Google: the Court MUST reject the Motion

Though Google's voice to the DoJ motion: the Court MUST reject the Motion, the possiblity that it is about to face more subpoenas for search related informaiton is rising! Declan McCullagh's article published ZDNet News detailly analysed the situation:

Google may be about to face a second round of subpoenas for search-related information.

If the U.S. Justice Department is successful in obtaining a week's worth of search terms from Google, which it demanded as part of an attempt to defend a 1998 Internet pornography law, a second round of subpoenas is shaping up to be far more intrusive.

The American Civil Liberties Union warned Friday that if the first subpoena is granted--giving the government's expert the information to use to evaluate the effectiveness of porn filters--its legal assault on the same antipornography law will require it to target Google as well.

"If the government utilizes the information in any manner, we're very likely going to need to do follow-up discovery," ACLU attorney Aden Fine said.

A legal brief that the ACLU filed with a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., on Friday says its request would seek to learn how Google's search engines operate, how Google serves up links in response to queries, and whether there is "any way to distinguish between queries generated by actual individuals and queries generated by artificial programs or software."

The civil liberties group, which characterizes itself as a staunch defender of privacy, says it is not eager to expose details about Google's inner workings and the habits of its users. The ACLU says it has "no need or desire to obtain any of this information from Google." But, the group warns, if the government gets the information, it would have little choice.

The unexpected news of a second subpoena from the ACLU could complicate the Justice Department's attempt to convince U.S. District Judge James Ware to grant its request. Ware has scheduled a hearing on March 13.

The Justice Department is seeking a random sample of 1 million Web pages from Google's index, along with copies of a week's worth of search terms to aid in the defense of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo voluntarily complied with similar requests.

A spokesman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.

For its part, Google has raised the possibility of being enmeshed in the increasingly complex COPA lawsuit as a reason to oppose the subpoena. That would place Google "in the witness chair, and exposes Google's intellectual property to cross-examination in open court by the ACLU, its counsel, experts, and consultants," the company said in its own brief filed Friday.

AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo each have received two subpoenas from the Justice Department, one asking for information about filtering technology and the other asking for search terms. The ACLU has given AOL a subpoena to appear at a deposition "asking for testimony about their parental control technology," according to the ACLU's Fine.

The Justice Department has disclosed nothing about what it plans to do with the records from search firms, except to say it has hired Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, to evaluate the search logs.#

More:
Google Argues Against Subpoena
Google Stands Up Against Tyranny
Google rips Bush administration's search request
In Google We Trust
Google fights US government over search records
Google rejects Justice Dept. bid for search info
Google says no to data request

Technorati tags: Google, subpoena

Testimony Catering to China

Other than China, nobody knows so well about China. A vast courtry covering 9,600,000 square kilometers with 56 races and more than a population of 13,000,000,000 is cerntain to have the most complicate national conditions than any other countries in the world. Compared to the situations of many years ago, China has advanced so much though yet to develop in many aspects. The democracy of American's style will not be so appropriate to China and doomed to be abolished at least for the present, China has its own way! Government-to-Government Dialogue is a wise and good way manner to reach some agreements. It is sure that China finally will enjoy more freedom (including speech, internet access) than ever some years later. Now:

"It is normal for countries to manage the Internet in accordance with law and to guide its development in a healthy and orderly fashion,"Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said. "China has also borrowed and learned from the United States and other countries in the world." ABC News

Chinese people are now more keen to make money (maybe Google also :-P, 110 million Internet users not a temptation?) than to talk the polictics. So it's vital to keep China stable and developing healthy. Internet has bocome a part of Chinese life. Thus the well-known what Google.cn did is right. Google's testimony was also good, telling those US lawmakers what Google's belief-- add one more commitment (Be responsive to local conditions) to its two fundamental commitments: (1) To satisfy the interests of users, and by doing so to build a leading company in a highly competitive industry; and (2) Expanding access to information to anyone who wants it will make our world a better, more informed, and freer place!

Before the testimony held, Google's offical blog of China version: http://www.googlechinablog.com was launched named Google黑板报--

Blackboard Newspaper on Valentine's Day (Click here to see the story a Chinese Google Engineer' told of). Google's China team is shown in the below picture (from a Noogler = New googler).

Anti-Bird Flu Aircons Come out!

The Korea Times reports:

Actress Lee Young-ae takes a look at LG Electronics’ new air conditioner at Grand Hyatt Seoul, Thursday. Lee models for the company. / Newsis

LG Electronics, the world's leading air conditioner maker, said on Thursday that it will start selling air conditioners that prevent avian influenza with a special filter coated with a substance extracted from a fermented kimchi. The new air conditioners target Southeast Asian countries affected by bird flu and will be marketed this year.

The new products, nicknamed ``Anti-A.I. Aircon,'' have a filter covered with an anti-bacterial substance extracted from kimchi, South Korea's spicy fermented cabbage dish, the company said in a press conference.

