Google

Facebook, Google, Carbonite?

Do you store personal data there?

Well, I saw the link to this over at Drudge:

The attack also highlights the inability of the private sector — including industries that would be expected to employ the most sophisticated cyber defenses — to protect itself.

“The traditional security approaches of intrusion-detection systems and anti-virus software are by definition inadequate for these types of sophisticated threats,” Yoran said. “The things that we — industry — have been doing for the past 20 years are ineffective with attacks like this. That’s the story.”

Source: More than 75,000 computer systems hacked in one of largest cyber attacks, security firm says

This story reinforces my disinclination to trust online personal data storage. So I don’t use it. Not even the free gigs provided by my ISP. Not even the space on the two servers I use to run my various sites.

Call me paranoid. Call me safe(r). 😉

Transparency

Google software bug shared private online documents

Google has confirmed that a software bug exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant’s online Docs application service.

The problem was fixed by the weekend and is believed to have affected only .05 percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet.

But a bunch of you wouldn’t listen to my earlier warnings (here and here), would you?!

Oh well. 🙄

Ah, yes. Transparency and openness — they’re the new wave. Well, you can surf it all you want. 😆

Oh, sorry me — I forgot — you know it won’t happen to you. Great. I will grant you that the .05% cited above gives you good odds. Still, what about the security lapses they haven’t even discovered yet? 😀

And how much comfort do the owners of the .05% derive from those “long” odds? 😯

Anyway, I’ll continue to store my stuff on CDs and DVDs and secondary PCs and external (almost always disconnected) hard drives.

Warning: Google Warming

Disclaimer: Despite the title above, I don’t know of any relationship between these two stories.

California farms, vineyards in peril from warming, US energy secretary warns

California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama’s cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration’s plans to combat it.

Whoa! And woe! This is coming from a physicist. And one that won a Nobel Prize at that. Pretty impressive.

Five paragraphs later, though, this: “Chu is not a climate scientist. He won his Nobel for work trapping atoms with laser light.”

Oh.

So what about Google? Well, this:

Google Offers “Latitude” to Track People

Google is releasing free software Wednesday that enables people to keep track of each other using their cell phones.

CNET got a sneak peek at it, and CNET-TV Senior Editor and The Early ShowNatali Del Conte explained how it works on the show Tuesday.

She says “Latitude” uses GPS systems and what’s called cell tower triangulation to do the job. The software seeks the closest three cell towers and, with GPS, combines the data to show where someone is.

It is designed to work on any phone with Internet capabilities, except the iPhone.

“Latitude” is being marketed as a tool that could help parents keep tabs on their children’s locations, but it can be used for anyone to find anyone else, assuming permission is given.

What’s the history and rationale behind their name choice for this new “tool”?

Headlines…and Perspective

Before the headlines, something to give you perspective: It’s What Disciples Do

Google, Move Aside for Cuil

I remember the pre-Google days when AltaVista was The Best Search Engine.

Is this the dawn of post-Google days?

Cuil Press Release

MENLO PARK, Calif.—July 28, 2008—Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.

“The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it,” said Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil. “Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web.”

So Cuil has some “significant breakthroughs,” eh?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

And test and see.

WWW: Wild Wild Web

I use the Internet.

I depend on the Internet.

But I’m very wary of it. Or if not of it, of the way it can be used and is used by people (as individuals, as corporations, as governments, as other people groupings).

So three headlines caught my attention earlier this morning:

Congress studies how people track your online use

Executives from major Internet players — Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. — are due for a grilling about online privacy in a Senate committee Wednesday, but the company likely to get the most scrutiny is a small Silicon Valley startup called NebuAd Inc.

NebuAd has drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates in recent weeks for working with Internet service providers to track the online behavior of their customers and then serve up targeted banner ads based on that behavior.

[…]

“This is analogous to AT&T listening to your phone calls all day in order to figure out what to sell you in the middle of dinner,” said Robert Topolski, a technology consultant to Public Knowledge and Free Press, two other public interest groups that have raised concerns about NebuAd.

[…]

Besides NebuAd, Wednesday’s hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee may also examine Facebook’s “Beacon” monitoring tool, which tracked online purchases made by Facebook members and sent alerts to their friends on the site.

For the record: Congressional hearings don’t rank highly with me either. 🙂

Anyway, I’ll say it again: Trusting the Web to maintain privacy requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

OK, on to Story Number Two:

Internet flaw could let hackers take over the Web

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.

“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”

The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.

Attackers could use the vulnerability to route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address is typed into a web browser.

[…]

On Tuesday the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), a joint government-private sector security partnership, issued a warning to underscore the serious of so-called DNS “cache poisoning attacks” the vulnerability could allow.

[…]

“Consequently, web traffic, email, and other important network data can be redirected to systems under the attacker’s control.”

[…]

Automated updating should protect most personal computers. Microsoft released the fix in a software update package Tuesday.

[…]

Hackers using the vulnerability to attack company computer networks would also be able to capture email and other business data.

And “they” want me to trust the Internet for data storage and data back-up?! Ha!

And “they” think I’m paranoid for warning even about plain ole email communications?! Hmph!

And “they” still think I’m a TechnoPetriefied Kook. Fine. Here’s Story Number Three:

Google ventures into virtual reality with ‘Lively’

…Google Inc. hopes to orchestrate more fantasizing on the Web.

[…]

Google thinks Lively will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities….

The Lively application already works on Facebook, one of the Web’s hottest hangouts, and Google is working on a version suitable for an even larger online social network, News Corp.’s MySpace.

[…]

Lively’s users will be able to sculpt an avatar that can be male, female or even a different species. An avatar can assume a new identity, change clothes or convey emotions with a few clicks of the mouse.

The service also enables users to create different digital dimensions to roam, from a coffeehouse to an exotic island. The settings can be decorated with a wide variety of furniture, including large-screen televisions that can be set up to play different clips from YouTube.com, Google’s video-sharing service.

Lively users can then invite their friends and family into their virtual realities, where they can chat, hug, cry, laugh and interact as if they were characters in a video game.

As a precaution, Google is requiring Lively’s users to be at least 13 years old — a constraint that hasn’t been enough to prevent young children from running into trouble on other social spots on the Web.

“As a precaution…” — oh, please!

Anyway, Lively is further good news for those wishing to exploit and expand the depravity of man. Stay away from it!

OK, now you may virtually stick your virtual head back in the virtual sand.

Above all, love God!