Get Cynical

From The Atlantic:

Two years after the the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the following tsunami and nuclear disaster, a large area around the failed Fukushima nuclear plant is still considered an exclusion zone. Namie, a small city just north of the nuclear power plant, was evacuated shortly after the quake, and its 21,000 townspeople have been unable to return since, leaving it a ghost town. At the invitation of local officials, Google recently deployed its camera-equipped vehicles to Namie to create a street view map of the deserted town so residents can see their abandoned homes, and the world can witness the remains of the disaster.

(via Poor Mojo)

From Wired:

Google made good Monday on its promise to stop filtering search results in China, and is redirecting all visitors to Google.cn to its unfiltered Chinese search engine in Hong Kong. But China is certain to get the last word by blocking Mainland users from reaching the Hong Kong servers or even more drastically, taking back control of the internet address Google has used there for four years.

Now a search on June 4, the day of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, returns 226 million results. Formerly that search, and thousands of other terms like it, had limited results and a notification to users that search results had been hidden due to the rules of China’s Communist government.

Google shocked the business world on Jan. 12 when it publicly announced it was no longer willing to abide by its 2006 deal with the Chinese government after it was the target of hacker attacks the company attributed to China. Google went into China with hopes that censorship would lessen over time, but in 2009, China’s leadership instead increased demands on search companies and tried to mandate state-run filtering software on all PCs.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/03/google-uncensors-china-search-engine/#ixzz0ixEtDBh9

From Wired:

With Chrome OS, the search giant is pushing an OS that enables us to do less — even less than already low-powered netbooks can do. Web apps can’t let us process Microsoft Word documents, sync our iTunes libraries, or edit photos with Photoshop, for example. Thanks to their crampy keyboards and small screens, netbooks aren’t ideal for productivity apps such as Photoshop or Microsoft Word — but you’d be surprised at the different uses for netbooks that made them last year’s hit product category. Watch what happens when Google offers an OS that doesn’t at least provide the option of using the aforementioned apps.

Of course, as Google’s pitch goes, there are web alternatives to everything. Cloud storage for backups, internet-streaming music and video services, and the Google Docs web suite for all your spreadsheet or word-processing needs. The list goes on.

The idea is such: Give up the computing experience you’ve grown accustomed to for over a decade. Come live in Google’s browser.

Why would anyone wish to do that today, tomorrow or even next year when the OS ships?

From CuriousRead.com:

Depending on which feature you use, Google Maps offers a satellite view or a street-level view of tons of locations around the world. You can look up landmarks like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, as well as more personal places, like your ex’s house. But for all of the places that Google Maps allows you to see, there are plenty of places that are off-limits. Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a “Prohibited” sign on the following 51 places.

(via Schneier on Security)

Awesome.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

From The Register:

About 70 per cent of the Earth is covered by water. So Google’s thinking it had better build some data centers that can float.

With a recently-released patent application, the search giant cum world power seeks exclusive rights to what it calls a “water-based data center”. This modular collection of processing, storage, and network resources would sit on a ship anchored somewhere offshore, using the crashing waves for both power and cooling.

Google envisions its seaworthy data center serving land-bound humans in times of emergency. “For example,” the application reads, “a military presence may be needed in an area, a natural disaster may bring a need for computing or telecommunication presence in an area until the natural infrastructure can be repaired or rebuilt, and certain events may draw thousands of people who may put a load on the local computing infrastructure.

(via Linkbunnies)