Google

When it comes to credit issues and identity theft, I sometimes feel like what we used to call a broken record. Almost incessantly, I urge readers to check their credit reports by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com or by calling 1-877-322-8228. Both will get you to the "central source" mandated by Congress a decade ago for consumers to request free reports from TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax, the nation's three main credit bureaus. If the reports are clean, I tell readers, there's no need to pay for a credit score - which Congress, alas, did not require the credit bureaus to provide, and did not bar them from pitching via side deals to consumers who request their free reports.

THIS WEEK, Google turns 10, and becomes the smartest 10-year-old in the history of the universe. The company indexes billions of Web pages using a patented ranking system to find the most relevant search results. For millions of people, Google has replaced everything from phone books to the public library. Research that used to take hours or even days can be done in seconds. News searches make it easy to follow headlines around the globe. Information can be exchanged over e-mail at blinding speed with someone thousands of miles away.

Way to go, Google. Google said this week that it would no longer censor its search engine service in China. The Internet giant began redirecting searches by users in China through Hong Kong. The move is unlikely to give users in China access to unflattering information about China's occupation of Tibet or crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square. But it sends a clear message that Google isn't going to cooperate with the censorship efforts of the Chinese Communist Party.

Google Inc. is adding 625,000 users a day to the Google+ social-networking service, which may total 400 million members by the end of next year, according to an independent analysis of its growth. The site's popularity has accelerated in recent weeks, with almost a quarter of its total user base joining in December alone, said Paul B. Allen, founder of Ancestry.com Inc., who tracks the numbers as Google+'s "unofficial statistician. " Google, the world's largest Internet-search company, aims to challenge the social-networking supremacy of Facebook Inc., a site with more than 800 million members.

A few years ago, I walked into an Internet room in Tibet's capital, Lhasa. There were no Chinese soldiers in the room and no visible government censors nearby. A sign on the wall, however, reminded users that China's all-seeing eye had not disappeared. "Do not use Internet," the warning instructed, "for any political or other unintelligent purposes. " Since then, China's ruling regime has perfected the science of controlling what the Chinese can read or write on the Internet to such a degree that it has become the envy of tyrants the world over.

No doubt, many centuries ago, bards in the mountains of Serbia, confronted by scribes with quill pens, cups of ox blood, and sheepskins on which to transcribe into fixed versions their ever-improvised 50,000-line epics, protested loudly. So did the historians whose hand-scripted chronicles of the rise and fall of empires were suddenly set in newfangled movable type and reproduced in many copies over which they had no control. Technology, ever changing, has unanticipated effects on the products of authorship.

A PHILADELPHIA woman has accused Google of illegal wiretapping for "intercepting" emails she sent to Gmail accounts and publishing content-related ads. The lawsuit filed by Kristen Brinkman, address unknown, echoes others filed around the country by class-action lawyers who say the practice violates wiretap laws in some states. They represent email users who do not have Gmail accounts and have therefore not signed the company's acceptance terms. "The terms are that Google can intercept your emails and use them for direct marketing purposes," said lawyer Richard M. Golomb, who has sued Google in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Florida.

PARIS - European regulators have asked Google to clarify its new privacy policy and make it easier for users to opt out of data collection because of concerns that the Web giant may be gathering too much data and holding it too long. France's data-protection agency led a European investigation into Google's new unified privacy policy, which replaces individual policies for its search, e-mail, and other services and regulates how it uses the personal data it collects. The policy allows Google to combine data collected from one person using its disparate services, from Gmail to YouTube.

"My Best Day Ever" was the theme of this year's national Doodle 4 Google contest, and when Sewell seventh grader Maria Iannone heard back in April that her artwork had been selected as her state's winner, that was a very good day indeed. This week was even better. On Tuesday, at a fete for the state finalists at Google's Manhattan offices, Maria learned she was one of five national winners. "I was kind of overwhelmed, but I wasn't really freaking out or anything," Maria said Wednesday, remembering her name being called as the winner in the sixth-and-seventh-grade age group.

