Interesting Google add on

Google Earth given celestial view

By Jonathan Fildes Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Imagery for the system came from six research institutions

The constellations of Andromeda, Hydra and Vulpecula are now just a mouse click away for amateur star-gazers, following the launch of Google Sky.

The tool is an add-on to Google Earth, a program that allows users to search a 3D rendition of our planet's surface.

Sky will allow astronomers a chance to glide through images of more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies.

Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.

"The basic idea is to take Google Earth and turn it on its head," Ed Parsons, Geospatial technologist at Google told the BBC News website.

"So rather than using it to view imagery of the Earth, use it to view imagery of space."

Dr John Mason of the British Astronomical Association, Britain's largest body for amateur astronomers said: "Light pollution and air pollution is now so bad in many areas that all you can see when you look up is a few dozen stars.

"If this helps people to realise just what they are missing, it is a jolly good thing."

Clear view

To use the new system, users will need to have Google Earth installed on their computer.

Digital astronomers can then zoom into an area from which they want to view the night sky.

SKY LAYERS Constellations: Connects stars and labels with name Backyard astronomy: Information on objects visible to the eye and small telescopes Hubble Space Telescope Imagery: 129 high-resolution pictures from Hubble Moon: Two months of lunar positions and moon phases Planets: Positions of seven planets two months ahead Users Guide to Galaxies: Virtual tours through different types of galaxies Life of a star: The different stages of a star's life cycle

"Click a button and the world flips round and you see the sky from that particular location," explained Mr Parsons. "[The view] would be the constellations that you would see oriented in the sky on that particular day at that particular time."

Users can overlay the night sky with other information such as galaxies, constellations and detailed images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Imagery for the system came from six research institutions including the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, the Palomar Observatory in California and the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre.

Much of the imagery can be found through searches on the internet but Google hope the add-on will be simpler and more fun.

Mr Parsons said: "The sky you will be seeing will be a completely clear and you will be able to see objects which are very faint indeed - that you can only see with very large telescopes."

Virtual tour

Sky is not the first time Google has ventured into space.

In March 2006, the company launched Google Mars which allows users to explore the surface of the Red Planet.

Nasa' and Google signed an agreement in December 2006

Another service, Google Moon, lets users view the sites of the Apollo moon landings.

Both services use data from the US Space Agency Nasa, with which Google signed an agreement in December 2006.

The Space Agreement Act was intended to put "the most useful of Nasa's information on the internet".

At the time, Nasa administrator Michael Griffin said the agreement would soon allow "every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars".

The two organisations also said they would collaborate in a variety of areas including adding data collected by Nasa to Google Earth.

However, Mr Parsons said the latest tool was not a product of the partnership.

Mass market

Google Sky is not the only tool that allows astronomers to explore the night sky from their computer.

Stellarium shows the night sky in 3D

For example, Stellarium is a free open source tool that gives people a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to planets and moons.

The software is the brainchild of Fabien Chereau, a Research Engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory, and is used in many planetariums.

Like the suite of Google applications, it allows people to explore places of interest on Earth, as well as mission sites on the Moon and Mars.

Commercial alternatives also exist, such as Imaginova's Starry Night, that offers a range of software packages aimed at beginners to "the serious astronomer".

Apple Mac users can download a Starry Night widget that will allow them to see the night sky from any location on Earth.

"The other astronomy packages are designed for maybe the more professional amateur market," said Mr Parsons. "We are aiming this more at the mass market. If people get hooked and interested they may migrate to these other packages."

Original article posted here.

Nice gesture, but Google unfortunately has an uphill battle to get this government to join the fight against censorship

Google Fights Global Internet Censorship

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER , AP Business Writer

A Google sign is posted at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. in this April 19, 2007 file photo. Google Inc. is seeking help from the U.S. government to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

(AP) -- Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google Inc. is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide.

The online search giant is taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S. trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce, such as tariffs.

Google sees the dramatic increase in government Net censorship, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, as a potential threat to its advertising-driven business model, and wants government officials to consider the issue in economic, rather than just political, terms.

"It's fair to say that censorship is the No. 1 barrier to trade that we face," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government affairs. A Google spokesman said Monday that McLaughlin has met with officials from the U.S. Trade Representative's office several times this year to discuss the issue.

"If censorship regimes create barriers to trade in violation of international trade rules, the USTR would get involved," USTR spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel said. She added though that human rights issues, such as censorship, typically falls under the purview of the State Department.

