The Los Angeles Times reported that more than 500 million Chinese citizens used the web last year, according to a tech-industry firm, changing the way people process and discuss information and news in the communist-controlled state.

In December, the number of internet users grew 12 percent to 513 million, compared with the same period in 2010, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. The explosive growth has benefited several Chinese Internet companies such as search engine Baidu Inc., news site Sina Corp. and gaming and messaging service firm Tencent Holdings.

According to the article, last year was also a time that experienced the explosive growth of Chinese micro-blogs, which were often used for mediums of public opinion that frequently went against the news reported by the state. Nearly 250 million people in China used micro-blogs last year, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

The growth of people using micro-blogs has alarmed the central government. In October, the Chinese government promised to gain more control of the Internet, and in December, cities created new laws requiring people to register their micro blog accounts with their real names, “making it more risky for individuals to challenge authorities,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

- Melanie Saxe

Just as the world debates the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) coming into law, one of the biggest and baddest piracy websites has been shut down with accusations that the owners have cost copyright holders over $500 million in lost revenue.

Megavideo shut down

Megaupload and sister site Megavideo were infamous file-sharing and video websites that let users share and watch files, many of them illegal, and many of them movies and TV shows. The sites were shut down by a US government department.

It is reported that the Fed have taken into custody seven individuals, who they say are part of a, “Mega Conspiracy, a worldwide criminal organization whose members engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale”. If convicted, the defendants will face up to 20 years in jail and fined up to $175 million.

The shutdown of the high-profile sharing sites could be in direct response to the mass online protests against the planned PIPA and SOPA anti-piracy bills being debated in the US Congress. The Megaupload site was run by a man called Kim Dotcom and six other individuals.

The FBI said of the takedown, “The estimated harm caused by the conspiracy’s criminal conduct to copyright holders is well in excess of $500 million. The conspirators allegedly earned more than $175 million in illegal profits through advertising revenue and selling premium memberships.”

This is huge news as megaupload was easily one the biggest file-sharing websites on the Internet. Although there re still plenty of others such as Rapidshare etc., the owners of those sites will not be sleeping well, we would imagine.

The site takedown notice comes just after massive website protests against the two piracy bills that are being debated by Congress. Although the acts are supposed to help in the fight against piracy and content theft, many think the powers are too great. Websites such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia have protested (some with 24hr blackouts) that the internet should remain free and largely uncensored.

Even if the acts are not passed, the shutting down of high a high profile video sharing site shows the intentions of the US Government for the coming year.

Incoming TV searches:

mega video, videobb down, megavideo news, sopa megavideo, videobb news, videobb sopa, megavideo sopa, sopa videobb, news megavideo, videobb down?

Read more internet tv news: Megavideo Shut Down, The Beginning Of The End For Piracy? http://www.worldtvpc.com/blog/megavideo-shut-beginning-piracy/#ixzz1kSxmpXzN

all such websites,” Justice Suresh Kait told the counsel for Facebook and Google India. The court asked them to devise a mechanism to keep a check on “offensive and objectionable” material and remove such content from their web pages.

Despite the HC’s refusal to stay the proceedings before the trial court, the magistrate may not take up the matter on Friday, as the lawyers told Justice Kait that they would not press for an effective hearing. The HC would further hear the case on Monday.

Acting on a complaint by Vinay Rai, the trial court had earlier summoned the representatives of 21 social networking sites, including those of Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Youtube. It had directed the centre to take “immediate appropriate steps” and file a report on January 13.

The complaint has been filed under Section 292 (sale of obscene books etc), 293 (sale of obscene objects to young person etc) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC.

A civil judge had last month ordered the social networking sites to remove all “anti-religious” or “anti-social” contents by February 6, 2012.

On behalf of Google India, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi said it was humanly not possible to filter or monitor the postings of obscene, objectionable and defamatory material. “Billions of people across the globe, post their articles on the website. Yes, they may be defamatory, obscene but cannot be checked,” he said.

Drawing a distinction between Google India and its US-based holding company Google Inc, Rohatgi said: “The US-based Google Inc is the service provider and not me (Google India) and hence, we are not liable for the action of my holding company. Moreover, it is criminal case where a vicarious liability cannot be fastened on a company which has no role, whatsoever, in the alleged offence.”

Another senior advocate NK Kaul assured the court that if the complainant provided defa

matory articles to Google India, then it could use “its good office” in getting them removed by its holding US-based firm

http://googlechina.net

The US giant is redirecting users in mainland China to its unrestricted Hong Kong site, although Chinese firewalls mean results still come back censored.

