#Google looking to make driverless cars legal in Nevada

Google looking to make driverless cars legal in Nevada

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(PhysOrg.com) — In an unexpected move, Google, the wily search giant with loads of ambition and enough spare cash to enable it to dabble in technologies that appear to have nothing to do with its core business, has hired lobbyist David Goldwater to represent the company in its push to legalize the running of autonomous vehicles on Nevada roads; this comes less than a year after announcing that it had been running live tests of its self-driving vehicles on California roads.

It was just last March that Google announced to the world that it had been racing autonomous cars around on rooftop parking lots and then just seven months later that it had been testing those cars on California roads; news that both made headlines and bolstered Google’s image as one of the more innovative companies operating today. Now comes news that Google is ready to tackle the sticky problem of allowing such cars to drive legally on roads, an issue no doubt that cropped up in the wake of its earlier announcements.

It’s not exactly clear why Google chose Nevada for its first push at legalizing what it’s been doing already; though there are theories, such as the fact that the giant Consumer Electronics Show (CES) just happens to be held in Las Vegas each year, or maybe it’s because Nevada has a history of allowing things that other states don’t; prostitution being the most infamous example, of course. Or it might be the fact that Nevada has a lot of roads that have very little traffic in very out-of-the-way places and thus could test its vehicles on public roads without much oversight.

In any case, it’s clear that Google is very serious about continuing its research with autonomous vehicles and as a part of that is pushing for legislation to create for themselves a hassle free environment for doing so. As a result, there are now two bills currently being introduced to the Nevada legislature related to autonomous vehicles; one would be an amendment to another bill regarding electric vehicles that would create a means of licensing and testing autonomous vehicles on public roads; the other would provide an exemption for such “drivers” from the current law that disallows texting while behind the wheel. Google claims that computer controlled vehicles are and will be much safer than conventional human driven vehicles because they are able to respond to road conditions more quickly and don’t fall prey to other human foibles, such as drinking and driving, falling asleep, or simply forgetting to pay attention. If Google’s push to legalize such vehicles succeeds, we might just find out over the next few years, if they’re right.

Malware authors target #Google #Chrome

Every time I write about Internet Explorer, it’s usually a matter of minutes—sometimes even seconds—until someone in the Talkback section proclaims, smugly, that they’ve switched to Google Chrome or Firefox and are therefore immune from malware attacks.

They’re wrong, and malware authors have begun preying on users of alternative browsers to push dangerous software, including Trojans and scareware. The problem is that most malware attacks aren’t triggered by exploits that target vulnerabilities in code. Instead, according to one recent study, “users are four times more likely to come into contact with social engineering tactics as opposed to a site serving up an exploit.”

I found a perfect example yesterday, thanks to an alert from Silverlight developer Kevin Dente. He had typed in a simple set of search terms—Silverlight datagrid reorder columns—at Google.com, using the Google Chrome browser on Windows. You can follow along with what happened next in the screenshot gallery that accompanies this post.

The first page of Google search results included several perfectly good links, but the sixth result was booby trapped. Clicking that link in Google Chrome popped up this dialog box:

That led to a basic social engineering attack, but this one has a twist. It  was customized for Chrome. If you’ve ever seen a Google Chrome security warning, you’ll recognize the distinctive, blood-red background, which this malware author has duplicated very effectively.

After the fake scan is complete, another dialog box comes up, warning that “Google Chrome recommends you to install proper software.”

That’s terrible grammar, and this social-engineering attack is likely to fail with an English-speaking victim, who should be suspicious of the odd wording. But a user whose primary language is something other than English might well be fooled. And the malware author has anticipated the possibility that you might click Cancel in the dialog box. If you do, it still tries to download the malicious software.

Each time I visited this page, the download I was offered was slightly different. My installed antivirus software (Microsoft Security Essentials) didn’t flag it as dangerous. When I submitted it to VirusTotal.com, only five of the 42 engines correctly identified it as a suspicious file. Less than 8 hours later, a second scan at VirusTotal was a little better. This time, eight engines confirmed that the file was suspicious. Microsoft’s virus definitions had been updated and a scan identified the rogue file as Win32/Defmid.

Panda and Precx identified the file as “Suspicious” and “Medium risk malware,” respectively. BitDefender, F-Secure, and GData flagged it as “Gen:Trojan.Heur.FU.quX@am@e97ci.” AntiVir detected it as “TR/Crypt.XPACK.Gen.” Kaspersky says it is “Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad.zdul.” Every other antivirus engine, as of a few minutes ago, waved this suspicious executable right through.

Meanwhile, back in the browser, Google Chrome’s warnings are completely generic. If you download the software it shows up in the Downloads folder looking perfectly innocent.

Interestingly, this set of “poisoned” search terms also affected Bing, although the dangerous search result was on a different site, which didn’t show up until the fifth page of search results. And the download that it offered was, apparently, a completely different Trojan/scareware product. But the end result would have been the same, regardless of which browser I was using.

