<IT WORLD>
Viacom wins victory over privacy
By Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - The fight over online privacy went further this week as
media and entertainment behemoth Viacom won a few more rounds against Internet
search giant Google in its billion-dollar lawsuit.
Google, under a US court ruling, now has to hand over huge amounts of code from
YouTube archives to Viacom. The data contains video and search information from
every clip ever played on the website. Lawyers for Viacom, which is after the
logs to prove whether copyrighted videos were viewed more often than home-grown
ones, have even offered Google hard disks to store
the 12 terabytes of data that will contain user IP addresses and viewers' login
IDs.
Google, which has also been ordered to provide copies of all clips that have
ever been removed, tried to block the requests on privacy grounds.
Privacy advocates have claimed that the court ruling disregarded the 1988 Video
Privacy Protection Act, which was passed by the US Congress to protect people's
viewing habits from being disclosed. YouTube users have taken that a step
further with an expletive-laden call to boycott the media company, with a
number of anti-Viacom videos already hitting the web. Google has removed the
most offensive ones.
Viacom was also angling for Google's advertising database and search source
code, claiming that the company had manipulated it in an effort to treat
copyrighted material differently - the judge saw this argument differently and
denied the request.
Google has asked Viacom to respect its users' privacy by allowing the company
to render the logs anonymous before they get handed over. The privacy aspect
and subsequent ramifications of releasing a mass of data on web surfers'
viewing habits via court order has sparked considerable interest in this
battle. Google has obviously been using the logs for its own benefit but the
big question now is what will Viacom find lurking in there?
It
seems that Google cries the privacy tune when it suits it, and another big
player is piling on the pressure. When it is your humble web surfer with a
problem the search giant seems to turn the corner, quite literally.
Google's Street View application has already sparked protest from the same
privacy advocates that are venting over Viacom. The all-seeing Google camera
vans have been spotted on the streets of Europe this week gathering photographs
and following the Tour de France.
If made available in the UK, the service faces being turned over to the
Information Commissioner and considerable opposition from Privacy
International, a UK rights group. The group is urging that number plates and
faces be blurred from online view. It claims Google has made assurances on
privacy concerns in the past and nothing has come of them. A spokesman has
already written to Google, which responded by stating that its face-blurring
technology has been in operation since May.
In a letter published on the BBC website, the search company conceded that
"with all such systems operating at this scale our blurring technology is not
perfect - we occasionally miss a face or license plate, for example if they are
partially covered, or at a difficult angle."
We investigated the technology this year, (see
Google eye too close for comfort, Asia Times Online, March 15, 2008)
when it sparked privacy complaints in the US. Now that Street View is in Europe
it is likely to face stricter legislation as to what can and can't be
published. As the technology improves, images with even higher resolution are
made available, Big Brother is definitely watching.
Industry
Just when we thought the love affair was over, Yahoo! made a statement on
Monday saying that its board was still open to buyout offers. This came after
on-off suitor Microsoft said it would consider buying all or part of Yahoo if a
new Yahoo board was elected.
"If Microsoft and [its chief executive] Mr [Steve] Ballmer really want to
purchase Yahoo, we again invite them to make a proposal immediately," the
Internet pioneer stated. Shareholder Carl Icahn has been instrumental in
running a slate of nominees to replace Yahoo's existing board in an effort to
resume negotiations. The statements, which came three weeks before Yahoo's
annual general meeting, caused an almost 12% increase in the companies share
value.
Microsoft, which wants to absorb Yahoo's search techniques and customers, is
due to make another acquisition this week with the purchase of online search
company Powerset. The US$100 million buyout of the start-up company signals an
investment in semantics, a technology that could revolutionize search from the
keyword-based algorithms dominating present use.
The natural-language search model may be used in Microsoft's Live search
engine, with which users can make a search by using natural sentences as
opposed to defined key words. A search engine using the "natural" technology
would know, for example, whether a search term "cancer" referred to a disease
or a horoscope. Microsoft hopes that the new ammunition will bring it closer to
Google, whose search technology is far from perfect and easily manipulated by
webmasters and techniques such as key-wording and link-spamming.
Yahoo has also been busy in its search department this week by banking on web
developers to bolster their presence with a new service called "Build Your Own
Search". Any website will be able to use Yahoo's technology to build a
customized system for searching information online. By allowing third parties
to use its search technology, Yahoo hopes to claw back a bit more of the market
share it is losing to Google, which is already offering a similar service. So
what do Yahoo get out of this? Their ads on all the results pages.
Telecoms
The iFrenzy began this week as eager buyers lined up for the Apple's new 3G
iPhone. The US$199 unit was released across the globe on Friday to the delight
of many and disappointment of a few. Twenty-two countries newly added to
Apple's list will get full support for the new iPhone, which boasts faster
Internet connections and an array of new gadgets - all downloadable only from
Apple of course.
Apple's new online App Store offering over 500 new programs for the iPod and
iPhone opened earlier than expected on Thursday morning. Existing Mac
subscribers, however, were frustrated from Thursday and into Friday with a
"service temporarily unavailable" message on mac.com, which hosts thousands of
paid-for email accounts. Coincidence?
Internet
A serious flaw in the World Wide Web was patched this week by security and
software experts. The fundamental fault in the Internet addressing system known
as DNS would allow cyber-crooks to redirect web surfers to another page even if
they typed in the correct address.
Phishing scams and personal information theft would escalate as people would
have been redirected to fake banking sites without their knowledge. Technical
details were not released, though it is known that the system web servers use
to translate words into numbers or IP addresses was vulnerable to exploitation.
Microsoft, Sun and Cisco systems have all been working with security experts
since March on a patch that was released this week. Regular users are unlikely
to have noticed any difference as the patch has been included in their
automatic updates - Microsoft's was on July 8.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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It
seems that Google cries the privacy tune when it suits it, and another big
player is piling on the pressure. When it is your humble web surfer with a
problem the search giant seems to turn the corner, quite literally.
