patrick.net

"The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates.
***
New America...employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.”
***
[After New America's Open Markets initiative scholar Barry Lynn] posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
***
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn.
***
Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”
***
After initially eschewing Washington public policy debates, which were seen in Silicon Valley as pay-to-play politics, Google has developed an influence operation that is arguably more muscular and sophisticated than that of any other American company."

I read about NewAmerica.org after seeing a terribly misleading comment on PatNet, and the user who posted it said it came from NewAmerica.org.

The disinformation turned out to be part of the "New America Muslim Diaspora Initiative." Among other things, the Initiative documents "Anti-Muslim Activities in the United States," for example which "local government officials denounce Islam." Accused online of such blasphemy, these local officials can then be added to Islamic State kill lists, because the Islamic penalty for blasphemy is death.

The question becomes, why have "New America" and apparently Google become so intent on spreading Islam and silencing blasphemy? PatNet readers may already know about Pakistan and KSA's "Muslim world plan against blasphemous content," including online, and that KSA leads a war on "terrorism" which it defines to include questioning the fundamentals of Islam, while KSA and Pakistan fund and participate in terror attacks against other countries.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-google-antitrust-aptoide/aptoide-wins-court-battle-against-google-in-landmark-case-idUKKCN1MW2CL

LISBON (Reuters) - Portuguese app store Aptoide said on Monday that a local court had ruled against Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) in a landmark case, ordering the U.S. giant to stop removing its app from users’ mobile phones without their knowledge. ...

“We believe this may apply to other situations where Google has competition,” Nestal said. Aptoide said in a statement that the court decision is applicable in 82 countries, including the UK and India.

Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The European Commission hit Google with a record 4.34 billion euro ($5 billion) fine in July for using its popular Android mobile operating system to block rivals.

Google Play caught hosting an app that steals users’ cryptocurrency. "Clipper" app replaced user's wallet address with addresses controlled by developers.

Google Play has been caught hosting yet another malicious app, this time one that was designed to steal cryptocurrency from unwitting end users, researchers said Friday.

The malware, which masqueraded as a legitimate cryptocurrency app, worked by replacing wallet addresses copied into the Android clipboard with one belonging to attackers, a researcher with Eset said in a blog post. As a result, people who intended to use the app to transfer digital coins into a wallet of their choosing would instead deposit the funds into a wallet belonging to the attackers.

So-called clipper malware has targeted Windows users since at least 2017. Last year, a botnet known as Satori was updated to infect coin-mining computers with malware that similarly changed wallet addresses. Last August came word of Android-based clipper malware that was distributed in third-party marketplaces.

The clipper malware available in Google Play impersonated a service called MetaMask, which is designed to allow browsers to run apps that work with the digital coin Ethereum. The primary purpose of Android/Clipper.C, as Eset has dubbed the malware, was to steal credentials needed to gain control of Ethereum funds. It also replaced both bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses copied to the clipboard with ones belonging to the attackers.

The discovery is yet more evidence that Google can’t be trusted to proactively keep malware out of Play. That leaves the onus on end users. People should limit the number of apps they install and then only after doing a fair amount of research. One way to check the legitimacy of an app is to independently visit the site of the outfit that purportedly developed the app. The official MetaMask website makes no mention of an Android app. That should have been a red flag that the Google Play offering was an imposter.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-play-caught-hosting-an-app-that-steals-users-cryptocurrency/

Google says the built-in microphone it never told Nest users about was 'never supposed to be a secret'

In early February, Google announced that Assistant would now work with its home security and alarm system Nest Secure.

The problem — users didn't know a microphone even existed on their Nest security devices to begin with.

On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider it had made an "error."

"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part," the spokesperson said.

In early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system Nest Secure would be getting an update — users could now enable its virtual assistant technology, Google Assistant.

The problem: Nest users didn't know a microphone even existed on their security device to begin with.

The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard (which is the alarm, keypad, and motion sensor component in the Nest Secure offering) was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device.

On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider the company had made an "error."

"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part," the spokesperson said.

Google says that "the microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option."

It also said the microphone was originally included in the Nest Guard for the possibility of adding new security features down the line, like the ability to detect broken glass.