This case study shows that malware authors are beginning to adapt to changing habits of PC users. There’s nothing inherently safer about alternative browsers—or even alternative operating systems, for that matter—and as users adapt, so do the bad guys.

Be careful out there.

The Beast File- Google (HUNGRY BEAST) (by gli96187)

Meet Google. The noun that became a verb. The world’s favourite search engine, and the company whose motto is “Don’t be evil…” abc.net.au/hungrybeast

Source: youtube.com

Oh, and Google probably also knows where your Wi-Fi router lives

After the iPhone and Android tracking revelations of last week, a researcher finds out how to query Google’s database of home and business router locations

WIFI Google knows where it is. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Google really does have a very big location map - and that may include where your router is. The results of its giant Street View exercise in which it took pictures of houses and shops but also gathered locations of Wi-Fi networks and - oops! - collected data from open Wi-Fi networks has all been collated.

And what’s more, you can query it yourself.

Got a Wi-Fi router? Got admin access to its interface? Then you can get its MAC address and plug it into the “android map” interface offered by Samy Kamkar, a hacker and researcher who last week showed that Android phones transmit their location data (as uncovered by another researcher, Magnus Eriksson)

The page where you can plug in the details is at http://samy.pl/androidmap/, and comes with an example MAC address in there, which if you click it shows the details that are held - log/lat, country, country code, region, county, city, street, house number, postal code, and “accuracy” - an interesting idea, though it’s not immediately obvious whether that’s accuracy in metres or some other metric.

As Kamkar explains,

android map exposes the data that Google has been collecting from virtually all Android devices and street view cars, using them essentially as global wardriving machines.

When the phone detects any wireless network, encrypted or otherwise, it sends the BSSID (MAC address) of the router along with signal strength, and most importantly, GPS coordinates up to the mothership. This page allows you to ping that database and find exactly where any wi-fi router in the world is located.

Personally, I tried it for the two Wi-Fi routers in my home, and it turned up nothing. It could be that the data for Britain has been wiped, or that my routers weren’t turned on the day Google drove by (it certainly did, because it’s got a pic of the front of the house) or that it somehow didn’t reach the car.

Scary? Encouraging? If all this data is somehow open sourced, is that useful or not?

Big Apple, Big Google, Big Brother

In some ways, all the uproar about Apple saving location data on its iOS device users is old news. Guess what? Big Brother, or Big Google, also collects geo-location information from its mobile, Android-powered devices. It’s like anything else in computing: geo-location can provide great services and resources, but it can also be abused.

Take, for example, a woman who was recently robbed in Texas. Using her stolen iPhone, police officers were able to quickly find not only her stolen phone, but her wedding ring as well. Yea!

On the other hand, say another woman is in an abusive relationship and goes to a friend’s house or to a “safe-house” shelter. Her husband tracks her down using her smartphone and literally drags her back “home.”

That last case isn’t fiction. My friend Angela, a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) tells me, “I teach tech-safety courses for domestic-violence survivors. This scenario has a probability of 1. In the two years I’ve been teaching, we’ve had multiple instances of abusers using hidden GPS-Bluetooth phone combinations to track vehicles, which sort of totally sucks when the vehicle is now parked at a ‘secret’ women’s shelter.”

“Worse, the use of phone ‘family’ plans and fancy smartphones are among the most difficult issues we face in the teaching process,” Angela said. “Most of the women we see are in desperate financial straits; often there’s no money for any sort of mobile plan (and we’ll leave aside the whole getting-an-account-set-up-under-those-circumstances thing), let alone for a decent phone. Realistically, they know they have to dump the gadget and the plan and so forth, but practically? With so much else happening? Argh.”

How about wanting the local cops to know where you’ve been for the last two weeks? Police already have the technology to grab GPS location data from smartphones including latitude, longitude, altitude and time data. They don’t need sophisticated forensics equipment. In Michigan, cops can do it in a roadside traffic stop in a few minutes.

The cops or the jealous ex don’t even need to get their hands on your smartphone or tablet. Both Apple and Google regularly pull down your location data. Apple, it seems, does it twice a day, while Google updates your location several times an hour.

Why do they need continual access to this information? Beats me. Advertising is what comes first to mind, but do they really need to know where I am around the clock to make sure I get local ads? It strikes me as overkill.

And here’s the part that really worries me. What stops someone from snatching that location data out of the air over the Wi-Fi or 3G/4G network? Do we want a government, say Syria, using this information to track down protesters seen at a recent demonstration? Might Syria’s dictatorship be doing just that with its recent pinpoint kidnapping of activists?

I know there are people who don’t consider it a big deal that Big Companies potentially knows their every move.. I do. There’s a huge difference between information that you opt to give a company when you buy their product or click on a Web ad, and information that flows to them whenever your device is turned on.

Sure, you can opt out by refusing to grant any geo-location app permission to run, but that’s not a viable answer. That’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The real answer, the better answer, is for Apple and Google to keep only a brief log of where you’ve been, and to stop transmitting this data to the home office. The applications don’t need this comprehensive information; the companies don’t need it, even if they want it; and the potential harm that can result from using the information far outweighs the benefits. Do the right thing, Apple and Google: Get out of the Big Brother business.

