Technology Info

Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China’s largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy.

Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as “incorrigible”.

The Chinese firm’s music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company’s home page.

Baidu provides links only to music files stored on third-party servers. No music is stored on computers owned or controlled by Baidu. (link)

While the RIAA has waged a full-on legal assault against individual file-sharers, the MPAA has instead chosen to go after individual web sites. In 2006, the motion picture industry trade group filed copyright infringement lawsuits against a number of BitTorrent sites, including TorrentSpy and isoHunt. TorrentSpy lost, thanks to its admins’ willful destruction of evidence, but isoHunt is fighting back. A recent filing in the case opposes the MPAA’s motion for summary judgment, arguing that isoHunt is just another search engine.

“There are hundreds of public torrent sites, some limited to a specific subject matter, others general aggregators like isoHunt, who like Google, try to cover as much of the Internet as possible,” reads isoHunt’s filing. “The essential functions performed at a torrent site are also performed at a comprehensive search site like Google or Yahoo!.” (link)

Yahoo Inc. plans to make its website a social hub by hosting applications from other online services, part of the Internet pioneer’s effort to spawn more advertising opportunities.

“We are going to rewire the entire experience at Yahoo to make it social in every dimension,” Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s chief technology officer, said Thursday at a “Web 2.0″ conference that drew a crowd of more than 1,000.

The more open platform copies a concept that already has been embraced by Internet search leader Google Inc. and a variety of online social hangouts, including Facebook Inc. and News Corp.’s MySpace.com. (link)

Yahoo Inc. is surrendering some of its advertising space to Internet search leader Google Inc. in an unusual test that appears designed to frustrate Yahoo’s unsolicited suitor, Microsoft Corp.

The two-week experiment announced Wednesday will allow Google to show ads tied to about three per cent of the queries made in the United States through Yahoo’s search engine - the Internet’s second largest after Google’s.

Yahoo will still use its own technology - acquired and developed at a cost of more than $2 billion - to place ads next to the other search results on its website. The Sunnyvale-based company also will continue to distribute search ads to its own partners. (link)

In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or eight per cent of its workforce.

With the shift, the Oakland, Calif.-based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies and children’s homework.

The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the southern and midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google. (link)

Google will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that’s likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times during this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Should other companies follow in Apple’s footsteps by making web access commonplace on their mobile handsets, Gundotra believes the number of mobile searches could outpace fixed internet search “within the next several years.”

That of course means big increases in incremental advertising revenues for the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant. Though Google’s primary revenue driver remains online advertising, the company has never separated out its mobile revenues from those of traditional computer-based browsers.

Gundotra, however, told the Times that the mobile segment was growing “above expectations”, both in terms of usage and revenues. (link)

Two civil rights watchdogs today filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security after a number of travellers complained that their laptops, mobile phones and other electronic devices had been excessively screened at border entry points.

Internet watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation and civil liberty group Asian Law Caucus (ALC) brought the suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The lawsuit (pdf), which was filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, calls for the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit of the DHS to cough up records that detail the “questioning, search and inspection” methods used on travellers who enter or return to the US through a number of ports.

The two lobby groups said they were prompted to act following more than 20 complaints by Californian citizens and residents, who told the ALC that they had been unduly harassed by CBP agents.

According to the EFF, US citizen Amir Khan – an IT consultant working in Fremont, California – has been stopped every time he returns to the country from travels abroad.

He claimed that custom officials searched his laptop, books, personal notebooks and mobile phone. Khan also said that he has been held for questioning for more than 20 hours. (link)

Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself. (link)

Protecting your data from identity theft

Chinese search engine Baidu.com is not only the biggest search engine in China, but the third largest search engine globally. According to comScore metrics for December 2007, Baidu.com handled 3.4 billion queries that month to Microsoft’s 1.9 billion.

Part of Baidu’s popularity, at least according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, stems from its disregard for intellectual property. The IFPI announced today that legal proceedings have been started against Baidu and a handful of other Chinese companies for their role in supporting privacy. The crime? Baidu provides links to file-sharing sites and, in many instances, direct links to pirated songs hosted on servers throughout the country. Separate legal action has been brought against web portal Sohu as well as Yahoo China, the latter of which is “refusing to comply” with a December ruling regarding such “deep linking.” (link)