Guess how long before YouTube takes this down in Germany? In the U.S.?
After all... This is technically illegal in Deutschland. (But not the U.S.)
The "illegal in another country" issue is why Google said they left China. Because Search Results shouldn't be upgafucked-with by any given country's laws (says Google.) Yet here we have Germany saying it's illegal to talk about Hitler in certain ways. Such as making fun of him. (I'm not totally clear about the precise laws in Germany vis-à-vis Hitler, but I'm fairly certain the above video breaks them. Hell; this conversation likely breaks them as well. *smiles sweetly*)
Well Google? Whatcha gonna do now, hmmm?
As to the second issue, that the copyright owner wants the video pulled down everywhere, including in the United States...
It's a parody. Funny as hell, also.
Parody is one of the primary tests for fair use under U.S. law. No question that this mix survives any challenge; the copyright owner is a legal fool -- other than causing lots of hype -- for even raising the issue. However as the mix points out, unless one has enough money to stay in the game, you're going to end up folding.
So Google... Are you going to cave in the U.S. under copyright law? Are you going to cave in Germany on the "no Hitler" issue? What's it going to be? Are you being evil today? Or... not.
Friday, April 23, 2010
It's a Parody, Dammit
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
Network Neutrality
Net Neutrality has been a big topic today.
Mostly because the Wall St. Journal wrote a bullshit article.
I posted at Firedoglake: WSJ Lies About Network Neutrality
Comments?
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Knol; a New Form of Web Info, Blogging and Community
When people think about scalability, normally they focus on the tools to make something grow larger. But applications, ideas, and tools that are truly scalable go both up and down. I am pretty excited about the new KNOL. Kind of like a blog, kind of like a wiki, but much more focused. Knols are single issue, idea, item, expert pages. Share what you know about one thing. How to? What about? Who, What Where When and Why.
"Welcome to Knol; A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic."
There is some good buzz going about this new web tool. It is as easy to use as blogger, and more laser focused than a wiki. I can see some of our GNB writers posting some great Knols. One on Truffles perhaps? Or on canvasing, or on NY CSA's, or ordering sushi, or registering to vote from overseas, or where to eat in Harlem. Lots to contribute to the Interweb's Body of Collective Knowledge
On today's front page of KNOL for example;
Migraine: Mechanisms and Management
Buttermilk Pancakes
Pediatric Sports Injuries
Barbecue Defined
More hours of great reading and time wasting is in my future. I am definitely going to play with this for a bit and write a few Knols myself. Oh.no. Just what I needed, another reason to write and read on the internet.
Not everyone is happy of course;
Competition; Since its announcement in December of 2007, there has been speculation on Google's motives and its position as a producer of content rather than as an organizer. The Guardian's Jack Schofield argued that "Knol represents an attack on the media industry in general."I like the idea of more narrow, focused, bite size bits of knowledge. If knowledge and access = power for the people, more is better. There's more...
Knol has been described both as a rival to encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia and Scholarpedia and as a complement to Wikipedia, offering a different format that addresses many of Wikipedia's shortcomings. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the name Wikipedia and the servers hosting the Wikipedia projects, welcomed the Google Knol initiative saying that "The more good free content, the better for the world." While Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, Knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and, like articles provided on Squidoo and Helium.com, knols will contain the personal opinions of the author. Despite the official Wikimedia response and the differences in format, Wikimedia Foundation chair Florence Devouard has expressed concern over Knol's potential threat to Wikipedia in terms of the competition it will create.
There has been debate whether Google search results can remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest. According to Sullivan, "Google’s goal of making Knol pages easy to find on search engines could conflict with its need to remain unbiased. -- Wikipedia.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Oh My Goosh.org
goosh.org -- A Command Shell for Google
I use Google hours a day.
Now, here is a command shell/web page, which not only dumps the ads, but lets me do search strings on sites, images, blogs, the entire Google dataset, as fast as I can edit my command string. And my command string stays in memory to be called back and reused, modified.
*does happy dance*
Why the hell hasn't Google already given us this?
This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page.
goosh is written by Stefan Grothkopp <grothkopp@gmail.com>
it is NOT an official google product!
Your language has been set to: en (use lang to change it)
Enter help or h for a list of commands.
guest@goosh.org:/web> help
help
| command | aliases | parameters | function |
| web | (search,s,w) | [keywords] | google web search |
| lucky | (l) | [keywords] | go directly to first result |
| images | (image,i) | [keywords] | google image search |
| wiki | (wikipedia) | [keywords] | wikipedia search |
| clear | (c) | clear the screen | |
| help | (man,h,?) | [command] | displays help text |
| news | (n) | [keywords] | google news search |
| blogs | (blog,b) | [keywords] | google blog search |
| feeds | (feed,f) | [keywords] | google feed search |
| open | (o) | open url in new window | |
| go | (g) | open url | |
| more | (m) | get more results | |
| in | (site) | search in a specific website | |
| load | load an extension | ||
| video | (videos,v) | [keywords] | google video search |
| read | (rss,r) | read feed of url | |
| place | (places,map,p) | [address] | google maps search |
| lang | change language | ||
| addengine | add goosh to firefox search box | ||
| translate | (trans,t) | [lang1] [lang2] | google translation |
| ls | [command] | lists commands | |
| cd | change mode |
- Anything that's not a command will search in current default mode.
