Worried about google: was -> Re: chrome, Google DNS

[theBlueSage]

On Sat, 2010-01-16 at 16:21 -0500, Stephen Adler wrote:
> I must say, I'm worried about google's dominance of information. The 
> recent attack on their gmail servers is one example of why the use of 
> free information systems (i.e. as in e-mail) is just dangerous. How many 
> people use yahoo, ms mail, gmail and other free mail services? Now with 
> google putting out its own cell phone, which has gmail installed on it 
> and I'm sure it uses google for is search engine. A google OS? A google 
> desktop system which "integrates its search ability" from desktop 
> through to all your internet searches... (I'm kind of feeling raped here..)
> 
> Does anyone share this feeling of privacy violation? 

I am a huge privacy advocate, and if you think google is bad now, wait
til 'waves' is mainstream. In effect, 'waves will combine your email
with your blog with your IM with your pictures with your videos all in
one interface. And every word that you type is passed through google's
fingers (on the pretext of using an online interactive spellchecker).
They will index everything with the intent of profileing you for ad
placement. As it will go out free to the public, it will have a low
barrier of adoption, and a high uptake as, for example, it enables
people to C&P from an email directly into a weebsite/blob without
leaving the 'waves' interface...


> I'm starting to 
> feel a bit like Kaczynski, not that I plan to mail bombs to Larry Page 
> and Sergey Brin, but that I feel the need to guard myself when I go off 
> and search the next. Some how do the online equivalent of running off to 
> Montana and learn survivalist skills. Actually, what we need is a 
> distributed search system, something akin to the SETI at home project, 
> where the search database is distributed throughout millions of desktops 
> and no one place contains the sum all of our queries...

Well Ian Clarke set out to do this back in the late 1990's :

http://freenetproject.org 

from the front page '

Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse
and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and
chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to
make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where
users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect. '

but it appears that apathy wins over concerns for privacy, and freenet
is still unknow by 99.9999% of the population.

reminds me of that muttering ... if you give up rights for security you
deserve neither? ..... 

Perhaps concerned BLU'ers with available servers could create a
freenetnode/nodes as an experiment to see if it really is a viable
option? 

Concerned Netizen ;)

Richard


> 
> I'm just rambling...
> 
> / <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Theodore_Kaczynski>/
> 
> On 01/16/2010 03:58 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> > Stephen Adler wrote:
> >> Has anyone tried out chrome for linux?
> >
> > I have it installed on an Ubuntu desktop. They conveniently provide a 
> > repository for the beta builds, and I see the updates getting 
> > installed quite often.
> >
> > I've used it rarely. Mostly as a sanity check back-up when something 
> > doesn't work right in FF.
> >
> > I spent some time using it on a Windows box back when it first came 
> > out. On that platform, it was a bit faster than FF, but the deal 
> > breakers were lack of session management, and it didn't interoperate 
> > with FF's bookmarks.
> >
> >
> >> Does chrome keep track of all your searches and send them to google...
> >
> > Sounds redundant, if most of your searches already go through Google.
> >
> >
> > Speaking of Google spying, anyone tried out their DNS servers? (They 
> > claim that they purge the logs.)
> >
> > Anyone ran across a DNS benchmarking tool for Linux? It would be 
> > useful to see whether the Google DNS servers really offer any 
> > advantage compared to your ISP's servers.
> >
> >  -Tom
> >
> 
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