Still, even if Google included the microphone in its Nest Guard device for future updates — like its Assistant integration — the news comes as consumers have grown increasingly wary of major tech companies and their commitment to consumer privacy.

For Google, the revelation is particularly problematic and brings to mind previous privacy controversies, such as the 2010 incident in which the company admitted that its fleet of Street View cars "accidentally" collected personal data transmitted over consumers' unsecured WiFi networks, including emails.

Tom Zeller Jr.‏Verified account @tomzellerjr

Follow Follow @tomzellerjr

If @Google's @Nest Secure devices really had secret microphones that they hid from consumers, those consumers should probably be forgiven if they don't trust the company's after-the-fact promises that it never spied on them. #DontBeEvil

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3336227/security/nest-secure-had-a-secret-microphone-can-now-be-a-google-assistant.html … via @csoonline

Google bought Nest — which was initially known for its smart thermostat device — back in 2014 for $3.2 billion. It became a standalone company in 2015 when Google reorganized as Alphabet, but in February 2018, it was brought back into Google under the leadership of head hardware exec Rick Osterloh.

Today, Nest offers a variety of IoT products including smoke detectors, video doorbells, and security cameras.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2

I have a friend that asks Google "N" word searches. What's fucked up is Google will give him Black historic answers.
He does it as a Joke, saying "I'm not racist, Google is, watch... Hey Google who was the first..."

LOL at all of the dislikes in the comments.

EBGuy says

I think they just made a movie about that: In what sounds like a parody, maybe intentional, of the way every intrusive, privacy-annihilating technology is heralded as a convenience, the movie has several people gushing about how, with Genisys, all their devices can be linked!

My wife and I have our email with different entities in an attempt at information silo diversification... probably just spittin' in the wind, though.

And about a two weeks ago, I think Google broke the internet (this may have been part of their "mobile ready" websites initiative). I run NoScript (edit: Firefox addon) and couldn't get "normal" functionality" out of several websites. Sigh.... most are back up now (I think some of them dropped scripting from googleappservices.com or something like that) .

On caller ID, my phone for whatever reason, comes up with the name "Victor" and a polish last name I will not publish. I assume it's the guy who owned my phone previously. Basically, as a joke 8 years ago, I made a gmail account with the name and have since registered all social media under that official name. I think I've confused them quite a bit. I remember in 1998, when that online browsing advertisement service "All Advantage" came out, they would pay you 50 cents an hour to surf the net. I wrote a bot to search random things every 4 minutes to fool the service into thinking I was browsing. I was thinking it would be useful to write a similar program to do so just to spam google with nonsensical searches. The goal would be to basically dilute your true searches in a sea of crap.

I was thinking it would be useful to write a similar program to do so just to spam google with nonsensical searches.

Just be sure those nonsensical searchers do not link you to pedo. Or racism or whatever the next cause de jour turns out to be.

Is it just me or has Google's search algorithm gone to shit? Whenever I searching something technical it used to pull up relevant stuff quick even on obscure (to the layman) topics... Lately it seems to wants to push Google scholar type links to the forefront (technical papers, etc.) Most of which are only available in full via a paid subscription.

Anyone else run into a similar problem... or is it just me?

https://storyfire.com/video-details/5f469f725029ac56680ab8c4

Apparently Alexandre Dumas identified as a non white.
(Screenshot from yesterday's doodle)


Keep in mind he was French.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/google_cookie_wipe/

Google exempts its own websites from Chrome's automatic data-scrubbing feature, allowing the ads giant to potentially track you even when you've told it not to.

Programmer Jeff Johnson noticed the unusual behavior, and this month documented the issue with screenshots. In his assessment of the situation, he noted that if you set up Chrome, on desktop at least, to automatically delete all cookies and so-called site data when you quit the browser, it deletes it all as expected – except your site data for Google.com and YouTube.com.

While cookies are typically used to identify you and store some of your online preferences when visiting websites, site data is on another level: it includes, among other things, a storage database in which a site can store personal information about you, on your computer, that can be accessed again by the site the next time you visit. Thus, while your Google and YouTube cookies may be wiped by Chrome, their site data remains on your computer...

