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Sure, with a $1 billion lawsuit hanging over its head concerning copyright issues on YouTube (even if Google is confident that it’s on the right side of the law), you might understand why Google would be a bit aggressive in its ramped up efforts to police content hosted on YouTube. However, should that aggressive effort apply to videos that aren’t public? Chris O’Donnell had posted a personal Christmas video of his family to YouTube using a couple of popular songs as background music — but he set the video to private, rather than public, and only sent it to a few family friends. A grand total of 3 or 4 people had seen the video. Yet, the video is now gone, as Google sent a notice saying that its automated content checker believed the video contained “unauthorized content.”

There’s clearly no way that the copyright holders in question would have complained about the video, as there was no way for them to see it. This wasn’t a public display or public performance of the content at all, and there may be some questions about fair use — which, as a court recently reminded folks, needs to be taken into account before DMCA takedowns are sent). Of course, technically there’s no DMCA takedown here — as Google was just doing some self-policing, but it seems like a pretty good question as to why the company is policing private videos that aren’t for public consumption.

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You have all seen calendars, currency converters and clocks displayed on webpages. Some of these are designed by the webmaster while others are gadgets that Google has which you can display on your website without any programming. All that you have to do is to copy a piece of code and paste it on your [...]

Introduction to RSS Feeds
RSS is an acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication. In layman terms, it is a way to syndicate information on blogs and other websites so that it can be delivered through a software platform to a person without actually having to visit a website. Software like Google Reader can be used [...]

As Google prepares to blow out the 10 candles on top of its birthday cake this Sunday, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin can be forgiven for cracking a wry smile as they reflect upon the fire they have just lit under Microsoft.

The conflagration that has the creator of Windows running for the fire extinguisher was caused by Google’s launch of its own internet browser. The arrival of Chrome, announced in typically idiosyncratic style through the medium of an online comic strip this week, represents more than just a challenge to Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer. It represents a fundamental fight over the future of the computer.

Microsoft, as so many potential rivals have found over the years, has a stranglehold over the market for the software that runs computers thanks to its hugely successful Windows operating system. So Google has taken heed of the old adage that if you cannot win, change the game.

The rise of broadband internet access has finally created an environment where applications such as word processors or spreadsheet programs do not need to reside on a computer. Instead they can be run on the internet and the documents created can be stored on web servers so they can be accessed from anywhere a person can get online. In a world where such web-based applications abound, it does not matter what operating system a computer runs because all it needs to have is an internet browser and an internet connection. In that world, a user could even opt for a free operating system.

It’s a change that Bill Gates himself foresaw when 13 years ago he wrote an internal memo in which he assigned the “highest level of importance” to the internet and warned his colleagues that it was a potential “tidal wave” that could fundamentally alter the rules.

That memo mentioned then market-leading browser Netscape as having the potential to “commoditize the underlying operating system”. That infamous memo was one of the catalysts of the browser wars of the late 1990s, which ultimately saw Internet Explorer crush Netscape Navigator, and it also included a line about ensuring that makers of computers ship their machines with a Microsoft browser pre-installed. That practice landed Microsoft in court and led to the effective split of the company. But by then the damage was done and Netscape ended up in the hands of AOL before disappearing all but completely.

When Gates testified as part of the anti-trust case brought against the company 10 years ago he was asked what that line about “commoditizing the operating system” had meant. He replied: “They were creating a product that would either reduce the value or eliminate demand for the Windows operating system if they continued to improve it and we didn’t keep improving our product.”

Firefox cub

Ironically, Chrome, which has been roughly two years in the making, builds upon innovations made in browser technology by Microsoft’s rival Mozilla, custodian of the Firefox browser, some of whose technological DNA comes from Netscape Navigator.

But the browser wars of a decade ago do not live on just within the technology of Chrome, but in Google’s decision to create it in the first place. The search engine’s chief executive admitted after the launch that “the browser wars of 10 years ago were right: the browser matters”.

