Google Vows to Improve User Privacy 

An upcoming change in Google's privacy policy was announced last week on the Official Google Blog. According to a couple of the company's high-level managers, Google will anonymize search logs after a period of 18 to 24 months.  The period should strike the right balance between two goals: the continuing improvement of Google's services, while increasing privacy by making it impossible to identify searches with users, once the log retention period is over.

Google warned that the log retention period may change in the future, should it prove to violate state requirements at some point. Users themselves can opt for log data to be kept for longer periods, for use in some of Google's personalized services.

The announcement comes in the same week when authorities have reportedly linked a wife who killed her husband to Google searches for "how to commit murder," "instant poisons," "undetectable poisons," and "fatal digoxin doses." 

OmniTI Labs Are Now Open

OmniTI, a global provider of Internet-based solutions and professional services for mid-to-large organizations, announced at the PHP Quebec Conference in Montreal, Quebec, the launch of OmniTI Labs, a free repository of Open Source projects, libraries and tools generated by OmniTI developers during the course of the company's consulting projects.

OmniTI Labs currently contains a variety of open source tools and libraries that may be of interest to developers using PHP, PostgreSQL, Solaris, XSLT and OpenID technology. These include code for diverse projects such as systems tools, service management systems, core networking, and disaster recovery, as well as C and PHP libraries.

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