So the executive producer of TechTalk sends me this link from Fox News and asks me what I think.

Oy… more blog fodder. So I emailed him:

Do you want me to take a half hour to write something about this?

That the Linux folk are meeting at Google does not portend well for the consumer. There are fewer and fewer potential competitors for Google, and their Google’s dominance combined with their ability to profile users based on click/search activity is an enormous privacy threat.

Ultimately, operating systems and interfaces should become very portable, and almost invisible. In theory, if one had a 5GB thumb drive loaded with browser settings, passwords, etc, someone should be able to “jack in” to a thin client at a Starbucks or library which has a 21″ screen and a USB port and a broadband connection.

No, I do NOT want to use iGoogle or My MSN or other web-based bookmark aggregators designed to enable their owners to send advertising my way and profile my search and click behavior. Nor do I want to keep my addressbooks and business files online so that a disgruntled employee or outsourced foreign programmer too remote for extradition can compromise my privacy.

If you like Vista, fine. If you like OS X, fine. If you like Linux, fine. If you’re still plugging away on an Amiga, more power to you. Just as a vehicle can run on Shell, Exxon or ARCO gas, a thin client terminal will reduce the number of breakable parts to almost none. Let the user be preoccupied with his experience and tweak his thumbdrive from home.

I hate operating systems. I hate the attitudes of OS developers even more. I hate how the press portrays Microsoft as the ultimate technical evil while ignoring Google’s greater dangers to our personal liberties. Yes, Microsoft is evil, but its evils are limited to monopolistic avarice, and that’s hardly the worst evil. Google really wants to control you.

People may portray Microsoft as Gulliver and Linux as poor vulnerable Lilliputians. But most people never read ALL of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and have never heard of Brobdingnag, which I liken to Google, or at least what Google aspires to be compared to Microsoft (Gulliver) at its greatest.

I think we’ll look back on a day, as we do at the Ma Bell phones, and lament how we bashed Microsoft into history in favor of telling Google our most private thoughts. Yeah, Microsoft is bad, but it’s not the worst bad.

Howard said “post what you just emailed me”.

Howard is kinda sneaky. He gets me to blog stuff even when I don’t want to work and just want to cantankerously vent.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under Internet, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.