fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Seems that the White House is doing its very best not to get indexed by just about every search engine under the sun, if their robots.txt file is any indication. Interpreted in SEO terms, they’re obviously tied up in a frenzy of privacy protection, trying to lurk far off from the madding crowd in the dark, like the shady spooks they are so very much in love with.

CEO Eric Schmidt has never been exactly famous for his social engineering skills. With a CEO like that, who needs corporate or public or private detractors? This new blogger takes an exceedingly (and very well worded) dim view of Mr Schmidt’s recent presentation at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s annual conference in Aspen

One of Google’s most vociferous public critics was sussed out by Matt Cutts at Sphinn and has decided to return underground.

Depersonalizing your Google search helps protect your privacy and may fend off grief incurred by two parties attempting to compare search results in a meaningful way.

Seems the Chinese government isn’t just blocking political dissidents: Apparently they’re not too happy about companies developing cloaking software, either.

Google’s privacy spokesperson Peter Fleischer threatens to close down GoogleMail in Germany if the German government persists in enforcing its controversial plans for more or less total surveillance and record retention of Internet traffic and e-mail usage.

Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation received some flak from anonymization experts (ourselves included) for their less-than-state-of-the-art white paper recommending some stragegies. Well, they’ve listened and issued an update now.

One would have thought that a company of Google’s resources and technical savvy would be able to prevent further downloads of their established spy- and malware. The more so as this specific download link is still being propagated across a multitude of blogs and fora. After all, they’ve had three full days to do it. But that’s precisely what’s not happening.

A friendly reminder on what should be the real driving force behind technology, even though it usually isn’t.

Hardly four days to oblivion – the deluge of PR-hurting reports has finally found its first deserving casualty: GWA is no more, at least for the time being. Still, it’s definitely a first victory and hopefully not the last one.

We’ve detected yet more Google Web Accelerator IPs. Make sure you adjust your existing .htaccess code to cover it!

We’ve detected another Google Web Accelerator IP range. Make sure you adjust your existing .htaccess code to cover it!

Here’s a page you can display to people who you are restricting from accessing your site because they’re using Google’s nefarious spyware. Plus some graphics we’re donating to the public domain: spread the message!

Time to act: here’s the meat on what to do to prevent Google’s parasitic Web Accelerator from scraping your web site and eating up bandwidth big time.

And on and on it goes with even the most acquiescent, docile and “we’re so excited to be a part of Google’s dream yadda yadda” industry pimping sites voicing at least some mild concerns about where Google’s latest gizmo may be heading.