Not Impressed

Tom Watson is a Labour MP and deputy leader of the party. He took £540,000 in election campaign contributions (which was used to help pay his office costs), from the multi-millionaire Max Moseley. The payments were, £40,000 in August 2015, £200,000 in June 2016 and a final £300,000 donation in February 2017 ....

Strange Connections Between Two Politicians And Eras ....

Mr Moseley is the son of UK Fascist leader Sir Oswald Moseley, who led the Union of British Fascists, and later founded the far-right Union Movement. Mr Moseley states that he no longer supports such views. This political alliance was odd enough to attract much interest in the press, as that amount of money to just one MP is highly unusual.

Googles Microsoft Moment

It had to happen one day, but it appears that the 'sooner' in the expression 'sooner rather than later', is now .... Google have become an old I.T. firm. They have in fact reached what I am calling their 'Microsoft Moment'.

That is the moment when it has to maintain legacy software at great cost, or risk alienating huge numbers of users/customers .... because up until now, Google have been able to:

(a) Easily maintain older versions of its Android operating system, and
(b) Rely on the fact that its customers were constantly upgrading their devices to the latest, which meant the majority were no more than one or at most two versions of the OS behind the latest release.

However a security firm has recently identified exploit vulnerabilities in the 'webview component' of Android 4.3 (aka 'Jelly Bean'), and this discovery includes the other older versions of the android operating system. The 'webview component' is used to display webpages on all Android devices ... that is mobile Phones, Tablets and even Laptops.

They informed Google of this potential exploit vulnerability, expecting that the company which doesn't 'do evil', would announce a patch release date .... but much to their surprise, they were informed that only the latest two versions of android, version 4.4 (known as 'Kitkat') and version 5.0 (known as 'Lollipop') are now covered by the relevant security patches.

The Invisible Web Man

The new EU law on Internet search results ...... the right to be forgotten or opt out of the Internet search results, is yet another in a long line of stupid decisions by a European Court that is almost semi-literate about the real world, and how the Internet works.

The Web Invisible Man Of Europe

I can maybe understand the right to have web sites take down incorrect information, or even spent criminal charges, that no one has the right to see elsewhere. But search engines are not where this information resides, its merely the road map to the content of the Internet .... its sites like this one that hold the information.

Obviously the idiots who came up with this law, chose to attack the search result provider because they can do it easily, rather than individual sites around the world. However how Google and the others such as Bing (other search providers are available), are supposed to police this arrant nonsense is not explained by the court. Probably because they haven't the slightest clue how it should work. On the face of it, Google and the others will be forced to just censor every requested result, or risk European courts fining them.

So just one day later, guess who are the first through the gate requesting 'web invisibility' .... a bad politician (who wants details of his bad behaviour struck from web records), an incompetent doctor with bad patients reviews, and a paedophile, convicted of downloading child pornography ... that about sums it up.

Another bit of clear thinking by the EU courts .... we now have lost the right to 'know' inside the EU. Apparently the court believes that what the individuals wants, outweighs any society gains .... a blow for big brother everywhere. I wonder if we can sue the EU when the first person who would have been protected by open knowledge, is hurt when that the information was not available because of this law. e.g If said paedophile is now hidden from view again, how can the Sarah's Law or Megans Law still work?

It would serve Europe right if all the major search engines abandoned Europe, and left us to the tender mercies of the only search engine that really knows how to censor results ..... Baidu in China.

Are Google Bad Guys Or Good Guys?

The 'Google Motto' is informally "Don't be evil" ...... but can a very big company really avoid doing bad things?

There was of course all that trouble with Google in China in which Google agreed to censor its Chinese search engine (google.cn.) results to comply with the Communist regimes truth suppression laws ..... this somewhat dented the image of the Internet giant. However the relationship with the Chinese has cooled dramatically after a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating from the country attacked the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google stopped censoring results by redirecting all search queries from Google.cn to Google.com.hk to bypass censorship.  

A few 'doubting thomases' have suggested that Google, having found themselves in second place in the search engine stakes to Chinese search engine 'Baidu' (a copycat clone of the Google site), which held more than 60% of the market (Google had only 31%), was looking for an out of the mainland China market, and regaining its morals was a convenient way in which to 'not be evil'. 

Now however a researcher who has accused Google of bias in its search results says the Internet giant is now waging a campaign to discredit him ......  Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, had published a study this week claiming Google boosts its own products in search results which is of course 'being evil'.

Google have responded by claiming he was actually working on behalf of its rival, Microsoft "Mr Edelman is a longtime paid consultant for Microsoft, so it's no surprise that he would construct a highly biased test that his sponsor would pass and that Google would fail," it said.

.... but we may be on the edge of big problems for Google as in November last year, the European Commission announced that it was launching an investigation into whether the company was abusing its dominance and also last year, the attorney general of Texas said he was looking at claims that Google manipulates results to boost its own products and therefore make more profit.

So corporate 'dirty tricks' afoot and as the Chinese curse goes for Google it "may be interesting times" ahead ......