Google Ideas
google.com
google.com
-a reverse proxy -service to scrape various business records, helping journalists analyzing records -anti-phishing tool (browser plugin?) that verifies you're not putting your (Google) password into a wrong site.
> Google Ideas is a team of engineers, researchers and geopolitical experts who build products to support free expression and access to information, especially in repressive societies. We focus on the problems faced by people who live in unstable, isolated, or oppressive environments, including the billions of people who are coming online for the first time.
> With the right tools, we can make the internet more free and open. Many of us take the internet for granted, but for human rights activists, journalists, and artists living under censorship, a free and open internet can be a matter of life and death.
edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my statement. It was based on outdated information.
Groucho Marx
They're justifying it as "it's better than nothing at all". Take from that what you will but let's get the facts right.
Google filtered terms the Chinese government required (by law), but did so by returning results saying that some items were filtered out specifically so users would know their results were filtered. Google never gave any information on who searched specific terms, but after some attacks on their servers in an apparent attempt to get this information, Google announced they would no longer filter searches for China. Talks on how to accomplish this broke down, and Google redirected their China site to Hong Kong, which has no censorship restrictions, but the Great Firewall seems to be filtering results.
They also removed the warning that the user's search results were being filtered [2].
To the best of my knowledge, the current status: User visits Google China - http://google.cn - This is a hyperlink to Google Hong Kong on the front page - IF user searches via Google.cn, the search results will be filtered by China not self-censored by Google. They will NOT be presented with a warning anymore. - IF user searches via Google.hk, from mainland china, the same thing will happen and the results will still be filtered. [3]
At this point, I don't believe the link to .hk Google serves as much use as it does a political statement.
[1] "Google stops Hong Kong auto-redirect as China plays hardball" http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/google-tweak...
[2] "Google's dropped anti-censorship warning marks quiet defeat in China" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-def...
[3] "China censors searches on Google's Hong Kong-based search engine" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...
I know it's entirely a business decision, but simply saying "Ok, forget about China" won't help either.
So Google has tried almost everything and has broken into China's Great Firewall. They even were warning users if the content was politically controversial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
1. Google builds stuff that lets lots of people have access to information. Already knew that.
2. Google has a team of engineers that build stuff to let lots of people have access to information, including people in developing countries or countries that have restricted internet access. Yep, knew that, too.
3. An open internet is good. Check.
....So what? At the risk of sounding like a marketing douchebag, where's the call to action here? Is this supposed to be some kind of new Google product? Or is it just a bunch of PR?
One of these investments is into something called "Civil Society Apps" - applications that support exporting American culture and values to certain areas of the world.
The United States benefits by being the center of entertainment (Hollywood), for example, and by having US Social Networking sites filter the content according to American values and ideals across the world.
This is a form of 'soft power'.
The DoD's investment in the tech sector, while also focusing on defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, is putting money into culture export apps.
While some of this work is already done, the governments and civil societies and organizations of other countries do not always like this export, and the US has been known to 'weaponize' some of the networks to stir revolution, dissent, etc (e.g. ZunZuneo).
Google Shield is a project whereby these cultural export apps can be given additional protection.
now, i beg the above user, or someone with an equally clear and analytical mind, to take a long and hard look at india, and what's happening with the urbanised (aka westernized) and so called sophisticated society of india, especially the youth. key words : whatsapp, instagram, mass message forwarding, hollywood, atheism, gender equality, sexual liberation, 'jesus christ', delhi rape, us kashmir india map vs indian govt india map; eventually you'll spot the pattern. we need help from the outside, urgently.
read on the internet.org initiative. google is not alone. they are out to get everyone.
also, (imo) anyone upvoting, commenting, and (probably) even viewing this page is on a list, and their preferences and moral leanings are being analysed. i can't be sure if that is individually, or in a grouping of data. so comment and upvote with care, and try to ensure anonymity.
- an international student with lots of american friends, who loves weed, flirts with other drugs, and tries to keep an open mind
ps - best of luck to us all and thank you if you sincerely read the whole message
Here's what I understand: the United States and the West are partnering very heavily with India to get it to rise in tandem with China. India doesn't have a goal to be a global power, and its economy is much more closely integrated with the West, so it's a very kind strategic ally in the changing global economic situation. Its growth and its rise is an area of balance for the West in a world where trade and economy are shifting away from the old world and into the Asia Pacific.
