SearchEngineUpdate with Vanessa Zamora - 03-31-2008 Part II
Abstract: 1. Google Clients Expand To Include Government Agencies, 2. Hackers Target Facebook Applications
Vanessa Zamora
Video Content Producer, SearchEngineWorld
8:45 pm on Mar. 31, 2008 (utc 0)
Transcript
Monday March 31, 2008
Google Clients Expand To Include Government Agencies
Google has been successful in its attempt to expand beyond its consumer and enterprise operations and increasingly includes the U.S. government, supplying intelligence agencies with equipment to better share information, including servers made to store and search internal documents made up entirely of government data. Other governmental customers include the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the state of Alabama and Washington, D.C. Apart from search technology, Google has licensed government agencies an advanced version of its aerial mapping service, Google Earth, which has been used to assist in navigation. Intellipedia, similar in structure to the Wikipedia web site, is a network for spy agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency that offers a cross departmental database of national intelligence. Mike Bradshaw leads Google's federal government sales team, which includes 18 employees.
Hackers are reported to be targeting social networking Web site Facebook, looking to use its independent applications as a way to take advantage of developers who unintentionally omit adequate security measures. As a result, hackers are sometimes able to access and change what should be private user data managed by the application providers. Facebook, which notes in its Terms of Service that Facebook members use developer applications at their own risk, gives developers information on every person’s Facebook friends, as well as most of the people in that user’s network once an application is installed. In some all that’s needed to hack some applications is a Facebook account, the Firefox browser, and the Firebug browser add-on.
