Google Shared IP for "Crime" of Free Speech

In August this year, a citizen from India was arrested, charged with posting insulting images of a historic figure to Google’s social network Orkut.com, CNet reports.

What the Indian authorities did to find the man’s identity to arrest him was to first query Google for the Orkut user IP, that unique address assigned to us when we surf the web which can be so helpful to authorities all over the world. With that IP address in hand – Google handed it over in “compliance with Indian legal process”, as they said – the authorities marched onwards to the Internet Service Provider, who in turn gave them a name assigned to that IP.

Only that, as it turns out, the ISP made an error and provided the wrong data, which then led to a 3-week jailing of a completely innocent person (as opposed to a person “guilty” of the crime of free speech within Orkut, that is).

In the meantime, Google, by handing over the IP of the Orkut poster, were showing that they do not always respect basic human rights (like free speech), if those rights are “overruled” by local laws. (We don’t know how much Google knew of the charges – Google refused to give CNet details on the order – but if they didn’t know details, then it’s their job to ask for them.)
Google simply stated that “authorities are required to follow legal process to get information,” and that’s it for them. There’s just one caveat: a set of laws do not replace any person’s responsibility to act morally by their own definition, not when it comes to crucial, core issues. A company’s compromises in this area are being paid by citizens who end up in jail; with the company not being the source of the problem (the source of the issue is the government, which may or may not have been installed in democratic ways), but the company acting as a “mindless” and seemingly amoral government tool, like so many companies did before throughout history.

New iGoogle Themes

Laurenty mentions in the forum that Google has added some new official themes for the iGoogle homepage. I’m not seeing these yet, but after a bit of digging around I was able to find the necessary XML files. So, if you want to enable any of the new themes before they’re made available to you, simply follow these instructions:

Visit www.google.com/ig.

Enter the following in your browser’s address bar:

javascript:_dlsetp('preview_skin=skins/jr.xml');

Where jr.xml can be the XML filename from any one of following new themes:

Aja Tiger: tiger.xml
Autumn: autumn.xml
Hong Kong: hongkong.xml
JR: jr.xml
Solar System: planets.xml
Click the Save button.

Google Tests Alternative Google.cn Homepage

Google China is playing around with a new homepage prototype at google.cn/hp?sp=china. At this time this is an alternative, not a replacement to the existing, more minimalist Google.cn, and it’s also not even linked from the Google China homepage yet... might be Google is only test-driving this for now.

What you can see on this page – check the screenshot with automated English translations added – is a lot of content; a push model vs the Google.com pull model, more suited for guiding people around (Yahoo/ portal-style) than relying on people always knowing exactly what they’re looking for. There’s tabs for music, TV stuff, games, software links and more. There are Google tools to choose from like the Google Input Method Editor (to transliterate Pinyin keyboard input into Chinese letters), or the Google toolbar. The tool links are showing an animated icon when you hover over them, similar to what happens at Google Korea. There’s the hot searches of the day, and a directory-style navigation below (the data to which we met earlier this year during the release of daohang.google.cn).

Android: The "Gphone" Mobile Platform

In a recent press release and blog post, Google has finally announced what many have been waiting for... well, kinda.
Andy Rubin, Director of Mobile Platforms at Google, thinks that what Google has announced is “more significant and ambitious than a single phone.” From the Open Handset Alliance website:<<>>
Mobile handsets using the Android Platform are expected to be ready for release in late 2008, although developers are being told to expect an SDK on November 12th this year.
After all the speculation over the past couple of years, what do people think? Is this better than a Google-branded mobile phone?
Engadget has live coverage of the conference call.

How to Enable Google Analytics Site Search

You can now log-in to your Google Analytics account to start enabling the new Site Search feature for a site of yours. The data won’t show right away, but apparently it will after some time (I just enabled Site Search today so I don’t know exactly what happens). Here’s how:

1. (First you need to make sure you have some kind of search engine for your site; e.g. in this blog, there’s a search box to the right side in the navigation utilized by the Google AJAX Search API; also, you must have the Google Analytics tracker script available in your pages.)
2. Go to Google Analytics
3. Next to your site, click Edit
4. On your site’s profile, again click Edit (in the top right)
5. Scroll down on the settings page and check the “Do Track Site Search” box
6. In the Query Parameter input box, enter e.g. “q” (no quotes) when your query parameter is q, as in http://example.com/search.php?q=hello+world
7. Hit the Save Changes button
8. Repeat for all of your sites

AdSense Ad In Speech Bubble

There’s an interesting type of Google ad placement on Pac-txt.com (a game of Pac-Man recreated as interactive fiction): a cartoon monster on a black background is connected to a speech bubble which seamlessly wraps a AdSense text ad. And a thought bubble below the monster integrates a couple of “digg this"-stye icons. The ad placement is original and kinda neat... though I wonder if Google would object to such a composition?
Here’s what the AdSense policies say:
Publishers participating in the AdSense program: ...• May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks• May not place misleading images alongside individual ads
Also, the policies say “No AdSense code may be integrated into a software application” (for instance, I was once asked to remove AdSense from the Blogoscoped chat, where they were placed on top of the chat room).

Source:
http://blogoscoped.com