As you can see from my recent postings, the submission on Slashdot asking Has Google Lost Its Mojo? is no surprise to me. Here’s an interesting comment:
Speaking as a Googler, “some” is an understatement. The best and brightest have been exiting Google at the earliest for months, leaving behind the political climbers, backbiters and the just plain incompetent. Now Google mainly runs on interns, everybody else is too “smart” to do the grunt work like coding, debugging, or much at all beyond getting face time. The reason for this is simple: narcissistic managers whose main talent is claiming credit for the work of their subordinates while punishing anyone who shows initiative, and thus possibly could get promoted. These days at Google, showing skill and dedication is a great way to get a bad review from your manager. Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck. by Anonymous Coward
Bad PR always is a clear sign for upcoming problems. In this case, there are the privacy concerns about Google Street View:
Don’t expect privacy in your front yard, even if your house is located one mile down a private, dirt road. (PressDemocrat.com)
Also, Google is taking away free dinner. I mean, this is not the worst thing on earth, but still, bad PR, because you can see, that Google is not different from any other company, trying to increase its profits. Also, Google has serious spam problems with Gmail. Also, I noticed that Google Suggest is the default search now - that means, Google seems to care about cuil.com. And so on…
At a T.G.I.F. — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) [...] When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft. (New York Times)
I just wrote a small script to manage my mails… turns out that Zend_Mail uses some special trick that causes a fatal error:
Reading 3274 messages…
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 11534336) (tried to allocate 18446744073709551615 bytes) in /usr/share/php/libzend-framework-php/Zend/Mail/Storage/Mbox.php on line 198
That’s around 17179869183 TB of memory… to read 3274 mails… makes 5247363 TB per message… not bad 
I just found a wonderful articale by Nicholas Carr:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
“Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does”
My blog was a calm place for a while now, because I’m terribly busy with writing code (like it should be…). With this posting, I want to present the prototype of JavaScript Components, which are comparable to Swing Components in Java. They make use of the Composite Pattern. That means every Component can act as a container for other Components. Together with Models, Views and a Controller (Event Dispatcher), they can form reusable widgets. Other projects did work on similar things (for example jMaki Widgets), but from what I see, they target different audiences. The suggested Components use a client-side only approach. They are tested with JavaScriptMVC, but may be useful for other frameworks as well. jQuery is required for DOM operations.
There already is a LayersComponent, which implements a content stack. Any component can be added as a new layer and only the respective top layer is visible.
Please check out the demo application (download as ZIP).
If somebody ever said, there is no memory leak in Firefox, here’s the proof:
It can’t be, that a browser with 4 open tabs requires about 600 MB of memory. That’s 150 MB per Web site, which seems a bit too much
Safari, by the way, requires 128 MB for 5 open tabs.
If you find that Firefox’s memory usage continues to grow after long periods of being open, you may want to consider periodically restarting Firefox to bring the memory usage back to reasonable levels.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak
Hi,
We would like to let you know that we have updated our report to include the omitted details. You can read it at: http://ece.uprm.edu/~andre/insert/gmail.html
Also we have made our proof of concept available at: http://ece.uprm.edu/~andre/insert/gmail.tar.gz
Best Regards,
Pablo Ximenes
I love short mails with a clear message 
“Google’s chronic silence on all abuse reports makes it impossible to tell whether they’ve taken any action on the problem, whether the problem reports have even made it to the operational staff responsible for the mailservers, or whether they simply don’t care. I’m sure you can all make your own snarky comments re ‘Do no evil’.” (BugTraq)
Don’t forget: Google offers a fast paced and dynamic work environment *rofl*
I know that mail logs are not the most interesting thing on earth, but I’m not used to get spam from Google Mail… from Yahoo and MSN maybe, but not from Google… never ever… so I try to understand this:
May 20 21:43:16 mail postfix/smtpd[30948]: connect from qb-out-0506.google.com[72.14.204.235]
May 20 21:43:17 mail postfix/policyd-weight[2754]: weighted check: NOT_IN_SBL_XBL_SPAMHAUS=-1.5 NOT_IN_SPAMCOP=-1.5 NOT_IN_BL_NJABL=-1.5 CL_IP_EQ_HELO_IP=-2 (check from: .gmail. - helo: .qb-out-0506.google. - helo-domain: .google.) FROM/MX_MATCHES_HELO(DOMAIN)=-2 <client=72.14.204.235> <helo=qb-out-0506.google.com> <from=alexandrearw7@gmail.com> <to=michael@liquidbytes.net>, rate: -8.5
May 20 21:43:17 mail postfix/policyd-weight[2754]: decided action=PREPEND X-policyd-weight: NOT_IN_SBL_XBL_SPAMHAUS=-1.5 NOT_IN_SPAMCOP=-1.5 NOT_IN_BL_NJABL=-1.5 CL_IP_EQ_HELO_IP=-2 (check from: .gmail. - helo: .qb-out-0506.google. - helo-domain: .google.) FROM/MX_MATCHES_HELO(DOMAIN)=-2 <client=72.14.204.235> <helo=qb-out-0506.google.com> <from=alexandrearw7@gmail.com> <to=michael@liquidbytes.net>, rate: -8.5; delay: 0s
May 20 21:43:18 mail postfix/smtpd[30948]: 09CFB196802E: client=qb-out-0506.google.com[72.14.204.235]
May 20 21:43:49 mail postfix/smtpd[30948]: disconnect from qb-out-0506.google.com[72.14.204.235]
Yes, these servers belong to…
OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US
NetRange: 72.14.192.0 - 72.14.255.255
CIDR: 72.14.192.0/18
NetName: GOOGLE
Other people are getting tons of spam from Google as well as it seems.
See also: Exploiting Google MX servers as Open SMTP Relays
So why is that? Mmmh… because the cool and smart engineers at Google can’t handle their job:
We would like to clarify to the security community that we have contacted Google about the issue more than a week ago and no response was provided despite our clear intent of cooperation regarding this matter.
We have plans to submit a paper about our work on the trust hierarchy of email providers to the SBSEG’2008 over this weekend. Since the paper will necessarily include full details about the flaw, we see no point on withholding the full disclosure of our self-censored report.
We are still waiting to hear from Google and we sincerely hope that this flaw can be fixed before the full details about the problem are released. (Source)
This was 8 days ago. Hello? Somebody there!? I’m 99.99% sure that Google won’t answer to my spam report. They can’t even write a small mail to the team that found out how to use Google as open mail relay. Other large providers like T-Online are far more cooperative and they actually answer to your requests.
“We are Google. Resistance is a good idea, because: You will be spammed. We will add our spam mail to your mailbox. Your culture will have to learn how to adapt its spam filters.”
Now, you can share your sensitive information about the following with Google (I got the list from the authorization agreement on google.com):
- HIV or AIDS
- Mental illness or any mental health condition
- Alcohol or substance abuse
- Sexually transmitted diseases
- Pregnancy
- Abortion or other family planning
- Genetic tests or genetic diseases
Isn’t that exactly what we’re all after? I think I will add Alcohol, HIV and Pregnancy to my profile and see what happens *lol*
Maybe I can combine Google Health with Google Analytics and see if the visitors to my blog share the same “health condition”…
See also:
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/google-wants-your-medical-records-and-more
As people start asking me about that ODBTP adapter for Zend Framework, I will publish it as attachment to this post now. It should work with the latest version of Zend Framework (as reported by a developer). If you want to use it, just copy the files to your include path (make sure the path comes before the ZF path). Of course, you need to install ODBTP as well and add extension=php_odbtp_mssql.dll to your php.ini.
Download here