While human rights activists are pleased with Google's efforts to fight censorship, they harshly criticized the company early last year for agreeing to censor its Web site in China, which has the second-largest number of Internet users in the world.

The company defends its actions, saying the Chinese government made it a condition of allowing Chinese users access to Google Web pages. China has an Internet firewall that slows or disrupts Chinese users from accessing foreign uncensored Web sites.

Censorship online has risen dramatically the past five years, belying the hype of the late 1990s, which portrayed the Internet as largely impervious to government interference.

A study released last month by the OpenNet Initiative found that 25 of 41 countries surveyed engage in Internet censorship. That's a dramatic increase from the two or three countries guilty of the practice in 2002, says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who helped prepare the report.

China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and Thailand, among others, are increasingly blocking or filtering Web pages, Palfrey says.

Governments "are having more success than the more idealistic of us thought," acknowledges Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Still, even government filtering isn't always successful. In a brutal regime like Iran, which filters Web content, there are nearly 100,000 bloggers, making Farsi "one of the most blogged languages in the world," says Palfrey.

Google's YouTube has become a common target for thin-skinned rulers. Turkey in March blocked the video-sharing site for two days after a complaint that some clips insulted Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Thailand continues to block YouTube after several videos appeared in April, criticizing the country's monarch.

Bloggers in Morocco said in late May that they could not access YouTube shortly after videos were posted critical of that nation's treatment of the people of Western Sahara, a territory that Morocco took control of in 1975. A government spokesman blamed a technical glitch.

One likely source for Google's censorship idea is a paper written two years ago by Timothy Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, who argues that downloading a Web page hosted in another country effectively imports a service.

Drawing on that concept, Google envisions using trade agreements to fight back. The negotiated pacts would include provisions guaranteeing free trade in "information services." As is true of most trade pacts, the provisions would call for arbitration if there are violations.

The U.S. has a trade agreement with Morocco and began negotiating one with Thailand in 2004, although those talks were suspended early last year after a military coup.

Columbia's Wu said the trade pact approach is likely to be more effective when governments are guilty of blocking entire Web sites or applications, such as Internet phone-calling, than when they filter specific content.

Under World Trade Organization rules, countries can limit trade for national security or public moral reasons, Wu said, exceptions that authoritarian governments would likely cite when filtering politically sensitive material.

The company's trade initiative reflects Google's increasing acceptance of the value of federal lobbying. The company didn't hire a lobbyist until 2003, according to public filings, but paid the high-powered Washington-based Podesta Group $160,000 last year to work on Internet free-speech, tax and other issues.

Human rights groups say Google's censorship efforts seem sincere, albeit motivated by bottom-line incentives.

"Free expression is a unique selling point" for a company like Google, O'Brien said. Filtering and censorship "diminishes the value of their product."

Yet last month at the company's annual meeting, Google's board recommended investors vote against a shareholder resolution urging Google to renounce censorship.

The resolution was defeated, although Google is already acting on some of the proposal's ideas, including working with other technology leaders, such as Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., to develop a set of principles on how companies should respond to censorship and other human rights violations when doing business abroad.

Human rights advocates, academics and corporate social responsibility groups are involved in the project, announced earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Google's global growth efforts continue. YouTube said Tuesday that it plans to expand into nine other countries, including Brazil, France, Spain and Poland, offering local-language Web sites and highlighting videos of domestic interest.

In China, where Google is the No. 2 search engine behind the domestically based Baidu.com, the company said in April it will increase its investment as it works to create more content of interest to Chinese users.

Original article posted here.

If not the government, the corporations . . .

Google is watching you

'Big Brother' row over plans for personal database

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor

Google, the world's biggest search engine, is setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives.

In a mission statement that raises the spectre of an internet Big Brother to rival Orwellian visions of the state, Google has revealed details of how it intends to organise and control the world's information.

The company's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said during a visit to Britain this week: "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'."

Speaking at a conference organised by Google, he said : "We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms [software] will get better and we will get better at personalisation."

Google's declaration of intent was publicised at the same time it emerged that the company had also invested £2m in a human genetics firm called 23andMe. The combination of genetic and internet profiling could prove a powerful tool in the battle for the greater understanding of the behaviour of an online service user.

Earlier this year Google's competitor Yahoo unveiled its own search technology, known as Project Panama, which monitors internet visitors to its site to build a profile of their interests.

Privacy protection campaigners are concerned that the trend towards sophisticated internet tracking and the collating of a giant database represents a real threat, by stealth, to civil liberties.

