PI Newswire

Google is experimenting with a new signup form that eliminates the ability to create anonymous accounts. The new form is part of an effort to expand the Google+ social network by automatically adding every new Google account to Google+. Because Google+ requires a name and gender the new signup form effectively eliminates the anonymous Google account.

The new account creation page can be found by following the links on Google’s homepage. As the Google Operating System blog points out, the older Google account page, which does not require signing up for Google+ or Gmail, is currently still accessible through Google Reader, Calendar and other Google services.

The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”

In addition to the Google+ integration, signing up for a Google account now means getting a profile page and a Gmail account; gone are the days when you could use an outside email address with your Google account. It is still possible to go in and delete the Google+, Google profile and Gmail portions of your new Google account after it’s been created, but given that few people ever change their default settings it’s safe to assume that most people won’t.

It should come as no surprise that Google is working hard to get more users signed up for Google+, after all, despite marginal momentum, Google+ is far behind Facebook when it comes to signing up new users.

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Spies working at the Government’s communications headquarters are being offered bonuses worth tens of thousands of pounds to stop them being poached by corporate giants such as Microsoft and Google.

The move follows complaints made by the head of GCHQ that he is losing top staff to companies that can afford to pay them £100,000 packages in salaries and generous perks.

Some of the staff being targeted by the private sector are vital to Britain’s intelligence services in the fight against cyber warfare.

GCHQ director Iain Lobban told MPs in July last year that he was struggling to recruit and retain key staff.

He warned the Intelligence and Security Committee: ‘They will be working for Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever.

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Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU Project and founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes that companies like Facebook and Google aren’t helping their users, but are in fact doing the exact opposite because of how they run their social networks. In an interview with RT, he briefly criticized both Facebook and Google+, but then underlined how the former has worse practices than the latter.

“[Facebook and Google+] mistreat the users,” Stallman said. “For instance, by requiring users to give real names. That’s a policy that puts some people in danger. So, you shouldn’t use them. But Facebook does many other bad things as well.”

It’s worth noting that Google said it would revise Google+’s real name management policy, but then simply told those complaining: just don’t use Google+. Facebook is very strict about its real name policy, although it does make exceptions, from time to time.

“Facebook does massive surveillance,” Stallman continued. “If there is a Like button in a page, Facebook knows who visited that page. And it can get IP address of the computer visiting the page even if the person is not a Facebook user. So you visit several pages that have Like buttons and Facebook knows that you visited all of those, even if it doesn’t really know who you are.”

Over the last few months, Facebook was accused multiple times of using cookies to track users even after they log out of the service, though it has since fixed the issues and explained how its system worked. For more information about how this story, the multiple follow-ups, and the ensuing PR disaster, please see the links below.

Google has been accused of compromising U.S. national security – by allowing aerial shots of secret military bases to be viewed by the general public through its online Maps computer program.

The search engine giant has come under fire after web users found once again that they can search for military bases, and then zoom in to see airstrips and possible top-secret military drones.

The discovery of a hidden airstrip at Yucca Lake in Nevada, which is used for testing the R-170 drones similar to the one lost in Iran last week, has raised further concern.

Cedric Leighton, a retired Air Force colonel, said: ‘Iranians would be most interested in operational bases because that tells them how we fly our surveillance missions.

‘Google is making public what was once the sole province of the military and intelligence community, making this a brave new world for the intel agencies as well,’ he told FoxNews.com.

Aviation website Flight Global claimed to have discovered the secret Yukka Lake venue, which shows satellite images of either a Predator or Reaper drone on the airstrip.

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Google is rolling out a new feature called “Find My Face” to Google+ users allowing them to opt-in to a new facial recognition feature for photos shared on the service.

Of course this isn’t the first foray Google has made into the facial recognition arena, they have offered the feature on Picasa Web Albums for a little more than three years.

The feature is not available to all Google+ users yet (at least not my account), but Google has decided to alert users to the presence of the new feature instead of just turning it on.

Facebook introduced a similar function last December, but required users to opt-out of the service causing much consternation in their user community.

