Tag: Daniel Brandt

Scroogle.Org

Google may not yet be evil, but it is certainly moving further and further down toward that end of the continuum with its extremely poor privacy practices in combination with the almost absurd amount of user data it appears to be logging and storing.

With that in mind, I suspect more services like Scroogle will arise to route around Google’s blase attitude toward user privacy.  Scroogle is basically a Google search proxy. Enter your search into Scroogle and it passes it on to Google using one of a small number of IP addresses, so yours is never logged. Scroogle then intercepts the cookie that Google returns and then displays just the actual search results.

Unlike Google which stores user identifiable information about the search for 18 months, Scroogle promises that a) it doesn’t store search terms at all and b) it only maintains logs for a maximum of 48 hours.

I noticed Daniel Brandt, who I’ve criticized in the past for his conspiratorial ways, is listed as one of the directors of the Scroogle effort. It’s nice to see him turn his anti-Google obsession to positive solutions.

Daniel Brandt As Clueless As Ever

Daniel Brandt is again embarassing himself, this time claiming that he’s found evidence of widespread plagiarism among Wikipedia entries. But how much of this is genuine plagiarism rather than just Brandt’s typical incompetence.

Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry on Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Brandt claims here that large portions of Wikipedia’s entry on de Tournefort has been swiped from an entry on de Tournefort at Armenica.Org, an online encylopedia of everything Armenian.

The only problem is that the origins of the Armenica.Org entry is made quite clear at the end of the article: Source: Wikipedia.org”

That’s right, Armenica.Org borrowed its entry from Wikipedia, not vice versa — so it’s not surprising the entries are almost identical!!!

This is fairly typical of the quality of Brandt’s investigations and conspiracy theories about Google and Wikipedia.

Conspiracy Theories About Google

Dave Winer is apparently impressed by Daniel Brandt’s anti-Google rantings. But as this Salon.Com article documents, Brandt is a nutty conspiracy theorist (just go a few links deep at his NameBase.Org who is pissed off because *his* page about Donald Rumsfeld, and a whole host of other people, doesn’t show up very high in Google searches.

I particularly love the brief explanation Brandt offers of why Google’s PageRank sucks,

It’s democratic in the same way that capitalism is democratic. You could have the cure for cancer on the Web and not find it in Google because ‘important’ sites don’t link to it.

But, of course, if there were a cure for cancer posted on the web, then it is likely that lots of people would link to it, much like many scientists would end up citing a paper that outlined a successful cure for cancer.

What Brandt wants is for Google to be democratic in the same way that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is Democratic.

In fact, as Salon notes, Brandt believes that if you search on “Donald Rumsfeld” his page about Rumsfeld should be shown before Rumsfeld’s DoD biography page, even though it is largely useless and almost impossible to navigate (the main problem with NameBase is that it is an index of citations largely of the conspiracy literature which Brandt has personally read).

Update: A good example of one of Brandt’s nutty conspiracy theories his his speculation about China’s blocking of Google in which Brandt argues that “China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security” because Google may be sharing data about Chinese users with the National Security Agency which would, in Brandt’s mind, “put the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.”