Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You didn't actually believe them, did you? After all, most of Big G's revenue is derived from selling advertising.

Well, today Google said that they are formally NOT going to follow through on their promise to block third-party cookies in their browser.

I AM SHOCKED, SHOCKED I SAY!

No, not really.

There's a reason why I don't use their browser, and not trusting Google at their word is one of them.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/google-will-not-disable-tracking-cookies-in-chrome-after-years-of-trying/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/07/22/2055228/google-wont-be-deprecating-third-party-cookies-in-chrome-after-all

Google bought Fitbit in 2021, and has been progressively trying to make things worse for those users. In their latest move, they're shutting down the web portal next month, making the only access to massive amounts of data through their app. And a phone app at that. No larger devices, like tablets. Just a phone app.

Remember Google, the company who announced their corporate motto is "Don't be evil"?

Garmin and Apple both offer tablet apps for their watches.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/googles-abuse-of-fitbit-continues-with-web-app-shutdown/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/06/12/1939226/googles-abuse-of-fitbit-continues-with-web-app-shutdown

If you send your phone in to Google, THEY CAN FLAT-OUT KEEP YOUR PHONE FOR NON-OEM PARTS!

From the article, "As YouTuber Louis Rossmann discovered, Google’s service and repair terms and conditions contain a concerning stipulation. The document states that Google will keep your device if a non-OEM part is found. You can see the excerpt below." (excerpt in the linked article)

The terms and conditions went into effect last July.

So, in the Samsung case, the repair shops are being ordered to destroy your personal property. In this Google case, it's theft. There's something called First Sale Principle, in that if you buy something, you own it - it is your property and you can do whatever you want with it. Both Google and Samsung are clearly violating this. There's going to be some serious class action law suits over this if anyone's property is stolen or destroyed following these rules.

As one Slashdot commenter said, it would be akin to taking your car into a dealership and they refusing to return it because you had a brake job done at Pep Boys or some place.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-keeps-phones-with-non-oem-parts-3448350/

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/06/03/2025211/google-can-keep-your-phone-if-you-send-it-in-for-repair-with-non-oem-parts

In a truly "unprecedented" event, Google *POOF*ed the cloud-hosted data for "UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members". ALL DATA. GONE.

Now, lest we think that UniSuper wimped out on their infrastructure design with their Google cloud hosting, they didn't. They paid for their hosting to be properly backed up and to be geographically diversified.

And somehow Google managed to wipe out all of it. Data: gone. Backups: gone.

The details of how Google threw all of this into the bit bucket is unknown.

The saving grace is that UniSuper was smart to diversify their cloud hosting and also hosted with a second provider, and were able to reestablish their infrastructure through recovering from their second hosting provider. However, it cost them two weeks of downtime, plus incremental restoration and account transaction processing. So not only was their IT team stressed beyond belief, but their customer service team were constantly having to tell people what was going on and having to answer why account balances were not correct.

This is supposed to be utterly impossible, they were also quite emphatic that this was not a hacking event. Additionally, most systems should be doing what's known as 'soft deletes' where if something is deleted, it just appears to have gone away and is invisible to the outside world but is still recoverable. Apparently this was all gone gone. Thus far no other cloud services provider is crowing that this won't happen if you switch to us, because clearly no one thought it could happen at Google until it did.

Google is quite sincere about saying 'steps being put in place to prevent this from happening again', what about explaining in somewhat abstracted terms what allowed it to happen in the first place? That would make the IT administrators in the world a lot happier!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/

Put everything in the cloud, what could possibly go wrong?! Well, how about six months of information suddenly going missing?

Google is advising customers to DO NOTHING to try to get your data back, let their engineers investigate the situation and find a solution.

Stuff like this happens, most likely a configuration change went live and had unforeseen repercussions.

I will once again remind people that all the cloud is is Someone Else's Servers On The Other Side Of The Internet. This is what the internet has been FOREVER, it's just marketing buzz, a convenient label.

I should dig up and post an article about a large company that decided to re-home servers FROM the cloud. That is, to buy big, beefy servers and run them themselves to save cloud hosting charges. They estimated it would save them, IIRC, over a million dollars a year. And they recovered that amount of money in about 3 or 4 months.

I personally would be reluctant to run my business through the cloud if it were of any size, there are too many risks including a backhoe eating your internet connection shutting your business down for a few days.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/google_drive_files_disappearing/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/11/27/1333218/google-drive-misplaces-months-worth-of-customer-files

I've never liked the Chrome browser, personally, for two reasons. It had an auto-update that at the time that I learned about it you couldn't disable, and it eats an awful lot of resources. And I don't use it except on a couple of PCs at work, not on my personal work station.

So let me give you a little background on how cookies can track you across web sites.

First off, don't go thinking that Google is mainly a search engine company. They are an advertising company. They make their money off of selling (functionally) ad space to companies through search results and looking at key words in your email. NEVER FORGET THIS. It used to be this was accomplished by what is known as third-party cookies. This was a special kind of cookie that could persist across web sites and browser sessions.

