I personally find Google a fascinating company and I have no beef with them what so ever. Don't want to use their search engine or other services?
Simply don't use them then.
Ultimatley every web service you take part in today records some information related to you, the customer database is more or less the only thing
valuable for a lot of startups and e-biz.
Everything ain't a conspiracy, it's simple business.
Personally I'm a lot more comfortable with letting Google be the company to host my webmail and other services than many other, the founders seems
pretty darn straight up respectable.
scroolge.com ? Pfft. Why not set up a 'nix box, use ssh tunnels and hacked routing tables while you're at it. Think you're "safe" with Windows
Vista and the personal firewall enabled?
If anyone would want to see what you're doing they can just access your friendly neighbourhood ISP and
all your "no cookies enabled searches" and the likes thereoff equals squat. I'd say worry more on current politics and voting, check out epic.org
and read what they have to say.
No videos was removed off YouTube before Google bought them? Duh.. that's because there was noone with cash to sue for copyright infrigement, which
is exactly what is happening now and that's why loads of vids are being removed. This isn't nuclear sience or my personal thesis, it's a wide
spread fact and has been speculated and debated wildy in regular magazines (wired, etc).
www.google.com...
Just use Google and search for YouTube sued
Finally, the fact that YouTube are removing videos isn't ultimatley what is bothering me, it's that organisations that are "pro disclosure/getting
the truth out there" aren't making their videos publicly available on the net already. Sometimes it's funny when you watch one of these docu. and
the front men or women talks about the power of the internet..am I like the only one going l.."yeah, and why the h*ll aren't you utilising that
power instead of forcing me to watch this low resoloution crap off YouTube".
And yeah yeah, I know they need money but when it comes to this, for me to really take them seriously I'm afraid it's donations only or it just
doesn't seem as serious. Them charging for the stuff ain't exactly lowering the bar for entrance into these types of questions for the average joe
(who frikkin neeeeds to know about this)..and certainly makes it trickier for Mr or Mrs Joe to separate the obvious BS from the stuff that has some
value, time and effort put into it.
Cheers ~ L
[edit on 7-4-2007 by lasse]