Kiddie Loving Google and Data Hoovering
April 22, 2025
If you do not have kids or grandkids in school, you may have missed Google’s very successful foray into K-12 education. Google’s “Workspace for Education” tools are free to schools, but is the company providing them purely from a sense of civic duty? Of course not. Bloomberg Law reports, “Google Hit with Lawsuit over Data Collection on School Kids.” Apparently, US schools did not learn from Denmark’s 2022 ban on Google Workspace in its schools. Or they decided savings and convenience trumped student privacy and parental consent. Writer Isaiah Poritz tells us:
“Google LLC is unlawfully using its products—ubiquitous in K-12 education—to secretly gather information about school age children, substituting the consent of the school for that of parents, a proposed class action filed in California federal court said Monday. The tech giant collects not only traditional education records ‘but thousands of data points that span a child’s life,’ and ‘neither students nor their parents have agreed to this arrangement, according to the US District Court for the Northern District of California complaint.”
This is a significant breach, if true, considering almost 70% of K-12 schools in the US use these tools. We also learn:
“The company doesn’t disclose that it embeds hidden tracking technology in its Chrome browser that creates a child’s unique digital ‘fingerprint,’ the plaintiffs said. The fingerprint allows Google to ‘to track a child even when she or her school administrator has disabled cookies or is using technologies designed to block third-party cookies.’ The suit said Google has failed to obtain parental consent to take school childrens’ personal data. ‘Instead, Google relies on the consent of school personnel alone,’ the complaint said. ‘But school personnel do not have authority to provide consent in lieu of parents.’”
No, they do not. Or they shouldn’t. It seems like parents’ rights groups should have something to say about this. Perhaps they are too busy policing library shelves. The suit alleges Google is both selling students’ data to third parties and using it for its own targeted advertising. We note it would also be very easy, if the firm is so inclined, to build up a profile of a student who later creates a Google account which is then mapped onto that childhood data.
Naturally, Google denies the suit’s allegations. Of course, our favorite company does.
Cynthia Murrell, April 22, 2025
ArXiv: Will Other Smart Software Systems Get “Free” Access? Yeah, Sure
April 21, 2025
Believe it or not, no smart software. Just a dumb and skeptical dinobaby.
Before commenting on Cornell University’s apparent shift of the ArXiv service to the Google Cloud, let me point you to this page:
The page was updated 15 years ago. Now check out the access to
NCSTRL, the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library.
CoRR, the Computing Research Repository.
The Open Archives Initiative.
ETRDL, the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library.
Cornell University Library Historical Math Book Collection
Cornell University Library Making of America Collection
Hein online Retrospective Law Journals
Yep, 404s, some content behind paywalls, and other data just disappeared because Bing, Google, and Yandex don’t index certain information no matter what people believe or the marketers say.
This orphaned Cornell University Dienst service has “gorged out”; that is, jumped off a bridge to the rocks below. The act is something students know about but the admissions department seems to not be aware of the bound phrase.
I read “Careers at ArXiv.” The post seems to say to me, “We are moving the ArXiv “gray” papers to Google Cloud. Here’s a snippet of the “career” advertisement / news announcement:
We are already underway on the arXiv CE ("Cloud Edition") project. This is a project to re-home all arXiv services from VMs at Cornell to a cloud provider (Google Cloud). There are a number of reasons for this transition, including improving arXiv’s scalability while modernizing our infrastructure. This will not be a simple port of the existing arXiv code base because this project will:
- replace the portion of our backends still written in perl and PHP
- re-architect our article processing to be fully asynchronous, and provide better insight into the processing workflows
- containerize all, or nearly all arXiv services so we can deploy via Kubernetes or services like Google Cloud Run
- improve our monitoring and logging facilities so we can more quickly identify and manage production issues with arxiv.org
- create a robust CI/CD pipeline to give us more confidence that changes we deploy will not cause services to regress
The cloud transition is a pre-requisite to modernizing arXiv as a service. The modernization will enable: – arXiv to expand the subject areas that we cover – improve the metadata we collect and make available for articles, adding fields that the research community has requested such as funder identification – deal with the problem of ambiguous author identities – improve accessibility to support users with impairments, particularly visual impairments – improve usability for the entire arXiv community.