Google’s take on this feature sounds sort of interesting. They call it “Find My Face” and when enabled will suggest to people in your circles or who have +1′d a post of yours to tag you in photos they post that appear to contain your face.

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Diaspora, the social network that sells itself as a privacy-conscious alternative to Facebook, is relying on user donations instead of advertising to get it going.

And by contrast to its other competitor, Google+, Diaspora also allows pseudonyms. The decentralised service aims to address some of the multitude of privacy and content control issues that have dogged Facebook and, arguable to a lesser extent, Google+, while still giving users the ability share content and ideas with their friends online.

Users retain the copyright of uploaded photos and the like, which is only shared among groups that users actively define, not friends-of-friends or the whole network (often the default options on Facebook).

The service was launched in November 2010 and remains in alpha. However having signed up to try the invitation-only service months ago, El Reg finally received an invitation to try it on Thursday, so things appear to be moving (albeit slowly). The emailed invitation (extract below) was nothing if not enthusiastic:

Finally – it’s here
The social network you have been waiting for has arrived. Revamped, more secure, and more fun, DIASPORA* is ready to help you share and explore the web in a whole new way.

Sign up now

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Mind what you say in Facebook comments, Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results. Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on a other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google.

The new indexing plan isn’t just about Facebook comments, but applies nearly any content that’s previously been accessible only through an HTTP POST request. Google’s goal is to include anything “hiding” behind a form — comment systems like Disqus or Facebook and other JavaScript-based sites and forms.

Typically when Google announces it’s going to expand its search index in some way everyone is happy — sites get more searchable content into Google and users can find more of what they’re looking for — but that’s not the case with the latest changes to Google’s indexing policy.

Developers are upset because Google is no longer the passive crawler it once was and users will likely become upset once they realize that comments about drunken parties, embarrassing moments or what they thought were private details are going to start showing up next to their names in Google’s search results.

For now most of the ire seems limited to concerned web developers worried that Google’s new indexing plan ignores the HTML specification and breaks the web’s underlying architecture. To understand what Google is planning to do and why it breaks one of the fundamental gentleman’s agreements of the web, you first have to understand how various web requests work.

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The lawyer of a Syrian national accused by the United States of spying for Syria has accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of resorting to Google to prepare the case against his client. Mohamad Anas Haitham Soueid was arrested last summer and charged with conducting political espionage against Syrian and American citizens participating in demonstrations against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The alleged espionage appears to have been organized by members of the Syrian embassy in Washington, DC. A few weeks prior to Soueid’s arrest, the US Department of State had communicated to Syria’s ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha, “a number of [...] concerns with [...] reported actions of certain Syrian embassy staff in the United States”. The concerns centered on confirmed sightings of Syrian diplomats conducting technical surveillance against Syrian opposition activists in several US cities. Soueid was subsequently arrested for allegedly gathering intelligence on protesters and planning an extensive intimidation campaign. But Soueid’s lawyer, Haytham Faraj, told the court last week that his client’s name, as transcribed in the FBI indictment, had been wrongly transliterated into English using Google Translate. He also wrote in a court filing that the prosecution had “demonstrated a serious deficit in its ability to translate recorded conversations from Arabic into English”. Soueid’s defense also argues that federal prosecutors appear “to have taken extensive liberties with a playful [telephone] conversation” between the accused and his wife back in Syria, eventually producing an English-language translation “that has no basis in fact”. In one case highlighted by the defense, the accused allegedly told his wife that the Syrian intelligence agency was monitoring telephone calls; but in English, the phrase was changed to say “this phone belongs to intelligence agency”. When Soueid was first interviewed by the FBI back in August, he denied having been in contact with Syrian government officials. He later changed his statement, after being shown photographs of himself meeting with President al-Assad.

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As a former process server (think Seth Rogan in Pineapple Express), Google Maps pretty much changed my life. I could leave my house on a job and know that no matter where I end up, I will never be lost. Street View has long been another great feature in Maps allowing you to view businesses, hotels and and stalk Kelly Ferguson’s house, all from the comfort of your computer or handy Android phone.

