Lately, I have noticed that Google is trying to force me to sign in. For example, when I go to their news collection site, sometimes it demands I sign in, sometimes it works the old way. Google now owns Blogspot, a service I left long ago due to ridiculous levels of censorship. Today, I tried to access a page where a gold enthusiast has collected many links to government data and information only to find it behind a Google firewall requiring I sign in!
UPDATE: I just corresponded with the person whose blog was inaccessible and it turns out he wanted to make it inaccessible for now, not Google. But the fact remains, more and more often I find Google wanting me to sign in to see various web sites.
I emailed the person who runs FOFOA to warn him, this particular page is now behind a firewall requiring one identify oneself to read it. I just clicked on my bookmarked link to the data collection page run by FOFOA and it is now gone! I get their main page but not the specific page I bookmarked!
Now…we know that Facebook is actually being used to track citizens and mine information about them without consent and is being used more and more as a control device and today we learned that Twitter will allow governments to track and censor people’s comments to prevent repetition of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.
Right on the heels of the internet’s many citizens successfully stopping SOFA from passing our corrupt Congress, the private owners of huge hunks of the web are stealthily imposing tracking methods and devices to keep us from really using the web for freedom purposes. The mainstream media is all for this because they want to control people’s minds and hearts via propaganda and blackouts of real information. One very early website was Into The Memory Hole which was where we parked stories that the media suddenly buried and denied ever happening, for example.
I can’t find it online anymore so I assume it died off, alas. It had a lot of information I stored there long ago! I would track stories to see if they are buried. One huge example was the USS Liberty information which we kept pushing into the mainstream media flow and it would then suddenly vanish again.
Google used to be a useful tool for me. Recently they totally changed things and I now regard them as a hostile entity. For example, we used to get ‘cache’ where we could see the history of a website. That is gone without explanation. They also removed ‘word search’ which would highlight words in different colors so one could glance at a page and find the exact information one was looking for.
This vanished, too! I was stunned by that for it makes my work a lot more wearisome. Why did they remove it? I can’t fathom it except for the idea, it makes life harder and make information mining a LOT harder. So only persistent people like myself can find things. I am a speed reader and speed typist so I can do things very fast when not doped up on pain killers like this last three months! But I much prefer to have tools that make things faster and easier.
So I believe that Google trashed this search tool in order to make us miserable and life harder for people looking for very specific pieces of information. Turning searches from ease of use to searching a hay rick for a needle serves the ruling elites and no one else.
I believe that the rise in indignation and the successful ability to organize people with no controls by the media owners and politicians have scared them into making life online more hellish for users. Google is owned by billionaires who want to keep their wealth. So is Facebook. And other entities online who hold us in their hands all want to be filthy rich, too and are out to undermine us collectively in order to get money from us and to control what we think and do.
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Is a “private cache” on your computer or somewhere in hyperspace?
Did they physically invade your computer to erase information?
No, the weird thing has been explained in an email exchange with the man who runs the blogger site: he got scared and cut off access to individual pages suddenly due to other people hassling him.
I am negotiating to put his data on my site. I hope he lets me do this. I will keep him anonymous, of course.
Email after reading this topic i would like to you write about the site http://www.duckduckgo.com they are a site that is against SOPA ACTA and etc…
Because Google and Facebook are now tracking us but duck duck don´t. This is why : http://donttrack.us/
You can still access the Google cached pages as before, but it requires a few more steps. Apparently they ‘cleaned up’ the search results page so now you have to hover over the search result to get a site page preview on the right. This preview includes the option to select the cached pages. I use that a lot as well and noticed when it was gone. I hope that helps!
“Don’t be evil” is the corporate slogan for Google, I hope they hold themselves to it!
ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ
ELAINE: Good lord!!!! How insane is that?????????
Thanks for the hint. I have clicked on the arrows in the past and didn’t have a preview like that. Hiding it…bizarro world stuff. And we still lost the color coded searches which is hyper-useful for me in the past.
If you use the Chrome browser the word search colour highlight works with the “find” function, and also has little border lines at every location on the right column as well. Makes it a snap.
One can use Chrome browser without signing in to Google. And considering that Chrome wins the ‘most secure’ browser in faceoffs all the time may make it worthwhile just for that reason alone. It’s very fast at page rendering as well. Only Opera comes close in my experience.
I don’t believe there is a disadvantage using Chrome in terms of Google accessing personal data if one uses Google site for searching anyway. If you sync your Chrome data (bookmarks, RSS feeds etc) online at Google you will be mined for sure, although currently you can opt out and use settings to ‘avoid’ most mining, if you believe that actually makes a difference.
Using another browser and alternative search sites such as Bing would evade Googles data mining. But I wouldn’t be lulled into thinking that only Google collects data that Gov can access. Besides, the web is easy to data mine as most traffic isn’t encrypted and the source and destination IPs are there for everyone to see. If you send emails unencrypted you are sending love letters into the public square.
For the paranoid there are anonymous VPNs, Tor and a host of such tools to anonymize web usage.
Jimmy and yv have you tried the duckduckgo site ?
I found this page: http://www.itsananderson.com/2011/11/creating-a-custom-chrome-search-engine/
The fact is, things were more obvious and easier last year. This year it is all tricky dicky poo. The internet was supposed to be better and better, not trickier and more difficult.
The entire reason I bought Apple computers was due to ease of use especially click and drag and other features. I hate jumping through hoops when I could easily not do it and save time, effort and grief doing things upfront and the obvious way.
