Just few quick hitters:
-Glad to see NBC finally pulled the plug on the West Wing. It has been slowly dying for the last three seasons. I haven't stopped watching because I really enjoy the characters, but it gets tougher every week to slog through these tedious storylines. It's a shame too, because the first three or four seasons were fantastic. Despite disagreeing with most of the politics I loved the crisp dialouge and well-crafted stories.
-Heard a radio spot for a local car dealership advising people to buy a car here because "with the money you save you can pay off your credit card debt." Am I missing something? Perhaps if you don't buy said car you would have even more money with which to pay off your credit card debt. Do people actually buy into this stuff?
-I plan to read up on the situation a little more, so forgive me (and let me know)if I have missed a big point, but I say 'Right On' to Google for refusing to turn over user records to the government. I have no illusions about how much of my personal info is actually accessible, but at least somebody is taking a bit of a stand. Would Google have to reveal any proprietary info that competitors would like to see as part of their cooperation? I suppose that would be reason enough to keep things private.
4 comments:
never watched west wing; that radio ad is symbolic of how stupid our society really is; RIGHT on to google...although im sure anyone that wanted to could find out anything about you with very little effort
The way the google subpoena was explained to me was this. The government knows there is child porn and worse child abuse aided by the internet. They need the specific website perpetrators turned over to them so they can prosecute. Think of it this way. You own a garage (Google) that warehouses other peoples stuff (websites) but not your stuff. You don't have the right to refuse to honor a search warrant if those things that don't belong to you but are in YOUR garage are illegal contraband. It makes sense to me. They want to shut down those sites and protect the children.
BTW....Yahoo and AOL readily complied with the subpoena.
What I read was that the Google subpoena had very little to do with child pornography, and that they were going after traditional consentual-adult material as well:
Quote from Wired:
Obtaining the subpoenaed information from Google "would assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current web users, (and) to estimate how often web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches," the Justice Department wrote in a brief filed Wednesday.
"Harmful-to-minors" could be interpretted very broadly. Exposing the search results will only expose those making the queries, it will do nothing to identify web-sites that actually contain illegal material.
Google is not a garage where people store things -- maybe this analogy can be applied to the internet in general.
Don't even start with me on the "do it for the children...", whenever I hear that argument, the proposal loses a good chunk of credibility.
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