Into Tech

Various safe harbors for service providers that protect them from the actions of their users make a lot of common sense. It’s simply wrong to blame a service provider for the actions of its users. We don’t blame the telephone company when someone commits a crime using the phone. And we don’t blame the car company for providing the getaway car. Nor do we ask those companies to do anything to block those actions. That’s because we all realize how silly that is — to blame a tool provider for the actions of its users. Yet, for some reason, when we move online, that concept gets confused. While most of the focus has been on safe harbors concerning copyright or defamation, when you toss in a bit of “but think of the children!” it gets even more ridiculous.

We’ve already seen this with US politicians bullying ISPs into blocking “objectionable” content, even though they have no legal basis for this (and, in fact, such blocking will only make it more difficult to track down those actually responsible). And, now we see it in the UK. UK MPs are claiming that Google needs to vet all of the content uploaded to YouTube “to protect children from harmful content.” Seriously.

I guess it’s only in the techie community that we recognize that the phrase “to protect the children” is almost always followed by a plan that does the opposite.

The politicians seem concerned that occasionally, questionable content is found on YouTube, and it might take them (gasp!) 24 hours to take it down. Apparently it has not occurred to those behind this demand that perhaps they should be focused on using the content being uploaded to track down those actually responsible for the objectionable (illegal?) content, rather than demanding that Google proactively hide the evidence. Next up, we’ll be expecting the report where politicians demand that telephone companies “proactively” review all telephone calls to make sure there is no objectionable content “to protect children.”

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While we all wait for the outcome of Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube, it appears that some other media companies aren’t waiting around. Italian media firm MediaSet, which just so happens to be owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has sued YouTube and Google for $779 million (almost as much as Viacom is suing for!). MediaSet claims that the 4,643 videos on YouTube that infringe on its copyrights have cost it 315,700 viewer days. Apparently, MediaSet prefers not to take into consideration (a) that most videos on YouTube are limited to under 10 minutes, meaning that it’s a poor replacement for watching on TV and (b) that people who watch on YouTube aren’t necessarily people who would have watched it on TV and (c) that folks who watch something on YouTube may, in turn, be convinced to watch a show on TV that they wouldn’t have watched otherwise. Why bother with little pesky details like that when you can just sue a huge company that has a lot of cash. Given that the Italian government is already trying to put Google execs in jail over some YouTube videos, this looks like a larger Italian campaign against YouTube in general.

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As was widely expected, Amazon has now launched a new payment service for online retailers as something of a PayPal competitor. Basically, it will let people use their Amazon account info to buy things at other stores. Of course, as others have discovered, taking on PayPal — while simple in concept — has proven a lot more difficult in practice. Companies like Google and Yahoo have tried and haven’t made much of a dent. Hell, even Amazon has tried this before, though that was a beta launch that never went very far. Actually getting retailers to implement this and then getting customers to use it is the challenge at this point, and it seems likely to be an uphill battle. There’s definitely a sense that many people don’t like PayPal, but it’s so well established that to provide an alternative, you really need to offer something that provides significant value above and beyond Paypal — and it’s not clear that Amazon really does that.

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A Californian start-up co-founded by engineers who helped create Google’s market-leading technology launched a rival search engine yesterday. It claims to scan three times as many web pages as Google but met with a lukewarm response.

Cuil.com, pronounced “cool.com”, may present a problem for people who access the internet at work, as it is just a small typing error away from an Italian hardcore pornographic website, Culi.com.

The website claims to have indexed more than 120bn web pages compared with Google’s estimated 40bn, was set up by Anna Patterson, its president, who worked at Google and helped create the company’s index of the internet, which is consulted when a search term is entered.

Her husband, Cuil’s chief executive and fellow co-founder Tom Costello, is a former researcher from Stanford University, where Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met, and worked with IBM on its search technology. Russell Power, its fellow co-founder and Cuil’s head of engineering, also worked at Google. The team has raised about $33m (£17m) from Silicon Valley investors.

The website looks very different from Google, presenting results - with pictures in many cases - in a magazine-type format rather than as a long list of links. Cuil claims to have an edge by looking not just at words but the concepts they embody.

A search for “Radiohead”, for instance, will bring up not just the band’s own website but ticket sellers and lyrics. But the site is far from perfect: the Radiohead search pulled up a picture of a woman in twin set and pearls as its second link. The website also crashed several times yesterday.

As one commentator on the technology website TechCrunch put it yesterday: “If this wasn’t started by some ex-Googlers, nobody would give a hoot.”

theodp writes “Recently, Google debuted its new Google Docs Template Gallery, showcasing a Shared House Expenses spreadsheet template in a pretty elaborate YouTube Video as an example of ‘tools that just work.’ Only problem is, the popular five-star template still doesn’t work correctly. Thanks to its doesn’t-handle-zero-correctly bugs, the spreadsheet fails to always divide expenses properly, allowing one roommate to get away with contributing far less than his “Fare [sic] Share.” So did Google release the spreadsheet to gazillions of users without bothering to verify it worked, or did all those Googlers fail to recognize some pretty obvious mistakes?”

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You would think that trying to get one over on Google would be as nailed-on a ‘doomed to failure’ operation as you could find.

We’re so used to the speed and effectiveness of its searches, not to mention the reams of other services it offers, that it’s difficult to imagine how someone would even begin to compete.

