Just got my reminder email from Showtime that Season 3 of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! starts Monday, April 25.

The purpose of the show is to debunk myths and scams, some of which permeate our daily lives. They’ve taken on topics like Alien Abductions, Bottled Water, Feng Shui, The War on Drugs, Creationism, P.E.T.A., Tantric Sex, Hypnosis, Ouija Boards, Aphrodisiacs, and many other interesting topics, and sorted out the facts from… well… the bullshit!

Some of the shows are pretty eye-opening, such as the one that suggested a lot of recycling programs are not only generating as much pollution as they claim to be avoiding, but their main benefit may be to further pad the already stuffed pockets of corporations who cynically ride the “Earth-friendly” wave when pitching over-priced recycling services to elected officials who want to look like they are being environmentally sensitive.

Anyway, Bullshit! is itself a good enough reason to subscribe to Showtime, but if you need more, then don’t forget that Showtime is the home of Queer as Folk, Dead Like Me, and Huff. So if you don’t subscribe already, you’re already missing some amazing programming.

An AP article on today’s SFGate.com heralds what will probably be Google’s next new privacy controversy: My Search History.

Yes, friends! Just when you thought you’d cleared your browser cache and disabled your browser’s history, Google helpfully offers up something for your wife’s divorce attorney to subpoena!

According to Forrester analyst (and apparent “Holy Grail of Search” enthusiast) Charlene Li, analysts are just the sort of people who might find it useful. The underlying idea is that by tracking what you’ve searched for previously, Google can tailor the results based on previous searches.

But then, of course, if you forget to log out, the results of your next search for “boring+work+research+topic” may be flavored with “Anna+Kournikova+upskirt”, “Jessica+Alba+accidental+breast+exposure”, and “painful+itching+rash+testicles”. Yes, the service apparently lets you go back and delete any queries that you might not have wanted tracked. But it’s always the trails of data that you forget about that are the ones that come back to bite you.

In the end, though, Google’s offering is neither unique or ground-breaking. Many other services have provided this kind of customized searching for a while. And as even Charlene Li points out, not that many “average users” will use the service.

Maybe I’m one of the “privacy fearing loonies” noted by a commenter on John Battelle’s blog entry about My Search History — although its the lack of privacy I really fear. But my greater concern comes from implications of the not-terribly-clueful quotes from Google’s VP of Engineering, Alan Eustace:

With “My Search,” however, information stored internally with Google is no different than the search data gathered through its Google.com search engine, Eustace said. “This product itself does not have a significant impact on the information that is available to legitimate law enforcement agencies doing their job.”

These comments are the sort that make PR people fear putting engineering-types in front of reporters. Is he really saying that Google already captures and stores search data tied to unique users? Unfortunately, Google’s privacy policy is pretty vague on the issue. It discusses how cookies are used to understand how unspecified “people” interact with Google’s services, and elsewhere it discusses aggregated information except under those circumstances in which you’ve specifically signed up for a Google service.

Eustace may have misspoken… but really he didn’t. According to the “My Search History (Beta) – Privacy FAQ,” you may feel free to edit the logs, but Google is still keeping copies of the unedited searches. So there you have it: a comprehensive log of your searches tied to your identity, available to law enforcement bearing warrants and litigious people bearing civil subpoenas. Signing up for the service simply provides them an easier way to wrap the data into a tidy duces tecum package!

So, in other words, you are already using My Search History, and you didn’t even know it!

Once again, Google has steped in a big pile of privacy crap without a plan.

I second the motion that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is a whack job. Why the opprobrium thrown at DeLay now? Well, try this on for size: (more…)

Another day, another data theft. Oh, did I say this before? Yeah, well, get used to it! News had leaked out a few weeks ago about a possible theft of a few thousand credit card numbers from shoe retailer DSW Shoe Warehouse. And of course the reality turns out to be worse. (more…)

The thought-leaders, and the wing-nuts are starting to weigh in on the Adobe-Macromedia merger.

Today’s “Whistling Past the Graveyard” Award goes to Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun, whose apparent focus on Java renders him incapable of understanding the value proposition of Flash. No wonder Java continues to stagnate! (more…)