I know Google is into “free.” The company is giving college students its quantumly supreme smart software for absolutely nothing. Maybe a Google account will be required? Maybe the Chrome browser may be needed to give those knowledge hungry college students the best experience possible? Maybe Google’s beacons, bugs, and cookies will be the students’ constant companions? Yeah, maybe.
But will ArXiv exist in the future? Will Google’s hungry knowledge munchers chew through the data and then pull a Dienst maneuver?
As a dinobaby, I liked the ArXiv service, but I also liked the Dienst math repository before it became unfindable.
It seems to me that Cornell University is:
- Saving money at the library and maybe the Theory Center
- Avoiding future legal dust ups about access to content which to some government professionals may reveal information to America’s adversaries
- Intentionally or inadvertently giving the Google control over knowledge flow related to matters of technical and competitive interest to everyone’s favorite online advertising company
- Running a variation of its Dienst game plan.
But I am a dinobaby, and I know zero about Cornell other than the “gorging out” approach to termination. I know even less about the blue chip consulting type thinking in which the Google engages. I don’t even know if I agree that Google’s recent court loss is really a “win” for the Google.
But the future of the ArXiv? Hey, where is that bridge? Do some students jump, fall, or get pushed to their death on the rocks below?
PS. In case your German is rusty “dienst” means duty and possibly “a position of authority” like a leader at Google.
Stephen E Arnold, April xx, 2025
Google Is Just Like Santa with Free Goodies: Get “High” Grades, of Course
April 18, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby himself.
Google wants to be [a] viewed as the smartest quantumly supreme outfit in the world and [b] like Santa. The “smart” part is part of the company’s culture. The CLEVER approach worked in Web search. Now the company faces what might charitably be called headwinds. There are those pesky legal hassles in the US and some gaining strength in other countries. Also, the competitive world of smart software continues to bedevil the very company that “invented” the transformer. Google gave away some technology, and now everyone from the update champs in Redmond, Washington, to Sam AI-Man is blowing smoke about Google’s systems and methods.
What a state of affairs?
The fix is to give away access to Google’s most advanced smart software to college students. How Santa like. According to “Google Is Gifting a Year of Gemini advanced to Every College Student in the US” reports:
Google has announced today that it’s giving all US college students free access to Gemini Advanced, and not just for a month or two—the offer is good for a full year of service. With Gemini Advanced, you get access to the more capable Pro models, as well as unlimited use of the Deep Research tool based on it. Subscribers also get a smattering of other AI tools, like the Veo 2 video generator, NotebookLM, and Gemini Live. The offer is for the Google One AI Premium plan, so it includes more than premium AI models, like Gemini features in Google Drive and 2TB of Drive storage.
The approach is not new. LexisNexis was one of the first online services to make online legal research available to law school students. It worked. Lawyers are among the savviest of the work fast, bill more professionals. When did Lexis Nexis move this forward? I recall speaking to a LexisNexis professional named Don Wilson in 1980, and he was eager to tell me about this “new” approach.
I asked Mr. Wilson (who as I recall was a big wheel at LexisNexis then), “That’s a bit like drug dealers giving the curious a ‘taste’?”
He smiled and said, “Exactly.”
In the last 45 years, lawyers have embraced new technology with a passion. I am not going to go through the litany of search, analysis, summarization, and other tools that heralded the success of smart software for the legal folks. I recall the early days of LegalTech when the most common question was, “How?” My few conversations with the professionals laboring in the jungle of law, rules, and regulations have shifted to “which system” and “how much.”
The marketing professionals at Google have “invented” their own approach to hook college students on smart software. My instinct is that Google does not know much about Don Wilson’s big idea. (As an aside, I remember one of Mr. Wilson’s technical colleague sometimes sported a silver jumpsuit which anticipated some of the fashion choices of Googlers by half a century.)
The write up says:
Google’s intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers.
I am not sure I agree with this. If the program gets traction, Sam AI-Man and others will be standing by with special offers, deals, and free samples. The chemical structure of certain substances is similar to today’s many variants of smart software. Hey, whatever works, right? Whatever is free, right?
