Techdirt. Stories filed under "google"

A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens.

Dennis Yang — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:56:00 PST

Needless to say, there's a pretty big protest going on right now against SOPA, with many sites either shuttering fully or making obvious changes in support of the protests. Leading the charge are Wikipedia, Reddit and Google. Sites like SOPA STRIKE and SOPA Blackout disseminated code to allow sites to easily join the blackout, but many sites have actually decided to take the time to tailor their protests for their own sites, which is amazing to see. It is this creative energy that drives the Internet and makes it what it is (for better or worse), and it is this very energy that legislation like SOPA and PIPA threaten to extinguish.

I've created a gallery of SOPA blackout screencaps, but here are some of my favorite takes on the protest today:

Reddit's blackout is probably the most complete; all URLs, including deep links, on Reddit lead to the blackout page, which is very impressive for such a largely trafficked site. For Redditor's going through Reddit-withdrawal today, they feature a handy countdown timer on their blackout page.

Wikipedia's blackout encompasses all of the English site, and as evidenced by @herpderpedia (who is collecting various angry Tweets about the Wikipedia blackout), it is certainly causing some frustration (and hopefully some awareness). That said, Wikipedia's blackout is very, very, very easy to thwart (just hit the ESC key before the page fully loads), so there's an easy escape valve for those that are in dire need of its content. In that same vein, Craigslist's full blackout also has a release valve that gracefully loads after a few seconds.

Google promised that it would do "something," and followed suit with a Google Doodle, essentially blacking out its logo in protest. Several sites followed suit, including Hacker News, 4chan's /b/ (link to a SFW screenshot), and TwitPic.

Taking the "censor-style" protest to the next level are Wired's blackout and Daily Kos' blackout. Wired's coders decided to mark up the page itself with black censor boxes, so that the page looks like it's been through the hands of some very aggressive government censors. Very clever from the design-minded folks over at Wired.

Elegant as always, xkcd's blackout offers the simple message, "[don't censor the web]".

And, the most amusing blackout of the day comes from McSweeney's (of course), who has handily replaced its site today with "A DAY’S WORTH OF FACTS TO GET YOU THROUGH WIKIPEDIA’S 24-HOUR BLACKOUT."

Check out the full gallery here, and let me know if there are any awesome blackout implementations that I've missed.

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Google's Next Victim? British Intelligence Services

Tim Cushing — Wed, 7 Dec 2011 05:15:11 PST

Google is at it again. Not content to singlehandedly destroy the motion picture, music, news and road map industries, Google's all-seeing eye, combined with its search engine, is now threatening the livelihoods of British intelligence agents, who will now be expected to tell their superiors "something they don't already know."

According to Sir David Pepper, former director of the UK Goverment Communications Headquarter, the "Google effect" of having so much information available online has "substantially raised the threshold for producing intelligence for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ."

"Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it," said Sir David, who was giving the annual Mountbatten Memorial Lecture at the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

"Many of the sort of things for which [officials] once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online," he said.

"Thanks to Google Maps and Streeview anyone can today see photographic detail of far away countries which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.

"Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all."

Now, not only is it going to be tougher for spies to outspy Google, but results will now be expected to compete with Google's famous fractions of a second.

Sir David Pepper also said "the Google effect" meant that officials who use secret intelligence were demanding it quicker than ever before.

"If the intelligence readers are used to getting information online very fast they're going to expect the intelligence agencies to be able to do much the same thing," he said.

It's not all bad news, however. The "Google effect" can also be used for good, rather than just as a tool to put industries out of business.

But online information was offering opportunities as well as challenges to those in the espionage trade, Sir David said. "You can find out a lot about potential spies without ever meeting them, simply by looking at their online footprints,"* he said.

*(Henceforth referred to as the "Facebook effect.")

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Judges Allowed To Use Google To 'Confirm Intuition' In Cases

Mike Masnick — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:56:00 PDT

One of the more controversial posts we've had recently concerned the discussion about whether or not jurors should be allowed to use the internet to do research related to a case they are hearing. It seems like most folks here were very much against it, though I think it's something worth exploring in more detail. But, let's take this question a few steps across the courtroom. What about judges? In a recent appeals court ruling, it was found that it's okay for a judge to use Google to "confirm his intuition."

The case involved a bank robber, and a question over whether or not he violated the terms of his release by (you guessed it) robbing another bank. There was a question over what the robber wore that resulted in the Googling:

Chin reviewed several pieces of evidence, including a bank surveillance video showing a robber who wore a yellow rain hat. A yellow rain hat was found in the garage of [Anthony] Bari's landlord.

Noting similarities between the hats, Chin at a hearing said he resorted to Google Inc's search engine for help. "We did a Google search," and "one can Google yellow rain hats and find lots of different yellow rain hats," he said.

While that single point seems to favor the suspect, in providing some bit of reasonable doubt that the yellow rain hat alone proves who it was, the judge, Denny Chin, felt that there was enough overall evidence, and sentenced the guy to three years in jail. However, because of that Google search, Bari appealed, saying this violated federal rules of evidence. However, the appeals court had no problem with it:

In its decision, the appeals court said most federal evidence rules "do not apply with their full force" in proceedings to revoke supervised releases.

Using this "relaxed" standard, it endorsed Chin's effort to confirm his "common sense supposition" that more than one yellow rain hat is available for sale.

But it went further, saying improved broadband speeds and Internet search engines cut the cost of confirming intuitions.

The court said that 20 years ago. "a trial judge may have needed to travel to a local department store to survey the rain hats on offer.
"Today, however, a judge need only take a few moments to confirm his intuition by conducting a basic Internet search," it added. "As the cost of confirming one's intuition decreases, we would expect to see more judges doing just that."

