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This is just paranoid ranting. Google is offering one way to protect yourself from DDoS. Without Google you could still do it.

Pointlessly contrarian criticism with a solid dose of conspiracy theory. Just vague complaints with no threat model. If you think there's a credible threat, provide a sequence of steps that could occur for that dangerous action to take place. Describe a potential PoC.

You had me nodding in agreement until the very last word. Don't ruin it.

That's the part I took least issue with.

>while google is the master of spreading consumer propaganda and spying on people.

Equating automated behavioral analysis or ad targeting with willful communications-spying, like NSA does, is retarded. Yes, Google has been guilty of many invasive tactics and holds too much power right now, but claims that they're doing that to "suppress dissent and unpopular opinion" or "spread propaganda" will need a lot of evidence.

>The commercialization of news is the best form of censorship. You don't need to censor much when the vast majority of news is meaningless bullshit stuffed with ads and promotions, and is already controlled by organizations like Google.

How is this Google's fault in any way? Google owns a lot of those ad networks, but beyond that they're not responsible for news quality.

>Google is one of these organizations that operate without scrutiny and transparency alongside organizations such as the NSA.

Aka every other private corporation in the US? You really seem to be grasping at straws trying to make them out to be as bad as intelligence agencies.

>If you think Google will help you with anonymity, free speech, or 'unfiltered' news, you are retarded.

They're dedicating their network resources to preventing independent news websites from being censored by oppressive governments or DDoS'd by hostile entities, pro bono, and it appears to be working quite well. You've cited no specific examples of them doing the opposite, while there are many examples of them doing as they say.

I am no Google fanboy. I hate advertising and ad networks and think (or at least hope) they'll mostly die within a decade or two. I use ad blockers on all my devices and have never put a single ad on any website I've operated due to the ethical concerns.

But come on.

I mean, if you want to go all out on the "propaganda" and "alongside the NSA" claims, don't just look at advertising. Google Ideas is pretty explicitly about political and government-linked activity. Any tech company can operate alongside the NSA (they don't have much choice), but most of them don't employ Jared Cohen and send their executives to tour Iraq's green zone.

I don't want to veer into conspiracy territory here - I absolutely think DDoS protection is a great project, and we need it no matter who it's being provided for.

But reading The New Digital Age was a creepy experience that made me stop equating Google's political standing with that of Apple or other US tech companies. It was very openly a love letter to state power in a way I haven't seen even from topical companies like Palantir.

I haven't read the book and was not aware of some of Google Ideas' more shady activities. Thank you, because otherwise I wouldn't have heard of any of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen#Involvement_on_Syr...

>In an email addressed to the deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton dated on July 25, 2012, Cohen revealed that Google Ideas was working on a project, together with Al Jazeera, to track defectors of the Syrian Army with the explicit goal of "encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition."

That is pretty frightening.

I'm glad you found it interesting.

I started from Assange's scathing review and decided I had to read the thing for myself. From an inside view, it's just terrible futurism (who wants to read the news on a transparent screen facing a window?), but from an outside view it's a fascinating position paper from Schmidt/Cohen.

I'm usually unimpressed with the "tech companies are all government conspirators!" paranoia, but I do have the sense that Google has chosen a way more active role in international politics than others.

How is it so ruinous? It's a fairly bog standard way to say "naïve", "ill-advised", and so on. Hopefully you wouldn't let the rest of the content be overshadowed or dismissed by a particular pejorative. OP still makes points worthy of discussion.

Many words were once bog-standard that are now frowned upon. I agree though, it's pretty gay that you're gypped out of calling a spade a spade by these uppity, autistic commenters..

But "retarded" is in fact a different word than the alternatives you posted. Different words have different implicit and explicit connotations. So word choice and style of communication are entirely valid factors when evaluating whether an opinion is worth one's time given that we now live in a vast sea of opinions.

I suspect that people who think that how they communicate is distinct from what they communicate have not thought very carefully about the problem of communication.

What the word "retarded" communicates about the person who uses it is something I think you can work out on your own. It's one of many similar words that I often use accidentally when I mean something more precise.

It was definitely bog-standard at my middle school in the 90s, but it is definitely not in my adult world of people who have learned to empathize with people and avoid pointlessly insulting them. There are plenty of better words to use for this.

Looking at projects like this, it almost looks like Google is actively seeking to become some kind of additional branch or agency of the government -- one with powers to do what the Fed can't, so they sell their services to those same Feds. Furthermore, the revolving door around tech giants and the government atop the Snowden leaks and Google's complete dismissal of them make me think the only "transparency" Google works toward is transparency of the citizen, never the state. That kind of transparency, which we call the surveillance state, or the Panopticon to illustrate the psychological effect, produces an enormous power imbalance against whomever has less information (the citizenry). These aren't benevolent acts. They are state power plays, and Google plays along with them.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/13/eric-schmidt-go...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Schmidt's behavior as described by Assange is extremely concerning and bordering on frightening, but, so far, no evidence has been produced that he's dedicated any of Google's resources to his personal goals. Just because the CEO of a company has an agenda (bordering on conflict of interest) doesn't necessarily mean Google itself shares that agenda.