sv_libertarian sends in this excerpt from an AP report:
“Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, for sacrilegious content, while blocking 17 other, lesser-known sites it deems offensive to Muslims, an official said Friday. The moves follow Pakistan’s temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version (more…)

snydeq writes “The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty has found passwords and email messages among the Street View Wi-Fi data Google intercepted, InfoWorld reports. The data protection authority has been investigating Google’s recording of traffic carried over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Google has said it collected only ‘fragments’ of personal web traffic as it passed by because its Wi-Fi equipment automatically changes channels (more…)

daria42 writes “Those who thought the brouhaha over Google’s scanning of Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars was over (whether you believe it was deliberate or not) are destined to be disappointed. News comes from Australia over the weekend that the Australian government has referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police for investigation. The country’s Attorney General, Robert McClelland, was quoted saying, ‘Obviously I won’t pre-empt the (more…)

theodp writes “While waiting for a hard disk of Wi-Fi data that Google says its Street View cars gathered by mistake, the Hamburg Information Commissioner’s office performed tests on a Google Street View car in a controlled environment with simulated wireless networks and issued the following statement: ‘For the Wi-Fi coverage in the Street View cars, both the free software Kismet, and a Google-specific program were used. The Google-specific program (more…)

Google has been collecting detailed user data since day one. Why? Essentially, as market research, which is then used to enhance their services. While the improvements that come as a result of Google’s data collection may benefit us all, it does come at a cost.

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The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google’s playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. “Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the (more…)

While all eyes of the tech world were on Google’s annual developer’s conference in San Francisco last week, a recent gathering of the intelligentsia in the world’s largest Internet market went unnoticed.

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united_notions writes “Slashdot has previously reported the legal challenges over the Gmail brand in Europe. Now, the BBC reports that UK users can finally register @gmail.com addresses — and existing @googlemail.com users can switch to @gmail.com too. Google has put up a page describing the change.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The days when the T-Mobile G1 was the big cheese in the Android world are happily gone. Now, the Android OS is being used to create some truly industry leading handsets and HTC is behind some of the best.

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Twenty-seven advertising partners in China also ask Google how they will be compensated if the company goes ahead with a threatened withdrawal.

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