Searching for truth

Many of you will be aware of the decision recently by the European Courts to force Google to carry out some quite specific actions in pursuance of individuals' rights to privacy.  Those of you from across the pond have probably felt that the ruling is a strange one, given the US Constitution and its position on free speech.  While I like my privacy and guard my rights to it assiduously, I'm also a great proponent of free speech too, so I'm pretty much with you on this one.

In a nutshell, as far as I can tell - and I'm no lawyer, I'm an engineer who writes Sci-Fi thrillers and comedic novels, for goodness sake - the ruling states that Google has to remove links to web pages that intrude on individual persons' that are no longer adequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.  Individual's have to apply to Google to have the links they don't like taken down and if Google thinks they have a good case then they will do so.  Apparently Google are wading through about one thousand applications a day to achieve this and have to date been asked to remove more than a quarter of a million links in 70,000 applications made so far.  Allegedly some of the applications upheld have included a convicted sex offender, apparently offended by links that tells the world what he's been convicted of, and an article about the brother of a high profile British politician converting to Islam. While anyone's religious convictions are truly personal, if their brother is one of the most influential politicians in the country then they lose some of their rights to be anonymous, in many eyes. Anyone convicted of sex crimes should expect that information to stay in the public domain forever, unless they can prove that the conviction was false. That's a decision for the courts though, not Google.

One American citizen has shown his irritation at the European ruling by setting up a website - Hidden from Google - which promptly aims to provide links back to the sites that Google is now suppressing.  Because the order from the court was simply to remove the Google search links, not to remove the sites, so he's simply reposted them. And because it is a new link, it will now reappear in Google listings until Google are requested to remove the link again. There's sufficient defamatory laws that cater for sites that tell lies about individuals, but apparently lies aren't the issue here, it's people hiding from the truth - maybe.  Challenging lies online can be a costly business and unless we have sufficient resources behind us most of us can only hope that appealing to the owner of the website or the host will work.  Running through the courts isn't an option for most of us, no matter how right we are. Incidentally Google removes links to websites every day without court rulings - sites that try to trick consumers, sites with embedded malware, sites that promote illegal activities. They do so of their own volition.

So despite Google's attempt at complying with the European courts, their attempts are being quite legally thwarted.  Probably just as well, as the ruling doesn't quite make sense.  And it does seem a little one-sided, Google may be the biggest, best known search engine in the world, its name now a noun, verb and adjective, but it isn't the only one.  I'm not aware that Yahoo or Bing have been ordered to edit their listings, so even if Hidden from Google didn't exist, individual's with a nose for a story could simply search one of the other engines. Interestingly, I'm not aware that either Yahoo or Microsoft have complained of the oversight regarding their search engines by the European courts. Of course many people don't rate these other engines, based on the size of Google.  That may or may not be a valid point and one that's difficult to test, but fear not, help is at hand.

Microsoft are clearly pushing to get their search engine, Bing, to be the engine of choice for more people.  Apple are using it on their products, probably because they dislike Google at least as much as they rate Bing, and of course any Windows machine has Bing as the default search engine anyway.  Is it as good as Google?  Microsoft seem to think so and for the second year running they've run a completion to see if users can tell which search engine is best for them.  If you mosey onto Bing It On you'll find you can carry out five consecutive searches for anything you want - no holds barred.  After inputting each search term the software runs off and applies it to both Google and Bing, giving you both results side by side.  You are then asked to vote on which set of results gives, in your opinion, the better set of links.  You don't find out until after the fifth search which engine you have been voting for.  I ran the test and found that I couldn't prefer one result over the other on one search, I favoured Google in two and Bing in the other two.  So I was a draw.  My wife had one result she couldn't choose between, one favouring Google and the remaining three favouring Bing.  So Bing won her round.  According to the website, Bing is consistently voted the better results.  Why not try the challenge while its still running, and if you find you prefer Bing, why not give it a go more often.  At least it isn't artificially suppressing links, but to be fair, it hasn't been compelled to by the European courts.

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Has Yahoo Mail Been Hacked?

Just before logging off from my work computer the other day two emails dropped in, apparently sent from one of my Yahoo accounts.  Now I knew I hadn't emailed myself anything and any computers with my Yahoo email on were safely powered down at home.  So I guessed I'd been hacked.

By the time I got home I had a raft of legitimate emails from friends and family suggesting my account had been compromised and some reporting that the links embedded in the emails being sent out were being flagged by anti-virus programs as containing malware.  I also had an email apparently from Yahoo suggesting that someone in Italy had logged on to my mail account and suggested I use a link in the email to change my password.  I was relatively unconvinced by the Yahoo email as the address looked a little suspicious - the address was yahoo-inc from memory - so I deleted that one, although I now have reason to believe it was legitimate.  I deleted all suspect emails from my tablet, then hopped onto my laptop and changed my password.