Beijing said the decision should not affect ties with Washington.

Google threatened to leave the Chinese market completely this year after cyber attacks were traced back to China.

Google’s move effectively to shut its mainland Chinese search service, google.cn, is a major blow to China’s international image, the BBC’s Damian Grammaticas reports from Beijing.

China is one step nearer a closed door    Google Buzz by Frank Chinese netizens divided Readers in China: Anger and regret China’s users see little change Learning to leap the Firewall

It means one of the world’s most prominent corporations is saying it is no longer willing to co-operate in China’s censorship of the internet, our correspondent says.

But business analysts say the company is taking a long-term gamble as the Chinese internet search market is growing by 40% a year.

China recently moved to further limit free speech on the web, and Google’s own websites and the e-mail accounts of human rights activists have come under cyber attack.

The White House said it was “disappointed” that Google and China had not been able to resolve their differences.

‘Politicisation’

A BBC search of google.cn on Tuesday using the word “Tiananmen” brought up results but the words “Dalai Lama” returned messages like “problem loading page” and “the connection was reset”.

GOOGLE IN CHINA 2000: A Chinese-language interface is developed for the google.com website 2006: Launch of China-based google.cn search page with censored results Mar-Jun 2009: China blocks access to Google’s YouTube site; access to other Google online services is denied to users Jan 2010: Jan 2010 Google announces it is no longer willing to censor searches in China and may pull out of the country Feb 2010: Hacking attacks on Google are traced to mainland China March 2010: Google says it will re-route searches to its Hong Kong-based site Timeline: China and net censorship Read more at dot.Maggie

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters that Google’s move was an isolated act by a commercial company and should not affect China-US ties “unless politicised” by others.

The government would handle the Google case “according to the law”, he added.

Earlier an official in the Chinese government office which oversees the internet said: “Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks.

“This is totally wrong. We’re uncompromisingly opposed to the politicisation of commercial issues, and express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying by Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Chen Yafei, a Chinese information technology specialist, told Reuters that Google should have accepted Chinese regulation if it wanted to operate in the country.

“Any company entering China should abide by Chinese laws,” he said. “Chinese internet users will have no regrets if Google withdraws.”

 

Google’s Peter Barron on decision

Young Chinese professionals working in Beijing’s main IT hub, Zhongguancun, expressed a mixture of regret, anger and surprise on Tuesday at Google’s decision.

“I think it was inevitable though,” Chen Wen, 28, told Reuters. “The government was never going to compromise on filtering. China needs this company. It’s a great loss for the country.”

You Chuanbo, 25, predicted the government would “just end up blocking access to all of Google”.

Valued market

In Beijing, some passers-by laid flowers outside Google’s offices to thank the company for standing up for its principles.

1) Users accessing the Chinese site Google.cn are redirected to the Hong Kong site Google.com.hk 2) The searches are carried out on the servers in Hong Kong and are sent back to the users in mainland China 3) On the way, the results are filtered by the Chinese government

International human rights groups praised Google’s move , with the New York-based Human Rights in China saying Google had put the ball in Beijing’s court – China promised to respect freedoms in Hong Kong when it regained the territory in 1997.

Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the CPJ hoped it would “ramp up pressure on the Chinese government to allow its citizens to access the news and information they need”.

A Paris-based rights group, Reporters Without Borders, called Google’s decision a bold move which other internet companies should follow. Foreign internet companies have to comply with China’s stringent censorship rules before being allowed to operate in the country.

Announcing the decision, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said that providing uncensored searches through the Hong Kong-based google.com.hk website was “entirely legal” and would “meaningfully increase access to information for people in China”.

The company said it would maintain a research and development and sales presence in China, where about 700 of its 20,000 employees are based.

Google spokeswoman Marsha Wang told AFP news agency she had no information about job losses or a possible transfer of staff to Hong Kong offices, saying only that “adjustments” could be made “according to business demand”.

Google is not the biggest search provider in China and its mainland Chinese operation accounts for just a fraction of the firm’s total sales.

However, the US giant risks losing market share, revenue and staff to rivals which include market leader Baidu, up-and-comer Tencent and US heavyweight Microsoft, Reuters notes in a commentary.

Tom Online Inc, an internet company owned by Hong Kong’s richest man, the billionaire Li Ka-shing, has stopped using Google’s search engine in protest, it said, against Google’s lack of compliance with Chinese regulations.

