JANUARY 2006

Popularity, "fame",a game, that can never be the celebrity of real talent or art, as it is a shallow imitation of business, capitalism, deals etc.

Disturbing Facts About Google
Published: 12/02/2005 09:56:15

Google are clearly gathering information about us but refuse to tell us why. It's nothing new to us, but while they cannot control normal SERPs, they do however control who is viewing what and when.

We run Google adverts in order to survive. Does this mean we shouldn't share the information below? If you know an alternative way to sustain costs please get in touch.

Please note, Google does not track you by simply viewing pages containing their adverts.

1. Google's immortal cookie:
Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines ; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.

2. Google records everything they can:
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."

3. Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.

4. Google won't say why they need this data:
Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.

5. Google hires spooks:
Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.

6. Google's toolbar is spyware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.

7. Google's cache copy is illegal:
Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in" for webmasters, not "opt-out."

8. Google is not your friend:
By now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. Webmasters cannot avoid seeking Google's approval these days, assuming they want to increase traffic to their site. If they try to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google's semi-secret algorithms, they may find themselves penalized by Google, and their traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time Google doesn't even answer email from webmasters.

9. Google is a privacy time bomb:
With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved.

google-watch

FOLLOWS EXAMPLES FROM SOME "GROUP" SITES

www.politicalfriendster.com
Counterintelligence Field Activity - CIFA's Friends; CIFA directorate, Behavioral Sciences, "has 20 psychologists and a multimillion-dollar budget," and supports both "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts," according to a government biography of its director, S. Scott Shumate. Submitted by "fedup"2005-12-20

Shumate was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA's counterterrorism center until 2003. His group has also provided a "team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees," according to his biography.

Political Friendster needs you! Contribute people and connections to build the site up. Political Friendster is nothing without you. You can contribute anonymously if you like, or register for added functionality!

Political Friendster is a parody of the social network Friendster. It allows a visualization of the connections between players in the political game.

This, above, is just one of the many social network sites that major players are interested in researching in order, possibly, to ascertain, contain and control a global network of users, their geographic predominance, their preferences and psychological outlooks.But the crisis evaluation is if these are attention directed networks or genuine social networks created by the members without inevitable links created by a host.

Google is at present building up research of this kind and the following is one of their lures for social networks that they might usefully link :
Popularity, "fame",a game, that can never be the celebrity of real talent or art, as it is a shallow imitation of business, capitalism, deals etc.

The more people that link to a site, the higher it is rated in Google's mind. By carefully choosing who to link to and where to place those links, SEOs can push a target website up the rankings. Some shady operators even create a fake ecology of websites which all point at each other.
Celebrities on  Google ! (Huminity advt)
Friendstr, Orkit/Orkut, My Space, Huminity,
Wired News: Making Friendsters in High Places (Google Search result)
Or how about this...............Friendster, known for breaking new ground in onlinesocialo networking and promoting self-expression among peers, fired one of its employees Monday for her personal Web log, or online diary. Joyce Park, a Web developer living in Sunnyvale, Calif., said her managers told her Monday that she stepped over the line with her blog, Troutgirl. They declined to elaborate, except to say that it was CEO Scott Sassa's ultimate decision, Park said. "I only made three posts about Friendster on my blog before they decided to fire me, and it was all publicly available information. They did not have any policy, didn't give me any warning, they didn't ask me to take anything down," said Park, 35.

FEEDBACK friendster is a business.It'snot a hippy commune where goal number one is to be happy. No one in that company outside of management has any business talking about the company without vetting their statement through whoever is handling public relations. That's how business works. This person played it loose instead of using her head, and she paid for it. Professionals know better than to do something like this. And hopefully she won't make mistakes like this in the future. - anonymous


ORKIT OR OKUT??
"Beware of this site(ORKIT), that may be linked on popular websites (search engines), Emails and stuff! Seems like they are collecting Orkut user data." from Tobias Schlitt

ORKUT

orkut is an online community website designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make your social life, and that of your friends, more active and stimulating. orkut's social network can help you both maintain existing relationships and establish new ones by reaching out to people you've never met before. Who you interact with is entirely up to you. Before getting to know an orkut member, you can even see how they're connecting to you through the friends network.
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If you haven't yet received an invitation to join, please be patient. We'd love to immediately include everyone who wants to participate; however, we're also trying to ensure that orkut remains a close-knit community. Over the next few weeks, hopefully, the network will grow to a point where everyone who wants to join has the opportunity to do so.