Then when I mentioned this in work I discovered that other people I know, some in my address book, some who have never been near it, have experienced the same issue over the last month.  The only common denominator is that they have Yahoo accounts.  Some may have had easily hackable passwords - others, including myself, had suitably complex passwords.  Most now have much more complicated passwords to add a layer of difficulty for those who pass their time hacking accounts.

But was the account hacked at all?  Well, certainly somebody gained access to the account as they gleefully used it to email malware to persons in my address book.  However I'm unconvinced that the amount of persons I know locally who have had their Yahoo accounts compromised recently is a coincidence.  Perusal of the web suggests that since January there have been a lot of Yahoo customers who have had their accounts hacked.  My unproven theory is that Yahoo themselves have had their security breached.

It makes sense for a hacker to put in the extra work needed to compromise the likes of Yahoo rather than trying to crack individual accounts piecemeal.  Even if a hacked file is encrypted, it's one big job to break it rather than lots of smaller jobs to break into individual accounts.

It's a bit of a growth industry, this hacking lark.  And sometimes it seems that  the criminals don't even need to hack a password to slip malware into people's email.  I've had a run of 'comments' posted by anonymous visitors to this blog recently.  Apart from all being anonymous the other common thread has been the insertion of a link 'to their website'.  Some attempt to massage my ego with kind words and slip a link in at the end, others offer to help me improve my blog and slip a link in to supplement the unsolicited advice.  Now I'm assuming that these links might be suspect - there's no way I would ever click on an unsolicited link provided by an anonymous person  - and consequently I delete these comments along with their links from the blog.  Don't get me wrong - if you want to make a comment about the blog, even if it is unflattering advice, then I'm happy for it to be posted.  But don't slip a link on the end of the comment if you want me or anyone else to read your comments.  OK, I'll see the comment, but if the posting has a link then I'll ditch the whole kit and caboodle, in a heartbeat.  Apart from anything else, I don't want any reader of my blog inadvertently being infected or scammed as a result of reading my posting.

As a result of these tainted comments, I now moderate any comments before they hit the blog.

The obvious question I have been asked by some of the less tech savvy victims of these Yahoo hacks is about the purpose.  What are the hackers hoping to achieve?  Well, short of  trying one of the suspect links, I have to guess a little here, but my best guess is that the links either insert keystroke logging malware, or otherwise try to persuade the recipients of the emails to enter their personal details - you know, name, address, date of birth, ATM PIN, mother's maiden name, favourite bank (easy one that - none of them).  The second approach is called phishing, and it's attempted all the time, all over the place.

In fact, some kids in Alaska have just been caught out running a phishing scam at their school.  The thirteen and fourteen year olds, obviously smart, managed to send their teachers a phishing email that extracted the teachers' login details.  They then used that information to access the student records.  The scam worked because the teachers, who probably resist phishing attempts all the time at home, felt they were safe within the school network so their guard was down.

Which is why scammers like to send people in your address book phoney emails that look like they're from you.  Luckily most of these scammers aren't anywhere near as bright as the average Alaskan  school-kid - they've got a lot to learn from those kids who succeeded where many thankfully fail.

So if you have a Yahoo email account -including the alternative suffixes such as rocketmail - then there's reason to believe that your details may have been compromised.  My advice is to run, not walk, to your settings and change the password - make it complex enough to be hard to guess, use numbers, letters and symbols, but make it easy enough for you to remember when sober.  Me, I use number, letters not in the alphabet and a squiggle that represents infinity minus the date of my last dental appointment.  Hack that if you can (oh shit, my dentist reads this blog).  Of course, the compromise I experienced may have been a good old fashioned laborious hack of my password, trying random combinations of letters and numbers one-by-one, but given the number of people I know to have experienced the same recently, I'm not convinced.

If you have experienced your email account being hacked, please feel free to post a comment at the foot of the page.  But don't insert a link if you want anybody else to read it!

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Unbelievagoogleable

I've got several dictionaries at home, gathering dust.  Not one of them, unfortunately, is remotely up to date.  None of them, for example, list 'internet', mainly because since the advent of the internet, there hasn't been a need to buy a new dictionary.  But they're unbelievably useful things, these books of common and exotic words with their carefully crafted definitions.  It's just that it's much easier when writing to look up an online resource than to put the laptop down, walk over to the bookshelf and flick through the dictionary.  And of course, you never do just look the one word up when you do get that book down off the bookshelf, because right next to the word you're looking for is a similar word that has an incredibly rude meaning.  Then there's the other words in the pages nearby.  Look up a spelling, check a meaning you're 95% certain is correct, and there's the afternoon gone.

Better I stick with the online version which tends not to drag me away or pervert my generally unspoiled mind is my view.

The reason the dictionaries in my house are out of date, of course, is that the English language doesn't stand still, never has, which is why Shakespeare sounds so odd, yet familiar too.  Dictionaries reflect the way we speak and the words we use.  We've all seen the newspaper columns announcing that some hip youth term that frankly I hadn't heard of until the news report came out is now being introduced into the dictionary  while my favourite technological oddity is coming out, simply because I'm the last person in the country to use the device and nobody understands what I'm talking about when I mention its name.