Related Stories:

iOS is watching you … always watching!

Your iPhone is tracking you (and has been for a while)

Congressman asks Jobs to respond about consolidated.db

Google's Android phones face more attacks via apps

Google’s Android mobile-phone platform faces soaring software attacks and has little control over the applications, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Applications loaded with malicious software are infiltrating the Google operating system at a faster rate than hackers did with personal computers at the same stage in development, said Nikolay Grebennikov, chief technology officer for Kaspersky. The company identified 70 different types of malware in March, up from two categories in September.

“The growth rate in malware within Android is huge; in the future there will definitely be more,” Grebennikov said. Kaspersky will offer security on Android in the third quarter of this year.

Hacking into mobile-phone software has become increasingly sophisticated, forcing Mountain View’s Google to remove malicious applications that were available from its Android Market store last month. The applications, which were remotely disabled, gathered information about mobile devices and could be used to access personal data.

Company spokesman Ollie Rickman referred back to Google’s comment in a blog post last month.

“We are adding a number of measures to help prevent additional malicious applications using similar exploits from being distributed through Android Market,” said Rich Cannings, a Google engineer who works on Android security, in the blog post.

Android will run on 38.5 percent of smart phones sold this year, according to market research firm Gartner. Google’s software is moving into cheaper hardware and starting to compete with high-volume, low-margin phones made by companies such as Nokia.

“Any time a technology becomes adopted and popular, that technology will be targeted by the bad guys,” said Jay Abbott, director of threat and vulnerability at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

The proliferation of mobile app stores at platforms from companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Nokia has made the functions and devices harder to secure, said Richard Overill, a senior lecturer in computer science at King’s College, London.

“It is a new frontier,” said Overill, who has been researching the industry since 1992. “It’s been an area that the criminal fraternity hasn’t gone into before because they are doing quite nicely, thank you, in the computer space.”

This article appeared on page D - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Facebook & Google are CIA Fronts

In the case of both Google and Facebook, three talented students in their 20’s came out of obscurity to establish multi-billion dollar enterprises. Do you suppose they had some help?



BY SANDEEP PARWAGA
(FOR HENRYMAKOW.COM)


There used to be a saying: ”No one makes a name for himself without giving something up”

As a youngster, I was awed by people who ”made it to the top” by creating and innovating corporations, technologies, or simply establishing themselves through sports, music, entertainment, etc. thus becoming millionaires.

Now as I have grown older, I realize how illusory this paradigm really is. I came to the conclusion that if you want to reach the ”top’,’ you have to give up your soul. 

Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He is one of the most ”successful entrepreneurs” in the last decade. Having made a fortune through his Facebook empire, he reaches more than 500 million people worldwide. It seems like a fairytale. A student creates a new interface to connect the people throughout the world. Well, it sounds great doesn’t it? It would, if we were true. 

Here is a good video that demonstrates that Facebook was indirectly funded by the CIA with the goal of learning and storing everything there is to know about you. Why? To monitor and ultimately control.  

Again, the people have been totally duped by the Facebook-mania and can only see what they are told to see. As my friends say: ”It is to connect people and share information”. In the wake of the recent crisis in Egypt, we might add that Facebook has become not just a data-mining operation, but also a soft power proxy for crisis-creation.

Let’s look at headlines that should cast no doubt about the true character of CIAbook:

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over -

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’

Facebook - the CIA conspiracy

The Face of Facebook -  (Pay particular notice to the IMs that got leaked and confirmed to be true by the New Yorker)

Facebook & Social Media: A Convenient Cover For Spying -

US spies invest in internet monitoring technology - Quoted from this article: ”In an attempt to sift through the blizzard of information, the investment arm of the CIA, In-Q-Tel, has invested in a software firm that monitors social media.”

Nihilists of The World Unite: Wikileaks Is The “Cognitive Infiltration” Operation Demanded by Cass Sunstein -

TIME Mag Person of the Year 2010 - This link is just a mere reminder of past history and the perversion of ”honoring”those who don’t deserve it. Would you like to share this front cover with Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger, etc.? I sure wouldn’t. Obviously Zuckerberg has done something ”great”. Just my 2 cents about this garbage.

google-nsa-665.jpgGOOGLE

Google has come under scrutiny over its attempt to eliminate competing search engines and block ”controversial” sites and people, but the biggest controversy came over its alleged ties to the CIA and NSA.

Google founders Sergey M. Brin and Lawrence E. Page are portrayed as average folks, Stanford University students, who teamed up to create a ”superior search engine”. Their attempt to do just that turned out to be so successful that they started to get funding from big players, for example Sun Microsystems. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin#Search_engine_development)

It can be assumed that the CIA and NSA funded them as well. As in the above example of Facebook, don’t forget the Google scandal connected to China last year, where Google simply evaded censorship laws by moving to Hong Kong.

