Google Gives Apple, Microsoft 90 Days To Fix Security Flaws

Aside from being the master of diversification, Google apparently either cares a lot about global security across the board, or is merely looking for ways to get back at its competitors.
Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corporation , the consortium had been a pain in Google’s neck for a while, blocking key smartphone patents for the company. While those issues have quieted down, Google found another avenue to go by. Having formed the Project Zero in July, the newly formed team seems to target “zero day” security flaws in software that hackers can take advantage of before developers learn of them.

A Bloomberg report now reveals that Google Inc. has given Apple and Microsoft 90 days to fix the latest flaws that Google has discovered in their code. While some may argue that it is a scare tactic, it has to be noted that Google’s Project Zero has so far singled out 39 loopholes in Apple products, 37 in Adobe Systems Incorporated software, and 20 issues in Microsoft products. Similarly, it released the information to the public at large about the flaws before the companies could find a fix in time. Apple is a 16-time victim, Microsoft suffered on three occasions, and Adobe was subjected to this issue once.

Jake Kouns, chief information officer at Risk Based Security Systems Inc., revealed the above information to Bloomberg(report containing this stuff) in an interview. Mr. Kouns believes that if the companies cannot work together, it will have a negative impact on the industry as a whole. Tom Gorup, manager at Rock Securities Inc., told Bloomberg that he believes otherwise, voicing his view that the strict policy is good for the industry. Because these companies have considerably greater resources than your average computer hacker, better results can be achieved when these companies take a pot shot at rivals’ security measures.

John Dickson of Denim Group Ltd., a software security company, summed it up best when he stated: “I’m not sure who made Google the official referee of the marketplace for vulnerability notification.” He assumes that the “nobility” of this cause is compromised when the company testing for vulnerabilities actually reveals their findings to the public at large instead of to the companies that harbor such security loopholes.

references:

http://www.bidnessetc.com/34697-google-inc-gives-apple-microsoft-90-days-to-fix-security-flaws-bloomberg/

UK Intelligence blamed over US Tech Firms.

Social media which controlled by large tech firms in US are blamed for supporting terrorist activities by the UK Intelligence.detailed news is follows.

Citing a number of popular social media sites, Robert Hannigan( the director of UK intelligence and security organisation GCHQ) says that ISIS is the first terrorist group to grow up on the Internet, and they're "exploiting the power of the web".

"The extremists of ISIS use messaging and social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, and a language their peers understand," "The extremists of ISIS use messaging and social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, and a language their peers understand," he says. "The videos they post of themselves attacking towns, firing weapons or detonating explosives have a self-conscious online gaming quality."

"Their use of the World Cup and Ebola hashtags to insert the ISIS message into a wider news feed, and their ability to send 40,000 tweets a day during the advance on Mosul without triggering spam controls, illustrates their ease with new media."

Hannigan insists that GCHQ, along with MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, can't tackle terror without support from the dominant US technology companies.

"They aspire to be neutral conduits of data and to sit outside or above politics," he said. "But increasingly their services not only host the material of violent extremism or child exploitation, but are the routes for the facilitation of crime and terrorism."

"However much they may dislike it, they have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us."

Hannigan also noted a shift in attitudes to online media from terrorist organisations.

"Where al-Qaeda and its affiliates saw the Internet as a place to disseminate material anonymously or meet in “dark spaces”, ISIS has embraced the web as a noisy channel in which to promote itself, intimidate people, and radicalise new recruits," he wrote.

His comments were met with dismay in some quarters. Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said: “It’s disappointing to see GCHQ’s new director refer to the Internet – the greatest tool for innovation, access to education and communication humankind has ever known – as a command-and-control network for terrorists.”

Labour Party MP Tom Watson was cautiously optimistic, saying that Hannigan's comments could help draw a line on privacy. However he insisted: “I hope they do not confuse the use of public propaganda through social media by extremists with the use of the covert communications. It is illogical to say that because ISIS use Twitter, all our metadata should be collected without warrant It is illogical to say that because ISIS use Twitter, all our metadata should be collected without warrant.”

