Egypt begins using Arab domain names on Internet

The Jakarta Post, Associated Press, Cairo | Thu, 05/06/2010 10:02 PM

Egypt's communication and information technology minister says his country has begun registering domain names in Arabic on the Internet.

Tarek Kamel said three Egyptian companies were the first to receive registrar licenses for the ".masr" domain written in Arabic, a development that represented a "milestone in Internet history." Masr means Egypt in Arabic.

The move comes about six months after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved the use of non-Latin domain names. ICANN is a leading Internet policy organization.

Egypt was among the first Arab nations to apply to use Arabic script in the top level domain - the suffix that comes after the Internet address, such as .com.

The three companies are TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link Registrar.

Cloud computing for business goes mainstream

BBC News, By Tim WeberBusiness editor, BBC News website, 23:04 GMT, Wednesday, 5 May 2010 0:04 UK

Investing in the cloud means less capital expenditure.

Cloud computing has been an information technology buzzword for many years. Now it is going mainstream.

Bryan Kinsella has a problem. As chief information officer of business services provider Rentokil Initial he looks after a widely dispersed and mobile workforce.

Email is a key management tool but as the company grew it found itself with 40 different email systems across 50 countries for 20,000 employees, with another 15,000 staff offline.

Setting up a new single email system with a global server infrastructure would have meant a massive capital expenditure.

Instead, he settled on a "cloud" solution, rolling out Google's enterprise email across the company. It's saving Rentokil about 70% in expenditure, he says, with lower support costs on top of that.

The Cloud explained

But what is cloud computing? In the simplest of terms, it is IT-as-a-Service. Instead of building your own IT infrastructure to host databases or software, a third party hosts them in its large server farms. Your company has access to its data and software over the internet (which in most IT diagrams is shown as a cloud).

Cloud fans claim five key benefits:

• Cheap: your IT provider will host services for multiple companies; sharing complex infrastructure is cost-efficient and you pay only for what you actually use.
• Quick: The most basic cloud services work out of the box; for more complex software and data base solutions, cloud computing allows you to skip the hardware procurement and capital expenditure phase - it's perfect for start-ups.
• Up-to-date: Most providers constantly update their software offering, adding new features as they become available.
• Scaleable: If your business is growing fast or has seasonal spikes, you can go large quickly because cloud systems are built to cope with sharp increases in workload.
• Mobile: Cloud services are designed to be used from a distance, so if you have a mobile workforce, your staff will have access to most of your systems on the go.

In other words: information technology becomes a utility, consumed like electricity, water, or even outsourced HR or payroll services, says Chuck Hollis, chief technology officer at information management company EMC. This year, he exhorts companies, "is the year to get your cloud strategy together."

Bear in mind, cloud computing is not new. Most of us are using the cloud already, through services like Hotmail, Flickr, Blogger and Facebook. It's business that has been slow in the take-up.

Using the cloud

For Bryan Kinsella, the cloud strategy is paying off at an enterprise level. So far his team has moved close to 10,000 staff on to Google's email services; another 10,000 will have migrated by the end of the year.

"We never went into this to get cost reduction," says Mr Kinsella. It was about "unifying the business... to operate and collaborate on a global basis."

Now he is rolling out Google Sites to share documents across Rentokil and create intranets for both the global company and its many divisions.

It's this easy scaling that makes cloud-computing attractive. Insurance giant Aviva, for example, moved all its enterprise content management and business intelligence tools online, using Microsoft's Sharepoint online service.

Logistics firm Pall-Ex can grow fast and cheaply by moving much of its IT to UK hosting firm Outsourcery.

Universal Music is using the cloud computing services of e-commerce provider Venda to roll out its online store model across Europe.

"It's so expensive to build a world-class e-commerce platform, no single retailer can build it by themselves unless they are the size of Amazon," says James Cronin, chief technology architect at Venda.

Competition boosts cloud computing

Cloud computing can be applied nearly anywhere: the small retailer that needs a secure e-commerce website quickly and cheaply; the ferry operator that has huge computing spikes in May and June while 90% of its IT system idle the rest of the year; the fire service that needs extra computing power to predict the movement of forest fires during the summer.

Cloud services range from fulfilling single business functions, say calculating payroll taxes, to outsourcing heavy-duty computing for complex 3-D modelling.