It is our mission to help you create a closer, more intimate network of friends. We hope to put you on the path to social bliss soon.

Enjoy (=

MAPPING, A SYSTEM,WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT !!

Network analysts often speak about (un)directed graphs. In essence, this refers to whether or not someone you know knows you. If reciprocity is required by the system, it's an undirected graph. The vast majority of online social networking tools assume that users are modeling friendship and thus if you're friends with someone, they better damn well be friends with you. As such, they use undirected graphs and you are required to confirm that they are indeed your friend. POSTED BY centrality(see link further down this page)

Marc’s got Huminity

Posted Dec 2, 2004, 11:17 AM ET by Judith Meskill

Huminity, a leading social network has become the first social ecosystem on the web by blending and interconnecting free personal and group Blogs, clubs, geographical user location search to its social networking and chat client.

The new version has created a sub culture of “Google Celebrities” with an index webpage updated every day with a listing of members’ pages that appear first in Google.  

They have numerous pages on Google I see.More...BTW, here’s a peek at Marc Canter’s Huminity network:



Feedster also has about 146 mentions of Huminity today—in the extended blogosphere.also Comment:Posted Dec 5, 2004, 2:22 AM ET by Stardance

How did you get the map for Marc Canter? When I searched Huminity with the search feature on their home page, it returned two links to blogs for two respective members, apparently, named "Marc Canter". There were many other "Marc" and "marc" members, too, but only those two for the surname "Canter". The page displayed by the link is an unused blog with little on it but the format or entry areas for different features. I don't recall seeing any menu entry on the home page for maps or other "tools".

09/21/04

01:17:57 am, Categories:"Building it from scratch", 285 words  

Huminity V2.0 will be out next week!

After a long and quiet development period, the time has finally come to launch beginning of next week, what is in our opinion the most developed and fascinating Social Software on the Internet today – Huminity Version 2. The major features we are adding are:

1. Location based user profile – users can search for people that are located NEAR them. We like the online world but believe that people should also interact in the physical world and knowing who is near you can help a lot achieving this goal for those who are interested in the technological side this is done with the help of GEO-IP.
2. Blogs – each of Huminity members will have a personal Blog! Easy and simple posting with easy picture sharing for all our users. Huminity is a social software… and idea sharing between people is a big part of it. The blogs we integrated are based on the amazing b2evolution blog – just like the blog system running this blog.
3. Huminities (Clubs) – Part of social life is belonging to a group – now people can join groups or create new ones in Huminity. People can see all other members of the group, what they wrote, who is on-line, chat with each other or work together regarding items that interest the club members.

All of these with addition to the current Instant Messaging, Social Networking, and visual maps of connections make Huminity the fullest social-software application on the web. Not only a full social suite of applications, but also a console that for the first time interconnects and brings together the whole online social experience.

Current users – no need to worry… Huminity auto-upgrade will upgrade all current users clients so you can enjoy the new version!

2 comments

This morning I have a Huminity press release in my news reader and an email from the Huminity team in my email box.

The abstract in their press release states:

Huminity, a leading social network has become the first social ecosystem on the web by blending and interconnecting free personal and group Blogs, clubs, geographical user location search to its social networking and chat client. The new version has created a sub culture of “Google Celebrities” with an index webpage updated every day with a listing of members’ pages that appear first in Google.

So, I clicked through to the Huminity website to see what they are up to these days and did a search for Marc Canter—knowing that if there is any constant in the Social Software universe it is this: If you build it Marc will come… (;=

We’ve had sporadic mentions of Huminity here at The Social Software weblog for over a year now. Anyone using it right now?

