Sven Welzel — Der Blog

Tag: google

  • Google services now hosting in South Africa and whois.co.za

    Google.co.za is doing it, Gmail is doing it — resolving to 196.23.168.147 – hosted by Internet Solutions, and reverse-IP’ing to za196-23-168-147.cache.googlevideo.com (which suggests the implemenation of local youtube caching (youtube.co.za is in the offing for some time now)) – full rundown here. Youtube.co.za — registered by MarkMonitor on behalf of Google – was last updated on 15 May 2010, so it’s not far away – well, at the moment, it’s just redirecting to http://www.youtube.com/?gl=ZA&hl=en-GB They weren’t that lucky with gmail.co.za though 🙂

    While we’re on domain names – did you know that whois.co.za is no longer functional? You need to browse directly to http://co.za/whois.shtml – I’ll put a little something together for that…

    Just kind of interesting 🙂

  • Domain registrations in China – turning .cn to .can’t

    I’ve been through the domain name registrations in China, in addition to the full documentation to be submitted to the Chinese authorities in order to not have the .cn account suspended.

    However, now things have become interesting – registering domain names through non-Chinese registration authorities has been suspended since mid December:

    We've disabled the registration of new domains for the moment. CNNIC
changed their rules regarding registration of new domains. Now, they
allow registration just for Chinese companies. Until they clear up
their policies, we've disabled the new domains registration.

    That’s what most registrars are coming back with at the moment. However, GoDaddy has suddenly decided that now – 24 March 2010 – they won’t register domains for Civil rights reasons, amongst others. (more…)

  • Google.cn relocated to Hong Kong

    Well, as I said in the previous posting on this matter, Google decided to ‘close’ operations in China – to relocate to Hong Kong as www.google.com.hk.

    In addition, there is no self-censorship in place anymore – anything goes, according to reports.

    The Chinese Government is ‘disgusted’ at these developments and reiterated that foreign firms need to stick to Chinese law in China – which includes the censorship which has been used as the football in this situation (seeing that the actual reason for the bruhaha is Operation Aurora).

    Google had a 35% market share of the search engine market in China – and now leaves a gaping hole in the online search/advertising space. So, is bing.cn next?

  • Google will shut down Chinese google.cn

    Google is going to shut down google.cn with a likelyhood some webhosts give as their uptime guarantee. With a reported 99.9% certainty, google.cn is going to power down, not due to business, but, as Eric Schmidt, Google CEO says, about the cencorship rules. Not, quite clearly then, as a reaction to Operation Aurora…

    Li Yizhong, the Chinese minister for industry and information technology, said on Mar 12, 2010 that if Google were to take steps violating Chinese laws, “that would be unfriendly, that would be irresponsible, and they would have to bear the consequences.”

    Mr Li encouraged Google to continue its operations in the country. “[Google] has taken 30 per cent of the Chinese search market.

    “If you don’t leave, China will welcome that, if you don’t leave, it will be beneficial for the development of the internet in China.”

    “Do no evil” vs business opportunity. Let’s see who wins…

  • Google’s Do No evil mantra

    When last did you access google.com/ig/oscheck? It returns a serialized array — with a weird space-holder — instead of “Do no evil” (which implies that you can be evil, think evil, plan evil, but not execute it), they’ve upped it a notch — all the way to “don’t be evil’” (note the trailing apostrophe).

    This of course changes the mantra — you can do evil, think evil, plan evil and execute it, but just hug a bunny and buy milk on the way home in your green car (so don’t be evil). Strange deviation. Also, the apostrophe implies omission (or ownership, with bad grammar). So did they mean don’t be evilk (whatever that may mean) — you go through the alphabet and figure that one out.

    Happy thoughts! 🙂

    throw 1; < don't be evil' >{m:[{i:1,st:"c=ig&e=APu7icpPle4eIsUPx/8S%2BVe24JQkS/cBvDBsJhSnfdcogQ1nIoym4glNnR1WvsfaswewrREVMvHzqhekfe75PLUAm7A4%2BOlsToBUzAVE4axMYP2Q%2BGGHAMUnq61oFTnlsEU%2BiqWrfH8"}]}

  • No more silly Google.com fade-in effect

    You’ve seen it, you hate it, you threaten to switch to wolfram or Bing… Or you can just make it go away.