India, with regard to geostrategy, is uniquely placed for growth. Of course it has a large population, which is a huge help, but it also likely to benefit from the trillions of dollars of investment being made by China's investment in Eurasian oil pipelines and trade routes (and Russia's attempt to galvinize a Eurasian Union).
That is to say India will benefit both by West and by East investment.
Now, in support of this Modi (which is in large part the 'West's man') has agreed to Westernize a very great deal and to grow India in very specific and strategic ways.
An example of this is China's investment and experimentation with "Smart Cities" - cities that are designed so that every piece of socioeconomic data can be recorded and adjusted. The idea with a smart city is that this level of insight allows huge boons in the study of, governing of, and changes to the municipality.
With the West's encouragement and investment (through multilateral investment groups) India has not only performed huge amounts of financial reorganization but also promises to build 100 smart cities of its own.
And interesting twist on this is that the smart cities invented by the West have an investment clause: the West wants to 'own' the city - to have equity in it - so that the cities are privately owned and that when people pay to live in the cities and as the cities produce surplus this money goes back into the pockets of private investors.
This is a kind of scary prospect for those who have traditional Western grounding as it makes these cities seem more like giant corporations (or maybe 'fiefs'?) than democracies.
But this probably isn't what the poster above is talking about?
Could you speak more about what trends you see in India?
it is very interesting to see your perspective on the global economic position that india occupies. think about how one country can actually 'own' shares of the very cities of another free democracy.
please do not take offence when i say that i can't tell you anything concrete at this stage, except harp about the evils of culture domination, about history repeating itself, and about researching more on my previous comment (if you are so inclined). this is in part because i haven't grasped the pattern fully myself, and for the safety of my dear ones. i just believe as much as a mind can, that there is evil afoot (apologies for being dramatic but i fully believe that a lot of countries including india face grave, long term threats).
i will leave you with this - https://ghanshyamtank.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/lord-macau...
Russia and China in particular are upset with this form of cultural domination and export by the West. Both have stated quite frankly in real terms that they seek to maintain and spread their own culture instead and in fact both Russia and China have begun programs for culture export based on the US model.
China is heavily invested in working in Eurasia, Africa and South America at the moment. They are a bit careful about the Middle East.
It looks like the speech has no good reliable source.
That doesn't mean this isn't happening or doesn't happen. Merely it means that the quote isn't supporting evidence.
That's a silly suggestion.
A more productive and charitable way to enter this conversation would be to engage it with fact-based and evidence-laden argumentation, and citation where necessary.
On that end if you have any fact-based questions I'm willing to unpack various claims and to discuss issues and ideas on their own merits.
This is not new, shocking or crazy information. It is not an unreasonable or alien claim.
If you do start reading serious journalism, paying attention to cyberwarfare, read up on current US propaganda efforts, or pay attention to US legislation or anything else that may turn your interest you've discovered that I'm willing to blather quite verbosely and would love to chat more.
I'd be wary. I'm sure there's lots of technical talent at Google, I'm sure they do interesting things. But they are not white knights, protecting the internet. And if I either would be afraid of harassment (see previous policy above) or a journalist with sources to protect, I'd look for more .. independent support, I guess.
Kidding aside, my first impression was wow, what a nice showcase for HTML5/canvas use. Whoever (at Google?) developed the website did an awesome job! Although knowing what's walking around at Google these days, I'm pretty sure it's been outsourced to an agency.
Just give me text damnit.
The Reality : "WHAT IT DOES : MAKES DATABASES SEARCHABLE"
https://www.google.com/ideas/products/password-alert/
It protects by computing something from the way you type your password as opposed to knowing the actual password.
Edit: This raises an interesting question. Wouldn't it then be possible to use the same algorithms elsewhere on websites to identify who is even anonymously using the site?
US investment in organizations and outlets that align with its strategic goals (or when they are fronts for one department or another) are looked very poorly upon by some countries around the world, which will attempt to take them down - either by legal means, cyber attack or network (e.g. DNS) level blocks.
It is a geopolitical project and a very valuable investment for the United States overseas power projection.
I would not claim to believe that they are a front or a partner. I'm not a good person to ask though, I don't know very much about CloudFlare.
