Google's Gone Insane

I've always supported Google, but I came across two things today that are making me change my mind ...

They are now allowing anyone to sign up for gmail (according to the googleblog, at any rate - I can't see a sign-up link on gmail.com). But there's a catch: "From there, you can get an invitation code sent to your mobile phone, and with this code, you can create a Gmail account." WTF?! Not everyone has a mobile phone, and not everyone lives in the US! Further on, they say: "Right now, sign-ups only work with U.S. mobile phone numbers, but we're eager to support others." Yeah. Like they're going to bear the cost of international SMSs? I really hate this US-centric approach that so many companies are taking these days (second only the broadband-centric approach). In fact, that's probably why I can't see the sign-up link - they're probably checking IPs and only allowing US-based ones. Although I did find this link (ironically, via google).

Then there's an older issue, which I only came across today. Since April, Google prefetches the first link in your search results, without telling you (if you're using Firefox, that is). I can understand how it may be useful to some people in some circumstances, but I think it's a security risk and, even worse, it's detrimental to dial-up users. My bandwidth is scarce enough, I don't need it downloading something that I don't know about and probably don't even want! I don't know how I missed this in April (oh yeah; I was probably too preoccupied with resigning!), but there's a lot of info out there if you want to know more. This is probably a good place to start. Oops, almost forgot to tell you how to disable prefetch: in firefox, type 'about:config' into the location bar, and once it's loaded, set 'network.prefetch' to false. Simple, but not exactly intuitive.