Several observations:
- Google’s originality is quantumly supreme
- Some people at the Google dress like Mr. Wilson’s technical wizard, jumpsuit and all
- The competition is going to do their own version of this “original” marketing idea; for example, didn’t Bing offer to pay people to use that outstanding Web search-and-retrieval system?
Net net: Hey, want a taste? It won’t hurt anything. Try it. You will be mentally sharper. You will be more informed. You will have more time to watch YouTube. Trust the Google.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2025
Google Gemini 2.5: A Somewhat Interesting Content Marketing Write Up
April 18, 2025
Just a still alive dinobaby . No smart software involved.
How about this headline: “Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro Is the Smartest Model You’re Not Using – and 4 Reasons It Matters for Enterprise AI”?
OpenAI scroogled the Google again. First, it was the January 2023 starting gun for AI hype. Now it was the release of a Japanese cartoon style for ChatGPT. Who knew that Japanese cartoons could have blasted the Google Gemini 2.5 Pro launch more effectively than a detonation of a failed SpaceX rocket?
The write up pants:
Gemini 2.5 Pro marks a significant leap forward for Google in the foundational model race – not just in benchmarks, but in usability. Based on early experiments, benchmark data, and hands-on developer reactions, it’s a model worth serious attention from enterprise technical decision-makers, particularly those who’ve historically defaulted to OpenAI or Claude for production-grade reasoning.
Yeah, whatever.
Announcements about Google AI are about as satisfying as pizza with glued-on cheese or Apple’s AI fantasy PR about “intelligence.”
But I like this statement:
Bonus: It’s Just Useful
The headline and this “just useful” make it clear none of Google’s previous AI efforts are winning the social media buzz game. Plus, the author points out that billions of Google dollars have not made the smart software speedy. And if you want to have smart software write that history paper about Germany after WW 2, stick with other models which feature “conversational smoothness.”
Quite an advertisement. A headline that says, “No one is using this” and” it is sluggish and writes in a way that a student will get flagged for cheating.
Stick to ads maybe?
And what about “why it matters to for enterprise AI.” Yeah, nice omission.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2025
YouTube Click Count Floors Creators
April 18, 2025
Content creators are not thrilled about a change in how YouTube counts views for short-form videos. The Google-owned site now tallies a view any time the short starts, regardless of how long it plays before the user scrolls on past. Digiday reports, “YouTube Shorts View Count Update Wins Over Brands—But Creators Aren’t Sold.” Though view counts have spiked since the change, that number has nothing to do with creators’ compensation. Any bragging rights from high view counts will surely be negated as word spreads on how their calculation changed. Besides, say seasoned creators, there could be a real downside for newbies. Reporter Ivy Liu writes:
Other creators said that they were worried the change could encourage YouTubers to focus on the inflated view metric displayed beneath Shorts, rather than the engaged view metric that contributes more meaningfully to creators’ income. For example, the creator BnG Refining — who goes by the name ‘Scrooge’ to his audience and asked not to be quoted by his real name — said that he was afraid less experienced creators might ‘flood the platform with content that they think is wanted, and not until hours, days, weeks later realizing that those were only fake views.’”
We are sure Google does not mind, though. Creators were not the real audience for the change. We learn:
“Brands and marketers are far more welcoming of the update, saying it brings order to the chaos of influencer marketing. Now, YouTube Shorts, TikTok videos and Instagram Reels all measure their views in the same way, making it easier for marketers to compare creators’ and videos’ performance across platforms. ‘It makes it easier, if you’re a brand, to say, “here’s how performance is across the board,” vs. looking at impressions and then trying to judge an impression as a view,’ said Krishna Subramanian, CEO of the influencer marketing company Captiv8.”
Of course. Because it is all about making it easier for brands to calculate their ROI. Creators’ perspectives, information, and artistic expression are secondary. As usual, creators are at the mercy of Google. Google likes everyone to be at its mercy. No meaningful regulation is the best regulation. Self regulation works wonders in the financial services sector too.
Cynthia Murrell, April 18, 2025
Google: Keep a Stiff Upper Lip and Bring Fiat Currency Other Than Dollars
April 17, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby himself.
