Greenspun: No Google Hits, No Job.

A couple weeks back, Phil posted this anecdote:

One of the hackers/company owners at the conference I attended in California said something that interested me: “When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person’s name into Google. If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it.”

This employer assumes that any competent programmer has left some trace of him or herself in version control trees of open-source software, question and answer forums, and other repositories accessible to Web search crawlers.

This is yet another bit of compelling anecdotal evidence that Google has -- in tandem with achieving it's de-facto monopoly in search -- indeed incurred the responsibility to provide tools to individuals to permit them configure and update their own Online Identity Management.

I'll do my best to come back and link to some specific articles from the blog, later; but it shouldn't take more than a few minutes of browsing below to see what I've been trying to get across about this topic for almost seven years, now.

gWifey: The New Google Wife Finder

I wonder where does this fit in the Open Source Physical Security matrix?

Here's Google latest plan to take over the galaxy with the power of their fully armed and operational server fleet: let you tag everything you want, from your dog to a book to your cellphone to your car keys, and have it controlled at all times using RFID. According to a report on the Daily Mail.

Of course, you have to consider the source, here. The Daily Mail is actually so irrationally paranoid as to use such captions as, "Facing the future: Will too much power be concentrated in Google's hands?"

Obviously, The Daily Mail is completely out of touch with reality as Google's SEC filings clearly promise that they can't ever be evil. Besides, first you'd have to define what is "evil," then you'd have to overcome the Empirical Fact that the first 50% of Google's name is a 75% instantiation of the word "Good." In Sergey we Trust.

Oh wait, there's my good friend's RFID moving right over ... toward ... uhhh ... my wife's RFID ... what? She just said she was working late again ... let's zoom in here a sec ... what? Motel 6? Dammit! Not just one, but TWO cheapskates! Oh well, thankfully Google has thought of EVERYTHING with this handy, context-aware "click to divorce" AJAX widget!

Phew! That was close, I was almost inconvenienced there, for a moment. Gee, thanks Google!

Do NOT E-mail Us our Passwords

If I had a nano-cent for every time I've unleashed this rant to a bank, online broker, or web site, I'd be richer than Sergey by now.

Please, listen to Brad and DO NOT EMAIL US OUR PASSWORDS!