Tag: Google

Google creates nightmare for business sites

Posted on December 19, 2014 by - News

 nightmareThe search engine Google is about to name and shame any site which does not use the HTTPS security protocol.

For years, it has been enough for site users to build their websites using HTTP with only those who run financial transactions needing the more secure protocol.

Now Google is proposing to warn people their data is at risk every time they visit websites that do not use the “HTTPS” system.

If implemented, the developers wrote, the change would mean that a warning would pop-up when people visited a site that used only HTTP to notify them that such a connection “provides no data security.”

The team said it was odd that browsers currently did nothing to warn people when their data was unprotected.

“The only situation in which web browsers are guaranteed not to warn users is precisely when there is no chance of security,” they wrote.

HTTPS uses well-established cryptographic systems to scramble data as it travels from a user’s computer to a website.

However, website operators might have a few problems when it comes to adopting the HTTPS system, but could see traffic plummet if they do not.

Currently only about 33 per cent of websites use HTTPS, according to statistics gathered by the Trustworthy Internet Movement which monitors the way sites use more secure browsing technologies.

Many large websites and services, including Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook and GMail, already use HTTPS by default. In addition, since September Google has prioritised HTTPS sites in its search rankings.

 

Google faces antitrust hearing

Posted on December 18, 2014 by - News

330ogleA judge will hear a plea from Google today that she on dismiss an antitrust lawsuit in San Jose based on a class action against the internet giant.

Google will ask US District Judge Beth Freeman to dismiss a class action alleging that its Android operating system forces companies that use the OS in their devices to not use competing software from other companies like Microsoft.

Google will argue that people are free to use any apps on Android that they want to even though the plaintiffs insist it’s difficult or fiddly to do so.

If the class action is allowed to proceed, it’s likely that it will take some time and we’ll be treated to internal Google emails while executives from the company might be required to argue their position under oath.

Google is under increased scrutiny for its business activities.  A four year long investigation in Europe was given extra impetus last month when the European Parliament passed a resolution to break up the company because of its dominance. That caused the US administration to express worries about the case being politicised.

The European Commission has not yet given any indication of when its investigations will be completed, but has the power to levy large fines on the firm.

Robots make up half of web traffic

Posted on December 18, 2014 by - News

114More than half of traffic on the World Wide Web is mostly created by robots reporting on the activities of humans.

According to security outfit Incapsula in 2014, bots roaming the internet represented 56 percent of total web traffic. This is a decrease from 2013, when bots represented 61.5 percent of total internet traffic.

The majority of these bots are ‘good’ bots which include ‘crawlers’ that index web pages for search engines, social networking platforms, RSS feeds and translation services.

Incapsula is worried about an increasing number of ‘bad’ bots, which pose a threat to websites. The worst are ‘impersonator’ bots which are malevolent intruders engineered to circumvent common security measures. They have increased by 15 percent in the last two years.

Incapsul’s Igal Zeifman said that more than 90 percent of all cyber attacks that are executed by bots and  the worst case scenario really depends on the attacker’s intentions and the target.

“Bots can spam, scam, spy, execute denial of service attacks and hack – they can do whatever a human hacker ‘teaches’ them to do, only on a much (much) bigger scale – and this arguably delays the internet’s growth, both as a medium and as a place of business.”

The overall decrease in bot traffic is the result of a steady drop in good bot activity. RSS services are dying and Google’s RSS service, Google Reader, shutdown in July 2013.

Zeifman said click-fraud bots that undermine the advertisers’ profitability are also growing in number.

“I think that today most advertisers have accepted the fact that some of their online budget will be lost on bots. However, I also believe that, as these losses continue to grow, the need for bot filtering solutions will become more and more clear,” he said.

 

 

Google reveals top 2014 searches

Posted on December 17, 2014 by - News

330ogleSearch giant Google processes trillions of searches a year and now it’s released a list of the top searches in a number of different categories for 2014.

The top searches across all categories were Robin Williams, World Cup, Ebola, Malaysia Airlines, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Flappy Bird, Conchita Wurst, ISIS, Frozen and Sochi Olympics.

And top five people searched for in 2014 were Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian, Julie Gayet, Tracy Morgan and Renee Zwellweger.

On the techie side, the most searched for terms were the iPhone 6, the Samsung Galaxy S5, the Nexus 6, the Moto G, the Samsung Note 4, the LG G3, the Xbox One, the Apple watch, the Nokia X, and the iPad Air.

