Google was aware that it was violating U.S. law since at least 2003 and provided “customer support” to some Canadian on line pharmacies until 2009 to help them reach U.S. customers.

If Google had been prosecuted by the government for knowingly endangering U.S. consumers, It could have tainted its famous credo of “Do No Evil.” A criminal conviction can also disqualify a company from bidding for any government contracts.

The settlement had been widely expected. Google said earlier this year that it was setting aside $500 million to resolve an investigation by the justice department but gave few details.

From a recent WSJ piece, via smooth OCR from Prizmo [iTunes link] for iPhone

Recommended reading

• Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal. | BIT-101 – I didn’t think to take such a close look at a Kindle
• Macsimum News – Greg’s bite: How to publish an Apple iBook – How to publish your own book onto iBooks
• How Oracle might kill Google’s Android and software patents all at once — RoughlyDrafted Magazine – You want a conspiracy theory about how Oracle is planning a death wish for Google – here it is
• Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth – Fascinating article detailing the conception and birth of the iPod
• Snow Leopard: This Cat Has Fleas – An interesting discussion of some serious bugs that still exist in OS X 10.6 or Snow Leopard
• Mail.app: Showing my sent messages in thread view – Super User – Jeez that’s a useful tip!

Recommended reading

• Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World? – This article argues fairly convincingly that techies can seriously benefit from doing an MBA
• Yankee Group Blog » Blog Archive » Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion – After 34 years of practice, Apple has mastered the art of making a successful tech device
• http://www.sandia.gov/~sjplimp/mapreduce.html – The open source implementation of MapReduce, got a few spare machines lying around?

I thought it was strange when I noticed that the search result position of a customer’s site, Eureka Financial, varies depending on whether the customer was logged in or not to their Google account.  It should be noted the customer is running Adwords campaigns for their site.

But it gets even stranger – can you believe that what browser you’re using affects the result position?

Here are the variations I’ve seen so far on searches for the phrase “financial training uk”:

• customer logged in, result position #2
• customer not logged in, result position #40
• me logged in (different Google acct), Safari: #37
• me logged in (different Google acct), Firefox: #40

When you’re using a Safari browser, Google adds a client param to the url, ie, client=safari, however for firefox the param is not added.

Go figure.

Amazing.