Google's Gmail Raises Privacy Concern
Fri Apr 02 2004 00:33:23 ET

Privacy advocates are concerned that there's one big flaw with Google Inc.'s free e-mail service: The company plans to read the messages.

Google's Gotcha Moment
By Keith Regan
E-Commerce Times

The best and most insidious part about Google's Deskbar is that it out-Microsofts Microsoft. After all, the software giant is always talking about how .NET and other improvements to its products are going to help people do their jobs more efficiently. What's more efficient than a Web search box beckoning right there on the desktop?

Block That Pop-up Window at Your Own Risk
By Lisa Guernsey

Over the years, growing numbers of Web sites have been designed to include pop-up windows that are not advertising and that users may consider helpful rather than annoying. But today many such pop-ups never see the light of day.

Google Stumbles?
By Mike Musgrove
Sunday, October 12, 2003

Is Google starting to show signs of strain against spammers and Web scammers?

Chatters at the geek news site Slashdot observed this week that using the search engine to track down certain oddball series of words, such as speaker bracelet or candle truck, turned up strangely low results. Instead of finding only the expected handful of sites, Google reported that none could be found.

Hackers Turn To Google

Computer hackers have adopted a startling strategy in their attempts to break into websites. By using the popular search engine Google, they don't have to visit a site to plan an attack. Instead, they can get all the information they need from Google's cached versions of web pages, say experts in the US. One way that hackers can break into a website is by hunting for private pages that contain the usernames and passwords required to access secure parts of the site. These pages are usually hidden from the casual browser because there are no hyperlinks to them on the web. But sometimes websites contain hidden hyperlinks or indexes that point to these private sites. These links may be inserted by faulty software, or they may be created by the owner for temporary use and later forgotten or not properly deleted. Either way, they are serious security loopholes.

Some scary statements have been made about the privacy of search requests. You may have heard Google was nominated for a Big Brother Award award. You may also have read Google knows everything you ever searched for. Should you be afraid? Is it time to boycott Google, as blogger Gavin Sheridan called for?

Johnny-B-Goode writes "

By Drew Cullen
Posted: 12/05/2003 at 10:19 GMT


Google has opened up a UK front for its automated news service. The world's favourite search engine has the same clustering of news stories, which we like. And it gives more prominence to stories about the UK. Which we probably also like. We trust that Google's sturdy news-grabbing algorithms will continue to yield the occasional eccentricity and company press release.

You can see the results for yourself at http://news.google.co.uk/.
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Johnny-B-Goode writes "PARIS You no doubt use Google to search the Web. Everybody does. But you probably don't know all of the things that Google can do, and you may not know that you can create your own programs to improve Google's already impressive searching power.
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Did you know, for example, that you can use Google as a U.S. telephone directory?
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To start, all you need to know is the person's last name and state. Type phonebook: followed by the last name and two-letter state abbreviation in the Google search field. (The search returns a maximum of about 600 hits, so to find names that are fairly common, you'll have to help it out by providing a city or a first name.)
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If you type rphonebook:, you will get only residential listings. If you type bphonebook:, you'll get only business listings. (Don't leave out the colon after “phonebook.”) You can even use this feature as a reverse directory. Type phonebook: (area code) (number), and Google will (usually) give you the name of the person who has that number.
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I recently learned this trick from a new book, Google Hacks, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, which is published by O'Reilly and lists for $24.95, or £17.50 in Britain.
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Computer books from O'Reilly usually demand a fair amount of technical knowledge. But this one is an exception. Its subtitle is 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, and while all 100 of them aren't as useful or as easy as the phonebook example, many of them are.
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Did you know that there are special syntaxes you can use to narrow your Google search? If you're researching an academic subject, type site: edu into the search window, and you'll restrict your hits to .edu sites - colleges and universities. It is also possible to search Google for a particular file type, such as a Microsoft Word document or an Adobe Acrobat file.
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Google also has a built-in dictionary. After you've done a search, search terms appear near the top of the page of results. Click on an underlined word, and Google will give you its definition. Another click activates a thesaurus.
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Another useful enhancement to Google, which Calishain said came too late to be included in the book, is Google Alert (www.google alert.com). You enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affiliated with Google, automatically runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.
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You can see a full list of all the tips in the book at hacks.oreilly.com/pub/ht/2. Several of them, including the phonebook tip, are available there as a free sample. It's No. 17.
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Calishain, the co-author of the book, has more free samples at her Web site, www.researchbuzz.com, an informative site dedicated to search engines and databases on the Web. You can find the Google tools that she has devised at www.buzztoolbox.com/google. Among the handy ones is Goofresh, which lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yesterday, in the last seven days or the last 30 days.
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By Declan McCullagh
CNET News.com
April 11, 2003

WASHINGTON--Children using Google's SafeSearch feature, designed to filter out links to Web sites with adult content, may be shielded from far more than their parents ever intended.

A report released this week by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society says that SafeSearch excludes many innocuous Web pages from search-result listings, including ones created by the White House, IBM, the American Library Association and clothing company Liz Claiborne.

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist, 4/7/2003

What most of us know about computer hacking we learn from movies, and of course the moviemakers know nothing. The new disaster movie ''The Core'' features a larcenous computer geek who lives with his mother, eats nothing but Hot Pockets, and can, of course, keyboard his way into any computer on earth.