Tech at Night: Google, Christian Coalition, Net Neutrality, Glenn Beck

Tech at Night

Here we go again. Carol Greenberg, also known as RedState diarist LadyImpactOhio, has begun her charge to peel off another ally from the neo-Marxist group Free Press and its Net Neutrality front group Save the Internet. She’s going after the Christian Coalition now. Amusingly enough they tried to defend themselves by telling her that the Gun Owners of America were an ally of Save the Internet, when Greenberg herself got the GOA to flip on that issue.

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Google got embarrassed tonight, as left-wing activists manipulated their service to try to inconvenience possible attendees of a Glenn Beck rally. The rally is set to take place at the Lincoln Memorial, but as Caleb Howe already pointed out today at RedState, any search on Google Maps for the Lincoln Memorial would return the locations of and directions to the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial. Further, searches for the Lincoln Memorial on the main search site would return as a top hit… the Google Maps entry for the Roosevelt Memorial.

At first I thought it was just a terrible error on their part but as it turns out, this wasn’t just an error. As Google has allowed in the past with Blogger and YouTube, the site’s services are wide open to malicious reporting by coordinated activists to attack the political right. RedState commenter charlienosurf found that the Google Maps data for the Lincoln Memorial had been recently edited by the Google-using public specifically to direct people to the Roosevelt Memorial.

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This is still a huge failure, but not of the kind I first thought. Google consistently allows this sort of thing to happen. Conservatives can be mark ed as spammers on Blogger, can have their videos temporarily (right when traffic is highest) taken down on YouTube, and now our events can be manipulated on Google Maps (integrated in other services as well, such as the iPhone).

For conservatives to trust this firm, much more work must be done.

Final factoid for the night: Cell phone plans have come down in price about 50% since 1999. Since when do we need heightened regulation?

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