Vast, unidentified, structures have been spotted by satellites in the barren Gobi desert, raising questions about what China might be building in a region it uses for its military, space and nuclear programmes.

 

By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai and Thomas Harding

1:50PM GMT 14 Nov 2011

438 Comments

 

In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space.

Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre.

In one picture from 2007, a mass of orange blocks have been carefully arranged in a circle. In a more recent image, however, the blocks, each one the size of a shipping container, appear to have been scattered as far as three miles from the original site.

Another image shows an array of metallic squares littered with what appears to be the debris of exploded vehicles while another shows an intricate grid that is some 18 miles long.

All of the sites are on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang, some less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, the headquarters of China’s space programme and the location of its launch pads.

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The two reflective rectangles lie 70 miles from the nearest main road and there is no sign of any surrounding activity. However, Ding Xin military airbase, where China carries out its secret aircraft testing programme, is relatively nearby, at a distance of some 400 miles.

400 miles in the other direction is Lop Nur, the salt lakes where China tested 45 nuclear bombs between 1967 and 1995.

The purpose of the structures is unknown, but some experts suggested that they might be optical test ranges for Chinese missiles, to simulate the street grids of cities.

Tim Ripley, a defence expert from Jane’s Defence Weekly, compared the structures to similar grids in Area 51, the secret United States military test base in Nevada. “The picture of the circle looks very like a missile test range, with target and instrumentation set out to record weapon effects. The Americans have lots of these in Nevada – Area 51!” he said.

Conspiracy theorists believe that Area 51 is home to the remains of an alien spacecraft found at Roswell, and there was no shortage on Monday of similar hypotheses about the Chinese sites.

“It looks like our own Area 51,” said one commenter on Baidu, a Chinese website. “Can it be an alien base,” asked another. “It looks like solar energy facilities, with a walkway along the side,” said a third.

When Google announced Tuesday it wouldn’t censor its Google.cn search engine anymore — all but committing the “Don’t Be Evil” internet giant to a self-imposed China exile — it took just seconds for its blog post announcing the decision to careen around the world.

Google came to China in 2006, with much of the same optimism that Nixon brought — a belief that engagement would be good for both, and would lead to freedom and prosperity for China’s citizens. The sprawling new condos and shiny American-branded cars in Shanghai seemingly attest to some level of Nixon’s success.

“What brings us together is a recognition of a new situation in the world and a recognition on our part that what is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy,” Nixon told the chairman, according to a declassified transcript of the historic meeting. “Therefore, we can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own ways on our own roads.”

With engagement, China has flourished financially with a massive expansion of trade and economic growth, but long-sought political reforms have not followed. China is still ranked as among the world’s worst performers on issues like human rights and pollution controls. Now Google’s confrontation over censorship there has raised anew uncomfortable questions about the costs of accommodating China at a time when the government appears to be tightening rather than loosening its grip. China may be too big to ignore, but when is enough enough?

Different approaches in different countries have produced varying results.

When it comes to smaller nations like North Korea and Iran, the view is stick it to them enough and they’ll suffer enough and will come around, said Susan Kohn Ross, international trade counsel at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp in Los Angeles.

“People actually made a conscious decision not to purchase things made in South Africa. That led eventually to the end of apartheid,” she said.

But the formula is not foolproof. “There is a whole community out there that will take the position that typically unilateral sanctions don’t work,” Ross added. “We’ve tried that in Cuba and it obviously hasn’t worked. International relations are never easy.”

Certainly, they haven’t been for Google, which agreed to censor search results in China while maintaining the right to tell users searching for forbidden terms like “June 4″ or “Tibet” that it was filtering information. That made Google far more informative than local search sites like Baidu, which still controls the majority of Chinese search traffic.

To be sure, that elevates Google and other Silicon Valley services like Facebook and Twitter as invaluable in times of social upheaval, just as publishers were centuries ago, according to UC Davis law professor Anupam Chander, who is writing a book on what he calls the “electronic silk road,” a reference to the old, overland trading route that connected China to the Western world.

“If you look to history, you find that publishers often served as voice for political dissidents,” Chander said. “You can go back to Galileo and the Inquisition, when a Dutch publisher goes to Italy and smuggles out the manuscript … and goes back to Protestant Northern Europe where this is permitted and publishes his last treatise,” Chander said.

And now Silicon Valley has finally begun to realize that it can be publishers of dissident speech better than any other set of companies in the world, according to Chander, referring to Google’s decision, andFacebook’s and Twitter’s support of Iranian dissidents.