Many firms "have not moved significantly to cloud computing yet," acknowledges Casio Dreyfuss at technology consultancy Gartner. But he predicts that "more dynamic" industries, "where business models change very fast, where competition is very hard... will move more quickly."

Right now, the cloud computing market is worth almost $2.4bn, says Gartner and predicts that by 2013 this will have grown to almost $8.1bn.

Get ready now and map your company's IT needs, says Mr Hollis. "If IT is your company's differentiator you may want to keep it in-house." But most IT is just another service that "can go the same way as other corporate functions like finance, logistics and manufacturing".

Storm clouds

Cloud computing is not without problems.

For starters, to be cheap cloud computing tasks need to be standardised. While traditional applications have many little-used features to cope with specialised needs, customising a cloud service costs extra.

For firms on a tight budget this may result in a few standard network solutions. However, it does not mean a standard look and feel. "I challenge you to spot that our customers' websites run on the same platform," says James Cronin at Venda. Plus most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers roll-out newly developed features to other customers as well.

Usability is another issue. Some people, firmly wedded to "their" software, whether it's Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook, are reluctant to switch to plainer online applications. Rentokil's Bryan Kinsella counters that his migration team received few complaints.

Connectivity is another worry. The City of Los Angeles wants to move 34,000 employees to Google Apps, but there are complaints about speed and reliability - problems that may be rooted more in the city's internal network than Google's service.

But what if you go offline? Well, most SaaS providers offer resilient offline solutions. Microsoft - a late-comer to the cloud computing party - likes to point out that it offers proven offline applications like Microsoft Office that integrate with its new suite of online applications.

In cloud we trust

Security concerns are a much bigger issue. Will your corporate and customers' data be safe? What about data protection? Can you meet all legal compliance requirements?

"There are enormous security [...] and auditing risks that have not been addressed yet," says Gartner's Mr Dreyfuss.

Google's Dave Girouard says cloud computing has a good track record

"Cloud computing," warns a top expert for business security, "is the concentration of corporate risk in one single place."

Not so, say the providers of cloud services. "We put together multiple points of replication... multiple lines of defence... multiple levels of sophistication... that a single company just could not afford," says Jean-Philippe Courtois, the president of Microsoft International.

His words are echoed by all his competitors. Dave Girouard, the man in charge of Google's enterprise solutions, says "trust" is the issue customers raise most often when they explore whether cloud computing fits their business needs.

"There are now enough proof-points, enough track record for it to go mainstream," he says. "Company data are much safer inside Google than in a company's data centre."

Pushing Cloud 2.0

If Mark Benioff is not the high priest of cloud computing, then he's certainly its televangelist.

Eleven years ago he founded salesforce.com. Today his "enterprise cloud computing company" is approaching annual revenues of $1.5bn.

Its key product, a cloud service for customer relationship management, is used by organisations ranging from small charities to computer maker Dell.

For years Mr Benioff has been repeating his "no software" mantra, arguing that the old IT and business models of companies like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle are broken.

Cloud computing, he says, is a total revolution of how we use and pay for software, and it is spreading fast.

His company now offers services like Force.com and Vmforce.com that provide developers platforms to build customised cloud services themselves.

Once belittled by rivals, he now revels in the fact that they all compete to prove their cloud computing credentials.

For Marc Benioff, though, one cloud is not enough.

These days he speaks about the transition to "Cloud 2.0". Just as he once queried why enterprise software was not more like Amazon, he now asks why it is not more like Facebook.

Enterprise computing is going mobile

Mr Benioff promises that new software like Salesforce's new Chatter will do just that.

"We are going through a major shift in computing," he says, where enterprise computing gets both more social (think collaboration) and mobile (think tablet computers, netbooks and smartphones).

Rentokil may be a case in point. Instant messaging software like "Google Chat has become a very powerful tool for us," says Mr Kinsella, while using Google's Android phones has made the enterprise software mobile. His new intranet, meanwhile, is getting a touch of YouTube: "We are using it carefully, but we now send out video messages to all employees, and they have the ability to comment."

Microsoft's direction is similar. It's new Office 2010 software, to be launched next week, makes steps to integrate both "social connections" and online services.

