Google knows everything you search for and every link you click on from their search. Now they want to know every website, picture, and download…  every time, everywhere …

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster we’re launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

source: google blog

Sounds like they are being helpful, yeah ? NO! By becoming the DNS resolver, they get to know every URL you visit, every image you look at, every download you make, every email server you touch, every bank you do online business with, every everything, every time. I personally think that is just dangerous. Unless they disclose their data retention and usage policy for "Google DNS", I won’t even kick the tires.

I have tried and given up on Google’s Chromium based browser several times. The failing grade always has come from the same issue – creating stand-alone web applications from web sites. “BUT WAIT” you scream at your computer in hopes I will hear – “Chrome has web applications shortcuts built right it!” Fortunately, I do not hear you. However, I did some digging and found an answer – actually, I found something that let me search form something more which eventually helped me to create an answer.

Problem statement:

I create an application shortcut in with a Chromium based browser to Google Reader. I launch the new shortcut and login and tell it to save my password. I then launch a standard Chrome browser. But wait, it is logged in with my user and password from the Google Reader web application. I don’t want that ! I really don’t want it. What happens when I launch my GMail application shortcut ? I have a different user and password for my personal GMail account. Chrome is meant to have these all as separate processes. Why it it sharing all this stuff?

Solution:

Firefox with Prism solves this by creating separate profiles. It turns out, Chromium can do the same. All you do is go ahead and create the application shortcut. Next right click on the shortcut and edit the properties. Find the “target” that specifies the program and command line options and edit it to be something like the following:

“C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome.exe” –app=http://www.google.com/reader/view/ –user-data-dir=”..\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\User Data\GoogleReader”

For each web application shortcut, you will replace “GoogleReader” with an appropriate folder name.

The above is for Chrome v3. Depending on what version of the Chrome browser you are using, the root of the user-data-dir seems to vary. One website listed it as “..\User Data\<name>” but that placed my results in an odd place. If all else fails, you can do what I did and temporarily give it a unique name, run it once, and then search for wherever the directory gets created; then adjust the target to get it where you want. You don’t need to have it with other chrome profiles so you may want to create a separate area for your web application shortcuts.

With this little addition, I now have “web applications” for my Google Reader, Google Voice, GMail, my router’s control page, my NAS’s control page, my printer’s control page, ….. I guess you get the idea.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I don’t actually run Google Chrome. I use SRWare Iron – the more private build of Chrome !

I have been researching various lock solutions for exterior doors. The motivating factors are to make it easy for the right people to get in even when their hands may be partially full and be ADA compliant and require less than perfect dexterity.

Anyone who has followed my musings, knows that fingerprint readers are not for everyone. NPR’s Scott Simon gave an essay on the subject. Some of my family suffer from “light fingerprints” – which is estimated to be a problem for about 2% of the population. So, for the moment, a biometric fingerprint reader integrated into the locks was out of the question.

I will continue my search – looking at proximity readers, iButtons, and the sort. In the end, odds are high I will end up with your plain and basic keys.

Still, there was some humor in the research process. An Australian website selling home and office security had the included graphic on the home page of their online presence. I guess the Aussies know something about “security”.

I could kick myself if I were more limber … I spend 5 hours completely rebuilding my work machine today because I *thought* I had some security software gunking up the works. I was wrong, it was just Microsoft Windows being a PITA.

The problem:
Lotus Notes “Single Login” aka “Log in to Notes using your operating system login” aka “single sign-on” etc. is set but the password prompt always appears.

The clue:
You look in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer and you see an application error “Lotus Notes Single Logon” that reads; “Notes Single Logon will not function properly: No mapping between account names and security IDs was done.”

The solution:
Launch RegEdit and navigate key: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/NetworkProvider/Order” then edit the value (a string of comma delimited labels) and find the value “npnotes” and move this value in front of the “WebClient” value.

Please don’t ask me why this works. It just does … at least for me <sigh>

Doing sufficient backups, building virtual machines, and storing my transient video collection “on-line” requires storage, storage, and more storage. With three computers now getting sufficient backups to give me moderate peace of mind, I needed more storage than my RAID1 NAS (network addressable storage) was ready to serve. I had 2 750GB drives but RAID1 used those as mirrors so I only got the real capacity of one drive (and in reality, you never get 100% of a disk drive and so it was more like 700GB).

Today I added 2 more 750 GB drives. The system reconfigured itself for RAID5 so now I have 2 TB (yes, TB = terabytes). So, it should be a while before I run out of storage and more important, with RAID5 I have hot swappable storage – if any one disk drive should ever fail.

the down side now is there is no way I will ever have a fallback for the NAS. It has become a single point of failure if – unlikely as it may seem – the entire thing should bite the dust. (I truly hope that writing that was not asking for trouble.)

BTW: for those with slow-speed internet, I apologize for the 360KB image. I tried to make it smaller but it started at 2.7MB so I feel I did “OK” when all things are considered. For those asking “how”, all I can say is; “GIMP is one of the most amazing photo manipulation tools I have ever used – and I’ve used Photoshop and Photoshop Elements for years … and GIMP is free !

The following news scares me something wicked …

Google’s ambition to maximize the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

Eric Schmidt, Google?s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organize the world?s information. Source: FT.com / Companies / Media & Internet – Google?s goal: to organize your daily life

I love how useful and ubiquitous Google search is. But the more I learn of the personal data they are gathering the more I get nervous. *Now* they are coming right out and telling us it’s their goal to get everything there is to know about us stuffed into their data hungry servers. The risk for misuse it obvious the means of misuse are infinite.

Further, even if Google has no intention – and even develops guarantees – they will never misuse the data, they will become ever more attractive targets for corruption, espionage, and government subpoena.

Imagine Google’s desire to be able to tell you what job you should have. Now imagine an Orwellian scene where social manipulation steps in and starts identifying persona traits and gathering up people “who possibly could be violent” or even more subtle, just tweaks the “your best job would be …” to suggest reclusive or dangerous pursuits.

Imagine Google wants to target OTC medicines and holistic health options, spa resort packages, and other ads to the individual. Not realize that same data could be used by health care providers to deny coverage or place you in a high risk category with higher premiums. To get more subtle, you might find you emergency room wait getting longer when the admitting system tricked Google into thinking it was you and now they know you could be a costly and time consuming case – aka poor ROI !

These are simplistic and obvious examples. The list could go on and on. Universities could filter applicants under the guise of targeted marketing. Pyramid schemes to target susceptible elders. Terrorists could identify recruits. The list goes on and on.

So, even if you disagree with everything I’ve said. Even if you think I’ve seen conspiracy theory too many times, answer just one question …

“Do you want Google to have that much of your personal information ?”

If not, what are you doing to prevent it from happening ? … Because it *is* happening …