[Update of an earlier post]
[The world is long familiar with the Business Myth:
Doughty inventors come up with a better mousetrap; find fortune; reign for a time; then
someone else invents an even better mousetrap and takes over the market, while
the dethroned entrepreneurs retire to Florida with their pensions and their
memories.
But now there is a new cycle: A firm grows and grows, and stays good at what it does
-- arguably in some areas the best, or at least the most accessible and
practical -- but turns gradually evil. It might not be possible, actually to better their mousetrap, in terms of
price and functionality (we’re not just talking techie -- think Wal-Mart as
well), so what is a freedom fighter to do?]
I earlier ranted anent the (comparatively venial) evilness
of Firefox. But Ggl is a jealous God, whom none dare annoy. So, interpret the title as
“giggling is voluptuous” or something.
But really, this all-powerful Entity -- who shall battle
W*k*p*d*a for mastery of the Universe at the End of Days -- this It that Must Not be Named -- is
adopting, not merely the practices (safely behind the scenes) but the actual
rhetoric of totalitarianism.
Thus, they used to nag you to “invite” friends to
Gmail. But now the message has
changed. In bright red, at the top
right of your mailtool, is a new slogan,
Switch friends to Gmail
Not “invite”, not “beg”, not “bribe”, just… go ahead and… switch them. Will only take a minute. You won’t feel a thing.
Hoping it was just a sort of typo, perhaps by some new hire
of Asian abstraction who has not yet fully mastered the subtleties of our
island tongue, I clicked on the
link -- flinching as though grasping an ember with a bare hand. But no, it was no mistake. The headline reads
Save your
friends
from outdated email
sort of like the anti-Communist propaganda of the John Birch
years; and, lest any doubt remain, the project is titled
EMAIL INTERVENTION
-- the way you tough-lovingly intervene with a drug addict
or a Moonie.
We - know - what’s - good - for - you. Must - cure - badthink. Cleanse - your - pod.
[Footnote:
As of writing, the very favorable search-returns for this site are
summarized here. Things like
“frisky marmots frolic in Cantorian realist bliss” whisk you to this very site.
If, after posting this, a search that includes even our
actual URL suddenly dumps you onto
page upon page of ads for pessaries and adult diapers, you will know that a
certain cloven-hoofed someone at Headquarters has been Displeased …]
[Update 6 Aug 2011] Google branches out in creepy directions:
-->
Something about their ‘self-driving car’ project just gives
me a queasy feeling. Too
reminiscent of the vestigial flipper people scooting around in such vehicles in
the dystopian post-apocalyptic animated film “Wall-E”. Hard to argue this logically; still, it
seems fitting that the first state to legalize the things should be Nevada, the
U.S. capital of cultural degeneracy, fraud, and crime. In a few years, Nevadans will be
nothing but these little eyeless blobby balls, permanently sucking on a
feeding-tube; many of them already
are.
[Update 16 Sept 2012]
Obama clips the evil G**gle's wings: -->
Belatedly following the lead
of Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and Apple’s Safari, Google
is adding a “Do Not Track” option to its increasingly popular Chrome browser,
AllThingsD reports. That means future updates of the browser will allow users
to tell websites that they don’t want to be tracked.
The move makes good on
Google’s February pledge to support the option by year’s end in response to an
online privacy push by the White House, among others. It also puts Google in a
bit of a funny position. The company, which reaps billions each year from
targeted advertisements that rely on tracking users, was not only the last
major holdout on the Do Not Track initiative. In at least one high-profile
case, it actually subverted Safari’s default privacy settings (a move for which
the FTC made it pay not-so-dearly last month).
Lately rivals have tried to
exploit Google’s position by beefing up their own privacy efforts. Mozilla
touts Firefox by pointing to its own not-for-profit status, and Microsoft’s
latest edition of Internet Explorer tweaks Google by making “Do Not Track” the
default option.
[Update 10 November 2012] Now there is an alternative:
The online search engine DuckDuckGo
does not track users. It doesn’t generate search results based on a user’s
previous interests. It is not cluttered with ads. And its use is soaring.
For an excellent overview:
A note on the name:
DuckDuckGo is in
the tradition of goofy-silly-sounding search-engine names, beginning with Yahoo and continuing with Google.
For anyone literate in English literature, Yahoo had a sour taste, since for
centuries yahoo has denoted ill-bred
troglodytes, based upon the faeces-hurling anthropoids of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; the Yahoo company seemed to be counting on its users not knowing this.
The name Google
was reportedly influenced by the mathematical funword googol (pronounced with secondary accent on the second syllable:
GOO-gawl), though it more directly suggests Barney
Google (you know the one -- with the goo-goo-googly eyes).
DuckDuckGo is
based most obviously on the game Duck-Duck-Goose; but with a sly echo that it
lets you duck (avoid) monitoring by Go[ogle].
[For further etymological adventures, click here:
~
Curious as to how this site fares in the new engine, we
searched on a couple of test-strings:
monostich: This site does not come up at all in the first several pages
of returns. Pointlessly, a
dictionary entry for the unrelated term monostele
does get referenced, merely because monostich
is the next word in the dictionary.
This site has dozens of original luscious monostichs, but the
monostichophile will never find them with DuckDuckGo.
“humble woodchuck”: DuckDuckGo finds little for this. One post of this site does make the first page -- but it
shouldn’t have, since it is about something else entirely, whereas our many
posts about this loveable furry critter are passed over in silence.
For the saga of our never-ending attempts to goose the
search-engine stats, click here:
~
The Portrait of
Dorian Google
The public image of Google, like anything else, is massaged
by flacks and spin-doctors. Yet,
deep within the innermost corporate vaults is stored a painting which supernaturally depicts an image
of the inner corporate soul. And
in yet another journalistic coup, the Black Ops department of the World of
Doctor Justice has managed to
exfil some sample soul-states.
 |
| Google-soul, ca. 1996 |
.jpg) |
| Google-soul, 2012 |
[Update 24 November 2012] Something quite evil just happened on my computer.
I currently use Firefox on my Mac. Firefox is somewhat evil, but I tried Safari, and it simply
didn’t work. So I’m stuck. One nice feature is an
always-present Google search mini-window in the corner of the screen, so that
you can search at any time without hitting Home (which for me is set to
Google). Only, beginning
this morning, the window defaults instead to searches on eBay, of all things.
As for eBay itself, its search is brain-dead beyond
belief. Some troglodyte manager
got the bright idea of disabling
wildcard search, which they already had up and running:
I won’t polemicize against this, since nobody reading this
blog (or capable of reading tout court,
or able to tie his shoes) needs to be told.
-- Incidentally, if the formatting of some of the posts on
this site seems jacked up, this is owing to a Blogspot “upgrade” forced on us
by G00gle. Certain things
that used to work, no longer do.
Worse, posts that were perfectly composed under the old regime now “go
bad” -- getting speckled with this symbol:
->
plus captions falling out of their images like an inguinal hernia.
Evil, evil, evil G***gle. Bad, bad, bad.
[Update 6 Oct 2014] A cautionary tale: a publishing giant dares defy the great G**gle, and is sent humbled home:
http://www.nzz.ch/meinung/reflexe/axel-springers-heikle-google-rechnung-1.18419162?extcid=Newsletter_06112014_Top-News_am_Morgen
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