Category: Google

Google StreetView – coming to a city near you…or Edinburgh

So, last week, there I was, slumped in a bus seat with a vacant look (as usual), when I spotted something odd coming out of a side street.
A wee black car…with a huge pole on top, covered with cameras.
Now, it’s coming up for Festival season in Edinburgh, when all sorts of strangeness occurs on a regular basis, and therefore such randomness would blend right in, but this was a tad too early.
Aha – it turned a corner, and I clocked the discrete little Google StreetView logo on its side.
Since then, I know it’s been into the cul-de-sac where I live (but not got my flat as it’s on the wrong side to be seen from the street), and continues to travel through Edinburgh.

Now, I know there’s debate over privacy issues (which, to be honest, I think are hugely overblown by the paranoid), but I personally think it’s kinda cool!
The usefulness of a walk-through map of a city, with actual images of the physical, ‘real’ landmarks and what they look like far outweighs the possibility of someone, somewhere being spotted doing something they shouldn’t be doing, or being somewhere they shouldn’t be.

So, when they launch it for Edinburgh, I’ll be the one with the disturbingly red hair on the top deck of the number 25 on Leith Walk….with the blurred out face 😀

Google and Firefox – saving the world, one phishing site at a time

So, I logged out of my internet banking service, and got a ‘stop’ icon on the right hand side of my toolbar, and a pop up box telling me that the site was a suspected web forgery. I was given the options of reading more, leaving the page – “Get me out of here!”, “Ignore this warning”, and “This isn’t a web forgery”. Since I’d just logged out of the secure area, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a phishing site, so decided to use the final option. This allowed me to submit a report anonymously, detailing why I didn’t think it was a phishing page.

So I did.
And this is the report I got back:

Google

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox BETA

Report Sent

Thanks for sending a report to Google. Now that you’ve done your good deed for the day, feel free to:

1. Take a second to rejoice merrily for doing your part in making the web a safer place.

2. Call/email/write to a neighbor/friend/relative and tell them what phishing is and how they can protect themselves.

3. Check out other extensions for Firefox from Google.

4. Spread the love by joining the Spread Firefox community.

I’m going to go for option 1. Feel my merry rejoicing!! 🙂

I think this will probably be a good thing – after all, I would have no idea who to report a phishing site to if I found one, and this way, I should be protected if I stumble across one, with a clear process for getting a wrongly identified site removed from the list.
I also like the fact that it’s not forcing you to leave a site – it allows you the option of continuing with what you were doing, instead of treating you like a child and enforcing its guidance…

Google Librarian Central

Link from Library Stuff

I have to confess to removing GLC from my Bloglines subscriptions late last year. Not only was it not being updated, but it went through a phase of having all its old entries appearing as new entries, repeatedly, and this went on for days. In the end, I got so irritated with it I removed it.

It did seem very odd that it stopped, with a promise of a return after the Summer, and no update posts since, even if just to say that they might have decided against continuing the blog. I found it often had useful tips, even for non public / school librarians, which it seems to be mainly aimed at.

Hopefully they really do like librarians, and will be back at some point…but if it’s in the Spring, just in time to warm up for the American library conferences, I have to admit, I’ll be giving in to my lurking cynicism!

Google again

Honestly, I’m not obsessive, really, they just seem to be pretty active just now!
Google have opened up their internal blog on their public policies, to allow users to see what their views are on various important areas such as privacy, content regulation etc.
Which is pretty interesting, but I’ve got to say, I’m not sure I entirely trust any organisation when they say ‘look how honest and open we’re being’…probably cos I know there are very, very few of them who will be!
But it’s a pretty good attempt to make more transparent the internal workings of a section of a massive corporation.