However, I find it worrying that people trust google. They are just as rabidly chomping at the bit of profit as Disney or NBC, or whatever. They don't have an altruistic plank in their yachts. They pretend to "not be evil" but regularly exert their dominance in public exposure via the web to piss all over other markets in an effort to clear a path for their own business strategy. They make things "free" so nobody can compete in conventional terms, forcing them into advertising revenue or similar structures and guess who has a huge monopoly on advertising online? Yeah... so before you go suckling the teet of google or similar companies, remember what it is they are after in the end.

Your other points are pretty fair, but I fail to see how this one is sufficient to characterize Google as "evil" or "untrustworthy" for that matter. Google and other corporations have shown over a decade now that advertising and other means of revenue are a sustainable strategy. Redhat has made it in the top 500 by creating Free software. If competing in conventional terms is now obsolete and can't win against Google's model, as you imply, why hold on to the old structures? I'm not into demonizing successful companies unless they're being anticompetitive and Google is not one of those companies. They have stated that they can and plan to make money by "not doing evil" and they're doing just that. They're the most open to competition between the three corporations mentioned in the fine article. (Open Standards, Open Web, etc).

Sorry to the rest for feeding a troll, but let's have some facts:

A month ago from today, mozilla didn't have any info on the vulnerability:

http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/02/22/secunia-advisory-sa38608/

neither did secunia:

http://blog.psi2.de/en/2010/02/20/going-commercial-with-firefox-vulnerabilities/comment-page-1/#comment-666

“This particular report is a bit special because of the lack of information available. Normally, we do not write about vulnerabilities unless certain details are available and / or we can test it. () and previous vulnerabilities reported by this company / person has proved to be reliable.

Mozilla posted was contacted by Evgeny Legerov on the 18th:

http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/03/18/update-on-secunia-advisory-sa38608/

So the response time is well under a month. now compare that to the time it took Microsoft to release the patch for the Aurora exploit:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-01/22/microsoft-learned-of-ie-zero-day-flaw-last-september.aspx http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9147058/Microsoft_patches_IE_admits_it_knew_of_bug_last_August?taxonomyName=Security&taxonomyId=17

From this evidence I can not come to the conclusion that slashdot is reacting fanboyishly when criticizing microsoft on security. Quite the opposite. I can however say that you're quick at defending microsoft without investigating the whole story, much like what you criticize slashdot readers of doing. I don't know, but in my book that is a fanboyish reaction on your behalf. =]

Actually, all modern browsers are eating off internet explorer's market share at the moment, simply by supporting new standards and being better browsers overall. Google going after firefox's market share makes no sense at all.

This is fact. IE lost 7% marketshare more or less last year, most of which firefox and chrome absorbed. For standards to continue forward, it's crucial that there are alot of competing browsers on the market, each with a good percent of marketshare.

So, even if HTML5 video were such an issue to the general population (which it isn't until youtube's HTML5 beta comes out of beta), it's more in Google's interest to continue to eat away IE's marketshare while having strong standard-compliant competitors like Opera, Safari and firefox.

Google's true enemy is IE's poor standard compliance. And frankly it's our (the users) enemy too.

Your definition of opening up their technology excludes small competitors and open source altogether though. And they are a large part of the competition out there today. Even inside a patent regime like the one in the US, there are ways to license your technology such that it does not exclude competition, while at the same time making a handsome profit. Software patents are squarely the one to blame and RAND licenses in particular. Such licensing schemes often lead to oligopolies, which are quite ant-capitalistic.

Actually it's a software patent problem that excludes small commercial vendors and open source vendors of any size. The HTML5 video spec does not define a standard codec, so using the operating system's back end is a reasonable choice for mozilla. The problem is that mozilla can not have native support for h.264 in any reasonable way that would let its users, or firefox variants for that case (like iceweasel/icecat, swiftweasel, etc), redistribute a modified version of their browser.

This whole problem could be avoided if Google decided to push for VP8 on youtube and license it in a way it could be used in open source software without patent restrictions.

Of course, the whole problem could be avoided altogether if software patents weren't allowed in the first place. This is a fine example of legal Bullshit getting in the way of technology.

A 3% marketshare for Bing is hardly anything to get excited about. Bing is seriously terrible compared to Google. Try any other language than english and you're fucked.

Also, Microsoft is terrible at privacy compared to Google. You may be too young to remember Google fighting off a subpoena to hand over user information, while Yahoo and Microsoft caved:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39248192,00.htm
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2006/01/19

Also, where was microsoft when Google was making a stand in China? Yup, nowhere...

Lastly, you mention that microsoft is deleting user data within 6 months as if it's a policy used today. If you read their own announcement, what they're saying is that they'll remove IP addresses from queries after 6 months and remaining cross-session IDs after 18 months. But they plan to implement this policy a year to a year and a half from now!

http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010/01/19/microsoft-advances-search-privacy-with-bing.aspx