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Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-22/now-apps-can-track-you-even-after-you-uninstall-them, posted 25 Oct by peter in android apple google mobile privacy
Uninstall tracking exploits a core element of Apple Inc.’s and Google’s mobile operating systems: push notifications. Developers have always been able to use so-called silent push notifications to ping installed apps at regular intervals without alerting the user—to refresh an inbox or social media feed while the app is running in the background, for example. But if the app doesn’t ping the developer back, the app is logged as uninstalled, and the uninstall tracking tools add those changes to the file associated with the given mobile device’s unique advertising ID, details that make it easy to identify just who’s holding the phone and advertise the app to them wherever they go.
The tools violate Apple and Google policies against using silent push notifications to build advertising audiences, says Alex Austin, CEO of Branch Metrics Inc., which makes software for developers but chose not to create an uninstall tracker. “It’s just generally sketchy to track people around the internet after they’ve opted out of using your product,” he says, adding that he expects Apple and Google to crack down on the practice soon. Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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How Google and Microsoft made E-mail Unreliable
https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/, posted Jul '18 by peter in communication crapification email google microsoft opinion
E-mail was once the pillar of the Internet as a truly distributed, standards-based and non-centralized means to communication with people across the planet. Today, an increasing number of services people rely on are losing federation and interoperability by companies who need to keep people engaged on their for-profit services. Much of the Internetâs communication is moving to these walled gardens, leaving those who want to run their own services in an increasingly hostile communication landscape.
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Why Google's CardDAV server isn't
https://evertpot.com/google-carddav-issues/, posted Feb '18 by peter in calendar crapification google opinion sync
The fact that Google advertises their servers as supporting CardDAV is an insult to anyone who does try to be standards compliant.
The Google CardDAV server has similarities to what we call CardDAV. For very simple, controlled stuff, it may be possible to pretend it is.
For anything advanced, avoid it at all cost.
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Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository | July 2016 | Communications of the ACM
cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext, posted 2016 by peter in development google management toread versioncontrol
This article outlines the scale of that codebase and details Google's custom-built monolithic source repository and the reasons the model was chosen. Google uses a homegrown version-control system to host one large codebase visible to, and used by, most of the software developers in the company. This centralized system is the foundation of many of Google's developer workflows. Here, we provide background on the systems and workflows that make feasible managing and working productively with such a large repository. We explain Google's "trunk-based development" strategy and the support systems that structure workflow and keep Google's codebase healthy, including software for static analysis, code cleanup, and streamlined code review.
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Development at the Speed and Scale of Google
www.infoq.com/presentations/Development-at-Google, posted 2015 by peter in continuousdelivery development google management toread versioncontrol video
Ashish Kumar presents how Google manages to keep the source code of all its projects, over 2000, in a single code trunk containing hundreds of millions of code lines, with more than 5,000 developers accessing the same repository.
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Why Google wants to replace Gmail | Computerworld
www.computerworld.com/article/2838775/why-google-wants-to-replace-gmail.html, posted 2014 by peter in business crapification email google social
Gmail represents a dying class of products that, like Google Reader, puts control in the hands of users, not signal-harvesting algorithms.
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Volatile and Decentralized: Rewriting a large production system in Go
matt-welsh.blogspot.se/2013/08/rewriting-large-production-system-in-go.html, posted 2013 by peter in development golang google toread
My team at Google is wrapping up an effort to rewrite a large production system (almost) entirely in Go. I say "almost" because one component of the system -- a library for transcoding between image formats -- works perfectly well in C++, so we decided to leave it as-is. But the rest of the system is 100% Go, not just wrappers to existing modules in C++ or another language. It's been a fun experience and I thought I'd share some lessons learned.
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Why Google Is Not A Search Engine But An Investigative News Agency, And Why That Matters - Falkvinge on Infopolicy
falkvinge.net/2013/05/30/why-google-is-not-a-search-engine-but-an-investigative-news-agency-and-why-that-matters/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Falkvinge-on-Infopolicy+%28Falkvinge+on+Infopolicy%29, posted 2013 by peter in copyright crapification dinosaurism google media opinion politics
When the copyright industry is demanding that Google censors “search results” from their investigative reports, they are demanding that an investigative news agency alter their journalistic findings because those findings of fact happen to be starkly embarrassing to the copyright industry. Further, the copyright industry is also demanding that the news agency should lie to the public about what the world actually looks like.
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Dumped! by Google : The Last Word On Nothing
www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/04/22/dumped-by-google/, posted 2013 by peter in backup business cloudcomputing crapification free google storage
Google not only reserves the right to take away or vaporize our data for any reason, but it also reserves the right to discontinue services, the means to access it, whenever it wants. It does this more often than you probably realize and most recently with Google Reader, which disappears on July 1.
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Google offers virtual dives in world's coral reefs - FRANCE 24
www.france24.com/en/20120926-google-offers-virtual-dives-worlds-coral-reefs?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter, posted 2012 by peter in 3d environment google map photography
The first underwater panoramic images were added to Google Maps with the help of Catlin Seaview Survey scientific expedition, which hoped that the up-close view of underwater wonders would inspire people to protect them.