Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

You’ve probably heard a lot about Google in the last few days. The company was all over the media because of two important issues.

The first one had something to do with their profits, and experts’ expectations of those profits. That’s all very boring unless, of course, you are a shareholder. Which I am not. So I’ll just ignore that one for now.

The second one is a bit more catchy. It’s the rise of an old question - “What happens if Google will go evil?”. Google has access to such much information that it can easily change lives of so many people both to the good and to the bad. And I am not only talking about all that information that is so easily found with Google’s search engine. Just in case you forgot or never knew - Google knows who is looking for what, where are you coming from, which languages you can read, and what browser do you use. It has also a pretty good idea about websites that you visit - which ones and how often (by means of Google advertising and Google web statistics). If you use Google Mail, they know a lot more about you, than you probably do about yourself. And so forth.

Until now though Google was pretty descent in most its politics. But a few days ago they did something in China that many people saw as an evil act.

The thing with China is that it is still a very much controlled state. There are things like government firewalls that prevent people from accessing all sorts of resources - from pornographic to political. There is a lot of censorship - who can say what and when, etc. That’s on one hand. On the other - more than a billion people. In English that means - a huge market.

So there is no surprise that everyone and anyone are trying to get their hand on China. Doing so though requires a lot of manouvering around Chinese government and its existing policies. And here is where Google came to light recently. Instead of supporting free speech and other democratic civil rights, they agreed to do a lot of filtering on the results they provide for certain keywords.

How bad is it? Well, consider an example. Bad. Very bad.

Why should you care? I don’t know. You decide for yourself.

For today I have a few Bittorrent links. We all have to do our peer-2-peering once in a while, don’t we?

• The Pirate Bay - The worlds largest BitTorrent tracker
  Tagged as: download movies search tools torrent web
• Seedler.org - The BitTorrent Source
  Tagged as: download movies music p2p search torrent tv
• Torrents Search Engine - Torrentz.com
  Tagged as: download p2p search tools torrent web

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-28.

Finally I got my act together and processed all the pictures. Out of 250 frames I selected 125. Mostly those are of Ian Gillan with a microphone. Steve Morse with his guitar and Don Airey up at his keyboards are the next most covered. Basist Roger Glover and drummer Ian Paice were on the other side of the stage, so their pictures aren’t as spectacular as of others, but I’ve go them covered anyway.

I’d like to thank Slava who started the whole argument with the security stuff and found out that it was OK to bring in the photo camera and that only video cameras were banned. If it wasn’t for him, I would leave my camera in the car and none of this pictures would have seen the light of the Web.

Without further a do…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-07-15_Deep_Purple_in_Cyprus

Firstly, I wanted to let everyone know that I am planning to go to the concert. I’ll be ticket hunting during the coming week. Anyone else wants to go?

Secondly, I noticed a strange thing with Google. My blog comes out as the top first result for the query “deep purple cyprus“. I’ve seconded even the official Deep Purple website. Does anyone know how can I make any money out of it? Just kidding. No, actually, I am serious.

Thirdly, some humor regarding the upcoming concert. I’ve heard a few guys talking the other day:

Someone: Are you planning to go to the concert?

Someone else: I’d go only on one condition - that they won’t play “Smoke on the water”. I’ve heard it way too many times and I don’t want to hear it again.

Someone else else: I must be kidding me. They would be killed and tortured by the crowd in so many different creative ways if they won’t play “Smoke on the water”… I’m sure even they know it and they won’t risk it.

Yet another someone else: I’m sure half of that crowd would pay twice the price of the ticket to just hear “Smoke on the water” a couple of times and nothing else. All they want is to hear it from the original source for once.

That second guy: Oh, well. Tough luck than.