Efforts are already underway in the UK to tackle online extremism.

Security minister James Brokenshire met recently with representatives from technology companies - including Google, Microsoft and Facebook - in Luxembourg, the BBC reports.

The government's Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), meanwhile, has removed more than 49,000 pieces of content that "encourages or glorifies acts of terrorism".

Hannigan formally took over the role of director of GCHQ at the end of October.

references:

http://mashable.com/2014/11/04/gchq-head-terrorist-warning/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss

Baidu challenges Google over deep learning technique

Deep learning has been a hot topic in recent times, particularly after Google brought it to the forefront of the tech industry with Google Brain that started in 2011.In May this year, the company snapped up the well-known artificial intelligence researcher, Andrew Ng, who started the Google Brain project.With the arrival of Ng at Baidu’s Silicon Valley operations, the company’s deep learning efforts have gathered pace.

Kai Yu, the head of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, told,only Baidu and Google are “capable of developing large-scale deep learning systems for all kinds of applications” due to how advanced the technology is and how much investment the company has sunk into it.

However, with deep learning, Baidu is becoming so much more than just a search engine

With the explosive growth of mobile, particularly in China where mobile has become the number one way to go online, surpassing PC access for the very first time, deep learning comes in particularly useful for images.

And image recognition is an area which Baidu is proud of its progress. Yu revealed that internal evaluations show Baidu recognizes images more accurately than Google for 68 percent of cases it tested out, 14 percent of the case it does worse than Google, while in 18 percent they perform about the same.

Without big data though, there wouldn’t be deep learning. And big data is something that search engines have plenty of, given that so many people conduct search queries every day.

How does big data work to come up with useful results? Zhang, the head of Baidu’s Beijing big data lab said that other than data, building a model is the key.

Google has been in the limelight recently for its efforts at creating self-driving cars and a new generation of robots, which are possible because of machine learning of big data

Baidu has also followed in Google’s footsteps to work on partial self-drive cars, which will have a steering wheel but can technically be operated without a driver.

We can only wait and see what Baidu has up its sleeves, but with its focus on big data and deep learning, it looks like the world may have to start taking Baidu seriously as it hones its techniques and can easily apply them elsewhere. After all, Baidu has plenty of potential ,it largely caters only to a Chinese audience now, and just recently launched a localized search engine in Brazil.

sources:

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/08/04/how-chinas-google-baidu-uses-deep-learning-to-make-your-phone-smarter/

Google's mysterious barges has been shipped out

One of Google's mysterious party/showroom barges has reportedly been sold and will be shipping out of its location in Portland. The barge was transferred to a new terminal Wednesday, and the terminal's owner states that it's preparing to ship out to a new owner shortly.

When the four Google barges first appear on both the East and West coasts, reports indicated that Google intended them to be a show floor for projects in work, such as Google Glass and the company's self-driving car technology. 

Little work had been done on the two barges parked in Portland and San Francisco Bay, and the two others in San Francisco's Treasure Island and New London, CT didn't even have superstructures to support future development. Portland collected property taxes on the barge parked there to the tune of $400,000. In February, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission told Google it needed to move its barge out

The reports say that the Portland barge was sold to an “international barging company" and is being prepared to leave the area, according to the owner of the Turners Island cargo terminal in South Portland where the Google barge was towed on Wednesday.Further the barge is still carrying the nondescript four-story-high structure that was originally built there. Google has remained tight-lipped about the barges since their discovery, but now they stand to slip away with much of the surrounding mystery unsolved.

sources:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/one-of-googles-mystery-barges-has-been-sold-and-is-shipping-out/

Apple and Google move forward likely in same way.