BTW, here’s a peek at Marc Canter’s Huminity network:

Comments(obviously this is put on by Huminity, see second comment or the "map" would not be here.)

1.Posted Dec 3, 2004, 1:30 PM ET by Marius

Quite nice this tool. I installed it on my desktop and must say its a nice gimmick. But wether i need it every day? I dont think so... ;-(

2.Posted Dec 5, 2004, 2:22 AM ET by Stardance

How did you get the map for Marc Canter? When I searched Huminity with the search feature on their home page, it returned two links to blogs for two respective members, apparently, named "Marc Canter". There were many other "Marc" and "marc" members, too, but only those two for the surname "Canter". The page displayed by the link is an unused blog with little on it but the format or entry areas for different features. I don't recall seeing any menu entry on the home page for maps or other "tools".

FOLLOWING UP THE SAME SITE A BIG FINANCIAL GRANT IS NOTED





Nov 5th 2005:(on google search)http://archive.globes .co .il/ENGLISH/index.asp?ID=737641

Sunday December 4, 2005 Israel  0.47 New York 17.47
Social networking software co - Huminity raises $2-4m - Huminity's product combines instant messaging and chat technologies enabling users to share their personal contact systems. Batya Feldman

DIGGING:
Orkut seems to be the same type of set up and see here is Marc Canter again:

{{why Orkut makes people insecure/Main/the danger of blogging as an academic }}

February 01, 2004

correcting Marc Canter's perception of my views

I was a bit miffed to read Marc Canter's perception of my views:

danah thinks we should treat these relationships more seriously.  Or somehow believe that by calling someone a 'friend' in an explicit social networking environment - actually means something.

I am not interested in what users SHOULD do; I'm interested in what they do do. That said, I truly believe that early users help construct the social norms for any given environment. In "Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do," Scott Feld talks about how people's understanding of how many friends they should have is constructed by their friends.

Marc - I don't believe that users should take these relationships more seriously; I believe that YOU should. Users will do whatever they damn well please, and I think that we should learn from them. But out of respect to the creators of these systems, many of whom are our friends, I truly believe that we should respect their goals and not engage in behavior that disrespects their intentions. Furthermore, I believe that we should never be the exceptions on any given service, the ones who push the boundaries. We are not average users. We should sit back and watch what average users do, not try to top them. By engaging in disrespectful behavior, we make it much harder for our friends and colleagues to execute their business plans as they're busy policing us.

This is about ethics and respect, not about any false notion that these networks actually mean something. This is about business models, strategy, and scalability, not research.

["Lago":: i definitely realize that it's a game; i'm sorry that you thought otherwise.]

Category: "yasns"

Posted by zephoria at February 1, 2004 02:48 AM |
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Danah, when I first read this, I thought of something else.

When I saw the word "YOU", I was thinking of myself and Marc Canter as developers. I'm not currently involved in developing Social Software, but I come from the developer mind set.

"WE" developers "should take these relationships more seriously". That means that although our users will game, will play, and stretch the system, we should design it as seriously as possible those who are serious, concerned, and value their relationships. "Calling someone a friend" should mean something -- something important.

Posted by: Christopher Allen at February 1, 2004 11:42 AM
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I popped off about being thankful for people who abuse systems in beta elsewhere, and I'd like expand on it while agreeing with Christopher. I read danah's "YOU" the same way. My opinion on seriously designing social systems is that the gamers and abusers should be taken seriously as part of the design. When considering any feature where people interact, my first thoughts are - how can I use this to harrass and annoy someone and what interaction am I willing to compromise.

Attempting to hold a public beta while protecting the system from abuse is a lot like throwing a wild party and not expecting someone to get drunk and knock over your priceless antique. Think of the possibility ahead of time and work it out the best you can - then let people in.

