Google Inc. fired a software engineer for snooping on its users’ private information, the Internet search giant confirmed Wednesday.

The 27-year-old employee, David Barksdale, allegedly accessed information about four teenagers he met through a Seattle technology group, according to gossip website Gawker, which reported the incident Tuesday.

Barksdale, a self-described hacker whose job was to maintain and troubleshoot Google sites, had access to users’ personal accounts and information, Gawker reported. His interaction with the teenagers was not sexual in nature, the gossip site said.
Google declined to confirm details about the incident. In a statement, Bill Coughran, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, said Barksdale, an engineer in the company’s Kirkland, Wash., office, broke Google’s “strict internal privacy policies.” Coughran said Google controls the number of employees with access to its systems and is constantly increasing strict security measures.

Barksdale, who was dismissed in July, could not be reached for comment.

A similar reported incident that did not involve minors also resulted in the dismissal of an engineer, said a Google employee who was not authorized to speak about the topic. That incident was first reported by technology blog TechCrunch.

The privacy breach comes at an awkward time for Google. Federal regulators and lawmakers are weighing whether to make Internet privacy rules more stringent — a move opposed by Google and other Internet companies that argue the industry can regulate itself.

Google is also under scrutiny in the U.S. and overseas for collecting personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks through its Street View service that takes panoramic pictures from vehicles. Google also raised the hackles of privacy watchdogs when it rolled out a social networking service called Buzz that is used in conjunction with users’ Gmail accounts.

On Tuesday, Google said it was working on adding more social networking elements to its products, and the company called on rival Facebook Inc. to give it access to users’ information, if users give permission.

Google’s hiring process includes criminal background checks, according to a company white paper.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington said in a blog post that Google should have pressed criminal charges against Barksdale. But the Google employee said the company did not do so at the request of one of the families who wished to remain anonymous.

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Google TV devices could launch on October 17, Engadget is reporting.

The technology blog cited an unnamed tipster who claimed to have taken a picture of “an internal Best Buy document” saying that Google TV would launch on October 17. The document said that the original launch of Google TV devices was slated for October 3.

“The launch of Google TV that was planned for 10/3 has been pushed back two weeks,” the alleged Best Buy document reads.

Speculation abounds over when Google TV devices will finally hit store shelves. Just last week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Google TV devices will “start shipping this month.”

Although Google has remained relatively tight-lipped on the availability of its service, which allows users to search for content on both the Web and through their cable provider’s offering, the company said recently that it expects Google TV to launch in October, further supporting Engadget’s rumor. The company has stopped short of announcing an exact launch date.

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Congratulations to Ms. Yvonne Kershner –  Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer with Brazos Valley Schools Credit Union!

She is the WINNER of a new Apple iPAD from the Percento Technologies drawing at the Texas Credit Union League 2010 Leadership Council.

Thank you to everyone who joined our drawing.

Percento Technologies exibitied to the Texas Credit Union League 2010 Leadership Council, open to member and non-member bankers, associate members, exhibitors and sponsors, which was held last week, at the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter.

The 2010 Leadership Conference & Expo is designed to keep your credit union relevant in a competitive marketplace, by giving you the edge and helping you position yourself for the future with the seeds of education, knowledge, and networking, which are critical to your credit union’s success.

In a new-millennium twist on the old protection money scheme, cyber criminals are now targeting business owners online – tellingthem to pay up, in virtual cash, or else. In this case, the “or else” involves a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the company’s Web site.

For the casual business reader, a few questions are probably coming to mind. First, what is a DDoS attack? Second, is this a real threat or a scam? Is my business Web site susceptible to this? And, lastly, what should I do?

No. 1: What is DDoS?

A denial-of-service attack is when an attacker overwhelms a Web site or network host by flooding it with invalid or complicated requests. When this type of attack is “distributed,” it means that it is being carried out by a network of zombie computers (a.k.a., a “botnet”) – making it far more damaging and difficult to defend against.

There’s no need to go further into the technical details here, as there are several types and methods for doing this, but the best analogy I can think of is to imagine a time when your kid was asking you questions. Let’s say you were trying to read or work at home, and your child started in with question after question. Now imagine there are tens of thousands of kids asking you questions — and you should now get the point.

No. 2: Are DDoS attacks common and easy to carry out?