There is no need to ridicule this poster, as parallel questions about national security efforts and how, where and when US tech companies help are topical, factual and technical.
> Google will, in all likelihood, very selectively give protection to news outlets.
> For example those from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, or from the BIIP, or from USAID, or from US sponsored NGOs are definitely going to get support.
But that "in all likelihood" is just you making things up and is not, of course, actual evidence. Everything else you've provided in this thread is handwaving.
Not in the least. Is there anything you'd like corroborated?
The United States disbanded USIA (the agency in charge of US propaganda) after the end of the Cold War in 1999. USIA was split into a couple components. Overt programs were given to the Department of State, covert ('black') programs to the Department of Defense and the Board of Broadcasting Governors were split off into their own organized body.
During the Bush administration there was a lot of turmoil about how to organize efforts - they found that splitting the efforts caused confusion as various programs weren't coordinated with the same messages. Bush created Policy Coordinating Committees for "Strategic Communication" to help interdepartment and interagency cooperation. Mostly during this time efforts were focused on the Middle East, and indeed today the US heavily blankets the Middle East with propaganda.
Things have evolved since Bush. There has been a growing role of social media analysis and interaction. The Department of State has a Digital Outreach Team where they will engage on forums in the Middle East (it's an overt program, so they will identify themselves) - but the goals as can be seen from FOIA requests and strategic documents are to confuse adversaries, 'get in their heads' and to engage parties whose opinion may be swayed. Covert operations do much of the same, but under false flags and with persona management software (check out Earnest Voice). You can find out more about these efforts by searching for the Department of States "war of ideas" or congresses "Jihad 2.0", or generally doing due diligence and reading legislation and strategy documents.
Another big change in US strategy is that its audience is much wider. Strategy documents toward the end of the Bush Administration and through the Obama Administration focus on the need to counter anti-American ideas abroad.
Now the CIA especially runs NGO and CSO fronts, many times through USAID, and more generally NGOs and CSOs are invested in if they align with US strategic objectives. If you like you can find CIA reports on investment in NGOs inside of Ukraine as part of their long term plan as project UNITER and how this turned out with NGOs leading Euromaiden protests (if you read foreign media - Germany's Der Speigel is a good source you may trust). ZunZuneo is a very transparent example because there's been lots of journalism on it - in this case the CIA set up a fake Twitter network in Cuba where they were monitoring citizens and planning to turn their network (peaking somewhere around 60,000 users) into an outlet to stir dissent and organize protests.
Many countries try to quell this activity. Cuba, for example, banned smart phones at one point. Russia recently, after the Ukraine affair, kicked out all NGOs with funding from or ties to Western governments.
Aaannnyyway. There's tons of more details to be had (US research into manipulating social networks a la DARPA SMISC, Project MINERVA) but in reading through material and reports on the various task forces of Congressional meetings it's quite clear - though really not surprising as these have been longstanding US practices.
If you would like to read more about propaganda and CIA fronts in the Iraq war, searching for Rendon Group, the Iraqi National Council, and the Office of Strategic Influence.
The United States unequivocally funds and supports NGOs and CSOs that align with its strategic interests and invests them as operating fronts for special operations. This isn't really something that's widely contested.
The Department of Defense (just search for this using your favorite client/search engine) is right now investing large amounts of money through partnerships with Venture Capitalists into Silicon Valley and the tech sector. There is a call for both cybersecurity startups and for civil society apps.
Google is offering (and there are plenty of examples of Google's involvement with US national security investments, perhaps you'd like to ask about this) to protect news and human rights agencies. This will of course be providing protection to US and US-aligned news media organizations and NGOs (they can call my bluff by supporting Chinese NGOs - and China is now starting to try to have its own culture export, news organizations, and human rights groups in Africa, South America and Eurasia).
That's not an argument or evidence, that's classic handwaving.
Understanding how the US operates, how US companies cooperate, and the context, timing, history and actor roles appear not to be enough.
I suppose you're looking for a smoking gun - a document from Google that explicitly states that Google's intention is to support American NGOs for the purposes of US power projection.
No, I don't have a smoking gun. I can not provide that for you.
It is established that America uses NGOs for culture export/soft power projection.
It is established that Google is a geopolitical actor.
It is established that Google provides investment for researchers who are funded by and for DoD programs.
It is established that Google aligns itself with US culture expansion abroad (they wrote a book on this).