Apple scored number five in the top YouTube videos with the iPhone 6 Plus Bend test.

The top five deaths were Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Peaches Geldof, Shirley Temple and Maya Angelous.

Dutch prepare to take on Google

Posted on December 16, 2014 by - News

boyne2_1Search engine outfit Google could face fines of up to $18.6 million if it does not stop violating the privacy of internet users in the Netherlands, the Dutch data protection agency warned.

The DPA said that Google is breaching the country’s data protection act by using people’s private information such as browsing history and location data to target them with customised ads.

Google has until the end of February to change how it handles the data it collects from individual web users or will have to start writing cheques.

The company’s handling of user data under its new privacy guidelines, introduced in 2012, has also been under investigation in five other European countries – France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain.

Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Dutch DPA appears to have had a gutsful of Google prevaricating.

“This has been ongoing since 2012 and we hope our patience will no longer be tested,” said.

Google needs to adequately inform users in advance and ask for permission before it uses data in this way, the DPA said.

It ordered the company to stop the violations or face incremental fines up to a maximum of 15 million euros. It said Google must start informing users of its actions and seeking their consent.

Google should be careful, the Dutch managed to humiliate the British Empire on more than one occasion and a tech Empire should be a doddle.

 

Spanish press backtracks on Google News

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

web-abc-madrid_sevillaAfter Google stopped printing news snippets on its News page from Spanish newspapers, the websites of those esteemed organs died.

Now it seems that the Spanish newspapers are asking the government to step in to force Google back.

Google shut its Google News service in Spain after the country bought in a new copyright law which would have forced Google to pay for the use of news snippets.

The Spanish Newspaper Publishers’ Association (AEDE) issued a statement last night saying that Google News was “not just the closure of another service given its dominant market position”, recognising that Google’s decision: “will undoubtedly have a negative impact on citizens and Spanish businesses.

“Given the dominant position of Google (which in Spain controls almost all of the searches in the market and is an authentic gateway to the Internet), AEDE requires the intervention of Spanish and community authorities, and competition authorities, to effectively protect the rights of citizens and companies”.

In other words, Google has the newspaper industry by the short and curlies and if the Spanish government does not do something quick, there will not be an industry to moan about the search engine’s control.

The only workable option is to take the route followed in Germany: to give Google a special deal that allows it to carry on as before, but without having to pay — which would gut the new copyright law completely.

It would also mean that Google would not only be allowed to do what it likes, but continue to have total control of the world’s media. It seems the Spanish Newspapers have found out the hard way that Google already uses its algorithm to decide what is news and which magazines have a right to exist

 

Europe continues its anti-Google campaign

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

euroflagzThe European Commissioner in charge of antitrust matters is to meet up with the companies that complained about Google’s behaviour in Europe.

According to a report in Reuters, the new commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, wants to gather more information on the case.

To that end she is to meet companies with a beef – those include Microsoft, Hotmaps, Expedia, TripAdvisor and a gaggle of publishers.  They all believe that Google is abusing its dominance in the European sphere.

Late last month the European Parliament voted to break up Google – that vote however lacks teeth.

Vestager has teeth and has the ability to impose swingeing fines on Google if it’s shown it has antitrust tendencies.

Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that a German company is suing Google and Youtube for allegedly infrong a patent for video compression it own.

Driverless cars hit UK roads soon

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

googlecarYesterday’s Autumn Statement by chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne included information about driverless car tests in the UK.

According to Innovate UK – an arm of the government, £10 million will be plunged into formal trials that will start in January 2015.

The trials will last between 18 and 36 months and will take place in Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Coventry, and Bristol.

Innovate UK said its aim is to make the UK the global hub for research and development of driverless vehicles and other technologies.

Nick Jones, a technologist at Innovate UK, said: “Cars that drive themselves would represent the most significant transformation in road travel since the introduction of the internal combustion engine. It’s vital that trials are carried out safely, that the public have confidence in the technology and we learn everything we can… so that legal, regulation and protection issues don’t get in the way in the future.”

£10 million doesn’t seem quite enough to make the UK the hub for driverless car technology, given that Google and a number of large car manufacturers are plunging heavy investment into the concept.

Apple App store safety is a myth

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

tumblr_mc8zb8BqH31rttlrno1_400If you believe the Tame Apple Press you would think that the Microsoft and Google App stores were a terrible place full of Apps poisoned with malware, while the Apple App store is so rigorously checked, that all is completely safe.