And it's not just English that's growing, all modern languages are, although the predominance of English in business and modern culture means that English words are being absorbed into other languages rapidly.  Technology has driven many of the new words in the dictionaries of the world, and many of the technological words I use in my blogs are recognisable across the world, even if my quirky sense of humour doesn't necessarily translate as readily.

Like most modern languages, Swedish is adopting words and creating its own.  And like most modern languages it has a body that looks after its language officially.  Where we have the Oxford English Dictionary to monitor the pulse of UK English words in common usage, Sweden has the Language Council of Sweden which promotes and demotes words in the Swedish language based on observation of usage.  Consequently they have promoted 'ogooglebar', which translates to 'ungoogleable' to mean any word, phrase, concept or idea that cannot be found in a search engine.

Google have complained that their trademark has been infringed and have insisted that the Council remove the word from its listing.  Their main complaint is not that there are words, phrases, concepts or ideas that cannot be found on Google - I'm guessing they're cool about that because if you Google 'ungoogleable' on Google then you'll find plenty of suggestions for ungoogleable ideas, although the fact you found them on Google does put that concept into doubt.  But the fact that they don't have knowledge of stuff is OK by Google.

Google's complaint is that the Swedish definition included any search engine, not just theirs.  So if I've got this right, Google want 'ungoogleable' to mean a word, phrase, concept or idea that cannot be found using Google but could on Bing or Yahoo.  In fact, the more I think about it, Google are actually suggesting that rather than we accept or even invite failure, we should try Bing or Yahoo first.  Then, when you fail with those two, give up because it is worse than 'ungoogleable', it is unbingable or, worse, unyahooable.  It seems a strange objection, but it does have a basis in logic.

There have been cases in the past where product tradenames have become so generic that the name owners have lost the legal right to exclusive use of the name.  One example that didn't go to the extreme that the company lost its rights, but did suffer long term, is Hoover.  In the 1930s Hoover were the predominant manufacturer of domestic electric appliances in the UK to the point where anyone running a vacuum cleaner over a carpet tile or two would say they were 'Hoovering', regardless of the make of vacuum cleaner.  Back then, with Hoover making virtually all the vacuum cleaners, electric cookers and washing machines in the UK and, apparently, dams in the US, the over-use of the trade name didn't do them any harm.  However, fast forward a couple of decades and we have new guns coming on the market, the Vaxs and Dysons of the vacuum cleaner world and they start to make serious inroads into Hoover's market share, and now the adjective 'to hoover' played against them.  Their tradename wasn't recognised, just the activity.

I suspect that this is what Google are trying to avoid, however I've got some bad news for them.  When the boss sticks his head around the door and shouts for someone to Google such and such, I'm sure anyone in the office currently using Bing or Yahoo don't close it down and open Google.  Google may have 90% of the search engine market, just as Hoover had of the UK vacuum cleaner market some time back, but the term 'to Google' is synonymous with using any search engine already, including the one you already have open on your desktop.  Of course Bing and Yahoo aren't going to bring Google down - they're too busy hanging onto the coat tail trying to keep up to do that - but someone will.  Probably some seventeen year old working on an app in a bedroom, an app that will blow away Google, Bing and Yahoo in one svelte move.  Almost certainly Google are keeping an eye for that app, because not only do they have spare cash for lawyers to bully Swedish wordsmiths, they have cash to pay seventeen year old kids with, too.

The biggest disappointment for Google, though, is that although they have persuaded the Swedish Council to not list ogooglebar and its meaning, it isn't going to go away.  Nor will ungoogleable in the English language, if we have any say in the matter.  It might have if they hadn't threatened legal action against a group of people whose only crime was to reflect the usage in their society, but now I would suggest everyone in Sweden will use the word even more, with the definition that Google don't like being pushed.  I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a backlash against Google in Sweden over the audacity of the company, which is currently defined as upgooglesownarse in Swedish, by the way.  Perhaps Abba could reform for the next Eurovision Song contest with a song entitled Ungoogleable, about how they searched for the pretty girl everywhere, using every resource at their disposal. Even the search engines Yahoo and Bing (rhymes with sing, so may work). And Google (ryhmes with misguided). Google might be able to challenge the financial might of Sweden with ease, but Abba?

Make sure you use ungoogleable at every opportunity possible, and make sure that it is clear that the word means that there is no means at your disposal that would help you find whatever it is you are looking for- the car keys are ungoogleable, I've looked everywhere dear. No, I haven't Googled for them, they're ungoogleable. My marbles are lost - yes I've tried all the search engines. They're ungoogleable.

Does anyone know of a search engine that doesn't have a distorted view of its own self importance? Absolutely ungoogleable.

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