Poor Googzilla. After decades of stomping through virtual barrier, those lovers of tea, fried fish, and cricket have had enough. I think some UK government officials have grown tired of, as Monty Python said:
“..what I object to is you automatically treat me as an inferior..” “Well, I am KING.”
“Google Faces £5bn UK Lawsuit” reports:
The lawsuit alleges that the tech giant has abused its dominant market position to prevent both existing and potential competitors from entering the general search and search advertising markets, thereby allowing Google to impose supra-competitive advertising prices. The lawsuit seeks compensation for thousands of UK advertisers impacted by the company’s actions.
Will Googzilla trample this pesky lawsuit the way cinematic cities fell to the its grandfather, Godzilla?
Key allegations include Google’s contracts with smartphone manufacturers and network operators that mandate the pre-installation of Google Search and the Chrome browser on Android devices. The suit also highlights Google’s agreement with Apple, under which it pays to remain the default search engine on iPhones. Plaintiffs argue that these practices have made Google the only practical platform for online search advertising.
I know little about the UK, but I did work for an outfit on Clarendon Terrace, adjacent Buckingham Palace, for a couple of years. I figured out that the US and UK government officials were generally cooperative, but there were some interesting differences.
Obviously there is the Monty Python canon. Another point of differentiation is a tendency to keep a stiff upper lip and then bang!
The wonderful Google and its quantumly supreme approach to business may be approaching one of those bang moments. Will Google’s solicitors prevail?
I am not very good at fancy probability and nifty gradient descent calculations. I would suggest that Googzilla bring a check book or a valid cargo container filled with an acceptable fiat currency. Pounds, euros, or Swiss francs are probably acceptable at this particular point in business history.
Oh, that £5bn works out to 5.4 million Swiss francs.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2025
Google AI: Invention Is the PR Game
April 17, 2025
Google was so excited to tout its AI’s great achievement: In under 48 hours, It solved a medical problem that vexed human researchers for a decade. Great! Just one hitch. As Pivot to AI tells us, "Google Co-Scientist AI Cracks Superbug Problem in Two Days!—Because It Had Been Fed the Team’s Previous Paper with the Answer In It." With that detail, the feat seems much less impressive. In fact, two days seems downright sluggish. Writer David Gerard reports:
"The hype cycle for Google’s fabulous new AI Co-Scientist tool, based on the Gemini LLM, includes a BBC headline about how José Penadés’ team at Imperial College asked the tool about a problem he’d been working on for years — and it solved it in less than 48 hours! [BBC; Google] Penadés works on the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria. Co-Scientist suggested the bacteria might be hijacking fragments of DNA from bacteriophages. The team said that if they’d had this hypothesis at the start, it would have saved years of work. Sounds almost too good to be true! Because it is. It turns out Co-Scientist had been fed a 2023 paper by Penadés’ team that included a version of the hypothesis. The BBC coverage failed to mention this bit. [New Scientist, archive]"
It seems this type of Googley AI over-brag is a pattern. Gerard notes the company claims Co-Scientist identified new drugs for liver fibrosis, but those drugs had already been studied for this use. By humans. He also reminds us of this bit of truth-stretching from 2023:
"Google loudly publicized how DeepMind had synthesized 43 ‘new materials’ — but studies in 2024 showed that none of the materials was actually new, and that only 3 of 58 syntheses were even successful. [APS; ChemrXiv]"
So the next time Google crows about an AI achievement, we have to keep in mind that AI often is a synonym for PR.
Cynthia Murrell, April 17, 2026
Google Wears a Necklace and Sneakers with Flashing Blue LEDs. Snazzy.
April 15, 2025
No AI. Just an old dinobaby pointing out some exciting developments in the world “beyond search.”
I can still see the flashing blue light in Aisle 7. Yes, there goes the siren. K-Mart in Central Illinois was running a big sale on underwear. My mother loved those “blue light specials.” She would tell me as I covered my eyes and ears, “I don’t want to miss out.” Into the scrum she would go, emerging with two packages of purple boxer shorts for my father. He sat in the car while my mother shopped. I accompanied her because that’s what sons in Central Illinois do. I wonder if procurement officials are familiar with blue light specials. The sirens in DC wail 24×7.