That concern has been reinforced by Google's $3.1bn bid for DoubleClick, a company that helps build a detailed picture of someone's behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick's "cookies", the software it places on users' machines to track which sites they visit.

The Independent has now learnt that the body representing Europe's data protection watchdogs has written to Google requesting more information about its information retention policy.

The multibillion-pound search engine has already said it plans to impose a limit on the period it keeps personal information.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK agency responsible for monitoring data legislation confirmed it had been part of the group of organisations, known as the Article 29 Working Group, which had written to Google.

It is understood the letter asked for more detail about Google's policy on the retention of data. Google says it will respond to the Article 29 request next month when it publishes a full response on its website.

The Information Commissioner's spokeswoman added: "I can't say what was in it only that it was written in response to Google's announcement that will hold information for no more than two years."

Ross Anderson, professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University and chairman of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said there was a real issue with "lock in" where Google customers find it hard to extricate themselves from the search engine because of the interdependent linkage with other Google services, such as iGoogle, Gmail and YouTube. He also said internet users could no longer effectively protect their anonymity as the data left a key signature.

"A lot of people are upset by some of this. Why should an angst-ridden teenager who subscribes to MySpace have their information dragged up 30 years later when they go for a job as say editor of the Financial Times? But there are serious privacy issues as well. Under data protection laws, you can't take information, that may have been given incidentally, and use it for another purpose. The precise type and size of this problem is yet to be determined and will change as Google's business changes."

A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner said that because of the voluntary nature of the information being targeted, the Information Commission had no plans to take any action against the databases.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy Ccunsel, said the company intended only doing w hat its customers wanted it to do. He said Mr Schmidt was talking about products such as iGoogle, where users volunteer to let Google use their web histories. "This is about personalised searches, where our goal is to use information to provide the best possible search for the user. If the user doesn't want information held by us, then that's fine. We are not trying to build a giant library of personalised information. All we are doing is trying to make the best computer guess of what it is you are searching for."

Privacy protection experts have argued that law enforcement agents - in certain circumstances - can compel search engines and internet service providers to surrender information. One said: "The danger here is that it doesn't matter what search engines say their policy is because it can be overridden by national laws."

How Google grew to dominate the internet

It's all about the algorithms. When Google first started up, in summer 1998, it quickly made its mark by being the internet's best, most efficient search engine. Now Google wants to know everything - all the knowledge contained on the world wide web, and everything about you as a computer user, too.

The key, at every step of the way, has been the methodology the company has used to catalogue and present information. The first stroke of genius that the company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had while they were still in graduate school was to measure responses to an internet search not only by the frequency of the search word but by the number of times a given web page was accessed via other web pages. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, now copied by every one of their rivals.

A decade later, their technical brilliance is operating on an altogether more ambitious scale. Google is now a $150bn (£77bn) company and a seemingly unstoppable corporate, as well as technical juggernaut.

The big question, of course, is whether the idealism that first fired up Page and Brin can survive in a dirty corporate world where information is not just an intellectual ideal, but also a legal and political hot potato involving profound issues of privacy, intellectual property rights and freedom of speech. "You can make money without doing evil," runs one of their most celebrated mantras. Does that extend to signing a deal with China whereby its search functions will be subject to state censorship? The furore over that particular decision, made at the beginning of last year, still rages.

Google's activities thus touch on some of the key philosophical questions of our digital age. Because of its power and prominence, it will also be the benchmark by which we come to measure many of the answers.

Original article posted here.

Google Once Again Not Doing Good

House panel: Why did Google 'airbrush history?'

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Google's replacement of post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its map portal with images of the region before the storm does a "great injustice" to the storm's victims, a congressional subcommittee said.

The House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on investigations and oversight on Friday asked Google Inc. Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt to explain why his company is using the outdated imagery.

The subcommittee cited an Associated Press report on the images.

"Google's use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history," subcommittee chairman Brad Miller, D-North Carolina, wrote in a letter to Schmidt.

Swapping the post-Katrina images and the ruin they revealed for others showing an idyllic city dumbfounded many locals and even sparked suspicions that the company and civic leaders were conspiring to portray the area's recovery progressing better than it really is.

Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesman, said the company had received the letter but Schmidt had no immediate response.

After Katrina, Google's satellite images were in high demand among exiles and hurricane victims anxious to see whether their homes were damaged.