Posted by: Scott Moore at February 2, 2004 05:04 PM
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November 29, 2005 Attention Networks vs. Social Networks

(originally posted on "centrality")

Network analysts often speak about (un)directed graphs. In essence, this refers to whether or not someone you know knows you. If reciprocity is required by the system, it's an undirected graph.
The vast majority of online social networking tools assume that users are modeling friendship and thus if you're friends with someone, they better damn well be friends with you !!!
As such, they use undirected graphs and you are required to confirm that they are indeed your friend.

Well, what about fandom? Orkut actually put the concept of fan into their system, but in order to be someone's fan, you had to be their friend first. Baroo? I've noticed that Friendster introduced fans, although it is not consistent across the site; the system decides who is celebrity. I can be a fan of Pamela Anderson but i cannot be a fan of Michel Foucault or Henry Jenkins. While i can understand that the former is clearly a Fakester, the latter is actually a real academic with a Friendster Profile that i genuinely admire (far more than Ms. Anderson). Even on MySpace where bands have a separate section, i have to add them to my friends; i cannot simply be fans.

The world is not an undirected graph and very little about social life online is actually undirected. Many social relations are unequal; they are rooted in directional graphs - fandom, power, hierarchy. So why do we use undirected models?

Of course, there are many systems that have directed graphs. I can read blogs by bloggers who who don't read me; blogrolls are directed. I can have friends on LiveJournal that do not reciprocate. I can subscribe to del.icious feeds of people that I admire without forcing them to do the same. I can make a Flickr user a contact simply so thatI can watch their photos. I do all this becauseI know the world is not undirected.

Part of the problem is that we've built a model off of social networks instead of attention networks and there's a very subtle difference between the two. Attention networks recognize power.
They recognize that someone may actually have a good collection of references or be a good photographer and that someone else may want to pay attention to them even if their own collections are not worthy of reciprocation.
Attention networks realize that the world is not an undirected graph.

There are many good reasons to use attention networks in systems instead of social networks. Do you really want to force people to get permission to subscribe to public material of someone else? Do you really want to put people through the awkwardness of having to approve someone that they don't know simply because one person respects the other? Of course, the awkwardness of social networks does not disappear simply by having directed graphs. Reciprocity is still an issue whenever the networks are performative (visible as a statement of connection). This is most apparent in the blogging community where people feel insulted that they are not included on the blogroll of a blog that they read regularly. Thus, people feel the need to perform a relation of someone that they do not read simply for good social measure.

Attention networks are far more visible when people actually use the network for some purpose. Friendster networks are meant to be performative first and foremost. There's minimal cost to having more friends. It may foul up your gallery searches but, really, does it make a difference if you see 4,325,935 people instead of 4,311,266? Attention networks like LiveJournal and Flickr combine the network with the subscription process. You want to keep your Friends page clean and to only get information from people you care about. Of course, LJ also recognizes that there are times when you need plausible deniability. It allows you to create a separate group of LJ folks that you actually watch (separate from your "friends" list). The subscription process is inherently a process of attention relations, not friendship.

Of course, the computation needed for directed graphs is much greater than for undirected graphs. Is that the main reason that most services require reciprocity? Even when it's not the best mechanism for the system? Or are there other reasons why folks are obsessed with undirected graphs?

Technorati tags: attention networks

Category: social software

Posted by zephoria at .....
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 Nir Ben Levy's blog

2004-10-22 10:45:12, Categories: My Posts 93 words  

Huminity v.2.0 is online:

These were long days… the finishing touches on the personal and group blogs in Huminity took longer than we expected . Oren and I had a couple of long nights testing / debugging and fixing all kinds of small “bugs” (the Unicode one was the worst). All of that is behind us!

The new Huminity is more of a social ecosystem now – Chat, advanced personal and group blogs, IM, search for people near you, search acquaintance paths between members and other people, visualization of your social world… long days but it was worth it.
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As can be seen we try to live to how we believe social software and networking has and will evolve

We combined Blogs, wikis, social networks, IM, chat rooms, visual maps not just because these are cool features but since all these features completely interconnect into a social ecosystem. Members and none members can navigate from one person to another, enter friends blog, see who their friends are, read their blogs, leave a message or invite them to chat, search-path between themselves… each step with one click of a button, in a way like a computer adventure game when each zone holds unique information and a door to another adventure.
3 comments
http://blogs.huminity.com/blogs/index.php/team

SAME BLOG FROM HUMINITY ITSELF:

Happy New Year 2005 - Members mosaic :)

May it be a GREAT year for you your family and friends! Peace health and prosperity to all

The Huminity Team

Lots of people asked how we made the mosaic... we used Andrea Mosaic great freeware mosaic creator .