But a study by InfoWorld has poured cold water on that particular myth claiming that the store has just as much malware inside.

Simon Phipps, who is an Open Saucy blogger, wrote that developers who are competing with Apple find that getting their apps into the store nearly impossible and those writing Apps for Apple find that the rules are constantly changing.

“But if you’re a scammer looking to make a fast buck, it appears that Apple process can be defeated and the scale of the problem became apparent in the the Apache OpenOffice community,” Phipps said.

For several months, the user support mailing list has been bothered with apparently random questions from people seeking support for an iPad app. Apache OpenOffice doesn’t even have an iOS version, so people wondered how there could be questions about supporting it.

It turned out that there was a $2.99 app in Apple’s iTunes Store and the developer who posted this app has used all sorts of tricks to populate the entry. He dubbed it Quickoffice Pro, which was the name of a genuine app bought by Google in 2012 and finally discontinued in 2014. Buyers would likely have an instinctive trust for the name, especially because the app uses the icon from the real Quickoffice product.

It simply displays a gray screen with the word Tap. When you tap the screen, the app exits. The developer has pointed angry customers at an innocent open source project whose ethos is to treat all user queries seriously and that doesn’t have the resources to mount a response for lack of volunteers.

It was posted under Lee Elman’s personal Apple developer account without permission or his  knowledge.

But how did this happen if Apple claims to meticulously screen all submissions to the store? InfoWorld found other examples. Again real accounts are being used for fake products.
Apple is not saying anything about the allegations.

 

Inbox to replace Gmail

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

330ogleGoogle plans to replace Gmail with Inbox, according to three engineers behind the project.

Lead designer Jason Cornwell said that in the short term Gmail is here to say, but in the longer term the new mail product will replace it.

“That’s why we’re launching it as a separate product. We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the end as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide,” Cornwell said.

It had been believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users. But Cornwell said that the two mail technologies were not aimed at different audiences. Both Gmail and Inbox are designed to scale from low volume to high volume users.

It appears then that Google’s decision will be based on what users want.

Cornwell added that Google could not add Inbox features into Gmail, mostly because the way people use the product has changed.

“With Inbox, we took a step back and did a lot of research into how most people are using email today. What we found was that email works as a todo list for many people, that phone usage is starting to eclipse desktop usage, and that many people have negative feelings towards email because it feels like so much work. We built Inbox as a separate product because we did not feel like we could solve those problems by just adding more features on to Gmail. We needed to start from scratch to build a tool that really helps you stay on top of your life,” he said.

Cross-browser support is also being tested internally across all of Google. The holdup is apparently because “we want to make sure that everything works perfectly before enabling it for all of our users.”

Google is also interested in attempting to integrate with other email systems such as Outlook.com and Yahoo. The Gmail app for Android recently gained this functionality.

The option to change the mobile app’s notification sound will become available “within the next few months.” Being able to download all attachments might also be coming.

The Undo Send feature and the ability to customize Snooze times are being worked on right now. Google is also developing a unified inbox option to handle multiple email addresses, adding signatures, building out Calendar integration further, and adding Drive integration.

Gangham Style nearly broke YouTube

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

0921-gangnam-style_full_600Gangnam Style, the South Korean pop star’s enduring video phenomenon from 2012, nearly broke YouTube by getting more than 2,147,483,647 views and creating a sort of Y2K fault.

The site’s original view counter was not designed to take that many hits and its developers could not believe that a video would be watched by numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (2,147,483,647 views).

Google, which owns YouTube, in a blog post this week. ” ‘Gangnam Style’ has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade!”

When programmers built YouTube nine years ago, they probably never imagined that a video on the young platform — back when several million views was considered a smash hit — might be watched more than 2.1 billion times.

As of late Wednesday morning, “Gangnam Style” had breached the barrier, showing more than 2,152,512,000 views.

Fortunately YouTube did not collapse with smoke pouring out of a server.  YouTube’s software engineers saw the problem coming and recently updated to a 64-bit view counter across the site, Google spokesman Matt McLernon said. The view counter can now go up to 9 quintillion views (9,223,372,036,854,775,808, to be exact), which should hold PSY for a while.

“Nothing actually broke,” McLernon said. “There was never anything that actually went wrong. It’s just people having fun with the language.”

