google has now seriously made me doubt its motives. They’re no longer some benevolent non-Microsoft BigCorp mascot, but just an overly ambitious and deathly efficient search engine (no more political/philosophical repsect). In spite of their trumpted “hell no, we ain’t giving you our users’ search records, you nosey non-warrant wielding Feds!” actions, their recent internal contradictions (censoring searchers in China != “Do no evil”) may have been the slippery slope they needed to allow them to have a change in heart about their hesitation to share your searches with people who think they know better than you. In fact, it’s more than just “Ok, here you go!”; it’s more like: “Ok, here you go! Oh, and we also included all the files on their computer, just in case you would ever be curious”. Yes, that’s right, your Favorite Search Engine is now copying your hard drive to their servers, for indexing and faster results, naturally. I’m glad that Google Desktop isn’t available for my system, cos I’d prolly be using it (until today).
What’s even worse, their corporate philosophy has matched to suit the new direction. What used to read “Do no Evil” on google’s corporate (mis)information page has been replaced with “You can make money without doing evil”. fuck!
At least, there’s a new option for all you digital music buyers (not that it’s only limited to that lonely lot). Sucks when your Yahoo! files won’t play in iTunes, doesn’ it? And, it’s based on the firefox trunk, so you can browse the web and stream freely. Oh, and it’s open source, and plays nicely with more codecs than you have fingers (and will soon be adding operating systems to that comparison as well).