WTF happened to Google?

[Janet]

In Google news, the judge dismissed the suit against them by the Authors Guild. Even as a librarian, I have to say that a judge ruling that people having access to books is more important than author's rights is a bit much. If I were an author, I'd be pissed.

[lisarea]

VIDEO: Google employee shouts down protesters as they block private Google shuttle

[Ari]

Sadly it turns out to be staged.
Which makes sense as the bus has high speed wireless, most employees do work on the bus while heading to the office.
Edit to add: Since it's not quite apparent what they are protesting. It's a combination of rising rent prices, questionable eviction practices and Google buses using public transit stops illegally without paying the city.

[lisarea]

Holy crap. How did they even think they would get away with that? They have a totally valid point and then they go acting like manipulative douches, which is going to draw attention away from what they're trying to say.

[Ari]

I know right!?
My guess is they wanted an angry person to get people's frozen knickers in a twist and realized no one on a bus that allows you to finish your project in between games of candy crush, with promises of gourmet lunch in the near future doesn't make for angry or unhappy people.
I know multiple employees who do like 50% of their work while riding too and from on the bus.

[lisarea]

This is actually pretty great:

The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended - The Awl

[erimir]

Psh, Panda is old news. We knew two years ago not to go around spamming comment sections.

The new thing was sending bloggers (usually mom blogs) free merchandise, possibly some cash, and getting them to put up reviews (which are curiously always positive) about your client's products.

Of course, I recall us having to email some of these bloggers asking them to remove or NoFollow previously bought links.

I have a feeling that even those lazy tactics of the past won't be working anymore, and these SEO places will realize that paying people $8/hr to crawl the web for spammy links won't work anymore. Maybe they'll need to hire people to do actual work and pay them accordingly.

[BrotherMan]

DEAR GOOGLE.

YOU CAN'T IGNORE OR DISMISS ME.

I'm looking at things on the Google Maps and I see a place that's marked wrong. I see that Google has helpfully provided a method for telling them when something is mislabeled. This isn't the first time I've had to click on something and tell Google they got it wrong. But this is the first time Google replied telling me they don't care.

HEY GOOGLE. LOOK AT YOUR OWN PICTURES TAKEN WITH YOUR OWN DUMB CAR AND YOU WILL SEE I AM RIGHT. THE FOOD PLACE YOU MARKED ON YOUR DUMB MAP IS NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF A DUMB MOTEL, IT'S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET, BURIED DEEP INSIDE THE STRIP MALL.

SIGNED HARRUMPHALLY,
BORT

[lisarea]

I am not even making this up: Just the other day, I was looking for this one kebab place on Google Maps, and it was all like, "Yeah, here it is, in this ditch."

The difference between you and me, though, is that I figure that's Google's problem and I'm not going to do their 'crowdsourcing' for them. If they ever ask me, I'll be like, "Yes, that is correct. I've totally been to that ditch restaurant."

ETA: AND YOU CAN TELL THEM I SAID SO, ENSIGN STEVE.

[Ensign Steve]

One time I did the feedback on the One Box and I was like "nope, that totally isn't a tv show" except it turned out it was and I was like lolz my bad.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

HEY GOOGLE. LOOK AT YOUR OWN PICTURES TAKEN WITH YOUR OWN DUMB CAR AND YOU WILL SEE I AM RIGHT. THE FOOD PLACE YOU MARKED ON YOUR DUMB MAP IS NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF A DUMB MOTEL, IT'S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET, BURIED DEEP INSIDE THE STRIP MALL.

SIGNED HARRUMPHALLY,
BORT

HARRUMPHALLY - Google Search

[LadyShea]

I cannot seem to access my saved maps on the Google Maps iPhone app. Is it me being stupid or are My Maps not available on the go?

[ShottleBop]

Discovered just now that if you have Google Now installed on your phone, it can't really tell the difference between "Okay, Google!" and "Okay, cool!"

