I can't believe that came from your mouth!
Google Glasses for Hipsters Too Lazy to Use a Smartphone
Apr 11th
This is getting a little silly. Is there such a thing as information overload?
And really? Moron can’t find the music section on his own? And no one uses Google Circles. Instead of calling it “Project Glass” they should call it “Googley Eyes.”
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
How to Opt Out of Google’s Privacy Policy
Apr 4th
It is very convenient and allows you to “toil on the hinterlands and die young.”
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Microsoft Hits G-Mail Over Keyword Snooping
Feb 2nd
Microsoft released a YouTube video making fun of the G-Mail man who snoops through your email to target you with ads. And with more and more companies beginning to outsource their email to G-Mail, it is nice to see that there are alternatives out there.
I’ve used G-Mail for a corporate environment, and it was okay. Best things were the mobility, ease of access and fast searching capability. Drawback is that it was Google, with the ad-targeting, the questionable privacy tactics and the reports of breaches.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Google Maps Sued by Looters
Feb 2nd
French cartographers are pissed that Google is giving away their maps for free. They have been unable to sell any of their own maps because they simply can’t run a business, so they went the way of Atlas Shrugs and sued under some Dog Eat Dog clause. Now Google owes these crappy cartographers and their crooked lawyers about 660 Thousand bucks.
From CNET here:
You may like that Google Maps is free, but a French court says it’s actually anticompetitive.
A Paris court earlier this week ordered Google France and its parent company Google to pay plaintiff Bottin Cartographes 500,000 euros (about $660,000) for providing its free mapping services to businesses across the country. The court also required Google to pay a 15,000 euro fine for its practice.“We proved the illegality of (Google’s) strategy to remove its competitors,” Jean-David Scemmama, attorney for Bottin Cartographes, a company that provides mapping services to businesses, told the AFP in an interview earlier this week. “The court recognized the unfair and abusive character of the methods used, and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application.”
Bottin has been arguing its case against Google for two years, claiming the search giant was engaging in anticompetitive practices by using its free service to take control over the online-mapping industry.
I can see the need for some companies to purchase professionally created maps, and Google isn’t providing those, so I really can’t see how these guys have a case. Google ought to just buy the company and start selling professional paper maps to businesses world wide.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Search Terms Now Being Encrypted By Google
Dec 2nd
The Web referrer logs of Belch.Com are now showing these typical stats below:
This is a result of Google encrypting their search terms for signed-in users, and it will have a lasting effect on all kinds of web services that rely on using search keywords and terms to understand what kinds of topics and content are driving traffic to a site. Google does this by providing the search results as normal to a logged-in user, but they replace the normal referrer line in the web request to a server with the “encrypted_search_terms” phrase. And yes, it violates the RFC for web referrals, but honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for this change to become a reality.
Google’s blog post here talks about this change. And you know, you can actually use this referrer term against them by using your website’s .htaccess file, a text based access control list, to redirect inbound connections with that referrer line to a specific site on your website, perhaps one with a known high clickrate for ads.
And I LOLed that everyone is searching for Anderson Cooper being gay. Gads, everyone knows he is, he should just come out of the closet already.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Bye Bye Blogger
Jul 8th
Google is stabbing the Blogger brand name in its poorly coded heart and will be dropping the brand as it moves to remake itself as it pushes Google Plus.
From Mashable here:
Say goodbye to the Picasa and Blogger names: Google intends to retire several non-Google name brands and rename them as Google products, Mashable has learned.
The move is part of a larger effort to unify its brand for the public launch of Google+, the search giant’s social initiative.
Blogger and Picasa aren’t going away, of course — they’re two of Google’s most popular products. Instead, according to two sources familiar with the matter, Google intends to rename Picasa “Google Photos” and Blogger will become “Google Blogs.”
I’ve tried to use the blogger platform a couple of times and always hated it. Too clunky and the site has chronic uptime problems and allows your detractors to falsely flag your site to prevent visitors. Google does a few things really well. Maps, for instance. Of course, search is still the best out there. Their video site was a huge failure, and gmail to me is marginally usable. With the rebranding going on with the Google+ push, I’m holding my breath, but honestly, I’m expect it to be clunky and still not as popular as facebook. Is anyone getting excited about Google+?