"People are working more and more from everywhere... home and workspace are merging," says Per-Olof Schroeder at Microsoft's Office software division.

Helpful downturn

Cloud firms are upbeat.

"The growth of cloud computing is phenomenal," says Fabio Torlini of hosting company Rackspace. "In the downturn all enterprises are asking 'what's safe to put in the cloud, and how can I save in the cloud'."

And there are other opportunities for growth. As connectivity improves, cloud computing can bring high-end IT services to developing countries.

Right now, says Google's Dave Girouard, cloud computing is just at the start of its evolution.

"All business computing will be more web-enabled," predicts Mr Dreyfuss at Gartner. "For some [companies] it will reach the point where it will be totally web centric."

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Microsoft, Nokia Release Free Enterprise Collaboration Smartphone App

Microsoft and Nokia are setting their sights on the mobile enterprise--and BlackBerry-maker RIM--with a new smartphone business-collaboration app, dubbed Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia.

CIO, By Al Sacco on Wed, May 05, 2010

Handheld-giant Nokia and Microsoft, the world's largest software company, on Tuesday announced the first fruit of their recent mobile-productivity pact: Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia handhelds and the Symbian platform.

Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia Diagram

Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia, which is initially available free of charge in English for Nokia's E52 and E72 devices via the Nokia Ovi mobile software store, is an enterprise collaboration tool that connects directly with Microsoft Exchange corporate systems. More specifically, the new app lets users view colleagues' status and availability and then click to contact them via various methods including IM, e-mail, text and voice. Colleagues' names and statuses are listed in users' contact applications, so they can update their own presence, initiate or join in on existing IM sessions, and place new calls from that central location.

The announcement is aimed directly at BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) and its enterprise users. RIM currently offers a variety of comparable collaboration tools for BlackBerry deployments in Microsoft Exchange environments, such as its BlackBerry client for Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS). And the new Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia brings much of the same functionality to Nokia smartphone users.

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"This application really provides a much more efficient way to work with others, as you can see if someone is busy or available and the best way to start a conversation with them," said Ukko Lappalainen, vice president at Nokia, in a press release. "It also meets all of the requirements for the enterprise: cost-effective to implement, secure, familiar and reliable."

The Nokia/Microsoft pact was first announced last August, and Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia is just the first product the companies plan to release for the enterprise market in the coming months and years.

Additional device support for handhelds including Nokia's new E5 device is expected in the near future. And Nokia plans to pre-install the client on select handhelds, as well.

Visit Microsoft's website for additional information.

Oregon Takes a Lesson from Google, Puts Apps in Schools

PC Magazine, by Chloe Albanesius, 04.28.2010

Schools in Oregon will soon have the option to embrace homework, lessons plans, and lectures in the cloud. The state is the first to adopt Google Apps for Education in all of its public schools, Google announced Wednesday.

Starting today, all school districts in the state will offer access to Google Apps – including Docs, Sites, Video, and Groups – to all teachers, staff, and students. The suite will also include e-mail filtering and protection from Postini, shared contacts via Google Contacts, Google Calendar, private online discussion groups via Google Groups, Google Talk, and iGoogle.

"School funding has been hit hard over the past couple of years, and Oregon is no exception," Jaime Casap, Google Apps education manager, wrote in a blog post. "This move is going to save the Department of Education $1.5 million per year — big bucks for a hurting budget."

Google and Oregon schools signed a five-year deal for program, though the agreement says that the customer has no obligation to use Google Apps and can stop using it at any time, for whatever reason.

Google said Apps will let students build Web sites or e-mail teachers about a project, access work from any location, or get help on a project in real-time. It will also help students prepare for a more tech-centric workplace, Casap said.

"It's critical that students learn how to use the kind of productivity technology they'll need throughout their lives, and Oregon is helping students across the state do just that," she wrote.

Participation will be on a voluntary basis, according to Susan Castillo, state schools superintendent. School districts can apply for a Google Apps for Education account online.

"Educators and students now have access to the same cutting-edge technology used in the business world with added federal student privacy and confidentiality protections," Castillo said in a statement. "In a time of dwindling resources, I am grateful for Google's partnership. Our students have a wonderful opportunity to prepare for the workplace by using workplace technology in the classroom."

