I hope someone else analyzes that USB stick to see what it's doing or trying to do when plugged in. It sounds too fantastic to be true, but I guess it's somewhat plausible.
Of course, all this applies to all cloudhosted services including Skydrive, Exchange Online, etc. but out of all companies, Google is the one that has most at stake if people become fearful of their data leaking on the way to the cloud and decide to keep their data inhouse instead of going to the cloud.
To me, the big surprise was that Google wasn't encrypting the links between it's own datacenters before these revelations.
As usual, Stallman is proven right again. If your data is under someone else's control, it's not yours.
Read a comment the other day wondering about what if two(or more) programs did this. Would you end up with a chain of proxies between you and the mail server?
Adware goes to where there are a lot of non tech savvy users. If desktop Linux gets more traction, you'll see such search hijacking on there too. Note that this story is about search hijacking on OS X, not Windows.
>Linux certainly has killed commercial unixes, but MS Server products never got popular for web and other areas Linux is traditionally strong in.
IIS runs a lot of websites, ~23% of websites tracked by Netcraft and does that while their competition gives away their products for free. I wouldn't say that it's not popular.