Unless you’re a dirty hippie living off the grid, growing ‘shrooms and playing the bagpipes all day (which you also resourcefully use to rip bingers when you’re out of Zigzags), you’ve heard about how you can now attach money to Gmail to send cash to anyone with an email address, 100% free for both you and the recipient if you use your bank account or a 2.9% take from Google if you use plastic (though still free for the recipient, who can use any email service he or she wants). You may have even thought how that’s a pretty sweet deal and wondered if the Paypal crew has upped their Valium dose in light of this hot competition.

My guess is they probably have upped their dose a few millies (at least those who favor Valium over, say, nitrazepam which as you know is the primo stuff), however, while Google has a lovely font on their sales pitch page, they reduce its size by a good (and by good I mean Evil) 25% to link you to the TOS with a mouseover popup that tells you “So you just had to look for fine print, didn’t you, dee-bag… well fine, knock your socks off, hope your schedule’s wide open, better crush up some Ritalin, and if you don’t like these terms then go live off the grid and smoke bagpipe bongs,” a link only second in obscurity to their privacy page (not kidding). Watch, I’m blowing the lid of this whole damn thing (or just skip down to the bullet points).

And that’s for just the elegant FAQ page, not the extremely tl;dr TOS page which you have to sign in with a Google account just to read – lolwut? Well screw that, not only is that messed up, semi-secret conditions of a major product launch, half of our readers don’t admit to having Google accounts so I’m making a local copy here for you guys, PDF link. Sue my ass Google, information wants to be free (or just 2.9% extra if you use plastic)! That was a joke Google, no need to sue my ass, just put a cease and desist in the comments.

Warning, it’s long as hell and there’s a zero percent chance you’ll actually read it (a 32% chance you’ve even made it this far through my article). But in Google’s defense it is least 25% shorter than Paypal’s TOS; however one could argue that Paypal is concealing less information or is being less cryptic or offers more serves; regardless, that that should not be interpreted necessarily as Paypal having more “fine print” in the figurative sense per se. It’s doubtful that either service would want to make things any less appealing to you than the various laws out there force them to. Google probably used Paypal’s as a reference when writing their own. If you do actually read Google’s TOS (I just read the FAQ), let me know if there’s anything in there prohibiting people like me from bootlegging their TOS. Also, it’s not just one document, their TOS refers to more TOS documents, like this sucker.

I will at least leave you with sample takeaways from their FAQ and a few from their TOS. In short, yes this looks like a huge threat to Paypal and no I cannot think of any reason why I would continue using Paypal in light of Google’s new service (other than a lack of money, not to mention bad credit, to send people anything). But, for starters, here you go, les bullet points:

• United States only.
• Both senders and recipients must go through the motions of signing up for a Google Wallet account.
• That process includes, as is mandated by some law, confirming your identity somehow (Google suggests possibly by providing your social or something along those lines, Paypal does it by making you confirm a micro-deposit in your bank account I think).
• While sending money directly from your bank account is free, it, unlike using plastic or your Google Wallet balance which again costs 2.9% but no additional transaction fee like Paypal, “could take up to several days.” I do not know if you can charge up your Google Wallet balance for free with your bank account and how long that takes.
• Transferring money from your Google Wallet to your bank account, once you’ve hooked that up, a “few” days.
• Daily transfer limit of $10K (to make you feel stupid, Google subsequently notes that there is a 5-day cap of $50K), so you’re SOL, high rollers. Gotta send at least $0.30 per transaction, so that means I’m getting a raise, right Smith?
• Perhaps worst of all, you have to use that new, weird Gmail compose “experience” they rolled out a few months ago – you know, the thing you mom called you hysterically to ask you help her turn off.
• Google, in typical “beta mode” fashion, notes they may change everything whenever they want because they feel like it.
• Google Wallet users are not insured by the FDIC or any other governmental agency and you will not collect interest (surprise).
• If your bank or other third parties involved decide to tack on charges, that’s on you, not Google.
• It’s on you if you screw up and send the wrong guy money, or you never get your shroom seeds, no refunds in this system through Google, that’s your problem.
• If you think there’s an error that Google made, you had better tell them within 60 days and they give them selves and additional ninety days to figure things out and resolve disputes, plus an extra three days to tell you about it. What, cut them some slack, they’re busy with the robot cars.