It is established that the US partners with private industry to achieve its objectives. It is established that the US has been calling for more partnership on the cyber domain and with strategic communication.
It is established that Google will be protecting American NGOs.
If it is reasonable to conclude that Google's involvement protecting American NGO's is partnership with US foreign policy is bullshit or handwaving, how would you read the situation?
I think it's unreasonable to think that:
A company that is legally obligated to maximize shareholder profit, and which partnered with the US government for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and whose executives fairly regularly meet in person with the president of the United States and who has a revolving door with the same Department of State for roles in under Public Diplomacy - that this company, completely separate from these details - on its own 'good will' - decided it would be a nice charitable thing to host US NGO sites and US news intended for foreign audiences.
https://www.google.com/ideas/products/
The page looks so nice but then they proceed to destroy usability with bizarre navigation schemes and breaking nearly every common design pattern - scrolling is just one of them.
I don't see what the point of breaking scrolling is.
Then they go and try to re-do something probably a dozen layers deeper than the frontend application code they used; scrolling - and will probably be surprised to learn there are compatibility problems!
I am astonished Google QA had nothing to complain about that.
IMO, anything Assange say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But then again, the same holds for Google PR.
Google is already very involved in geopolitics.
Google Ideas is a way to protect US investments in culture export "civil society" apps.
They certainly seem to try, don't they? to be horrible.
I tried using google maps today a few times and each time was filled with curses and WTF's.
They just, shouldn't be making websites or doing any kind of design work at all. Maker the backend technology, sure - get someone else to do anything front end. Across the board suckage.
There was edonkey, then bittorent, then the cloud, then git, then bittorrent sync...
I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off. The internet was built for p2p, but it's still mostly used as a broadcast system where everything is centralized.
Why isn't google trying to fund those projects ? Because they re so much invested in the web of HTML content they can't look eitherway.
I think the problem has been always the poor UX, but eventually something well thought out like popcorn-time could appear and cause a greater adoption.
Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised. If we moved to P2P systems they could still provide an index, but I'd wager far less data would ultimately pass through them. Not to mention that if people were more in control of their data rather than LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, I bet they'd be less inclined to having it indexed publically simply because they have a choice.
There's all sorts of network effects and shitty incentives at play, and it's a shame.
My twitter rant (not the whole thing even)
> though they have their place, centralised systems reinforce the role of the middle man, which is prime for rent-seeking and lopsided value
> in reality networks exist on a continuum between centralised/decentralised. The web makes it difficult to choose the correct degree per case
> both centralised and decentralised systems have trust issues, but they are different in kind not magnitude
> the incentives are wrong for innovation. Google requires centralised, so HTTP is fine. Ubiquity, so HTML is fine
> web developers have spent years becoming skilled in their corner and are incentivised to defend and perpetuate the platform
> if you think discoverability, zero-install and sandboxes are only possible on the web, I invite you to consult the literature
> we could have decentralised, secure, simple, efficient primitives, but network effects and incentives steer us away
> tech solutions are moot unless they incentivise behaviour that leads to better returns for everyone. layers on HTML/HTTP will never do that
For starters: navigating the web in the beginning consisted of clicking links which caused you to go from one website to another. This all worked well when (a) the web was small and (b) there were (hardly) no trash pages.
Search engines changed that, and once they got 'good enough' the link graph became a mere starting point for crawling the web rather than the way we navigated from site to site. For a little while the link graph was used as a popularity measurement but this too changed (because of the huge number of low value links).
Then we got silos. A 'silo' is a bunch of data locked up under a trade between users and large web properties. The trade is 'you give us your content and a bunch of information about yourself and we'll use that content to attract others and to sell ads'.
Examples of such silos are Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
Finally, if originally (and the internet itself) was strung together by a peer-to-peer approach it turned more and more into a division between producers and consumers, with the producers on the 'server' side and the consumers on the 'client' side.
Mobile devices accessing the net further accelerated this trend, right now the only internet (not web) applications that are still peer-to-peer are torrent applications. For the most part the division on the web is complete and hosting a web server on your very powerful cable modem or DSL line would be grounds for termination of your access.
Servers are hosted centrally and are operated by companies whereas clients are simply terminals that access the content stored on those servers.
I hope that answers your question in enough detail, you could easily write a book about this.