Now, though, a virtual trip through New Orleans via Google Maps is a surreal experience of scrolling across an unscathed landscape of packed parking lots and marinas full of boats.

Reality, of course, is very different: Entire neighborhoods are now slab mosaics where houses once stood and shopping malls, churches and marinas are empty of life, many gone altogether.

John Hanke, Google's director for maps and satellite imagery, said "a combination of factors including imagery date, resolution, and clarity" go into deciding what imagery to provide.

"The latest update from one of our information providers substantially improved the imagery detail of the New Orleans area," Hanke said in a news release about the switch.

Kovacs said efforts are under way to use more current imagery.

It was not clear when the current images replaced views of the city taken after Katrina struck August 29, 2005, flooding an estimated 80 percent of New Orleans.

Miller asked Google to brief his staff by April 6 on who made the decision to replace the imagery with pre-Katrina images, and to disclose if Google was contacted by the city, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey or any other government entity about changing the imagery.

"To use older, pre-Katrina imagery when more recent images are available without some explanation as to why appears to be fundamentally dishonest," Miller said.

Edith Holleman, staff counsel for the House subcommittee, said it would be useful to understand how Google acquires and manages its imagery because "people see Google and other Internet engines and it's almost like the official word."

Google does provide imagery of New Orleans and the region following Katrina through its more specialized service called Google Earth.

Original article posted here.

You knew it couldn't last: Beware the Google

Miserable failure' Bush rehabilitated as Google steps in to defuse the Googlebombs

Nicholas Carr
The Guardian

If you've had occasion to do a Google search on the phrase "miserable failure" over the past few years, you've probably found that the top result is the official site for George W Bush's presidency. It's there because of a campaign of "Googlebombing". A lot of people wrote the term "miserable failure" on their personal home pages and then linked it to the White House site. Google's search engine dutifully made the connection.

Article continues
But last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.

Googlebombing was amusing at first, but it got old fast. So I'm perfectly happy that Google is giving it the heave-ho. It's like scrubbing graffiti off the side of a subway car.

But there's a deeper story here, and it lies in Google's explanation for why it finally decided to defuse Googlebombs. You might assume the company was acting out of a desire to present better results, or to counter internet vandalism, or simply to serve the public interest. But you'd be wrong.

What drove Google to act was its fear that Googlebombing was tarnishing its painstakingly controlled image.

One of the company's top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: "Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)

The company is allowing concerns about its public image to influence the search results it dishes up. The upshot in this case may be salubrious, but what kind of precedent is being set here?

And, perhaps more important, what does it tell us about what's inside the Google black box that determines how most of us find information on the web most of the time?

Three years ago, when Google was first asked about Googlebombing, it gave the corporate equivalent of a shrug. It's not our problem, the company's technology director, Craig Silverstein, told the New York Times. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web, for better or worse."

The implication was that Google's search engine was a passive feedback mechanism that reported the public's wisdom - or stupidity - back to the public. Reflecting all the strengths and flaws of democracy, it was the people's machine. Google itself had little control over it. (nytimes.com)

The perception of Google as an honest broker, disinterested in the information it presents, remains a popular one. We like to believe that "we the people" control what comes out of Google's mouth.

But while that may have been true once, and while it was in fact one of the company's founding ideals, it's not so true any more.

Google's search engine originally worked according to a simple principle: web pages were ranked according to the number of links they received from other sites, with each link weighted to reflect a site's popularity. That principle is still part of the equation, but Google's software has become much more complicated over the years.

Its search engine operates according to an array of sophisticated and secret algorithms crafted by the company's brilliant coders.

It's a machine that's been tweaked to do precisely what Google instructs it to do, even if that might mean filtering results to protect the company's reputation.

Google may have good in its heart. It may, for the time being anyway, be fighting on our behalf to bring order to a chaotic internet. But let's not forget that Google's machine is not our machine. It's Google's, for better or worse.

· Nicholas Carr is the author of Does IT Matter? He blogs at roughtype.com

Original article posted here.

