The thing is, any time you get a provider in the market that has a predominantly large share of that market, questions start to get asked about their practices, about what their motives are. I desperately hope that they [Google]…in fact I expect that they will change. They will become as grown up as some of the larger companies around, so in some respects it’s a predictable thing.
Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist
As you can see from my recent postings, the submission on Slashdot asking Has Google Lost Its Mojo? is no surprise to me. Here’s an interesting comment:
Speaking as a Googler, “some” is an understatement. The best and brightest have been exiting Google at the earliest for months, leaving behind the political climbers, backbiters and the just plain incompetent. Now Google mainly runs on interns, everybody else is too “smart” to do the grunt work like coding, debugging, or much at all beyond getting face time. The reason for this is simple: narcissistic managers whose main talent is claiming credit for the work of their subordinates while punishing anyone who shows initiative, and thus possibly could get promoted. These days at Google, showing skill and dedication is a great way to get a bad review from your manager. Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck. by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25, @07:39PM (#24744501)
Bad PR always is a clear sign for upcoming problems. In this case, there are the privacy concerns about Google Street View:
Don’t expect privacy in your front yard, even if your house is located one mile down a private, dirt road. (PressDemocrat.com)
Also, Google is taking away free dinner. I mean, this is not the worst thing on earth, but still, bad PR, because you can see, that Google is not different from any other company, trying to increase its profits. Also, Google has serious spam problems with Gmail. Also, I noticed that Google Suggest is the default search now – that means, Google seems to care about cuil.com. And so on…
At a T.G.I.F. — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) [...] When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft. (New York Times)
I just found a wonderful articale by Nicholas Carr:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
“Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does”
Hi,
We would like to let you know that we have updated our report to include the omitted details. You can read it at: http://ece.uprm.edu/~andre/insert/gmail.html
Also we have made our proof of concept available at: http://ece.uprm.edu/~andre/insert/gmail.tar.gz
Best Regards,
Pablo Ximenes
I love short mails with a clear message 
“Google’s chronic silence on all abuse reports makes it impossible to tell whether they’ve taken any action on the problem, whether the problem reports have even made it to the operational staff responsible for the mailservers, or whether they simply don’t care. I’m sure you can all make your own snarky comments re ‘Do no evil’.” (BugTraq)
Don’t forget: Google offers a fast paced and dynamic work environment *rofl*
I know that mail logs are not the most interesting thing on earth, but I’m not used to get spam from Google Mail… from Yahoo and MSN maybe, but not from Google… never ever… so I try to understand this:
May 20 21:43:16 mail postfix/smtpd[30948]: connect from qb-out-0506.google.com[72.14.204.235]
May 20 21:43:17 mail postfix/policyd-weight[2754]: weighted check: NOT_IN_SBL_XBL_SPAMHAUS=-1.5 NOT_IN_SPAMCOP=-1.5 NOT_IN_BL_NJABL=-1.5 CL_IP_EQ_HELO_IP=-2 (check from: .gmail. - helo: .qb-out-0506.google. - helo-domain: .google.) FROM/MX_MATCHES_HELO(DOMAIN)=-2 <client=72.14.204.235> <helo=qb-out-0506.google.com> <from=alexandrearw7@gmail.com> <to=michael@liquidbytes.net>, rate: -8.5
May 20 21:43:17 mail postfix/policyd-weight[2754]: decided action=PREPEND X-policyd-weight: NOT_IN_SBL_XBL_SPAMHAUS=-1.5 NOT_IN_SPAMCOP=-1.5 NOT_IN_BL_NJABL=-1.5 CL_IP_EQ_HELO_IP=-2 (check from: .gmail. - helo: .qb-out-0506.google. - helo-domain: .google.) FROM/MX_MATCHES_HELO(DOMAIN)=-2 <client=72.14.204.235> <helo=qb-out-0506.google.com> <from=alexandrearw7@gmail.com> <to=michael@liquidbytes.net>, rate: -8.5; delay: 0s
May 20 21:43:18 mail postfix/smtpd[30948]: 09CFB196802E: client=qb-out-0506.google.com[72.14.204.235]
May 20 21:43:49 mail postfix/smtpd[30948]: disconnect from qb-out-0506.google.com[72.14.204.235]
Yes, these servers belong to…
OrgName: Google Inc. OrgID: GOGL Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway City: Mountain View StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94043 Country: US NetRange: 72.14.192.0 - 72.14.255.255 CIDR: 72.14.192.0/18 NetName: GOOGLE
Other people are getting tons of spam from Google as well as it seems.
See also: Exploiting Google MX servers as Open SMTP Relays
So why is that? Mmmh… because the cool and smart engineers at Google can’t handle their job:
We would like to clarify to the security community that we have contacted Google about the issue more than a week ago and no response was provided despite our clear intent of cooperation regarding this matter.
We have plans to submit a paper about our work on the trust hierarchy of email providers to the SBSEG’2008 over this weekend. Since the paper will necessarily include full details about the flaw, we see no point on withholding the full disclosure of our self-censored report.
We are still waiting to hear from Google and we sincerely hope that this flaw can be fixed before the full details about the problem are released. (Source)
This was 8 days ago. Hello? Somebody there!? I’m 99.99% sure that Google won’t answer to my spam report. They can’t even write a small mail to the team that found out how to use Google as open mail relay. Other large providers like T-Online are far more cooperative and they actually answer to your requests.
“We are Google. Resistance is a good idea, because: You will be spammed. We will add our spam mail to your mailbox. Your culture will have to learn how to adapt its spam filters.”
Now, you can share your sensitive information about the following with Google (I got the list from the authorization agreement on google.com):
Isn’t that exactly what we’re all after? I think I will add Alcohol, HIV and Pregnancy to my profile and see what happens *lol*
Maybe I can combine Google Health with Google Analytics and see if the visitors to my blog share the same “health condition”…
See also:
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/google-wants-your-medical-records-and-more
Hehe, I like bashing successful companies, but not this time: Google has done a great job in adapting their Web site (at least search and news) to the iPhone. Google Doctype was an excellent idea as well. Thanks a lot!
This is my own colorful work environment. The food is not free, but the Thai next to my home is very good
is living in Berlin, Germany. He loves to work on large Web applications, especially those that use a lot of JavaScript in the front-end. His private interests include photography, travel and cybernetics.
