Could Google Gears Make 'Cookies' Obsolete?
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In what appears to be a serious and genuine attempt to take the lead in the growing AJAX market, Google may be trying to invent something that has already been invented before, perhaps several times: a way to implement a local data store for Web-based and remote applications run through the browser.  But because it's Google that's doing it, the results this time around might be different.
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Also: Radio tags could make jewelry more secure. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Mozilla Corp. is gung-ho on support for offline applications, but it's not committed to using the Google Gears technologies in the next Firefox, an executive of the open-source developer said.
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A great presentation by Ilia Alshanetsky from the International PHP Conference 2004. The only thing I would like to point out is that MMCache is still being actively developed, as evidenced by the CVS activity at sourceforge.  PS: You might need to use Mozilla to view this. IE sometimes doesn't work properly. I thought IE was a defacto standard :-)
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Sam  posts an interesting proposal.  This is better than the HTTP delta suggestion but still has a few issues.  The client needs to know the ETags before it can start performing differential fetches.  With date ranges you still preserve the initial archive query.  For example when you first subscribe to a feed you could fetch 30 days worth of posts.  If you like the feed you can even fetch *older* posts which could be really cool.  Also even if you still use faster checksum algorithm like CRC32 or Adler32 you still have an O(N) performance hit for your document.  If you have a btree on your post dates you will gave O(log(N)) for search for a much smaller string (64bit in most situations).  F ...
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Google added last Thursday a nice little video to their YouTube account without mentioning anything significant to their blogs as they usually do for announcements of new product features. Search Engine Roundtable noticed it on Friday and made a quick post, Lifehacker posted about it on Saturday.Â  The new feature is in my opinion significant and worth [...]
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'Hey! We care about privacy' As Google plays games with its cookies, semi-rival Ask.com is actually getting serious about privacy. The web's fourth-leading search engine is giving web users a brand new tool that ensures their search results will not be retained by the company - at all. As the company points out, that's a first among major search engines.â¦
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Google and the History of Link Building  I can't begin to tell you how sick I am of reading articles and posts that mention the two words "Google" and "penalty" in the same sentence!  So many webmasters are walking on eggshells these days when it comes to Google, and it just doesn't ...
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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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By CHRIS BLACKHURST AS I WRITE this, mid-morning, I check. I've already used Google more than 10 times today. Is there any other product quite like it, anything so ubiquitous, so taken for granted? There's the phone, but I can switch the network. Petrol? I never bother with the brand.
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Google is in the online ad-service business. Why does it lavish attention on software developers and open-source projects? Kicking offline Web apps into gear
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Lost a lot of traffic  from Google recently? Slipping in the SERPs? You've heard of the Google Bomb, Google Whacking, the Google Dance and Googlisms, but there's a new Google-word you might be interested in if you're losing your Google Juice. What is this new term? I call it 302 Googlejacking. The problem seems to have been around since at least August 2003, and is commonly known as the Google 302 Pagejacking issue. To be fair, it has affected other search engines as well.   If you're curious, there are some things you can check that will show whether or not you've been afflicted by what some people call a bug at Google. (Who knows, maybe it's just a 'feature' we don't understand. ;) Also included are some side notes on the 1969 cache bug/feature that might be related, Google Update Allegra, a poll on the big three and more. If you're into SEO,   read on.
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Are Internet users about to suffer from beta-testing burnout?
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Global privacy counsel obsessed with male physique A brief summation of Google's new privacy policies. One: Your search data will be made anonymous after it sits on the company's servers for 18 months. Two: Your Google browser cookies will expire if you don't visit the site for two years. And three: a man should not be allowed to hide his "shrinking shoulders" and "protruding paunch" behind a business suit and necktie.â¦
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Blog: Garmin offers some APIs so Web sites and its GPS units can communicate, while MapQuest announces a beta version of an ActionScript interface for Flash fans.
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Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.
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Loren&#8217;s post and Matt Cutts comment about sites being de-listed from Google because of down-time and alsoÂ some discussions about problems with site moves from one domain to another and launches of big sites with a lot of pages plus the comments and recommendations from Search Engine representatives like Vanessa Fox from the Google Webmaster Central [...]