The Supreme Court of India has denied legal protection to a 19 year old computer science student facing a lawsuit for comments left on a group page he created on the Google owned social network Orkut, according to The Times of India. Local press has identified the young man by the name Ajith D (a common name) and report that his alleged offense was creating a group page where other visitors left "libelous" comments critical of militant right-wing political party Shiv Sena.
Indians around the internet are condemning the ruling as a blow against freedom of speech and democracy. It certainly appears to be a dangerous misunderstanding of the nature of the internet on the part of the court and a bad precedent in the most populous democracy in the world.
The online world is an imperfect place. Gmail goes down, chunks of blog posts disappear, and users are deceived on a regular basis. Most of us who spend time online are aware of - and have come to expect - these foibles and hiccups. But now, throngs of mainstream media outlets are entering the fray with a bit of naivete, rushing to use online services that may not yet be ready for prime time - literally. ABC News learned their lesson the hard way during US President Obama's address to Congress.
"Hey check out this video! http://tinyurl.com/xyz,"; says an old friend by Google Talk IM. Well sure, you think, I'd love to see a video from you - it's been a long time! Maybe you got an IM like that this afternoon, too. Maybe you got six.
There's nothing wrong with clicking on such a link, but when the site that loads as a result, Viddyho.com, asks for your Google Talk username and password in order to view the video - then you should know that trouble is afoot. Surprisingly, a whole lot of tech savvy people fell for it today. Update: The Harvard Crimson says it has unearthed the person responsible for the Viddyho worm.
According to Hitwise, search queries on all the major search engines are starting to get longer and longer (PDF). While the average search query is still around two words long, queries that are longer than four words have become increasingly popular over the last twelve months.
Hitwise's latest data also confirms that Google's market share in the search business is continuing to grow at a steady clip (9% year-over-year). Year-over-year, all of Google's larger competitors lost ground, though at least between December and January, both Yahoo and Ask.com saw a very minor increase in their market share.
Google today finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google's App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure and, until today, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting today, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.
Apple today released the first public beta of Safari 4, which sports a redesigned interface that resembles Google's Chrome, as well as support for all of the major Internet standards, and a large range of new and enhanced features. Among these new features are a reimagined start page with a speed-dial interface similar to what Opera and Chrome are currently offering, a Cover Flow-like interface for browsing your bookmarks and history, and the ability to perform a full-text history search of your bookmarks.
Gmail was down for so long last night that Google felt compelled to apologize this morning. Google's online apps are unavailable for short periods of time often enough for it to be unsurprising, but the length of this outage (2 hours plus) was quite remarkable.
What do you do when you're left waiting for a meeting or a lunch? If you're like us, you probably check your email. What do you do if your email keeps you waiting? Something else! What better excuse could hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, have to do something else with a few precious hours than to say "all of Gmail is down?" We presume that books were read, "to read" lists were plowed through and who knows - maybe a few babies were conceived!
It's tempting to give Apple's iPhone credit for the birth of touch-based computing, but it was not the first touchscreen user interface - nor is it the only one in existence today. Long before the iPhone, touchscreen LCDs were common, as were touch smartphones from Palm, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and others. In addition, back in 2001 - long before the iPhone launch - Microsoft began work on Microsoft Surface, a touchscreen tabletop computer. Yet it was the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities along with its stellar design that really got the ball rolling for touch computing. The only question that remains now is what will come next?
A new survey from Gartner Research delivers some bad news regarding our online security practices: two-thirds of U.S. consumers use the same one or two passwords for all the websites they access. And they like it that way. Although people claim they're concerned about security, they still tend to use unsafe password management techniques rather than exploring new methods - be they new hardware, software, or new authentication frameworks like OpenID.
Three years ago Google launched Google.org, an attempt to "use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age." And they've been very successful in that regard, providing more than $100 million in grants, creating tools like Google Flu Trends, and leveraging technology like the recently launched Google PowerMeter. But there is still much to be done. Now, Google.org has announced a reorganization to help them meet the goals for Google's philanthropic arm - by bringing Google.org closer inline with Google itself.
