I don’t know Amal Jaraisy – in fact, I don’t know anything about her lawsuit against Google Israel other than what was written on several websites – but I do know that she has zero chance of getting her lawsuit certified. According to news reports, Jaraisy, a resident of Nazareth, is suing Google in an Israeli court for enrolling her in Google Buzz without her permission, and revealing information she wanted to keep private. Buzz apparently chooses users for you to follow, a la Facebook, and publicly displays the names of those you are following – based on your private Gmail correspondence, so everyone knows the people you’ve been e-mailing back and forth with – even if you’d rather keep that relationship private.
However, it is highly doubtful that a lawsuit against Google would go anywhere, since there are so many provisos and “outs” in the terms of service all users agree to when they sign up for a service. Regarding the use of Gmail contacts for a purpose other than email. A quick scan of the Gmail TOS, like all TOSes, basically gives Google the right to add, subtract, or otherwise alter the services it provides or doesn’t. One relevant line in the TOS is in paragraph 4.2, which reads: “Google is constantly innovating in order to provide the best possible experience for its users. You acknowledge and agree that the form and nature of the Services which Google provides may change from time to time without prior notice to you.”
Ms. Jaraisy is an intelligent young woman – here Facebook page says she attended the Technion, Israel’s top science school. One could assume she knows her way around a computer, and a TOS. So why is she bringing the lawsuit? And why is the first Google Buzz lawsuit being brought in an Israeli court? Wouldn’t it make more sense to sue in a California court, where Google is headquartered? After all, the Israeli office does not operate as an independent entity, and Google’s facilities in Israel are dedicate to research and development, not management.
I have some ideas on what the motivation here might be, but I need more information – and as soon as I find what I’m looking for (which I’m pretty sure is out there) I’ll let you know.
There’s only so much you can put in a newspaper article (like the one I wrote on Google’s ‘courageous’ stance on China’s human rights offenses), I find – I’m often forced to leave out the juiciest nuggets. Like this week, when I wrote about how Google, so courageous when it pursues China for hacking into its accounts, somehow loses its nerves when it comes to net abuses in the Arab countries.
As my article points out, the Arab countries are far more obsessive in their censorship of web usage – and far more vengeful against those who violate the rules. Offenders who post information that displeases the various dictatorships they live in run the risk of jail time (think “Midnight Express” prison, not the Allenwood federal pen) – or worse, like torture. Is China any better? No; it’s just as repressive a society. But at least China strives to improve material living standards for its billions of citizens – unlike most Arab countries, where residents are expected to toil without complaint, making the barons and sheikhs who run their countries richer.
If Google had pinned its decision to “reconsider” doing business in China on Beijing’s oppression against human right activists – a claim that rings very hollow, given the company’s lack of backbone on Arab country’s rights abuses. Google’s complaints would be a lot more believable if they pinned their complaints on China’s industrial espionage or some other business motive. But human rights abuses? That claim only opens Google up to charges of hypocrisy.
Not that you can blame them for not wanting to start up with the Muslim world, given its reactions to images and words that “offend” Islam. No doubt they would say that they don’t want to “offend” the “culture” of the countries gracious enough to host their search engines and services. But the company has no problem taking on the “yellow peril.” Meaning that Google is more afraid of the Arabs than the Chinese – clear proof that the Chinese have a far lighter touch than the Arabs, imho.
And here, it seems to me, is the definitive proof: There is only one image in the world that Google Earth displays in a different format than anywhere else. The entire world as rendered by GE shows hills and dales, lakes and rivers, buildings, houses and cars. From an aerial view, you can look down and see the actual topography of the world – natural and man-made. Except for one spot: The Ka’aba, the center of Muslim worship, in Mecca. According to the Google Sightseeing blog post for this photo, the photo used is a Digitalglobe satellite photo, the only one used on GE. Why?
It took me awhile to figure out, since there doesn’t seem to be a ban on photographing or taking video of the place (you can watch Muslims praying there five times a day on many satellite TV stations in the Arab world). But then I saw the following on this web site, discussing the direction Muslims must bow when they pray: “As one is not permitted to take a GPS reading from on top or inside the Kaaba, an estimate must be made from various positions around the Kaaba.” That photo may have been taken by a Digitalglobe satellite, but it looks suspiciously like a pencil drawing (as you can see from the photo below; note the contrast with the buildings to the south) – something Google decided to put in out of “respect” to Islam, which probably would have frowned on (or, more likely, “strenuously” protested) inclusion of an aerial photo of the Kaaba in GE. Can’t say I blame Google for wanting to avoid trouble. But at least they could drop the pretense of standing up for “morality” when it comes to China.