AND THE NEXT PART

Action Alert!
Google did it again! (updated)

Uruknet

January 20, 2006 On January 12, 2007 Google has stopped indexing Uruknet.info as a news source (The latest Uruknet article included in the Google News index is Iraqi Children "Play" Civil War, January 12, 2007). We wrote to Google News and this is their reply: Hi Vincenzo, Thank you for your message. We apologize for the confusion, we've reviewed your site again and are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We appreciate your willingness to provide your articles to us, and we will log your site for future consideration. Thank you for your interest in Google News. They are unable? and for which reason? Of course there isn’t any technical reason, because Google.news have been indexing Uruknet up to five days ago and although old pages are still available, there has been no update since then. The only "technical reason" is censorship. We rewrote to Google.news and their reply was even more cryptic: Thank you for your note. Although we're unable to provide specific information at this time, we sincerely appreciate your interest in Google News and your willingness to provide us with your content. Please be assured that we'll keep your site on file should we be able to crawl it in the future. Thanks again for taking the time to contact us. Regards, The Google Team Of course, it is a lie: In our logs it seems that you still crawl Uruknet, but the articles do not appear on Google.news. We re-rewrote to Google.news and we didn’t get any answer at all. We ignore the reason for which Google has manipulated the rankings for Uruknet , but we think the exclusion of alternative media through search engines results is government/corporate tactics to harness the free flow of information on the Internet. Being banned by Google.news is obviously a serious threat to a news website's existence. This isn't the first time that Google discontinues indexing Uruknet. On February 18, 2005, Google.news removed Uruknet.info as a news source, apparently thanks to Michelle Malkin's protestations only to reinstate them - following many complaints sent in by our readers. On June 4, 2005 both Google.com and Google.news dropped Uruknet again without explanation: and in this case too Google reinstated Uruknet only because of complaint messages from our readers. We must add that Google’s censorship unintentionally occurs in a particularly critical period for our website. Uruknet has been under hacking attacks since September 2005. These attacks increase whenever there are important events from Iraq. Since this past summer, when a great number of attacks were carried out against Uruknet, we have been moving our servers and spending lots of time, money and energies in order to prevent these attacks and to repair the damages. Since the assassination of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the attacks have increased again and last week they managed to destroy our main server and other servers we use for mirroring websites. As our readers know, we never carried out campaigns neither for fund-raising nor for any other kind of aid. Although we’ve been able to provide, in spite of sacrifice, for maintenance and safeguard of Uruknet and mirroring websites, and although we succeeded, notwithstanding such a great deal of problems, to face all damages caused by hacking attacks, now Google’s censorship risks to be a blow too hard to ward off. We therefore kindly request our readers to write to Google asking Uruknet.info to be reinstated as a news source. Please, send your complaints to google.news! Click here to fill a speedy form. Update A few hours ago, we asked our readers to send their complaint messages to " source-suggestions@google.com " Now google.news claims that the address source-suggestions@google.com is no longer active. When one of our readers sends google.news a complaint letter for having stopped indexing uruknet, he receives the following automated response from google: ----- Original Message ----- From: news-feedback@google.com To: pao**si@tin.it Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2007 8:00 PM Subject: Re: [#102548054] Complain for removing www.uruknet.info from google.news Thank you for your note about Google News. This is an automated response to let you know that we appreciate your interest and feedback. Please note that this email address is no longer active. To further assist our users, we've created a Google News Help Center, where you can search or browse all of our available support information. Our Help Center is located at http://www.google.com/support/news/ If you're a news publisher, please visit our Publisher Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/news_pub where you'll find extensive, up-to-date information and solutions. But four days ago google.news did reply us from the same email address: so on 16 January 2006 the address " source-suggestions@google.com " surely was active. Messaggio Originale -------- Oggetto: Re: [#81255140] Re-inserting uruknet.info into google-news *Data: * *Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:24:43 -0800* *Da: * *Google Help source-suggestions@google.com* A: enzo@uruknet.eu Hi Vincenzo, Thank you for your message. We apologize for the confusion, we've reviewed your site again and are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We appreciate your willingness to provide your articles to us, and we will log your site for future consideration. Thank you for your interest in Google News. Regards, The Google Team -------- Messaggio Originale -------- Oggetto: Re: [#81255140] Re-inserting uruknet.info into google-news Data: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:45:05 -0800 Da: Google Help source-suggestions@google.com A: enzo@uruknet.eu Hi Vincenzo, Thank you for your note. Although we're unable to provide specific information at this time, we sincerely appreciate your interest in Google News and your willingness to provide us with your content. Please be assured that we'll keep your site on file should we be able to crawl it in the future. Thanks again for taking the time to contact us. Regards, The Google Team We therefore strongly suspect that google.news "source-suggestions@google.com" has put a filter on the word "uruknet". We made some test, and we made sure that if someone sends to source-suggestions@google.com an email message without the word "uruknet", google news doesn't reply that the address is inactive. Please click here to send your complaints to google.news.

Original article posted here.