Unfortunately, the answer here is “yes.” There are tools available online that make it relativity easy for unsophisticated cyber criminals and script kiddies to launch sophisticated DoS and DDoS attacks. However, since the DDoS also involves use of a “botnet”, that means the hacker must have access to one. Botnets can be rented for less than $100, so it’s not that hard to accomplish a DDoS.

No. 3: Is my business susceptible to DDoS?

Probably. There are several preventative measures that can be taken to make it harder to attack your network this way, but the reality is that every network is vulnerable to this type of attack. A massive DDoS attack was launched against U.S. government sites on July 4th, 2009.

No. 4: If my network is attacked, what should I do?

If your business receives an extortion e-mail, whatever you do, don’t pay them anything. Chances are it’s just a scam – and the attackers aren’t really capable of launching a DDoS. However, you would be advised to review your network security policies as well as to speak with a cybersecurity consultant who can analyze your network and improve your level of protection. If you hire a consultant, just make sure the person has these initials after his or her name – CISSP, CEH, or CISA.

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 Hewlett-Packard Co. didn’t allow the chaos surrounding the unseemly Aug. 6 departure of former CEO Mark Hurd blunt its pursuit of grid storage maker 3Par Inc.

After winning a weeks-long bidding war with Dell Inc. early this month, HP walked away with the Fremont, Calif.-based storage vendor for about $2.4 billion in cash. HP had thrice topped bids from Dell, whose final offer was $2 billion.

Analyst John Bender, who once ran HP’s mergers and acquisitions group and oversaw the massive 2002 HP-Compaq merger, called the move to buy 3Par a good one for his former employer.

The deal lets HP control its storage technology — it currently resells high-end arrays from Hitachi Data Systems Corp. — while strategically keeping 3Par’s well-regarded offerings out of the hands of rivals like Dell and Acer Inc., said Bender, who’s now managing director of Bender Consulting.

And just as important, he added, HP needed a win after the contentious departure of Hurd, who resigned about a month ago in the face of a sexual harassment claim that led to the disclosure of some inaccurate expense reports. (Hurd was hired last week as co-president of Oracle Corp. , and HP immediately filed a lawsuit charging that its former CEO had violated his severance agreement.)

Bender expects HP’s Enterprise Services unit, formerly EDS, to aggressively sell 3Par products.

“There will be a strong link to EDS. Whether it’s just from a professional services perspective to set it up for customers or a fully embedded business unit, time will tell,” he said.

The big winner of the bidding war is 3Par, according to Arun Taneja, a consultant at Taneja Group, who said 3Par’s CEO, David Scott, “is sitting there smiling, as is his staff and shareholders.”

As for Dell, acquiring 3Par would have been a critical part of its plan to become a provider of a full line of data center products and services, according to analysts. The addition of 3Par’s technology would have allowed Dell Services to add strong cloud offerings to its product catalog, they said.

However, “Dell has a major problem right now,” Bender contended. “They have to consider whether or not they should take the money they would have spent on 3Par and develop those capabilities internally.”

Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau contributed to this story.

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For Stanford University student Feross Aboukhadijeh, what started off as a bet fueled by youthful ambition and technical bravado, ended up an Internet hit and quite possibly a job.

Last week, Aboukhadijeh, 19, was just an ordinary, albeit talented, college student as he tested out Google Instant, the Web giant’s new predictive search results feature. He was immediately impressed on its debut Wednesday but also inspired. To his roommate, he said, “I bet you I can build YouTube Instant in an hour.” And his roommate took him up on the bet.

Aboukhadijeh didn’t quite make the hour deadline, but three hours later, YouTube Instant was born. The site lets people search the enormous YouTube video database in real time.

He spent a couple more hours Thursday sprucing up the user interface. And before going to sleep that night, he posted his work to his Facebook page.

“When I woke up Friday morning there was craziness,” he said.

By “craziness,” Aboukhadijeh means countless e-mails congratulating him, a bevy of interview requests, a server flooded with Web traffic, the creation of a Wikipedia entry in his name, and–perhaps most notably–a job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley via Twitter.

Unsure just how seriously to take the tweeted job offer, Aboukhadijeh replied along the lines of “Is this a for-real offer?” Hurley then e-mailed him to set up a meeting, which is scheduled for Monday at YouTube’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, Aboukhadijeh said.
YouTube officials didn’t respond to an e-mail request sent Friday from CNET seeking confirmation of the job offer or meeting.