At the tail end of all of this plus the million things I didn’t list, Google notes in all caps that whatever they may have left out of these terms, they disavow themselves of liability not legally imposed onto them, or something like that. It’s complicated, I’m obviously not a lawyer, just making a point that it’s not as simple as their cute video suggests but do feel that this looks like an awesome service that will contribute to consumers, I like almost anything that helps make money change hands and I also really like the idea of competition between Google and Paypal. And no, I do not know where you can score either ‘shroom seeds, bagpipe bongs or nitrazepam (protip, Tor).

Doug Simmons

Well, the latest high-profile Twitter hacking incident went down Friday by the Syrian Electronic Army which compromised multiple sites including The Onion and the Financial Times, including the FT’s website and its Twitter feeds. The FT’s Twitter account was used for something, albeit political, that was categorically horrific and uniquely puke-inducing. Even if your skin is thick I would advise against trying to dig up more on that, and if you have any related links, please do not post them in the comments.

There have been more in between, but this comes on the heels of the Associated Press’s account which tweeted a presidential assassination scare that smashed the Dow down 200 points. These incidents, which include other presidential assassination tweets years back, make up a rather long and colorful list which will continue to grow briskly.

The frequency of these incidents would have been greatly mitigated had Twitter implemented two-step verification. Not a new concept, large-scale implementations arrived years ago. It’s a nuisance most Outlook.com and Gmail users would prefer to live without, but major Twitter accounts of the AP and other media outlets and celebrities, accounts that can be hijacked for a political platform or to cause panic, many of those account holders would be willing to take the extra step to log in if it means fending off the likes of these folks. Without that feature, evidently, having a Twitter account associated with your organization is a significant liability both to you and to everyone, one worth reconsidering.

There have been rumors for months that Twitter is rolling this multi-step authentication system out to those who want it but there is still no sign of it, just talk. Especially given what has already happened, this is an obviously urgent feature to roll out and then to educate users about aggressively. However complicated it may be to pull that off, taking years to continue to fail to figure it out and make it happen is weirdly negligent and by any measure simply unacceptable.

Doug Simmons

If you thought part of the big WebP adoption holdup by Mozilla had anything to do with implementing its support involving a significant undertaking to code it in, nope; it seems that’s not the case at all, judging from Shay Elkin’s contribution to one of the multiple Mozilla bug threads on the topic. Shay offers simple instructions to make yourself a fresh build below.

Mozilla is approaching their third year of WebP debate. Take your time fellas! What’s “just a few kilobytes of savings” across the stupid clueless web worth anyway, right? When you run out of things to debate and daft insults to hurl, before making any devastating decisions you’ll surely regret, no problem, just wait for another player like Facebook to adopt WebP somehow and then you can debate the fallout from their users’ complaints for at least another five months, then repeat that forever while you watch your base of users just slowly fade away. Don’t worry, I’m sure some of them don’t care about progress.

Shay Elkin, 2013-05-12 09:10:18 PDT, Comment 66

I try to maintain a webp-enabled and updated version of mozilla-central (the patch is the same as the one in this bug)

You can find it at https://github.com/EverythingMe/mozilla-central Assuming you have a configured build environment, the following will get you a Firefox build with webp support:

git clone –branch webp git@github.com:EverythingMe/mozilla-central.git
cd mozilla-central
./mach build

Really frustrating fellas. Perhaps Matt Brubeck could swing by and offer me some clarity again, perhaps starting with Fennec’s lack of WebP support, the only Android browser I can find that doesn’t seem to support it.

