This year at Davos, Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, told an audience of journalists that his company is not a country, does not set laws, and does not have a police force. Yet in its showdown with China, Google is acting as the ambassador for the internet. Well, somebody has to. Next to no one has been [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged Alan Davidson, Censorship, China, Cyber Attacks, Digital Rights, Dissidents, Eric Schmidt, Espionage, Freedom of Expression, Human Rights, Internet, Jeff Jarvis, John Perry Barlow
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Playing with apps on an Android phone is fun. Building your own apps, even more so. But what about using the phone to operate a moving, talking bot? Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman have done exactly that. The bot they recently finished building — Truckbot — is still relatively simple. It’s got an HTC G1 [...]
Friday, February 12, 2010
Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture. Universal, ultra [...]
Thursday, February 11, 2010
More censorship, this time from Iran. WTH is it with authoritarians anyway… can’t handle the idea of people having open access to information and thinking for themselves, or what? Only a government or organization insecure of the validity of its own ideology uses oppressive censorship to hide information from its own citizens. And no, I’m [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity. Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), the attacks are distinctive in the kinds of data the attackers target, and they are rarely detected by antivirus and intrusion programs. What’s more, the intrusions grab a foothold into a company’s network, sometimes for years, even after a company has discovered them and taken corrective measures. “APT is a [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged Adobe Reader, Advanced Persistent Threats, AOL, APT, China, Email, Hackers, Hacking, Internet Explorer, Law, Malware, Mandiant, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Passwords, Phishing, Privacy, Secrecy, Servers, SQL Injections, SSL Certificates, Taiwan, Technology, Windows, Yahoo
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When I first began blogging in the mid- ’90′s we didn’t call it blogging and there were literally no freely hosted blog sites or even the software to host your own. Lots of people communicated with each other on IRC or through mailing lists. Mailing lists had to be hosted on a ListServ, which you paid for and [...]
Filed in Journalism, Log
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Also tagged AdSense, Amazon, Apture, Blogging, Delicious, Facebook, FeedBurner, Google Analytics, StumbleUpon, Supr, Technology, Tools, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube
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Saturday, January 30, 2010
Google has announced a bug-bounty program that will pay researchers $500 for each vulnerability they report in the Chrome browser and its underlying open-source code. In a post to the Chromium project’s blog , Chris Evans, who works on the Chrome security team, said the base bounty would be $500, but that “particularly severe or [...]
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Data from the depths could get a lot less murky soon, thanks to a new partnership announced by Google and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA will provide data from its various ocean-science programs and Google will build tools to visualize that information, the two organizations announced Tuesday. The deal extends a collaboration that began [...]
Thursday, January 21, 2010
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that December’s mass cyber attack against 33 American companies was most likely the result of a coordinated espionage campaign endorsed by the Chinese government. Google’s revelation that they’d been hit was deemed a “watershed” moment by security industry analysts, but the other 32 companies who were hit have not followed [...]
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Surely, the U.S. Congress that is now putting its foot down on private companies cooperating with such abusive spying elsewhere would react very angrily in the face of revelations that it was being done here. Actually, in the face of such revelations less than two years ago, they ended up on a very bipartisan basis [...]
Are you or a loved one trying to locate someone in quake-struck Haiti? Google has an app for that. Using technologies written after Hurricane Katrina, Google has created a Web application that allows users to search an add to a vast missing persons database. The code may also be embedded into Web sites. via Google [...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Microsoft has not commented on Google’s decision and don’t expect the company to do so. What’s to say? We value shareholder interests above freedom and democracy? Tyranny keeps our stock high? Some of our best customers are Communist Party censors? Certainly businesses have to balance competing interests, but at some point, compromise without question becomes [...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
In March 2009 Villeneuve uncovered “GhostNet,” (.pdf) a cyber-spying operation originating in China that was said to have targeted the Dalai Lama and other human-rights activists. Though Villeneuve has no direct knowledge of the attacks discovered by Google, he says it’s likely that they match the methods he has been monitoring. Villeneuve says the hackers [...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
To be clear, Google is not accusing the Chinese government of anything, and a spokesman would only say that they’ve determined the latest string of attacks “originated from within China.” But cyber security expert Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, said that attacks like the one on Google can be judged to [...]
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be [...]
Thursday, December 24, 2009
There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Business, Collaboration, Freedom, Innovation, Internet, Open, Open Source, Science, Technology, Transparency, Vint Cerf
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Monday, December 14, 2009
We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a [...]
Friday, December 11, 2009
Today, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth’s forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world’s rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of [...]
Monday, November 30, 2009
The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. “Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages,” says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search [...]
Filed in Technology
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Also tagged Dark Web, Darknet, Deep Web, Filesharing, Freenet, P2P, RBN, Sealand, Surface Web, The Pirate Bay, TOR
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
Tweet: Rupert has balls. Well, he used to. That’s the essence of Murdoch: balls. It’s the essence of the culture of News Corp., which I learned from working there (at TV Guide): Australian macho seat-of-the-pants instant decision making. That is the secret to Murdoch’s success. It is also the secret to his failure: Sometimes his [...]
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a “don’t be evil” twist. Unlike Google’s biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google’s store will not be device-specific — allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers [...]
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Raj Rajaratnam (pictured right), is a one of America’s wealthiest men. He is a portfolio manager for Galleon Group, a hedge fund with up to $7 billion in assets. He stands accused of conspiring to use insider information while trading securities in publicly traded companies. Google Inc., the highly successful search engine company is one [...]
Sites where pay walls have been erected have suffered cuts in user traffic of, in many cases, as much as 95 percent as audiences merely move on to other, free options. “What Murdoch seems to be talking about only has a logic if you don’t introduce the behavior of the audience into the equation,” says [...]
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