So much for Don't be evil

As pointed out by Josh Lewis:

Google's Response to DOJ

Google put their Response to the DoJ motion online. It's an interesting read. I'd like to see Cutts' declaration if anyone knows if it's available. For those not even wanting to read the intro (I recommend reading the whole thing), the key arguments are:

• Insufficient justification for non-party subpoena
• Possibility to becoming admissible evidence not established
• Compromising trade secrets without substantial need
• Undue burden for non-party

Sub-points to the third are it's also a compromise of user privacy and trust, and sub-points to the fourth are that some information is covered under various government privacy acts that may not be covered by a subpoena or require advance notification of the user. Like I said, it's an interesting read.

Another google security/privacy issue?

So I'm poking around with Google Alerts, pointing it at bloglines subscription addresses. I'm not logged in since I'm making individual addresses per query, and need to enter an email address. There's an issue where I haven't received the confirmations (which is probably due to bloglines' flakiness lately), so figure I'll enter them again just in case. I enter one, and it comes back with "You've already created this Google Alert. Please enter a different search.". Is it really that easy to check whether someone has subscribed to a google alert on something? I suppose they could be tracking me since google tends to track everything, but you'd think it would have thrown an error at the different addresses or pretended to remember me in that case. So wipe out all cookies in that browser, and try again. Wow...

I think today was the longest lab so far this semester - almost an hour. Jeff even posted an entry about how entertaining it was... Otherwise the day was pretty uneventful. I found out that nobody else in the class seemed to be having any luck with the AI homework either. Oh well, we'll see how class goes tomorrow. Stocked up on the dew again so should be ready to battle the sleepiness after lunch at the gate... Good food, but it always makes you really sleepy - oh well, it's worth it. I still don't know how I manage to keep so highly ranked on google. Looking through the search keyword summary a lot of people still want info on the excel 97 easter egg, and are following the link to my page which shows up on the first page. Other popular ones include the nerdity test, and for some reason this month has a surge to a copy of an article someone wrote about Columbine... Even searches for fellowship of christian athletes pictures or MN FCA now or recently have had pages for the Osseo FCA stuff. And yea, if you search on my hich school on MSN you still get qux.net pages on the first page of results (yet not the school's real site). Oh yea, and you can apparently search on lyrics by Hive and find me too... And people complain about the search engines not finding them... :)