That said, I agree there is a clear move towards our data and services being handled by fewer, and larger entities, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. But they aren't a single entity, and I don't consider that centralized. Any one of those providers could implode today, and very little of their services could not be picked up by some competitor easily. I don't consider that centralized.
Your peer-to-peer view of the internet died roughly in '98.
And there are many of them, some owned by companies that use them exclusively, some conglomerations of many different providers but owned by yet another party. How is this centralization? I still think you're just arguing that we've compartmentalized certain services to sets of companies, for the most part, but even that isn't centralization, because there are multiple distinct companies using multiple distinct networks and in many cases they are presenting multiple distinct capabilities. Not having something handled at the end point does not mean it's centralized, there's a very large middle ground here, and that's where we are currently at. I'm not sure I see any evidence that we are moving away from that towards actual centralization.
> When I received mail in '95 or so the machine receiving it was the workstation I wrote the reply on.
And many people that used POP3 continued to do so well into the 2000's. It's silly to run a mail server on your workstation. I know, I did it for years myself. You run into all sorts of stupid problems related to your workstation not being always on, badly configured backup MX servers, and other issues. We don't do it anymore not because we were forced out of it (you can still do it now), but because there are solutions that are better for most use cases, and we opt for those.
We don't all wash our own cars, or do our own plumbing, or even clean our own houses. Some people do, some people pay others to do that work. The fact they pay others doesn't mean we've moved towards centralizing those services. There isn't some national bureau of plumbing that is our only recourse when the toilet is clogged and we don't want to fix it ourselves.
The reasons why we are moving to a more centralized internet are what is interesting, such as - you rightly identified those - that stuff isn't always powered up and that keeping a mailserver up and running is work and so on.
But none of that changes that centralization is happening.
Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet. That's what a decentralized network infrastructure used to mean, where the 'peers' were equals.
Nowadays it means clients in one camp and servers in another, and large scale consolidation of those servers in the datawarehouses of a relatively low number of companies serving up the bulk of the data. If that trend continues it's not a bad or a good thing per-se but it would be good to stop and think about how desirable that is.
So from that point of view a lot of centralization has already happened.
Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).
In the end, convenience won over 'peer-to-peer', there are many reasons besides convenience (firewalls, for one) but the results are here and we'll have to live with it (except for a couple of die-hard hold-outs).
I think it is correct to say we are, or at least were, decentralizing, to a degree. I think it's correct to say that we are not fully decentralized, which we were close to initially, but I don't think it's entirely constructive to say we are moving in a direction that leads to a centralized internet, and what that implies (a single authority, even if for a single service). I think we are moving towards, or have arrived at, what we see in many markets. Large dominant players that the majority use, but with a large market of smaller players that provide for the niche needs. Take the automotive industry, for example.
I think we are largely arguing over semantics, which is something I don't want to do, but at the same time it's hard to be sure I'm not just reducing your arguments to the point there's no difference and ignoring important points at the same time.
> But none of that changes that centralization is happening.
I think it's cyclical, and there will be periods where we move along the spectrum back and forth, but I doubt we'll get as close to the decentralized end as we started at, but for many reasons. I don't think we'll get all that close to the decentralized end either though.
> Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet.
My argument has not been "we are decentralized", it's been "we are not centralized". To that effect, peer-to-peer is irrelevant to my argument, and I've tried to make that clear.
> Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).
Because it's very, very inefficient. There are upsides to centralization (e.g. discoverability), just as there are downsides (e.g. homogeneity). I think the sweet spot that maximizes the upsides and minimizes the downsides is somewhere between decentralization and centralization.
In decentralized networks there end up being accumulation points, and Zipf's law (which shows up in piles of different contexts, originally noticed in rank of words used in languages) gives a pretty good idea of how that accumulation plays out in basically an L-shaped curve. Point being that it might have a lot more to do with the structure of human networks and attention than with choice of wire protocols...
You seem to be conflating the web with the internet.
But all if this is obviously beside the point that the OP made. Even if you don't want to develop a search engine or a phone app, you still have to tie your users to a central "cloud" service and web site so you can get discovered by google. That's a huge disincentive for p2p services.
