Google Facing $30 Million Lawsuit

Google has just opened its new French headquarters, but it seems that they won't be receiving a warm welcome in the nearest future. The reason is that the company has recently landed itself in hot water over the abuse of its dominant position one more time, facing a lawsuit that demands over $30 million for damages to some navigation software firm.

French company named NAVX is currently suing Google in the Paris Commercial Court over what it believes to be wrongdoing about blocking advertisements from the company. NAVX has appealed to the local antitrust authorities over its treatment by the search giant where it was discovered that competition legislation has been violated. The search giant was ordered to reinstate the NAVX’s advertising, as well as clarify the conditions of its Adwords service for further use. NAVX, which offers content for GPS and smartphones, confirmed that Google did agree to do so.

Nevertheless, the French firm acknowledged that it has lost out on a load of money because of Google’s meddling, so it has demanded damages of around $31 million. NAVX Chief Executive Officer Jean Cherbonnier has announced that the dominant position of Google on the advertising market connected with search engines can’t be disputed, particularly after the investigation carried out by the French Antitrust Authority that concluded a year ago that the search giant undoubtedly holds a dominant position.

NAVX is currently asking the Paris Commercial Court to hand down ruling saying that Google abused its dominant position. The company also hopes the court will order Google to pay damages. Meanwhile, such court case couldn’t come at a worse time for the international corporation. Its CEO has just met with European Commission antitrust boss in a kind of last ditch attempt to stop a formal investigation into the company landing the search giant with a statement of objection over its practices.

Truly, it looks like NAVX isn’t the only company out for Google’s blood after the latter allegedly mistreated them. Such firms as Ciao and Foundem are also enraged at Google’s activities and are currently pushing for intervention of European Commission into what they see as bullying and bullish behavior. In other words, it is very unlikely that some other companies making detrimental claims against the search giant while talks are ongoing do Google any favors.

Search Site Accused Google Of Antitrust

Product search online service called Foundem has said that Google was directly targeting household name search websites via Google Panda, with the algorithm being central to ongoing antitrust cases. The website kicked off the antitrust investigation of EC against Google after it monitored their website drop down the page rankings upon introduction of Universal Search four years ago.

After the website first presented the case against the search giant, both sides of the Atlantic launched an official investigation, which has centered around the company’s leveraging of its dominance, 95% of the European market, to favor its lucrative forays into other things like maps and product search. Today, with an ongoing high profile investigation carried out by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, Foundem thinks that the search giant is close to facing retribution from the watchdogs upon flouting anticompetitive legislation with Panda.

Foundem owners have put the case for the search giant’s abuse of its dominant position to both the European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. They claim that Google has upped its attack on rival services by using Panda update to its search algorithm. The service founders hope the European Commission will understand the urgency of these issues and come to a decision soon, hopefully finding the search giant guilty of abusing its dominant position in both search and search advertising. Indeed, Foundem has some compelling evidence, aimed to prove that Google has abused its position while moving into product search, and now it is trying to stop Google from sending rival companies spiraling down search rankings. This past September Google boss was called before the Senate in order to discuss antitrust allegations.

The plaintiffs claim that the search giant needs to clearly disclose when it inserts its own services into its own search results. They also want Google to stop discriminating in favor of its own services. However, the European Commission can only apply a 10% fine in the best course of action, while the money doesn’t matter here, because the fine of this size is undoubtedly insignificant to Google. Instead, the innovative businesses crushed by the engine’s tactics are looking forward to a set of remedies able to stop Google’s anticompetitive behavior.

McAfee Lost Key Employees

McAfee, the worldwide-known insecurity outfit, which was purchased by chip giant Intel, has just lost a couple of key employees. Meanwhile, the company is expected to introduce a new generation of security products in the nearest future.

George Kurtz, the worldwide chief technology officer, known for helping lead the McAfee’s product strategy, is going to leave the company by the end of October. However, he isn’t the first key staff member leaving the company: vice president Dmitri Alperovitch, a highly regarded threat researcher known for his work at McAfee that helped give the outfit a reputation for conducting cutting-edge research on hacking, has already slipped out the back door. Surprisingly enough, few noticed his move, as the media didn’t observe the event at all.

Dmitri Alperovitch was leading a research team which released a number of high-profile studies on alleged Chinese-government backed hackers. He is also known worldwide for coining the term “Operation Aurora” to describe hacker attacks suspected by Chinese intruders on the largest search engine Google and many other organizations.

