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Google Wants U.S. to Use 100 Percent Alternative Energy by 2030 Jason Mick (Blog) - September 9, 2008 11:34 AM Google has already made it clear that it wants to promote alternative energy in a big way as part of its "Don't be evil" philosophy. Its initial round of funding included grants to solar and a high-altitude wind power startup. In its second round, Google granted $10M USD more to a couple of geothermal startups, looking to harness Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) -- which involve injecting water deep into the ground to make steam. Now Google has outlined a comprehensive...

Google's online advertising dominance grows -- Don't forget the pending DOJ investigation... Google's dominance of the Internet's business model for monetizing content only grows. "Gap widens in online advertising: Rivals struggle to catch up to Google as buyers favor search over display" reports Jessica Vascellaro in the Wall Street Journal. The article's conclusion is dead on and ominous -- the gap between Google and its competitors in online advertising is widening and will continue to do so because the business that Google dominates, search advertising, is growing significantly faster than display advertising is. While the article focused on the different...

Let’s say you’re an average 20 billion dollar company, with a sparse webpage and a search box. And since you’re swimming in money and ideas, you like dreaming up different ways to revolutionize the Internet. For instance, maybe one day you got tired of typing “Mapquest”, so you invented a new method to combine satellite and plane images into a seamless pyramid of tiles, and then leveraged your computing power to make them zoomable in real-time on a web page. Then, you threw in some roads and driving directions, hey real-time traffic too, and oh, since you were in the...

My colleague John Markoff wrote earlier Tuesday about the barrage of cyber-attacks on Georgia’s technology infrastructure. Others have covered the story as well. But not all stories appear to be accurate. Several reports suggest that data from Georgia and the neighboring countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan has been stripped from Google Maps. One story says that “the relevant maps went blank as soon as fighting broke out,” according to the Azerbaijan Press Agency.

A new feature on the Google Internet site allows anyone with a computer and Internet access to look at street-level views of towns and cities throughout the world. Although it's a useful tool for drivers planning car trips and curious folks who want to explore the globe, at least one lawsuit has been filed from a couple who said their privacy was violated after Google's cameras took a picture of their home as the company mapped the United States. Google offers the map service free of charge for people with access to a computer. After the company's Google Earth program...

Blogger and Brooklyn College Professor of Business Mitchell Langbert has been doing a yeoman’s job investigating the records of Senator Obama’s birth certificate. Despite the pleas from many quarters of the blogosphere, thus far his birth certificate has not been made public, except for a proven forgery on the Daily Kos site and his own campaign site Fight the Smears. At this time, there is no proof that Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, and therefore no proof of his eligibility to be president. What should be a simple matter of producing a paper document...

Last week, we published Babba Zee's Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots. Thurday, Blogger locked our original (and still quite robust) site, DBKP at Blogger for being a spam blog. One would think Blogger would have a system in place before shutting down blogs with any kind of Google Page Rank. After all, your average spam site doesn't acquire much of a page rank. But, apparently, one would be wrong. Our original site is PR-5. Were Obama supporters behind this latest round of blog shutdowns, as they were last month? In Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue "Blog Burning", Confederate Yankee...

It’s bad enough that most media outlets are falling over silly for Obama, but now it seems Google has joined the fast moving train of Obama supporters. Initially, I didn’t believe the reports that the Obama campaign was intentionally shutting down blogs because these blogs were questioning the validity of Obama’s birth certificate. That was until I received an email from Dr. Mitchell Langbert last night, a blogger and Professor at Brooklyn College, who advised that Google had placed a temporary hold on future posts at his website.

While Google may claim that there is no such thing as privacy anymore, I can't see this unnamed Google executive being too happy about the NLPC using Google's own technology against him. It's the sort of thing that might cause him to place a bit more value the privacy of himself and others.

Washington, DC – Today, Google is under fire for issuing contradictory statements on privacy. In California, Google responded to California State Assemblyman Joel Anderson’s (R-San Diego) concerns about Google’s privacy policies yesterday by stating that “Google takes privacy very seriously.” However, in Pennsylvania court documents released the same day, Google stated, “privacy does not exist.” Google’s privacy statements yesterday came on the heels of comments by Google “Evangelist” Vint Cerf to the Washington Technology Alliance’s annual luncheon in May where he explained that “nothing you do ever goes away, and nothing you do ever escapes notice… There isn’t any privacy,...

Ugggh I am livid. I just found out Google did a street view of my neighborhood, not only that they got me outside in the picture. They should be required by law to give forewarning that they are taking pictures in your neighborhood.

Some bloggers opposed to Barack Obama say they suspect Obama's supporters — with the assistance of Google — may have tried to censor them when the Internet giant froze their Web sites for five days last month. Seven blogs run by Democrats who oppose Obama’s nomination for the presidency were incorrectly flagged as spam sites by Blogger, the hosting service Google has owned since 2003. Google says it was an automated response from a spam filter. But the bloggers believe that Web surfers who support Obama took advantage of a loophole in Blogger’s system that allows readers to report spam...

Strange thing. Google has buried the disputed Birth Certificate images. They are NOT in Google's image results when searching "Obama Birth Certificate" or "Barack Obama Certificate" or "Obama Certificate of Live Birth". They have lots of general pictures of Obama and pictures of generic BCs or joke ones, but not the ones being disputed. I've gone over 20 pages deep, 400 images, and NOT found any of the disputed images or the various post KOS posting created variations. That is very suspicious... someone is hiding something. Even More Strange: I searched through 980 images out of over 18,700 of a...

Is there a place to write or call to remove one's address and satelite photo from Google Maps. I do not wish my satelite pictures nor my address to be listed. I find it to be an invasion of privacy of the first degree.

Plans by Google to photograph millions of British homes and publish them online have been condemned as a 'gross invasion of privacy'. The internet giant's StreetView website will allow anyone in the world to type in a UK address or postcode and instantly see a 360-degree picture of the street. It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say the site is a 'burglar's charter' that makes it easy for criminals to check out potential victims. The Google Earth spy car takes images of individual streets for inclusion on the StreetView website The pictures also show people leaving...

Does Google Inc. violate the same "neutrality" principles that it wants mandated for Internet providers like Comcast Corp.? That's the argument being made by some who accuse the search behemoth of hypocrisy when it comes to free speech on the Internet. Here's the deal: Mountain View, Calif.-based Google recently drew the ire of several authors of anti-Obama blogs, hosted on the company's Blogger platform, whose posting rights were temporarily suspended after Google identified as them "potential spam blogs." "You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not...

A U.S. judge's order to Google Inc to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom Inc sparked an outcry on Thursday from privacy advocates in the midst of a legal showdown over video piracy. Viacom, owner of movie studio Paramount and MTV Networks, requested the information as part of its $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the popular online video service and its deep-pocketed parent, Google. Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google on Tuesday to turn over as evidence a database with usernames of YouTube viewers, what videos they...

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there. The order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of YouTube viewers. Viacom said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to...

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights". The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details. While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to...

GOOGLE REMOVES ATLAS HAGEE VIDEOS As bloggers continue to slog through increasing regulation, scrutiny and in some cases deletion (here) I received this from google (big brother, busy suspending anti-Obama blogs). Youtube removed my Hagee video(s)( three 9 minute videos of of the his AIPAC speech - that great inspiring speech from AIPAC 2007. They cited copyright infringement. Whose? There were 6,000 people there. And it was such a great speech. "Israel you are not alone" listen to it here. (You know Atlas is always one step ahead :) Download JohnHageeAIPACSpeech-all-20min.mp3 (I love Hagee, what a friend Israel has. My...