Aboukhadijeh is just finishing up a summer internship with Facebook, but he doesn’t see how that would prohibit his taking a job at YouTube, which is owned by Google.

“I’d like to finish college,” he added, which he agreed could pose the bigger problem.

Much like Google Instant, YouTube Instant lets people type in what they’re looking for, and the engine guesses what that video is. By design, it plays the video immediately. However, based on feedback, Aboukhadijeh said he’s working on play and pause features, among other improvements.

“It’s not as useful as Google Instant if you know exactly what you’re looking for, since you’re shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination,” Aboukhadijeh told All Thing Digital’s Peter Kafka. “But I think this is perfect for many Internet users.”

He built the site using the YouTube API but scraped YouTube search suggestions after Google blocked his server for making too many repeated requests to the search suggestion endpoint. Aboukhadijeh ended up re-writing the site to instead query YouTube directly for search suggestions, “eliminating the round-trip to my server,” he said.

Aboukhadijeh, who is from Sacramento, Calif., said he’s been blown away by how quickly his tool went viral and is grateful for all the supportive feedback.

“I’m amazed and humbled by all the attention it’s received. So thank you,” he said.

But imitation is the highest form of flattery, and it appears he’s got that, too. TechCrunch on Saturday pointed to Alabama-based developer Michael Hart, who, inspired by Aboukhadijeh, used jQuery and the Google Maps API to build Google Maps Instant. And the same blogger later pointed to an all-encompassing Instantise page that gives a home to the evidently quickly growing number of sites with instant, predictive search results. Instantise was reportedly designed by Scottish engineer Tam Denholm, TechCrunch said.

Aboukhadijeh is a majoring in computer science, but his technical expertise has been developing over many years. Around age 5, when his parents bought a new microwave oven, he took the manual and learned how to turn on the child lock, something his parents never learned to do. That knowledge came in handy when he was old enough to get grounded–he would lock it up and use it as a bargaining chip.

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Google Instant is game-changer in a search market that had grown relatively stale, but it also threatens to disrupt the search engine optimization (SEO) marketers have carefully cultivated.

Real-time indexing and user interface cosmetics from Google and Bing made search a little more lively, but at the end of the day core search functionality was the same. People came. They entered queries. They clicked enter. They got results, or didn’t, as it were.

Google Instant lets users type a query and see results without hitting enter. Each letter triggers a predictive search until a user clicks on a link he or she find useful.

IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds called Google Instant a dramatic break from the traditional Google search experience, which he said was wasteful of users’ time. Indeed, Google said the average search took 25 seconds to complete from start to finish. Google Instant could trigger searchers in a third of the amount of time.

“Google Instant should cut down dramatically on the “pogo stick” problem, where users iterated clicking through results links until they got too frustrated to continue,” Reynolds said. “Instant will help show what the right links are more quickly.”

While Google Instant is exciting because it accelerates the search process for users, it changes the SEO game for advertisers bidding on keywords from Google AdWords.

Whereas a user might have typed in a handful of words for song lyrics, users now need only type a few and Google fills in the blanks, intuiting what the user intended to type and displaying results directly on the search home page without making users click through several pages to get results.

For SEOs, that means less keyword real estate with which to work.

Patrick Kerley, who as a senior digital strategist creates Internet marketing and communications plans at Levick Strategic Communications, said Google Instant’s predictive nature boosts the importance of the top few spots in search results.

“As people search and the results start to display, they’re going to be paying attention to only what they can see on the screen,”Kerley told eWEEK.

Accordingly, there will be a lot more clicking on the first result that pops up. This will make it a far more competitive landscape, Kerley said.

Kerley said advertising, not organic SEO strategy, is the major point of impact for Google Instant.

For example, a Google user searching the keyword combination “travel deals” will see suggested results for Travelocity and Travelzoo, as they type the word “travel.” This gives these service providers immediate exposure if users choose to pick those results.

When a user completes their typing of the word “deals” after travel, they will see also results for Expedia, Orbitz and others.

Kerley believes Expedia and Orbitz may miss opportunities for e-commerce engagements with users because those service providers did not advertise on the keyword combo “travel deals.”

“They’re being cut off from people who are used to completing the ‘travel deals’ search,” Kerley said. “Their advertisements and their organic search results aren’t going to be part of what people are seeing.”