“That’s crucial for Silicon Valley to recognize, and they now see themselves as doing more than creating a social network for sharing photos and see themselves as places to share information about politics and culture,” Chander said.

Google went to China hoping it would be a force for good, and that its decision to compromise its principles would be balanced out by the good that its search engine would bring to Chinese citizens. In 2008, it reported to Congress about a Reporters Without Borders finding that it was censoring far less than other Chinese search sites, including those run by Baidu, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Then came a series of high-profile scandals in China — milk poisoning and shoddily constructed buildings that collapsed in an earthquake — information that had been censored by the government and, by default, search engines including Google. That led some in China to turn to Google.cn, rather than Baidu, because Google would at least tell people when information was being censored — even if the information was missing.

To Google, it looked as though the Chinese public was learning through Google that its government was censoring them, and gave the company hope that its Faustian bargain with China was paying off and leading to a new age of freedom in China, according to an industry source familiar with Google’s situation in China.

But 2009 turned out to be the Year of the Censor in China. The Chinese government decided to mandate censorship software called Green Dam in all new PCs (to which manufacturers acquiesced). In March it blocked YouTube due to videos of anti-Tibetan violence, a block that remains. Then the government began hammering on Google, claiming the search engine was steering too many to pornography. The list of forbidden search terms kept growing.

And then Google announced Tuesday it had been the target of a “highly sophisticated” and coordinated hack attack against its corporate network, and that the hackers had stolen intellectual property and sought access to the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, the very people who Google wanted to help when it entered the country.  The attack had originated from China, the company said.

That, according to the source, was the final straw, leading Google co-founder Sergey Brin to finally say enough was enough, and that Google wasn’t going to censor search results anymore.

Making Google’s decision all the more difficult is the dual-use nature of communications technology — which can simultaneously be used by citizens to communicate and by governments to spy on citizens, said Leslie Harris, the president of the Washington, D.C., advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology.

“Their core business is giving people more access to information and helping people collaborate,” said Harris, whose group applauded Google’s decision. “Their core business is a human rights-enhancing technology. Here the government sees the net as a threat to its control and a way to control the population.”

Google will likely shutter Google.cn and its China offices — largely abandoning a market of 340 million current internet users — since it unequivocally said it was no longer willing to censor search results.  That leaves the Chinese very little room to negotiate or save face, as evidenced by its statement Thursday that it would not back down.

On Friday, the State Department officially elevated the showdown into a diplomatic affair, announcing it would soon file a formal complaint with the Chinese about the hacking incident.

For the moment, Google’s bottom line won’t be affected even if human rights concerns embolden the search giant to vacate the world largest online marketplace. Google says revenue from the China division of the internet behemoth is “immaterial.” Some analysts were anticipating it would earn $600 million in China this year, a nice number but not critical to a company that pulled in $22 billion from internet ads last year.

But China is quickly growing a middle and upper class, and the profit growth potential is seemingly unlimited.

Critics jumped on Google, saying the high-profile retreat was just a way to gain back the ethical capital it lost when it decided to censor itself, while pulling out for economic reasons.

But Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker says Google’s position in China wasn’t bleak.

“While our revenues from China are really immaterial, we did just have our best quarter ever,” Stricker said in an e-mail.

Google apparently is alone in its espoused policy to disengage from China, the world’s third largest economy, it’s largest market by population and exporter of everything from Ugg boots to iPhones. General Motors sold more cars in China last year than it did in the United States.

Yahoo, for example, said it was “aligned” with Google’s stance but declined to say whether it was considering selling its 39 percent stake in the Alibaba Group, China’s leading e-commerce enterprise.

Yahoo came under heavy fire two years ago when its Hong Kong operation cooperated with the Chinese government’s request to get at a dissident’s e-mail account. That landed Wang Xiaoning in prison for 10 years and put Yahoo executives in front of Congress, which wanted to know why the company was helping China repress human rights.

Yahoo and Google learned from that lesson. Google never put its Gmail servers inside China, thus making it immune to legal requests (but not hacks) from the Chinese authorities. And when Yahoo launched a portal for Vietnam, it also located those e-mail servers outside the border, beyond the legal reach of communist authorities.

Microsoft has its own operations in China, and censors its blogging platform based on blacklisted words given to it by the government. The world’s largest software maker, however, isn’t budging just because Google is going.

