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Google execs convicted of privacy violations

Firm considered Italian trial a threat to freedom on the Internet

updated 1:36 a.m. PT, Wed., Feb. 24, 2010

MILAN, Italy - Three Google executives were convicted of privacy violations Wednesday in allowing a video of an autistic boy being abused to be posted online — a case that has been closely watched for its implications on Internet freedom.

Judge Oscar Magi absolved the three of defamation and acquitted a fourth defendant altogether. The three received a suspended six-month sentence for the conviction on violating the youth's privacy.

The trial had been closely watched since it could help define whether the Internet in Italy is an open, self-regulating platform or if content must be better monitored for abusive material.

Google has said it considered the trial a threat to freedom on the Internet because it could force providers to attempt an impossible task — prescreening thousands of hours daily of YouTube footage.

Prosecutors insist the case is not about censorship but about balancing freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.

The four executives were tried in absentia in a closed-door trial.

All denied wrongdoing. None was in any way involved with the production of the video or uploading it onto the viewing platform, but prosecutors argued that it shot to the top of a most-viewed list and should have been noticed.

Convicted of privacy violations were Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted.

Bullies
The charges were sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome. The group alerted prosecutors to the 2006 video showing an autistic student in Turin being beaten and insulted by bullies at school. In the footage, the youth is being mistreated while one of the teenagers puts in a mock telephone call to Vivi Down.

Google Italy, which is based in Milan, eventually took down the video, though the two sides disagree on how fast the company reacted to complaints. Thanks to the footage and Google's cooperation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced by a juvenile court to community service.

The events shortly preceded Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube.

By: KC Morgan

Collecta: Real Time Search

Spend at least ten minutes on the Internet, and you’re bound to become familiar with the concept of search engines. In fact, the entire World Wide Web probably wouldn’t work unless users had some comprehensive way to find information on pages, and that’s what search engines are all about. But aren’t all those engines essentially the same? Collecta is different; keep reading to find out how, and how it might affect your site.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask. They’re all different search engines, but in many ways they’re all the same. Like most other search engines out there, these sites work in the same basic way. Search engines like these scan the Internet, archiving information about the pages they find, so this data can be quickly accessed when users like you type in search terms.

[To See How Different Collecta is, Click here]

Doing Real Time Search? Watch Your Word Order

If you’ve been reading ResearchBuzz for a while, you probably know that the way you enter your search terms in Google makes a difference. If you enter words in one order, you may very well get a different result count and a different order to the results you get back. (Try searching Google forscratching post and post scratching to get an idea of what I’m talking about.)

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Viewzi Search

Who said searching has to be boring?

Discover new ways to search with Viewzi

example: http://www.viewzi.com/search/4sources/windows%20phone%207%20series



what's cool about this search other than grouping similar results in the search engines, it also shows if there is a digg url associated with that posting, as you see in the screenshot

Facebook launch 'Zero' site for mobile phones

The world's biggest social network has revealed details of a stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site called Facebook Zero.
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Why Hadoop Users Shouldn’t Fear Google’s New MapReduce Patent

By Derrick Harris

Updated: Google, nearly six years since it first applied for it, has finally received a patent for its MapReduce parallel programming model. The question now is how this will affect the various products and projects that utilize MapReduce. If Google is feeling litigious, every database vendor leveraging MapReduce capabilities – a list that includes Aster Data Systems, Greenplum and Teradata — could be in trouble, as could Apache’s MapReduce-inspired Hadoop project. Hadoop is a critical piece of Yahoo’s web infrastructure, is the basis of Cloudera’s business model, and is the foundation of products like Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce and IBM’s M2 data-processing platform.

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Google Buzz may force government to act on Privacy concerns

by Doug Hanchard @ February 13, 2010 @ 10:32 AM

Google’s Buzz application has unleashed editorials and flame wars around the U.S amid privacy concerns. At least it picked a name appropriate for the current backlash. Google however may wind up regretting how it launched Buzz, with significant legal and ethical concerns on the horizon. Google also faces severe criticism on how it deals with customer privacy that may tarnish that image that will require considerable repair.

The U.S. government may also have to act. As this product launch unfolded, the buzz turned ugly very quickly. Google may have few if any options but get hung out to dry and wind up being monitored with big brother oversight over how it manages and processes privacy practices.

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Smart Search Engines

See if you can find something odd I noticed in the results?

http://www.google.com/search?q=empire+state+height

What do you think is odd? I want to see your queries :)

Google Creating Twitter Clone for Gmail

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be.
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Parisian Love

Data mining service crawls billions of Web pages

By Eric Lai | Computerworld

Startup 80legs launches data mining service that leverages a 50,000-computer grid to search, crunch millions of Web pages in minutes

80legs has officially launched its service, which brings supercomputer-scale data mining of the Web to companies, and even individuals.

The Houston, Texas-based startup leverages a grid of 50,000 servers to search and crunch millions of Web pages within minutes, CEO Shion Deysarkar told Computerworld on Monday ahead of the Demo Fall 09 conference in San Diego.

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Twitter’s Development History Beautifully Visualized In A Video

Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data [read more]

42 Reasons Why Netbooks Are Better Than the Apple iPad

By Cisco Cheng

Steve Jobs will probably disagree, but we think that netbooks have a few things up on the iPad.

Steve Jobs felt compelled to take jabs at the netbook market when he announced his magicalApple iPad stating at one point, "The problem is that netbooks aren't better than anything." But don't ditch that netbook just yet. Here are 42 reasons (ranked in no particular order) why I think netbooks can give the iPad a run for its money.

Please Click Here for the 42 Reasons!

Why Chrome Will be Your Next Browser

By Lance Ulanoff

Google Chrome's market share numbers are skyrocketing, blowing past Safari and Opera to become the number three most-widely-used Web browser. That's pretty impressive, and I don't think it's going to stop there. I fully expect it to overtake Firefox and challenge, if not beat, Microsoft Internet Explorer sometime in the next 5 years.

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Google struggles with social skills

Google has decided that its social-networking strategy could use a few more followers.

Perhaps no one did a better job of capturing the Internet from its inception until, say, 2007, than Google. But over the last several years, an explosion in Web content generated by social media has created a new dimension of the Web that Google doesn't control--and sometimes can't even see. Google CEO Eric Schmidt used to think that Google could index the Web by 2300, but he told CNET last year that with the advent of social media, "I'm not even sure it's possible" to capture everything.

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DotBot

This is super cool. A C/Python crawler than tries to index the web and make that index, or at least lots of aggregate information about it, public. They explain it well:

We want to make the internet as open as possible. Currently only a select few corporations have a complete and useful index of the web. Our goal is to change that fact by crawling the web and releasing as much information about its structure and content as possible. We plan on doing this in a manner that will cover our costs (selling our index) and releasing it for free for the benefit of all webmasters. Obviously, this goal has many potential legal, financial, ethical and technical problems. So while we can't promise specific results, we can promise to work hard, share our results, and help make the internet a better and more open space.