With advertisers seeing the long tail of search keywords impinged, the rendering of results as moving targets is bound to make advertising on the word “travel” even more expensive than it already is in the AdWords keyword auction. Search Engine Land provides more examples of how Instant impacts the long tail of keywords here.

However, IDC’s Reynolds said Google Instant won’t change the world a lot for search engine marketers (SEMs) and SEOs because the paid ads will still be linked to their keywords and the working of the organic placements will still work in their mysterious ways, only faster.

“User behaviors will change, however, and those changes could open up room for innovation in getting content in front of users in the ‘instant’ environment,” Reynolds said.

Google’s antispam guru and search quality expert Matt Cutts agreed that Google Instant will impact SEO over time because people will learn to search differently with Instant. Cutts noted:

“For example, I was recently researching a Congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this Congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

Cutts, though, refuted Steve Rubel’s claim that Instant makes SEO irrelevant because it includes personalization, which impacts SEO.

“But that doesn’t mean that SEO will die,” Cutts said. I’ve said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt and even flourish when changes happen.”

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan did his best to assuage SEMs’ fears about SEO’s future here.

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While Google is hyping Google Instant as the greatest thing since sliced bread, some see it as bad direction for the search behemoth. They argue Google should be focused on better search results, not gimmicks. Of course there are the believers who see Google Instant as a major advance in search technology saving time and helping you winnow your search without ever hitting the Enter key.

I haven’t had the pleasure of trying Google Instant, but judging from those that have, at this stage of its development, there appears to be two stubborn camps forming – the Pros Camp and the Cons Camp.

For the uninformed, Google Instant is a new search option from Google that displays search results as letters are entered into the Google search field. Each keystroke triggers a predictive search which eventually will display the target of your ferreting. (See related:Google Instant Searches the Web As You Type)

PRO

The one very big pro in Google Instant’s camp is that it saves time searching for stuff on the Internet. Web searching before Google Instant is pretty much as Andy Ihnatkodescribes it in the Chicago Sun Times: “Searching the Web is like being a sniper with little talent but lots of ammunition. You guess at the right search term and hit ‘return.’” And typically you hit that Return key again and again praying for the right result.

Google estimates with Google Instant you can cut by two-third the 25 seconds it takes to search Google. “Google Instant should cut down dramatically on the ‘pogo stick’ problem, where users iterated clicking through results links until they got too frustrated to continue,” IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds told eWeek. “Instant will help show what the right links are more quickly.”

PRO

Not only can Google Instant save time, but it makes it much easier to refine searches. PC World’s Jared Newman explained why that’s important this way:

“[I]f I want to read about Google’s stance on evilness, the search term ‘Is Google evil’ primarily brings up news and feature articles on the subject. Now I can tweak it and Tack on the word ‘doing.’ This surfaces Google’s corporate philosophy page as the top result. Tweaks will come in handy for people who usually start their searches from dedicated browser search bars, instead of Google’s home page.”

CON

There are those, however, that believe Google Instant can waste much time as it saves. “You could end up getting distracted by the suggestions and read an article that you weren’t even looking for,” Heather McClain, 16, a waitress, told the BBC. “It will probably end up costing you more time than it saves you.”

CON

Fellow Brit and university student Alistair Kerr, 22, asserted that Google Instant has diverted Google from addressing the real problem with Internet search. “A better thing to do would be to improve the quality of results that pop up,” he said. “Instead of just trying to predict what you’re looking for.”

Another check in the con column against Google Instant is that it may hurt SEO marketers. Searchers will be less likely to click through to a second page of search results, critics say, which will give marketers fewer keywords to work with.

CON

Google Instant has also been tagged as aiding and abetting online scammers. “We know for a fact that most Blackhat SEO campaigns automatically query Google’s trending topic results and now it seems that Google Instant will be suggesting those trending phrases (verbatim), potentially putting millions of victims directly in cybercriminals’ crosshairs,” Sean-Paul Correll of Panda Labs told Webuser.

CON

One of the biggest cons of Google Instant, though, is that, unlike plain old vanilla Google, it can’t be accessed from everywhere. It’s not on mobile browsers, nor is it plugged into the search bars found on the toolbars of most browsers. That, though, is one criticism that Google will solve in the coming months.

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