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Google Plus to Take On Facebook
Jun 29th
Google Plus has some pretty cool concepts, but its biggest drawback is going to be the biggest drawback about Facebook- All your data is in the mitts of a giant corporation that just wants to mine your information for money.
I for one wont be joining the google network, but I have a feeling that others will. Do any of the readers here want to jump ship from Facebook to Google?
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Someone’s Not a Happy Farmer
Jun 7th
Some farmer spent quite a bit of effort to make this awesome crop circle. There is an airport nearby, and maybe the farmer intended his message to be read by those small aircraft using that aviation field. Click here to see this on Google Maps.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Ready for the Google Toilet?
May 15th
It will serve you ads based on its analysis of your scat.
This is old, and its from current TV, Al Gore’s abortion of a cable network. That explains why I haven’t seen it before.
But if there was a Google potty I’m sure it would target me with ads for hotwings, salad dressing and new books, and of course, huge multi-paks of air fresheners.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
No Fury Like a Woman Scorned
Feb 5th
Jack Weppler done pissed a bitch off. Look what she did with his photo, an hour on Memegenerator, and a dash of good google fu. Anyone googling his name in the future will find these:
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
How the Web Browser Works
Nov 8th
A geeky cartoon here shows how a web browsers work.
Thanks to FMLFTW for the graphic.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Goombahs Live Here
Oct 13th
There is a winery near my home called “Quattro Goomba’s” Winery. While looking for directions to it on my iPhone, I misspelled goomba, adding an H to the end. Google automatically redirected me to a hunk of rock on the western side of Malta. I reckon that must be the mythical source of all goombahs.
Apparently there used to be a fungus growing atop this rock that was highly prized for its medicinal purposes and people were put to death for stealing it. It was harvested for a while too.
From Gozofarmhouse here:
Fungus Rock or, as it is locally known, the Gebla tal-General which translates to General’s Rock. It is called so in remembrance of the Italian General who centuries ago fell to his death while supervising quarrying activities in the area.
History tells us that a special plant with medicinal and healing properties used to grow on Fungus Rock and because of this the Rock used to be heavily guarded during the era of the Knights of Malta. Anyone caught stealing the crop was sentenced to death or to life on the galleys.The crop was picked and brought to the mainland by using a primitive system of baskets and pulleys
I’m thinking psychodelic mushrooms.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
11 AM Music: Arcade Fire – “The Wilderness Downtown”
Sep 7th
Arcade Fire teamed up with Google Maps and Chrome’s HTML5 capability to produce what may be one of the first interactive music videos. Click the logo below to go to the website in Chrome and enter the address of where you grew up. One part of the video urges you to write a quick note to your childhood self. Very creative concept and awesome music!
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Headshot at Anti Violence Rally in the Ghetto
Aug 4th
Once each year, the ghetto stays open late as residents celebrate “National Night Out” which is supposed to somehow stop violence and drugs. Two fellas were arguing and one ended up dead. Not surprising when you realize the Google Streetview van cruised this block with the doors locked.
From Fox by way of Drudge here:
A man attending a block party as part of the National Night Out anti-crime initiative was shot and killed in Paterson, N.J.
Police say 39-year-old Robert Godfrey was shot in the head while arguing with another man Tuesday.
It happened in front of a crowd just before midnight at 74 Godwin Ave.
Paterson Police on Wednesday were searching for Marlon Rochester. The 30-year-old has been charged with Godfrey’s murder and weapons offenses.
This kind of thing seems to happen pretty frequently whenever liberals try to throw block parties to stop violence. See this prior instance here.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
Happy Birthday PacMan!
May 21st
Once upon a time, long before I used to scour pubs and restaurants for Golden Tee Golf, I used to ride my ten-speed with my friends looking for 7-Elevens or other similar convenience stores like the Little Sue store pictured below and we would spend our allowances and newspaper route money on PacMan, Ms. Pacman, and Crystal Castles.

I didn’t even know it was PacMan’s 30th birthday until I had to do a Google search and saw the playable Google banner. Now I can’t remember what I was going to search for. So if you haven’t played a free game of Google PacMan, you should.
Were there any coin-op games you remember playing that you would make a special trip for?
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
So Google Collected PCAPS? Who Cares?
