Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently made that statement to this reporter. A few years ago, it might have sounded far-fetched. But if you’re one of the growing number of people who are using more and more products in Google’s ever-expanding stable (at last count, I was using a dozen), you might wonder if Bankston isn’t onto something.
The deal Google cut with publishers to settle their copyright infringement suit would give a green light to the search giant’s book-scanning services and turn it into a retailer of out-of-print books. But resistance to the deal has been growing, as a variety of parties are realizing that the settlement gives both Google and the Book Rights Registry created by the deal enormous power over the dissemination of the scanned material. The latest groups to weigh in represent research librarians, who are worried about the deal’s privacy implications and the lack of guarantees of current and future access. The solution, in their view, is to structure the settlement in a way that guarantees the court the right to intervene in the future.
That’s the question on the mind of Robert Darnton, who runs Harvard University’s library system. For years, the Google Book Search project has digitized millions of books from libraries around the world, running into copyright law and a class action lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers in the process. When Google reached a tentative settlement of the suit in October, Darnton got nervous and refused to abide by the settlement; at least, not until he studied it a little more. Now, after poring through all 134 pages and 15 appendices, he’s feeling even queasier and has written a lengthy explication of his fears (what he calls a tension between “jeremiad” and “utopian enthusiasm”) in the New York Review of Books. Google, Darnton ultimately worries, cannot be trusted. Because the history of literature and publishing since the Enlightenment shows that no one, however noble, can be trusted with control of the entire corpus of human thought.
Microsoft’s (MSFT) supposed plan for Windows 7 on cheap netbooks is a cut-down version called “Windows 7 Starter.” The forced limitation, according to reports, is that it will only let you run three or fewer apps at a time; if you want to run more, you’ll have to pay up for a full version of Windows 7.
SAN FRANCISCO — Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms.
Until today, one of the biggest drawbacks of Gmail is that you could not go through your emails when you were offline. Today, that changes. Gmail is finally going offline. Google is rolling out a Google Gears version of Gmail that will be available to users starting today in Gmail Labs. (If you don’t see it, keep checking, the rollout to all users should be complete by the end of the week).
What does it cost to host an e-mail account? It seems like a simple question, but a remarkable number of enterprises surveyed by Forrester had no idea of how to answer that question. A new report by the research company has taken a look under the hood of both in-house and commercial e-mail services, and put some numbers on the per-user costs associated with a variety of options. The surprise result was not so much that Google’s corporate services come out ahead, but rather how large a lead it has on every other option.
How many times have you stumbled home after a long night out with friends, only to plop down in front of the computer and start sending e-mails that you would wake up regretting the next day? OK, maybe some of our older readers in the crowd have never moved beyond “drunk dialing,” but many of us are probably more familiar with the embarrassing phenomenon, a technological evolution of the drunk dial. Thanks to a new project out of Google Labs, however, you can at least stop yourself from sending “impaired” e-mails during certain hours.
When I was on the high school debate team, about 15 years ago, using the Internet was considered strange, if not cheating. We used photocopy machines, print magazines and academic journals almost exclusively. That time in the world’s history is now gone forever.
When the T-Mobile G1 was shown off in NYC last week, it didn’t have the gusto of a Stevenote. There was no “boom!”—no “one more thing!” And as a result, many (including us) felt a bit underwhelmed, and were quick to interpret the device’s inconsistent GUI as an indicator that the lack of attention to detail would doom it.
Google co-founder Larry Page says the time for delays has passed: he wants the Federal Communications Commission to open up fallow “white space” in the TV broadcast spectrum for unlicensed use, and to do it before November’s presidential election. Page, who spoke at a Capitol Hill event Wednesday, blasted incumbent broadcasters for lobbying “against the public interest” to block access to the unlicensed spectrum. Calling claims of potential interference with existing broadcast stations “garbage” and “despicable,” Page charged that FCC field tests this summer had been “rigged” against spectrum-sensing technology that’s designed to enable exploitation of white space.
In a recently published patent, Google describes a vision for an open wireless world, one in which mobile devices (and smartphones in particular) are no longer married to particular cellular service providers. When you buy a phone in the United States today, you typical have to sign a contract that prevents you from using that phone with more than one provider for a predetermined amount of time. You’ll encounter no such requirement when purchasing a laptop, which can be used to connect to the internet through any service provider at any time.
Amid the iPhone 3G launch hysteria, we made a pronouncement that, looking back now long after the dust has settled, pretty well nailed it: forget hardware, it’s code that counts. Code via the juggernaut that is the App Store, which allowed the iPhone to truly came into its own as a mobile platform.
T-Mobile, Google finally unveil the first Android phone
T-Mobile, Google, and HTC finally officially launched the first Android-enabled mobile device to hit the market. As expected, the first Android phone will be the HTC Dream (also known as the T-Mobile G1), a device with a large touchscreen and a slide-out physical keypad that will run Google’s new mobile platform. The Dream will be available through T-Mobile and will launch “simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Until Chrome came along, Google’s Master Mobile Plan didn’t quite add up. Now it does. Chrome — Google’s new superbrowser — is cream on the top of a new mobile software stack. Let’s call it GACL, for Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux. Gears is a way to run Web apps on desktops and store data locally as well as in the cloud. Android is a development framework for Linux-based mobile devices. Chrome is a browser, but not just for pages. Chrome also runs apps. In that respect, it’s more than the UI-inside-a-window that all browsers have become. It’s essentially an operating system.
