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[sei]

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, used his personal blog to urge Firefox users away from Google and to use Microsoft's search engine Bing, instead. Dotzler cited privacy concerns, specifically pointing to comments recently made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

"I think judgment matters," said Schmidt. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Dotzler then links to the Bing add-on for Firefox, stating that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's (and notably fails to mention Yahoo at all).

[Brentai]

Out of the frying pan and into the epicenter of a 50 megaton thermonuclear detonation.

[Shinra]

microsoft buyout of mozilla inc?

[sei]

Any thoughts on scroogle?

(Especially interested in opinions from Thad and/or Paco.)

The output is (IMO) fuck-ugly, which I can get around by throwing something together to restyle it for myself.  The view-next-100-results mechanism is also pretty cumbersome.  I'm less interested in thoughts on theme-ing than the legality or whether it's probably just a gigantic honeypot.

EDIT: Proof-of-concept restyle, though the colors aren't ideal or anything:

[sei]

Conspicuous ToS changes damage ad monetization hopes of a former featured project on code.google.com and code.google.com/apis/youtube.

When the YouTube API team saw Totlol they liked it. At about the same time someone else at Google saw it, realized the potential it, and/or similar implementations may have, and initiated a ToS modification. An instruction was given to delay public acknowledgement of Totlol until the modified ToS where published. Later an instruction was given to avoid public acknowledgement at all.

[Mongrel]

Soooo... they've mastered subtlety better than Microsoft ever did (a pretty damn low bar, but still...).

Good to know.

[Mongrel]

Google to stop censorship of search results in China. Well. That's what you get when you play ball with Beijing.

By the way, does anyone know what sort of censorship Baidu engages in? I'm assuming that with a 61% share of the Chinese market, they're subject to the usual Central Committe-type oversight.

Who knows, perhaps this will actually increase google's market share in China?

[Mothra]

It's weird to think that some internet company has the power to completely overturn China's policy simply because it doesn't suit them. A superpower can't really afford to go on without Google's support anymore.

[patito]

I don't know, Baidu has the highest market share already, so it's not that problematic for them to lose google.

[Saturn]

google got pissed that SOMEONE *cough cough the chinese government cough cough* kept attacking their servers with the aim of getting into the gmail accounts of chinese human rights activists and stealing intellectual property

[SCD]

Seriously boys and girls. 

Johnathan Spence - To Change China

I know it's hard for the western world to keep up on modern affairs, and sometimes even we tend to be amnesiac about little blips of history of the past that go against the usual patterns...

BUT IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR SOME WISDOM OBTAINED FROM THE SAME FUCKING PROGRESSION OF EVENTS OVER THE PAST FOUR FUCKING HUNDRED YEARS OF REPETITIVE HISTORY OF WESTERN INTERACTION, COMMERCIAL TRADE AND ADVISING WITH EVERY FORM OF THEIR GOVERNMENT?

Leave the dragon alone, he will probably poison himself to death over the next century anyways..

(i will be quoting this one when China either censors or kicks google out of china)

[Mothra]

Pretty good NYT article on the whole China/Google issue.

“In the short term, the Internet environment will be very cold,” he said. “But for the government to close the door and revert to 30 years ago is hard to imagine. If they want to go forward on the information highway, they’ll have to listen to others.”

“I think Google’s departure from the Chinese market would be a big loss to Google, though not as big a loss to China because Baidu and other search engines are still rising,” Mr. Rao said in an interview.

As far as the services Google provides, China could fairly easily turn to similar companies that'll play ball. I guess the biggest result from Google pulling out would be the China's further online isolation.

“It’s not Google that’s withdrawing from China, it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world,” said one message.

[Mongrel]

Regardless, this is still a black eye for China internationally. That's pretty significant.

Every Chinese person I know has always said the same thing: the worst way to hurt the Chinese government is to make them lose face.

Is challenging them openly a better route to change than quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy? Well, that's a different debate.

[Brentai]

MS has a search engine they're trying to pimp.

Just saying.

[sei]

Another alternative to having to use scroogle.

GoogleSharing is a special kind of anonymizing proxy service, designed for a very specific threat. It ultimately aims to provide a level of anonymity that will prevent google from tracking your searches, movements, and what websites you visit. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize all your traffic, but rather something designed exclusively for your communication with Google. Our system is totally transparent, with no special "alternative" websites to visit. Your normal work flow should be exactly the same.

[Dooly]

Is there some particularly worrying reason Gmail doesn't have a valid security certificate right now?