Brin added that “operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world. They have become kind of bulky … We [web users] want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone are shrinking.”

That is bad news for Microsoft, which makes a significant chunk of its revenues from its Windows operating system and Office suite of software, both of which sit upon the computer itself.

Google, of course, makes pretty much all of its revenues from online search. It has gone from a doctoral project at Stanford University to the world’s largest search engine in 10 years, blasting through the traditional media and advertising industries on the way. It is now one of the world’s most trusted and recognised brands.

Over the past few years, the company has moved into online applications and services such as email, word processing, calendars, instant messaging, maps, spreadsheets and even bought the online video phenomenon YouTube.

But ultimately everything it does is about persuading people to do more with the internet. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to search for something and the more likely they are to generate revenues for Google or queries that help improve its search algorithm. So why would it want to dabble with browsers?

Firstly, the sense that Google’s executives have given over the past few days is that if the rest of the industry had produced good enough browsers, there would have been no need for them to create Chrome.

Announcing the launch of Chrome - which was leaked after a Google staffer posted a copy of the 38-page comic that heralded the move - the company said on its website: “People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

“We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Android attack

Chrome, according to early testers, is certainly faster than many of the browsers already in the market - especially the current version of Internet Explorer - and it has been engineered so that if one website being visited freezes up, the entire program does not crash.

Google has moved into another area - mobile phones - for roughly similar reasons. The creation of its Android operating system for mobile phones - the first device that runs it is expected in time for Christmas - owes much to the fact that the mobile internet has been promised for years but the industry’s love of proprietary systems has held back its arrival.

The first gadget to deliver on the promise of the mobile web, Apple’s iPhone, owes some of its success to the fact that it is an “open” platform, so anyone who uses common web standards can create applications for it. Android is also an open mobile platform, in the same way as Chrome is an open browser platform.

But Chrome is also a crucial defensive play for Google. If you rely - as it does - on people having access to the internet to make your money you not only want to make it as simple as possible but ensure no one gets in your way.

The new, eighth version of Internet Explorer, which is due out soon, includes the ability to view web pages anonymously. Erasing a user’s online footprints would make it harder for Google to collect the data about visitors that it uses to improve search results and serve relevant adverts.

Chrome also has an anonymous browsing mode - which has quickly been dubbed “porn mode” because it hides details of where the user has been from other users of the same machine - but Google will still know what that user has been doing online.

Then there is the fact that browsers increasingly contain search boxes within them, raising the risk that a popular new browser could slowly squeeze Chrome out of the market by signing up with a rival search engine.

Google has already been hedging its bets. It has a deal with the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit-making organisation that funds the development of Firefox, the web’s second most popular browser, to have its search box within the browser itself. Just last month Google extended that deal - which has recently generated more than three quarters of Mozilla’s revenues - until 2011. Google’s toolbar is already standard on Apple’s Safari browser and can also be downloaded and installed on Internet Explorer.

Chrome has excited the tech world but ultimately it
all comes down to money and for Google that means more people searching more often. As Citigroup put it in a note to clients this week: “Given that search has become such a fundamental part of internet usage, anything that impacts overall internet usage is important for Google.”

Backstory

Google is either more than 12, nearly 11, exactly 10 tomorrow or not quite 10 years old, depending on which event is taken as its birth. While still at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on technology that would become the forerunner of Google by January 1996. It was called BackRub, because it analysed back links - essentially the links to a site from other sites.

BackRub was “let loose” in March 1996. Brin and Page had created an algorithm that ranked pages by importance - PageRank, which is still at the heart of Google today. The bigger the internet got, they reckoned, the bigger the search engine would get, which led them to name it after googol, the term for the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros. Google was launched in August 1996

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000, making the cheque out to Google Inc, which did not exist. So on September 7 1998 Brin and Page incorporated Google as a company.

Video sites are made available for many people with the recent advancement of internet technologies. The internet connection like broadband had made viewing videos online comfortable. Computer hardware being more affordable has also resulted in the surge of new internet users & they sure like video!
Comedy Variety on Google Video
Google Video is one of the [...]

