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Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:55 am
by Bill H
...no politics please.
Greatly agreed. But politics aside, what in the sam hill do they think they are going to actually do with that ungodly huge mass of data? And at what cost (in dollars)? Is the end result actually worth it?

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 2:15 pm
by Moocat
Well, it's very hard to discuss a Googe vs. the government without getting politics involved but I'll try to shift it to the side as much as possible :)

Anyhow, I don't know what they're going to do with that huge chunk of data, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to foot the bill for the amount of money it's going to cost to analyze and report on that baby.

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 3:22 pm
by wtf
It's all marketing stunt. After this event the cows in Nebraska will know about Google.

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 6:16 pm
by evilmonkey
What gives them the legitimacy to do so? Nothing. Internet aside, look at what they are doing: they are asking a US corporation to turn over information about how its users use the service. If the US government were to ask a Canadian corporation to turn over some records, I'd fully support the Canadian company giving the US the finger. Bu, Google, being an American company, must comply with american laws. What Google might do however is turn over only the queries that originated from american IP's, claiming that the US has no right to spy on the citizens of other countries. I would fully support that, and I kind of wish they would do that. My Ameican friends, you have to realize that every day your government passes laws that further limit your freedoms. The constitution might as well be null and void withthe amount of amendments that were added to it, and with bill being passed every day to further limit your rights. DMCA, Patriot Act, those are just the begginning. I don't mean to get political, but for the love of your country, stop electing Bushes!

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 6:45 pm
by d3ad1ysp0rk
Well, I guess Bill isn't as tough as we'd hoped:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1914323,00.asp

Nor is Yahoo!, sad really.

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 7:33 pm
by evilmonkey
What kind of crap is COPA in the first place? Where are the parents? You don't want your 8 year old child viewing smut online, then be a responsible parent and keep track of what your child does on the internet. If you have to be elsewhere whiile your child is on the computer, then you fail as a parent. Why should should the internet enterprises and sysadmins recoup your failures? Grr... :x

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:43 pm
by pilau
evilmonkey wrote:If you have to be elsewhere whiile your child is on the computer, then you fail as a parent.
What? That's totally not true, What if a person is a single parent and he must do double ships to support his family? So he fails as a parent?

Personally I know of many told and software that can control internet browsing on a PC.
Besides, I don't think that giving an 8-yo child access to the internet is such a good idea in itself :P

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:48 pm
by josh
If I did not have access to the internet as an 8-yr old I probably would have never picked up programming. How would anyone possibly need search history data to find out how to block content, regardless they wouldn't be able to do anything about it even if they could without abolishing free-speech on the internet. This is like saying monitoring 1 million random phone calls will help them stop crank-calls.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 6:24 am
by Chris Corbyn
pilau wrote:I don't think that giving an 8-yo child access to the internet is such a good idea in itself :P
The internet is something children should definitely have access to. It's perfect for education. With the correct filters (DansGaurdian ? ) in place you minimize the risk. Granted, supervision is certainly needed with younger children but at what point do you start to give your children a little space?

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 6:29 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
COPA is no longer in force - COPPA (easily confused) is. Its also internationally applicable - if your site is in any way aimed at kids, or may be used by kids, or whatever other conditions it imposes - you're legally obliged to check age (as worthless as that is) and not allow the new account until permitted by a parent/legal guardian. Its not restricted to US sites...per se.

I hear internet/privacy filters are useful - much better than easily avoided online measures...

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 6:41 am
by pilau
d11wtq wrote:Granted, supervision is certainly needed with younger children but at what point do you start to give your children a little space?
It's quite a dilemma parent have to face a lot of time. Every parent educates his children differently, and sometimes one parent has to surrender to what society (or in plain a majority of other parents) dictates.
Well, after thinking about this a little more, young tots should be given access t the internet, but supervision (either digital by filters or real by prents) is definitely requiered.

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2006 3:34 pm
by Gambler
It's all marketing stunt.
Yep.
you're legally obliged to check age (as worthless as that is)
Worthless and annoying. And there are hundreds of more viable solutions. And all of them suck anyway, because you can't replace parents with some kind of device that would prohibit kids from doing certain things.

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 11:36 am
by waradmin
To touch on the fact that Yahoo! and MSN gave up their results, I dont find that to be as big of a deal. Mainly because MSN and Yahoo are never used by me or people I know. So the feds can sift through that all they want, none of my search information will be found there.

But that makes me think, at times if you click a link or a popup comes up, and the page cannot be found, some browsers take you to the MSN message that displays the URL saying its invalid. Isnt that much like a search, are the 404 errors logged in the search records too? Because that would be indirectly submiting data to MSN in my opinion.

As far as how they will sift through the info. Ill bet its all neatly organized into columns, ID, IP, Search Term, Results etc. So simply sort by IP, etc and boom you have your data.

Why would google, msn, yahoo, etc keep records for such a long period of time? So they can look at trends for marketing tactics.

All in all, to me it looks like http://www.vpntunnel.net is going to be getting a lot more hits.

-steve

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 11:50 am
by feyd
All the search engines keep zeitgeist information, allowing them to track trends, popularity, among other things. It can help them fine tune the engine more, along with help push them into different markets or better information retrieval from pages they crawl. Click-tracking is also likely used to help tune the results or the engine, and helps them target advertising.

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2006 9:06 am
by waradmin
I fully understand why a search engine company would want to keep records of search terms. But why associate the IP with that, what benefit does storing the IP have? Is it used for more targeted advertisements based on the area the IP range is assigned to or what?