Tag: germany

Germany Idiocy

Google might disable Gmail in Germany as last fallback should the German government maintain its position in regards to a newly passed law on record-keeping and supervision of internet traffic. According to this law, email services here will be forced to maintain personally identifiable records attached to email accounts. What exactly this might mean for Google I don’t know, but perhaps it would result in Gmail having to start requiring full addresses (and perhaps even having to verify an address by sending a snail mail to the user). As usual in these circumstances, the law is pushed through in the name of fighting “terrorists.”

fighting stupid and harmful laws

Street View Paranoia

The Drudge Report, that early-warning system for democracy, is now using a screencap of someone peering out of a living room window as his top image. If that didn’t scare you, the banner headline might: SMILE, YOU’RE ON GOOGLE EARTH!

wow, the retards have discovered street view.
2008-04-10:

Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates.

While Google has defended the project, the internet company baulked when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group’s key figures to allow the paper’s photographers to take pictures of their homes.

it’s luddite season again!
2008-07-30:

The report also includes the distance from the street to the executive’s front door, the most likely driving route the executive would take to Google’s Mountain View headquarters and photos of the stop signs, stoplights and intersections the executive would pass along the way. The Center is publicly releasing the document today to highlight the invasiveness of these Google technologies to individual privacy.

who are these assclowns?

What is it about Europeans that makes them so susceptible to populist arguments in favor of expectations of privacy in a public space? In Europe, Street View is getting a steady onslaught of negative publicity, mainly instigated by populist newspapers, about the evils of taking photography in a public place and publishing it. What a strange concept: Government officials complaining that a company is observing the law, but that they don’t like it anyway.

2010-08-23:

Geht es allerdings um Googles fotografierenden Fuhrpark, klingt Konstantin von Notz plötzlich so, als sei er frisch einer kommunistischen Kaderschmiede entsprungen: Google stelle “monopolartig” den “kompletten öffentlichen Raum” dauerhaft und “aus kommerziellen Interessen” ins Netz, schimpft er dann und fordert “eine Beteiligung der Öffentlichkeit an den Gewinnen”. Hui! Da kommt einfach dieser Internet-Konzern aus einem fernen Land und verdient Geld mit Abbildern des öffentlichen Raums? Ohne zu fragen? Also in etwa so, wie Postkarten- oder Reiseführer-Verlage? Das geht natürlich nicht! Enteignen! Notz ist in bester Gesellschaft, beim Wettbewerb um die höchste Punktzahl auf der nach oben offenen Streetview-Hysterie-Skala.

the real reason germany is so nuts about street view: it exposes the widespread technological illiteracy in europe.

Germany Media Luddites

Mathias was able to download a complete copy of a current German bestselling book, which was quite delicate considering the company behind VTO supported a lawsuit against Google Book Search because Google allegedly didn’t protect well against the downloading of book texts. But maybe that’s the core of the problem: they want to compete against a tech company (Google) in a technical space (the web), but they’re non-technical themselves, possibly lacking the means to judge the quality of the outsourced work