One day this month will mark Google’s official 10th birthday. The company will probably celebrate with a blog post and a special logo and we’ll see a slew of articles about how much they’ve accomplished in those 10 years. A few publications couldn’t wait and got their Google tributes out last month.

But when exactly should we be celebrating? Almost certainly on September 27. But the real answer is way more complicated than that.

Google is actually nearly 13-years-old, if you go by their corporate history page: “By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyse the ‘back links’ pointing to a given website.”

But if you go by when the Google.com domain name was registered, September 15 1997, the company will turn 11 next week.

However, the date Google celebrates as their birth month is a year later, September 1998. They celebrated on September 7, the date of the company’s incorporation, until 2005. Since 2005 (and also randomly in 2002), they’ve celebrated on September 27.

So why do they celebrate it on the 27th? According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who wrote about this mess last year, they pushed the date forward in 2005 to allow for the announcement of an index-size milestone (ie the record-breaking number of pages the search engine was sifting through).

At least Google is consistently inconsistent: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”

So Happy 10th, 11th and/or almost 13th birthday Google! The first three people who sing Happy Birthday to Google in a video comment below (all the way through, full volume, go for it) get a TechCrunch T-shirt.

Not many people have heard of graphic designer Dennis Hwang, but he has millions of fans, and probably more than a billion people have seen his work. But the 29-year-old has a unique platform for his skills: he does the “Google doodles” – variations on Google’s colourful logo - that appear on the search engine’s popular home page.

The doodles that celebrate special days such as Christmas, Halloween and Google’s birthdays signal that Google is a different kind of company: a playful one. “It’s not a gimmick,” says Hwang. “It really grows from the core culture. It comes from the founders, Larry and Sergey, their quirky personalities and drive for innovation. At a time when the company logo is considered sacred, they’re saying ‘Let’s have fun with it’.”

I met Dennis in 2005 when he judged a Doodle 4 Google competition, which invited British schoolchildren aged four to 18 to design their own logo. It was a delight. Google’s office filled with kids, and 11-year-old Lisa Wainaina got to see her winning design on the Google UK home page.

“These kids are competition I wasn’t aware of,” quipped Hwang. “My job security just went out the window.”

In reality, doodling is a sideline, and started by accident in 1999 when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were going to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. “Sergey added a tiny symbol to the home page logo to communicate directly with the users,” says Hwang.

The next doodles were done by outside contractors, but then Brin discovered that Hwang was studying art at Stanford, as well as computer science. “He said: ‘Hey, Dennis, why don’t you give this a try’,” says Hwang. He did Bastille Day in 2000, and he’s been doing them ever since.

The staples are Chinese New Year, St Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. These are supplemented by major events such as the Olympics, where there can be half a dozen doodles telling a little story.

Painters are an obvious temptation for a graphic artist, and there have been doodles to celebrate the birthdays of Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Andy Warhol, MC Escher, Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, among others. But often Hwang surprises us: there have been doodles for Ray Charles’s birthday, Bloomsday, the transit of Venus, leap year and the opening of Google’s lunar office – on April 1. One 2001 doodle that attracted particular attention celebrated Korean Independence Day, and Hwang was interviewed for the Korea Herald. Although born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up as Hwang Jung-moak in Gwacheon, South Korea. “When I was at school, the teachers didn’t like my doodling habit, but my parents always supported me,” he says. “Something that used to be frowned on turned out to be my greatest asset.”

Hwang returned to the US in 1992 when his father was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, and had to cope with the American education system while unable to speak English. He still made it to Stanford University, where Google was founded.

The doodles are produced on computer, but “everything I do is hand drawn”, says Hwang: “I have some tools and tricks to make it look as though it’s done on pencil and paper.” He’s been using a Wacom graphics tablet and a stylus for input, and adopted a Tablet PC so he could work directly on the screen. “That’s my secret weapon,” he says. “It shaves two to four hours off how long it takes to draw one.”