Google worked with Oregon to develop a program that meets legal requirements regarding federal student records and safety precautions, Castillo said. Districts must obtain parental consent for all student participation. The default setting on Google Apps for Education, meanwhile, does not serve up ads, though Oregon schools could opt to turn on advertisements if they wished.

"This public-private partnership with Google is more than exciting," said Vickie Fleming, Redmond school superintendent. "As public education strains to keep up with digital content and applications, this partnership is critical to students, parents and classroom teachers."

Google is a member of Accelerate Oregon, a public-private partnership dedicated to providing Oregon schools with the tech-based tools. Members also include Intel and Cisco.

Google offers Apps for Education at the K-12 level, as well as for colleges and universities like Northwestern University, Abilene Christian University, the University of Notre Dame, and George Washington University.

Also involved are New York City Intermediate School 339, Maine Township High School District, and Prince George County Public Schools in Maryland.

Case studies for these and other schools are available on Google's site, Google said.

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Greenpeace lauds Cisco on climate, chides Google

Cnet, by Martin LaMonica

Despite Google's lobbying on clean-energy policy and investments in renewable energy, it was Cisco and Ericsson who received Greenpeace's top marks in its ranking of computing vendors' activity on climate change.

The environmental watchdog group released its annual Cool IT Leaderboard on Thursday, which judges large IT and consumer electronics companies on a range of criteria related to climate change, including efforts to lower their environmental footprints and commercial efforts in energy and efficiency.

This year, Greenpeace placed Cisco at the top of the list because of its move into building energy management and the smart grid, technologies that can boost renewable energy use and efficiency.

Ericsson and Fujitsu scored well for developing methods for measuring the environmental impact of IT and for setting credible carbon reduction estimates for its customers.

Google, meanwhile, was marked down for not reporting its internal greenhouse gas emissions, which most companies surveyed do. In response, a Google representative on Wednesday said that it doesn't disclose information on the size of its operations for competitive reasons.

Google's data centers run efficiency, consuming about half the power as typical data centers by optimizing the chip, power pack design, and building cooling. "We are...dedicated to minimizing our footprint; it makes business and environmental sense for us to do so," the representative said.

Overall, Greenpeace is pressuring IT and communications companies to get involved in energy policy, which is historically not been an activity of tech companies. As it did in last year's Cool IT Leaderborad, Greenpeace is also prodding IT companies to take advantage of the commercial possibilities in lowering greenhouse gas emissions, as does IBM's Smart Planet initiative. Greenpeace estimates that applying IT to transportation, buildings, and power generation can result in 15 percent emissions reduction over the next 10 years.

"The company bottom line coupled with the environmental bottom line, the need to curb a growing greenhouse gas emissions, should send the IT industry to the front lines in the battle for a clean energy economy," said Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harrell in a statement. "The sector needs to step up its policy advocacy now."

For Earth Day last week, Greenpeace organized a panel on IT and climate change which was hosted by Cisco and had representatives from Cisco, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

Related Article:

Climate Policies Earn Cisco Top Spot in Greenpeace IT Rankings

One Laptop Per Child reaches Gaza Strip

BBC News

The laptops are designed for use by children in the developing world

The UN in the Gaza Strip has begun distributing 200,000 laptop computers to children in its schools.

The rugged laptops are made by the non-profit organisation One Laptop Per Child, which aims to give a computer to every child in the developing world.

One Laptop Per Child say computers are a good way of improving the education of children living in poverty.

Humanitarian conditions have deteriorated in the Gaza Strip in the last three years, the UN says.

Israel and Egypt maintain a blockade on Gaza, which was tightened in 2007 after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, and all but humanitarian supplies are prevented from entering.

Connected

One Laptop Per Child has built the energy efficient XO laptop especially for children in developing countries.

"The XO laptop has a special place in children's education in regions that are disrupted by ongoing violence," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the organisation.

"With the XO the children can continue to stay connected and gain the skills and knowledge required to participate fully and thrive in the 21st century - even when getting to school is impossible."

The UN agency which looks after Palestinian refugees, UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provides housing, health services, education and emergency food supplies to more than four million refugees in five countries.

The computers are to be loaded with textbooks and teaching aids that cover the primary school curriculum, a statement from UNWRA said.