The CIA might have used Google as a soft power proxy in China as well for destabilization operations. Here are a few issues that made the news regarding Google:

Tarpley: US Gov uses Google proxy to attack China - (Vid)

Google-NSA collaboration draws alarm -

YouTube’s Parent Google is a Corporate Member of the Council on Foreign Relations -

Ex-Agent: CIA Seed Money Helped Launch Google -

The Google-NSA Alliance: Questions and Answers -

 
CONCLUSION

I admit I have Facebook. I am not particularly happy about it, but it does facilitate being connected with friends from other places. I try to keep a low profile. Don’t reveal anything or don’t click on trivial buttons, for example the ”Likes”.

Use alternatives to make contact if you can, e.g. email or other messengers. If you have Facebook, you have probably realized how people have literally sold their lives over to it.

Every time I see people revealing things to the finest detail, they don’t think about any consequences, or let’s say, they are not smart enough to care. The scientific dictatorship has done a ”good” job in brainwashing and manipulating the masses. Don’t be fooled by the deceit. The mainstream media has been very reluctant to cover the disturbing Google/Facebook ties as it would expose important assets for the Big Brother machine and its secret use to destabilize.

 Zuckerberg or the Google founders would never have gotten the publicity, wealth and success without a CIA or NSA  connection. To elaborate on the opening quote, I assume they have been initiated into the Illuminati Order and sold their soul.

Google Acquires eBook Technologies

Having acquired 25 companies in 2010, Google is continuing its buying spree in the new year with the purchase of eBook Technologies, a supplier of e-book reading devices and content distribution technology.

“eBook Technologies, Inc. is excited to announce that we have been acquired by Google,” said the La Jolla, Calif.-based company on its Web site. “Working together with Google will further our commitment to providing a first-class reading experience on emerging tablets, e-readers and other portable devices.”

Google declined to provide specific details about its future product plans. “We are happy to welcome eBook Technologies’ team to Google,” said a spokesperson in an e-mailed statement. “Together, we hope to deliver richer reading experiences on tablets, electronic readers and other portable devices.”

No price for the deal was disclosed.In December, Google launched its digital bookselling platform, Google eBooks, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and book scanning. Having entered into competition with Amazon and Apple in the process, Google has tried to differentiate itself by characterizing its ecosystem as more open than what’s offered by its rivals.

“Open” however doesn’t mean open in the sense of content without digital locks. It means open in the sense of allowing partners to have a meaningful role. In fact, Google’s interest in eBook Technologies appears to be in securing e-book content and protecting itself against potential patent lawsuits.

eBook Technologies licenses e-book technology from companies hailing from dot com boom at the turn of the second millennium: SoftBook Press, NuvoMedia, and Gemstar. It also appears to have rights related to some relevant patents, such as one titled “Electronic Display Device Event Tracking,” which lists eBook Technologies co-founder and president Garth Conboy among the inventors.

Indeed, the company boasts about its intellectual property portfolio on its Web site, or at least it did until these pages were removed in conjunction with the acquisition. “Patented areas of the eBook technology suite cover the unique designs, features and functions of the entire eBook publishing system,” the company states on its old Web site. “Intellectual property includes: the eBook system and features, cryptography, user interface elements, industrial design and manufacturing processes.”

Google’s interest in eBook Technologies may also have an enterprise angle: eBook Technologies has developed a comprehensive network architecture for e-book sales and distribution that includes a component called eBook Express Manager. This is an application that “allows enterprise customers to centrally manage the delivery, access, audit, and updating of enterprise content for groups of e-book users.”

 

Scroogled (by Cory Doctorow) #mustread #clickthis #google " #fiction "

Scroogled (by Cory Doctorow)

Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine.

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” –Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” –Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.

Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration–Powered by Google.

“I thought that didn’t start until next month?” The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.

The U.S. government had spent $15 billion and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time”–which turned out to be less rewarding than he’d expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends’ PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain 10 pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed 24-hour gym.

He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.

Expand all…

“Evening,” Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.

“Want to tell me about June 1998?”

Greg looked up from his Departures. “I’m sorry?”

“You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, ’Are shrooms really such a bad idea?’”

The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he’d been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.

“Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?”

“What?”

“Model rocketry.”

“No,” Greg said, “No, I’m not.” He sensed where this was going.

The man made a note, did some clicking. “You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail.”

Greg felt a spasm in his guts. “You’re looking at my searches and e-mail?” He hadn’t touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.

“Sir, calm down, please. No, I’m not looking at your searches,” the man said in a mocking whine. “That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I’ll give it to you when we’re through here.”

“But the ads don’t mean anything,” Greg sputtered. “I get ads for Ann Coulter ring tones whenever I get e-mail from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!”

The man nodded. “I understand, sir. And that’s just why I’m here talking to you. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently?”

Greg racked his brain. “Okay, just do this. Search for ’coffee fanatics.’” He’d been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called Jet Fuel. “Jet Fuel” and “Launch”–that would probably make Google barf up some model rocket ads.

They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Halloween photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for “Greg Lupinski.”

“It was a Gulf War–themed party,” he said. “In the Castro.”