    Stylish allows you to apply custom stylesheets to sites by wildcard prefix, so that it works and look the way you want it to. For Firefox. For IE, IE8Pro does something similar (YMMV — I haven’t tried it…)

    All you need to apply is a simple CSS script:


    @namespace url(https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

    @-moz-document url-prefix('http://google.'), url-prefix('http://www.google.') {

    #ghead, #sbl, .fade, #fctr{ opacity: 1 !important; }

    }

    Lots of customisations available at userstyles.org!

  • An update on Operation Aurora

    The attack (Operation Aurora) on around 20 companies in the US, including Google, Adobe, Juniper Networks and others using the zero-day exploit of Internet Explorer is partly linked to social engineering — as the carefully crafted emails were plausibly created and structured, users bought into it. Once the machine was owned after the payload was released, the affected machine would contact a Command and Control (C&C) server that would send back specific instructions based on Workgroup name and machine environment (OS etc), accepting and transmitting data via a home-made encryption based piggy-backed onto the 443 port — typically reserved for the HTTP SSL transfer of data. (more…)

  • Google Analytics unzulässig nach deutschem Recht?

    Die Zeit berichtet, daß Datenschützer, auch mittels Bußgelder bis zu €50 000, von dem Gebrauch Google Analytics abraten möchten. “Google Inc. räumt sich ausdrücklich, in seinen beim Einsatz zu akzeptierenden Regularien das Recht ein, die über den einzelnen Nutzer mittels einer eindeutigen Kennung gewonnenen Daten mit anderen, bereits gespeicherten Daten” etwa aus Google Mail “zu verknüpfen und diese Informationen an Dritte weiterzugeben.” Der Hauptpunkt dieser Entscheidung hängt damit zusammen, daß der Benutzer sich nicht ausdrücklich einverstanden erklären muß, bevor die Privatdaten (etwa geografische Lage, Rechnereinstellungen) einfach an Dritte übertragen werden. Die Debatte läuft, mal sehen, was drauß wird!

    In short, to re-iterate what I wrote above in a short point: As you do not explicitly opt in to the use of Google Analytics, German lawmakers are trying to dissuade/stop the use of GA on sites in Germany with the added incentive of fines up to €50 000 so as to protect individual’s personal privacy rights.

  • Google Lab’s FastFlip – Hyperlinked Slideshow?

    Google Labs launched FastFlip – a good example is the “Centre for Investigative Reporting” site.

    So you can flip between pages that are rendered and pre-loaded as graphics (PNGs, avg 40kB, 634px by 884px) without incurring the (X)HTML load-times, and all the underlying elements. See the page you like, and then click on the one you choose to have it actually load. The basis is a pre-render that is then flipped through like a slideshow with hyperlinks. Problem is dynamic and ad-generating links on the source documents that will lose their value – you won’t click twice on a link of interest if you know that, on second thoughts, this may be ads rather than content. In addition to which, you incur 404‘s following pages form the preview. Some work… You can’t click on the link you want to follow — you click and it takes you to the page, and then you have to click again… Isn’t that removing a level of “hype” from the “hyperlink”? 🙂

    (more…)

  • Over a trillion unique URLs in Google (but you knew that already)

    On the Google Blog, they’ve been going on about the size of the Google index that’s grown at such great speed over the time of Google

    The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

    Now, the whole thing about unique URLs they go on to qualify later, going on about a potential infinate quantity of links on the web, like ‘next month’ links and the like. Sure. But what abou the specifically google-tailored and subdomain cross-linked ‘SEO’ domains? I’m sure we can take out a margin of errors of 30% – 35% of auto-generated pages, links and domains.

    But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

    So they don’t index every page. Real content vs google-specific content…

    I think it may be safe to simply agree that the index is big. Very big. With lots of lots of pages. There’s not much point in going on about the number.