GOOGLE IS 13 YEARS OLD

Search giant Google has entered teens today, the tech behemoth has turned 13. Officially a teenager, Google celebrates its birthday with a doodle that shows the five letters of the company logo wearing party hats placed around a cake with balloons and gifts around.

A click on the doodle takes visitors to a search result page on Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google Inc in September 1998 with four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine can change the world.

The company though filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, and Google.com domain was registered on September 15, it officially celebrates its birthday on September 27.

As Google enters its 13th year, the company faces increasing legislative scrutiny and increasing competition from social networking giant Facebook. Google Inc has evolved to become a dominant and potentially anti-competitive force on the Internet, US senators remarked at a recent congressional hearing.

"Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the Internet," said Republican Senator Mike Lee, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel. "In the words of the head of the Goggle's search ranking team, Google is the biggest kingmaker on Earth."

The company has been broadly accused of using its clout in the search market to stomp rivals as it moves into related businesses, like travel search. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into that charge and others, including whether Google manipulates its search result rankings to favor its own products.

LATEST IT NEWS: Moves by Google and HP

 The world's largest computer maker is giving up on PCs. The world's largest search engine plans to sell smartphones.
The news this week regarding Hewlett-Packard and Google was big. HP is killing off WebOS and wants to sell its PC unit, thus betting its future on cloud-based enterprise software and services.
Google, meanwhile, bought troubled Android-maker Motorola Mobility at a 60% premium, fueling speculation that the motive behind the pricey $12.5 billion purchase (by far Google's largest acquisition) was expensive patent protection. Motorola Mobility owns more than 17,000 wireless patents, while Google's Android OS has been the target of intellectual property litigation. Should the deal be approved by regulators, much of Google's patent pain will be eased.

Each company acted in response to market conditions in their respective sectors. However, they were primarily defensive moves, and actions taken defensively almost always carry some downside or risk because they're not made in optimal conditions.
For example, in acquiring Motorola Mobility and its war chest of wireless patents, Google also has signed on to running a low-margin business (selling mobile devices). Wall Street is used to -- and historically has rewarded -- Google for producing high margins from its online advertising juggernaut. If the acquisition goes through, Google's operating margins will be diluted.

In addition, Google would be taking over a company with a smartphone market share of only 10%. A company whose employee headcount (19,000) would increase Google's managed workforce by 60%, and a company that would be competing against other Android makers such as Samsung and HTC.
These obvious complications and potential problems are apparent to Wall Street. Shares of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) are down about 10% since the Motorola Mobility announcement, and the stock has received a sharp downgrade by Standard & Poor's.
Meanwhile, shares of HP (NYSE: HPQ) were down 20% early Friday afternoon, less than a day after HP released dismal third-quarter earnings and again revised downward its full-year revenue outlook.
The earnings announcement came hours after HP confirmed rumors that it was going to kill off WebOS, attempt to spin off its Personal Systems Group, and buy U.K.-based cloud software and services provider Autonomy for $10.3 billion.

If HP had been counting on its dramatic strategic shift to cushion its stock price from its bad quarter and worse outlook, it was in for a disappointment. Friday's price of 22.75 was the stock's lowest in more than six years.
Chief executive Leo Apotheker is under tremendous pressure to kickstart HP's sagging share price, so Wall Street's immediate and sharply negative reaction makes it imperative that the new strategy bear immediate positive results.
It's hard to see how that's going to happen, since HP will be losing about 30% of its revenue when it dumps the PC group, which rang up $9.6 billion in third-quarter sales. Granted, the group's margins are low and sales are declining, but HP is a long way off from replacing that revenue with software sales, even counting Autonomy's $256 million revenue in the second quarter.
However the HP and Google moves play out, they certainly made this anything but a slow news week in tech.

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Facebook's phonebook fiasco

Want to find the phone numbers of all your friends and some strangers, too? Just look inside your Facebook contacts page. 

Who are all these people, and what are their phone numbers doing on my Facebook contacts page? That’s the question I am now asking.
I have 987 Facebook friends, some of whom I actually know. A handful of them are on my Android phone. Most if not all of the contacts inside my mobile phone are now listed in Facebook – as well as numbers for things like the pizza joint down the street, which doesn’t have a Facebook page.

You know how it goes on Facebook – somebody you don’t know asks to be your friend, you look over their friends list, decide they probably aren’t an axe murderer or a Tea Party member, and you say Yes, because Facebook is a fairly low risk, low maintenance connection. And if they prove to be truly annoying you can always block or defriend them later.
The vast majority of these people did not voluntarily give me their phone numbers. Some probably would if I asked, others might decline. But Facebook just gave me all their numbers – no questions asked. Apparently it’s because they elected to share their contact information with the world, so Facebook took the next step and added their info to my list.
Want to see for yourself? Launch Facebook, click Account and then Edit Friends, then select Contacts from the menu on the left. You should see a long list of profile pictures with phone numbers attached.

My Facebook phonebook: Who are all these people?
It gets weirder. There are also people whom I do not know, who are not in my Android phone’s contact list, with whom I share no connection whatsoever and have no friends in common, who are in my Facebook phone book. Now Facebook is asking if I want to friend them. I have no idea why.
And some of them are minors.
Wait, it gets weirder still. As regular readers of TY4NS may remember, I have a few Facebook alias accounts that I use for testing. None of these have their own cell phones or contact lists, so I never imported any contacts to them. Yet these accounts also display the phone numbers of everyone in their respective friends’ lists. So despite what Facebook’s contacts page says, this has nothing to do with using Facebook’s mobile app.
As Swiss developer Kurt Von Moos points out, Facebook has been syncing mobile contacts this way for some time. I’d just never clicked the contacts page before. He writes:

... with neither your knowledge or consent, [Facebook will] import ALL the names and phone numbers FROM your phone’s address book and upload them to your Facebook Phonebook app ... on Facebook.com, thus storing your private contact numbers on Facebook‘s servers. Once your phone is synced , Facebook will attempt to match the newly uploaded phone numbers to users that have listed the same phone number on their Facebook profile, whether you are friends with them or not.

Why the shock?
You are responsible for sharing your phone number when you provide it to Facebook. Facebook is doing what it feels like with it. As usual. Are people really still surprised when they find out that information they share with some free online web site is going to be used in ways that they didn't anticipate?

Hacker News user grannyg00se | What's your take?

Why exactly is Facebook storing all of those numbers on its servers? That’s a good question.
The problem: Many people give everyone on Facebook access to their contact information and may not even be aware of it. Freelance coder Tom Scott has created a Web app (called “Evil”) that randomly displays phone numbers unsuspecting Facebook users have made public, along with their profile picture. He blocks out the last three digits of each one, but they are visible on Facebook itself.

My advice: Stop sharing your phone number on Facebook. You can go to Facebook’s Remove Imported Contacts Page to delete the numbers of your friends (though when I tried to do that with one of my dummy accounts, it didn’t do a damned thing). You can go into your Account/Privacy settings, click Customize settings, and change access to your Contact Information so only select people can see your number.  Or you can just delete your digits from Facebook and be done with it.
Would you just hand your phone number to a random stranger in a bar or on the street? Probably not. So why are you doing that on Facebook?