For a company whose unofficial slogan is “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.

I still need to use some Google services–I have clients who share a couple of documents via Google Docs, I need to access one private blog on Blogger, and I will continue to use Google search (though I plan on exploring alternatives, such as Bing and Yahoo). But for the most part, I’m dropping Google wherever I can.

It was a combination of recent incidents that drove me to this point. One was the introduction of Google Buzz, which, in some cases, disclosed contact information that users thought was private. When Google launched Buzz, its “social networking tool,” the company didn’t let users opt into the program, but automatically applied it to all of the millions of users of the company’s free Gmail. Google quickly backtracked, but it is not clear whether the “turn off Buzz” link at the bottom of Gmail pages truly purges the links that Google created.

Full Story ~ PC World

As the online search giant Google has completed its acquisition of video compression outfit On2 Technologies the company was recommended by the Free Software Foundation to release On2’s latest codec under an irrevocable free license and use it to replace Adobe Flash on YouTube.

“With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec: VP8,” reads a open letter to Google, posted to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blogs.

“Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).”

Full Story ~ Ecommerce Journal

Google released Buzz last week as a better way to manage the growing deluge of social networking information, but privacy concerns have caused quite a fallout. First, numerous complaints online caused Google to quickly change some features. Then came a complaint to the FTC from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Now Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed this week in federal court in California, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a resident of Florida, though the suit seeks to include all 31.2 million Gmail users as potential plaintiffs. Buzz was rolled out to most, if not all, Gmail users last week. In at least some cases the feature was automatically activated, and generated publicly accessible lists of followers gleaned from users’ Gmail accounts and Gtalk conversations. There is real concern that sensitive information related to some contacts could have been exposed.

Google made numerous changes last weekend in an attempt to make it easier to opt out of the service and make contact lists private. It also dropped the automatic following features, replacing it with a list of suggested contacts. Buzz won’t automatically connect and use public data from Picasa and Google Reader without a user explicitly activating the connecting, either.

Full Story ~ ars technica

According to Computerworld, a class action lawsuit has been served upon the Lower Merion School District, based in Ardmore, Pa. It declares that the school district has taken on surveillance methods of which a sex video store owner or that nice Stasi man in the movie “The Lives of Others” would have been proud.

What is alleged to have occurred is that the parents of student Blake Robbins received word in November from an official at Harriton High School that their son has been involved in “improper behavior in his home.”

(Credit: CC Sergis Blog/Flickr)

The story, you see, heads in a direction somewhere east of disturbing. The Robbins family says an assistant principal at Harriton High, Lindy Matsko, confirmed that the school district “in fact has the ability to remotely activate the Webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose, and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the Webcam.”

Update, 3:46 p.m. PST: Lower Merion School District has issued a statement regarding the allegations on its Web site.

It says the remote-activation Webcam system has been deactivated, effective immediately. It further states that the feature was enabled only “to track lost, stolen, and missing laptops.”

While declaring that the system was only able to take “a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen,” the School District says it “has not used the tracking feature or Webcam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.”

The school district says it is continuing to review the matter.

Full Story ~ cnet news

Sherif Hashim, an iPhone developer who developed a hack for the latest iPhone OS 3.1.3, and iH8Sn0w, who developed the XEMN tool designed to unlock iPhone 3.1.3 radio baseband for the 3G and 3GS, found that their Apple IDs were blocked and accounts deactivated when they tried to access the app store of Monday. Their respective reactions can be found in Twitter posts here and here.

The move sparked concerns that Apple might ban all jailbroken iPhones was accessing the App Store. However, such a move would prevent Apple’s application developers from selling to the millions of users of jailbroken devices and would be especially bad politics following the launch of the Wholesale Applications Community at the Mobile World Congress conference earlier this week.

Full Story ~ The Register

The most recent numbers from research firm Gartner show that Microsoft is a distant fourth in the market in terms of worldwide sales and units shipped.

Nokia’s open-source Symbian OS leads the pack, with a 44.6% share, followed by Research In Motion’s Blackberry, at 20.8%, and Apple’s iPhone OS, with 17.1% as of the third quarter of 2009. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile held just 7.9%.

Google’s Android OS, meanwhile, is fast gaining steam. On the market for less than a year, Android-powered phones already hold a 3.5% market share, according to Gartner.

Further clouding the competitive landscape is Intel. The chipmaker on Monday said it would team-up with Nokia to develop a Linux-based mobile OS called MeeGo, for use on devices powered by Intel’s Atom chips.

Still, Windows Phone 7 could put Microsoft back in the game.

