More and more, I get the feeling that if there’s a rift between the old “Don’t be evil” Google and the new “Let’s do whatever we want” Google, that it’s a rift between Schmidt and Larry/Sergey — if not personally, then at least culturally within the company. On the one side, the Larry/Sergey Google that makes amazing cool things — the search engine, Gmail, Android. On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.

A lot of people seem surprised by Google’s alliance with Verizon on mobile network neutrality. That stance doesn’t fit with my view of the Larry/Sergey Google. But it fits my idea of the Schmidt Google like a glove.

This rings true.

Georgia collected $8,537,319 in prepaid 911 fees. “None of these funds were allocated for 911 or E911 use,” the report says. Instead, they too sat in the state treasuries’ general fund.

California’s listed but not the amount.

Baylor University doesn’t want its students using peer-to-peer networks. A BlueCoat PacketShaper locks down bandwidth to students, and all inbound ports are blocked by the campus firewall to keep “computers from acting as servers or super nodes in peer to peer networks.” Illinois State uses a packet shaping device called the Packeteer; it singles out P2P traffic and clamps down hard on its available bandwidth to ensure it can’t disrupt other, likely more productive uses of the campus network. In addition, the school’s intrusion prevention system tries to block P2P traffic in both directions at the campus border, though only if it comes from residence and wireless hotspots—faculty and staff are trusted to use P2P applications responsibly. Reed College in Oregon shapes bandwidth using a NetEqualizer device, though it doesn’t single out P2P traffic. Instead, the system keeps on eye on overall user bandwidth use. Anyone using “excessive bandwidth” gets a friendly call to “ensure that the bandwidth consumption is for legal purposes and that the user is aware of the College’s policies concerning illegal file sharing.”

Here’s to hoping Caltech doesn’t fall prey to this incredible waste of everyone’s time.

The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.

I hope this gets more attention before someone has a chance to do something nasty.