PSY’s trademark horse-riding dance video, is almost 2½ years old and was uploaded in July 2012, “Gangnam Style” was the first clip to hit a billion views and is the most-watched video of all time. It was even the 5th most-played video on YouTube this past summer.

“People still play this video an absurd number of times,” he said.

To commemorate the occasion, YouTube has added a new wrinkle: If you hover your cursor over the “Gangnam Style” view counter, the numbers spin backwards and forwards.

UK to tax Amazon, Google

Posted on December 3, 2014 by - News

gosborneUK chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne unveiled his autumn statement today and said he would tax multinationals who avoid paying tax.

He told the House of Commons that the government will raise £5 billion over the next five years by taxing profits from banks and companies like Google and Amazon who make money in the UK and then shift it abroad.

He said that some large multinationals including companies in technology “use elaborate structures to avoid paying tax”.

He will introduce a 25 percent tax on such profits. The diverted profits tax might be difficult to collect however.

Earlier this year, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that if governments griped about companies like his not paying enough tax, they should introduce legislation to change the picture.

However, the situation is complicated by the fact that firms like Google and Starbucks will simply find other ways to avoid paying tax and such changes really require international cooperation.

One financial analyst told TechEye that even if 20 countries agreed to such changes, the companies might simply find country 21.

Tablets face squeeze from notebooks, phones

Posted on November 28, 2014 by - News

ipad3Shipments of notebooks are only set to grow 0.6 percent in 2015, amounting to 174.6 million units, while sales of tablets will fall by 3.5 percent to 185.6 million units.

That’s according to Taiwanese market intelligence firm Trendforce, which said that this year notebook vendors struggled to gain market share this year by essentially engaging in a price war.

But Caroline Chen, a notebook analyst at the company, said that next year we’ll see an array of different products with tablets and low priced notebooks facing stiff competition from smartphones and so called phablets.

She thinks notebook vendors need to rethink their strategies.

Tablets didn’t do well this year and overall 366 million mobile PCs – a category that she defines as including notebook computers and tablets – shipped. That’s largely similar to sales last year.

Subsidies from major players like Microsoft, Google and Intel have skewed the market. Chromebooks, she thinks, will account for eight million units in 2015.

She said that because subsidies from Intel and Microsoft lower manufacturers’ costs, the subsidies benefit end users.  “It would be better if Microsoft and Intel can find more substantial ways to develop the market,” she said.

trendforce

EU wants to widen “right to be forgotten”

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

thanks-for-the-memory-movie-poster-1938-1020198195European privacy regulators want Internet search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing (MSFT.O) to scrub results globally, not just in Europe, when people invoke their “right to be forgotten”.

The European Union’s privacy watchdogs agreed on a set of guidelines on Wednesday to help them implement a ruling from Europe’s Supreme Court that gives people the right to ask search engines to remove personal information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”.

Google has been scrubbing results only from the European versions of its website such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France, but they still appear on Google.com.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the head of France’s privacy watchdog and the Article 29 Working Party of EU national data protection authorities, told a news conference that from the legal and technical analysis we are doing, they should include the ‘.com’.

Google said the company had not yet seen the guidelines but would “study them carefully” when they are published.

Google has previously said that search results should be removed only from its European versions since Google automatically redirects people to the local versions of its search engine.

However some feel that Google’s current approach waters down the effectiveness of the court ruling, given how easy it is to switch between different national versions.

The search engine has problems in Europe. Google is facing multiple investigations into its privacy policy and is bogged down in a four year EU antitrust inquiry.

The EU ruling has pitted privacy advocates against free speech campaigners, who say allowing people to ask search engines to remove information would lead to a whitewashing of the past.

EU to vote on Google breakup

Posted on November 24, 2014 by - News

euroflagzA motion to break up search giant Google will be debated in the European parliament this week.

That follows scrutiny of Google’s practices within Europe by antitrust regulators.

The vote, proposed by MEPs from Germany and Spain proposes that Google’s search business should be separated from the rest of its business activity.

But even if the vote goes against Google, the parliament doesn’t have the power to take it to pieces.  Nevertheless such a vote in favour would be a bad PR blow to Google, which has led a spin initiative in the last few months to convince Europeans that it isn’t evil.

What a positive vote might do is to put pressure on the EU’s competition commissioner to scrutinise Google more.

Google has argued that it is not anticompetitive and that it already has plenty of competition in Europe.  That hasn’t stopped publishers like News Corp and German publishing outfit Axel Springer getting irated about Google’s marketing clout.