Paranoia watch.

Paranoia is worth watching out for. Google just announced yet another free tool (full disclosure: I'm a Google fan and a modest stockholder). It's one of those Web accelerators for making your surfing experience faster. When I saw this the other day, I downloaded it immediately, even though Google said up front it was for people with broadband connections, and wouldn't help dialup users. I thought, how bad could it be? And the idea of tapping into Google's formidable server collection to get pages down faster appealed to me. In other words, I thought, if it'll work great for broadband, think how great it'll be for cheapskates like me. Well, it doesn't work any better for dialup than the other tools out there, which actually slow my Web use down. I turned it off immediately. But I didn't uninstall it; who knows, maybe they'll improve it for dialup. Why would they offer it to people who already have fast connections anyway? Well, quick as you can Google, the security-privacy guys started yelling about sinister motivations, intrusions, and so forth. Of course, everything Google does--anybody does--on the Net is an intrusion into, what? The massive screaming river of communications it carries? You mean we're supposed to have total privacy while using this amazing, instantaneous, multilevel, multimedia communications channel? Caveat surfer. Uh oh. I have just reached the standard blog attention span limit. More later.