May 14th
Other than the paranoid privacy geeks, no one cares that Google snapped a few errant frames of data from open wireless access points from its Street View van as it roamed the neighborhoods. Get this privacy geeks- People are broadcasting it onto the open airwaves. Just as if it were citizen band radio or a walkie talkie. Anyone can sniff the packets and collect them. And its not illegal.

Drudge blasted the headlines today that Google has somehow captured peoples’ emails. WHATever. If you had any idea about the amount of meta information Google collects on all of your online activities, you would probably want to log off right now and not connect to the intertubes again.
Most people have a Gmail or YouTube account. Google tracks all of your online video watching habits and it sniffs your emails for keywords to target you with advertising. Even this blog features Google’s Adsense, and if my words alone don’t create targeted ads for you, your own surfing habits might produce ads that target you better. Google tracks your web surfing habits via cookies generated from any Adsense enabled site you visit.
Just think about the keywords for searches you send to Google. I once gave a presentation on how hackers target and collect the Google keyword searches from compromised systems because it provides a really accurate profile of who you are and where you live and what your interests are- My own past queries over the last few days lists search terms for nearby restaurants, local events, automobiles that interest me, tips on potty training, and medical terms that I would find embarrassing if they were to be known. A hacker can use that information to further the theft of your identity. And Google already has all of it. Yours, your neighbors, your community, and everyone else.
So before you start getting outraged that Google snagged your WAP ID of “Linksys” and the fact that you might have been viewing porn at the time, do everyone a favor. Get more outraged about the stuff that they are already tracking about you. And dammit, secure your Wireless Access Point and stop surfing porn.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
The Real Reason Google is Pulling Out of China?
Mar 22nd
I had written previously here about Google’s righteous indignation at how the Chinese had hacked their Gmail accounts to scrape information on dissidents and internal corporate secrets and how Google vowed to GTFO of China. Suddenly Google was sick of China’s censorship policies even though they knew what those policies were when they began their ventures there. They vowed to shutter Google.CN.
There is a Reuters story here about how China is accusing Google of simply backing down on their own commitments in the pending shutdown of Google.CN. But is the real reason why they are shutting down simply because they got their asses kicked in the market by Baidu? And does blaming Chinese hackers allow them to back out of a market without looking like their search engine is not the best?
Joseph Evers of EncyclopediaDramatica thinks so, and I must admit his theory looks pretty good to me. He wrote on the ED blog during the Aboriginal article scandal:
The “Aboriginal” article was recently removed from Google Australia’s search engine results. This was right after Google had done a large amount of grandstanding about fighting Chinese censorship. Which proves they’re a bunch of spineless hypocrites. Really, you have to admire the shrewdness of Google. China was a gigantic business failure, and a loss leader. With a bunch of CIA and shareholder money Google went in promising that their search technology was really so much better that the Chinese market would fall in a fortnight. Years and what is likely billions later, Baidu completely dominates the Chinese search market. By spinning an obvious business failure as a failure of RED POLITICS Google was able to pull out of China without losing face. Their idiot shareholders sat there and applauded them for wasting billions of their money. For that I give Google a lot of respect. They are some of the most brilliant marketers around, but as anyone who has used Google’s ad placement can attest, the only thing they really excel at selling is themselves.
So if you hear Google touting how they are fighting censorship, remember that they are the world leader in Censorship. Maybe they are finding out that censorship is bad business, but make no mistake. Business failure in China is why Google is getting out of China.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
The Whole World Will Know How Fat You Are
Jan 29th
Now with the new wifi-enabled scale that interacts with your iPhone and Google Health, the whole world will know how fat you are and where to mail your donuts and pizza.

From the Reg here:
Not content with knowing where you go, both in real and cyber space, Google will soon know how much you weigh too – thanks to wi-fi-connected scales.
The scale in question come from Withings, and it was launched last year with connections to various fitness websites and an iPhone application. But now Withings has managed to integrate its monitoring software into Google Health, allowing users to share their current weight with the chocolate factory without leaving the comfort of their own bathroom.
Imagine receiving targeted advertising fliers in your mail based on your body mass index? Coupons for free donuts and barbecue sauce? Bring it. Coupons for yoga classes or yogurt because you’re a skinny minnie? Well, if that’s what you’re into. Not sure why anyone would be interested in this, but it exists.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.



