Google used to be much, much better. It is significantly degraded to the point, I really hate using it now.
For a search engine I use Startpage, no user tracking and every listing can be opened with their proxy option.
https://startpage.com/
I ditched google a couple of years ago.
@Elaine: “Google used to be much, much better. It is significantly degraded to the point, I really hate using it now.”
I agree completely. Google deteriorated fatally after it grew to a behemoth and went public. You could find all sorts of stuff directly with a search, now you just get pages upon pages of (paid for) spam no matter how well defined the search is. Just like you I have noticed a lot of good info I used to access in the past has simply disappeared or been made impossible to find. The only option, I guess, is to copy and save independently any good information you come across as you know chances are it will be gone later.
Yes, tons of spam. And yes, a poorer and poorer searcher. I struggle to find simple information that used to be easily discovered.
DuckDuckGo, Dogpile and Startpage are all compilation sites depending on other databases and search engines like Wolfram, Wiki, Google, Yahoo (Bing as of 2009) and Bing proper. While the compilation sites claim no tracking how does one know for sure. With the larger engines there is enough scrutiny to catch likely misbehaviour. These smaller proprietary sites could really be doing anything with their code or data.
Since it’s the aim of the Govs to scrutinize the online behaviour of webusers it’s a simple matter of legislative authority to make information trackable. Witness countries like India and Saudi Arabia and RIM’s recent compliance to provide a backdoor to encrypted data to intelligence authorities.
As annoying as Google has become it is still ahead of the competition for the kinds of searches I do. I admit the quality of the results I seek have been increasingly dismal the past few years. Even so when I try say Bing it just doesn’t come close to Google for what I need.
I depend heavily on RSS for most of my surfing rather than surfing. The downside is that like minded sites link to each other so you can get a biased perspective on a given subject simply using RSS.
The question is, why is it getting ‘worse and worse.’ I would suggest this is DELIBERATE. So…I expect it to continue to deteriorate. I have been on the ‘web’ back when it was used mainly by the military and NASA. This is how I communicated with my parents, for example. Way back to the late 1970’s. It got bigger and better all the time but no more. It is getting worse and worse.
I would say, the ‘free for all’ heyday was 2000. Then, it began a steep decline as far as freedom is concerned. Very steep!!!
Of course is deliberate, when the “suits” moved in with Google going public, the “profit and control” thinking began and Google deteriorated.
It is like inviting termites into one’s home. 🙂
Gardener, thanks for the link. I’m going to try it out. How long before the Internet is shut down for “security reasons” or “cyber attacks”? I’m supposing just as long as it takes for civil unrest to occur in this country.
“I would say, the ‘free for all’ heyday was 2000. Then, it began a steep decline as far as freedom is concerned. Very steep!!!”
That was around the time of the .com crash. Up until then, it was thought that the free market could beat us into submission without any conscious help. There were a flood of new .com businesses, and a tidal wave of spam. We were told over and over again that the purpose of the internet was online shopping. It was thought that all that comercialization and spam would stifle the political discussions on its own.
After the “free market” threw in the towel and went home, somebody decided a more directed and subtle approach was necessary. But they haven’t got Pandora’s box closed quite yet.
“shockuhzulu
January 28, 2012 at 4:23 am
Gardener, thanks for the link. I’m going to try it out. How long before the Internet is shut down for “security reasons” or “cyber attacks”? I’m supposing just as long as it takes for civil unrest to occur in this country.”
You’re welcome. I learned what a blackguard google was when we lived in China.
Google is evil.
It is systematic. Amazon, Visa and Paypal showed themselves to be willing tools in taking down Wikileaks. Facebook and Google are information gatherers for the CIA, FBI, various intelligence services. They are all in cahoots.
I’m using Firefox, just because it is collectively made and non-profit. I’ll install Ubuntu and get rid of Windows next week when I have a bit of time to fiddle around.
also disapeared…..the LibertyForum.org….a very up to the second reportage press endevor…..
http://www.liberty-forum.org/
Is this what you were looking for?
Elaine, I decided to sign the so called privacy policy; it is not a policy that preserves privacy; rather it is just the opposite; it is an oxymoron; that is it is double speak.
Yes knowing this I signed on as I use Google Docs to write my documents before posting them to my blog. And I use Google Blog comments which at times I like to leave my Google ID.
In other words for a matter of convenience I signed onto the so called Google privacy policy.
There is likely to come a time, when for a matter of principle, I will no longer use their web services and as a result go without writing, commenting or searching.
The current reason why Google has implemented the new privacy policy is to go beyond creating my Internet Profile to creating my Digital Persona, that is a health, economic, phisolophical and religious essence of my person. One thing that will be lacking is the fact that I died in Christ so I might come alive in Him. Therefore, I am no longer my own person, rather I am, one of Him, the Lord. Yes, I died and He now lives, and the life I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God.
Best to you.
Isn’t that always the tradeoff a bit of privacy for a bit of convenience.
A bit of liberty for the facade of security.
Elaine Just say no to big brother.
You of all people should know better. When in doubt ask google.
http://www.googleguide.com/cached_pages.html
On another google peeve. Auto fill and preferences has changed to now it rolls out you settings.
If anybody has some secret controls to make it stick, help please.
This one helps but not with holding preferences.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en
‘Google now owns Blogspot, a service I left long ago due to ridiculous levels of censorship’
Such as?