Doncha love it When Multideath Corporations Get Sued by Little Guys?
Did @google rip off my band @valleylodge's song?- Ours (https://t.co/CJhaoz87eB) Google's (https://t.co/a98cb0x6g9)
— Dave Hill (@mrdavehill) December 7, 2015
Next week, Google will be joining Koch Industries, ExxonMobil and a passel of other fossil fuel barons at ALEC's annual meeting in Washington, DC, where bills to "tax the sun" and limit the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases will be on the table.
What happened to "don't be evil?"
Google and other tech giants have reportedly teamed up with the pro-corporate ALEC to draft model legislation on technology issues. This puts Google in bed with an outfit infamous for crafting “stand-your-ground,” voter ID and other right-wing bills that are then pushed through state legislatures....
It's consistent for a corporation that has turned it's back on it's earliest motto, Don't Be Evil.
Source: consortiumnews.com
The ivory trade is slaughtering elephants by the hundreds in horrific massacres that rip apart herds and leave orphaned calves to starve. But despite an official policy against selling products from endangered animals, Google still traffics ivory -- taking money from ivory sellers to promote their products. Google offers thousands of ivory items on its shopping sites around the world. Its lax enforcement of its own policies allows unscrupulous sellers to find easy markets for illegal ivory.Google needs to stop this horrific practice today.
Call on Google to stop trafficking in ivory immediately.
Elephants are some of the most intelligent and social animals on the planet. They develop lifelong friendships, spend years raising their young, mourn their dead and weep at rejection. They’re also at enormous risk: the population of African forest elephants has plummeted 62% in the past decade. We must stop the ivory trade if we wish to save this species.
Studies show that a robust legal trade swells overall demand for ivory, resulting in poaching, more deaths, and increased risk of extinction. Google claims that it “takes down ads as soon as they are detected”, but the ivory trade has been a chronic issue on the website. The same ads appear day after day after day. Google is simply not taking its own role in the ivory trade seriously.
Google is only paying lip service to the idea of stamping it out, because Google doesn’t want the world to know that it has blood on its hands. If we, as its customers, can raise enough of an outcry, Google will dedicate itself to eradicating the ivory trade on its own site.
Tell Google to stop with the excuses, and stop selling ivory.
After years of declining elephant populations, the global ban on new ivory in 1989 caused elephant populations to surge back. But the short reprieve has ended, and in many countries elephant populations are once more dropping drastically. We need to end trade in all ivory, including older products, in order to ensure elephants remain here for our grandchildren.
Source: action.sumofus.org
Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil," but on July 11, Google hosted a $250-$2500 per plate fundraiser for one of the worst climate deniers in the world: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK). Google has been a corporate leader in fighting climate pollution. Its support for liars like Inhofe is a glaring mistake.
Sen. Inhofe has claimed: "CO2 does not cause catastrophic disasters ... actually, it would be beneficial to our environment and the economy."
Google chairman Eric Schmidt has said: "You can lie about the effects of climate change, but eventually you'll be seen as a liar."
UPDATE: Google went ahead with their fundraiser and refused our petitions in D.C. We're planning a delivery at Google headquarters soon. Please sign and help us get to 15k signatures before we take our concerns directly to Mountain View.
Ref: Google Washington to host NRSC fundraiser for Sen. Jim Inhofe on July 11, Political Party Time.
Source: act.forecastthefacts.org
Gay 'cures'? There shouldn't be an app for that. But, there's a new one called "Setting Captives Free," available in both the Apple iTunes and Google Play stores, meant to teach you how to stop being gay.
It's a 60-day course that tells gay people they are not "born this way" and offers to help them find "freedom from the bondage of homosexuality."
These so-called treatments can cause terrible harm to lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people, or anyone forced to try to change who they are or who they love.
Apple and Google have policies against these kinds of apps but so far this one has escaped their notice. Sign now to tell them to drop this and all other gay 'cure' apps!
It’s the latest in a series of events that show Google is basically using the FTC as its own personal blow-up doll. The FTC decided not to investigate the Wi-Spy scandal, leaving the scraps to the FCC who wound up imposing its largest fine ever on Google. They gave Google a softball settlement in the Buzz scandal, and looked the other way when they bought Admob, Doubleclick, Admeld, Motorola, ITA or any of the other 119 companies Google has gobbled up.Just last week the FTC’s lawyers marched into court joined at the hip with Google’s lawyers, jointly misrepresenting to the judge that the FTC commissioners intended for Google to be able to retain the data they stole from Safari users by hacking their privacy protections (according to one of the FCC’s commissioners, they didn’t).What a happy coincidence that Google chief Eric Schmidt hit the campaign trail for President Obama and was on hand at the Chicago campaign headquarters when the President stopped by to thank campaign staffers after the election.Despite the admonition of watchdog groups asking the President to distance himself from Schmidt when the company was under investigation by the Department of Justice for selling hundreds of millions of dollars in online ads to illegal pharmacies, the Bromance continues.It’s pretty much now or never for the FTC to take any antitrust action against Google. The term has expired of the only FTC Commissioner who has stood up to either Google or Facebook, J. Thomas Rosch, and Obama’s nominee to replace him — Joshua Wright — has close ties to Google and openly opposes the antitrust investigation.
