Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue. We can't fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don't see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK [the Pirate Bay documentary] by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows.

The silent attacks come from multiple Hollywood sources including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate and are being sent out by multiple anti-piracy outfits. Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link to TPB-AFK on Mechodownload. Paramount did the same with a link on the Warez.ag forums. Viacom sent at least two takedown requests targeting links to the Pirate Bay documentary on Mrworldpremiere and Rapidmoviez. Finally, Lionsgate jumped in by asking Google to remove a copy of TPB-AFK from a popular Pirate Bay proxy.

Written by Google, this library is a flexible, efficient, and powerful Java client library for accessing any resource on the web via HTTP. It features a pluggable HTTP transport abstraction that allows any low-level library to be used, such as java.net.HttpURLConnection, Apache HTTP Client, or URL Fetch on Google App Engine. It also features efficient JSON and XML data models for parsing and serialization of HTTP response and request content. The JSON and XML libraries are also fully pluggable, including support for Jackson and Android's GSON libraries for JSON.

with Google Compute Engine, AWS has a formidable new competitor in the public cloud space, and we’ll likely be moving some of Scalr’s production workloads from our hybrid aws-rackspace-softlayer setup to it when it leaves beta. There’s a strong technical case for migrating heavy workloads to GCE, and I’ll be grabbing popcorn to eagerly watch as the battle unfolds between the giants.

So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.
And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.
Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.

Chilling Effects is setup to stop the ‘chilling effects’ of Internet censorship. Google sees this as a good thing and sends takedown requests it receives to be added to the database. Fox sends takedown requests to Google for pages which the company says contain links to material it holds the copyright to. Those pages include those on Chilling Effects which show which links Fox wants taken down. Google delists the Chilling Effects pages from its search engine, thus completing the circle and defeating the very reason Chilling Effects was set up for in the first place.

<p>
From my brief time at Google, my internship at Yahoo!, and conversations with other companies doing web authentication at scale, I’ve observed that as authentication systems develop they gradually merge with other abuse-fighting systems dealing with various forms of spam (email, account creation, link, etc.) and phishing. Authentication eventually loses its binary nature and becomes a fuzzy classification problem.</p><p>This is not a new observation. It’s generally accepted for banking authentication and some researchers like Dinei Florêncio and Cormac Herley have made it for web passwords. Still, much of the security research community thinks of password authentication in a binary way [..]. Spam and phishing provide insightful examples: technical solutions (like Hashcash, DKIM signing, or EV certificates), have generally failed but in practice machine learning has greatly reduced these problems. The theory has largely held up that with enough data we can train reasonably effective classifiers to solve seemingly intractable problems.
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Failures happen, and resilience drills help organizations prepare for them.

Abstract: Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

To appear in:
OSDI'12: Tenth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, Hollywood, CA, October, 2012.

Shapps founded HowToCorp in 2005, a site that, among other products, pitches the TrafficPaymaster software. The software apparently “scrapes” or copies content from all over the web, from RSS feeds to even sets of search results, to automatically generate pages that probably make little sense to the human visitor but which may pick up some traffic from Google and, in turn, generate clicks on Google AdSense or other ads.

An hour or so after Curiosity’s 1.31 a.m. EST landing in Gale Crater, I noticed that the space agency’s main YouTube channel had posted a 13-minute excerpt of the stream. Its title was in an uncharacteristic but completely justified all caps: “NASA LANDS CAR-SIZE ROVER BESIDE MARTIAN MOUNTAIN.”

When I returned to the page ten minutes later, [...] the video was gone, replaced with an alien message: “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that.” That is to say, a NASA-made public domain video posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel, documenting the landing of a $2.5 billion Mars rover mission paid for with public taxpayer money, was blocked by YouTube because of a copyright claim by a private news service.