Google reports an alarming rise in Web censorship by international governments in the last six months, according to its latest reports. The surprising thing is that most of those requests are coming from democracies.

Take one guess at the most important demographic in the tech industry. Now guess again, because your first guess was probably wrong.

Most of us have SoundHound or Shazam on our smartphones to help us play the “What’s that song?” game when out and about. But most users never realize that their smartphone apps are fueled by big data.

Got employees that work the 24/7 shift? Not the best strategy for success.

If you have stock in Nokia, you probably don’t want to read Andy Blumenthal’s latest.

Big bonus for the gadget-crazed among us: It’s rumored that Google’s first Android tablet will be called the Asus Nexus 7. Kind of rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it?

Speaking of tablets, Microsoft will not be announcing a partnership with Barnes & Noble this afternoon. Sorry, Charlie.

A proposed new Web censorship status code 451 would pay homage to recently deceased science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury.

• Ultrabooks are blurring the lines between laptops and tablet devices, but the real question is whether your employees will use them to hit the network on the sly.
• Did you hear the one about how the United Nations is going to take over the Internet? Hands off our tablet devices, guys.
• We’ve all heard about Google’s and Facebook’s iterative changes — usually from users who are complaining about those same changes. Here’s the inside scoop on how they jockey that user feedback internally.
• Gadget lovers rejoice: Google is launching its own Android tablet devices this month, while Tim Cook announced a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with the Apple Retina display at this week’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.
• The question of booth babes at IT conferences is discussed as a symptom of the male gaze.
• If you’re worrying about whether the United States can win a cyberwar, stop worrying — it can’t, and here’s why.
• Were people seriously concerned about a brave new world without the Apple Retina display?

Actually, if you look at the historical record (below; data available from July 1, 2008), at least according to StatCounter, you will see that Chrome first surpassed IE on March 18 of this year, 32.71% to 32.5%. Since then, the two have been playing leapfrog for first place. (Mozilla Firefox maintains a distant-though-solid third place.) Chrome and IE each hit their high (34.55%) and low (29.4%) points, respectively, on the same day, May 13.

The browser wars used to be a big deal, when the PC was king. But no longer, with mobile applications becoming a common method for using the Internet, and with PC sales struggling to maintain any semblance of growth. Still, I was writing and editing stories about Netscape Communicator when the browser wars really meant something — when IE’s penetration was like 90%, and when IE essentially put Netscape out of business and sparked the landmark antitrust action against Microsoft. (I also have a theory that the ruling against Microsoft was one of the triggers of the dot-com meltdown and ensuing recession, but that’s a story for another day.)

Microsoft, despite its inevitable decline in browser market share, has to feel some vindication by this point. Company officials said all along that its actions with IE were about embracing and extending Windows, and that competition and other market forces would win out. They have. Market forces have won out. And the better browser won.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

The majority of U.S. mobile users now own smartphones, according to Nielsen Wire, and of them, the most popular mobile operating system is the Android.

Happy birthday to SMS technology, which turned 20 this week. Seems like only yesterday we were writing out “you are” instead of “ur”.

John Herrman is terrified of Samsung’s latest Android news for several reasons, one of which is that it’s a little overinvested in its mobile users.

If you find typing on the slick iPad 2 keyboard annoying, you’re not alone. Check out this technique for speeding up text editing on the iPad’s native keyboard (via Subtraction).

Infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay has officially scolded the hacker group Anonymous for cyberattacks on its behalf. That’s saying something when a very sketchy torrent site takes the high road.

The latest Android news that you can’t afford to miss: IRCbot malware has joined the party and is targeting the most popular mobile device. How’s your mobile device security policy looking these days?

In the midmarket space, however, we’re a little less likely to have free housecleaning and giant, human Pong games during lunchtime. The practical lessons of the innovators, however, are definitely echoed and adopted in smaller IT shops. Paul Harder, the winner of this year’s SearchCIO-Midmarket.com IT Leadership Cultural Innovation Award, has a line on the secret of building a positive workplace culture, even within the very tight budget of a nonprofit organization. His practical lesson in building workplace culture is all a matter of empowering his IT talent. “I look at myself as trying to enable them to get their job done, and then empower them to do it. Otherwise, I pretty well leave hands-off. I make sure that from a 10,000-foot view that everything’s getting done, but I’m not even going to come close to micromanaging them,” he said.

Speaking of personal freedom in workplace culture, Mauricio Vicente, our IT Leader of the Year (and a finalist for the Cultural Innovation Award) said, “I give them creative freedom. I work with a very talented group of individuals who surprise me every day with their own feedback and how they execute the ideas that are brought to us by the different layers of the organization.”

One thing that Harder and Vicente have in common with the culture meisters at Google and Facebook: the concept of personal autonomy.  Former Facebook designer Joe Hewitt summed it up nicely after he decided to leave the social network company last year. He also singles out autonomy as a facet of workplace culture. “Management gave me the freedom to work on my own ideas, and just like with real startups, some of my projects never made it out of the lab, while others shipped and were huge successes. The brilliance of Facebook management is encouraging everyone to take initiative, take risks, and wear as many hats as you can. I wish more tech companies operated like this.”

Of course, being an awesome company doesn’t prevent brain drain from happening, but it seems to be the key to making sure that your open recs have hundreds — or thousands– of qualified applicants, all eager for a chance to join your team. And what CIO doesn’t dream of that?

• As predicted when the new iPad release date was announced, throngs of Apple faithful waited in line to buy the new iPad last Friday, including the Woz. However, at least one store had more Apple employees than waiting customers.