“Cyberattacks are an unfortunate way of life, not only in China, but outside China,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC in an interview. “We’ve been quite clear, we’re going to operate in China, we’re going to abide by the law.”The question of how to engage remains a difficult one for tech companies, according to Harris, who says that the principles of the Global Network Initiative are still the best ones for companies and democracy. They require members, which include Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, to assess and manage risk to human rights in their overseas operations.

“You are talking about a technology that everyone acknowledges is critical for liberalization and democratization,” Harris said. “In our world, taking the position that if it’s not 100 percent, you shouldn’t go in is just not sensible if what you want at the end of the day is more human rights and internet freedom.”

And if the upcoming talks between Google and the Chinese government lead to the shutdown of Google.cn, that will be a loss for the Chinese people, even if it’s a win for internet freedom.

Photo caption: In this Feb. 21, 1972 file photo, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, left, shakes hands with Chinese communist party leader Chairman Mao Zedong during Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China, in Beijing. Forged in absolute secrecy at the height of the Cold War 30 years ago, the diplomatic ties established between the United States and China were meant to balance out the Soviet threat.
AP Photo/File

Photo Ilustration: Felipe Siem

Correction: The story initially reported that China was the world’s largest economy, a distinction that belongs to the United States. China has the world’s largest market when measured by population.

How to Care for a Child’s Teeth:Taking a Child to a Dentist

December 15th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Taking a Child to a Dentist You should begin taking your child to the dentist no later than by the age of two years. The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommends a visit by the time your child is one year of age. Usually all the primary teeth have erupted by the time your child is between two and three years of age. Most children three years of age or younger have no or few dental problems, 

Pardon me for repeating myself (you can hear a similar version of this post in Thursday’s Buzz Out Loud, starting around 29:30), but I think Thurrott is placing an unfair expectation of perfection on Google, and I don’t believe Google’s departure from China is cynical or, frankly, even a very good business decision.

The fact that Google previously made a “cold-hearted” decision to do business in China (from what we know, despite the objections of Sergey Brin and others in the company) shouldn’t mean the company can never reclaim a moral high ground, and doesn’t mean every following action will be equally cold-hearted or purely business-minded.

That’s assuming Google’s original move was merely calculating in the first place. At the time it entered the Chinese market, Google officials were clear that they hoped bringingany light into the country, in the form of access to the incredible trove of information that is the Internet, would lead to an infectious spreading of that light, and they were also clear that they weren’t sure the whole experiment was going to work out.

Did Google make a devil’s bargain? Sure. I think in the end it found out that dancing with the devil isn’t, in fact, all it’s cracked up to be, what with the constant stepping-on-your-feet and the overpowering scent of brimstone that you just can’t shake. Now it wants out. But if Google made a mistake four years ago by entering the Chinese market in the first place, do its motives have to be forever besmirched? I don’t think so.

So, then, let’s talk about business. Thurrott says Google did business in China for four years, “reaping the benefits” of running amok in the world’s largest potential marketplace. In truth, Google was hardly making a dent in Baidu’s market share–not that it couldn’t have over time, but it wasn’t yet–China revenues have been $250 million to $300 million, according to estimates, or about 1 to 2 percent of Google’s global revenues. Did Google just walk away from a failing venture?

Not likely.

Those revenues were only headed northward–a recent JP Morgan estimate spotted the company $600 million in Chinese revenue for 2010, and persistence is, after all, a key indicator of success. Google’s leaving money on the table and it knows it. So do its shareholders. So, yes, the calculating part of Google’s action has been trying to walk a razor-thin line by leaving some operations up and running in China. Still, the company had to know that was an unlikely route to success, and sure enough, the costs of its search-related actions continue to mount, and the likelihood of any serious Google business happening there is pretty low.

Most of China’s telecoms are reconsidering search deals with Google, under pressure from the Chinese government, and the government is reportedly also pushing to ban Android handsets from the country. China Unicom already announced it won’t use Google’s search engine on any of its phones, even if they’re Android phones. Google stands to be cut out of a mobile Internet market that numbers 230 million users.

And Google’s stock, although not suffering big losses in the immediate wake of this week’s drama, started slipping around January, when the company first started making noises about leaving China. In fact, the company has lost about $10 billion in value since January 12, when it first accused China of hacking and cyberwarfare, not including future revenues it’s given up in China. There have even been suggestions that, as relations deteriorate, Google’s China employees may actually face arrest, as has happened when other business negotiations with China soured. The cost of not doing business in China is, as I put it in this week’s Buzz Report, nontrivial.