Doug Simmons

Seems everybody’s got a rather different-looking website when you visit on your phone. Many take it an annoying step farther and prompt you to install an app just to read their website. However, phones have been changing, the web has been changing, both heading in a similar direction, overlapping to the point that the need for a mobile format is dissipating, and I think we’re now better off without it. That’s why we’re seeing more mobile browsers, and the mobile themes themselves, offering to grab the desktop versions of sites.

Odds are 31% that you’re reading this on a phone or a tablet now, but if you haven’t been here on a phone, this is basically what it would look like. Trying really hard to get a cold load of posts down to 1000ms. Not there yet on cellular but it’s getting fast. Thanks to mod_pagespeed, memcached, WebP, some other tricks and this further-minified minimalist theme (also, soon, SPDY), loading with nothing cached on your end, an individual post (not counting the ads) takes maybe 45KB or so over nine requests, not factoring in the roughly 70% HTML/CSS/JS gzip compression that mod_deflate produces for the data transfer to you.

Even fewer bytes involved if you’re using Chrome, Opera or Android as you’ll get served WebPs like you might on Facebook which eat up about half the bytes of their jpeg and png counterparts, depending. It could use more polish to make it look acceptable on both computers and phones, I’m aware this doesn’t have a Park Avenue veneer to it now, but I think that’s time and energy better spent on writing content at this point, content which will hopefully soon include how awesome SPDY is for us once we finally rig it up, plus a few less-boring articles written by someone else. And yes, when that day comes, there will be at least one link to download Chrome somewhere.

Doug Simmons

I am finally out of denial that Google will shut down Reader. Additionally, I have found my new home, I set it up just right, installed some Chrome extensions for it, tweaked my RSS adding thing, exported/imported my zillion feeds, getting the hang of the keyboard shortcuts, the whole deal. Haven’t switched yet but I’m ready.

I know there are lots of shiny alternatives to Google Reader and this one in particular may not get the most votes, but I just liked the actual old Google Reader the most, and I want something as similar to that as possible, basically. RSS stands for really simple syndication, did you know that? I don’t want to jazz it up. So I’m with TheOldReader.com, and so far so good.

But they don’t have an Android app yet. They say they’re working on it. I like what I’ve seen enough to risk some period of no app during which I could get by with something like Feedly, but I think that would be a better opportunity for me to take Google+ for a spin finally. Or maybe I don’t need an effing app?

Never mind, seems he already is going back to North Korea. Why? Rodman’s on a mission of high-stakes diplomacy in a bid to free that American prisoner sentenced to fifteen years at a labor camp for attempting to overthrow the North Korean government.

Though the North Koreans have insisted the incident is not an attempt on their part to create a bargaining chip (to, for example, lure Bill Clinton over again), Rodman is taking it upon himself to “get the guy out” because, as he put it, “We got a black president who can’t even go talk to Kim Jong Un. Obama can’t do shit.”

When asked how he has so far contributed to our national interests with respect to our dealings with a country that releases Youtube videos depicting their dreams of nuking us, Rodman responded that his friend Kim Jong Un “put those missiles back into storage.”

“That black guy called Obama? F*** him,” he added.

Needless to say it is unlikely Rodman, perhaps emboldened by his success on Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice, is coordinating with the State Department on this.

Here in the US the education system has been taking a beating and politicized taking the emphasis off the kids who are struggling and placing blame for their apathy and declining GPA’s on budget cuts and disgruntled educators. Somewhere in Duncanville (wherever that is) there is student who has had enough and apparently intended to voice his objections while departing his classroom on what can only be a familiar walk to the principals office. His tirade seemed at first staged and well rehearsed but after listening to it a second time it seems he is more upset than I first thought because it sounds like his voice is cracking towards the end of the video before he walks out.

Take away what you want from this but in any case it is still pretty funny!