I'm curious to see if the same people, who were horrified at my suggestion that Google searches for juries might not be such a horrible thing, feel the same way in the case of a judge. Because one of the key points raised in the discussion here was that "rules of evidence" were concrete and could never be messed with -- and even suggesting that the concept might be due for an update was pure blasphemy. Yet, here it seems that an appeals court recognizes that modern technology may change how rules of evidence can work.

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Google To Newspapers: Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

Marcus Carab — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:11:00 PDT

The Google Public Policy Blog recently posted a summary of a speech by Chief Economist Hal Varian on newspaper economics. Alongside the we-are-not-your-enemy message that Google is hoping newspapers will someday listen to, it contains useful insights on the challenge of succeeding as an established print publication in the digital world. Varian suggests a few potential courses of action, but the real value of the piece is that it highlights the obstacles in a way that can be tackled by experienced insiders—especially marketers and salespeople, which newspapers employ in abundance but often fail to set free on experimental strategies.

One of the first things Varian establishes is the volume and value of online news readers, and then he looks at the difficulties of turning that value into revenue. The numbers may be discouraging for newspapers, but they could also become the basis of several important short- and long-term goals in an online strategy:

"Visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers' ad revenue comes from their internet editions, according to the most recent Newspaper Association of America data.

There's a reason for the relatively short time readers spend on online news: a disproportionate amount of online news reading occurs during working hours. The good news is that newspapers can now reach readers at work, which was difficult prior to the internet. The bad news is that readers don't have a lot of time to devote to news when they are supposed to be working. Online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity."

Varian talks about the need to increase leisure involvement with online news, and in the full speech, he lists ways this might be done: leveraging new technologies like smartphones and tablets, developing more engaging formats for journalism (like Google Living Stories, which recently went open source), and creating multimedia experiences.

These are all important ideas, but to some extent, they miss an opportunity by focusing on ways to get people reading at home instead of work: namely, don't at-work readers have value too?

For a long time, newspapers have used "business purchasing influence" as a prominent reader statistic in media kits. But we now live in a world where business purchasing influence is a much more distributed thing, hardly limited to managers and IT folk: employees at every level in every field make use of online services to expedite their work. Web services subvert the top-down model of corporate IT, allowing workers to seek out the tools that work best for them. These services usually have freemium models, with prices that suit small departmental budgets, and since there's no software installation there's no need to involve IT staff.

Think web lockers (plenty of companies still have laughably low email attachment limits). Think Flash-based presentation tools (graphics departments hate PowerPoint). These are bottom-up business services: a few employees get free accounts, a few more get on board, and before you know it a whole department is more than happy to pay a monthly fee for such a useful tool. These are the companies that want to reach people at work, during those 70 seconds they spend reading a news story while wondering how to transfer a 50-megabyte PDF.

There are some other excellent parts of Varian's post, including a look at the goldmine vertical markets which have traditionally sustained newspapers: automotive, travel, home & garden and the like (he oddly fails to mention real estate, which is a biggie). These are the same verticals that sustain Google's search advertising—the problem is that the end market is now specialty sites, not news publications. Though Varian doesn't discuss the possibilities, this is an area where newspapers still have a chance: they should be leveraging their community respect while partnering with specialty purchase sites through advertising and affiliate programs, ensuring that they continue to be an important link in the chain. TechCrunch recently reported on a Forrester Research study that estimates that web-influenced offline sales in the U.S. (purchases where the consumer made their decision online then went to a retail store) are worth nearly a trillion dollars, and news websites should absolutely be a part of that.

It's well worth reading Varian's post in full, but in the end, his core piece of advice is what counts:

"In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet."

That really is the core of it. Newspapers must experiment with new ways to report the news, new ways to engage their readers and new ways to get advertisers on board, while embracing the fact that their readers are switching to a medium that costs them less. There are over 70-million Americans reading news online—if newspapers can't turn those eyeballs into money, someone else will.

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Why Don't Newspapers Realize That Google's Handing Them Quality Leads

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:10:28 PDT

A bunch of folks have been sending in Scott Rosenberg's wonderful response to those who keep incorrectly claiming that Google is somehow to blame for the decline of news, and should "pay" newspapers. The whole thing is worth reading, but there's one key message towards the beginning: Google is providing newspapers with "qualified leads," normally considered the most valuable type of leads in any sales operation. These are people who actually want what a newspaper is offering... and rather than thank Google for sending them such qualified leads (and figuring out ways to provide enough extra value to have anyone want to pay, the newspapers are whining and complaining about this process.

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Google Kills Off Videos People Thought They Had Purchased

Mike Masnick — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:20:00 PDT

It's tough for many to remember these days, following the growth of YouTube and free videos online, but in January of 2006, when Google launched its online video service it was supposed to change the world. Remember, they had all these partners signed up who were going to sell video content via Google? It seemed pretty pointless at the time and the near total failure of the video sales to take off simply confirmed it. One of the key points that seemed particularly poorly thought out was the decision to create yet another type of DRM that would require the content you bought to call home every time you wanted to play it. Plenty of people pointed out all of the problems with this idea, with one big one being that, should Google ever kill the service, the content people "bought" would no longer be available. Guess what? Google is killing off the service and the content people "bought" will no longer be available. Apparently Google is handing out credits for Google Checkout for those who bought videos, but they can't use those credits to buy the videos anywhere else. Of course, chances are many of those videos are now available for free on Google-owned YouTube, but that's a separate point. In the meantime, does anyone else find it ridiculous that anyone who makes or uses any kind of tool to circumvent this DRM to view the content that they legally purchased will now be breaking the DMCA's anti-circumvention laws and could face jailtime?

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