoft's search engine the paternal image is represented by...... ... a penguin !

Lately I've been finding it quite difficult to actually get good results from most search engines, hence after a while I'd often end up back on "do some evil" Google search engine page. After experimenting with other search engines like Ixquick (very good on privacy) and Clusty (they changed their name :/ but I like the idea of clustering results) I was still hungry. And then I found DuckDuckGo, very nice and clean interface, works with https (as the link shows) and gives results in https when possible. It has too many features for me to write about, go and look around in the options and such.

Stupid anti spam services, that is the future of the Internet, everyone delegating their email filter (and comment filtering as well) to third parties. Well guess what is happing people, the filtering systems are lazy and now it's simple: If your domain does not generate enough traffic or is not "important" enough then your emails just get junked. Done. You can be as careful as you want, as strict as you can possibly be it does not matter. After 8 years of operating my mail server, not 1 spam has been sent and yet my emails get tagged and junked half the time while at the same time I receive so much spam from actual verified hotmail accounts (that have been hacked of course) as well as from other domains.

What can you do ? For starters you can contact your email provider, tell them you would like to know how their filters work, on what basis does a domain become a suspected spam source ? Ask if you can change the level of filtering and such (I offer this to my users, they chose if they filter and to what extent). Oh but wait, because it's all free (and you are too cheap to consider email services worth any of your money) I don't think you have ANY say in that. So maybe you could get a real email service, you know the thing that you pay for and that owes you some kind of service and such things. I only say this because I have sent many emails to hotmail and apart from the auto-replies I have received nothing. The situation has changed, back in the olden days I'd get the AOL people on the phone and we'd solve things (like adding my static home IP to their whitelist), (never thought I'd say anything good about AOL).

So there are now 2 solutions for me, 1. give up and get a gyahoomail account, or 2. or start rejecting emails from servers/domains who don't have any respect for proper SMTPing. This is the price of a privatised Internet.

So Google and Verizon want to be business buddies, I do not understand how anyone can think this is good.. . detailed official crap here.

In short this all about saying that net neutrality isn't necessary on wireless (mobile) networks. This is very smart on their behalf because so many humans believe that Google will do no evil however as we may already know, the future Internet may have most of it's traffic come from mobile networks. Preparing the terrain while claiming that mobile networking is still beta might actually get them to finish killing off the Internet we love. Oh, and all this while confusing the non-Internet-savy by stating how much neutrality and accessibility to The Network is important (as long as it's by wire (*DSL/Fiber/cable/RTC).. .

If you are reading this there are chances you already know how to use the Interweb, when you are given an address (url, webiste link, etc) you know how to get there the proper way. However, so many people, and I mean many many many just get it completely wrong. So I thought maybe an image could help explain.

As you can see, when you have the actual address for a site you don't need to use a search engine to find it, you already have it, you may enter it in the "address bar", that is the bar on top circled in green. That is one of it's main uses, the other being that it indicates where you currently are. Would you lookup in the phone book a number you already have ? So why do that with an URL ?

Icky on the inside ?

I noticed chrome is available for Debian/GNU Linux among others.. They have also been putting up ads around town that are impossible to miss. Some people think this is good, probably because Google is already their start page for many people, some even type the URL of the page they want to see on Google !

Some have told me to stop seeing evil everywhere and just bend over and. ... well, while I do think that the Google search engine is unquestionably good I don't think that I want to see one entity have so much control over the Internet, because the Internet belongs to everyone.. .well, things are changing.

I went through the Google Chrome Terms of Service and tried to understand a few things...

Okay, I will do this. I've been signing to much crap without reading it in my life, I really like GPL software just for the fact that I don't have to reread it all over again each time I install a program.

I think this is somewhat "normal", however this a word out to those who think it's outrageous to spend 5 dollars a month for your own domain and web space : It's maybe time you found a local "organic/fair trade/green/wtf" email provider, one you can even get your own domain name with and all, it's worth the money, you'd have no ads (unless it's a ripoff) and some kind of guarantees. This would also be a step to insuring a stronger independence of the internet...

I'm not going there in this post, however it's got some tasty pickles..

This is the one that scared me the most, basically, the Internet is filtered out by Google's search engine results (only because "everybody" depends on it). Now that so many people are going to get the Google browser the Internet will slowly be shaped (I almost wrote sheeped) into the Googlenet. Of course in this statement Google only reserves the right to do it, but that is a guarantee that they have the intention of doing so... (don't be fooled by the "sexual content" thing being in the same article).

P.S. If you accept the terms today, hahaha lol, because you'll have to manually check every time you use the service to see if their have been updates. You can probably sign up to a newsletter somewhere, no indication of that though, so this abusive article (used by so many other companies) should be abolished ASAP.. I'm not even sure this is really legal..

Imagine your computer's operating system updater not asking you if you want to update, not providing you a way to NOT check automatically... . Even when I used to use Windows it wasn't like that (not sure how it is today).

This turns your browser into an Iphone, meaning you can't even install an extension that they don't want.. .enough said here.

So, do you still want to install this software ?