R.I.P. "Don't Be Evil"
Google is allegedly helping the CIA spy on Americans:
"Google is being actively hypocritical and deceptive in playing up its refusal to help the Department of Justice when all along it has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command."
Censoring the search results in China was bad enough, but at least they were forthcoming about it. "Google, for its part, refuses to comment on national security matters. This story, and Google's refusal to comment, simply provide more ammunition for Google's critics."
You apparently missed the update.
Posted by: Michael Hampton on October 31, 2006 8:33 AM | permalinkNow you've got it. :)
P.S. You should have different fruits every time.
Posted by: Michael Hampton on October 31, 2006 10:23 AM | permalinkUpdated. I always appreciate good investigative journalism; RIP Gary Webb, Daniel Pearl and Paul Klebnikov.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on October 31, 2006 10:26 AM | permalinkAlso, I keep the fruit the same because no spammer has bothered writing a script for this comment form yet and it's convenient that people only need to solve it once and then it's saved in a cookie.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on October 31, 2006 11:38 AM | permalink"...it's convenient that people only need to solve it once and then it's saved in a cookie."
And quite a puzzle it was to solve!
I wanted to post because I just remembered reading about this anti-spam mechanism a couple years ago. The article had some kind of prediction on how long it would be before computers and software would be good enough to do image recognition to get around this.
Do you know anything about that? From what I recall, they seemed to think it was kind of far off (at least 10 years).
Posted by: Od*ll on November 1, 2006 12:53 AM | permalinkExactly -- it's extremely simple for an English speaking person and really challenging for a bot that hasn't been coded to deal with this specific question (as opposed to character recognition in most captchas).
Posted by: Joe Grossberg on November 1, 2006 6:42 AM | permalinkNo more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.