In Google's defense

On the surface, it would seem Google is intrusive; I have news for our readers: the Internet is, by design, intrusive — Google only employs that design to help navigate the Internet. Google works at being the best (i.e. "complete") Swiss Army Knife on the Internet. It is better said, "Google is ambitious".

Google is venturing to be "everything Internet". Google is the standard, by which all other search engines are judged. Google provides one of the best free email services on the planet. Google pays web site owners to let Google be their search engine — check out Google Ad-Sense. And now … Google is introducing the best deal I that I can find for web domain hosting. And … when was the last time *anyone* in this audience has paid Google for anything?

OK … I paid them $10 for one year of registration and hosting of callurth.com with 100 MB of storage, hundreds (maybe thousands by now) of web site gadgets, 250 email addresses, a federated XMMS chat server, and *no* ads. Google may be the biggest Internet presence, but they are far from the most evil.

Certainly, I am going to exploit what they make so readily available. This ISP has few advantages to encourage subscriber growth — dial-up access is painfully slow and many big companies (like Sprint and BellSouth) have the advantage of subsidy for their infrastructure. Other companies (like AOL and Earthlink) are preferred customers for facility and get tremendous discount for their volume purchases. Mom and Pop enterprises like ours have only reputation and small communities where that reputation is promoted.

I dislike intrusion as much as anyone, but finding safe haven from intruders is impossible on the Internet. Have you ever looked at the HTML source in major web sites? If you have, you might notice many pages include links to graphics or other content on third-party sites? Guess what … every site receives information about your surfing habits when you access their content.

Care to know what information is shared with the most basic web design?
OK … read on.

• QUERY_STRING (*your* form submission detail)
• HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE (*your* preferred language and character set)
• REMOTE_PORT (*your* open port to accept communication)
• HTTP_USER_AGENT (*your* browser and Operating System detail)
• HTTP_ACCEPT (*your* accepted media formats)
• HTTP_HOST (*your* name for the web server)
• REMOTE_ADDR (*your* public IP address)
• SCRIPT_NAME (the application *you* requested)
• USER (the application user *you* authorized)
• HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING (*your* accepted data stream formats)
• HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET (*your* accepted character encoding)
• REQUEST_METHOD (*your* form submission type)