It has amused me for some time that Google (formerly of "Do No Evil" fame) was widely proclaimed as one's friend, but after Eric Schmidt took over chairmanship, the "Do No Evil" moniker was at some stage quietly dropped. Maybe evil is more profitable ? Who knows ?
I had been intending to get a VPN subscription for some time, and having done a little investigation, I purchased a subscription from a provider this week, installed the software, and then kick-started the gerbil into action. All go.
I was just getting my daily dose of Russian propaganda from Sputnik this morning:
https://sputniknews.com/russia/20210...bureau-frozen/
And while recalling that RFE / RL was established by the CIA at the time of the Berlin airlift (and wondering why it had taken the Russians so long to take some action), I couldn't quite remember whether 1948 was the year of the airlift.
So I quickly Googled "Berlin airlift", and immediately received a Google message saying "that unusual activity had been detected at my IP address". What the ?
Clicking on the helpful hyperlink within the same message suggested that I might be a robot, and would I please complete and send a CAPTCA response (in order to proceed with my query). The knees might be creaky and be in some future need of mechanical replacement, but a robot I am not. And what robot reads a news article, and then Googles some distant but related aspect of said article.
So I declined their kind offer, shut down the VPN session, waited five minutes, and then repeated the same exercise (this time without VPN active). No Google challenge this time.
[ Edit: Inbetween these two, I did another Google query - while the VPN session was still active - using some quite innocuous search terms ("Air New Zealand"). In this case, the same Google challenge and message was returned (this time with "Air New Zealand" in the search string returned). ]
So I'm unsure whether Google has tagged me as a subversive (but ranked me as relatively benign), or whether it is monitoring IP addresses for various VPN providers having servers based here in New Zealand.
Sensible replies welcomed.
Cheers, Viking
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