Patrick says

Google exempts its own websites from Chrome's automatic data-scrubbing feature

I don't even have this shit installed on any of my systems.

I'm going to throw in my 2 cents.

First, your phone is 100% insecure. You cannot secure it. Give up on that. It's absolutely impossible.

If you want to use a phone anyhow, use Brave - you can use TOR on it, TOR is a method to both obscure who you are, and where you are however nothing prevents the Android OS from directly identifying what you are doing and what you are looking at.

Second, get a burner phone. You almost are always near wifi anyhow, or at least I am. The only time I actually make use of an SD card is when I'm going between work and home. I don't use if it I'm out, I'm not asshole with the people I hang out.

If you have a computer assigned you from work, use it exclusively for work.

If you use a your own computer to connect to work, use Virtual Box or VMWare - this allows you to install a complete operating system on top of a software simulation of a complete computer. When I connect to work, I'm doing it through Virtual Box. From the point of view of my company, my computer has 4 GB of memory, 100 GB of disk storage, and 4 processors. What I actually have is an 32 GB of memory, an 8TB HDD and 8 processors. There is no way for my company to access my main machine.

Finally, don't use Chrome at all. I'd advise against I.E. Yandex is a Russian company that makes a decent browser and search engine, I'm sure there is no security there, but it's just Russians that are watching - who cares?

Do not do banking on your phone. Do not use your phone for financial transactions at all. I know how insecure phones are, and they are HOPELESSLY insecure. This is intentional. Do not store compromising or sensitive information on a phone, period, even on a burner phone.

https://reclaimthenet.org/google-play-bans-bitchute-app/

Google Play has booted a third-party app for BitChute, one of the most popular free speech focused YouTube alternatives, from its app store as part of another contentious crackdown on an alt-tech competitor.

The app was created by Hexagod and had over 100,000 downloads before it was removed. Google cited violations of its “Webviews and Affiliate Spam policy” as the reason for taking the app down.

Specifically, Google claimed the app was in violation of the rules because its “primary purpose is to drive affiliate traffic to a website or provide a webview of a website without permission from the website owner or administrator.”

But BitChute has disputed this characterization and tweeted: “Contrary to the message below there was never any affiliate deal and permission was given.”

Google is simply banning a rival which does not censor based on politics.

I highly recommend https://www.bitchute.com/

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-after-years-2020-10

Entrusting your data to big tech platforms can be highly risky.
Users who have been banned by Google for supposedly violating its terms of service have been left without access to key parts of their lives.
Many have appealed the suspensions but have received automated responses.
They don't know why they've been banned. "This is just how life is when you're dealing with trillion-dollar faceless corporations," said Aral Balkan.

When he received the notification from Google he couldn't quite believe it.

Cleroth, a game developer who asked not to use his real name, woke up to see a message that all his Google accounts were disabled due to "serious violation of Google policies."

His first reaction was that something must have malfunctioned on his phone.

Then he went to his computer and opened up Chrome, Google's internet browser. He was signed out. He tried to access Gmail, his main email account, which was also locked.

"Everything was disconnected," he told Business Insider. ...

He feels anger, too. "I'm extremely angry at Google for just completely locking me out or deleting all my data without a single notice, losing money, data on personal projects, contacts, so much," he explained.

The lack of transparency about how he broke their terms of service also has him worried. "I keep thinking there has to be a reason they've suspended me, even though it could just be some algorithmic glitch or something.," he said. "It's difficult to shake this feeling, given that Google practically has mountains of data on me.

"I'm also angry at myself for not having even thought of the possibility I could lose my Google account with everything in it and accounts linked through Google," he added. "Apparently I'm not alone in this blind faith though. Hopefully that changes."

Patrick says

"I'm extremely angry at Google for just completely locking me out or deleting all my data without a single notice, losing money, data on personal projects, contacts, so much," he explained.

Google be like: "How much did you pay for the service, Sir? $0? Here's your money back, sorryaboutthat."

The truth however, is you paid Google with your ass.

It was data-rape.

Google is extremely expensive for users.

Google targets companies to sell GSuite, it's one of their biggest products outside of search. GSuite is basically email/documents/etc... all ran by google. So a lot of companies do have it, and now Google targets government so they'll be collecting government data soon too.