Have a global change project? Start by understanding remote offices

ZDNet, By Patrick Gray, TechRepublic on April 28, 2010

Successfully implementing global change projects, whether they involve a massive worldwide software package or "soft" changes like a new process or policy, involve a unique set of challenges.

Not only are you faced with the usual gauntlets of scope, timeline and budget, but unique additions like language, culture and the "headquarters dynamic" rear their heads, derailing the most well-intentioned efforts if they are ignored. The headquarters dynamic is one of the more interesting of these challenges and represents the relationship between corporate headquarters, which generally initiates a change project, and the field offices, which are usually on the receiving end of these efforts.

Sir, yes, sir!

Traditionally, most companies implementing large-scale global projects assume a command-and-control model, with headquarters marshaling resources, setting schedules and essentially dictating orders to field offices.

You don't need an advanced degree in international relations to imagine that this usually breeds discord and resentment; field offices see the initiative as yet another grand scheme cooked up in the "ivory towers" at headquarters, with little regard to local operating, legal and resource constraints.

At best, regional offices begrudgingly comply with headquarters' fiat and promptly look for the best way to modify, work around, or altogether disregard the results of the change effort.

The opposite model is to issue what amounts to "suggestions" to local operating entities and hope that they follow through. Like the hundreds of e-mails we each receive offering advice and mild threats if some new policy or procedure is not obeyed, most of these end up promptly filed in the nearest rubbish bin.

What is needed is a model that takes into account the unique assets of field offices and leverages the operational and administrative powers of the home office as an asset rather than an overbearing administrative headache.

Understanding the remote office

Using the headquarters dynamic as an asset rather than a liability requires some understanding of the conditions in the field office.

Most field offices have less staff than headquarters and are more tightly focused on core operational activities like sales, marketing, manufacturing and logistics. Since these offices are usually established as a beachhead in an attractive market, they are generally lean and mean and focused tightly on getting the maximum results with the minimum amount of resources. As such, creative ways of doing business are often developed, and models that could benefit the company as a whole may be lying about undiscovered.

Many remote offices take pride in the success they have achieved, without the additional perceived overhead that exists at headquarters. Key to leveraging the headquarters dynamic is to acknowledge the good work frequently done in the field and seek out any best practices that can be incorporated into a global model.

In addition, rather than trying to deploy a "one-size-fits-all" solution to every global problem, consider two or three "standard" processes that accommodate a wide variety of statutory requirements, volumes of business, and varying staff levels. Usually what works at headquarters or a major regional hub is vast overkill for a local office that works in dozens of transactions rather than thousands.

The obvious way to ensure regional voices are heard is to incorporate regional personnel on the planning and deployment teams. Not only will their thoughts and field experience prove invaluable, but seeing multinational faces rather than yet another team of "drones from HQ" on the next change project will instantly instill confidence and credibility that local concerns are being aired and accounted for.

Making a friend of HQ

Perhaps the best role of headquarters in a global project is to serve as a global clearinghouse of knowledge, people and dispute resolution. Most failed global projects are rooted in a poor understanding of the headquarters dynamic, usually with the home office underestimating the complexities of field operations or simply turning a blind eye to their requirements and attempting to implement an overly complex solution in the name of "global standardization".

When headquarters is seen as having an open ear and working to transparently resolve disputes that are bound to arise in the course of a global project, the field will eventually see headquarters as a trustworthy asset to the change effort, rather than a monolith bent on implementing ill-conceived projects that get in the way of local operational activities.

For more on the role headquarters should play in a successful global change project and other tips on global projects, please download the free white paper: "Conquering the World--Delivering Globally".

Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.

100-Year-Old Trick Squeezes Fiber-Optic Speeds from Copper Wires

The technology could enable 100-megabit home DSL without an infrastructure upgrade

POPSCI, by Jeremy HsuPosted 04.23.2010 at 1:28 pm6

Copper Wires Is this the future of fiber optic speeds?

Netizens without access to cable broadband speeds might someday get fiber optic speeds over their old copper lines. Alcatel-Lucent combined several old networking tricks to boost DSL speeds over copper telephone lines to 100 megabits per second (Mbps) at distances spanning almost two-thirds of a mile, Technology Review reports.