Thanks, OpenAI. You produced a good enough illustration. A first!
I thought about K-Mart when I read “Google Slashes Business Software Prices for US Federal Agencies.” I see that flickering blue light as I type this short blog post. The trusted “real” news source reports:
Google will offer steep discounts to U.S. federal agencies for its business apps package as the company looks to capitalize on the Trump administration’s cost-cutting push and chip away at Microsoft’s longstanding grip on the government software market.
Yep, discounts. Now Microsoft has some traction in the US government. I cannot imagine what life would be like for aides to a senior Pentagon if he did not have nifty PowerPoint presentations. Perhaps offering a deal will get some Microsoft afficionados to learn to live without Excel and Word? I don’t know, but Google is giving the “discount” method a whirl.
What’s up with Google? I think someone told me that Gemini 2.5 was free. Now a discount on GSA listed services which could amount to $2 billion in savings … if — yes, that magic word — if the US government dumps the Softies’ outstanding products for the cloudy goodness of the Google’s way. Yep, “if.”
I have a cute anecdote about Google and the US government from the year 2000, but, alas, I cannot share it. Trust me. It is a knee slapper. And, no, it is not about Sergey wearing silver sparkle sneakers to meetings with US elected officials. Those were indeed eye catchers among shoes with toes that looked like potatoes.
Several observations:
- Google, like Amazon, is trying to obtain US government business. I think the flashing blue lights, if I were still working in the hallowed halls, would impair my vision. Price cutting seems to be the one true way right now.
- Will lower prices have an impact on US government procurement? I am not sure. The procurement process chugs along every day and in quite predictable ways. How long does it take to turn a battleship, assuming the captain can pull off the maneuver without striking a small fishing boat, of course.
- Google seems to think that slashing prices for its “products” will boost sales. My understanding of Google is that its sale to government agencies pivots on several characteristics; for example, [a] listening and understanding what government professionals say, [b] providing a modicum of customer support or at the very least answering a phone call from a government professional, and [c] delivering products that the aides, assistants, and contractors understand and can use to crank out documents with numbered lines, dense charts, and bullet points that mostly stay in place after a graphic is inserted.
To sum up, I find the idea of price cuts interesting. My initial reaction is that price cuts and procurement are not necessarily lined up procedurally. But I am a dinobaby. But after 50 years of “government” work I have a keen desire to see if the Google can shine enough blue lights to bedazzle people involved in purchasing software to keep the admirals happy. (I speak from a little experience working with the late Admiral Craig Hosmer, R-Calif. whom I thank for his service.)
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2025
Extra Effort Required to Find Some Google Information
April 10, 2025
Dinobaby says, “No smart software involved. That’s for “real” journalists and pundits.
We are plugging along on a little project. As part of our checking assorted publicly accessible sources for being publicly accessible, we were delighted to verify that Exploit Database is alive and kicking. Plus, it appears to be current as of August 2024.
Since we are doing some poking around for information related to the newly-almost-free Pavel Durov, we were interested in the Google Hacking Database. You can locate that list of “Google dorks” at this link. The most recent additions or dorks provide some information about finding files containing passwords.
Here’s the little discovery. None of the almost 8,000 dorks are Telegram specific. However, many of the methods can be applied to Pavel Durov’s interesting outfit. We tried a handful and learned that Google’s index either is filtering Telegram-related content or simply does not make much of an effort to provide pointers to certain types of public Telegram information.
How does an analyst or researcher locate current, comprehensive information about bots, Groups, Channels, and third-party specialized services for that platform? That is an excellent question which leads to some Russian resources which are often presented in Russian, semi low profile outfits like Forbidden Stories.
Net net: OSINT professionals depend on Google. However, certain large services engaged in a wide range of activities require pushing beyond the Google and its ever-helpful smart software.
Stephen E Arnold, April 10, 2025
Click Counting: It Is 1992 All Over Again
March 31, 2025
Dinobaby says, “No smart software involved. That’s for “real” journalists and pundits.
I love it when search engine optimization experts, online marketing executives, and drum beaters for online advertising talk about clicks, clickstreams, and click metrics. Ho ho ho.