Yes, the iPhone is coming to Israel, but I wouldn’t get too excited – unless you like overpaying and getting stuck with what’s probably going to be a whopper of a voice/data plan. If I know the Israeli phone companies, customers who buy the iPhone from the carriers – Orange Israel (Partner Communications) and Pelephone – are going to be paying… and paying… and paying some more!
How do I know? Because that’s just the way things work here. Israeli cell phone companies don’t give out any free lunches – or free phones. Unlike in America, where they give you a phone for nothing (or for a very nominal cost) when you sign up for a plan. Here, you have to buy the phone, for full price – and then some!
Yes, you can pay it off in 36 payments, at NIS 29 a month. So what. Even over three years at 21% interest, with minimum monthly payments, it comes out a little cheaper buying it from Amazon!
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that this phone is an OLD phone (old in “cellphone age,” that is). It was announced almost a year ago and went on sale last fall (2008). That’s why it’s marked down at Amazon from its $319.99 original price (the original Orange price was correspondingly higher, too). Here, Orange isn’t selling this phone unlocked; it expects you to use it for the next three years, and is treating it like a premium/top of the technology product! Not that there’s anything wrong with this Sony model (we have several Sony phones and they’ve all been great). But why do we have to pay top shekel for older phones that they’re giving away for nothing in the U.S.? Correction – they’re not even giving away that phone anymore; it’s too old! The phones they’re giving away are phones like the Blackberry Curve 8900, the LG CU920, and the Samsung i637. Just for signing up for a plan!
So how much do you think they’re going to want for the latest top of the line iPhone? Answer: It doesn’t matter. Given the history of phone costs in Israel, I predict that regardless of what they decide to charge (note that iDigital, the Israel Apple reseller – which is NOT an Apple Store – is buying the phones from Apple and reselling them), it will be cheaper to spend the $100 on the iPhone in the States, sign up for a month of AT&T service and then pay the cancellation fee ($175) plus other various and sundry costs!
P.S.: There’s much more to say about taking the cell phone service providers taking top shekel for outmoded cellphones; the biggest scam has to be how the companies bought up old analog cellphones for pennies, rebranded them, and sold them for ridiculous amounts of money to Haredim as “kosher” phones. But that’s for another post!
Thanks to the internet, we can share our most intimate ideas and thoughts with people all over the world. With Twitter, the privilege of getting thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to check out what you think is important in life is accelerated and democratized even further, since you don’t even have to bother with a blog if you want to reach “your public.” In a sense, we’re all celebrities now – just like Tom Wolfe predicted forty years ago, in the midst of the “Me Decade.”
That term, so closely associated with the 1970s, came from the name of an article Wolfe wrote for New York Magazine (it’s a great story, and if you’ve never read it, click on the link!). The article investigated some of the (then) new phenomena that really took hold during that decade – things like religious and secular cults, the sexual revolution, huge divorce rates, and the first stirrings of Christian “Moral Majority” style politics. Wolfe traces these developments to the Sixties, but by the mid-Seventies, they were part of the mainstream, no longer reserved for the hippies.
Americans have always been rugged individualists, and during the Seventies, Wolfe says, they took that individualism and combined it with the money they earned during the (then) “Thirty Year Boom” after World War II to start engaging in activities previously reserved only for the rich and powerful – namely,
“remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes.”
In other words, all Americans could now become part of that class of aristocrats who could see
“my life becoming a drama with universal significance . . . analyzed, like Hamlet’s, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind.”
Wolfe called the new attitude to “Me” the “Third Great Awakening,” comparing it to previous religious movements that changed the face of the world. The “liberation of the self” was a kind of religious movement – it was the liberation of the repressed who for so long had been treated like “the proletariat” by their self-proclaimed social betters. Now, everyone was important, said Wolfe – it was the logical end-product of democracy.
At the end of the article, Wolfe asks:
“Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own.”
A great question, at the time, and Wolfe’s article was one of the most influential in the late seventies (at least two professors in my college had us do assignments on it!). But it’s now been forty years since that article was written, and the results of the Me-based Third Great Awakening can now be analyzed.
