Stop the presses!! After a year an a half of R&D spending thanks to a very successful IPO, Google's GMail is moving from its Beta designation now that it's email services has a delete button!
Okay bigger news than the Gmail delete button is that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (aka Beto) is trying to get Google to share its search data with the federal government. It seems that the government wants more than just library records of what books you read and now they want to know what you search for. Attorney General Beto has subpoena the search giant to get access to a list of search terms for a one week period and a random sampling of one millions searches.
It seems that the federal government has just figured out what most peeps already know; Google knows everything. Or more importantly, Google keeps everything. Every single search made from your computer is stored in some giant data center somewhere in an underground bunker under GooglePlex. If you use GMail they still have emails which you thought you deleted! And whey you log onto GMail or AdSense they can use that login to associate subsequent searches to your user name. If you are as curious as me I know you have search for the Communist Manifesto, the Anarchist Handbook, designs for a nuclear bomb, and of course the location of Osama Bin Laden. Google has denied the government's request and the two are scheduled to meet in the courts over this issue.
What seems most interesting to me is not that Beto wants to know what Google already knows, but that Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo for that matter) bends over to the Communist Party in China in censoring websites yet it dogfights the Department of Justice here in the States.
Also this week, it has been widely reported that Google will not pay the extortion proposed by the SBC CEO. The phone companies want to get paid all over again on top of the monthly dues that internet users already pay. On top of the mula the phone mullahs are making with DSL subscriptions fees they want to charge content providers such as Google to have their sites load faster. If this extortion were in place it would be the end users that would end up paying because content producers would just end up charging end users. It would surely suck if every search cost me $0.01 or whatever the price would be. Not only that but maybe even popular blogs would have to pay up to Ma' Bell's evil offspring SBC which recently renamed itself AT&T.