Google targets children too. All the teaching stuff my wife is doing with 3rd graders is using Google products. You just know they are accumulating data on those little consumers already.

FNWGMOBDVZXDNW says

Google does provide you with incognito mode in chrome to handle this.

I'm not saying you specifically, but incognito mode is misunderstood by many/most people. Its main benefit is (at least hopefully) to not store your personal data from a browsing session on the computer you are using to browse. Example of use: Use incognito mode when browsing using the computer at the public library so that the next person to use that computer won't see your "recently visited pages" history. The websites still run all their scripts and, if logged into their website, know exactly who you are, etc.

FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut says

Google targets companies to sell GSuite, it's one of their biggest products outside of search. GSuite is basically email/documents/etc...

Just took a new job at a company using this. Already late for a meeting because the calendar notifications suck.

Already late for a meeting because the calendar notifications suck.

Need to add that as an entry to the "Big Book of 'Scuses"

True story. Wed browsers don't have notifications that pop out like Microsoft office suite does.

When you're 'in the zone', deep in some code you need that. It's why I didn't use ubuntu at work as well. No MS integration.

Damn, I wanted to check if my ballot was counted right, but cannot do that without the government turning all my info over to Google via the recapcha shit js they include on their page. Page won't work unless you let Google fuck you in the ass first:

Why are you turning over every bit of data entered on https://california.ballottrax.net/voter/ to Google?

I'm a javascript programmer. This is not merely a security hole, it's outright betrayal of the public interest:

script src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js?onload=onloadcallback&render=explicit"

Any javascript included on a page can read everything the user enters on that page, track every keystroke, every mouse movement.

Please, stop this crime.

Patrick Killelea
Menlo Park, CA
p@patrick.net

Booger says

Who exactly has deplatformed them? AWS? Azure? Google Cloud?

Patrick says

Google via the recapcha shit js

Didn't make me do that. I just checked mine. Apparently it was 'accepted'.

@just_passing_through Actually, it did. Google was given free access to all the info about you. Even if you didn't see the Recaptcha, it happened by spying on your keystrokes, etc.

Try blocking all Google domains and resubmit. It won't work.

You can block Google with /etc/hosts for example. I use Little Snitch.

Problem is that just about everyone does not block Google domains and more than half of all websites betray everything you do to Google, even government and medical sites.

Oh, yeah, I know... I just didn't have to click buses n' stuff to prove I'm human.

Oh, dug out my old trial proton mail account. I remembered both passwords! I may be switching soon/finally. Just need to figure out how I'm going to handle 17 years of email and what sort of calendar I'll use to replace gogles.

GreaterNYCDude says

Is it just me or has Google's search algorithm gone to shit?

Google hires based on what kind of junk you have between your legs, how many genders you have, and how much melanin is in your skin.

Yes - it HAS gone to shit. Use www.yandex.com or www.duckduck.go (wrapper for google, but still an improvement).

Remember when Yahoo was king of the Internet? That's Google and Facebook in 10 years. They're crap.

richwicks says

www.duckduck.go (wrapper for google...

Is it really?

Duckduckgo is completely separate from Google I believe. Nothing at all in common, and they don't like each other.

richwicks says

Use www.yandex.com

I've already switched to https://translate.yandex.com/ for translation things because it's definitely as good or better, and I'm pretty sure the Russians are not sharing their dossier on my searches with the US government, or China.

"best tits" results are waaay better on yandex!

Patrick says

Duckduckgo is completely separate from Google I believe. Nothing at all in common, and they don't like each other.

Google once portrayed themselves as the champions of free speech and not being evil, and enemies of propaganda and government censorship.

Don't trust anybody.

All I know though, is google is only slightly more useful than tits on a bull for doing searches now. Bing isn't bad. Google is one of the last places I go to in order to find technical information.

Eric Holder says

richwicks says

www.duckduck.go (wrapper for google...

Is it really?

I think it is.

I believe it started out as a wrapper for a GROUP of search engines. Used to be pretty lousy but it's improved beyond the point of google. Google will actually remove sites entirely now.