Most social analysts agree that the internet is the most democratic vehicle for expression in human history. For better or worse, anyone can proclaim him/herself an expert on anything – whether or not they have a graduate degree or years of experience in a field. Of course, if you want people to take you seriously, it helps to have the credentials.
But short of declaring myself a medical doctor or lawyer (or other government-licensed professional), I can pretty much brand myself any way I want. And thanks to blogs, Google (thanks to which we have SEO and can theoretically be seen by hundreds of millions) – and especially thanks to Twitter, I can believe and say anything I want about myself, and broadcast my “Me-ness” to tens of thousands, or even millions. There are so many “marketing experts” out there who claim to have “the secret” to making millions on-line, and maybe they do. But a world (and a platform, like Twitter), where everyone is an expert can only be possible in a world after the Me Decade.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it! I remember a discussion on a Quark xPress newsgroup from about ten years ago, where one of the posters once mourning the “lower quality” of publishing as a result of DTP. In the old days, the guy said, you had to be an “expert” – using the hot type, setting up the plates, etc. Now, any kid could make their own newspaper or magazine, and it was ruining business! As one of those “DTP kids,” I felt bad for this gentleman, who was obviously losing out in what had become an outmoded, dinosaur business. But why shouldn’t I have an opportunity to have my say if the technology allows it?
If there’s anything Twitter proves, it’s that there’s room at the top for everyone. Just like anyone could be an expert on DTP or marketing, and everyone can have their own blog, Twitter lets everyone take advantage of technology to market or brand themselves any way they want. The ability to be who YOU want – and to get others to take it seriously – is the ultimate end-product of the Me Decade, and Twitter is the tool that makes it happen!
Do you know how Google PageRank works? Lots of people out there believe they do – many of them have made turned that understanding into a career, working in SEO to get their clients on the all-important first results page. You can have talmudical-level discussion with some of these people; no question that they know their stuff. Some have even gone on the lecture circuit or written books on how PageRank works.
But can they explain how it works in three minutes or less? Probably not – no, make that definitely not, if the websites of many of these experts are any indication. “What kind of question is that,” I hear an insulted SEO expert saying; “Nobody could explain such a complicated technology in three minutes or less!”
Oh yes they can – and they (or rather he) did just that last week, during the finals of the Israel Famelab contest, a part of the British Famelab, established five years ago in Britain, and expanded to several other countries, including Israel, two years ago. Famelab is a contest designed for graduate students and researchers to “help discover the new faces of science.” According to the rules, the candidate must take an interesting (and complicated) scientific topic, and explain it to a panel of judges in just three minutes (!) in their native language. The winners get a laptop and a free trip to England, where they are honored at the Chelthenham Science Festival.
The PageRank presentation was made by Ohad Barzilai, a candidate for a doctoral degree in computer science at Tel Aviv University. Here’s a rough translation of the highlights of how he explained PageRank (original Hebrew here)
“With PageRank, Google lets the internet make its own popularity standings. The standings are determined by links and connections between sites. The sites with the most links get the highest rankings.”
Okay, even the judges knew that part! But Barzilai goes into the gory details; Google’s bots, crawling around the net, mine the data for links and connections, and builds a database over 20 billion lines long (!), with all the link data between sites correlated. But once that’s done, Google then has to determine the quality of those links:
“Here’s an example: You are an employer interviewing two potential employees. One brings with him ten letters of recommendation, and the other brings only one. But that one was written by Bill Gates. Who would you hire, based on that information? Clearly the letter with Gates’ nod is more valuable. When someone giving a recommendation has an important reputation of his own, we give those recommendations more value. But what if you discovered that Gates’ had written 10,000 such letters? Would you still value his recommendation as you did before? Most likely not; as a person gives out more and more recommendations, those recommendations are worth less.
“That is exactly how PageRank works. Google has discovered an amazing thing: If they apply a mathematical equation called a diagonal lemma to the big list of link results, they are able to get a picture of the importance of the links and the sites themselves. The astounding thing is that Google has discovered, using linear algebra, to mathematically quantify the intuitive standings of popularity and relevance. It’s all done automatically without human intervention. This is what Google does, and they do it better than anyone else in the world does today.
