"Lakehead University in Canada was one of the first large-scale adopters of Google applications, but a storm has broken out after staff were told not to use it for personal or sensitive information. The problem arises because the information is stored on Google's servers in the US where authorities have the right to read everything Google stores under the Patriot Act."

Ah, the ugly side of cloud computing is emerging. And Google wants to get privacy standards unified? Fat chance, but with all of Google's resources, they should be able to built distributed datacenters in each country... they maybe open it up like Amazon has so ew can all benefit?

"While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide."

Good luck Google if you're bringing this to Melbourne. Unless you cater for our broken system, all Google Transit will do is remind us what public transport should be.

"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft."

Arrogant twat. Nice to see he conveniently forgets that we're actually giving Google all our data for free so they can effectively on-sell it and make more money at our expense. There's no such thing as a free lunch, people.

"Camera-shy pedestrians should be advised to stay indoors this summer as a fleet of Google-mobiles equipped with roof-mounted cameras trawl Australian capital cities snapping locales for the Internet search giant’s Google Street View. The cars will be doing the rounds in Australian capital cities, taking 360 degree panoramic street-level photographs to be used on Google Maps’ Street View feature."

Hahaha... this will be interesting. Can't wait to see the results :)

"We’ve been digesting Google’s announcement of the Android platform and the formation of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) for the last couple of days... Our conclusion: ignore the platform itself and look at the motivation. Google’s long-term objective is not be a player in the mobile platforms business - this is all about creating market conditions compatible with its unique business model. Read on to find out why…"

Great, well-written article exploring the reasoning behind Google's android mobile platform. After all, it's all open-sourced, and Apache-licensed, so they effectively have no control over it - so where's the business case? (no even Google doesn't give stuff away for no reason.)

"Google hopes to promote third-party mobile software development and foster a broad developer community on top of Android's Linux-based mobile platform... Although the underlying Linux kernel is licensed under version 2 of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPLv2), much of the user-space software infrastructure that will make up the Open Handset Alliance's platform will be distributed under version 2 of the Apache Software License (ASL)."

Good analysis here, and a very smart decision by Google. At least one heavy user and contributor of open-source software realises that the world isn't open-source vs. proprietary (although that may be because a lot of Google's stuff is proprietary built on open-source code).

"Today Google released the Android platform SDK for Open Handset Alliance devices. Android contains a custom Dalvik virtual machine for running applications written in a subset of Java... Instead of providing a full version of the Java SE or Java ME Google has diverged on two fronts. First, a limited subset of the core Java packages is provided."

Nice overview of Android from a developer's perspective, but wtf Google! Let's fragment the mobile world further by introducing another incompatible app platform!

"Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and e-mail?"... "Sir, calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches," the man said in a mocking whine. "That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I'll give it to you when we're through here.""

Creepy little story about the might of Google. Kind of reminded me of the scene in the Matrix when Neo is sitting at his green-screen, then all of a sudden getting a knock on the door...

"If you think you’ve seen bizarre lawsuits before, check this one out. Pennsylvania resident Dylan Stephen Jayne is suing Google for crimes against humanity and is asking the court for $5 billion in damages. The charge: his social security number, when turned upside down and scrambled spells Google... And even though it is handwritten, it’s a real lawsuit."

Only in America... love the handwriting :)