RE. THE SUBJECT OF SOCIAL NETWORKING ON INTERNET THAT IS HUMINITY AND ITS BOAST OF BEING THE SOCIAL NETWORK OF GOOGLE -

As can best be described as the first “Google of people & social networking”, users can see a wider view of their social network by entering their email to the catchy URL
www.huminity...... (an example… there isn’t such a user )

The strength of the weakest link

Common sense is a very deceptive instrument because it imparts characteristics from one field to another – just as most people have a very hard time believing that a heavier stone will not fall faster than a lighter stone. But what about connections? The intuitive judgment based on common-sense and basic laws of physics/ mechanics will imply that “a chain is as strong as it’s weakest link” as suggested in this recent article about Visible Path's concept...… intuitively, it makes sense, but, as said earlier – common sense is a very deceptive instrument…

Why not “a chain is as strong as it’s first link” since the first link is bound to have the most goodwill to help, but if it is weak, then obviously nothing will come out if it. Or on the contrary, maybe it is “as strong as it’s weak links” as suggested by Mark Granovetter in his 1983 study and somewhat doubtful, by Joi Ito … Or maybe “a chain is as strong as it’s last link” since the last link is the key to reaching the target, but if it has a weak connection and scarcely knows the target person, then obviously nothing will come out if it…Maybe the strength of a chain is determined by the strength of the node in the middle which holds the chain together on both sides… and maybe there are more alternatives than we can imagine…

In Huminity, we did not go in the path of VisiblePath to scroll over a person’s e-mails and determine the strength of connections with any person in their rolerdex based on amount of mail sent and received, firstly because we think it’s private but functionally we think it adds noise rather than value. We didn’t go in the path of Spoke to determine the source of connection to each person on the rolerdex (work, school, etc) since we think it’s irrelevant in the most important aspect of finding available paths.

Basically, we took the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach, and it brings pretty good results. Anyone can search all available (non duplicative) paths to anyone, and then determine how to approach the person. Maybe the first link was the important one, and maybe it was the last one. One thing is for sure – social networking is an art, not a science…Leave a comment

Huminity CONTINUES THEIR SENSELESS GAME - THE SEARCH FOR INTERNET "FAME"::

Picked by Yahoo!

This story is a bit similar to the /. story. We noticed a sudden increase in hits frommy.yahoo.com and it’s sub domains. Going tomy.yahoo.com did not show any link to us. The educated guess was that users writing about us caused the hits. Blogs write about us, livejurnal has a lot of links to Huminity.... but this traffic was different – its frequency and mass was, lets say, higher

Using Michal's my.yahoo.comaccount and selecting possible content types came up with the following discovery:

Yahoo software editors have chosen Huminity to be featured in their daily pick PLUS:

Top 50

We had a feeling this might happen this week. After all slashdot org did bring some users and their friends, and their friends and... you know how it works

To be on Cnet’s download.com top-50 most downloaded software is quite an achievement after all it’s the Internet’s #1 download site and a barometer to the most popular software on the Internet!
(these comments in Huminity are plentifully interspersed with idiotic "smiley" logos

THEIR TECHNOLOGY AND REASONS AND THEIR SICKENING SMILIES!:
So why did we choose desktop?