• Are you on Google+ yet? Mike Elgan feels that after years of ineffectual social media marketing, Google+ is the best thing that ever happened to his career.

• The Sistine Chapel is now digitized and allows you to fly around examining Michelangelo’s crowning achievement. Does the Vatican have a CIO?

• In the mobile apps arena, PayPal has announced a Square competitor, PayPal Here. It’s essentially just like Square, only with the pain and anger issues from being a PayPal product.

• According to a Harvard Business Review survey, women are considered better leaders than men. However, looking at the reasons why, this is hardly a coup for women in IT.

• Think your Google Fu has what it takes? Maybe, but we bet you don’t know each of these 10 Google search tricks.

• our next Skype internet telephone call might have an unwanted visitor. Microsoft and Skype have built a backdoor into the Skype internet telephone application that allows for “Lawful Interception” — aka eavesdropping.

• If you celebrated the new iPad release with a fresh tablet device, here’s how to transfer everything from an old iPad device to the new iPad painlessly.

Now, Google has agreed to support the Do-Not-Track button and will add it to Chrome within nine months. You may remember that the Federal Trade Commission called for the adoption of a Do-Not-Track button on Web browsers two years ago. In theory, it would allow consumers more autonomy in sharing their own personal privacy with third parties. Nevertheless, when Firefox and Internet Explorer added Do-Not-Track buttons, users were still tracked by advertisers and companies that hadn’t agreed to honor the arrangement. What is it they say about good intentions?

Meanwhile, California is attempting to shut down data privacy leaks via mobile applications. The state has reached an agreement with Google, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com, Apple, Microsoft and Research In Motion — one that it hopes will protect smartphone users from further privacy breaches like the Path and Google debacles uncovered earlier this month.

When it comes to the Internet and government intervention, we have to be mindful of the careful dance around precedent. We applaud when the U.S. government tries to protect us from data poachers with a privacy bill of rights, but just a month ago we were up in arms about the Stop Online Piracy Act. So, which is it going to be? Do we want the government regulating the Internet or don’t we? As you well know, I tend to have a cold, black heart that’s filled to the brim with pessimism about Internet privacy; the Do-Not-Track button and the White House’s privacy bill of rights feel to me like security theatre.

What do you think? Will the Do-Not-Track button make a difference in upholding consumer data privacy? Is it the role of government to regulate the Internet? The comments are waiting to hear from you.

• Remember Google’s vow to do no evil? If you use Safari, you have been the victim of privacy violations. Google has bypassed Safari’s default privacy setting with regards to its third-party cookies. Whoops?

• Speaking of macolytes: Just remember, kids, friends don’t let friends leak Apple insider secrets.

• Are you ready for the Nook 8GB tablet? Time to dig out that BYOD policy and update it again.

• Every CIO is familiar with Moore’s Law, but a new transistor made from a single atom might beat that principle very soon.

• Google is still king of the Web, according to last month’s Web traffic ranking, which also reveals that U.S. Internet users hit a whopping 36 hours online last month. We’re more surprised that there are people still using MySpace.

• If your CMO has been making noise about starting a Facebook storefront, you might want to point out the deserted Facebook storefronts that already litter the social media network’s Main Street.

• Are we just going to have to accept online privacy violations as a way of life?

Your team is your first line of defense with your company’s data privacy and security, yet your employees are sharing company secrets — intentionally or not — via IM clients. Check out this primer to ensure that sensitive information stays out of chat logs.

We all know that meetings are a critical part of managing a team, but they can be enormous time-wasters too. Here’s a great drill-down of a best practice for the weekly status meeting.

What does the term distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, really mean? We predict that “Anonymous” won’t appreciate Forbes calling its work “digital graffiti.”

Blogger Ian Thomas argues that we might be jumping into big data before we’ve gotten our storage strategies in line.

Hackers have broken into the Google Wallet app on Android devices. Google is addressing the personal data privacy and security breach, but when you start hacking into the world of finance, everyone gets a little testy.

If you’re worried about personal data privacy and security, be careful with your free mobile apps. It turns out that the free Path iPhone app was grabbing its users’ contact data and uploading their data to its own servers. What? You mean a free service is taking advantage of its users somehow? Color us shocked.

First, maybe I’m pessimistic, but I’m kind of shocked that Google hasn’t been combining its information about users all along. I mean, it’s 2012, right? Facebook basically knows enough about me to successfully predict what I’m going to wear tomorrow, yet we all grudgingly accept Zuckerberg’s evil empire and go on with our status updates. But Google makes one tweak with how its own products manage a user identity and everyone is up in arms? Face it, the war was over a long time ago when it comes to online identity. You want to be mad at a company, it’s not Google — not this time, anyway.

A single Google privacy policy across Google’s products is nothing but a good thing. It protects its own users. I understand that some people prefer to have their services broken up into manageable pieces, but for the majority of users, it’s a good thing when Gmail talks to Google+. And there were already Google-wide preferences before, so it’s not like this change is completely off-book for Google or its users.

Of course, there’s the new Google Personal Search, which I’ll admit is a little disarming, but then again, I am somewhat surprised that there are still people who believe that the stuff you put on the Internet is somehow hidden from the world. This naïveté might have been appropriate in 1996, but at this point, how can people not understand how the Internet works?

If the idea of people seeing your Facebook timeline in their Google searches is unnerving, turn it off. Google has provided a handy way to opt out of Google Personal Search. Pick “Do not use personal search results” in the Google Search Settings and you’re golden. Then stop worrying that the Google privacy policy means that Google is the evil empire. I’ve seen the face of evil, and man, it sure is not Google.