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Comment Re: Friends (Score 2) 367

If it's a preview and they're using the same key for all the installations, why bother with a fucking key in the first place?

I'm sure the software phones home occasionally to validate the key. Once they reach commercial release (or maybe even the next major stage of development), they can revoke the key so folks can't just use this alpha release as a free copy of Windows.

Comment Re:Or how about... (Score 1) 95

Just yesterday I was chatting with a student in a programming class. She was complaining that she got in trouble for using language features that were "not taught yet" in the class.

That is sad. I did the same thing in junior high. We had a small unit in a computer apps class on programming in Basic. I did some research in the library to come up with idea for a group project program and ended up making a game. I used RND to randomize the outcome of a choice, a function that had never been covered in class. That and the fact the teacher could tell I wrote the whole game myself (since i was a lousy typist the other guys typed up what I'd handwritten) earned me a grade of 115% of the available points.

Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 1) 225

I know, and that's part of the problem. Internet Explorer used to have a separate "Search" and "Go" button on the right side of the menu bar so you could choose which action was performed. Not anymore. And I'm seeing more and more cases where simply hitting the enter key after entering a URL actually does search, leaving it a mystery if it's even possible to go right to the site anymore.

Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 1) 225

Wait, which is it? Do you want browser makers to try and fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, or do you want to preserve the status quo?

I want them to fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, but that's not what they're doing. They're trying to make it into a combination address bar and history/web search box, and they're making it harder and harder to actually use it as the former for business reasons.

I have talked to people who are unable to reach the gateway of their DSL router to make changes to it, because every time they type the gateway IP into the address bar, even if they jut hit [enter], it runs the string through Bing (or one of dozen other sites), instead of trying to go there. They can only get pages of search results that contain the IP address (usually help pages from router makers), and the results page, nor the browser interface offer an easy to find way of telling the browser to go right to the IP. I have to have these people pull up a Run box on Windows in order to go right there.

Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 1) 225

If I were one of your company's customers, I would rightfully be blaming you, not google, for your inability to make google understand how I should get to my email.

Jesus Christ, did you read what you just wrote? Google Search exists to help people find what they're looking for, and you're saying it's our job to tell Google how to help people find our site? No. It's Google's job to do that. Their whole search premise is based on this idea they have spiders crawling the Net, building a comprehensive index of everything on it. This a public website, we aren't hiding it or anything. If Google can''t locate it when they have applications on users phones and computers that are literally watching where they go online, it's their fault.

If people want to find our web mail portal they can come to the website we print on their damn bill, or they can call and ask us how to get to it. They might miss us, though. We're only open 24 hours a day. Hey, we'll even tell them how to set up their email in a client so they don't even have to worry about finding a website or remembering their login -- their email will magically appear from clicking an icon.

Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 1) 225

I doubt Google would like to be so blatant as the Great Firewall of China, if you search for a particular site you'll find it. If you're only vaguely close though it might end up on page 10 instead of page 2.

This is all they have to do really. I know I said Google could remove the listings from their index, but they could also bump them way down the list just as easily. Of the people who depend on Google to find everything for them, how many do you think are patient enough to look through more than the first couple pages of results? There might as well not be more than three pages of results displayed. Same result -- but plausible deniability ("We didn't remove the site. It's still there, see? Right on page eighteen! The algorithm is what decides how things are displayed, we don't influence it.")

Google needs to appear neutral, they're just an action house selling off adwords to the highest bidder while displaying whatever search results their robots have found. If they start messing with that image though obviously taking sides they'll lose far more business than they gain. Google is now to online marketing what lawyers are to lawsuits, no matter what side wins they always get paid. They'd have to be really, really dense to mess with that.

It doesn't have to be Google themselves. That's what Googlebombing and SEO is all about -- making sure it's not the most relevant results that are displayed, but the ones the purchaser of the service wants to have come up, when certain keywords are typed in.

If you type the actual address in the address bar and it is parsed as a URL by the bar -- you're going to get what you want, unless there's DNS poisoning going on. There's little room for someone to influence what you get for their personal gain.

Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 2) 225

It actually makes a lot of sense to use google for everything. At the beginning there were IP addresses ; hard to remember. Then DNS came up and URLs got much easier to remember.

No, that would only be true if Google were able to deliver the result you're looking for 100% of the time, and in a listing a person can easily recognize as the correct one. This requires a user to be able to differentiate between the real site and another site that claims to be the site and isn't purely by the listing text.. this is exactly how phishing works. Making people think they're where they want to be and they aren't. And in this case it's just a SEO trip away. You shouldn't trust PageRank to keep you out of danger.

I do Internet support. One of the companies I support (which shall remain nameless, but it's pretty big in rural areas) did not, until recently, have their webmail site listed on Google. I don't know how that happened, as I assume Chrome is spying enough to have told the mothership about the existance of the site, but no, it was not possible to find this web portal by searching for it by URL on Google. To make matters worse, there is another arm of the same ISP that maintains a separate webmail site that looks very similar to the first one, but is not the same site. That site is what Google gave for search results when you looked up the first one, even though they are slightly different URLs and completely separate sites. Customers would repeatedly go to the wrong site and be unable to log into their email because they were not on the right website.

Now ignoring how stupid this whole situation was for the customers (and the tech support people like me who had to deal with it), note that in this case they simply got sent to a site by the same company, that failed to give them their email.

What if it hadn't been the same company? What if it was a phishing site? All these people who thought they had reached the right destination because they did a Google search for the site, instead of just typing the URL in their address bar have been typing their email credentials into someplace they shouldn't, giving them to who knows who.

Comment Re:Stupid move, celebrity (Score 4, Interesting) 225

Um Google owns the Blogger site so ya they are hosting the images. So they are making money from the images because they draw more people and that means more ads placed, more ads clicked, more ads sold. Bit of a women hater hu?

Were DMCA requests filed against the specific web pages hosting those pics? Or did they file a request for the images to be taken down from one person's blog, and assume that request runs to perpetuity for all future occurrences of the same image? Some people think Google actively monitors all the content on their services and will see the files automatically.

Comment Re:Makes Sense (Score 5, Insightful) 225

These photos were leaked on the Internet, and Google is like King of the Internet and can control and censor every last thing that happens on it.

This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want. Even when they have the URL.. That's like going to a reverse phone book to look up a person by their number -- to find out how to call them..

The biggest problem (that is often ignored) is you're now putting control over your access to the Internet in Google's hands by doing this. If Google doesn't want you to visit a website for business reasons, or political reasons, all they have to do is remove the sites from their search index. Unless you know how to actually browse to the site or think of looking on a search engine other than your usual, you're effectively blocked from it.

For these people Google does, in practice, have the ability to censor the Internet.
And browser makers increasing trend to monkeying with the address bar's function only makes it worse.

Comment Re:misleading (Score 2) 72

This is a misleading story and summary.

I got the impression the police were distributing this as some kind of internet filter, and secretly using it to monitor your computer.
It's not.
The are advertising it for what it is. A keylogger... so you can spy on your kids.

If it's for parents to monitor children, why is the data being sent to a third-party server? It should be staying on the computer for parents to peruse later.

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