News

Look out, Zillow, Google wants to eat your lunch:

Zillow better watch out: The latest thing to emerge from Google's barrage of launches this week duplicates one of the Seattle startup's most valuable features.

Google is now offering an instant mortgage quote service that instantly connects lenders to buyers, and provides useful tools for comparison shopping. It also instantly estimates house values (a Gestimate?) provided by IntelliReal.

Just another “free” product that Google can use to mine information from out of people. It's really amazing that so few people seem concerned about Google's relentless march into people's personal lives. If Google was the government, libertarians everywhere would be running around screaming about this. But not too many libertarians seem too concerned about Google. Something they should keep in mind: A massive corporation isn't much different than the government.

It's time people started caring about what Google is doing with the data it's collecting from them. And the profiles it is building from that data.

They're also launching a new product and invading a new market:

In a move that is likely to be seen as an attack on yet another industry, Google on Wednesday said it would release a free navigation system for mobile phones that offers turn-by-turn directions.

Analysts said that Google’s free service, if successful, could erode the sales of GPS navigation devices made by companies like Garmin and TomTom and of navigation services offered by cellphone carriers.

“There’s no doubt that those guys are going to be disrupted,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst with Opus Research.

More surprising is that Google is acknowledging from the get-go that it wants to load up this application with ads before long. Driving from Mountain View to San Ramon? You might see an ad for your favorite fast food restaurant which has a franchise along the way. Meanwhile, your trip across the Bay Area gets recorded by Google's computers. Your precise location will be tracked by Google if you use their software.

The only way to protect your privacy and prevent Google from recording your movements is to avoid using Google software. That means saying NO to Android, NO to Google Maps, and NO to this latest piece of GPS spyware from Google.

If Google gets its way, there will be no place to stay safe from its unblinking Big Brother eyeballs:

The company has done well so far with services that appeal chiefly to consumers, but Schmidt said at the Gartner Symposium here that Google likes services that become part people's lives regardless of whether they are doing work. And because the company covers its costs by charging enterprise accounts $50 per person per year for those services at work, he said it's just a matter of attaining scale before the business becomes “very profitable” for Google.

Google's goal is to be able to watch everyone, all the time, no matter where they are or who they're with. Home, work, on vacation. If you use Google products and so does your employer, what doesn't Google know about you?

Talk about a creepy, undesirable future…

It sure would be great if they did:

Apple has had a fairly comfortable relationship with Google in the past—CEO Eric Schmidt had a place on Apple's board, Google is the default search for its Safari browser, and Google Maps and YouTube are first-class applications on the iPhone. Apple has even created a maps API that allows iPhone developers to easily include Google Map data directly into their own apps. However, earlier this year Apple bought a small startup that created its own Google Maps competitor. The purchase may be a sign that growing competition between the two companies—which resulted in the recent resignation of Schmidt from Apple's board—could be causing a rift in the once-friendly alliance.

The mapping company Apple bought is called Placebase, and its CEO is now part of what is called the “Geo Team” at Apple.

Google rivals Yahoo and Microsoft already offer their own online maps, and there's also MapQuest, which is owned by AOL. Of Google's rivals, Bing Maps (from Microsoft) is perhaps the best, with its Birds Eye View imagery a standout feature.

More competition would be a good thing… when there are alternatives to Google, users have choices and can avoid placing all their data in the grasp of one company.

This headline is not an April Fools' joke:

Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. Let me restate that slightly to make it more clear: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome.

Yes, it’s both hilarious and awesome (or hilariously awesome, if you will) that Google seems to dislike IE so much that it has spent its own time improving it. Google claims its goals are noble. Talking to Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, they tell us that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. That said, they are only targeting one browser, IE, right now.

And so Google's march towards full control of the user desktop continues.

With its Chrome Big Brother operating system still months away from shipping, and the Chrome browser clinging to a toehold of market share, Google has come up with yet another scheme to get its spyware onto users' computers: Take over installations of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Google's “plugin” even rebrands Internet Explorer in the About window.

And there's only an IE “plugin”…. for now. In the near future, expect to see a plugin for Firefox which does the same thing to Mozilla's browser. When is Mozilla going to realize that Google is not their friend and break off that search deal?