[Ensign Steve]

That's cuz Google is cool!

[specious_reasons]

So, most of Google is not working very well for me today, including Google Plus (don't judge). I don't think it's my PC or my network, because most other sites seem to be working OK, including this one.

So, I try to submit feedback, and naturally the feedback submission failed.

Ironically, I was learning about Site Reliability Engineers while this is happening.

[JoeP]

Gmail returned invalid certificate issuer errors last night for Little Miss JoeP, but was fine for me (on different OSes). Other big-G sites were OK.

[specious_reasons]

It probably wasn't Google, it was probably my own network. Some thing are still squirrelly, so it's making work harder.

[LadyShea]

Well I just right this second learned that Google is allowing Google+ pages and YouTube channels using something other than your real name. Seriously I almost beat up YouTube because it kept asking me why I didn't want to use my real name, why I wanted to keep a grandfathered in alias, could I please just use my real name...I was like "Have you actually seen YouTube? You want me to let those evil hordes know my real name?"

Same thing with Google+...there's cool things to be done there, but having my name on Facebook and trying to keep up with the privacy issues there is bad enough. Google is even more everything.

Anyway ES we had talked about this from a safety and privacy aspect, and if you had anything to do with it being changed...good job!

[LadyShea]

There was even buzz about it that I totally missed. I found it by accidental today! Why didn't ES tell us?

Google Plus finally ditches its ineffective, dangerous real-name policy.

[Corona688]

Too bad people alread have two or three google, gmail, blogger, and/or youtube accounts in states of mixed partial connectedness and brokenness from having this stuff crammed down their throats. Too bad it ties relevant ads to you between linked accounts no matter what the name. Too bad it took real, physical danger to make google understand the point of "it's not nice for everyone to know everything about me, everywhere, all the time because not everyone in the universe deserves to do so".

Too bad it took three years for them to acknowledge (they must have known, just not cared) flaws any third-grader could point out.

Too little, too late for the millions of people it forced to make accounts already.

[LadyShea]

Agreed.

[Ari]

I don't know what finally got the change through but there were multiple activists and trans google employees that have been arguing against it from the beginning. Even the people that wrote the original "this is our new policy" were partly against it. The original policy came from high up in both google and the rich white privileged 'why should it matter' spectrum.

I like the theory behind real names but the forced aspect was a problem, I have hope that there will be a social drive to not take people with random handles (vs clear aliases) as seriously so we can have the best of each.

While I can't say much more, I do know that thanks to things like PRISM Google has spent effort to delink certain profiles and names from others, maybe in the future we will get the ability to control for ourselves how our stuff is linked.

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by Ari

I don't know what finally got the change through but there were multiple activists and trans google employees that have been arguing against it from the beginning. Even the people that wrote the original "this is our new policy" were partly against it. The original policy came from high up in both google and the rich white privileged 'why should it matter' spectrum.

I guess that's what's "happened to google". It's no longer a rogue band of developers, there is now a "higher up" which can force its developers to do things things contrary to common sense.

[ceptimus]

My Nexus 7 was updated to the latest lollipop version of Android and now it runs as fast as a snail. Make that a snail loaded down with a heavy bag of shopping.

I didn't particularly want to upgrade the damn thing anyway - I just did it in response to the nagging over-the-air "upgrade now?" prompt. Apparently there's no really simple way to revert it back to how it was before (that is, usable) without re-installing all my apps, settings and data.

Perhaps this is just Google's way of trying to get me to buy a newer faster tablet - but I'm not about to do that - I'll get some other brand of tablet first if this is the way Google is going to test its software roll-outs in future.

[Janet]

I forgot we had a thread to bitch about Google. So, despite sending in a report pointing out that their own photo of my house showed the address was different from what their maps showed, they haven't fixed it. So I still have to field calls every damn time I order a pizza because the driver's phone wants to send him to the wrong address.