Google turns over IP address to the FBI in a hurry

Watch out what you post on the Internet.  In the news regarding a Philadelphia man charged with threatening to kill House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his family (you can read it here), I wanted to point out how the Feds got their man.

Google, the owner of YouTube, provided the FBI with the IP address of the person who submitted the video and found it to be in Philadelphia.  The video that was uploaded by the guy threatened Rep. Cantor with violence and called him and his family “Lucifer’s abomination.”

While this does not seem surprising that Google with help the FBI catch such a loon, it is still noteworthy to point out how quickly Google tracked down the culprit and sent the information to the FBI.  The FBI downloaded the video on 3/26, and the culprit was arrested on the 3/27.

I’m reminded of the technology used to try and catch Will Smith in “Enemy of the State,” and how I thought that the technology back then was pretty scary.  Today, with Google’s help, Big Brother is a whole lot scarier.

Google Adwords Don’t Violate Trademark Law

An adviser to the European Court of Justice says the use of a competitor’s trademark as a keyword by companies advertising on Google doesn’t violate trademark law.

The issue is at the heart of the so-called adwords approach used by Google in selling ads on its search engine. Under this approach, a competitor can pay to make use of a company’s trademark as a search keyword, thus directing potential customers of that company to the competitor’s Internet ad.

“Google has not infringed trademark rights by allowing advertisers to buy keywords corresponding to registered trademarks,” says the opinion prepared for the French Cour de Cassation by Advocate General Poiares Maduro. However, using a competitor’s trademark in the content of the ad could still violate the law.

Read the rest of the article here, and here.

Google announces new Operating System

In an effort to compete with Microsoft, Google announced Tuesday night that it plans on releasing a new operating system for inexpensive computers.  The OS will be based on their recent web browser, Chrome.

The Chrome operating system will run in a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel – computer coding that has been the foundation for the open-source software movement for nearly two decades.

Google has already introduced an operating system for mobile devices, called Android, that vies against various other systems, including ones made by Microsoft and Apple Inc.

The Android system worked well enough to entice some computer makers to begin developing netbooks that will eventually run on it.

Google, though, apparently believes a Chrome-based system will be better suited for running applications in netbooks.

For a full report, see this article.