flaktrak

That's interesting because I block all publicly facing ips from DigitalOcean from every server I own. the amount of spam and hackers probing from there ips is beyond a joke. Anyway thanks for your input.

I guess I better get a screen shot in case it goes away http://i.imgur.com/fwl0yTJ.png

Above the fold on my 26" screen http://i.imgur.com/yXya3MI.png . As you can see 0 blue links!

this is about all the Syrian govt can retaliate with. it's not like they can physically reach and stop the USA from attacking them.

I am surprised the US is even that high!

Yeah Matt it is

These people are dinosaurs. That is the most scary aspect. Imagine if Dinosaurs still existed but new how to search internet databases to find their targets!

The problem as I see it is that no matter how much they store. If they so wish they can search for you!

The potential for abuse is just to high.

Originally I was so what some random stranger at some big department might have some info on me.

A friend said to me once "think of your worst enemy, whoever that may be, if they had every piece of communication you ever sent on the internet or if they had list of every website you ever went to, would you be worried?"

That clarified things for me. Not that I have enemies in that respect (at least I hope not) but if I did would I want them to have access to this information.

We do not know who has access to this info and business leaders (especially in countries other than the US) are having their conversations monitored and that info is apparently being passed to business leaders in the US.

We can't have this.

I take it a step further I use vmware to run a different instance of windows and go through a proxy. Paranoid? yes! but let Google track that particular me and not the real me.

Nice win but I have to say the bit that really got me excited was this

"My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents?"

How great would that be?

I understand where you are coming from but we really need to focus on the bigger picture. Let us all just get back to hating Google for being the most evil company that has ever existed and live in peace.

I take it you were offended?

America the land of the brave. The land of the free.

I completely agree with this and anyway many of the caching programs are starting to understand that nginx is out there. I am pretty sure w3 total cache does.

However since using nginx I have done away with caching as it is so much faster than apache + caching that I don't really need it.

And so it should! Apache is last millennium's technology.

One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?

Now it appears Google is one of those almost all companies.

Yes and BI would probably not care or notice.

Matt aren't you getting sick of having to constantly defend the actions of your employer? You seem like a positive guy but it must be getting even you down.

so sad!

Quite frankly Matt as someone who can't stand G+ I skip most mugg shot links as I have started assuming that it is going to be some crappy little G+ throw away post. So there is every chance that the person in question is getting less clicks due to the mugg shot.

Let's put all that aside what this situation is highlighting is just how terrible the webmaster tools data really is. I have clients that have not ranked for a keyword for over year yet webmaster tools is still telling them they are ranking. All this serves to do is confuse them. Which seems to be the point of what Google does these days.

You keep banging on about increased transparency but the fact is we don't need more badly made webmaster help videos. We need accurate stats and the promised accurate feedback as to what has gone wrong.

In fact I have mug shotted my posts before and if you switch the picture to a picture of something other than a face Google seems to penalize you.

Was an interesting experiment and one that I would like to take further.

killed all my Google accounts. Can't stand G+ at least with FB most of the people who have accounts wanted the account. G+ most people don't even want the stupid thing.

The fuhrer.. err I mean Larry Page has declared G+ or die! So expect more to go that competes or can't intergrate G+ properly. Google long ago lost the "Do no evil" moniker.

Good post and you had me all the way up until you said "journey". I hate that word. Pre-internet Journey meant something now every man and his cat uses it to talk about the incites they had while doing something, it has lost its impact. However like I said I enjoyed the post until then.