What’s the Buzz? Google’s newest product, an in-your-face status broadcasting service built onto Gmail that acts like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, was launched the day it was announced two weeks ago. The initial reaction, at least at Harvard, has been polarizing. Many students struggled with exactly what Buzz is and how it’s supposed to be used. Is it a way to transmit status updates? Share photos? Meet new people? As a fellow Crimson writer described it, “I don’t know what it is, but I hate it.”

Google remains the best search engine in the world, has one of the most fully-featured free email services around, and keeps yuppies from getting lost in big cities. But social networking may be its Achilles heel. Its version of MySpace, called Orkut, has made inroads in Brazil and India, but lags far behind in the rest of the world. Buzz may someday succeed at supplanting other, more popular social networks, but the product’s abrupt launch has generated serious privacy concerns.

(Continued)

Last week’s close Undergraduate Council election ended with a bang: The Election Commission voted to decertify the results, prompting half of the EC to resign in protest, and the UC President’s email account sent a message accusing Vice Presidential candidate Eric Hysen of fraud—signed by Vice President Kia McLeod—but no one admits to drafting it.

The debate centers on the computer system that tallied the votes, and whether anyone tampered with election results. Electronic voting systems have their advantages in cost, accessibility, and, precision. But last week’s events illustrate that machines are more likely to sink an election than to save it, in part because electronic voting often generates the perception of unfairness, even if everything is played by the book.

(Continued)

Anyone who has walked from Mather House to Northwest Science in the heart of winter knows that Cambridge is a very windy place. In fact, Boston is the windiest major city in the country. So it makes sense that Harvard announced a plan last week to generate 10 percent of its energy from wind over the next 15 years.

Of course, the wind won’t be generated here—we’ll get it from Maine, which has increasingly positioned itself as a provider of green energy for the region, though not without controversy. It may seem hypocritical for Harvard to go green by pushing the noisy, unsightly turbines out to a poor rural community far away, as if we’ll only help save the planet provided it doesn’t block our view of the Charles. However, the university has little choice but to outsource to the countryside, and though this commitment is short and limited, it should be commended as an important first step.

(Continued)

Big Brother lives next door, and he loves playing online games for cash. Next month, a British firm will launch a website that allows people to win money for reporting crimes recorded by private security cameras. Businesses who own closed circuit television equipment can pay a fee to include their video feed in the game, and those fees get redistributed as prizes to players who report a crime in progress.

There are lots of things wrong with this picture. The most obvious critique of the game is that opening up private cameras to public viewing is a gross invasion of privacy. Since anyone can “play,” it gives carte blanche to snoopers to keep tabs on their neighbors and relatives as they go to the bank or the grocery store and opens up a world of possibilities for stalkers. It could easily lead to harassment, enabling perverts to ogle attractive women, racists to target minorities, and reactionaries to sniff out atheists or communists. It’s only a matter of time before footage of an embarrassing moment, or, worse, someone flashing her social security number, ends up on YouTube.

(Continued)

Earlier this month, some students at a handful of colleges that had outsourced their e-mail accounts to an outside provider unintentionally gained access to each other’s inboxes. For anyone who sends sensitive information via e-mail—that is, all of us—it’s the worst kind of nightmare, one that causes people to bolt upright in a cold sweat. This provider, which we’ll call Company X, declined to state which schools the mistake affected, although Brown admitted it was one of them. Worst of all, the glitch went unnoticed by authorities for more than three days until Company X “fixed” the problem by shutting down the accounts. Brown’s IT department was never informed, and the other schools’ probably weren’t, either.

While Brown admits the episode only affected 22 students, it serves as an excellent anecdote for arguing against University-wide outsourcing of vital IT services like e-mail or tech support. At the very least, it shows that schools should be very careful about which companies they entrust with sensitive information. But Company X isn’t some small start-up run by inexperienced managers. Surprisingly enough, it’s Google, one of the most trusted brands in any industry.

(Continued)