Sober check on Gmail

Just a quick post to mention a silly experiment that Google has released to the public: Mail Goggles. This feature is designed to prevent you from sending stupid e-mails in the small hours, when you're most likely to be inebriated and at risk of making a complete idiot of yourself.


When enabled, Mail Goggles kicks in at the time you specify (default is between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on Friday and Saturday), and throws five math problems up on the screen when you press "send." You have a limited period of time to solve them. If you can answer the questions, presumably your mind is sound enough to send the mail.


To activate Mail Goggles, go into Gmail's settings, and turn on Mail Goggles in the "Labs" tab. Then adjust how and when it works in the "General" tab.

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Cloud Computing - A trap

Richard Stallman on cloud computing: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign."

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the Internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained prominence in recent years. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".

The growing number of people storing information on Internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies.

Dell recently even made attempts to trademark the term "cloud computing".Fortunately its application was refused.There has be a rise of concern that involvement in cloud computing could bring in privacy and ownership issues.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," Stallman said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

Previous article: Google's third founder

Google's Third founder

Just as Google is celebrating its 10th anniversary, a man claiming to be the "third" founder of Google has come out to stake his claim to history."Google was designed by Larry, Sergey, and me in February 1997,"Hubert Chang claims in this online video.Chang has emerged from obscurity this week with the audacious claim that he helped launch the search giant in 1997 along with acknowledged co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

In the video, Chang said he met Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani in the summer of 1996 while studying for a Ph.D. at New York University. Motwani, later introduced him to Brin and Page, who were students at Stanford.Chang claims he helped Brin and Page come up with the PageRank algorithm that became the basis for Google's search engine. He also said they all agreed on the kind of corporate culture the company should have.

Google's response to Chang's claims is "Though many people were involved with Google in its early days, it has been well documented over the past decade that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in September 1998."Google's sparse corporate history makes no mention of Chang.

Motwani, in an e-mail, dismissed Chang's claims. He recalls email correspondence with Chang but refutes any existence of a third founder.He mentions by the time the basic idea of PageRank was in place and there was a clear intent of building a company around it he never met with Hubert Chang.

Chang claimed he did not stay to help found Google because he had a made a commitment to his father to finish getting his Ph.D. He also said his e-mail correspondence from 1997 was not saved because he exceeded the NYU e-mail quota for messages at the time.

He closes the video by noting after ten years he's telling his story. "I feel quite confident about the good side of humanity. If you could, please forward this video to your friends. Thank you."

Squabbles over who originated a specific technology or concept are nothing new in Silicon Valley. The latest high profile case involves competing claims by Harvard classmates that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social networking giant Facebook, wasn't the only founder. But this kind of claim so late is quite skeptical.

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