And it’s a doozy:
So, par for the course for Google, really.
…most wonderful person that they’ve ever known in their lives. Slate, of all organizations, summed it up best:
Is PRISM ghostwriting now? RT @Slate: Identical passages in Larry Page’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s PRISM denials: http://t.co/QujqKOOmcy
— Timothy P Carney (@TPCarney) June 7, 2013
Basically, it looks for all the world like Google and Facebook got some sort of recommended talking points memo designed to end this hullabaloo by giving them something suitably vacuous to say that would allow them to, I think, progress past this issue and move on.
…OK, I’ll stop now.
Moe Lane
I mean, I like Firefox, but dear God but I want this:
Google’s Chrome browser might soon be getting an easy way to tell you which open tabs are making noise, or recording it. The new feature is part of the latest Chromium build, and features a throbbing EQ animation over the noisy tab’s favicon (video below) to tell you and your system that it’s doing audio stuff. Chromium is the open source project that feeds into Google’s Chrome browser, and is often the first place that its new features show up.
Via Instapundit. I don’t know why this isn’t built into every browser anyway, honestly.
This is awesome. I know that this post will also make no sense starting Sunday, but that’s all right.
Eric Schmidt’s not very happy with life:
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to the Washington Post. So remarkable that Post editors preceded the transcript with this disclosure: “He had just come from the dentist. And he had a toothache.”
[snip]
“So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,” Mr. Schmidt told the Post. “It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?”
Yeah, Eric: you’re saying that your company got mugged by the branch of the legislature (i.e., the Senate) still controlled by the political party (i.e., the Democrats) that you’ve been giving a badly-disguised leg up for some time now, and you don’t care for it.
…Oops?
Moe Lane
Let me explain this one: there’s a debate Thursday that’s being sponsored by FoxNews & Google. Google is letting people submit questions via YouTube – frankly, this has more than a slight whiff of gimmick about it, but let’s roll with the notion for a moment. The preliminary survey of submitted questions indicate that the top two categories of questions submitted are “Government Spending” and Debt (17%) and “Jobs & Economy” (16%), with “Social Issues” (12%) and “Energy and Environment” (9%) being the next two. By my calculations, that means that roughly 54% of the questions being submitted involve one of those four topics, which I think that we can all agree are legitimately of interest to Republican voters, yes?
Well, WE HAVE YET TO HAVE A 2012 REPUBLICAN PRIMARY DEBATE WHERE FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT OF THE QUESTIONS WERE LEGITIMATELY OF INTEREST TO REPUBLICAN VOTERS. We have, instead, had inane questions at worst and invitations to intra-debate sniping at best. I for one am getting tired of it. And, apparently, I’m not the only one, either. Continue reading Debt & Jobs dominate GOP FoxNews/Google debate question requests.
(Via Hot Air Headlines) To summarize this Politico article: Google’s testing out a new ad program that harvests email addresses. Fine*. This appeals to political campaigns. Also fine. A NRSC staffer saw something that looks like said ad program – one apparently bought by the Obama campaign – on Real Clear Politics last month, and emails Google’s ad people to get a pricing on a similar service. Still fine. But Google informed the NRSC staffer that:
“This is a pre-alpha product that is being released to a select few clients,” [a Google saleswoman] wrote in an email, referring to the first stage of a product’s roll-out. “I’d be happy to get you into the beta if you’re interested.”
Not fine. Continue reading #rsrh Google covering up sweetheart Obama deal?
OK, I admit it: when I heard this morning that Rep. Weiner had supposedly sent a coed a picture of his (encased) genitalia via Twitter, I assumed that somebody was just having his or her little joke by hacking into the man’s account and indicating that Weiner is, as I put it, one of the bigger d*cks in Congress. But that was before Ace of Spades demolished this argument utterly (H/T: Neil Stevens) (remember, folks [and bad Moe!]: identity theft is a crime), so now I am taking this seriously as a possible scandal, and I found something interesting going on. Somebody’s scrubbing the recipient’s Internet presence, even as we speak.
Continue reading #Weinergate update: Coed being scrubbed from Google.
Well, isn’t this interesting: apparently Blogger/Google has decided to remove Ann Althouse’s blog. They’re also being neither particularly helpful in either explaining why, nor sounding particularly sympathetic that it’s been taken down, either. One reason why I never used that particular webhosting service
Wonder if this has anything to do with Ann’s objective (and thus, anti-administration) coverage of the Wisconsin protests? I certainly hope that it has nothing to do with that…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
THEY’VE DECIDED THAT THEIR NEW LINE OF WEB-OPTIMIZED NETBOOKS WILL NOT HAVE A CAPS LOCK KEY, BECAUSE – I QUOTE – “WE EXPECT THIS WILL IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF COMMENTS ACROSS THE WEB.”
It won’t, of course – as Gizmodo notes, this can be evaded via the trivial exercise of holding down the shift key, assuming that some aggrieved caps locker doesn’t create a mod that addresses the problem – and as Gizmodo also notes, this kind of restriction doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem. I will add that Google’s willingness to still try to take my choices away from me pretty much confirms that it’ll be a c0ld day in Hell before I buy one of their netbooks and/or use the Chrome browser. Because if they have a taste for restricting my behavior for the perceived sins of others on this unbelievably minor issue, then what’s keeping from trying to do it for more important things?
THAT’S RIGHT. NOTHING.
Moe Lane
Update: Backtracking already?
