Will only people who repeat government propaganda have the high scores?

If your score is above 75, you're probably a government propagandist.

This is why i use openDNS on my kids computer. You do realize children are not capable of making their own decisions 100% of the time right? You do realize that some things should be censored from kids so that they can have a childhood right?

I agree. And that is your responsibility as a parent. But I do not agree that the world at large should be barred from certain subject matters simply because your child should not see it.

Well, the other thing is that Google or whatever can use the power of advertising to convince people with DNT turned on to allow them to opt in.

Lest you think this is impossible, remember that we're talking about multiple circles of hell here.

The outer level? Totally free content, no ads. (Outer level is, in fact, not hell at all)

Inside level: Free content, with a few ads that are actually interesting.

Inside that level: Free content, with ads that are not remotely interesting. BROUGHT TO YOU BY VAGASIL! IF ITCHINESS LINGERS, PUT CREAM ON YOUR FINGERS! VAGASIL!

Inside that level: Free content, with ads that are positively unpleasant. You know the type, the ones that use fleas bouncing on an animated dog to advertise various mortgage rates you can get with a sub-prime loan. (That make you think "Does anyone think this is a good idea for an ad?")

Remember too that the selling attraction of some stores is that they carry ads tailored towards you. That's what Amazon.com's recommendation system is, for instance, and for many of us, that's actually a selling point. Now, sure, most of us don't want to see ads when we're not shopping, but, well, you get the drift.

Finally, it's hardly a disaster for Google if Microsoft does this. Google still has:

- Android
- Chrome and Firefox
- Macs
- The ability to revert to plan B - use the website the user's on to determine an appropriate ad

My gut feeling is that whatever Microsoft's goals here, this is generally a good thing, albeit with the risk that by making it opt-in it'll undermine the concept and encourage seedier advertisers to ignore it.

Pretty bizarre test IMO. A brand new PC with Windows:

- Contains software pre-installed by the Vendor. Expect the usual Symantec/Norton pre-installed crap to be phoning home every five minutes
- Likewise, except it to phone home to HP, Dell, or whatever, to download the latest ads... uh, I mean, "alerts". Yeah, yeah.
- Will phone home to Microsoft periodically to check for updates

Ubuntu actually does that last one too. Hell, for all I know, it does the first too, but I've never checked. Actually, no, wait, I know it does, because Firefox is the default browser, and that's getting all cloudy and "I can haz update?" these days.

OMG! UBUNTU IS SPYING ON ME!

It's nice on the one hand that Microsoft is making the privacy option the default, but if DNT is unenforceable, wouldn't "DNT by default" give certain entities an excuse to ignore the DNT flag by default?

From TFS:

Responding to complaints from Chinese Googlers that the search engine is 'inconsistent and unreliable,' Google has updated its service to help users steer clear of search queries that will result in page errors. Google will now highlight characters and phrases that are likely to 'break' a user's connection.

My reading of that is that Google is being censored, not that Google is censoring as otherwise not a word in it makes sense.

If Google were censoring, then the search engine would work normally, it's just certain search results would not appear. So a search for "Tienanmen Square Massacre" would come up with pages of results of, say, Fred Tienanmen's blog entry where he massacres those proposing that squares have the same sized sides, but would be absent anything about some funny business that occurred in China during the 1980s.

That's not what's happening though. What TFS is saying is that users are suffering random page errors, that the engine feels "inconsistent and unreliable". That's consistent with a third party, say, perhaps, the Great Firewall of China, interrupting page downloads as they happen because they have naughty words on them.

You do know that Google didn't own Motorola until LAST WEEK, right? And that Motorola's lawsuits were launched long before Google started the process of buying Motorola?

Could you list all the products Google had out a decade ago that now require you provide a phone number and real name to use, that didn't then?

Does Google search require this, for example? (Answer: no)
What about GMail? (Answer: no)
Google groups? (Answer: no)
Google maps? (Answer: no)
Google news? (Answer: no)
OK, well, iGoogle? (Answer: no)
Youtube? (Answer: no)

OK... so what are we talking about here?

I know that the generic Google account system recommends you give it a cellphone number, so you can recover your password more securely. But you're not required to. In fact, the only tool I'm aware of that requires you give your phone number is Google Voice, which it's required you do since its inception, because it needs it in order to work properly.

What about real names? Well, there's Google+, but that's new. And it has plenty of competition. And in fact, the real names thing is probably why Google+ hasn't taken off. So that pretty much kills that argument.

Real names are also required for... well, anything that uses payments (Google Play, for example, if, and only if, you buy something, and AdWords), because, well, credit cards are difficult to charge if you don't have a fucking name. But that's ALWAYS been the case, since Froogle.

AdSense does too, but again always has done. (Yes, Google knows who I am)

So, really, what's your argument here?

Google has always had services that require real names and/or real telephone numbers. They're pushing the latter recently solely to help you recover lost passwords, and they're pushing the former only in relation to one service that, by no stretch of the imagination, can remotely be considered to be having monopoly power, and whose primary competitor, which pre-existed Google+ by many years, has always had the same policy.

Yes, blaming Google for the actions started years ago of a company they literally bought last week is sure to prove your argument.

What? Google has patent trolls running proxy fights on phone makers who install Windows Phone, really?

That said, I'm not 100% sure Google is right here. Microsoft seems to be fairly open about wanting a slice of the Android phone cash bonanza, and is negotiating with phone manufacturers (as it should be - those are the people actually selling devices that have a price on them) without demanding amounts that would make Android phones impossible or uncompetitive.

Microsoft has even put some effort into ensuring Android phones fit within a Windows infrastructure, from licensing ActiveSync so it's integrated within the Android's native mail app, to porting across the Lync and OneNote clients.

That doesn't look to me to be Microsoft's usual brand of hostility. That looks, to me at least, more like Microsoft's attitude towards, say, Mac OS and Mac OS X. Provide the integration, and profit by the fact corporations can safely pick Microsoft-only infrastructure rather than rushing into the arms of rivals who provide more open, standard, systems than they do.