iByte

In 1998, Google’s search index included 26 million webpages and in 2000, they hit the 1 billion mark for the number of websites known to Google in the search index.

Yesterday, Google engineers stopped and stared in awe as their index reached and flew past the 1 TRILLION mark for the number of websites and pages in its index.

Just to put that in perspective, it is estimated that there are just over 6.680 billion people on Earth which comes out to about 150 pages per person on the planet.

Interesting, isn’t it?

e-Gold, an internet money and payment service, has found itself in legal trouble in the United States after being charged with conspiracy to engage in money laundering and conspiracy to operate a money-transmitting business without a license.

As well as the companies being charged, key members of the exective side were also charged with felonies including the CEO of e-Gold, Douglas Jackson as well as Barry Downey and Reid Jackson, two other key directors for the service.

Douglas Jackson faces a prison term of 20 years with a fine of half a million dollars on the money laundering charge and a sentence of five years and a fine of $250,000 on the operation of an unlicense money transmitting business charge.

The two companies could face a fine upwards of $3 million dollars at sentencing.

e-Gold provided digital currency services at e-gold.com and Omnipay.com where users were not required to provide their true identities in order to create an account and, despite knowing that their services were being used for criminal activity, e-Gold assigned employees with no prior background in fraud and abuse prevention to monitor hundreds of thousands of user accounts.

As part of the plea bargain, e-Gold must create a comprehensive abuse and fraud detection system that verifies user identity and reports suspicious and/or fraudulent activity.

Today, the Senate passed the controversial FISA Amendements Act which broadly expands the Executive branch’s warrantless wiretapping authority and provides retroactive immunity to telecommunications firms which provided information to the US government under the illegal domestic wiretapping program of the NSA.

Last month the House of Representatives passed the same bill and as such, both bills will now go back to the House to have any differences resolved and once finalized, the bill will go onto the President to be signed into law.

What this bill does is not only seriously invade the rights of United States citizens in the name of protecting them, it also grants immunity to telecom companies who participated in an illegal warrantless domestic wiretapping program under the order of the President of the United States operated by the National Security Agency.

We encourage every single person who feels that this is an egregious and gross violation of their civil rights and freedoms to contact their represantives, especially those who voted in approval of the bill to express their outrage and to contact those who voted against the bill to thank them for standing up for your rights.

According to Threat Level at Wired, Google has been ordered by the court to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users including users’ names and IP addresses to Viacom.

Viacom is seeking the information to prove that infringing material is more popular than the user-created content which could be used to increase and prove Google’s liability if found guilty of contributory infringement.

Back in March of 2007, Viacom filed suit against Google for more than $1 billion dollars in damages for allowing users to upload copyrighted clips of Viacom property. Google has argued that the law provides a safe harbor for online services such as YouTube as long as the fully comply with DMCA Takedown notices.

In spite of the fact that turning over such data invades the privacy of its users, the judge called such an argument “speculative” and ordered the data turned over on a set of four terabyte hard drives. The judge cited Google’s own defense of its data retention policies that IP addresses aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves to justify the order to turn over the data.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the court order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 which prevents disclosure of personally identifiable video rental records from being distributed without consumer consent or valid warrant or court order to police officials.

Also part of the order is the requirement for Google to turn over all copies of videos that it has taken down for any reason including those not affected by the Viacom claims.

Viacom also made requests for the source code of YouTube, the source code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked as private by users and Google’s advertising database schema. All of those requests were denied in whole except that Google will have to also provide data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many people.