Thursday, February 02, 2012

ListedLinks 2012-02-02

Update: Must... post link to comic: Why is this responsible?
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I am sorry, but I can't resist the urge to share links anymore. Ever since google (GOOG) removed the reader sharing feature and I couldn't find any good alternative. I have no choice but to post the links in a blog post.

Speaking of google, it seems that they lately are doing something that I find pretty ominous. Their urge to "unify" all their services. It became clear when they crippled google reader. First, they imposed the same visual style and then making all their services subservient to pushing google plus. Now they are unifying all the ToS and ... all the information they have about you.

It does not really bother me enough in the privacy sense to quit using their services on which I have already gotten horribly locked into. Google are not going to be getting more information about me. And they already had ways of knowing that all the information they had from multiple sites was mine. The real change is that now the automated search.

What I really dislike about all this is that Google is finally becoming a corporation. Long gone are the days in which google was a bunch of hackers maintaining different sites and services with little intro-mission from the top. Now all services have to be part of giantic google and serve their information to giantic google. Google is feeling a lot more bloated than before.

Anyway: First link.

What Actually Changed in Google’s Privacy Policy :
It Shouldn't Take a Letter from Congress for Google to Give Straight Answers About Privacy Policy Changes


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Second link:
A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target

I will admit the irony of this attack amuses me greatly; Briggs accuses me of many things he himself is doing. That is standard fare from antiscience group: creationists, global warming deniers, and alt-medders, for example, all seem to project their own tactics on the scientists with whom they disagree. Don’t like real medicine? Accuse scientists of being in the pocket of Big Pharma (and forget about the millions being made by quacks on useless "remedies"). Don’t believe in evolution? Accuse scientists of being too dogmatic. Don’t think global warming is real? Accuse scientists of misrepresenting the data.


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Microsoft woos disgruntled Google users in full-page newspaper ads — here’s the first one I liked this, because it was a message of optimism. I was depressed of google's action but then MS came to remind me that I got to cheer up, it could be worse, I could be using hotmail. By the way, it would be a little lame to decide to switch to MS' services because of google's new privacy statement, considering that MS' is definitely not really better.

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