Robot Monkeys

fucking-a [via]:

It turns out the bug in Android I wrote about yesterday was worse than we thought. When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. Wow!

(issue 1207) jdhorvat:

It turns out the bug in Android I wrote about yesterday was worse than we thought. When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. Wow!

This post may be best described as being “true, but not insightful.”

A lot of people are talking about people leaving Google now. This article isn’t about that. This article is about perceptions.

For the last couple of years I begun to consider everyone’s favorite Hippocratic company, Google, and how long it’s run of being the most popular kid in The Valley was going to last. I suspected it was getting ready to end soon, especially with the introduction of Android. gMail didn’t really bother me so much, since it was just yet another webmail, albeit with context sensitive ads. (Like you don’t think that Microsoft and Yahoo aren’t reading your mail as well.) gTalk? Whatev’. It’s cool that someone big was using Jabber, but again, that’s just yet-another-im, and one that went nowhere. gApps was interesting, but it didn’t seem to be more than a curiosity so I wasn’t too worried. Very interested, but not too worried. Android on the other hand, is Google controlling your life.

It’s a Microsoft ploy.

The reason why Microsoft got the reputation for being evil was:

1. They were/are everywhere.
2. They created substandard products.
3. They flaunted and broke existing standards.
4. Their products don’t play well with others.
5. They would illegally leverage their monopoly.

Now the blogosphere is all in a flutter over Google’s daycare blunder. Apparently the whole daycare thing is Susan Wojcicki’s program, and it was created after she had a baby, and tailored for her views. Now that she doesn’t need it, it’s being overhauled in very unfriendly way to say the least.

I know I’m connecting Android, gMail, AdWords, the various gAlsoRans, and daycare. There really isn’t a connection between them except perception. The perception is that Google is quickly becoming the 800 pound gorilla, and there’s stirrings of a break culturewise.