Worlds are colliding! In the freakiest bug I have witnessed so far, every search result on Google (as of the time of this posting) is now tagged with the ‘This site may harm your computer‘ warning, even when you google the term ‘Google’:
If you are brave enough to click a result you get the even more frightening ‘Malware Warning‘ page:
This even happens when you use your local site, google.co.il in my case:
Update: At 15:36 GMT, almost an hour after I first noticed it, the glitch was fixed.
The impact: an estimated 17 million search results affected, an undetermined number of people bumfuzzled, and as of now 361 now 1738 people blogged about it (including TechCrunch and me).
Update 2:Google admits its fault, attributing it to human error and puts the duration of the mayhem closer to my estimate of “almost an hour”, than TechCrunch’s “about 15 minutes”.
Afterword:
I should emphasize this incident is not some cute thing that happened. This event has repercussions we have yet to understood. This event will be studied and articles will be written about it. Just like when all the airplanes were grounded in the days after 9/11, which allowed scientists to test the true nature of our climate without the effect of vapour trails, tests that were not possible since the time the commercial jet was invented – so will this event be analyzed to determine what happens the day the Internet breaks, including but not limited to the financial impact on the web economy.
I have never heard of Oren Lavie, nor his song titled Her Morning Elegance, until today. Both of them came to my attention hours ago when the music video for the song climbed to the top of ViralVideoChart.com:
Oren Lavie sounded like an Israeli name and so I was somewhat intrigued as I could not recall an Israeli video that ever went viral. Sure enough, it turns out that Lavie, an unknown Israeli singer, took a giant step towards fame by releasing a stop motion video last week. Within that short period of time, the video has been viewed almost 400,000 times, and was blogged about 1500 times (now 1501). Have a look-see:
Now, I know it is quite easy to dismiss this as one of the many viral videos that enter and exit our screens every week, but I think this is much more than that:
We live in an exciting period of time when new business models are developed and adopted right in front of our eyes and the very nature of art and commerce is evolving. Not everyone is excited about it, though: like the Luddites who destroyed mechanized looms in the early nineteenth century trying to resist the inevitability of the Industrial Revolution, the music industry had spent a decade trying to convince people that there is nothing wrong with the old business models and that sharing music is a crime. When everyone around you is committing an illegal act, including the kid next door and his father the policeman, it is quite difficult to treat piracy like the trouble it is made out to be. Home cooking is not killing the restaurant industry, and home taping is not killing the music industry -- it didn’t during the 1980’s when cassettes were used, and it is not killing it nowadays when peer-to-peer file sharing protocols are in use. In ten to twenty years, we would wonder what the fuss was all about, and would find it hard to believe that artists stubbornly refused to adopt new technologies, new ways of communicating and new ways of earning a living.
Allowing people to download your music for free? Of course! How else did you plan to make money?
Fill up your dosage of free culture here, here and here.
[...] I watch the pro-Palestinian rallies that have been staged in capitals across the globe, and I try to tell myself that these people are not against me, or even Israel; that they just are dismayed with all the violence. I tell myself, as Jean Renoir pointed out with such pellucid irony in The Rules of the Game, that everybody has their reasons. But here is what I finally know: with all the troubles in the world, with the terrible things that the Chinese do in Tibet, and do to their own citizens; with the horrors of genocide committed in Darfur by Sudanese Muslims; with all the bad things that Arab governments in the Middle East visit upon their own people – no need for Israel to have a perfectly horrible time – still, the focus is on what the Jews may or may not be doing wrong in Gaza. And it makes people angry and vehement as nothing else does. The vitriol it inspires is downright weird. But that makes sense, because antisemitism itself – creepy, dark, ancient and insidious – is, more than anything else, just plain weird.
– – “Standing Against A Tide of Hatred” – Elizabeth Wurtzel, January 16, 2009
Artist: Maggi, Pierce And E.J.
Track: Linda’s Red Button
Album: The Red Album
Genre: Folk Rock / Soul / Indie
Label: EMPrecords
Release Date: 1998
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Maggi, Pierce And E.J. aka MPE Band – Linda’s Red Button – lyrics
Sittin’ here in Linda’s bed
Tryin to listen to the things inside my head
I was gonna write a song
But I turned the TV on instead
Woke up with some ideas
Went down to make some tea
I had no strength I just had to see
Any creativity
That was once inside of me
Is now sucked away by MTV,
VH1, HBO, CNN, Cinemax
My brain melts like wax
I know it would have been a hit
If I’d have gotten down to it
But no, instead I know
That my role model’s queer
The trial’s nowhere near
Moe Lester’s skin is clear
The world will end this year
If all that matters is untrue
Hey what does this red button do?
I don’t have a clue
I was gonna write a song
But I turned the TV on instead
Sittin’ here in Linda’s bed
Tryin to listen to the things inside my head