[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/heres-how-dominant-google-is-i... [2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25450615
However, each and every one of those services are centralised in a technical sense on account of HTTP. Why might an alternative be useful? Consider the solution the Google service we're addressing is putting forward cf. Content Addressable Networking systems[0]. I can't spend any more time explaining, sorry. This might help- note the levels of centralisation in each generation of P2P systems:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/15-440/F12/lectures/p2p-approxim...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_addressable_network
Forget the web as a whole and consider a single service such as HN. That graph has |clients| >> |servers|. More than the cardinality the client and server nodes are different in kind.
I consider a decentralised architecture to be one where the nodes can in principle participate equally.
You are arguing that the web is decentralised because there are many services to choose from. I don't disagree, but that's above the application layer protocol- which is what I thought we were discussing. In that case decentralisation happens above the application layer. So in humans? By that definition BBS's were decentralised because I could call a different one.
In other words, yes the web is decentralised because I can choose from many Forex APIs. But at the logical application layer of HTTP, OANDA is a centralised service. HTTP addresses point to specific nodes which may or may not be individual servers at the network layer, but from the point of view of HTTP that's what you address. In a decentralised application layer protocol I would expect to that not to be the case.
That Google is proposing this service is proof that individual web services are centralised. There's a single point of failure.
We're talking at different layers. It's just semantics from here on in.
I think you would have communicated your intent better if you said the web is not decentralized enough. I've been arguing the web is not centralized, you've been arguing the web is not decentralized (but by saying the web is centralized), and the problem is that both are true. The current situation is in-between those two extremes. Arguing that the web is centralized, when it isn't unless you define your scope to be so narrow as to not really encompass what most people think of when you say "web" is counter productive, when your point is a good one, and whether the web is "centralized" is irrelevant. What matters is whether there are benefits to being less/more centralized (or more/less decentralized) from the current state.
Edit: As a suggestion for how to refine your original statements so they are more accessible and understandable to those reading them, I suggest changing "the web is centralized" to "the protocols the web relies on require single centralized authority". It's more verbose, but it doesn't require cognitive leaps in just one of multiple possible directions to get what you are trying to express.
You could argue that the root servers are too centralized, and that their control constitutes centralized DNS control, but since the only reason they have control is that all the different DNS servers use them as authorities, an argument could also be made that their control is more be convention than anything else, and all it would take is a competitor to ICANN that added some value, and eventually we could have multiple authorities. Whether that would be beneficial or detrimental is another discussion.
It's true that it's decentralized, that's it's easy to create websites, but in nature, if you shut down dns servers, you shut down 99% of the internet, which inclues HTML website.
And I think that a decentralized web might be more easy to index (proof of work system, etc).
If you look at what internet.org attempted to do, that's actually how the internet is used most of the time. For consumers and most small businesses, internet is centralized. Technically, most of the internet is just http requests, meaning that there will always be this duality of servers and clients. Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.
> Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.
There are webservers, and admins. That hasn't changed. There's been a shift to larger sites, but there's still plenty of small ones. You sill have the options to put your site at many different locations, or use a platform such as Facebook, Blogger or Wordpress.
What I'm talking about, is protocols that make services impossible to shut down, like bittorrent or bitcoin. That's what I mean by a decentralized internet. Those technologies are different and were made especially with the goal of avoiding control, and they are exactly the solutions to breaches of privacy. Here every computer is equal, and that's a true decentralized internet, in term of hardware AND software. What I was talking about, is generalizing bitcoin and bittorrent to messaging or even hosting databases.
Such software would run on many domestic computers that want to use it and host chunks of data in a redundant manner. The issue is authenticity and signing of data. But other than that, that's where the future is.
I'm sorry but I can't trust the html/http web one bit. HTML and javascript are awful technologies, which are slow to parse, building web browsers have been a race that resulted in no interesting progress and the web2.0 has been a joke. All those techs have been the base google have been making its money on, which also makes easy to mine, so to me centralization is a privacy issue.
I see it exactly the other way: Google makes money precisely because the web is decentralised, and hence you can create an invaluable service by crawling it and creating a centralised search index.
It's client/server on a massive scale. Just because the servers are public, doesn't make it decentralised.
It's unnoticeable when not using smooth scrolling (my personal default). Not a huge problem for a design feature to be unnoticeable though.