“And you’re dressed as…?”

“A suicide bomber,” he replied sheepishly. Just saying the words made him wince.

“Come with me, Mr. Lupinski,” the man said.

By the time he was released, it was past 3 a.m. His suitcases stood forlornly by the baggage carousel. He picked them up and saw they had been opened and carelessly closed. Clothes stuck out from around the edges.

When he returned home, he discovered that all of his fake pre-Columbian statues had been broken, and his brand-new white cotton Mexican shirt had an ominous boot print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. They smelled like airport.

He wasn’t going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. There was only one person who would get it. Luckily, she was usually awake around this hour.

Maya had started working at Google two years after Greg had. It was she who’d convinced him to go to Mexico after he cashed out: Anywhere, she’d said, that he could reboot his existence.

Maya had two giant chocolate labs and a very, very patient girlfriend named Laurie who’d put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6 a.m. by 350 pounds of drooling canine.

Maya reached for her Mace as Greg jogged toward her, then did a double take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and trapping them under her sneaker. “Where’s the rest of you? Dude, you look hot!”

He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. “Maya,” he said, “what do you know about Google and the DHS?”

She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. “Top of the light pole there; don’t look,” she said. “That’s one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk.”

In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn’t paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public–there’d been a day’s worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.

Feeling silly, Greg mumbled, “You’re joking.”

“Come with me,” she said, turning away from the pole.

The dogs weren’t happy about cutting their walk short, and expressed their displeasure in the kitchen as Maya made coffee.

“We brokered a compromise with the DHS,” she said, reaching for the milk. “They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users.”

Greg felt sick. “Why? Don’t tell me Yahoo was doing it already…”

“No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn’t the reason Google went along. You know, Republicans hate Google. We’re overwhelmingly registered Democratic, so we’re doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn’t P.I.I.”–Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age–”It’s just metadata. So it’s only slightly evil.”

“Why all the intrigue, then?”

Maya sighed and hugged the lab that was butting her knee with its huge head. “The spooks are like lice. They get everywhere. They show up at our meetings. It’s like being in some Soviet ministry. And the security clearance–we’re divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn’t cleared, but no one knows why. I’m cleared. Lucky for me, being a dyke no longer disqualifies you. No cleared person would deign to eat lunch with an unclearable.”

Greg felt very tired. “So I guess I’m lucky I got out of the airport alive. I might have ended up ’disappeared’ if it had gone badly, huh?”

Maya stared at him intently. He waited for an answer.

“What?”

“I’m about to tell you something, but you can’t ever repeat it, okay?”

“Um…you’re not in a terrorist cell, are you?

“Nothing so simple. Here’s the deal: Airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a ’person of interest’–and they never, ever let up. They’ll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches.”

“I thought you said the courts wouldn’t let them…”

“The courts won’t let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you’re in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for ’suspicious patterns,’ using deviation from statistical norms to nail you.”

Greg felt like he was going to throw up. “How the hell did this happen? Google was a good place. ’Don’t be evil,’ right?” That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of why he’d taken his computer science Ph.D. from Stanford directly to Mountain View.

Maya replied with a hard-edged laugh. “Don’t be evil? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to Swift-Boat Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago.”

They were quiet for a minute.

“It started in China,” she went on, finally. “Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction.”

Greg sighed. He knew Google’s reach all too well: Every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google maps or Google mail–even if you sent mail to a Gmail account–the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.

“They were using us to build profiles of people,” she went on. “When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they’d come to us and find a reason to bust them. There’s hardly anything you can do on the Net that isn’t illegal in China.”

Greg shook his head. “Why did they have to put the servers in China?”

“The government said they’d block us otherwise. And Yahoo was there.” They both made faces. Somewhere along the way, employees at Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the competition was doing than how their own company was performing. “So we did it. But a lot of us didn’t like the idea.”

Maya sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of her dogs sniffed insistently under Greg’s chair.

“Almost immediately, the Chinese asked us to start censoring search results,” Maya said. “Google agreed. The company line was hilarious: ’We’re not doing evil–we’re giving consumers access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn’t get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience.’”

“Now what?” Greg pushed a dog away from him. Maya looked hurt.

Every time you visited a page with Google ads, or used Google maps, or Google mail–even if you sent mail to a Gmail account–they collected your info.

“Now you’re a person of interest, Greg. You’re Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You know the mission statement, right? ’Organize the World’s Information.’ Everything. Give it five years, we’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you’re–”

“Scroogled.”

“Totally.” She nodded.

Maya took both labs down the hall to the bedroom. He heard a muffled argument with her girlfriend, and she came back alone.

“I can fix this,” she said in an urgent whisper. “After the Chinese started rounding up people, my podmates and I made it our 20 percent project to fuck with them.” (Among Google’s business innovations was a rule that required every employee to devote 20 percent of his or her time to high-minded pet projects.) “We call it the Googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your Gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it. Greg, I can Googleclean you. It’s the only way.”

