Just googled out

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This morning’s Observer column…

Why does Google remind one of Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls for 20 years and arguably the most inventive judge of his time, forever generating new precedents and concepts and requiring the weekly updating of legal textbooks? Things got so bad that a law student once famously wrote to the Times requesting that the Master of the Rolls should stop making new law until the Bar exams were over.

Google is like Denning on steroids. Scarcely a week goes by without it unveiling yet another wheeze to put someone else out of business. The converse also applies: if Google says it wants to be your friend – as with eBay recently – your share price goes up. But in the main most of Google’s announcements involve plans to eat somebody’s lunch…

Lunch with the FT

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I read the Financial Times every Saturday, mainly because its magazine still contains some of the best book reviews. One of its more quirky features is “Lunch with the FT”, in which a journalist takes some grandee out to lunch at the paper’s expense and, under cover of that, conducts a half-baked interview. This week, the guest was Professor Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian. The lunch was in Wilton’s, a ludicrously expensive restaurant just off Jermyn Street in London. What interested me about the piece was not so much the content (which was pretty banal) as the bill:

1 x crab and avocado salad
1 x asparagus with Bernaise sauce
2 x poached halibut
2 x summer pudding
1 x expresso
1 x bottle of mineral water
1 x half bottle of Pouilly Fume

Total: £169.88

iPod eBooks Creator

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Wow! iPod eBooks Creator…

This utility/PHP script loads a large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It’s as simple as turning pages of the book…

The future of ITV1

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James Cridland’s in Berlin and has seen the future.

The television has DS:F on it, which until recently has been showing a motor-sport type show, and is now showing what QuizCall would look like if it was also a porn channel. A leggy blonde in yellow hotpants is asking questions to a caller – they could win 200 euros – and has just peeled off her top to display a fearsome set of headlights. She’s now stroking her hotpants suggestively. This is the German equivalent of ITV1, at 10.50pm, folks. This is what might happen at home. Please write to the Daily Mail now…

Christians First, Americans Second

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Well, well. After all that guff about how muslims are more loyal to their religion than to their country, how about this from the Pew Research Center…

Among non-Muslim nations, the United States is the outlier in terms of religious self-identification. The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes poll finds American adults are closely split between those who see themselves as Christians first (42%) and those who see themselves as Americans first (48%); an additional 7% say they see themselves as both equally. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%), and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality…

New from Google — Microsoft Office Live

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Well, not quite — yet. But you can see where they’re headed.

Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization’s website, too. It’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain…

Google is making a particular pitch at educational institutions. For example:

Get your campus talking

Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain…

Meditations on search

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Lovely, thoughtful piece by Andrew Brown on how much we divulge to Google & Co. Best thing written so far IMHO on the AOL search-data release fiasco.

In March this year, a man with a passion for Portuguese football, living in a city in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. “My wife doesnt love animore,” he told the machine. He searched for “Stop your divorce” and “I want revenge to my wife” before turning to self-examination with “alchool withdrawl”, “alchool withdrawl sintoms” (at 10 in the morning) and “disfunctional erection”. On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could “predict my futur”.

But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed this month when AOL published the details of 23m searches made by 650,000 of its customers during a three-month period earlier in the year. The searches were actually carried out by Google – from which AOL buys in its search functions…

Your ID Card details are safe with us (snigger)

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From The Register…

Australia’s identity card system was routinely searched for personal reasons by government agency employees, some of whom have been sacked.

Police are now investigating allegations of identity fraud resulting from the security breaches.

There were 790 security breaches at government agency Centrepoint involving 600 staff. Staff were found to have inappropriately accessed databases containing citizens’ information. The databases are part of a massive federal Government smart card project which will link medical, welfare, tax and other personal data on Australia’s 17m citizens.

In total, 19 Centrepoint employees have been sacked and 92 others have resigned. Police are conducting investigations into five employees, they said.

The man charged with protecting citizens’ privacy in relation to the project said that the government must do more to prevent this kind of security breach when so much vital information is gathered in one place.

“The Centrelink revelations are deeply disturbing,” Professor Allan Fels told Australian ABC radio. “I take some comfort from the fact that the government has caught them and punished them, but there is still a huge weight now on the Government to provide full, proper legal and technical protection of privacy with the access card.”

The police have confirmed that investigations are ongoing after five referrals were made to it from Centrepoint. At least one of the cases is believed to involve allegations of the establishment of fake identities to be used to receive payments.

The investigation took two years and involved the use of sophisticated spying equipment. Union officials said staff had repeatedly been warned about the inappropriate accessing of records…

I expect the UK Home Office will issue a statement saying that it couldn’t happen here because it will be in charge of the proposed system. No wonder satirists are having a thin time at the moment. It’s hard to keep up with reality.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.