11 ms·
Scroogled (2007)
- jcr 15y agoOf course, the potential (but improbable) implications of up-voting this story should not be lost on anyone.
- icebraining 15y agoOr reading it on a Google Chrome browser...
- Vivtek 15y agoD'oh! Might as well upvote, then - in for a penny, in for a pound.
- chrislomax 15y agoI didn't read the short story line at the top there, I actually thought this was a real account then. Coming from the UK none of this applies to the UK so I wouldn't have heard about this initiative if any of it was true. Good story and could quite easily be true
- simonw 15y agoYou can tell this is from 2007 because Google employees are obsessing about what Yahoo! are doing. Today, it would be Facebook.
- icebraining 15y agoOr because Google did move out of mainland China and stopped censoring searches in 2010.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoThis is an important reminder that events do not progress in a straight line.
- fuzzix 15y ago"This is an important reminder that events do not progress in a straight line" Yes, Google+ is the intermediate step in the all seeing "identity" service depicted in this story ;)
- roc 15y agoOr a reminder that sometimes symptoms are misidentified as causes. (Which is to say: Doctorow seems to have seen being in China as a big step on the way to relaxing "Don't be evil". But perhaps Google was only in China because it had already relaxed on "Don't be evil". And thus staying in China, or even going there initially, was relatively irrelevant to its corporate trajectory.)
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- mike-cardwell 15y agomike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s http://www.scroogle.org/doctorow.html|cat -n|grep -i yahoo 231 Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already..." 234 "No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn't the 331 "The government said they'd block us otherwise. And Yahoo was 333 Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the mike@Fuzzbutt:~$
- newsoundwave 15y agoCLowned. EDIT: It's supposed to be Command Line Owned, but I can't stop seeing "clown".
- jamesbritt 15y agoMaybe CL0wn3d? Hmm. Still seeing clown. :(
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- martinkallstrom 15y agoCLpwnd?
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- philwelch 15y agoAlso because it's Google that's evil, and not Facebook. Everyone worried about online privacy seems to have completely forgotten about Google since Facebook exploded.
- rickmb 15y agoOnly for values of "everybody" that don't include Europe.
- arethuza 15y agoThis story is also included in the excellent "With a Little Help" collection: http://craphound.com/walh/ http://craphound.com/walh/ The free audio versions of the stories are particularly good.
- user24 15y agoreminds me of the nine billion names of God: http://365tomorrows.com/09/12/the-nine-billion-names-of-god/ http://365tomorrows.com/09/12/the-nine-billion-names-of-god/
- adaml_623 15y agoMay I point out this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God Nothing to do with Google and I hope that all that are interested can find a copy of the original story which I remember quite well.... even though according to that wiki article it hasn't been republished in the last 45 years.
- gue5t 15y agohttp://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
- rmccue 15y agoI like the reference to China, considering Google recently backing out of there due to these sorts of reasons. Makes me wonder if they'd ever consider doing the same in one of their key markets, such as the US.
- icebraining 15y agoOf course, the irony of this being hosted on that site is that using Scroogle primarily would result on a suspiciously light Google profile, which would most definitively get yourself marked for further investigation. After all, that's the corollary to "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide".
- brokentone 15y agoIf 1984 were written today, I believe it would read a lot like this. However this one reads remarkably like reality. Good story Mr. Doctorow.
- dennisgorelik 15y agoReality? Since when have government started using information technology efficiently?
- angelbob 15y agoThey haven't. But they do leverage civilian companies who do - for instance, the credit bureaus routinely do what turns out to be police or intelligence surveillance, without specifically meaning to. If they could make Google do the same, they would.
- dennisgorelik 15y agoThe problem is that when government involves private company, the resulting quality of work deteriorates down to typical government work. One example is fraud prevention. Fraud hurts e-commerce badly, and the government would have been in great position to identify and prosecute fraudsters (fake credit cards etc.). But government agencies are so inefficient and lazy, that they even discourage sending fraud data to them. My biggest concern with government abuse of power in airports is not violation of privacy. It's travelers time and tax payers money wasted for nothing.
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoBrings to mind the line "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn't exist." Just because some govt institutions are notoriously bad at IT, doesn't mean that all are. And perhaps those capable, are more than content to let you think they aren't? There are some spooky mother effin agencies out there. Rickmb makes a good point as well. Also, I already thought Google had been involved in doing some work with the NSA? I'm too lazy to dig up the sources for it, but I'm pretty sure they're already in bed together. edit: my bad, this was in reply to dennisgorelik's comment
- gwern 15y agoThe suicide bit is cute. Indeed.
- kevinalexbrown 15y agoParticularly the bit about probable cause from statistical anomalies. Oh, we don't indiscriminately go through your records, unless you use TOR, in which case what are you hiding?
- notaddicted 15y agoI guess this is minor, but why does it say 1997 in the title? I can't find the year anywhere in the story or in these comments.
- pothibo 15y agoI couldn't help myself from drawing subtile comparison with 1984. And I loved it.