“I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

She shook her head. “I’m already doomed. Every day since I built the damn thing has been borrowed time–now it’s just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh, I don’t know. Whatever it is they do to people like me in the war on abstract nouns.”

Greg remembered the airport. The search. His shirt, the boot print in the middle of it.

“Do it,” he said.

The Googlecleaner worked wonders. Greg could tell by the ads that popped up alongside his searches, ads clearly meant for someone else: Intelligent Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, Terror Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, the Homosexual Agenda, Cheap Toby Keith Tickets. This was Maya’s program at work. Clearly Google’s new personalized search had him pegged as someone else entirely, a God-fearing right winger with a thing for hat acts.

Which was fine by him.

Then he clicked on his address book, and found that half of his contacts were missing. His Gmail in-box was hollowed out like a termite-ridden stump. His Orkut profile, normalized. His calendar, family photos, bookmarks: all empty. He hadn’t quite realized before how much of him had migrated onto the Web and worked its way into Google’s server farms–his entire online identity. Maya had scrubbed him to a high gloss; he’d become the invisible man.

Greg sleepily mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted at the flashing toolbar clock: 4:13 a.m.! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour?

He shouted, “Coming!” in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went. At the door, he squinted through the peephole to find Maya staring glumly back at him.

He undid the chains and dead bolt and yanked the door open. Maya rushed in past him, followed by the dogs and her girlfriend.

She was sheened in sweat, her usually combed hair clinging in clumps to her forehead. She rubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined.

“Pack a bag,” she croaked hoarsely.

“What?”

She took him by the shoulders. “Do it,” she said.

“Where do you want to…?”

“Mexico, probably. Don’t know yet. Pack, dammit.” She pushed past him into his bedroom and started yanking open drawers.

“Maya,” he said sharply, “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”

She glared at him and pushed her hair away from her face. “The Googlecleaner lives. After I cleaned you, I shut it down and walked away. It was too dangerous to use anymore. But it’s still set to send me e-mail confirmations whenever it runs. Someone’s used it six times to scrub three very specific accounts–all of which happen to belong to members of the Senate Commerce Committee up for reelection.”

“Googlers are blackwashing senators?”

“Not Googlers. This is coming from off-site. The IP block is registered in D.C. And the IPs are all used by Gmail users. Guess who the accounts belong to?”

“You spied on Gmail accounts?”

“Okay. Yes. I did look through their e-mail. Everyone does it, now and again, and for a lot worse reasons than I did. But check it out–turns out all this activity is being directed by our lobbying firm. Just doing their job, defending the company’s interests.”

Greg felt his pulse beating in his temples. “We should tell someone.”

“It won’t do any good. They know everything about us. They can see every search. Every e-mail. Every time we’ve been caught on the webcams. Who is in our social network…did you know if you have 15 Orkut buddies, it’s statistically certain that you’re no more than three steps to someone who’s contributed money to a ’terrorist’ cause? Remember the airport? You’ll be in for a lot more of that.”

“Maya,” Greg said, getting his bearings. “Isn’t heading to Mexico overreacting? Just quit. We can do a start-up or something. This is crazy.”

“They came to see me today,” she said. “Two of the political officers from DHS. They didn’t leave for hours. And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions.”

“About the Googlecleaner?”

“About my friends and family. My search history. My personal history.”

“Jesus.”

“They were sending a message to me. They’re watching every click and every search. It’s time to go. Time to get out of range.”

“There’s a Google office in Mexico, you know.”

“We’ve got to go,” she said, firmly.

“Laurie, what do you think of this?” Greg asked.

Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. “My parents left East Germany in ’65. They used to tell me about the Stasi. The secret police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotic joke, whatever. Whether they meant it or not, what Google has created is no different.”

“Greg, are you coming?”

He looked at the dogs and shook his head. “I’ve got some pesos left over,” he said. “You take them. Be careful, okay?”

Maya looked like she was going to slug him. Softening, she gave him a ferocious hug.

“Be careful, yourself,” she whispered in his ear.

They came for him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he’d imagined they would.

Two men arrived on his doorstep shortly after 2 a.m. One stood silently by the door. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sport coat with a stain on one lapel and a American flag on the other. “Greg Lupinski, we have reason to believe you’re in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” he said, by way of introduction. “Specifically, exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. Ten years for a first offense. Turns out that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies as a felony. And oh, what will come out in the trial…all the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile, for starters.”

Greg had played this scene in his head for a week. He’d planned all kinds of brave things to say. It had given him something to do while he waited to hear from Maya. She never called.

“I’d like to get in touch with a lawyer,” is all he mustered.

“You can do that,” the small man said. “But maybe we can come to a better arrangement.”

Greg found his voice. “I’d like to see your badge,” he stammered.

The man’s basset-hound face lit up as he let out a bemused chuckle. “Buddy, I’m not a cop,” he replied. “I’m a consultant. Google hired me–my firm represents their interests in Washington–to build relationships. Of course, we wouldn’t get the police involved without talking to you first. You’re part of the family. Actually, there’s an offer I’d like to make.”

