O que o gigante Google sabe sobre nós

Cada pesquisa que fazemos no Google fica registada nos arquivos da gigantesca empresa americana até 2038.

O artigo
They know all about you
Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public knowledge? Yet for thousands of AOL customers, that nightmare has just become a reality. Andrew Brown reports on an incident that has exposed how much we divulge to Google & co

Monday August 28, 2006
The Guardian

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.
The gigantic database detailing these customers' search inquiries was available on an AOL research site for just a few hours before the company realised that substituting numbers for users' names did not really protect their identities enough. The company apologised for its mistake - and removed the database from the internet. The researcher who published the material has been sacked, as has his manager, and last week AOL's chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, resigned. But those few hours online were enough for the raw data files to be copied all over the internet, and there are now four or five sites where anyone can search through them using specialised software.

in The Guardian - Technology

A citação
"All of this information is stored. Google identifies every computer that connects to it with an implant (known as a cookie) which will not expire until 2038. If you also use Gmail, Google knows your email address - and, of course, keeps all your email searchable. If you sign up to have Google ads on a website, then the company knows your bank account details and home address, as well as all your searches. If you have a blog on the free blogger service, Google owns that. The company also knows, of course, the routes you have looked up on Google maps."
- Andrew Brown, "The Guardian"

O uso do e-mail profissional

É melhor ler bem antes de clicar no botão de enviar...

O artigo
Re: What You Say in Work E-Mails
By Stephen Barr
Thursday, August 17, 2006; Page D04

A lawyer at the Small Business Administration received and sent more than 100 e-mails through his government computer in support of the Green Party in California. A federal board has ordered his firing.
A former chief of staff at the General Services Administration traded e-mails with lobbyist Jack Abramoff . Prosecutors used the e-mails to link the two, and a federal jury convicted the ex-government official of lying and obstructing justice.
A recent audit by the inspector general for tax administration found e-mail at the Internal Revenue Service that violated agency policy. The audit turned up a large percentage of chain letters, jokes and pictures that, while harmless, increased the risk of computer virus infections, the report said. Other e-mails contained hate speech and sexual content or facilitated commercial activities, such as outside employment.
Inappropriate workplace use of e-mail is not new. But as e-mail increasingly substitutes for face-to-face conversation, it seems that more employees send messages that get them into trouble.
"When people are on the Internet or using e-mail, there is almost an unconscious dimension they have entered," said Scott Bloch , the head of the federal Office of Special Counsel.

in The Washington Post

Sete pesquisas-tipo na Internet

A partir da informação revelada pela empresa AOL, Paul Botin propõe sete pesquisas-tipo na Web.

O artigo
You Are What You Search
AOL's data leak reveals the seven ways people search the Web.
By Paul Boutin
Posted Friday, Aug. 11, 2006, at 5:30 PM ET

AOL researchers recently published the search logs of about 650,000 members—a total of 36,389,629 individual searches. AOL's search nerds intended the files to be an academic resource but didn't consider that users might be peeved to see their private queries become a research tool. Last weekend, the Internet service provider tried to pull back the data, but by that point it had leaked all over the Web. If you've ever wanted to see what other people type into search boxes, now's your chance.
The search records don't include users' names, but each search is tagged with a number that's tied to a specific AOL account. The New York Times quickly sussed out that AOL Searcher No. 4417749 was 62-year-old Thelma Arnold. Indeed, Arnold has a "dog who urinate on everything," just as she'd typed into the search box. Valleywag has become one of many clearinghouses for funny, bizarre, and painful user profiles. The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from "you're pregnant he doesn't want the baby" to "foods to eat when pregnant" to "abortion clinics charlotte nc" to "can christians be forgiven for abortion."

in Slate - Technology

Navegar na Internet sem privacidade

Imagine que um dia ao entrar no portal do seu servidor de acesso à Internet descobre uma lista das pesquisas que fez associadas ao número do seu bilhete de identidade. Foi o que aconteceu no sítio do gigante americano AOL há dez dias atrás com 658 mil clientes.

O artigo
AOL apologizes for release of user search data
Search log information originally intended for use on new research site; company calls data posting a mistake.

update AOL apologized on Monday for releasing search log data on subscribers that had been intended for use with the company's newly launched research site.
The randomly selected data, which focused on 658,000 subscribers and posted 10 days ago, was among the tools intended for use on the recently launched AOL Research site. But the Internet giant has since removed the search logs from public view.
"This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant," AOL, a unit of Time Warner, said in a statement. "Although there was no personally identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We've launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again."

in Cnet News.com

A WWW nasceu há 15 anos

A 6 de Agosto de 1991 a "web" tornou-se "world wide".

O artigo
How the web went world wide
By Mark Ward Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

From its origins at the Cern lab the web has become a phenomenonIn a few short years the web has become so familiar that it is hard to think of life without it.
Along with that familiarity with browsers and bookmarks goes a little knowledge about the web's history.
Many users know that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva .
But few will know the details of the world wide web's growth - not least because the definitive history of how that happened has yet to be written.

Quando dois grandes Instant Messaging Services se cruzam

Com as últimas versões do MSN Messenger e do Yahoo! Messenger, já é possível ter, num dos serviços, contactos de ambos e comunicar com eles. Ainda existem algumas limitações, mas são cada vez mais pequenas.

O artigo
Finally, a Peek Over the Barriers Between IM Networks
By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, July 30, 2006; Page F07

A couple of weeks ago, one of the longest-running problems of the Internet began to get better.
No, nobody's found a cure for spam or viruses or those animated ads that temporarily flood browser windows. But we're now closer to being able to chat via instant messaging with anybody -- not just people using the same network.
That development should not count as news. With most other kinds of communication -- phone calls, e-mail or cellphone text messages -- the ability to contact somebody who uses a different provider than you isn't considered a feature worth advertising.
Instant messaging, however, has remained stubbornly proprietary. The operators of the three major commercial networks -- AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo -- have kept their systems closed off from each other.
Earlier this month, however, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. updated their software to allow people on one network to chat with people on another. One person can log into Microsoft's software, the other into Yahoo's, and both can chatter away as if they were on the same network.

in The Washington Post - Columns

Acesso limitado aos social networking sites

Escolas e bibliotecas americanas podem passar a limitar o acesso dos mais novos aos social networking sites.

O artigo
Chatrooms may be banned in US schools to combat sexual predators
· Bill seeks to limit MySpace and other websites
· Opponents say proposed law casts the net too wide

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday August 1, 2006

Chatroom websites including MySpace, Facebook and Friendster could be banned in America's schools and libraries under legislation aimed at sexual predators that is working its way through Congress.
The deleting online predators act (DOPA), which was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives last week, had been expected to go before the Senate this week, but opponents appeared yesterday to have postponed the battle there until next month. The bill identifies "social networking websites" as hunting grounds for paedophiles, and requires federally funded schools and libraries to limit access to them.

in The Guardian