Since the engineers at Google never sleep and are constantly improving on their services, Street View is getting a new addition by way of business interiors, allowing for users to get off the street and inside of businesses. It doesn’t end there, Google is also reportedly working with some businesses to add additional content like pictures of food being offered at restaurants.

The way it works is a business must opt-in for interior view by submitting an application to Google and scheduling a day for the photo shoot. Google Places will then show up and snap 360-degree shots of the interior of their store and whammy — a new virtual tour via Google Maps. Google is apparently adding interior view content from 37 different cities around the world from countries like the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France and the UK.

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The number of U.S. government requests for data on Google users for use in criminal investigations rose 29 percent in the last six months, according to data released by the search giant Monday.

U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests for data on Google users and services from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2011, an average of 31 a day. That’s compared to 4,601 requests from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2010, the company reported Tuesday in an update to its unique transparency tool.

Google says it complied in whole or part with 93% of such requests, which can include court orders, grand jury subpoenas and other legal instruments.

For the first time, Google’s transparency report includes the number of users and accounts affected by such requests — in this case, 11,057.

The search and software giant also received 92 requests to remove data from its services, including YouTube. The requests collectively asked for 757 individual pieces of content be removed. Google says it complied fully or partially with 63 percent of the requests. The company noted it received a request from law enforcement to take down a video showing police brutality and another for videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. Google did not comply with either.

Google is alone in providing this data to the public, which it says it hopes will give a push to efforts to reform a 25-year-old government privacy law that lets law enforcement get access to users’ online communications without having to get a judge’s approval.

Google is part of the so-called Due Process Coalition fighting for reform, but none of its fellow members — which include Amazon, AOL, AT&T, Dropbox, Facebook and Microsoft — provide any data at all about how often the government requests data or how often they comply.

Google does not, however, break down requests by type — so it’s still unknown how many of these thousands of requests use the powers under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to request, without judicial oversight, communication records of Americans.

The transparency tool also covers requests from other governments around the world, but due to the size of the U.S. population, Google’s California headquarters and the large number of Americans online, the U.S. leads the world in data requests to the search giant.

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Google radically expanded Tuesday its use of bank-level security that prevents Wi-Fi hackers and rogue ISPs from spying on your searches.

Starting Tuesday, logged-in Google users searching from Google’s homepage will be using https://google.com, not http://google.com — even if they simply type google.com into their browsers. The change to encrypted search will happen over several weeks, the company said in a blog post Tuesday

The change means that the communication between a user’s browser and Google’s servers will be wrapped in encryption by default for those logged into their Google account. That means that hackers, school administrators and nosy corporate network admins won’t be able to see what search terms you are sending to the search giant.

Google introduced an HTTPS search option in May 2010, but users had to decide to go to that page (https://google.com). Google made it harder to find after schools objected to the change, saying it prevented them from censoring and monitoring their charges.

This go-round Google is providing a way for schools and network administrators to prevent the redirect to HTTPS, but Google will also make it clear to searchers on those networks that they are not sending data to Google via encryption.

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The US Internal Revenue Service is auditing strategies that Google uses to cut its tax bill by about $1 billion a year by funneling profit into subsidiaries located in territories with low or non-existent rates, according to a published report citing unnamed officials.

The agency is “bringing more than typical scrutiny” to techniques known as the “Double Irish” and “Dutch Sandwich,” which move profits through units in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Bermuda, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. Last year, Bloomberg reported that the practice had saved Google $3.1 billion in just three years.

In 2009 alone, a Google subsidiary located in Bermuda, where there’s no corporate income tax, collected about $6.1 billion in royalties from a separate Google unit located in the Netherlands, Bloomberg reported. By transferring profits out of the US and other territories where rates are high, Google is able to drastically lower its costs. On Thursday, Google reported an effective tax rate of about 19 percent for third quarter, less than half the average combined US and state statutory rate of 39.2.

Google is by no means alone in pursuing the strategy. US companies are sitting on at least $1.375 trillion in earnings in their foreign subsidiaries that aren’t subject to income taxes. If the earnings were transferred to the US, they would face a 35-percent corporate rate. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco Systems use similar vehicles to avoid federal income taxes, but it’s not clear they do so with the same spectacular success.

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