Don't Be Evil

[Mongrel]

Google China Prototype Links Searches To Users Phone Numbers

The search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.

Previously undisclosed details about the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, show that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such as “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin.

Leading human rights groups have criticized Dragonfly, saying that it could result in the company “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” A central concern expressed by the groups is that, beyond the censorship, user data stored by Google on the Chinese mainland could be accessible to Chinese authorities, who routinely target political activists and journalists.

Sources familiar with the project said that prototypes of the search engine linked the search app on a user’s Android smartphone with their phone number. This means individual people’s searches could be easily tracked – and any user seeking out information banned by the government could potentially be at risk of interrogation or detention if security agencies were to obtain the search records from Google.

[beatbandito]

I accessed my actual personal email and not the bullshit account one on my phone yesterday, which is something I do rarely enough that I've skipped entire devices.

Immediately after I got an email to the account from google listing all the great bloatware I cleared out and how I definitely should get that back to enjoy my phone. Ever since I've gotten some kind of telemarketing call every four hours or so.

So clearly I left some privacy options unchecked on there that need to get sorted out.

[Mongrel]

I can't convince myself that this isn't actually an Onion article:

Ars: Google promises to shut down two of its seven messaging apps

When they are shut down, Allo and Hangouts will join Google Talk, Google Spaces, Google Wave, Google+ Messenger, and Google Buzz in the graveyard of former Google messaging apps.

The article's secondary headline isn't helping either.

[Grath]

Allo was meant to compete with Whatsapp but they already had too much foothold on the "places that don't use Facebook Messenger or iMessage" market. Hangouts is just old, janky, and unreliable. I've missed more Google Voice texts than I've received with them routed via Hangouts.

[Blossom]

... well, shit, I use Hangouts all the time as the main way to chat with one of my friends. Not sure what we'll have to switch to.

[Niku]

it looks like hangouts is just splitting into "hangouts for texting" and "hangouts for video" unless i'm parsing that wrong.

[Grath]

Highlights of Sundar's testimony to Congress today:

[Mazian]

Google is shutting down Google Trips.

By itself, that's hardly news — it's the 13th Google product to get the axe this year — but I'm only just now learning that it even existed at all, and I would probably have tried it when I was on the road all the time. However, I can also see why I never learned about it: it only supported trip entry either by parsing it out of your GMail inbox, or typing it all in manually. Neither would've worked for mail from our corporate travel system to my work account.

Travel bookings are still a field where different companies have to smoothly interchange data by necessity: a single air booking can link to multiple airlines, hotels, rental car companies, etc., and in corporate-land that also has to tie back into the booking engine and expense reimbursement, and on top of that they can automatically feed it all into consumer apps like TripIt. It doesn't always work together cleanly, but it looks like Google didn't want to step outside their walled garden at all, and that's a heck of a lot less useful.

[mharr]

So I'm going to make the wild assumption that everyone here sees Stadia as just another hopefully-doomed step in the general direction of the meta-capitalist techbro monopoly in which only corporate entities may own property, but reddit just hosted the most milquetoast AMA ever in which Andrey Doronichev spent a thousand words saying nothing, cherry-picked the five google projects that actually stuck around for a few years, and was challenged by absolutely no-one, not even a link to the graveyard.

Further searching revealed a cadre of true believers in r/Stadia that apparently love everything that's happening and believe the generalised farting noises from the gaming press, podcasts and 'tubers is a conspiracy of paid anti-Alphabet shills. The fuck is going on there? Are we all dinosaurs about to be wiped out by the inevitable cyberpunk future? Do we need to ally with GoG's gator fanboy community to stand a chance at survival?

[Mongrel]

Not really.

We're not yet at the point where if the product is shit that they can still force us to buy it anyway.

[Grath]

I preordered the Stadia founder's edition bundle thing, partially because I see Stadia as the lesser evil than Epic Games Store and I want to be able to play Borderlands 3 before April of next year.

[zaratustra]

So I'm going to make the wild assumption that everyone here sees Stadia as just another hopefully-doomed step in the general direction of the meta-capitalist techbro monopoly in which only corporate entities may own property, but reddit just hosted the most milquetoast AMA ever in which Andrey Doronichev spent a thousand words saying nothing, cherry-picked the five google projects that actually stuck around for a few years, and was challenged by absolutely no-one, not even a link to the graveyard.

Further searching revealed a cadre of true believers in r/Stadia that apparently love everything that's happening and believe the generalised farting noises from the gaming press, podcasts and 'tubers is a conspiracy of paid anti-Alphabet shills. The fuck is going on there? Are we all dinosaurs about to be wiped out by the inevitable cyberpunk future? Do we need to ally with GoG's gator fanboy community to stand a chance at survival?

[mharr]

That reminds me, I'm still bemused by the shutown of Reader because surely that was perfect for mining data for deepmind? Like, a year of watching me use that and they could probably convincingly recreate me as a holographic crew member on Voyager.

I eventually replaced reader with Podcast Republic after Pocketcasts crapped the bed, it's secretly a pretty good generalised rss reader, and even an offline YouTube player when combined with podsync.net

[Thad]

For reference, here's some previous discussion on Stadia in another thread:

Announcement; discussion continues for most of the following page
Boy this thing doesn't look like a very good value for the money

Further searching revealed a cadre of true believers in r/Stadia that apparently love everything that's happening and believe the generalised farting noises from the gaming press, podcasts and 'tubers is a conspiracy of paid anti-Alphabet shills. The fuck is going on there?

The gaming equivalent of "RELEASE THE SNYDER CUT!"

[Büge]

Youtube copyright claims continue to be absurdly stupid.

[Mongrel]

As always, Idiocracy is a utopia compared to what we've got now.

[Mongrel]

Also, the kids in one class are growing little potted plants, and the other day one of them left a gatorade bottle next to the plants all day.

It took an impossible amount of willpower to go that whole time without making any Brawndo jokes (not because it would be mean, but because no one would get it ;__; )