Let's do give carriers more ways to extract money from cell phone users. Let's leave them more susceptible to extortion if carriers take a 2nd swipe at metered data plans.
I guess don't be evil is only a catch phrase now.
Hey, it popped up! I thought that they had deleted that post.
I take back some of what I said about Facebook.
Finally, someone with some tech cred has confirmed what I have suspected about the turd that Samsung dropped on my phone: no one at Google is setting any standards or doing any code reviews of the different versions of Android. I seriously doubt that Samsung did any regression testing with this version of Android on my phone.
I've got a bone to pick with Samsung, as the last link shows. A couple of applications that I have on my phone seem to get high overhead and bloat out over the device's resources kind of like Microsoft Office Extra Deluxe, 2015. One of them was Facebook v.1.9.4. I used to have a life event about deleting it from my phone on my FB page, griping about this flavor of Gingerbread and how awful the Facebook app was. I sent a link of that event to Samsung Support on a form they have on Facebook about a couple of weeks ago. Funny thing: that life event is gone from my FB page.
The only good thing that Samsung has done is to show me how to reboot my phone without having to pull the battery out of the back of it. Other wise, I don't have any confidence left in Samsung to support their products through a life cycle of three years. I told Facebook all about it last night.
Whittaker’s main issue is what, in his opinion, was a core value shift that took place when former chief executive Eric Schmidt stepped down and Larry Page took over at the helm. The former Director acknowledges that advertising has always been Google’s main business, but until Larry Page took over at CEO, advertising was treated as a means to an end, providing the funding that allowed Google employees to build innovative products. Once Page became Google’s top executive, Whittaker says, the opposite was true. Google’s products became a means to an end, providing the tools Google needs to collect as much personal information as possible about its users, thus better equipping the company to woo advertisers.
Source: bgr.com
Last week there were some official announcement from Google which they are going to retire the Google Buzz and introduce some new changes for one-of-the best online news reader websites Google Reader. As a results of these new changes, Google reader will lose its popular features like friending, following and sharing. These feature are supposed to be integrated in Google Plus.
Since this announcement Iranian community of Google reader users started to show their anger and disagreement about these announced changes. But why Reader matters for us?
Google Reader, which thanks to its social features (which are going to be removed), is much more than a simple RSS reader for Iranian users. Google Reader is not in a separated domain (like any other Google product) and thanks to https protocol, it is hard to filter by government (To filter google reader the whole google.com domain should be filtered). In a country which all social website like twitter, facebook, friendfeed, and video or image sharing websites like youtube, tumblr, flickr, picassa and many more are banned, Google reader acts like a social websites and in lack of any independent news website (it should be mentioned that all international news channels like BBC, CNN, VOA, and all other non-governmental news website are banned,) Google Reader acts like a news spreading website. Easy access to Google reader made it suitable for Iranian community and through all these years, specially after June 2009 election, developed an strong community for spreading the news.
I wouldn't trust Google+ either: I've been trying to access it through a Google Apps account for over a month - someone hasn't turned the switch to let me in, yet. That's not a sign of a mature application, IMO.
Source: amirhm.com
diegueno reblogged
colourbrush
I need to read the rights & releases next time
From Steve Rosenbaum:
Google’s terms and conditions, buried in tiny print that most users will miss, gives them the right to take control of your content.
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.”
The key terms here are Perpetual, Royalty-Free - and most disturbingly - Adapt and Modify.
This means that if you’ve taken pictures of a sunset, or fireworks, or your children playing with a toy - or anything - Google has the right to grab those images, edit them, publishing them, and re-sell them.
If you think the answer is simply that you won’t put any pictures on your G+ page, think again. Google REQUIRES you to link your Picasa account to your G+ account, and therefore requires you to license your Picasa to them under their Royalty-Free contract.
SCARY STUFF.
I have no respect for people who are joining Google +. Didn't we learn our lesson from livejournal, myspace and facebook?! I did, and I didn't even have a livejournal or myspace!
diegueno reblogged
Skype is a hot item! The video chat service is fielding separate acquisition offers from Facebook and Google, Reuters reports. It’s not clear which behemoth Skype would prefer selling to but the offers being thrown around are as high as $4 billion. Other sources say a Skype IPO could generate $1 billion, a prospect that is “still in the cards” for the second half of 2011. Which company would benefit most from a Skype acquisition?
Read on at The Atlantic Wire.
In one aspect, it's irrelevant because neither Facebook or Google do even a half-assed job responding to customer requests for service or repairs.
Again, in most cases, it's true you're getting as much service as you're paying for, but that doesn't illustrate what either Facebook or GOOG would do if you paid them.
diegueno reblogged
What on earth…this is real, though. (Also, heheheheh.) Is Google being tricksy again?
Looks like a sexist, immature hack of Google data via Latitude to me, but what do I know? I have a penis.