Using Flickrblockers you can be the life of the party without worrying about the plague of incriminating evidence showing up on Flickr the following morning.

[via Wired Compiler]

MAY 12, 2017 – BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc today announced they’ve acquired the internet for the astounding sum of $2,455.5 billion in cash. The deal had been rumored in various search blogs since the beginning of the year and was now confirmed by the company’s CEO. “This is in line with our vision to make information more accessible to end users,” says Eric Schmidt. “With the acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”

In a conference call earlier today, Larry Page explained the strategy behind the acquisition. “We realized it’s not very cost-effective to buy the internet in smaller portions.” During the past two decades, Google had acquired YouTube for $1.65, DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL for $12.5 billion, and last year, Microsoft for the record sum of $120 billion.

Questioned on the first steps the company would take integrating the internet onto their servers, Eric Schmidt announced immediate plans to redirect Yahoo.com to Google’s own search engine. “From an end user perspective, having two search engines is just bad usability, and [causes confusion]. While we appreciate Yahoo’s recent advances in search technology, we felt this move is best aligned with the interests of our advertisers, users and shareholders.” Eric added, “By leveraging third-generation mobile platforms in sustainable verticals, new monetization opportunities can manifest into an improved web experience, greatly benefiting investors and digerati alike – a true paradigm change synergizing the Web 6.0 framework on the enterprise level.”

Accompanying Google’s acquisition revelation, privacy groups today released a paper criticizing the move. However, Larry Page argues that privacy is improved by Google’s acquisition, explaining that “[the] main privacy issues for users today are data leaks to third parties. By eliminating all third parties, we closed this hole.” Eric Schmidt adds that Google intends to replace their current privacy policy with a “privacy scale” which better balances necessary compromises. “When you can improve the privacy of a large group of people by violating the privacy rights of a small number of people, in the end this improves overall privacy.”

The Chinese government in the meantime congratulated Google Inc on their move. Regarding the potentials of expanded censorship, Sergey Brin told members of the press that Google would now drop all search results filtering and instead “address the root problem from a publisher perspective” by directly blocking certain keywords the time they are entered in Google-owned tools such as Blogger, Gmail, Page Creator, Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders were not available for comment at this time due to temporary technical problems with their web-based email clients.

Under a top secret program initiated by the Bush Administration after the Sept. 11 attacks, the [name of agency (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)] have been gathering a vast database of [type of records] involving United States citizens.

“This program is a vital tool in the fight against terrorism,” [Bush Administration official] said. “Without it, we would dangerously unsafe, and the terrorists would have probably killed you and every other American citizen.” The Bush Administration stated that the revelation of this program has severely compromised national security.

“This program is a threat to privacy and civil liberties,” [name of privacy advocate] said. But [name of spokesperson for Bush Administration] said: “This is a very limited program. It only contains detailed records about every American citizen. That’s all. It does not compromise civil liberties. We have a series of procedures in place to protect liberty.”

“We’re not trolling through the personal data of Americans,” Bush said, “we’re just looking at all of their records.”

The [name of statute] regulates [type of record] and typically requires a [type of court order]. Although the [name of agency] did not obtain a [type of court order], the Bush Administration contends that the progam is “totally legal.” According to the Attorney General, “we can [do whatever we did or want to do]. The program is part of the President’s emergency war powers.”

As it happens, I was discussing style guides with some of my colleagues today, when one joked that he was waiting for Google to announce thier own manual of style. That got me to thinking, what would a Google style guide look like?

Following Nathan’s formula, here’s what I came up with:

• All headings in Google font & colors
• Contextual ads alongside each paragraph in your article
• Publications embedded with RFID chips (cookies for online articles) to track where they are being read, but only Google sees the data
• Requires GooglePaper and GoogleInkJetCartridges (both in beta)
• Your paper won’t be accessible from China.