Caught In The Act?

Did Google alter the public record of its blogging service's massive 2-day crash?

 

Last Friday, I published a brief post to inform readers that Blogger, a blogging service owned by Google and used by many of the older Jewish blogs, had been down for more than a day. Blog owners were unable to post or access their blogs operating system.

And worse than that for many bloggers, recent posts they had made before the crash had disappeared as if they had never existed.

My post was meant to be a public service announcement, so any Blogger-powered blog readers who also read me would know why those blogs suddenly appeared dormant.

Shortly after I posted, a reader claiming to represent Google posted a comment criticizing me for making a disparaging remark about Google's management of Blogger.

Within that comment this person also posted a link to Blogger's status page.

So I followed the link.

Here is a screenshot of what I saw:

Note that there are no status updates at all on Thursday, May 12 – the day the crash began.

A few hours later, on Friday evening I went back to that Blogger status page to see if the crash had been fully resolved. But what I saw surprised me:

That's right. A post dated Thursday, May 12 had appeared out of thin air.

Did Google alter its status page by backdating that post?

Or was this simply a byproduct of Blogger's crash, a status update page that failed along with the rest of Blogger?

We may never know.

But Google has been accused of similar behavior in the past.

According to conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, Google's YouTube service marked several of her videos as private without her consent or knowledge, apparently in an attempt to censor those videos. When asked about this by a reporter who was visiting Google's corporate headquarters, a senior member of Google's legal staff stepped out of the interview to check on the allegation. She came back a few minutes later and assured the reporter – who had seen the videos marked private earlier that day – that the videos in question were and previously had been marked public. Google had made its censorship disappear.

Google's AdSense, the leading online advertising service which has a near monopoly on Web advertising, has long followed a policy of banning publishers from its program for alleged rules violations without documenting those alleged violations or allowing the banned publishers to contest the bans.

This doesn't mean Google played fast and loose with Blogger's status page during last week's near-epic crash. But it doesn't mean it didn't, either.

Comments

[adam]

The post probably was posted on May 12 but didn't appear due to the crash.

Google is neither frum nor neoconservative...not everything with them is some giant conspiracy to hide the truth.

[ez]

yes but google is ultra liberal, and just like most other things that ultra liberals do, is lie and fudge results.
a recent example: this was a poll after bin laden was killed which showed obama at 60% approval. do you know what the split was?
something like 49% dems 23% rep and 28% ind
not surprising they where using skewed numbers.
they also do voter fraud.
google has been known to pull conservative videos from youtube, they also pulled pro israel videos.
so its not surprising they blocked michelle malkins videos.

[theman]

SCOTT!!!- YOU USED YOUR COMPUTER ON FRIDAY EVENING?!!?!?!?!?!?!

[Shmarya]

SCOTT!!!- YOU USED YOUR COMPUTER ON FRIDAY EVENING?!!?!?!?!?!?!

Posted by: theman | May 19, 2011 at 09:11 AM

Evening starts well before Shabbat does this time of year.

[Tdevorah]

@adam - angry people are angry people. They will vent to anyone silly enough to listen - it doesn't matter what the subject is! The lowlife that runs this site picks Frum Jews cause its a subject close to him (and apparently a sore one at as well - guess someone's got a score to settle with the first grade teacher or something). But given enough fodder, he can rant about the shade of the pope's robes as well...

[effie]

There has been no shortage of complaints regarding the blogger meltdown. The latest is that people who complained the most had their google mail accounts suspended unless they provide a cellphone number.

[effie]

Google also removed a number of nasty responses to their customers who were trying to find out what the hell was going on.

Adam & Tdevorah: It's okay to shut your mouths when you don't know what the hell you are talking about. And you two clearly don't know what the hell you are talking about.

[ah-pee-chorus]

yes but google is ultra liberal, and just like most other things that ultra liberals do, is lie and fudge results.
Posted by: ez

wow!!! so you accuse them of using an improper sampling representation in a public opinion poll. i wonder which is worse, that, or causing the deaths and injuries of 50,000 young boys while bankrupting our country in a war on iraq justified by known lies...

[Garnel Ironheart]

> Did Google alter its status page by backdating that post?

> Or was this simply a byproduct of Blogger's crash, a status update page that failed along with the rest of Blogger?

> We may never know.

Shmarya, go over to one of the walls of your house. Once there look carefully and you will see a large square piece of glass held in place by a frame. Look through it. Yes, that's the real world out there. Fresh air. Sunshine.
Close your laptop, go for a walk, smile and say "hello" to strangers who go past. You've clearly spent wayyyyyyy too much time in your basement.

[Adam Neira]

To say that Google has enormous power is an understatement. With power comes responsibility. So much of the world now is about trust. Things are becoming so interconnected that we know deep within our hearts that what we do can affect other human beings and other parts of the world.

What was the reason for the service outage ? Where they acting nefariously or just doing some housekeeping ?

I don't know but I know that I need to trust the people at Google are doing the right thing. If there was no trust there I would have long ago consigned myself to not using the internet or a mobile phone. However I know that the internet is a gift from G-d that if used properly can help with the redemption, i.e. Counter-balancing of dark energy with light.

I agree with some oversight and regulation of cyberspace. There is a responsibility for both the user and the service provider. Technology like a knife can be both a tool and a weapon.