Folks are estimating Microsoft will rake in a cool $3.4 billion this year on Android licensing deals. Wow. That’s 20% of the company’s 2012 income. Others guestimate they’ll be making upwards of nine billion a year from their Android-related operations by 2017 which is over half their 2012 take.

A critic might note the irony of all this near-priceless intellectual property behind phone design contrasting with Microsoft’s flaccid inability to compete with phones of their own, but I’d prefer to offer my compliments to their legal team. They devised a system that makes a ton of scratch change hands perpetually and at an accelerating rate, a lot of which (most of which?) comes from foreign pockets. That’s great for Microsoft shareholders (like me), it’s probably helpful to Nokia, it’s good for the GDP, for the country and, unless this is all a zero sum game with nothing of actual utility contributed anywhere, the world too.

High five, Horacio Gutierrez, and however many others are at your side fighting the good fight. Bravo!

I just gave a Firefox Android nightly a chance to win me over again. It had no idea what websites I frequented, no bookmarks, no plugins synced, no settings, no tabs open on my computer, nothing. Yes I realize Firefox can sort of sync up like Chrome, but it made me realize that there are benefits of surrendering one’s privacy, benefits I don’t want to lose, which is good because that seems to be the inevitable direction we’re heading. And what better way to do that than with Google as much as possible, given that they provide such a vastly wide array of services that all tie into each other. No one comes close to that, nor to their transparency.

That reminded me of a USA Today article I ran into last night (in part because Google News knows I would be interested) on Siri vs Google Now for iOS. Its author, Anick Jesdanun, gave Google Now an extensive international test drive. He noted that while Siri has about a dozen amusing answers to “what is the meaning of life” and so forth, Google Now, which could recognize his voice well presumably due to various forms of data mining, produced information that tended to be remarkably relevant to his interests — presumably, largely, thanks to Google’s data mining practices of his behavior on Search and his Gmail too (that turned my head). Seems he was never the type to enable Chrome’s Do Not Track or Incognito mode feature, and consequently he knew the local currency rates, which hotel, a tap for turn-by-turn, tourist stuff, you get the idea.

“You must give it permission to access calendar entries. Privacy worries aside, Google Now’s appeal is in what it does with that data. That’s why I’m okay with Web History,” Anick aptly put it. This type of privacy invasion strikes me as being obviously helpful to consumers, to commerce and to the whole wide world. So what’s the problem? Grow up and just go with it.

Doug Simmons

When I switched to T-Mobile way back in 2010 I was in awe of being able to get actual 3G speeds throughout Manhattan (in spots and times of day where AT&T would be unusable), so amazed that I dragged raced the two carriers here. I’ve since moved to Connecticut, and on my Nexus 4, without enabling its secret LTE radio, I can pull down data almost at the speed of my Verizon FiOS connection, over 20mbps, with a respectable 42ms ping. And, unlike Verizon, they don’t throttle down Youtubes to unusable speeds.

But in recent trips to midtown Manhattan, the speed has dropped substantially. In some areas like Times Square, not enough data even to get my Google Reader app to catch up. And they still haven’t gotten around to lighting up Grand Central Terminal’s train runway, so that’s a good eleven minutes to escape to Harlem on top of however early you got on the train during which time you’ll have no service at all, which, in addition to not having service, I believe drains your battery, fighting for a connection.

Now, LTE has a much higher spectral efficiency than anything, which I suppose why, given that 21mbps is good enough for anyone and LTE isn’t in the real world that much faster, carriers have been racing to deploy LTE (so that people packed into dense places like Manhattan and Frisco can use their phones). I just hope that, given the finite amount of spectrum and the increasing use of smartphones, the technology ends up being good enough for all New Yorkers once most of them eventually migrate to LTE to be able to spread their throughput wings and watch Youtube clips on their Google Glasses while stumbling into each other.

Doug Simmons

Update: Seems I’m not the only one venting. Uh oh, Verizon LTE complaints too..