Alperovitch was last mentioned in the press when his team discovered so-called “Operation ShadyRAT” – one of the largest cyber attacks throughout the globe, which caused the infiltration of the networks of seventy-two outfits, including the UN and numerous governments and companies all over the globe. However, the papers say Alperovitch will be doing a bit of work for McAfee as a consultant.

The industry observers only noticed the lack of the two key figures of the company when they were not found on the speakers list at the McAfee’s annual security conference. The rumors are that the two left because they weren’t happy about Intel’s involvement with China. The insecurity outfit has operations in China, but Intel features a much bigger manufacturing and marketing presence there. Operation ShadyRAT pointing the finger at that country must have caused some problems for the company. So, it seems that since Alperovitch has never openly pointed at China for some cyber espionage cases, it might have more to do with Intel than Alperovitch really wanted to say.

The company announced that the two key positions have been filled internally. Alperovitch was replaced by David Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, and George Kurtz’s place is filled by Stuart McClure. 

Microsoft Restricted Access To Geolocation Database

Microsoft has locked down their Wi-Fi-powered geolocation service. The reason for the decision was that insecurity expert Elie Bursztein recently raised privacy concerns about the data which is being stored within the service.

The expert was trying to find out whether it was possible to track a laptop by snuffling the Wi-Fi information stored by Windows each time it connects to an access point. Actually, the only way he could do that was by obtaining access to Microsoft's MAC Address Database. As a result, Microsoft took a decision to restrict access to its database as a prevention measure for the future.

According to media reports, the decision follows the Google’s move, which had the same privacy complaint. Currently Microsoft, Google, and Skyhook operate Wi-Fi geolocation databases particularly designed to provide quick location data to electronic devices, including phones, tablets, and laptop computers.

Recently it was discovered that Google's database was full not just of access point MAC addresses, but also of laptop and smartphone addresses that could have been easily tracked. As a result, search giant switched something in its service so that it restricted access by requiring two nearby MAC addresses to be entered instead of only one. In other words, the new approach made it virtually impossible to query a particular phone's MAC address in order to learn where the person was.

Meanwhile, the disadvantage of all this is that if someone wants an approximate location with only one access point visible, Microsoft will reject to give them one. On the other hand, it seems that companies like Google and Redmond took a decision to better ensure their users’ privacy than convenience, in this particular case. As for the industry experts, most of them believe that the change is really unfortunate, because Wi-Fi-based positioning is a very convenient feature to have, particularly for laptops often Wi-Fi-enabled but in most cases lacking GPS hardware. In our days, geolocation is a feature from HTML5, supported by all up-to-date browsers in order to enable services like foursquare and location-based search. Some suggest that instead of restricting the service, a move in the opposite direction, like publishing the API and making it accessible to 3rd parties, plus integrating system-wide support for it would all be a valuable improvement to Windows and the online community.

Google Cautioned Against Internet Filtering

Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Google Inc. has warned House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet that even the proposed measures of fighting copyright infringement are inefficient, because even if Internet service providers blocked domains of infringing services through DNS interference, they will still be reachable via its IP address or other means like browser plug-in software.

A couple days ago the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet held another hearing on protecting copyright, during which the search engine giant Google provided some words of caution for legislators.

The backdrop for the event is again the controversial COICA legislation, renewed a week ago by a few Congressmen from the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. During the hearing, Kent Walker, Senior Vice President for Google, claimed that the government should aim at the worst foreign services without targeting legitimate businesses. Nevertheless, pro-copyright outfits like the MPAA and RIAA keep repeating the same nonsense about “notorious websites” and the necessity of taking action against them. In the meantime, Kent Walker argues that American current legislation is quite capable of addressing the problem of services subject to US jurisdiction, and therefore doesn’t need any further causes of action. He believes that extra enforcement tools should only be used for targeting the services residing outside the US, engaged in commercial infringement.

Besides, Google’s Senior Vice President pointed out that defining what exactly constitutes a “notorious website” isn’t that simple task, because an overbroad definition would ensnare millions of popular American sites letting users to sell products or upload material. Meanwhile, there are a lot of sites that are responsible and promptly respond to takedown notices and comply with the DMCA. Those websites shouldn’t be deemed rogue and be pursued.

Talking about using the DNS system to fight illegal activity, Google’s representative pointed out that such effort must be properly weighed against its limited efficiency and implications for core US values like innovation and fundamental freedom. In fact, when discussed, it appears that the largest real threat to US content industry that the COICA is supposed to protect is the reluctance by American rights owners to develop new innovative services the customers need so much.

