Google Responds To Breaches By Employees

Giant Google made a mistake a little while ago, acknowledged the mistake and the management maturely apologized for its mistake. Ironically, while some countries have asserted the company's act was illegal, Google has maintained that it didn't break any laws.

What really happened?

In May, one of Google's engineers had created a program that vacuumed up potentially sensitive personal information, including e-mails and passwords, from unsecure wireless networks while Google cars cruised neighborhoods around the world. The cruise was primarily for Google's online mapping service. But they, reportedly, also carried an equipment to log the location of Wi-Fi networks.

According to a report by Canada Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart late last month, the incident was caused by: "an engineer's careless error as well as lack of controls to ensure that necessary procedures to protest privacy were followed."

Consequently, the leading search engine is tightening its privacy leash on employees in an effort to ensure that they don't intrude on people while Google collects and stores information about its users.

How? According to a report by Yahoo, Google said that it will require all 23,000 of its employees to undergo privacy training. The company is also introducing more checks aimed at making sure workers are obeying the rules.

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"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefits of all our users."

Alan Eustace, Google head engineer.

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Scams Vs E-Learning

I really appreciate the benefits that the Internet has brought along. Most importantly, I really applaud the promotion of education. For instance, classes are being administered online these days; Wikipedia and its sister encyclopedias offer free references to everything; we have sites providing free tutorials such as the w3school; which offers free tutorials on the markup and scripting languages; and, we also have free e-books.

These days, it is common for people to choose a relevant virtual academy, fill in electronic forms, pay some dollars in the registration process, take an exam, await the results, and finally, receive a well earned certificate.

On the other hand, what if these certificates are fake? What if these online academies do not comply with the regulations? What if this whole thing happens to be just but another Internet scam?

Yahoo reported, late last week but one, that the Texas Attorney General's office is suing 3 online home schools. To quote the report:
"A State district judge in El Paso granted a temporary retaining order on Thursday to close the Advent Harvest Academy schools run by Teri Tout-Dennis and Mike Martin of Tarrant county."
"The AG's suit accuses the men of unlawfully marketing fake high school diplomas to people who paid $225 to enroll in their uncredited program and take a test."

According to Yahoo, a temporary injunction hearing will be held this Nov, on 4^th.

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Some cool educational links:

• Reference: Wikipedia.
• Free Tutorials: w3school, A+ Certification, N+ Certification...
• Free e-books: free-ebooks.net

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3 Characteristics Of Information That Online Publishers And Marketers Should Pay Attention To - Richness

Previously... parent post.

1. Reach.

2. Richness.
This refers to the content itself. Marketers, as the experts say it, can achieve this by making rich information available about their products. For publishers, this can be a little more complicated. But not as complicated as I make it sound.

Since publishers focus on maintaining existing readers and attracting new ones, a lot more work needs to be done to achieve rich content. From the experts mouth, this are arguably:

• Deep content - this is where you base your content on a topic that you have a deep knowledge.
• Diverse content - this is where you provide a variety of content on your site.
• A gift to the community - this is where you add something unique to your site that is intended to enrich the entire Internet, i.e. a service, a tool, or a combination of both.
• Own voice - this is by simply being distinctive. Having a distinct voice.

3. Affiliation.

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"Viewing a web site is like looking at a painting through a magnifying glass: a visitor never has more than a small view of the entire thing. Without a special assistance, it's a challenge for visitors to discover what has changed on a site since their last visit."

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