Apparently, the Motion Picture Academy, the folks who put on the Oscars (also known as “The Academy Awards”), say that the tickets to that event are non-transferable. That’s fine. It’s their event, they can set up whatever rules they want. However, where it gets strange, is that they are now suing a bunch of folks who tried to sell their tickets online, and even got a judge to force Craigslist to reveal the name of a seller in order to sue him.

So, here’s my confusion: if the tickets are non-transferable, why not just check IDs at the door and not let those who were not given tickets?

As for forcing Craigslist to reveal the name of the seller, why is that allowed? The Academy can have whatever rules it wants in terms of letting in or not letting in people, but what law was broken by the seller, and what makes it so that Craigslist should be forced to give up the name of an anonymous seller? All the Academy had to do was not let the person in the door, but apparently it chose not to run things that way. But that’s the Academy’s choice, not a legal issue the requires revealing the name of an anonymous seller.

Furthermore, the Academy’s explanation for this also seems ridiculous: “If you don’t know who’s inside the theater, it’s very difficult to provide security.” Really? Most places that provide security don’t know the names of everyone who’s there and they seem to do just fine. And, again, if knowing who’s in there is such a big deal, then why not identify them as they enter, and verify that they’re supposed to be there? None of that would then involve lawsuits. But, then again, this is the movie industry, which has shown a penchant for lawsuits over actually thinking things through and taking the easier path.

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Sometimes you hear about lawsuits that are so bizarre and so wrongheaded, you just have to shake your head and wonder what people are thinking. For example, take this news that Italian prosecutors are preparing to file criminal charges against four Google execs. Why? Not for anything Google, as a company, did. Or anything those executives actually did. But, because four kids filmed themselves taunting a disabled boy in a classroom and that film was uploaded to Google. The four kids in question are also facing criminal charges — which is perfectly reasonable.

But under what distorted sense of justice does one somehow have to have to think that Google executives also deserve criminal charges over this event?

The fact that the video was uploaded to Google gave the prosecutors the evidence necessary to go after the kids in question. Google, itself, had no proactive role in uploading the video. Neither Google, nor the executives in question, had anything to do with the video whatsoever. In fact, Google took the video down within hours of being alerted to it. It serves no viable purpose under any justice system whatsoever to charge Google executives for the content in the video. The report notes that the kids in the video hit the disabled boy with a pack of tissues as well. I would think that the tissue company has just as much, if not more, responsibility for the video than Google. Will we soon see charges against its execs as well?

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While Google has bought plenty of small startups, almost none of those deals have amounted to very much. It almost seems like most of the startups disappear into Google forever. There are a few exceptions such as YouTube and (maybe) Writely. But the list of startups that have simply languished or died is much longer. TechCrunchIT is running an interesting post that suggests one of the key reasons: Google’s proprietary tech stack. While Google is a big open source supporter for lower level infrastructure, once you get above that — it’s very much a strong believer in doing everything its own way. I’ve heard from friends at Google about the difficulty they’ve had learning to deal with Google’s tech stack — and certainly have heard how it’s slowed down the progress of some Google acquisitions while they learn how to “transition.”

In fact, some have pointed out that this is one of the side benefits to Google’s AppEngine offering. Since it exposes some of Google’s tech stack to folks for them to develop and run their applications, it will make it much easier to integrate them into Google at a later date. So, for startups whose strategy is to get acquired by Google (and, I should note, if you start with that strategy, you’re probably going to fail), it may make sense to develop on AppEngine just because you’re already signaling to Google that the integration costs are significantly lower.

Still, this highlights one of the major downsides to Google’s belief that it can do everything much better than everyone else by starting from scratch: in doing so, it actually makes it much harder to capitalize on synergies from many acquisition targets. Yes, there are reasons to go against the “standard” way of doing things, but there are significant costs as well.

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We’ve been talking about the popularity of “technopanics,” where the press (often spurred on by “advocacy” groups) push out a “but think of the children” campaign to worry about how child predators are using this or that kind of technology — when the reality is that there is often little to no evidence that this is actually happening or a serious threat. Studies eventually show that the press blew the “threat” way out of proportion, but by then it’s too late. The public already believes that there’s a huge threat. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some folks who have used these sites to prey on children — or that people shouldn’t be aware that it’s a risk. But most kids seem to have no problem ignoring or brushing off the extremely rare solicitations they might get — usually because their parents or educators taught them to be cautious around random strangers.

So, with studies finally showing the lack of a threat on social networks, it seems that technopanic advocates have had to move on to things like gaming consoles. The latest is even more ridiculous. Apparently an advocacy group is trying to warn people about the supposed dangers of Google’s Street View technology. Apparently, they’re worried that child predators will use the tech to scope out where children live, because Google Street View might possibly maybe have caught kids playing outside. Is there any evidence that this has actually happened? Nope. Is there any reason to think that this makes sense for a child predator as compared to actually getting in a car and driving around and seeing what’s happening out in broad daylight? Nope. It’s just fear, fear, fear!

Amusingly, I found this story from Stephen Shankland at News.com, who points out that the same day that advocacy group put out its fearmongering press release, another group was announcing how you can use its new service, built on Google Maps, to see if any registered sex offenders live near you. So, while we have one group warning about how Google Maps can be used for evil, another group is pointing out how it can be used to see if there are any threats in the neighborhood.

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