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Google: Principled Defenders of Privacy or Communist Enabling Stooges? January 24, 2006, 10:18 pm

Posted by quintapalus in Industry, Outrage, Technology.
6 comments

You may remember a story from last week regarding the Bush administration’s attempts to get porno querying habits from search engine companies like Yahoo, MSN and Google. (Full disclosure: don’t waste time trying to track me down; Quinto uses the search string “thai+asian+slut” regularly and often. What’s the matter? So I like the Asian girls, sue me.) Yahoo and MSN complied and Google told the feds to get bent:

Google on Thursday rebuffed the Bush administration’s attempt in federal court to force it to hand over search-engine data on millions of customers. The Justice Department asked a federal judge in San Jose on Wednesday for an order to turn over the records as part of the adminstration’s efforts to revive a controversial online pornography law. The issue is expected to be resolved by March. Google has already refused to comply with a subpoena, issued in August, to turn over a mountain of material, including all requests entered into Google’s search engine from any one-week period and 1 million randomly selected websites from Google databases. Rival search engines Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN have cooperated with the government. But Google, the world’s largest search engine, opposes releasing the information because it says that doing so would reveal trade secrets and that the information requested is not relevant to the government’s case.

BTW, this is one of those issues that drives me batty with the Republican party. Can’t we leave this BS nanny state stuff to the Democrats? Oh no, there’s porn to be found on the Internet! So what! Let parents do their jobs and stay out of people’s lives with this stuff.

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Finally, a BitTorrent Client I Can Make Sweet, Sweet Love to November 28, 2005, 5:36 pm

Posted by quintapalus in Technology.
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I’m not really a one BitTorrent client man, you see. I have my own hopes, desires and needs and tend to be a pretty selfish person in general. There just isn’t much room in my life for dealing with needy programs. I am high maintenance; my BitTorrent client shouldn’t be. I used to use Azureus, a Java based client, but running this bloated, memory hog of an app got old real quick. Simpler clients like BitTornado open a new instance for each torrent you are trying to download, and that gets pretty annoying. After doing some research to see what else is out there, I finally found what I have been looking for. It’s real early in the relationship and I don’t want to jinx it, but I think I am in love. It’s name is uTorrent (which can be found here).  It’s absolutely miniscule compared to other BitTorrent software (only  105K!!) and typically uses about 6MB of RAM when in use.  The interface is simple and clean, and it does everything that I need.  I’m really happy so far and, God willing, I will be for sometime.  Wish us luck!