Full Story ~ Information Week

A shadowy group of cyber-activists who succeeded Thursday in jamming key Australian government websites for a second consecutive day warned they could shut down the sites for months.

The group, Anonymous, blocked the main government website www.australia.gov.au and www.aph.gov.au, the Australian parliament’s homepage, for a second day running in protest over controversial plans to filter the Internet.

Codenamed “Operation: Titstorm“, the hacking campaign involves hundreds of people from around the world and used a technique called Distributed Denial of Service to jam web traffic, one of the protesters said.

“It is effectively a lot of computers around the world all trying to access the same sites all at once making so that no one can access them,” the activist, who calls himself Coldblood, told AFP.

“I believe that the government websites will remain down as long as we can keep them down. That could be anywhere from a few hours to a few months at the most,” he added.

Coldblood, who would reveal only that he was based in Europe, said the campaign would last “as long as the individuals that make up Anonymous decide that action needs to be taken to protect the freedom of the internet.”

Anonymous has previously campaigned against the Church of Scientology and helped get information out of Iran during last year’s election unrest.

Coldblood said its members wished to “keep the internet a place that is open and available to everyone without censorship“.

Full Story ~ AFP

Peiter Zatko–a respected hacker known as “Mudge”–has been tapped to be a program manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to protect against cyberattacks, CNET has learned.

Zatko will become a program manager in mid-March within the Strategic Technologies Office at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is the research and development office for the Department of Defense. His focus will be cybersecurity, he said in an interview with CNET on Tuesday.

One of his main goals will be to fund researchers at hacker spaces, start-ups, and boutiques who are most likely to develop technologies that can leapfrog what comes out of large corporations. “I want revolutionary changes. I don’t want evolutionary ones,” he said.

He’s also hoping that giving a big push to research and development will do more to advance the progress of cybersecurity than public policy decisions have been able to do over the past few decades.

“Not much has changed” with regard to strengthening the U.S. cybersecurity position, he said. “As a society, we have a larger dependence on being wired in, yet the government only focuses on particular areas.”

The connectedness of commercial, government, and military networks makes the situation even more dire, he said. “I’m going to argue that they’re all pretty much intertwined now and we’ve seen how vulnerable some of those sectors are now. That’s unacceptable,” Zatko said. “I aim to fix that.”

Full Story – cnet news

In just two-plus years, social gaming is proving to be a lucrative business for Internet start-ups, particularly for the largest maker of these games, Zynga Inc.

The San Francisco company, founded in 2007, has put some of the $180 million it raised in December to work, acquiring smaller and younger rival Serious Business Inc., also backed by venture capital. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Zynga, whose popular games include “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars,” is the oldest in the nascent social-gaming industry and also the largest with more than 235 million monthly users. The company is reportedly generating upwards of $250 million in revenue per year. It also develops games for Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone.

Its two biggest rivals are Playfish Inc., which was acquired by Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) for $300 million in November, and Playdom Inc., which a day later raised an unusually large $43 million first-round of venture funding. Playfish was founded in 2007 like Zynga and has more than 49 million monthly active users, while Playdom, which has said it’s profitable, was formed in 2008 and boasts 25 million monthly active users, according to Appdata.

By comparison, Serious Business was founded in 2008 and is known for its game “Friends For Sale,” which claims more than 5 million monthly active users.

“Serious Business was getting a lot of inbound interest from a lot of folks from the end of last year,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which invested $4 million in the company in 2008.

Zynga moved quickly and made a strong offer, he said. “Zynga was interested and they put an offer on the table that was compelling and exciting to the team,” Liew said. “It allows them to have the benefit of being inside a large organization with increased resources.”

Full Story ~ The Wall Street Journal

Google Inc. has acquired Aardvark, a San Francisco start-up whose service melds Internet search and social networking.

Aardvark co-founder and top strategy manager Max Ventilla told Reuters his company had signed a deal to be acquired by Google “recently,” but would not comment on the price.

A report on the technology blog TechCrunch said the deal was for $50 million, citing a source briefed on the transaction.

A source familiar with the situation told Reuters the deal was expected to close within the next week.

The purchase represents the latest sign of Google’s interest in the fast-growing social networking market, ruled by companies like Facebook and Twitter. On Tuesday, Google introduced a new product called Google Buzz that integrates Twitter-like social networking features directly into its Gmail Web-based email service.

Aardvark, which counts two ex-Google employees among its founders, has pioneered a new type of Internet search dubbed “social search.” Instead of looking at Web pages to find answers to search queries, Aardvark’s service taps a person’s network of social contacts.

Full Story ~ Reuters