Google Buzz Class Action Settlement…

I just got an email from Google, which was bit strange because as the email says Google normally don’t contact their customers if they do It hasn’t happened to me after the the first welcome email I have gotten from them. Only other time I got an email when I got select to phone interview with Google for a Software Engineering position.

Anyway, Some Gmail users have filed a law suit against Google Buzz concerning its privacy. I thought entire point of Buzz is to be public and if you are so concern about it you should simply ignore the buzz and not participate in it. But I am also not happy how Google has been tapping into private data streams such as open networks while they capture street views. Just because you are the giant in the search industry you don’t get to do what ever you think. Remember great power comes with great responsibility.

Protected: Social Problem Tracking Tool

Google Voice expose voice mails for public search

Chill out, It’s not bad as it sounds. Yes, I freaked out when I first saw the news. I did the search and sure enough I saw plenty of voice messages freely available as search results. Not only that I was able play them and actually listen to a personal conversation. After few seconds I stopped playing messages simply because its wrong. But just confirmed if they were really voice messages. It only shows three pages worth of search results. If Google were to list all the Google voice mail messages it should well be beyond three pages of results. That tells me this sounds like a link of test.

I checked to see any of my voice messages are showing up on results page fortunately it didn’t, and this made me think twice continuing with the Google Voice account.

Google Voice Messages

Hosting Facebook Data Mining Project in Google Code

I have created a Google Code project to host our Facebook base Data Mining development. We will be checking in all the development starting from extraction to all the development of our mining concepts. The project name is data-extraction-facebook. Since this is a research project, only myself and Mark are allowed to do check-ins. All the development will be done by myself and Mark and Anjana will provide her weka knowledge to compare results that we get from our data mining implementation with Weka.

Google Flags its own site as “This site may harm your computer”

This is strange; Today around 9.15am I was searching something related to Facebook api for a project that I am currently working on but I realized that almost all my research results came flagged. All the results were flagged as “This site may harm your computer”. I was curious about it so I typed Google on the search box and guess what same result, Google was flagging its own site as “This site may harm your computer”.
If you don’t believe me check this out…

Objective::First phase of my research

Objectives
Main objectives of this research project are to implement Perl module to handle nick names as inputs and make suggestions for possible first names while attaching nick names with the matching last names to retrieve genealogical history of a given name, extend gen.pl along with additional modules to interface with http://www.ancestry.com to retrieve genealogical information related the names that are resolve by gel.pl module, add functionalities to handle combinations of errors such as misspelling, nicknames, mistakes during the census records and finally compare Soundex values of the return query and along with our implementation. The application will use gen.pl as its primary source and additional modules will use Perl as its primary language for implementation purpose.

gen.pl -> Pre-implementation by Dr. Bradley Rubin

Nicknames in America

As I started my research work on finding issues with Genealogical information, I ran into a problem that finding right nicknames using the internet. As I always do first thing I did was pound my research query in Google of course Google game me a hit (what do you expect its Google). The results that I found were fairly good and recognized. I found two main link one was publish from Connecticut and other was Genealogical Information related website. But my biggest concern was not about the links that I found, it was about from what date to what date these nick names were used. Simple example If your name is Richard as my host families name is, automatically your nick name is Dick but my questions was is it true to the modern day nicknames. How about if your name is Kevin, and modern day people use Kev instead of Kevin. But the nick name lists that I found on internet didn’t have modern day nicknames.