Not bad for three minutes! PageRank a very complicated subject, as you can see from here, a college level course that spends a semester discussing it! Making sense out of PageRank in just three minutes is truly an accomplishment. By the way, Barzilai only came in second place for this – the winner discussed memory and face recognition! Some people fear that Israel’s educational system isn’t doing the job when it comes to training students for science and hi-tech. Looks like they just might be wrong!
Not to sound racist, but there’s no way a person raised in a Western country can’t feel some consternation when a person of clearly Arabic background gets on a plane. 9/11 was just too much of a shock to the system, and it’s impossible not to do some personal profiling, even if you try not to.
The same applies to Arabic text. If you’re from the United States or Israel (and probably lots of other countries) it’s impossible not to look at a page of Arabic writing and not get “nervous” – as in, “it must be some anti-Israel/anti-Jewish/pro-terrorist screed.” We’ve come to expect it, especially in Israel. And if you live in an area where there is lots of Arabic on the radio (such as Israel), you get the same suspicions listening to broadcasts of speakers who are dramatically intoning – something.
Other than learning to understand Arabic, there’s little you can do about the audio “threat” (one of my daughters more or less taught herself Arabic, so she can make out what goes on in these broadcasts). But for the rest of us who are too lazy/uninterested/incapable of learning a new language at this point in our lives, there’s Google Translations. There are lots of reasons not to like Google (like the people here say), but one amazing thing Google has done, imho, is Google Translate, where you can paste in text or URLs and get them automatically translated between dozens of languages – like English, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and of course the more “pedestrian” languages like Italian and French (no offense meant!).
Google Translate has helped me out numerous times – including just this afternoon, as I was writing a feature story on Israeli boxing. As part of the story, I wanted to mention the tragic death of a former Israeli Golden Gloves champ, Karim Nayif Bathish, who was killed a couple of weeks ago in an auto accident. I really wanted a picture of Bathish, but couldn’t find one anywhere – on the English and Hebrew sites, that is. Then I got the bright idea to Google Bathtish’s name in Arabic, seeking out articles about him on Israeli websites in Arabic. As a local hero in Nazareth and Haifa, you’d figure there would be a couple of articles. And indeed there were – complete with picture. The articles were quite factual, and the talkbacks were all what you would expect (mourning for the victim, etc.).
This isn’t the first time I’ve used Google Translate to research an article on Arabic language websites – I actually wrote an article in the JPost about it last year. And of course, I can’t help but check out other stories than the ones I was searching for on these sites. Let’s just say that while some fill the post-9/11 stereotype, most don’t. Believe it or not, “they” are not as obsessed with us as we think they are!
The thrust of my boxing article is how the organization tries to promote co-existence (most of the boxers are Arab or Russian kids). The director of the organization, Dr. Shahade, told me than in 20 years of running the Israel Boxing Association, there hasn’t been one ethnic/religious fight among the boxers! That’s great for kids who are in shape enough to box – but how can the rest of us avoid tension? Maybe Google Translate is the arena for us!
Before anyone gets too panicky about swine flu, make sure you check with the experts. Not the CDC or your doctor; as everyone knows, Google is the real expert on everything, including flu. And according to the Google Flu Trends site, the risk of flu is low – nearly minimal. “Current estimates of flu activity are still generally low across the United States, as is expected given the confirmed swine flu case count,” say Google.
And how did Google get to be such an expert on flu – and other – trends? By working with great developers right here in Israel! Google has two development centers in Israel – in Tel Aviv and Haifa – which shows how much Google values Israeli development (there are only a couple of countries around the world – MUCH bigger than Israel! – that have more than one development center).
Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness.
But it turns out that Google has been not only using made in Israel tech – its whole identity could be considered to have been created here, according to this article in Haaretz. Artist Ruth Kedar designed the famous Google logo ten years ago while she was at Stanford in California. According to Kedar, the logo’s simple look is deceptive, hiding its complex layers. Quoting her, the article says:
Someone who sees the logo for the first time doesn’t necessarily need to absorb all the layers and considerations behind every decision – it’s better for him to discover something new every time. It somewhat amuses me to turn on the computer and look at the logo I designed. But it also fills me with pride. When you say Google to people today, they immediately see the colorful logo.”
Israel is the world leader in hi-tech innovations. So many of the internet, cellphone, and gadget inventions that make our lives easier and more fun are born right here in Israel! Get the inside track on the newest ideas and innovations in our bi-weekly Digital Israel Newsletter. Sign up right here!
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