Yahoo! Messenger Censors FilesTube Links

Censoring the Internet on behalf of the entertainment industries appears to be a growing trend. Talks about Internet blocklists, domain seizures of alleged pirate sites, and Google’s proactive filter of “infringing” searches are just a few examples. Today it appears that Yahoo! has hopped on the bandwagon with its censoring of links to FilesTube, one of the largest media search engines.

Imagine that you found this great new TV-show “Pioneer One,” which the makers decided to give away for free. You’re actually so excited about it that you want to share it with a friend by pasting them a FilesTube link in Yahoo! Messenger.

Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Yahoo! appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination. The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this “feature”.

For those not familiar with the site, FilesTube is arguably the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers. Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated search engine serves millions of users every day, and this number is on the up.

The big question of course is why Yahoo! Messenger users are prohibited from sending their contacts links to the site. FilesTube is merely a meta-search engine and does not host any content on its servers. It even abides by the U.S. DMCA by honoring takedown requests from copyright holders.

TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate. Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.

Although not very logical, such a selective censorship attempt would not be entirely new. Just a few months ago Google decided to arbitrarily block a few piracy related keywords from their “instant” and “suggest” features while leaving direct and just as popular alternatives unharmed.

Whatever the reason is for Yahoo! monitoring private conversations and then swallowing FilesTube links, censorship is an up and coming tool that will be used increasingly to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. It complements other indirect but effective anti-piracy strategies, and despite the constitutional issues that may arise, the anti-piracy lobby will not rest before their goals are completed.

MPAA Threatened To Disconnect Google

Within recent months, Google has been reported to receive dozens of copyright infringement notifications from the MPAA-affiliated film studios. Although such warnings are largely directed at users of the company’s public Wi-Fi service, some of them still seem to be directed at employees located at its headquarters. The warning letters say that the entertainment industry is unhappy and notifies Google that it might get disconnected from the web.

The largest movie studios and record labels constantly send out thousands of notifications to users alleged of sharing their copyrighted content through BitTorrent networks. Such notices are only meant to inform of wrongdoing, working as follows. The rights owner hires some firm to track down Internet users sharing certain files on file-sharing networks. Such firms simply join the swarm and request these files from others. After having someone sharing a piece of the file with them, the company logs the IP-address, look up the Internet service provider and automatically send it a warning.

While major part of the warnings is sent out to the largest broadband providers, asking to forward them to the users in question, Google also appears receiving quite a few. Over a hundred of those automated messages have been sent to the search giant within the past several months.

As the company offers Wi-Fi hotspots in some places, the infringers usually don’t actually share content directly from Google’s headquarters, but some of the notices do appear to be aimed at the company’s employees. This is, at least, a very awkward situation for a search giant trying to help out the copyright holders by implementing a censorship policy towards some of the BitTorrent-related terms. It may sound funny, but Google runs the risk of losing its Internet connection, as the movie companies believe that copyright violation also means a violation of Google’s ISP’s terms of service and should cause a disconnection from the Internet.

A few of the warnings sent to Google’s headquarters are published on ChillingEffects, so it’s not clear whether the search giant has forwarded them to employees or not. Meanwhile, the most recent warnings received by Google have been sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures and Paramount Pictures for the illegal sharing of “The Green Hornet” and “The Fighter” accordingly. On the whole, the search giant has published over twenty of these notifications in the last month.

Google Started Censoring File-Sharing Search Results

Google turned out to follow through on its last month promise “to prevent terms related to piracy from Autocomplete.”

Indeed, Google is keeping its promise made in December 2010 to “better address bad apples using the web to violate copyright.” As you might remember, Google’s 4-part plan for “Making Copyright Work Better Online” contained a promise to prevent terms associated with online piracy from Autocomplete. That’s exactly what the search giant did.

However, the Google team seems to choose terms without any customer feedback or sensible criteria. For example, the search engine banned the terms like uTorrent, BitTorrent, MegaUpload, and RapidShare. Meanwhile, it didn’t include The Pirate Bay, Vuze, Mediafire, or Transmission in the ban list. In other words, BitTorrent and uTorrent are actually the sole BitTorrent applications banned from Autocomplete. Unsurprisingly, BitTorrent Inc. found the censorship far too aggressive, particularly when Google singled out its legally trademarked name of all things.