When smooth-scrolling using the middle mouse button on Chrome/Linux, it doesn't update dynamically as it scrolls; the background snaps into position when scrolling stops. In Firefox/Linux, it does update dynamically with middle mouse smooth scrolling, but jerkily. It's noticeably bad in both browsers.
or maybe their intent was to bore me off their site because I'm not a journalist. In that case they did well!
I used to work for one of these companies, and we built quite a few highish-profile sites for Google and YouTube. The quality of work done by this company varied wildly between excellent and utterly dismal. Project management interactions with the Google side were haphazard at best and chaotic and disruptive at worst. Requirements would constantly change, and the designs would be all over the place. I don't think one time we thought about accessibility. A number of the projects were death marches, and I worked on at least one huge failure, which fell over on a live TV show with millions of viewers.
TL;DR - just because it's on google.com doesn't mean it was designed or built by Google.
How about no. Seriously. Google of all companies should know better than to rely on autoplaying any sort of audible multimedia, especially as what I'm guessing to be the preferred source of information (guessing since - at the point where people started talking - I simply closed the tab).
https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative-dashboar...
Some good ideas there, but mostly it's a collection of high-level tools and visualizations...my main objection is that journalists have a tendency to see data and documents as "magic" and making a slick Investigative Dashboard doesn't really dispel that. The main problem of data and document collection is not much different than in data science, where research and data cleaning/collection is by far the most time consuming part of the process. Improving OCR (and let's give Google credit for its work on tesseract) and creating a more friendly interface for tesseract (such as a training GUI) would be much, much more useful to the average investigative reporter.
And in terms of collection/research: if Google took up the work of reverse-PACER (for court documents), or furthered its work in election data (https://developers.google.com/civic-information/)...those would also be hugely beneficial initiatives.
Of course, a well researched and written article will defend itself, and the last think a company that really has something to hide wants is to go to court when there's unflattering things that can be proven, not just reported.
This sort of information would be useful for a project I'm working on, especially the business relationships.
> OpenCorporates aims to do a straightforward (though big) thing: have a URL for every company in the world.
Edit: okay so I think I get it; they outline a product then you can click through and apply to use that product. Not very descriptive though.
I think these products are meant for journos and NGO workers who want some level of protection without knowing much about what they are doing.
The way I see it from under my tinfoil hat, is that this is a bit of protection paid for by making your work instantly indexed and searchable by the US for various purposes.
It may not make web designers swoon circle jerk, but a web site with 0 CSS (or close to) would give a better experience. In this case, and in many many many others.
So... I see that they are doing this on their ideas page [1] with the following code on their background image :
position: fixed; transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px); -webkit-transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px);
Google is aligned with the United States State Department and DoD when it comes to investing and spreading American culture and values around the world.
This partnership brings the United States a lot of value, and those at Google also believe that it enriches their company, America and the world.
There is a bit of a paternalism to the conscious design of culture export, and it can be hard to think clearly about.
It's supposed to protect news outlets from DDoS. Fine.
It's altruistic. Fine.
I see no technical guarantee that some future Google couldn't pull the shield away from a news outlet that speaks ill of Google. Not fine.
No centralized "shield" tech can provide said guarantee--rather, only a decentralized, community-driven shield can be provably neutral. Amiright?
For example those from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, or from the BIIP, or from USAID, or from US sponsored NGOs are definitely going to get support.
When I asked what the hell they did, he said that they did some Cloudflare like stuff for political speech in the middle east and spent a bunch of time on building and deploying infrastructure to link up a bunch of anti-human-trafficking agencies all across Asia.
Maybe it's a jaberwocky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas
Shrug.
Break it up.
Says who? Corporations have been waist deep in geopolitics since (at least) the beginning of the 20th century. see British Petroleum & the Iran coup, or Hearst and the American-Spanish war ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.")
Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics
- Fox Media (and anything owned by Rupert Murdock)
- Oil companies (e.g. Haliburton)
- Movie studios
- Fracking companies
- Numerous corporations behind TPP/TTIP
As I read it, parent commenter said this. It is an opinion.
> Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics
It does not follow that it should be like this.
Google had a really deep and good idea with PageRank for search, but what truly innovative ideas have they had since then? Scaling datacenters with commodity hardware? Giving people lots of free email storage? These were neat tricks (and huge engineering challenges) but they don't feel very game changing. Maybe I'll feel differently if I can ever get my hands on a self-driving car, but until then... I'm honestly curious what game changers Google has produced.