1. It provides stickiness – In Huminity, people get notified whenever one of their friends joins, or when someone invites them to chat. It’s more “social” than just going over people’s profiles. In Huminity you can go over a person’s profile and TALK to that person, so the gratification is immediate.. The real time communication between people is the glue of society.
2. It provides graphical representations through the use of local computing power. This eliminates the latency problems that web-based services suffer, without even having such graphical representations as Huminity does.
3. It enables adding features not all accepted well in websites, like chat, chat-rooms, skins, bookmarks, sounds, different kind of social maps, VoIP, personal blog , notifications, etc… some taste of our current and near future additions
4. It’s a 24*7 application – see your friends, their friends, who is connected to who, search a path to a person, visualize it, chat with that person. Get to the next stage of social conduct – all the pieces of the social web finely clear and helpful for all.

Hype aside, social networking implemented right is the most powerful tool created to date. It gathers around it every social activity one can imagine – dating, business, selling, buying, renting, job seeking… you name it, it should deliver. But it has to be implemented right first. And doing it right means a very low churn rate and value added– after all, it’s “social” networking. If it isn’t sticky for all people, then it’s simply another forum with a few “market makers” …
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Slashdot had an article about US! Wow! We were excited like kids, slashdot is the internet pulse after all, we were also scared stiff. As long time /. readers we heard about the effect.

First thing call Skagg the all mighty. With his usual calmness he said that we should not worry - the servers will take it… the page will be cached by ISP’s all over the world.

So what was there left to do? Run TOP and see how the server is handling it. It handled it great. Why shouldn’t it? Skaag and Mark tweaked it plus rackshack do have good boxes.
Took out the flash movie from the home page, wrote that we are under slashdot effect and watched the log files run!

That was a good day. We don't remember buying that patent that they talked about in /. overall that was a GREAT piece about us.

And yea – the registration rate was unbelievable
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We search Google every day to check which of Huminity's members became Google Celebrities
and their pages appear in first places when searching for their name

Want to be a Google Celebrity?
This is followed by long table of Huminity members names
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More:

Huminity, a leading social network has become the first social ecosystem on the web by blending and interconnecting free personal and group Blogs, clubs, geographical user location search to its social networking and chat client. The new version has created a sub culture of “Google Celebrities” with an index webpage updated every day with a listing of members’ pages that appear first in Google.  

They have numerous pages on Google I see.More...BTW, above there is a peek at Marc Canter’s Huminity network:

Feedstr also has about 146 mentions of Huminity today—in the extended blogosphere.also Comment:Posted Dec 5, 2004, 2:22 AM ET by Stardance

"How did you get the map for Marc Canter? When I searched Huminity with the search feature on their home page, it returned two links to blogs for two respective members, apparently, named "Marc Canter". There were many other "Marc" and "marc" members, too, but only those two for the surname "Canter". The page displayed by the link is an unused blog with little on it but the format or entry areas for different features. I don't recall seeing any menu entry on the home page for maps or other "tools"."

And if one sort of surveillance interests you there is also this to think about: Israel has set up government subsidized telecommunications companies which operate in the United States. One of these companies is Amdocs, which provides billing and directory assistance for 90% of the phone companies in the USA. Amdocs' main computer center for billing is actually in Israel and allows those with access to do what intelligence agencies call "traffic analysis"; a picture of someone's activities based on a pattern of who they are calling and when. Another Israeli telecom company is Comverse Infosys, which subcontracts the installation of the automatic tapping equipment now built into every phone system in America. Comverse maintains its own connections to all this phone tapping equipment, insisting that it is for maintenance purposes only. However, Comverse has been named as the most likely source for leaked information regarding telephone calls by law enforcement that derailed several investigations into not only espionage, but drug running as well. Yet another Israeli telecom company is Odigo, which provides the core message passing system for all the "Instant Message" services. Two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, Odigo employees received a warning. Odigo has an office 2 blocks from the former location of the World Trade Towers.

UPDATE:

Motorola adds Google to mobiles BBC World News

Motorola has announced plans to enable users of its mobile phones to access Google's internet search engine at the touch of a single handset button. The US mobile phone maker said it would introduce Google's software technology to many of its new handsets. The companies said they wanted to encourage more mobile users to access the internet using their phones. Separately, Google also announced an internet video service deal with US chip giant Intel.