BitTorrent Inc. Vice-President pointed out that although they do respect the search giant’s right to set algorithms to deliver proper search results, the company’s trademarked name is actually fairly unique. That’s why BitTorrent Inc. is sure that anyone typing the first several letters must get the same easy access to search results as with any other organization. Besides, there’re lots of likewise legal BitTorrent search results that will now be affected by Google’s new filter.

BitTorrent Inc. is not the only company showing its discontent. MegaUpload has also found itself on the wrong side of the filter. The guess is that now the cyberlocker should take time to rethink its recent comments made about Google also being a “rogue website”.

And, of course, RapidShare will surely find the censorship particularly offensive, because German and US courts have repeatedly ruled that third parties, but not the service itself, are responsible for copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, it’s quite interesting to see what Google will do next. It has already established a baseline for preventing terms “closely associated with infringing material” from those shown in Autocomplete, but it’s not clear whether it will leave it as is, or add more of them and which ones.

Google Pitching Online Music Service To Labels--Billboard

SAN FRANCISCO, California, United States—Internet search powerhouse Google is trying to put together an online music service that would take on Apple's market-ruling iTunes, according to a report at Billboard.com.

Google is courting record labels for a service that would let people download songs in digital format or store music in the Internet "cloud" for streaming to online devices, according to unnamed sources cited by Billboard.

Google is reportedly proposing charging annual subscriptions of about $25 to let people store music online and then stream or download tunes to Internet-linked gadgets as desired, Billboard said.

Google is seeking to have the service include letting customers listen once to any song all the way through before limiting them to a 30-second sample of the song, according to Billboard.

The service would reportedly have aspects of Lala.com, an online music website bought by Apple in December and closed early this year.

Lala boasted a playlist of more than eight million tunes and hosted users' digital music collections on the Web, allowing access from varied locations in what it described as "music in the clouds."

Apple has not disclosed its plans for Lala but there has been speculation that it may adapt its technology to create a Web-hosted music subscription service of some kind.

Lala launched in 2006 as an online vision of a vintage San Francisco record store where people tipped each other off to artists, shopped for CDs, and traded used ones.

Facebook Traffic Tops Google For The Week

Facebook topped Google to become the most visited U.S. Web site last week, indicating a shift in how Americans are searching for content.

Web analysis firm Experian Hitwise said Monday that the social networking site surpassed Google to take the No. 1 spot for the week ended March 13.

"It shows content sharing has become a huge driving force online," said Matt Tatham, director of media relations at Hitwise. "People want information from friends they trust, versus the the anonymity of a search engine."

Facebook accounted for 7.07% of U.S. Web traffic that week, while Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) received 7.03%. The study compared only the domains Facebook.com and Google.com -- not, for example, Google-owned sites like Gmail.com.

Though the traffic levels were close, Facebook's year-over-year growth far outpaced Google's that week. The number of visitors to Facebook spiked 185% compared with the same period last year, while Google's traffic climbed just 9%.

"It's definitely a big moment for Facebook, even though they beat by a small margin," Tatham said. "We've seen it coming for quite a long time."
0:00 /2:39Facebook's 6th birthday

Facebook had never before beaten Google over a full weeklong period, though it has been the most visited site on recent holidays: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Facebook was also the top site on the weekend of March 6-7.

But Tatham noted that when he added up traffic on all Google properties like Google Maps and YouTube, the company's sites comprised 11.03% of visits. Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) was second with 10.98%.

Google.com had been the No. 1 site each week since Sept. 15, 2007, when ironically it passed another social networking site, MySpace.com, in order to take the crown.

Of course, the MySpace connection could be a bad omen for Facebook. MySpace enjoyed dominance on the social networking scene for years until it saw traffic plummet following Facebook's rise.

"By nature, the Web is ever-changing," Tatham said. "The Internet can be a fickle crowd."

Google Co-Founders To Sell $5.5B Combined In Stock

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plan to sell 5 million shares apiece of their company stock, worth $5.5 billion combined at current prices.

The sales will occur periodically during the next five years and leave the two with 48 percent of the voting power among stockholders, down from roughly 59 percent now. But with Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt controlling nearly 10 percent voting power, the trio will still control the company.

According to regulatory documents filed Friday, Page and Brin will still own 47.7 million shares combined after the sales.

Shares fell $2.71, or 0.5 percent, to $547.30 in extended trading Friday.