Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Sounds like you’re going to spend a week or two pleading with Google tech support. Don’t expect answers, and don’t expect much help.
From Google:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.

In other words, helping a customer using a free service would cost us money, so get lost we don’t give a sh*t. If you keep bugging us we’ll send you more marketing lies like this.

I’ve had a growing concern about Google. I’ve never seen a case where a company gets to be the size of Google and actually does something good. There’s a bell curve in the corporate world, and generally the bigger they get, the crappier they become. I think Google’s on the way down at this point. They’ve peaked and they’re only going to become (more) evil after this. At this point I’m relying on the “free” services of monolithic corporations like Google too much.

In a real-world application, we not only need to collect settings, but also override them in different environments. Many of our applications are deployed in 4 or more environments (developer machine, build server, staging server, and production), each requiring different databases at the very least.

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I was trying to find a good deal on Canon 40D, it usually costs around 1299 from stores like Amazon. Ebay has the best offer of 1099$. But as you see in the above, I had four deals from the sponsored links – one right on the top which says – $519. The rest four as highlited, from the right sponsored results (all offering between $500-800$). There are probably many other products as I had similar results from using keywords like “Canon 40D”, “Nikon 200D”, “Samsung LNT4661″ (the no 1 selling hdtv). Here are the standard list of of Fraud websites, Fraud internet shopping sites for digital cameras, picked up from Google Sponsored links,

www.shopcartusa.com fraud site
http://www.bwayphoto.com fraud site
www.thecameraprofessionals.com fraud website
www.lowpricedigital.com fraud comparison site
www.everyprice.com fraud website
www.expresscameras.com fraud website

As a simple test, if you ever come across such an unbelievable offer, simply call their customer service number. Remember DO NOT GIVE your credit card info or buy from the site yet. If you get a continuous waiting message, try again. In my case, I called 8 companies, all of them had been listed on the fraud website lowpricedigital.com. Though different 1-800 numbers, they all had the same exact waiting message (some christmas carol), half of them never picked up inspite of waiting for 10 minutes.  And then, one guy picked up. He was so arrogant, a lot of noise hissing in the background. The guy said something like “It’s all sold out” and hung up on me! That’s it. Three seconds. “Wow”, I thought. I called the other and after nearly twelve minutes, someone picks up and says. “It’s all sold out Sir. We have’nt yet updated our website stock information”. I couldnt help but imagine the dude from the movie, Knocked Up, specially when it’s so easy to setup a shopping cart website these days.

Internet fraud is not uncommon these days but what’s shocking and devastating is that these sites appear on Google search results in their Sponsored links area right on the top. I wouldn’t have bothered if it was the general search results, as filtering them is far more uncontrollable. Google strives for innovation and certainly cares for it’s users like no one else and a lot of us respect that. But in this case, it looks like they’ve been quite callous to verify the integrity of the contents in these sponsored links.Â

What does this mean to the millions of users who trust Google? Doesn’t Google care enough to verify these sponsored links? Doesn’t Google like to take a little more responsibility on it’s premium content? If more people get duped everyday using Google’s search results, do they sue the website or the search engine which indirectly ‘helped’ them to buy the product. It’s not surprising to see that this is not the first time someone has reported about Google Sponsored Links Fraud Scam content. As one of them said rightly -

“In my opinion, if it comes to Google’s attention that they have a scam website for which folks use their search engine to locate vendors, and if they (Google) do nothing about deleting a scam site, then they should be held liable.”

It shouldn’t be that difficult to implement a remedy for this. Adding a “Report this link” button under each sponsored link to collect user’s feedback would certainly help. Once a certain number of reports are registered. Google can take a look at this for investigation and report the same/remove the links. I just hope someone isn’t frustrated to a point where, Google is sued and make bad press out of it but if you’re a user like me, spread this message, let THEM know, that we care about Google and everyone else.

Hold on. Lets look back. There are actually some great women who contributed some of the best things that happened to Computers. Did you know that: -

• The world’s first 6 programmers, were all women? (the team that wrote the software for the ENIAC).
• The design lead for SmallTalk was a woman – Adele Goldberg
• Yahoo!’s overall classification and organization scheme, the foundation stones of Yahoo’s system is designed and lead by a woman – Srinija Srinivasan.
• One of the world’s first software patents was by a woman, Erna Schneider
• World’s first compiler — Yes. Developed by a woman - Grace Murray Hooper.
• One of the Driving forces behing Java was a woman – Kim Polese

We need more such people. Women like Fran Allens, Amy Fowlers , Kathy Sierras, Holly cummins and the GNOME Foundation. They bring a lot of diversity to the table. Unfortunately, in today’s IT world, at most, we see women as Graphic Designers, QA specialists, Business Analysts or as game programmers (where there is a real need for women), but where are the open-source-women programmers? Industry sources count that less than 2% in Open source are women. When you attend a Tech conference, it’s carcass is spread with geek men fondling their macbook pros and round rimmed glasses, bald VC’s (who happen to be men too) wait to exchange their business cards and Grey haired fat ‘male’ managers checking Outlook mail in their IBM Thinkpads. Women only occupy the reception counters with their pretty faces or double as Hosts for the evening.

Where are the women in IT?

We miss them, we miss them so dearly that our java cups pale without their feminine scent, our keyboards miss the romance of the nature, the 19″ monitors dont invoke a woman’s sensuous, caring touch and the meeting room is so dull without the assertive voice of a confident woman in charge.

We miss the geek-girls.