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Google: Finally, A Human Face Behind The C&D, Instead of Nastygram Lawyerbots

Posted in Google, Google Imaging, Google Maps, Google News, GoogleMaps, Opensource by Hakim Bennis on 2006-11-27

Google asks the creator of the Gaia project – “an attempt to reverse engineer famous Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and extendable way” – to stop his attempts. But they’re actually asking nicely. Or, as Andy Baio puts it, “finally, a human face behind the C&D, instead of nastygram lawyerbots.” (via Google Blogoscoped)

Original letter from Michael Jones:

From: “Michael Jones”
Subject: Writing from Google about Gaia and Google Earth

Hello,

I am Michael Jones, the Chief Technologist of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local search writing to the author(s) of the Gaia project (http://gaia.serezhkin.com/) with an urgent concern. We have now become aware of your efforts and are concerned that you may not understand the developing global social impact of your engineering creativity.

The data that we license for Google Earth and Google Maps is made available for use under the restriction that it not be accessed or used outside of Google’s client software. These products — Earth, Maps, and Mobile Maps –each have a data protection mechanism tailored to their environment. They
also all come with a clearly indicated end user license agreement, known as the Terms of Service, which means “these are the conditions under which we are providing access to valuable data through our client software for your use.” In all three cases, the ToS are very clear that the data services used by the client software must never be accessed directly and that the encryption, passkey, and other data protection mechanisms must not be circumvented.

We appreciate that you like our software and enjoy the many millions of dollars and years of labor that the licensed data represents. Unfortunately, your curiosity about the protected server mechanisms ignores the Google Earth Terms of Service, the software license agreement that you accepted when installing Google Earth, the built-in encryption mechanisms within the client/server protocol, the economic rights of a worldwide network of providers who license this data to Google, and most of all, the sense of fair-play that is the basic relationship between Google and its users worldwide.

The kindness through which Google has made the wonder of our planet available to more than 100 million users around the world is now threatened — not by a menacing and fierce business competitor — but by you. Please hear the seriousness in this statement. I am not an attorney. I am not posturing. Just the opposite. We on the engineering team are hopeful that despite the risk your actions (break the ToS, reverse engineer parts of the data protection mechanisms, publish the fact and code, encourage others)
pose to our product, team, company, and users, we remain hopeful that this was an unintended result of what started as intellectual curiosity by a smart engineer like ourselves who has a passion to learn how things work.

Are we right?

If so, we really need to have you take down that code and refocus your work toward building an open earth viewer that uses open earth images (such as from NASA) or licensed earth images from willing providers rather than having the basis of your project being the improper use of our images. If you understand the gravity of the situation and agree to respect or position in this, please let me know quickly (hours rather than days) and on an equally responsive time scale please modify your project pages to remove anything suggesting or teaching the improper access to our data servers.

Anxious to hear from you,
Michael

–
Michael T. Jones, Chief Technologist, Google Earth, Maps, Local

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043Email: xxxxxx@google.com T:(XXX)XXX-XXXX M:(XXX)XXX-XXXX F:(XXX)XXX-XXXX

Explore Google Earth! Site: earth.google.com Community: bbs.keyhole.com

7 comments

Wishful Thinking: Google/Apple World

Posted in Apple, Blogroll, Gmail, Gmail Chat, Google, Google Vision, Googleness, Gtalk, Steve Jobs by Hakim Bennis on 2006-10-18

This is just great news! Apple and Google combining their brightest minds and setting a future course of fearless innovation is just what the world needs now.
Some of what I’d like to see from Google/Apple is:

1) .Mac fully being transmogrified into Google services. (Yes, that would imply the things like application sync, photocasting, web-publishing, etc, being available for Windows and Linux as well, I don’t see any reason why not.) The rumored GDisk would be the logical next step to seamlessly knit this together.
2) iTunes and Google Video somehow collaborating. Letting people sell their movies, videos, (music), etc through the iTunes store front with Google serving as the back end, and vice versa. Hollywood is already crumbling, and the distribution of the content is their last strong-hold on the industry. And with Google’s massive bandwidth and storage capacities, HD movies would not be impossible any more, would they? Hello iTV. What was that huge data-center I heard of up north going to be used for anyway?
3) iChat and Gtalk interoperate. Video and audio conferencing cross-platform. Jabber is nice, but not much more than text. (Oh yes, Gtalk for Linux, please. You got to feed those hungry Ubuntuans.) 4) Please, please let us sync Address Book and iCal with Gmail and Gcal! (See number 1.)
5) Geo-tagging photos in iPhoto via Google Earth or Google maps (…)
6) Perhaps OT, but it would be great to have Gcal, Gmail but especially Writely and Spreadsheet work as offline apps so we can use them while not on the Internet. Make everything we write save to a buffer on the hard-drive, to be synced next time we connect the computer.
7) Definitely OT, but it would be great if you could add a queue in Gmail to “send this mail on this date and this time”.
Again, best of luck to my two favorite companies!

2 comments

Google Sitemaps Is Now “Google Webmaster Tools”

Posted in Blogroll, Google, Googleness by Hakim Bennis on 2006-08-22

Google Sitemaps

Google announced they renamed Google Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools.

Google writes:

“Our suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility.

Getting Google’s view of your site, and diagnosing potential problems
The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on Google is learning how our robots crawl and index your site.

Crawl info: You can make sure we have access to your site, and see when Googlebot last visited. You can also view URLs that we’ve had trouble crawling and why we couldn’t crawl them. This way, you can fix any problems preventing us from indexing all of your pages.
Robots.txt file validation: See if we’re having trouble with your file, and test out changes to that file before you change it on your server.
Website content: View top content from your site and see the words that other sites use to link to it.

Seeing how your site performs
A second step is learning what drives traffic to your site.

Top queries: Find the top queries that drive traffic to your site and where your site is included in the top search results. This will let you learn how users are finding your site.
Indexing information: See how your site is indexed and which of your pages are included in the index. If we find violations in your site, we’ll give you the opportunity to fix the problems and request reinclusion of your site.

Sharing info with Google about your site
Since no one knows more about your site than you do, you can also share this info with Google and improve your crawlability.

Submit a Sitemap file: Tell us all about your pages by submitting a Sitemap file; help us learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.

Specify your preferred domain: Tell us which URL to use when indexing your site; we’ll do our best to index the version you prefer.”