From an article posted at Mac World by Robert McMillan:

A small Indiana company has sued tech heavyweights Microsoft, Apple, and Google, claiming that it holds the patent on a common file preview feature used by browsers and operating systems to show users small snapshots of the files before they are opened.

Cygnus Systems sued the three companies on Wednesday saying that they infringed on its patent with products such as Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome, which allow users to view preview images of documents on the computer. Mac OS X, the iPhone and Safari also infringe, the company said in court filings. Apple uses this technology in its Finder and Cover Flow Mac OS X features, the filings state.

A quick look at Cygnus Systems’ website shows at least a strong relationship with one of those named defendants:

I guess I don’t quite understand the politics behind it, but suing a vendor which you’ve been named a partner of and for which a large part of your business is based on doesn’t sound very logical. Given the nature of the patent which the lawsuit is based on, other companies could be considered future defendants.

A more in-depth article now exists at Ars Technica.

At first I thought there was an update to Firefox that changed some locale setting. But then I noticed I had the same issue on every computer regardless of which browser I was using. I assumed it had to be a problem with Google in relation to my IP, but I couldn’t find any confirmation until just today.

In a Google Groups discussion, a lot of users were reporting the same issue. One was able to get information from Google and relayed it to the group. Google uses location files to keep track of where an IP resides in the world in order to provide region specific services. Apparently, the files are not perfect and fortunately Google has provided a form in order to report any issues that are found.

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=ip

If anyone else is experiencing this strange phenomenon, let Google know so they can correct it. Even my brother on location in Afghanistan was being redirected to www.google.de.

And while mankind can not control the awesome force of a hurricane, we can still develop better ways to track and predict where a hurricane may strike populated areas in order to issue fair warnings so that people can seek safety or shelter in time. When Gustav was still a major threat, Google put together a meta-page in order to track it and help with any recover efforts. One of the most interesting links from that page was the Hurricane Tracking Map that StormAdvisory.org maintains.

Powered by Google Maps, you can select any or all of the hurricanes from this season and see their path from life to death. Different stages, or way-points, are detailed to show date, time, and wind-speed and are color-coded according to each storm’s severity. Current storms also give projected paths. Whats even more intriguing is that StormAdvisory even has a drop-down menu where you can see the paths of every hurricane known to exist as far back as 1851. Of course, accuracy begins to decline the further back in time you look, but it’s still cool to see.

As it seems almost impossible to reach anyone directly at the behemoth known as Google, Inc., I hope this has an iota of a possibility that someone in the know will read it.

This is in regards to the new “Sorry” page that results from certain search queries. No, it is not from any virus or spyware. No, deleting cookies obviously does not fix the problem. No, my query originates from the actual Google search pages.

I’m not sure what the issue is, but there’s certainly a major failure taking place. Considering how I use Google for many reasons (search, mail, rss reader, analytics), I would be hard pressed to move my usage some place else. However, I need access to a search engine that is not prone to failure. Tonight, I haven’t been able to make more than two queries before having to prove my humanity with a captcha, or a flat out denial of service.

I can’t be the only one having this issue.