Greg turned to the coffeemaker, dumped the old filter.

“I’ll go to the press,” he said.

The man nodded as if thinking it over. “Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle’s office in the morning and spill everything. They’d look for a confirming source. They won’t find one. And when they try searching for it, we’ll find them. So, buddy, why don’t you hear me out, okay? I’m in the win-win business. I’m very good at it.” He paused. “By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first? Takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?”

Greg watched as the man silently took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid his cuffs and carefully rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. He poured the beans out of the grinder and into Greg’s colander, and rinsed them in the sink.

He was a little pudgy and very pale, with the social grace of an electrical engineer. He seemed like a real Googler, actually, obsessed with the minutiae. He knew his way around a coffee grinder, too.

“We’re drafting a team for Building 49…”

“There is no Building 49,” Greg said automatically.

“Of course,” the guy said, flashing a tight smile. “There’s no Building 49. But we’re putting together a team to revamp the Googlecleaner. Maya’s code wasn’t very efficient, you know. It’s full of bugs. We need an upgrade. You’d be the right guy, and it wouldn’t matter what you knew if you were back inside.”

“Unbelievable,” Greg said, laughing. “If you think I’m going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Greg,” the man said, “we’re not smearing anyone. We’re just going to clean things up a bit. For some select people. You know what I mean? Everyone’s Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. Standing for office is like a public colonoscopy.” He loaded the cafetière and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. Greg retrieved two coffee cups–Google mugs, of course–and passed them over.

“We’re going to do for our friends what Maya did for you. Just a little cleanup. All we want to do is preserve their privacy. That’s all.”

Greg sipped his coffee. “What happens to the candidates you don’t clean?”

The Stasi put everything about you in a file. Whether they meant to or not, what Google did is no different.

“Yeah,” the guy said, flashing Greg a weak grin. “Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be kind of tough for them.” He searched the inside pocket of his jacket and produced several folded sheets of paper. He smoothed out the pages and put them on the table. “Here’s one of the good guys who needs our help.” It was a printout of a search history belonging to a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to in the past three elections.

“Fella gets back to his hotel room after a brutal day of campaigning door to door, fires up his laptop, and types ’hot asses’ into his search bar. Big deal, right? The way we see it, for that to disqualify a good man from continuing to serve his country is just un-American.”

Greg nodded slowly.

“So you’ll help the guy out?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. There’s one more thing. We need you to help us find Maya. She didn’t understand our goals at all, and now she seems to have flown the coop. Once she hears us out, I have no doubt she’ll come around.”

He glanced at the candidate’s search history.

“I guess she might,” Greg replied.

The new Congress took 11 working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America’s Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of intelligence and analysis work to private contractors. Theoretically, the contracts were open to competitive bidding, but within the secure confines of Google’s Building 49, there was no question of who would win. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet they would have caught them–governments just aren’t equipped to Do Search Right.

The next morning Greg scrutinized himself carefully as he shaved (the security minders didn’t like hacker stubble and weren’t shy about telling him so), realizing that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent for the U.S. government. How bad would it be? Wasn’t it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted DHS desk jockey?

By the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike racks, he had convinced himself. He was mulling over which organic smoothie to order at the canteen when his key card failed to open the door to Building 49. The red LED flashed dumbly every time he swiped his card. Any other building, and there’d be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that.

Swipe, swipe, swipe. Suddenly he heard a voice at his side.

“Greg, can I see you, please?”

The rumpled man put an arm around his shoulders, and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. It smelled like what his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Greg couldn’t remember his name. Juan Carlos? Juan Luis?

The man’s arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the herb garden outside the kitchen. “We’re giving you a couple of days off,” he said.

Greg felt a sudden stab of anxiety. “Why?” Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail?

“It’s Maya.” The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless gaze. “She killed herself. In Guatemala. I’m sorry, Greg.”

Greg seemed to hurtle away, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, where he looked down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep.

From a long way away, he heard himself say, “I don’t need any time off. I’m okay.”

From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist.

The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49, and the door swung shut behind them.

Some Google employees defect, then rebel #tracking

Many computer engineers consider a job offer from Google as the golden ticket.

Outdoor volleyball courts, free gourmet food, on-site haircuts, massages and laundry are among the perks Google has offered its employees at its main campus in Mountain View, California.

But some of the people who do leave are challenging the company in the best way an engineer knows how: by developing programs that could detract from Google’s core business.

Brian Kennish worked at Google for seven years, managing teams of engineers on a variety of products such as the Chrome browser and the moribund Google Wave.

Near the end of his stint at Google, Kennish developed a browser extension for Chrome called Facebook Disconnect.

The software blocks websites that have Facebook widgets installed from automatically sending information about the user back to the social networking company. Facebook Disconnect has 75,000 users, Kennish said.

“No one at Google asked me to do it,” Kennish told CNN this week.

What sparked Kennish’s project, he said, was reading the recent scrutiny of online data-collection tactics chronicled by news organizations. The Wall Street Journal has been running a series called “What They Know,” and CNN had its own last week called “End of Privacy.”

