Police said as many as 200 protesters were arrested in the melee. More than a dozen others were injured and taken to local hospitals in one of the biggest Googleplex protests following Google's decision last month to alter the interface of its clock app in the latest Android operating system.
On Thursday, Google's headquarters here was a tinderbox. Hundreds of protesters were seen carrying placards reading "Google Hates Homoglyphs;" "Shame on Google;" "Google Out of My Homoglyphs" and "Legalize Love: Google."
Photo: Jason/TYDN |
The crowd got even more agitated when a Google engineer addressed protesters and shouted through a megaphone that the search giant wasn't discriminating against their lifestyle.
Instead, engineer Mark Risher said Google just released a new spam filtering algorithm for its popular Gmail e-mail program, which he shouted "rejects duplicitous unicode homoglyphs."
Risher narrowly escaped with his life amid jeers from protesters claiming he was speaking in some underhanded code.
In an exclusive interview with TheYellowDailyNews, Risher said Google's homoglyphs discrimination actually benefits the gay, lesbian and transgender community.
"In fact, its good for everyone. We're just filtering out exploits in which nefarious people send links in email that have duplicitous unicode homoglyphs. You know, characters that look like letters in the alphabet but are not," Risher said. "We're trying to help people from getting malware on their machines. There's such a thing as a character that looks like the letter o but is in fact not the letter o. That's what we're filtering here."
Protesters began packing up after a helicopter in the sky dropped leaflets with a more detailed explanation of the discrimination.
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