Both Apple and Google companies talked about design and consistency in their Developer conferences last month. Both companies talked about improving back-end services. And both companies talked about new initiatives to make stuff on your phone appear seamlessly on your tablet or laptop. Android L release comes out this fall, this means your phone and your Chromebook are going to be able to share even more stuff than they already do.If you have your phone with you, it can unlock your Chromebook (and if you have your smartwatch with you, it can unlock your phone). If you get a call or a text or your battery is running low, you'll be told about it on your Chromebook.

On the other side Apple aims to implement same like facilities.For eample AirDrop will be able to move files between iOS devices and Macs. "Handoff" can send e-mails, webpages, and even files from iCloud-enabled applications on iOS to their counterparts in OS X (or vice-versa). You can receive texts alongside iMessages in the Messages app, and you can make and receive phone calls from your Mac even if your phone is in another room.

This isn't about which company is copying from which.This kind of integration is a logical next step for both Apple and Google after years of moving various operating systems and services closer and closer together.All of these features sound like great, logical ways to extend both companies' platforms, since you can often assume that someone using an Apple phone will be using an Apple computer. They're also going to make it harder than ever to extricate yourself from a given company's ecosystem once you've become embedded in it.

sources:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/apple-and-google-move-computing-forward-in-identical-yet-incompatible-ways/

Google Now will suits best for Android Wear

While there is plenty of Android in Google’s smart watch operating system and while developers will be able to develop apps specifically for it, Wear in its current form is fundamentally about bringing Google Now notifications to your wrist.

Android Wear, of course, also shows you all of your notifications from your phone.You could push all of your phone notifications to your watch, but that would be overkill. Thankfully, Google lets you choose which applications can push to Wear. But its most useful feature and maybe its killer feature overall is definitely easy access to Google Now.

Everybody is pretty much familiar with Google Now, but there is something fundamentally different between using it on your phone and on your wrist. Sure, the mission is the same on both platforms.Google wants to give you the right information at the right time.Just like Google Now brings together a number of Google’s services into one product, Wear has a similar feel to it. It’s a mix of what it has learned from Android and its ecosystem, its advances in voice recognition and its newly found design chops.In the next few months, Google will get some competition from Microsoft, Apple and a few startups in this space. For better or worse, none of them know as much about you as Google does, so it’ll be hard for them to replicate the Google Now experience.

sources:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/05/google-now-is-the-killer-app-for-android-wear/?ncid=rss

Android Smartwatches will not work with 3/4 of Android phones!

Always we hear peculiar compatible devices by search giant Google.But contemporary stats reveals something customers are not willing to hear.By Google’s own count, 13.6% of Android phones are running the latest public build of the OS, Android 4.4.Android Wear watches, meanwhile, require a phone running Android 4.3 or newer to work.Between Android 4.3 and 4.4, that’s a grand total of 23.9% of active Android phones that are currently Wear-friendly. In other words, less than 1/4 of the Android phones currently in use can be paired with an Android Wear watch.there’s a pretty good chance the watches won’t actually work with your phone.It also makes it pretty damned hard to give an Android Wear watch as a gift, unless you know exactly which phone the recipient has.

sources:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/less-than-14-of-android-phones-work-with-googles-new-smartwatches/

Google and LG merges on 3D tablet

Google Inc.'s advanced research lab focused on cutting-edge mobile technology, may go on sale for consumers next year.It is working with LG Electronics to make a version of a tablet that captures three-dimensional images, which was developed as part of a research effort called Project Tango. The aim is to have the gadget ready for sale to the general public in 2015.
Google is also integrating the device with Unity, a platform that helps developers create video games.Google's research group is currently making a few thousand versions of the tablet for outside developers to try out, hoping to encourage them to develop games and other applications for the device and accompanying technology.
During a demonstration on Thursday at Google’s developer conference,on the project showed a colleague walking around a building holding the tablet. The device tracked the person’s journey and built a 3-D image of the parts of the building where he walked, including a stair case rising up several floors.
Google engineers say the device should be able to gather enough information to help create 3-D games and “fantasy lands” in real, physical places.
sources:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/06/26/lg-to-make-a-consumer-version-of-googles-3-d-tablet/