• Google’s doodle competition

Electricity-free charity

I am a small, private donor to a developing world charity helping a village with no electricity. So far I have been able to give them a clockwork radio and torch. Are there any cheap computers designed for this market?
Chris Berg

JS: The most widely publicised device is the MIT-inspired XO-1 laptop, which has been developed under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. You can donate a laptop for $200, but you can’t direct it to a particular village (laptopgiving.org). Alternatively, have a look at UK-based Aleutia (aleutia.com). This company has developed the low-power E2 Mini Computer (£199), which can be powered by a foldable solar panel, and is suitable for use in Africa. The project started after Mike Rosenberg, the founder, set up a cybercafe in Takoradi, Ghana, to work with street children. The site’s wiki says: “We package the E2 with low-power LCDs, folding solar panels, and rugged batteries to form a 3kg, $900 kit that can be dispatched anywhere and set up in minutes, and is used by aid workers in the field.” (wiki.aleutia.com).

The Ethical Superstore may suggest some cheaper non-computer ideas: ethicalsuperstore.com.

Photo recovery

I have accidentally deleted some photos (grandchildren, special events etc) that I thought were backed up on my slave drive. I used Active File Recovery to undelete them, but I cannot open them. Irfanview says “cannot display header”.
Tony

JS: Try using PhotoRec, which is designed for “digital picture and file recovery”: it’s not guaranteed to work but at least it’s free. Image Recall may be even better: it costs £24.99, but there’s a demo version. Programs that will try to reconstruct damaged image files include Pix Recovery and EasyRecovery Pro.

They want your money

I’m seeing much more spam with zip attachments. The messages are carefully crafted to induce any busy office worker to click on them without thinking, and often seem to be targeted at individuals within the company. I’m not about to click on one of these, but if I did, what would happen?
Roger Wilson

JS: This is a common way of distributing botnet-controlled Trojan files, such as the ZBot banking Trojan, ideally a variant known as Prg. The basic idea is to capture and simulate all the keystrokes used to access your (preferably commercial) bank account to perform a fraudulent money transfer that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. ZBot can also attempt to disable your firewall, steal credit card numbers, takes snapshots of your screen and download extra components as required. Anti-virus software should block it, including online scanners such as Kaspersky. However, anyone who finds it would also need to change their banking and other passwords.

Email alerts

In the film Sleepless in Seattle, an onscreen alert box popped up every time a new email was received by one of the characters. I use Hotmail, Gmail and the Microsoft Vista successor to Outlook Express, but none of them seems to offer this convenience. Why not?
Michael McCarthy

JS: It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea but can easily become really annoying. Still, many, if not most email programs have some form of alert, including Windows Live Mail, and you can set a sound for New Mail Notification in the Control Panel’s Sounds and Audio Devices applet. If you have Windows Live Messenger, you can get email alerts that, if clicked, will launch your Windows Live Mail program. For Gmail, you can use the Gmail Notifier - still in beta - but if you install the Google Talk client, you will get email alerts automatically.

There must be dozens of email alert programs and add-ons, many of them free. You can browse a selection. Otherwise, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, and I have not seen either.

Backchat

Richard Cooke wanted a PC to edit native AVCHD hi-def movies with Pinnacle software. Neil says he edits it with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. There is a free trial version of the Sony software at Softpedia.

Annie Hall wanted to send newsletters from her Talk Talk mailbox. According to comments on the Ask Jack blog, Talk Talk can send an email to up to 50 recipients, but kds1767 reckons Talk Talk will solve the problem by soon offering Hostopia’s Announcer service. AttendantLord says: “My partial solution is to send bulk emails using the email facility of the hosting company for my website (Vision Internet).”

Last week, I mentioned Windows Easy Transfer Companion but Microsoft has withdrawn it. A Microsoft staff member said in a forum: “I think the download link is removed because [it] is not compatible with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows XP Service Pack 3.”

Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

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