Is leaving the Chinese market a smart, cold-hearted business decision, part of a calculated determination that Google can live without the largest population of Internet users in the world? I don’t think so. It’s also not purely a matter of standing up for human rights and basic freedom; let’s not kid ourselves, if that were the business of business, this world would be a very different place.

But Google has been trying to tiptoe carefully through a field of explosive moral issues on the way to unfettered, shareholder-pleasing growth, and it’s one of the few companies making any noise at all about taking those moral issues seriously. Now, it’s cutting itself, possibly permanently, out of the largest potential market in the world. And if you want to see some cold-hearted, ruthless bastards at work, watch Wall Street go to town on GOOG if it can’t deliver come earnings report time. Then we’ll find out the real cost of turning your back on China

.

Over a two-year period, Levy got unprecedented access to people, places, and meetings at the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley. The fruit of that labor is a new book called In the Plex that does a deep dive on how Google become Google, how it made its fortune, the ambitious culture inside the company, the moral dilemma in China, Google’s relationship with governments, and the aggressive expansion into new frontiers of information.

Levy is currently doing a speaking tour about In the Plex, and I caught up with him on April 26 at his stop in Louisville, Kentucky. Below are some of the highlights that I took away from Levy about his book and his general impressions of Google.

• Early on, co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin made a list of all the smartest and most influential people in computer science and then went down the list and tried to hire every one of them.
• Once Page and Brin hired a bunch of smart people, they set them on the mission of turning what they had originally created at Google into an artificial intelligence learning machine.
• When Google created its AdWords and AdSense programs, it hired a bunch of statisticians and mathematicians in order to predict user behaviors of times, days, and events that will people will be doing different types of searches. This information is a critical part of the auctions for various ads.
• When the company went public, the Google co-founders forcefully told investors that sometimes they would forgo profits to do the right thing for humanity, and Levy saw this action in multiple ways during his behind-the-scenes stint st Google.
• In 2004, Bill Gates told Levy that spam would disappear in about a year. At that same meeting, Levy told Gates about how he was now using Gmail because of its huge storage limits and told him how much data he had in his Gmail account. Gates started going off about how Google wasn’t compressing the data correctly and was using way too much storage for the number of messages. Levy said Gates was stuck in the old paradigm where storage costs were expensive. With inexpensive storage, Google could offer virtually unlimited storage (with minimal compression) and totally change the game.
• When Google launched Gmail, a lot of users freaked out about contextual ads that matched subjects in their emails because they thought it meant that people at Google were reading their messages. Google was perplexed by this because they thought it would be apparent to people that it was just a computer doing the matching. Levy cited this as the beginning of Google’s privacy problems and associated it as a pitfall of the engineering mentality at Google.
• One of the holy grails that Google is working on is “zero query search” where Google can anticipate that you’ll want a search and give it to you before you ask for it. This could be location-based where you look at a building or based on past regular behaviors, for example.
• Levy called Page, who recently returned to the CEO job, a “very unusual” and “very ambitious” guy. Levy said Page is ambitious in the good sense of the word –he wants to accomplish big things. In fact, Page told Levy that in these amazing times he’s surprised that people aren’t more ambitious because there are so many possibilities for doing things that have never been done before.
• Google calls its big, ambitious projects “moonshots.” Two examples are its experiments with self-driving cars (using what it’s learned about artificial intelligence) and Google Books.
• Page and Brin continue to be stunned by the negative reactions and lawsuits surrounding Google Books. They sincerely see this as something that Google is doing for the good of humanity.
• “Google is a failure machine,” Levy said. You see that in the millions of computers that it builds itself to run its data centers. The hardware and software are engineered so that if a machine fails, the whole server farm keeps running without even a minor blip. You also see it in the way Google allows its employees to try lots of different projects and many of them fail. Google leaders believe that if they aren’t having enough failures then they aren’t taking enough risks.
• In most companies, the job of the lawyers is to say, “no.” That’s not the case at Google, according to Levy. At Google, the job of the lawyers is to figure out how to say “yes” to the things that Page and Brin want to do.
• Levy’s favorite part of the book is the chapter on China. While Google went into China in order to help change China for the better, Levy believes that China changed Google more than Google changed China.
• “Emerald Sea” is the codename for Google’s big social initiative, likely coming this year. The name comes from an Albert Bierstadt painting of a ship engulfed by a huge wave. Google used this to symbolize the idea of either riding the social wave or getting drowned by it.
• “Google is very worried about Facebook. It’s going through a Facebook panic right now,” Levy said. “It drives Google insane that there’s all this valuable information [in Facebook] that it can’t use.”