For example, you buy a pair of shoes off of Amazon. Amazon keeps a cookie (or three) in your browser's cookie cache that remembers some information about you, and theoretically no one except Amazon can read that information. So we have an Amazon.com cookie. Now, a super cookie is just a cookie with the name .Com and that's it. And because it's a top-level domain (TLD), apparently it can read some information below it, such as the Amazon.com cookie. It may not know what the information within the Amazon.com cookies means, but it knows the information is there and might be able to make some guesses.

Advertisers want as much information about people as they can get, supercookies are one such tool. Another tool is tracking pixels. These are invisible 1 pixel images that are inserted into a page or email that link to a server where the tracking pixel has a specific identity tied to the email or page that you open. If your email or web page doesn't block images or tracking pixels, when you open the page, that pixel is loaded - and the tracker database knows that specific pixel was loaded and ties that page or your email into tracking information about you.

Now, email programs can be configured to block tracking pixels and supercookies, which advertisers hate because they get less analytic information which means less information they can sell to potential ad or analytics buyers. And remember, Google is in the ad serving business.

Google came up with an alternative, baked into the browser that they want everyone to use. When you open Gmail, or Google Search, in Firefox or Microsoft Edge or Safari, you get this lovely popup: For the best experience, open this page in Google Chrome. Gee, wonder why! Now what Google is doing is they analyze the page that your browser is now looking at and generates a 'topic list', along with a unique identifier for your PC, and now they have analytics that they can sell for ad buyers! All without cookies! Oh, and it gets better! Google claims "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

They also claim that they'll block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024. I think Firefox now does that by default. And while Microsoft Edge, which is a pretty good browser, is built on Chrome code, it can also block third-party cookies.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

Over the weekend Google updated their Terms of Service to say that they'll scrape everything they can see online and use it to train their AI systems.

From the article: "...the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot."

Now, there's something very important here. Google is not talking about words that you've posted on Google servers, like Gmail or Spaces or whatever. They're talking the ENTIRE World Wide Web. Facebook. Restaurant reviews. Blogs. Etc. ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING.

And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they ignored robots.txt block lists. Odds are the only thing that'd keep them out is passworded areas, and they know some ways around those.

Remember when Google announced that their corporate motto was "Don't be evil"? How I laughed at that! Didn't people realize that it was a hipster ironic statement? There was an unprinted subtext that followed: "... as long as it doesn't get in the way of us making a bazillion dollars and ruling the universe."

https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486

There's been a big rise in bogus ads being put into Google searches that result in malware being downloaded.

If you need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader or other software, go directly to the vendor's site. If you're not sure, you can search for the proper maker easily enough.

Hopefully Google will soon tighten up their ad inspection and this problem will subside.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/until-further-notice-think-twice-before-using-google-to-download-software/

This is an amazing thing, and they've been doing it for a decade! A German entrepreneur created a search engine that, for approximately every 45 searches on its site, they plant a tree! They've built renewable power plants. They have a branch of the company (heh, heh) that monitors satellite imagery of the areas they've planted to make sure things are going well.

The company is Ecosia, and their web site has a running counter of how many trees that they've planted. The first eco-search engine that he tried to set up was in partnership with Google, but that quickly ended. This engine's results are back-ended with Bing. I'm not sure what I think of that, I just switched my iMac's Firefox browser to it, so I'll be seeing. I'm running three browsers on my iMac, so I'll be switching my Safari browser to it later, then I'll have to reconfig my laptops (yes, I have two: a MacBook Pro and an Asus running Windows 10), and then I'll have to consider my two iPads and my iPhone. THEN I'll have to think about my work computer....

Oh: if you create an account on their system, it'll show how many trees that your searches are responsible for planting! I do a lot of searches at the library, I expect I could be good for a tree a week maybe!

https://www.ecosia.org

https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/ecosia-start-up-aims-to-use-your-search-results-to-plant-trees-a-1278617.html

By the way, if you have an Apple device, and perhaps Android, you can subscribe to Der Spiegel's international edition for $1 a month on a six-month subscription! Lots of good stuff.


Speaking of trees, a recent study shows that living surrounded by leafy trees is much better for your wellness. I need to read the article as the forest that I live in is mainly pines. I could clear some and plant some leafy things that might be hearty enough to survive up here, but I don't know how long they'd take to be beneficial.

https://www.citylab.com/environment/2019/07/urban-tree-canopy-green-space-wellbeing-research/595060/

It's interesting. We're used to being presented with a Captcha box with squiggly letters that supposedly only humans can decifer (which software could in some circumstances), now Google will be presenting us with a checkbox that says 'I am not a robot.'

The little square that the text and box are in is monitored, and Google says that the characteristic of a person checking that box is unique and identifiable. I just wonder how long it will take spammers to figure out how to make the mouse pointer jiggle a little bit before checking the box. I also wonder how this will work with assistive devices for people who don't use conventional pointing devices.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-one-click-recaptcha/