``A special filter is coated with a substance called leuconostoc citreum, which is derived from kimchi. After tests, the filter was found to block viruses that causes bird flu,'' said Seo Seok-jang, chief of the company's air conditioner research lab, during the conference held at Grand Hyatt Hotel in central Seoul.

There have been a few reports that indicate kimchi and other fermented dishes could be effective in treating avian influenza on birds, as a Seoul National University team reported last year. However, there hasn't been no evidence of its effect on humans so far and there is no commercially available vaccine to protect humans against the bird flu yet.

Seo said that the company first designed the product two years ago, and is working to get patents for it. LG said the effect of the new air conditioner was certified by China Agricultural Scientific Academy, and a British research firm Estro Screen Virology is about to issue a certificate within this month. The two agencies were not available for comment.

During the news conference, LG also said it successfully maintained the top position in the household air conditioner market for sixth consecutive year by selling 10.5 million units in 2005. The global market was estimated to be 60.4 million and China's Haier followed LG at around 8 million units, the company said citing a report by Japan's Fuji Economics Research Institute.

LG said it will start operations at its new factory to be built in Poland from late this year, to increase the global production capacity from current 14.4 million to 16 million by 2007. Currently, it can produce 7.4 million units in overseas factories and 5.5 million in South Korea.

``Chinese makers have an edge in price, but most of their manufacturing facilities are located within China which means that they cannot handle rapid demand changes from different regions in the world,'' Lee Young-ha, CEO of LG's household appliance department said. ``As we increase the production capacities in our bases overseas, we will be able to meet the such rapid changes in demand, unlike the Chinese competitors.''

I think that LG's Anti-Bird Flu Aircons comes out timely, as now the influenza-horrific shadows never faded since the Bird Flu broke out in Southeas Asia ~ two year ago! Anyway such aircons will have provided one more protective manner to hinder flu virus to spread fast.

Technorati tags: Bird Flu,LG, Aircons

Photoshop Magic?

Boing Boing's The impossible photos of Li Wei post lets me track the origin of the picture posted there. The pictures feel so amusing even just at first glimpse but somewhat ridiculous later, some of them are displaying below. That's why Robyn Miller suggested Li Wei himself to have a look also. Is my comment left in his blog is right or reasonable? "Using the modern digital technologies plus the appropriate softwares (e.g. Photoshop, ACD 8.0), one can draws whatever kind of fantastic pictures he wanna!"

Update: The four pictures selected and posted here previously were directly uploaded using pictures' URL and now found not displayable (thus deleted from here). When checking the hosting website, I got only such notice:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /ART/liwei/PHOTO.htm/PHOTO0000.htm on this server.

My comment echoes a similar one in Robyn Miller's post: Are they Photoshoped?"

Live Office to Debut

Microsoft's Office Live is set to be launched by today for free while contemplating to release public versions of all three Office Live editions in late 2006. For those SME, Office Live is definitely smart choice! Digital Inspiration offers you some glimplses at this Office Live interfaces!

CNET News.com's Ina Fried wrote "Microsoft to launch Office Live beta", some excerpts:

Microsoft plans on Wednesday to kick off the test version of Office Live, the company's collection of Web hosting and business applications for small companies.

The company is targeting businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Although nearly nine in 10 such businesses have Web access, only about half have their own Web site, Microsoft says.

"That's a lot of small businesses without a Web site," said Dean Nicolls, senior product manager for Microsoft's information worker services group. In one sign of the demand, Nicolls said, more than 100,000 businesses have signed up for the test. All of those companies are being included in the test of Office Live, while additional companies can sign up on Microsoft's site. ....

Office Live Basics, the free entry-level service, offers small businesses their own Internet domain, 2GB of e-mail storage for up to five accounts, 30MB of storage for a Web site and up to 10GB per month of data transfer. Those who set up a site with Office Live Basics also get access to simple site analytics such as page views and which browser customers are using to visit the site. Office Live pages can be built using a variety of customizable templates, and no HTML experience is needed.

....Full Report!.......

Richard MacManus of ZDNet analysed:

Microsoft's web-based office product, called Office Live, is being released in beta today. Office Live will integrate with existing Microsoft Office products Jupiter analyst Joe Wilcox has the early word on the release. He firstly points out that Office Live is in no way "a hosted version of Microsoft Office". That's true, but personally I expect Microsoft (and probably Google) to eventually release a fully functional Web Office suite. It's just a matter of time. Note that it won't just be a replica of desktop office, because it'll need to be native to the Web. And I'm talking years not months, unless Google comes out with such a product sooner than expected (which is always a distinct possibility with Google). I'm going to write more on that subject in the near future, but for now let's focus on what IS in Office Live. Here are the main features:

• Basic e-mail and calendaring
• Collaboration functions (similar in nature to SharePoint Portal Server)
• Project management functionality
• Domain name and Web site ("security-enhanced and "affordably managed and maintained by Microsoft", according to the current Office Live homepage)
• Document management tools
• Customer relationship tools

.....Full Report!........

• 
  

Technorati tags: Microsoft,Office Live, Web 2.0