blog dds

2009.07.01

Real-Time Google Earth GPS Tracking

In a recent trip I incorrectly assumed that real-time tracking of Google Earth's pre-cached maps with a GPS receiver would be sufficient help for navigating around the highways in Los Angeles. I therefore experimented with the way Google Earth's sparsely-documented real time tracking works, and wrote a small program to interface Google Earth with a GPS receiver. Fortunately, after seeing a colleague drive with a car-GPS device on the dashboard I came to my senses, and got a real Garmin Nuvi car-GPS device.

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2006.01.25

Google in China

Google "don't be evil" Inc. launched a self-censored version of its service for China.

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2005.11.09

US Military Removes Word Documents from the Web?

On August 25th 2004 the comp.risks forum run an article I submitted regarding the large number of Microsoft Word documents available on US milatary sites (sites in the .mil domain) through Google searches (23.50 "U.S. military sites offer a quarter million Microsoft Word documents"). The article documented how such documents could lead to the leakage of confidential data. A week later I setup a script to watch the number of Word documents available through Google searches to see if and when the military would recognise the threat those documents posed and remove them.

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2005.05.05

Google's Web Accelerator as a P2P CDN

I admire Google's guts in deploying their Web Accelerator. Proposing to act as an intermediary for the whole planet's web traffic takes a lot of courage and a certain amount of audacity. Interestingly, the system's design can be quite scalable, through the use of peer-to-peer and personalization technology.

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2004.08.31

U.S. military sites offer a quarter million Microsoft Word documents

I was Google-searching for the Air Force Operational Test & Evaluation Center publication "Software Maintainability - Evaluation Guide". To make my search more efficient I restricted it to military (.mil) sites, using the Google keyword "site:.mil". I was not able to find the publication I was looking for, but was surprised to see a number of Microsoft Word documents in the search results.

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2004.06.25

Google Mail and Privacy

I recently subscribed to Google mail, to obtain a reasonable alias (I thought I could get my loved dds initials, but it turned I would have to use at least 6 characters). However, I doubt I will use the service, because I really don't trust Google to search through my personal email data. I have 300MB of email now, representing about 18 years of email discussions. (I routinely remove all attachments, which I file separately, so the size of my emails is relatively modest). If I trusted Google, I would like to upload all my messages to their servers, and utilize Google's awesome search capabilities. However, the truth is, I see too many ways for the service to be misused.

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Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.