I have read it. Google rep showed up with a (probably unwelcome) government shadow. Doesn't mean that Google == Government. If they did, we'd never hear about any of these goings on. Google (and many other companies, and individuals) are often required to comply with governmental directives, on a daily basis.

It seems like half the people posting here today believe that Google is giggling and sending private data to the government willy nilly, when the case is they were legally required to, have constantly pushed back where possible against this kind of request, actively help campaign for better consumer protection, and, as soon as they legally are allowed to, inform the public of what teh government is making or trying to make them do.

And as noted, it's not just Google, Microsoft also, in a big way, and many other companies of all sizes.
The common thread here isn't Google and it being evil. The common thread is the government.

btw, I'm not a Google fanboy, or an any company fanboy. I own machines running windows, osx and linux and android. I use chrome firefox and... well I only use others when I have to actually, but if you want to be calling out evil companies, there's some real actual targets like big pharma, tobacco, etc. Google is a veritable choirboy compared to them imho. As is MS and Apple too. They make profits by making life better for us, big tobacco, on the other hand....... All the evil that seems to come out of these big tech companies is pulled out legally by the government, almost always against the companies desires.

No...... That's not Google's evil, that's the government's evil. When men in suits with the the power of the government behind them come to you legally requiring you to hand over a customers information, doing so doesn't make you evil. It makes you a law abiding citizen. And if they also legally prevent you from letting that customer know, that's their evil, not yours.

They were complying with the request from their local government that was legally reasonable, and that they had no place to interfere with, which they are required (just like every other person/entity/company) to do in order to operate within their locality.....

Yeah, and that is exactly how they get around disingenuous offshore entities... by putting an office out there with at least 1 employee in it. Then it's legitimate. All the larger companies save far more than it costs to set this up when they do so. Smaller companies cannot offset the cost. But that's purely based on the amount of money your company makes. There's a point where you have to get some tax loopholes, as that's what most of your best competitors are doing, and you aren't going to want to compete with a handicap... But the solution is tax reform, and ianap (i am not a politician(thank goodness)) so getting waaay of topic here :)

How much security he has on his personal machine is secondary.

Hackers/government/whoever will target the big databases with everyone's information in them. That is worth their time. If your information is in there, you suffer also.
Hackers/government/whoever are far far far less likely to be hacking your personal computer, unless you've managed to get flagged already, and become a target through some other means, which sure can happen, but the point is, you don't need to be targeted to have your identity stolen if your identity information is being logged and stored by multiple other systems.
Simply not having/being in those big databases is better than any personal firewall imho.

Ran out of mod points, or I'd give you some :) Posting instead:
Always call people on this kind of shit. So many people trying to avoid responsibility for what they say or do these days.... and he was already posting as AC to begin with.....

Ahh, as you said, same mysql interface used in many other languages. The problem was never that "The old MySQL wasn't secure" - I actually think the new mysql implementation is too much hand holding and coddling. I've been writing in PHP using MySQL for over 15 years now, and I did/do my own security on for it, same as I wrote/write my own user authentication, and specify htaccess rules, and set up firewalls (or have the sysadmin do it for me)... The problem with PHP is also what makes it so good: It's easy to get into. And that's great, When interviewing for more PHP developers, it's really not hard to tell which ones are programmers and which aren't.
Whatever the field, it's good to have an easy-access at entry level tool that's capable of, when you learn it properly, full commercial-grade applications.
PHP is a lot like photoshop: Easy to get started in, and make a mess with, and if skilled, and you master it, capable of top quality professional work, but just because there's a lot of "I'm a designer, I've got a mac with photoshop" or similar, it doesn't mean the quality of work is there.
Most other web development languages have smaller "user bases" and higher levels of entry, so the problem is far less prevalent, or they're frameworks that allow lesser skilled developers to produce 'working' product without needing to even think about things like security. But hate the player, not the game :)

Perhaps it's just my circles, however, as a contractor, right now I'm doing work for Verizon, AT&T, Cisco, and others... I've worked with hundreds of designers, programmers, etc, etc, and most of us have done work for fortune 500 companies, and they're all as the grandparent described. Personally I find it to often be even worse in ways I don't have the time to get into.
I'm now curious as to if there are any statistics on where web developer work ends up...
I started programming before the internet existed, and moved from C to PHP when the internet took off, been making websites ever since.
I was (still am) proud of how fast I can build any type of website from scratch, and still get to do small amounts of that occasionally, but I've had to learn multiple frameworks from Drupal (please god no) to Wordpress (please god no) to Cake (please god no) to (please god no)..... I loathe them all, not equally, but no love for any of them (Well, I actually kinda like jQuery now, but can do fine without it). They serve a purpose however, and when clients all want fast development times, and don't mind bloated codebases and inevitable security issues and heavier duty servers to support it, I give them what they want in the timeframe that takes. But I love when I get to write something clean from the ground up.
On the other hand, I love basecamp, foundation, have my own custom css on top, etc, that allows me to focus more on the programming, and less on bollocks like responsive design support... I guess that's a bit hypocritical of me :P

HTML is structure and layout, not programming.
CSS is structured storing of display values, not programming.
Using a structured specified format to lay out static structural content is not quite the same as "computer instructions" Unless you call using notepad to write a shopping list "programming" (you're using the code of the alphabet to instruct the program to display them in a specific static order.....)
If you need your site to do more than display pages of content, you need something more.
A programming language of some sort.
There's javascript, python, php, asp, etc, etc, etc... All web programming languages.

Show me the pseudocode version of something written in pure html and css, and we'll see how much programming is involved.
Show me how HTML manages mutable variables, and basic logic structures and loops....

By your logic, that'd be like me saying: you are doing X. X is dangerous, so we make it illegal.
Now it is up to you to prove it isn't dangerous, until then, you can't do it. Where X can be anything from smoking pot to eating cornflakes to singing Justin Beiber lyrics in a public place.
The missing piece in the above example, and yours, is that perhaps the issue should be scientifically analysed and proven to be a problem before a law is made prohibiting it. I don't think the law should come first and it be up to the victims to do the research.
Responsibility is the lawmakers. And whoever votes them into office does so based on what they claim they're going to do - well the general public voters think that's what's going on anyway, but still, it's not on the general public to prove that THC intoxication doesn't significantly impact driving accident rates any more that we should have to prove any other arbitrary scenario.
This isn't shifting responsibility, it's leaving it where it belongs.

All it needs to say is "Yes Dear" and give compliments, save me a lifetime of grief. Of course, it'll also need to learn how to apologise when it's right... That might be a bit trickier.

I think there's a pretty good chance this will cost him more votes than it gains him.
Really, the only votes this will get him is from apple fanbois that care more about their favourite brand than wasteful spending.
People who care about spending, or dislike apple (Which while less outspoken I think are still a majority) won't vote for him because of this, I'd think.
And, in Australia, everyone has to vote, unlike the USA where it's optional, which changes the demographics of voters from just the 'politically minded' to 'everyone', which needs to be taken into consideration.

If google gets, say, a million complaints sent through, and facebook does nothing, then the Google can make public "We forwarded a million complaints, and facebook did nothing", which, if timed correctly, probably as facebook makes some "we listen to our users, if 100,000 people ask for something, then we do it" type publicity, google can trot this out... Not saying they would, or should need to, but it's hanging over facebook's head unless they deal with it. Google is just being the 'big backer' for our complaints, thus giving them credibility.
Sure, perhaps there are better things that could be done, but this is surely better than Google doing nothing?