That could allow telecommunications companies to effectively compete with the 50-Mbps speeds provided by cable companies, but without the need to install new fiber optic lines themselves. It might also give an extra kick to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plan for providing broadband speeds to 100 million more Americans by 2015.

Such speed boosts rely upon a networking trick invented in 1886 by John J. Carty., an electrical engineer who eventually became a vice president at AT&T. He examined the traditional method of sending digital signals over two wires twisted together (one positive, one negative), and discovered that it was possible to send a third signal on top of four wires arrayed as two separate pairs.

The negative part of the phantom connection goes down one pair, and the positive part travels down the other pair. Analog processors sort out the two real signals and one phantom signal at the wires' final destination.

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Any added bandwidth from phantom channels typically gets lost in the increased noise caused by electrical "cross-talk" induction among the bundled wires. But another method known as DSL vectoring was used to cancel out the noise by sending the exact opposite of the cross-talk signal.

A third trick known as bonding also treats multiple copper lines as a single cable, and boosts bandwidth by a multiple almost equal to the number of cables. Both vectoring and bonding have been used in certain urban areas of Europe and Asia, where the economics make sense.

Alcatel-Lucent and other companies could make 100 Mbps speeds over copper a reality within five to ten years, a researcher told Technology Review. Until that happens, netizens can check out the FCC's interactive tools for understanding the current allocation of the broadband spectrum.

[via Technology Review]

White House Web site releases custom Drupal code

CNet News, by Steven Musil

Six months after announcing it would employ the open-source software Drupal to manage and publish its content, the White House Web site has contributed some custom code to the project.

Dave Cole, a senior adviser to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President and the man responsible for managing WhiteHouse.gov, said Wednesday that the administration is contributing four modules it created for the president's revamped Web site.

"This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify," Cole wrote in a blog announcing the contribution. "We're excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications."

The four new modules focus on improving scalability, communication, and accessibility, Cole wrote.

A module designed to improve scalability is called "Context HTTP Headers" and allows Web site builders to add new metadata to their content and gives instructions to servers on how to manage specific pages, such as cache scheduling. Another module focused on scalability called "Akamai" allows WhiteHouse.gov to integrate with content delivery network Akamai.

A communication module called "GovDelivery" allows for more dynamic emails tailored to users' preferences.

An accessibility module called "Node Embed"--designed to make it easier to manage rich photographs and video content--aims to help the site be in compliance with Section 508, the government's accessibility standard.

The White House's announcement last October that it was transitioning to Drupal was a high-profile endorsement for the open-source software, which allows anyone to see, modify, and redistribute the source code underlying the software that's actually installed on a computer.

Google, YouTube Received 10,000 Government Requests for User Data

PCWorld, Jon Brodkin, Network World, Apr 21, 2010 5:10 am

Google and the Google-owned YouTube received more than 10,000 requests for user data from government agencies in the six months ending Dec. 31, 2009, according to newly released data.

"Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products," Google says on a new site that sheds more light onto government demands for user information and requests to take offensive material off the Web.

Google Buzz's Privacy Tweaks: Good Start, Not Enough

The vast majority of requests for private user data "are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations." Likewise, many requests to remove videos and other content are valid, for example requests to nix child pornography, Google notes.

"However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available," Google said in its blog Tuesday. "We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship."

Between July 1 and Dec. 31, Google received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating from Brazil. The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other countries.

Brazil also sent the most requests to remove content, at 291. Germany was second with 188 such requests, followed by India with 142 and the United States with 123. Google fully or partially complied with 80% of content removal requests in the United States.

The numbers are imperfect, because a single request could consist of multiple users' data or removal of multiple URLs. There could also be multiple requests for the same data or to remove the same content.

So far, Google is not saying how often it complies with government requests for user data, but said it plans to in the future.

"We would like to be able to share more information, including how many times we disclosed data in response to these requests, but it's not an easy matter," Google says. "The requests we receive for user data come from a variety of government agencies with different legal authorities and different forms of requests. Given all this complexity, we haven't figured out yet how to categorize and quantify these requests in a way that adds meaningful transparency, but we plan to in the future."

In related news on Tuesday, Google was sent an open letter by government regulators from several countries demanding that the company respect national laws on user privacy.

Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

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