Mozilla is a nonprofit that is in Google's way. Google wants all Firefox users to be using its Chrome spyware. It's not enough that Firefox ships with Google as the default search engine. The entire browser needs to be provided by Google so that Google can track search habits and web browsing history to feed its profit machine. For now, Google is going after Microsoft, but without a doubt it will soon seek to cannibalize Mozilla. The Foundation is, of course, a nonprofit, so buying it isn't really a possibility, and taking control of Firefox is not feasible either because Firefox's code is open source. Google will probably opt for a plugin that takes over Firefox, and continue to urge people to simply download its Chrome spyware and abandon their other browser(s).

Google is already using its websites, i.e. YouTube, to promote Chrome spyware. It's only a matter of time before it becomes more aggressive about pushing the browser onto users. Google could, if it wanted, embed download links on every search results page. Such a plan has no doubt already been considered by the Monster of Mountain View and may be closer to implementation than anybody knows.

What a stroke of luck:

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype in the United States District Court of Northern California. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of Skype for $1.9 billion to a consortium of investors led by the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

[…]

Several potential bidders for Skype, including Google, cited wariness about potential liabilities in the Skype case as a reason for backing away from a potential deal, according to a person briefed on the Skype sales process. It is not clear if the latest suit will delay the Skype sale.

Is there any tech company smaller than Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, or Oracle (and excluding hardware manufacturers) that Google bigwigs haven't thought about acquiring?

This sucks:

Google Inc., the most popular Internet search engine, acquired ReCaptcha, a company that helps prevent fraud and spam at Web sites such as Ticketmaster.com.

The technology will be used to protect Web surfers and improve the scanning of books and newspapers, Google said today on its blog. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The technology is used on more than 100,000 sites.

reCAPTCHA, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, but apparently no longer affiliated with that great institution, is easily the most usable and readable CAPCTHA system out there. Now it's just another extension of the Google empire, another way for Google to collect data from webmasters. This site – Leave Google Behind – has not used reCAPTCHA to date, and now it won't for sure.

What's even more sinister is that Google plans to use this acquisition to bolster its evil plan to gain control over orphaned books. That plan has run into significant and welcome opposition; the head of the U.S. Copyright Office has even spoken out against it to Congress.

If Feedburner offers any history lesson, the swallowing of reCAPTCHA will be messy and bumpy.

Renowned cartoonist David Horsey, who draws for Hearst Corp., has put together a pretty compelling cartoon illustrating Google's global ambitions to compile and control every bit of information it can, no matter how intrusive…

The folks at Twitter, Inc. are learning this the hard way:

The reason why 300+ confidential documents were stolen from Twitter’s Google Apps account was actually because of Google’s totally insecure login process.

Don’t believe me? Just try login at docs.twitter.com as… say “ev” like in Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder (”biz” would be another alternative). Of course, unless you really know the password or use some sort of an automated password tool, you won’t get in.

So Google is secure, right?

Wrong! For Sophos security analyst Chet Wisniewski, the problem is actually as simple as the vulnerability is huge: Google will not throw you out after, let’s say 25 attempts guessing Ev’s password.

Actually, Google doesn’t even seem to impose any limits on fraudulous attempts – I couldn’t get this confirmed by Google who will not talk openly about its security process.

Worse, because of Google’s lack of security, Twitter’s co-founder wouldn’t even know that someone has tried to breach into his account. “Even my Linux machine will warn me when my wife tries unsuccessfully to login,” jokes Wisniewski.

The whole thing is worth a read. It's also got screenshots, incidentally, which illustrate the perils of relying on Google Apps. Not only might Google harvest your data for its own purposes, but it won't be properly protected from hacking attempts.

Eric Schmidt is saying goodbye to Apple:

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Google chief executive Eric Schmidt resigned Monday from the board of Apple due to potential conflicts of interest as the two tech giants increasingly become rivals.

“Eric has been an excellent board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said a statement from Apple chief executive Steve Jobs.

Schmidt, who had been a member of the board since August 2006, could not function effectively with Google entering more of Apple's core businesses, such as the smart phone and personal computer operating system markets, said Jobs.

This move should have happened weeks, perhaps even months, ago. It's about time Apple bid farewell to Schmidt. The Monster of Mountain View is or will soon be competing against most of Apple's products (the iPhone? Android. Mac? Chrome. Safari? Chrome).

Don't be surprised if at some point Google tries to launch GoogleTunes and partners with some lowly digital music manufacturer to create a would-be iPod rival. Google is gaming to compete with everybody in the hope that it will be able to own the digital experience for at least a hefty percentage of consumers. The whole world is probably out of reach, though it can be done… ask John D. Rockefeller.