While Facebook and the applications that run on its platform can be considered personal-data hoarders, Kennish eventually realized his then-employer was, itself, among the biggest collectors.

To name a few practices, Google can track search queries over time, target ads to its Gmail users based on the contents of e-mails, and use a person’s location data to determine which shops’ ads it will show. Google, like many Web advertising companies, uses small files called cookies to track internet surfing habits in order to better target ads.

“I never worked directly with user data,” Kennish said of his time at Google. “I didn’t have a good sense of what was being collected. Privacy wasn’t a passion of mine or something that I knew a lot about until basically two months ago, when I started reading about this stuff.”

Kennish left Google in November to focus more on programs that empower people to take control of their privacy online.

“I had this holy-cow moment when I realized what was going on,” Kennish said. “There’s just so much unknown about what’s being done with this data.”

“I think there is a good reason to be concerned with it all and, frankly, to be fearful of it,” he said.

Last week, he released a second browser extension, another tool for Google Chrome, called Disconnect. Once installed, the program blocks major internet companies, including Google, from installing cookies on — and thus tracking — a computer.

People using Disconnect can decide which cookies they’d like to allow onto their system. Cookies can be helpful when, for example, you’d like a website to remember your login credentials and not ask for them every time you visit.

“I would like to see us move to a point where all the data that’s collected about folks is intentional,” rather than without people’s knowledge, Kennish said. “So if I give you permission to collect my data, then go ahead and do it.”

In its first week, 25,000 people downloaded Disconnect. Kennish is releasing a new version Friday that lets users choose whether Google can personalize search queries based on the data it has about the person. By default, Disconnect blocks Google from doing this.

“Any data that’s collected has the potential to escape the collector,” Kennish said. “So I would like to see Google only collect data that I explicitly allow them to collect.”

Google hosts a dashboard for users to review a breakdown of the messages and information attached to their accounts. The Google Privacy Center provides information on how the company collects data and lets people, whether they’re registered with Google or not, opt out of ad and analytics tracking.

Michael Gundlach, another ex-Google engineer, developed an alternative to complicated opt-out systems that vary between ad networks. Like Disconnect, it’s a browser extension, and there are versions for Chrome and Apple’s Safari.

Called AdBlock, Gundlach’s program can prevent Web pages from loading and displaying ads. That includes Google’s ads, which account for the vast majority of the search giant’s revenue.

AdBlock offers a setting to easily enable ads from Gundlach’s former employer, though those ads are disabled by default. “Google didn’t ask me to put that in,” Gundlach wrote in an e-mail. “I find Google text ads to be useful.”

Still, Gundlach says he blocks most ads because “I don’t wish to be bombarded by consumerism.”

The real economic conundrum: If website visitors don’t pay figuratively — by watching ads or by having their personal information sent to advertisers — they may have to start paying real money for online services.

Kennish plans to devote six months to developing Disconnect and will reevaluate then whether it could be a sustainable business.

He’s “pretty close” to releasing an extension for Safari and recently began working on one for Firefox, he said. If he’s forced to abandon the project, the source code is freely available to any enterprising developers who want to take up the cause.

“The only business model I see,” Kennish said, is to eventually provide a more advanced version of the software that costs money.

“When I use something like Google, I’m paying for Google with my attention and my data,” he said. “There’s no such thing as free. These are companies that have to pay employees’ salaries.”

Parts of Google’s maturing business may clash with some of the wide-eyed engineers it hopes to attract, especially those passionate about taking risks to change the world, hopefully for the better.

But a Google spokesman, who declined to comment on most questions pertaining to this story, said the company’s attrition rate — that is, the percentage of employees that defect — hasn’t changed in more than seven years and is better than the industry standard.

In addition to all the on-campus amenities, a program called “20% Time” lets Google engineers devote a sizable chunk of their work weeks to projects of their choosing. (Kennish said he developed Facebook Disconnect after work hours.)

The perks haven’t stopped some high-profile people from leaving the company.

Product designer Douglas Bowman left in a huff last year for a job at Twitter after reportedly becoming fed up with nearly three years of what he publicly described as Google’s design-by-committee mentality.

Some notable Google alumni are spiting their former employer in a different way — by joining Facebook.

The social network is perceived by some as Google’s biggest rival. People are spending more of their time online using Facebook. They’re thumbing through photos and asking questions to friends, rather than searching the wider Web. Google is unable to crawl most of the data posted to Facebook.

As Google-to-Facebook defections grow, Google is reportedly offering some employees multimillion-dollar packages to convince them not to go to Facebook.

After wooing executives who worked on Google-owned YouTube, Android and advertising; the architect of Google Maps; and at least two Gmail co-founders, this week, Facebook claimed Paul Adams, a former Google employee who was previously an outspoken critic of the social network. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s venerable chief operating officer, also came from the big G.

But abandoning Google hasn’t always proved to be a wise or permanent move. Anna Patterson left the company in 2007 to start a rival search engine called Cuil. When that tanked, she returned to Google in September.

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