I think I was involved in creating a Web site called Point (The Top 5% of the Internet). The idea was simple: Curate and present a directory of the most popular sites on the Internet. It was a long shot because the team did not want to do drugs, sex, and a number of other illegal Web site profiles for the directory. The idea was that in 1992 or so, no one had a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval-type of directory. There was Yahoo, but if one poked around, some interesting Web sites would display in their low resolution, terrible bandwidth glory.
To my surprise, the idea worked and the team wisely exited the business when someone a lot smarter than the team showed up with a check. I remember fielding questions about “traffic”. There was the traffic we used to figure out what sites were popular. Then there was traffic we counted when visitors to Point hit the home page and read profiles of sites with our Good Housekeeping-type of seal.
I want to share that from those early days of the Internet the counting of clicks was pretty sketchy. Scripts could rack up clicks in a slow heartbeat. Site operators just lied or cooked up reports that served up a reality in terms of tasty little clicks.
Why are clicks bogus? I am not prepared to explain the dark arts of traffic boosting which today is greatly aided by scripts instantly generated by smart software. Instead I want to highlight this story in TechCrunch: “YouTube Is Changing How YouTube Shorts Views Are Counted.” The article does a good job of explaining how one monopoly is responding to its soaring costs and the slow and steady erosion of its search Nile River of money.
The write up says:
YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing
I don’t know much about YouTube. But I recall watching little YouTubettes which bear a remarkable resemblance to TikTok weaponized data bursts just start playing. Baffled, I would watch a couple of seconds, check that my “autoplay” was set to off, and then kill the browser page. YouTubettes are not for me.
Most reasonable people would want to know several things about their or any YouTubette; for example:
- How many times did a YouTubette begin to play and then was terminated in less that five seconds
- How many times a YouTubette was viewed from start to bitter end
- How many times a YouTubette was replayed in its entirety by a single user
- What device was used
- How many YouTubettes were “shared”
- The percentage of these data points compared against the total clicks of a short nature or the full view?
You get the idea. Google has these data, and the wonderfully wise but stressed firm is now counting “short views” as what I describe as the reality: Knowing exactly how many times a YouTubette was played start to finish.
According to the write up:
With this update, YouTube Shorts will now align its metrics with those of TikTok and Instagram Reels, both of which track the number of times your video starts or replays. YouTube notes that creators will now be able to better understand how their short-form videos are performing across multiple platforms. Creators who are still interested in the original Shorts metric can view it by navigating to “Advanced Mode” within YouTube Analytics. The metric, now called “engaged views,” will continue to allow creators to see how many viewers choose to continue watching their Shorts. YouTube notes that the change won’t impact creators’ earnings or how they become eligible for the YouTube Partner Program, as both of these factors will continue to be based on engaged views rather than the updated metric.
Okay, responding to the competition from one other monopolistic enterprise. I get it. Okay, Google will allegedly provided something for a creator of a YouTubette to view for insight. And the change won’t impact what Googzilla pays a creator. Do creators really know how Google calculates payments? Google knows. With the majority of the billions of YouTube videos (short and long) getting a couple of clicks, the “popularity” scheme boils down to what we did in 1992. We used whatever data was available, did a few push ups, and pumped out a report.
Could Google follow the same road map? Of course not. In 1992, we had no idea what we were doing. But this is 2025 and Google knows exactly what it is doing.
Advertisers will see click data that do not reflect what creators want to see and what viewers of YouTubettes and probably other YouTube content really want to know: How many people watched the video from start to finish?
Google wants to sell ads at perhaps the most difficult point in its 20 year plus history. That autoplay inflates clicks. “Hey, the video played. We count it,” can you conceptualize the statement? I can.
Let’s not call this new method “weaponization.” That’s too strong. Let’s describe this as “shaping” or “inflating” clicks.
Remember. I am a dinobaby and usually wrong. No high technology company would disadvantage a creator or an advertiser. Therefore, this change is no big deal. Will it help Google deal with its current challenges? You can now ask Google AI questions answered by its most sophisticated smart software for free.
Is that an indication that something is not good enough to cause people to pay money? Of course not. Google says “engaged views” are still important. Absolutely. Google is just being helpful.
Stephen E Arnold, March 31, 2025
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