Google Search Fade-In: Privacy Issues

Ever wonder what the real reason could be for Google's Search fade-in effect? There have been arguments back and forth on aesthetics and animations etc.

My theory is that it allows Google to track your searches and build a better profile of it's users. How you ask?

Well - Google's "Web History" feature can be switched off making sure that your search habits are not tracked. However, if you are logged in to any of Google's services (like GMail, Picasa etc.) and then use Google search, your queries CAN be tracked..

Typically when I hit google.com and if I noticed that I'm logged in, I click "sign out" immediately and THEN search. But because of the fade-in effect, most people would type their search request in and later realize they were actually logged in. It's a pretty clever (and sneaky) way to make people search and not realize they are indeed logged in and therefore identifiable.

Shutdown/Startup scripts for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

OS: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise (64-bit)
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Most of my work being in Identity Management, I usually try to load as many components as I can onto a single virtual machine instance. For example: Having Oracle Identity Manager alone doesn't help me much, unless I can test provisioning to Active Directory, Exchange, Oracle Database etc.

However, the downside is that each of these services typically use a LOT of memory and so I usually install them and shut them down till required. Most services (like an Oracle Database) are easy to bring up when necessary. However, I didn't find an easy way to shut down or start up Exchange services and so decided to write my own - especially since there are about 23 services that Exchange runs! I also didn't want to have a script shutting down each of the services individually.

From what I was able to analyze, the service hierarchy is as shown below.

• Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology Service
• Exchange Address Book Service
• Exchange Anti-Spam Update
• Exchange EdgeSync Service
• Exchange File Distribution Service
• IMAP4
• Mail Submission
• Mailbox Assistants
• Mailbox Replication
• POP3
• Protected Service Host
• Replication Service
• RPC Client Access Service
• Search Indexer
• Service Host
• Throttling
• Transport
• Transport Log Search
• Forms-Based Authentication Service
• Exchange Server Extension for Windows Server Backup
• Exchange Monitoring Service
• Exchange Information Store
• Exchange System Attendant

As you can see, just shutting down the AD Topology Service also shuts down 17 associated services with it. This leaves 5 other services to be shut down separately and allows me to write a simpler, smaller script file.

Type the following into notepad and save it as a .bat file and execute.

net stop MSExchangeADTopology /y
net stop MSExchangeFBA
net stop wsbexchange
net stop MSExchangeMonitoring
net stop MSExchangeIS
net stop MSExchangeSA

Memory usage with Exchange running: 1.09GB
Memory usage after Exchange was shut down: 552 MB

That saves me a cool half gig of RAM! :-)

Funny