Google introduces Smart TVs, Watches and Cars

On Wednesday Google announced Android TV, a version of its Android operating system designed to power smart TVs. Android TV is Google's third connected-TV service It compromises with the features, like pulling in live TV feeds and streaming videos from someone's smartphone, with new features like gaming support.Google reveal these announcements as part of its annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco.Android TV will be built into TVs to be released this year from Sony and Sharp as well as set-top boxes from Asus.Google is weaving in features that go beyond simply staring at something on a big TV. People can conduct searches on an Android TV-powered screen to find movies or TV shows, watch them and receive information like cast members' filmographies or lists of Oscar-nominated films in a given year.People can also play video games on their TVs and play against someone using an Android tablet.

TV isn't the only hardware that Google wants to connected through Android. Through a new version of Android called Android Wear designed for wearables like smart watches, Android-powered smart watches can be connected to a person's Android phone and can serve as a kind of remote control when the phone is in someone's pocket.

Cars are also getting the smartphone treatment through Android Auto, a program to connect Android phones to cars.Through voice-guided navigation, people can pull up driving directions, control the music or send text messages.

sources:

http://adage.com/article/digital/google-debuts-smart-tvs-watches-cars/293888/

Google targets new Android, cloud features for businesses

Google decides to pay their attention to the enterprise with announcements about Google Docs and its cloud service at the Google I/O which was held in June 25-26.
Google noted that, users get native editing for Office documents from their Android-based mobile devices or from Google Drive, the company's file storage and synchronization service.That means a user can open a Word document, for example, on an Android tablet and edit it without having to stop and convert it to a Google Doc.All files now uploaded to Google Drive will also be encrypted, not only between the user's device and Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also while the information is at rest on Google servers.
Google didn't leave the cloud out of its focus on the enterprise.The company also introduced the Google Cloud Dataflow, a managed data processing service.This cloud news is more important to the enterprise, and hence to Google's enterprise push, than its Google Docs changes.
sources:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249383/Google_targets_business_users_with_cloud_Docs_advances

Google's Web Starter Kit simplifies cross-device site development

Google launched Web Starter Kit on last Thursday, a download that consists of all the templates and tooling developers need to create sites that function on any device and any display(which the term you most familiar as "responsive").

Today’s Internet users don’t have just one device. They prefer as physical keyboard for their PCs but they want as touch screens on mobile. These days, no two screen sizes are alike. Users expect the same website to perform differently depending on the device by which it is accessed.

In its introduction to the kit, Google divides the workflow in to three functions: developers can pick a template, build the site and test it out.

The kit is designed to not just create attractive websites across Internet connected devices uses Google Chrome, but all browsers. That’s because it’s based on the Web standards provided by the W3 Coalition to make the Web accessible

Google's Web Starter Kit may tie into some new design concepts coming from Google in the coming weeks and months, including the expansion of its Polymer Web design principles it announced at Google I/O 2013 and the rumored Google Quantum Paper project for Android design.

sources:

http://readwrite.com/2014/06/19/google-launches-starter-kit-for-a-more-consistent-web#awesm=~oHT6OW4nNaS8eG

Google Fit-Google's newest health service

Google is planning to launch a new health service called Google Fit to collect and aggregate data from popular fitness trackers and health-related apps. It will launch the service at the Google I/O conference for developers, being held on June 25 and 26.

Google Fit will aggregate data through open APIs, instruction sets that allow apps to share information, and will also announce partnerships with wearable device makers at its I/O conference.This will be more complicated  because of the given reasons: the concern over privacy and how best to process information as sensitive as health data.Google has been in this field before with Google Health, which also acted as a 

health portal but was shut down in 2012.

references:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/06/12/exclusive-google-to-launch-health-service-google-fit-at-developers-conference/