Business people apparently don't understand English words

What you said:

“Universities don’t innovate,” says Curtis R. Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., that bought what remained of RCA’s lab. “Innovation means you get it out so people can use it. The university is not going to take it to the world.”

What you meant:

"While universities do most of the innovation, they tend not to productize. Those innovations don't always turn out to be practical, cheap, scalable, or a thousand other things that a functioning product depends on, particularly in the time horizons that the short attention spans of MBAs like me can wrap their heads around."

We make orders of magnitude less money than you do; the least you could do is give credit where credit is due. You might have heard of a little company called Google? Care to guess whether that innovative little venture came out of a university or not? Want me to send you the list of companies that were started out of Stanford, Berkeley, or UW alone (nevermind MIT, Harvard, etc.)?

Oh hell

I just noticed that I'm the first link you hit in Google if you search for "dateline defcon".

So, umm...hi world!

I was wondering why I was attracting attention from NBC Universal (hi NBC Universal!):

altabur231.nbcuni.com, Tue Aug 7 11:10:20 PDT 2007, page viewed: http://halcyonic.blogspot.com/2007/08/video-from-datelinedefcon-fiasco.html
altabur233.nbcuni.com, Tue Aug 7 11:11:08 PDT 2007, page viewed: http://halcyonic.blogspot.com/2007/08/video-from-datelinedefcon-fiasco.html
altaec231.nbcuni.com, Tue Aug 7 11:11:11 PDT 2007, page viewed: http://halcyonic.blogspot.com/2007/08/video-from-datelinedefcon-fiasco.html
altaec231.nbcuni.com, Tue Aug 7 11:11:35 PDT 2007, page viewed: http://halcyonic.blogspot.com/2007/08/video-from-datelinedefcon-fiasco.html

...

altaec231.nbcuni.com, Tue Aug 7 12:03:21 PDT 2007, page viewed: http://halcyonic.blogspot.com/2007/08/video-from-datelinedefcon-fiasco.html

I'm going to be sued for something now, aren't I?

Relatedly, I'd like to title this next picture, "Why We Are All Google's Bitch":



Also, I (heart) Google Analytics.

Google censorship

I hadn't quite realized the degree to which Google "fine-tunes" their results. It appears they do, in fact, exercise a certain degree of censorship, which is kind of disturbing. Observe Zittrain and Edelman's preliminary study comparing the results of google.com versus google.fr and google.de.

The issue is actually a rather interesting one that cuts to the heart of the Internet age. The reason everyone is salivating to invest in Google is that they seem the best positioned company to serve as the portal through which everyone gets to the Internet. AOL tried to do this, in their own way, and this is part of why they were a darling of the tech bubble. But, of course, they failed. They were overly ambitious: they sought to actually reshape the internet by creating a veneer over it. They wanted AOL to _be_ the Internet. Problem is, the Internet doesn't want to be controlled by AOL. Enter Google.

Google had the much more workable idea of simply being a directory for the Internet. They have no interest in controlling every last inch of cyberspace (per se). They just want to be the resource you go to to find what you're looking for. Turns out, this is pretty much just as powerful as controlling the Internet as a whole, and yet it still allows the Internet to grow independently.

However, that power is exactly the trouble. Think about how often you use Google to find what you're looking for. Hell, half the time even if you know what website you're going to, you still go to Google to pull up the actual URL for you because you're lazy. Think about the power that gives them. They control exactly what you can and cannot see. If they choose not to list your website, you may very well never see it! Even if you do, 99.999% of the rest of the population won't (because they're not as tech savvy as you are, you clever dog).

Think, for a minute, what would happen if the government owned Google. What if the government had that kind of power over what information you could and could not find? Wouldn't that freak you the fuck out?

And yet, there are at least some checks on government. You have the power to vote elected officials out of office if they piss you off. You essentially have no such power over Google. You have no say. And there are no laws governing what Google can and cannot list, really. They're completely lacking in oversight. The only thing that's there to keep them honest is whether they can continue to get ad revenue. As it happens, that does tend to keep them somewhat honest, and yet...it should still make you supremely uneasy.

Anyway, here's a list of other sources from someone on the Harvard tech forum mailing list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-03-02-n19.html
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
http://www.sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_removes_German_BMW_from_search_results
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/27/google_doesnt_censor/

A little peek at the inside of Google

Interesting little peek at how the inside of Google works from a now-Microsoftie. I very much agree with pretty much every suggestion the guy makes. Food should be free at Microsoft, and developers should have much more freedom over what kind of computers they are using. The quick-stop tech support is a brilliant idea as well.

Viacom vs. YouTube (i.e., Google)

Viacom fires. Google responds.

I still think Google is boned. There is no fundamental difference between the Napster case and the YouTube case. Both were centrally controlled services hosting arbitrary content. Neither one themselves posted infringing content, but both derived their business model from pirated content. If Google's argument rests on the DMCA's safe harbor provisions alone, that should have been enough to save Napster, and it wasn't. I think the argument is going to rest much more on the Betamax-ish question of "significant non-infringing use." In other words, the only hope Google has is to argue that there's sufficient non-pirated content on YouTube to justify the site's existence independent of all the tv shows. Which, actually, is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it's not at all clear cut.

Incidentally, it's not that I want Google to lose, per se. Every argument by the media conglomerates about the civic importance of intellectual property is horse-shit. If the RIAA and the MPAA went away tomorrow, artistic development would do just fine thank you, and our economy would be just dandy too (by the way). They're just hoarding, and they don't like the idea of someone muscling in on their territory. At the same time though, Google these days seems to define the term "hubris," and I would love to see them dragged back to reality. You know, the place where the rest of us live where there are actual laws and companies are actually responsible for making money (instead of being paid by starry-eyed fucktard bankers to dick around all day)?