Cookie conundrums? Google contest wants to help
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Search giant, which has endured past criticism from privacy advocates for its Web cookie policies, backs $5,000 prize for best YouTube video demystifying the tiny text files.
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It can be difficult to determine who owns pictures on the web. Why not create an attribute for the image tag that clarifies the confusion? In Monkey Bites.
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Plus: Google apps for your site, and HP's pretexting debacle.
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Also: Mobile office challenge finds monkeys are distracting. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Do patents, white papers, and other publications authored by search engine employees provide clear guidance to how to optimize Web pages?  A panel of experts debated the issue at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference.
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Ziff Davis - New hires, a domain-name registration and Mozilla bugs lead to speculation that Google is preparing a Web browser, but the clues could point in many directions.
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Internet search leader Google Inc. is trying to convince federal and state authorities that Microsoft Corp.'s Vista operating system is stifling competition as the high-tech heavyweights wrestle for the allegiance of personal computer users.
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Two Google site vulnerabilities that could be used to mount phishing attacks have been reported, says the Internet search giant. It already has fixed one, and expects to patch the second shortly.
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Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
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Google makes it easier for bloggers to distract their users by allowing its
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc.'s plans to shorten the life-span of cookies installed on a user's computer, ostensibly to improve user privacy, is being dismissed by some as complete hype. Apart from making it appear that the company is taking steps to address growing privacy concerns related to its data storing habits, in reality, the move changes very little they said. "No users will experience any gains in privacy at all due to Google's change in policy," said Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, a vendor of antivirus products based in San Diego. "It's not a bad idea. It's just a worthless one. (Google's announcement either) demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about the role cookies can play in privacy, or else utter contempt for the intellect of Google users." In a blog post on Monday, Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said that in the coming months the company will start issuing user cookies that will be set to auto-expire after two years. Currently the cookies set by Google on a user's computer are designed to expire in 2038 -- unless users set their browsers to delete them sooner, he said "After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies," Fleischer said. But the fact that Google's cookies will auto-renew every time a user visits a Google web site completely negates any affect the move might have had, Abrams said. Only users who do not return to Google for two years will have their cookies auto-expire after that period. In all other cases, cookies will auto-renew and reset their life-spans with each visit to a Google site. Consequently the move has no effect on Google's existing privacy posture, said Pete Lindstrom an analyst with the Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. "As far as I can tell, there's going to be no change to the effective level of their intrusiveness, which I don't think is too significant in the first place. Maybe they want to get a little bit of privacy press." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google's plans to shorten the life-span of its cookies come amid growing concerns, especially in the European Union (EU), about its data retention policies. In June, Privacy International, a global privacy advocacy group, placed Google at the bottom of a list of 23 internet companies for "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy." In June Google announced that it would anonymize its search server logs, including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers after 18 months. That move was in response to a letter sent in May by the EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which expressed concerns about the length of time Google stores information in its search server logs. The letter, addressed to Fleischer, noted that server logs contain information that could be linked to an identified or identifiable person and therefore come under the purview of European data protection laws. In the same letter, the EU group also expressed concern about the 30-year life span of the cookies that Google installs on user systems. The letter noted that the Google's cookie lifespan was "disproportionate" to its stated purpose of storing user preference information.
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New Web ads respond to your activities--and this has privacy advocates worried.
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Google says it will work to make it less lucrative to tie up millions of Internet addresses using a loophole in a practice known as domain-name tasting. It plans to keep those domain names from legitimate individuals and businesses.
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Google rules all in the online world, and businesses live or die on its search rankings determined by a secret algorithm. Everyone is trying to crack the code, and some people might pay $10 million or more to anyone who does.
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Plus: Is Microsoft search engine crawling Google? [News.com Extra]
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SEO firms debate how to best target traffic-driving sites like Digg, MySpace, and Technorati.
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Paul Reinheimer, one of two behind the funcaday website (providing details on one PHP function each day and special content on the weekends) has posted a supplement to this weekend's posting covering escaping.   The disadvantage with the escape for now, not for later approach is simple. If you save a user's post to the database, then that user's post is displayed 2,000 times there will be some serious differences. [...] You will need to balance your security concerns with performance needs.   The comments on his post back up his suggestions (and include other tips like a recommendation to cache on an even higher level - page blocks).