Forget the crayons, paintbrushes, and colored pencils. The path to becoming an accomplished artist - or at least to a $30,000 college scholarship - is now etched on a tablet. That's what 12-year-old Maria Iannone, a seventh grader at Chestnut Ridge Middle School in Washington Township, used for her entry in Google's nationwide K-12 "Doodle 4 Google" contest. This year's theme: "My Best Day Ever. " Her doodle shows the silhouette of a person using a telescope to gaze at a yellow half-moon.

Its website has a new look, Twitter and Facebook are getter ever-higher profiles, and now the Upper Darby Township Police Department has signed on to Nixle, an instant-alert system that has gained popularity around the country. "Social media is a big thing," said Upper Darby Capt. Anthony Paparo, adding that it's a high-tech version of an old concept: community policing. The department also has set up an email address for crime tips. Nixle essentially is an electronic community bulletin board that can target alerts and advisories all the way to the block level, Pararo said.

* THE NEIGHBORS. 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, 6 ABC.   TOKS Olagundoye studied for years to play an extraterrestrial living in New Jersey. She just didn't know it. One of the stars of ABC's "The Neighbors," Olagundoye - whose first name rhymes with "jokes" and is short for Olatokunbo - was educated in her native Nigeria, in England and in the United States. She also was schooled by Bravo's "The Real Housewives of New Jersey. " "I watched three seasons of it, fully enjoyed it, then I didn't enjoy it. I stopped," she said of the "reality" show that "The Neighbors" satirized earlier this season, as Olagundoye's character tried to fit in with a group of human females by adopting a "Housewives" persona.

By agreeing to a toothless invasion-of-privacy settlement with Google, federal and state authorities blew a chance to take a bolder stand against the Internet behemoth's prying into people's lives. Between 2008 and 2010, Google employees carrying out its Street View mapping project drove by countless homes across America and harvested people's personal data, including passwords, medical records, financial accounts, and e-mails. Google initially denied it had obtained private information.

Without fanfare, Google announced that it is killing off its once popular Reader, a program that allowed users to subscribe to news feeds through a simple interface. It was sad news for news junkies and researchers who used it to suck in thousands of headlines from publications both local and global. Wired, lamented the loss, calling Reader 'revolutionary' and 'beloved.' "That's a shame, because Reader was pretty great," Wired stated. Google says Reader will go away July 1. Reader used what was nicknamed Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, to bring in news stories through a bit of programming code known as XML. Google reader debuted in 2005 and morphed into a simple, easy-to-use program that allowed users to personalize feeds by curating them by topic in folders.

In the Region Foot doctor ahead in drug-firm pay   A Philadelphia-area foot doctor was named one of a few dozen physicians across the nation who have earned more than $200,000 from speaking and consulting work for drug companies. Warren S. Joseph of Huntingdon Valley was No. 5 on ProPublica 's list of Top Earners, one of a handful of doctors who grossed more than $500,000 from pharmaceutical giants. ProPublica is a nonprofit news organization devoted to investigative journalism.

I have an embarrassing story to tell you about how I tore my quadriceps muscle. I didn't do it skiing or running, snowboarding or hiking. All I did was get off the toilet seat. Yes, I'm too old to pee-pee without hazard. Last Sunday I left the bathroom, took a step, and got a pain in my thigh that felt as bad as childbirth without the ice chips. I tried to take two more steps, but couldn't walk. I broke out in a sweat and cried out in pain. The dogs didn't notice anything amiss.

"The voice-activated wearable computer ... it's coming from IBM," a commmercial declared a dozen years ago, while showing a dude wearing funny eyegear and shouting , scaring pigeons in Venice's St. Mark's Square. Finally, such a device could be out this year - but from Google, and, as folks have been hearing since last spring, it's called Google Glass . The buzz got louder this week with two appearances by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, one at an after-Oscars party, another speaking at a California innovation conference.

SAN FRANCISCO - Google's stock price topped $800 Tuesday for the first time amid renewed confidence in the company's ability to reap higher profits from its dominance of Internet search and prominence in the growing mobile market. The milestone comes more than five years after Google's shares initially hit $700. Not long after breaking that barrier in October 2007, the economy collapsed into the worst recession since World War II and Google's stock tumbled into a prolonged malaise that eventually led to a change in leadership.