- Aliases will expand to commands. Numbers will expand to corresponding search results.
- Use cursor up and down for command history.
- Enter keyword and hit the tab-key for tab-completion.
Google junkies rejoice.
Go try goosh.org today.
h/t Boing Boing. There's more...
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Google Takes it to the Cloud
Developers Get Access to the Google Cloud
Yesterday, Google announced that Developers could Beta new services from Google. Specifically, that web applications could be developed taking advantage of all of Google's internal structures, from Google Bigtable to the Google File System.
This is a BIG FRACKING DEAL.
'Course, the catch is, as a developer, as other's have said, you're tied in tight to Google, and it would be nice if they gave you more than just Python to hack in. Sure, if you wanted to migrate away, you probably could write abstractions and move out, but still. On the other hand, for those who want to live in Google's world, this is the way to go. Everything from authentication to mail is handled.
May a million startups bloom. The age of needing your own hardware to run a startup is damn near over. Thrown everything up in the cloud, even if you're video intense. You'll still own it. Just run it on someone else's stuff. Focus on what you do best, which is hacking code, and getting customers. Managing infrastructure is no longer a core competency for a startup. Or at least, it doesn't have to be.
Matt Cutts
This is pretty cool. Google launched App Engine, which lets you write code for a web application, then Google takes care of the scaling/failover/logistics-type issues. You can store your data in a Google Bigtable using the Google File System. There’s a bunch of App Engine APIs to simplify things like sending email and fetching urls. Your application can authenticate users that are using Google Accounts, so you can avoid the whole “ask your users to create a new account” issue if you want.The official blog post makes it clear that this is a preview release, so Google will be adding more functionality over time but they’re opening the program up now to start to allow real-world applications and to get real-world feedback. The first 10,000 developers to sign up get to play with it now.
My favorite part is that the usage model looks pretty solid:
During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.
ReadWriteWebI'm not as afraid -- yet -- of Google as I am of Microsoft. Mostly I guess because Google is riding the historical wave, and Microsoft still is fighting the tide of history.
Let's firstly review what this is - and what it is not. Google App Engine is similar to the Amazon Web Services stack, which rolled out at the end of 2006 and has since gone on to be utilised by many startups for their infrastructure needs. But it is not a set of standalone services like Amazon's - which includes S3 for storage, EC2 for hosting and the SimpleDB database. Google App Engine is an end-to-end service and bundles everything into one package.In that respect Google App Engine is more like the so-called "Platform-as-a-Service" (PaaS) apps like Bungee Labs, which we profiled firstly in April 2007 and then more recently in February when it launched a new version. Other PaaS contenders include Salesforce.com's Force.com platform (nicely summarised by Dan Farber) and Morfik's Ajax platform.
There are many compelling reasons for startups to use Google App Engine; and Alex Iskold summed them up in his post Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. Alex explained why the likes of Amazon, and now Google, are providing a valuable service to startups:
"We are witnessing a fundamental shift in our ability to compute and this is just the beginning. Amazon is at the forefront of making massively parallel, web scale compute services available to the world. Free from the need to solve the scalability problems, startups are able to focus on the specific problems that their product or service is trying to solve. All of this is happening while the cost of hardware, bandwidth and services overall keep dropping."
(emphasis mine)However, there are a few downsides to the Google approach. For one thing, it means developers must use Python as their programming language - PHP and Ruby are two other popular languages today. But looking at the bigger picture, startups which use Google App Engine are essentially tying themselves into Google's technology. They'll need to host with Google, do their processing with Google, store their data with Google, etc. And as some people have already speculated, having a web app built and deployed with Google App Engine makes it much easier for Google to eventually acquire that web app.
It does make you wonder: would you want Google to control your entire end-to-end development environment? Isn't that what developers used to be afraid of Microsoft for?
Cloud computing is here. It isn't getting here. It is here.
GNB routinely serves almost all of our data from the cloud. From Google's Blogger cloud (mostly), HaloScan's cloud (mostly), and from Amazon's S3 cloud (a little.) Plus other clouds we call to frequently such as Google's YouTube. In addition, we have a datacenter in Tokyo where we serve our "We Fight On" graphic. We run daily backups to our Tokyo datacenter and our Seattle headquarters. Not to mention some of us routinely back up our work to little flashdrives and aways have backups with us, where ever we go.
The point is, having our data live in the cloud and not on our own servers (except for local backup) means we don't have to concentrate on infrastructure. We don't have to pay for infrastructure either (which again, is a big fracking deal.) We just have to concentrate on what we do best, which is journalism and taking care of listening to our readers. This lets us increase our customer base.
This is precisely what Cloud computing is about. Off load startup infrastructure (and costs) to the Cloud, allows startup companies (such as GNB) to focus on their core competencies and see if they have a viable business. How you know you have a viable business, by the way, is if customers show up. If they do, you've got one. If they don't, you don't. Cloud computing lets startups test out ideas without having to make enormous infrastructure investments.
GNB (and The News Blog before us) wouldn't exist today without Cloud computing.
Bring on the Cloud. There's more...
