Tag: Google

Google hires Oxford boffins to provide AI

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

oxford-robesGoogle is finding itself a little short on intelligence and has been seen snuffling around near the Oxford headquarters of TechEye.

When cornered, near one of the wheelie bins at the back of public house the Kite, a Google staffer explained that the search engine was expanding its artificial intelligence initiative. Apparently, they are hiring more than half a dozen leading academics and experts in the field and announcing a partnership with Oxford University to “accelerate” its efforts.

Apparently, Google will make a “substantial contribution” to establish a research partnership with Oxford’s computer science and engineering departments, and Oxford will return the favour by holding one of its famous dinners.

Google did not provide any financial details about the partnership, saying only in a post on its blog that it will include a program of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops “to share knowledge and expertise.”

Google is building up its artificial intelligence capabilities as it strives to maintain its dominance in the Internet search market and to develop new products such as robotics and self-driving cars. In January Google acquired artificial intelligence company Deep Mind for $400 million according to media reports.

The Oxford boffins will be joining Google’s Deep Mind team, including three artificial intelligence experts whose work has focused on improving computer visual recognition systems. Among that team is Oxford Professor Andrew Zisserman, a three-time winner of the Marr Prize for computer vision.

The four founders of Dark Blue Labs will also be joining Google where they will be will be leading efforts to help machines “better understand what users are saying to them.”

Google said that three of the professors will hold joint appointments at Oxford, continuing to work part time at the university.

 

Amazon invests in German datacentres

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

amazonsMany people might think that Amazon is where you buy your books, your Hue lights and your CDs but behind the scenes it is  becoming a major player in the datacentre business.

And now, according to the Financial Times, Amazon will build several datacentres in Frankfurt in a bid to allay customers’ fears that their data is housed in places where security and privacy are not as high a priority as in Germany.

The FT reports that the EU has much stricter data protection laws than other territories.  And, of the EU countries, Germany has the best privacy control.

A senior VP of Amazon Web Services told the FT that many of its German customers would prefer to have their data held locally. Although a figure hasn’t been placed on the German infrastructure investment, it’s believed that such a project will require a multimillion dollar investment.

US providers like Google, Rackspace and others compete with Amazon but are based in the USA.  Amazon is believed to generate revenues from its cloud business amounting to over $5 billion during 2014.

Chromebooks start to shine brightly

Posted on October 22, 2014 by - News

google-ICNotebooks using the conventional Wintel model seem to be past history, but Chromebooks are selling like there’s no tomorrow.

That’s the conclusion of research by ABI Research, which said that shipments of Chromebooks soared by 67 percent in a quarter.

Acer is the top dog in the sector, followed by Samsung and HP – those three accounted for 74 percent of shipment share during the first half of this year.  That isn’t going to change in the second half of this year, said ABI.

So-called vertical markets like schools are a driving force, and Chromebooks also sell well in emerging markets. But ABI said that North America will account for 78 percent of the Chromebook market and other regions such as Asia Pacific and Western Europe are set to grow shipment market share over the next five years.

Stephanie Van Vactor, an analyst at ABI, said that while Chromebooks might be a temporary fad like the netbook, but the price and design mean that it’s attractive to the world+dog.

“People are hungry for a product that is cost effective but also provide the versatility and functionality of a laptop,” she said.

Driverless car hits 149MPH

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

Audi's Hackenberg with the RS7 driverless carGerman car firm Audi said it has demonstrated a car without a driver clocking nearly 150MPH at the Hockhenheim racing circuit.

A number of automotive manufacturers are experimenting with the concept of cars that don’t need drivers.  And Google is at the forefront of such attempts.

It may be quite a while before we see such vehicles on the roads, however, with a number of obstacles on the way including the question of liability in case of accidents.

The RS7 Audi used a heap of sensors including GPS to navigate around the race track, with the data generated being analysed and processed by software. The car took two minutes to complete one lap of the circuit.

Software is notoriously bug ridden and some governments would be a little nervous about licensing potential death traps to scoot around increasingly congested cities.

Audi board member Dr Ulrich Hackenberg said the test allowed Audi to test several concepts which could be applied to cars with drivers.

BBC to remember web pages forgotten

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

beebGoogle removal of BBC web pages under the so-called “right to be forgotten” is being challenged by the broadcasting giant.

The BBC feels that some of its own pages shuld not have been taken down.  David Jordan, who heads up the BBC’s editorial policy said it would publish a regularly updated list of pages that Google has removed.

The European Court of Justice told Google that people should have the right to have content they objected to removed.  Google, said Jordan, doesn’t let people or organisations that run pages know links have been taken down.

Jordan said that the BBC wouldn’t publish any identifying information or republish pages.  He said there isn’t an effective appeal process and said one page about members of the Real IRA was removed from the BBC website even after two people were convicted.

Jordan made the remarks at a meeting organised by Google. The search engine is currently engaged in a PR campaign around Europe in a bid to help people understand Google really isn’t evil.

Workers reject Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe

Posted on October 15, 2014 by - News

courtroom_1_lgEmployees suing Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe over running a hiring cartel have asked an appeals court not to approve a $324.5 million settlement in the case.

Plaintiff workers accused Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe in a 2011 lawsuit of conspiring to avoid poaching each other’s employees. The companies agreed to a $324.5 million settlement earlier this year.

US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California rejected the proposed class action settlement, saying the amount was too low. The companies appealed last month, saying she committed “clear legal errors”.

The workers said that although they believed the $324.5 million deal originally warranted approval, the judge had the proper authority to reject it and they would “defer to Koh’s sound judgment about how best to oversee this litigation”.

Tech employees alleged that the conspiracy limited their job mobility and, as a result, kept a lid on salaries. The case was interesting because it appeared to be another conspiracy organised by Steve Jobs.  Jobs also conspired with book publishers to keep the price of eBooks artificially high.

Plaintiffs based their allegations of conspiracy largely on emails circulated among Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs and former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt.

Koh repeatedly referred to a related deal last year involving Disney and Intuit. Apple and Google workers got proportionally less in the latest agreement compared with the one involving Disney, Koh said.

To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal “would need to total at least $380 million,” Koh said.

Google plays Amazon red herring

Posted on October 14, 2014 by - Moving People, News

red herringAs Google continues to be investigated by the European Union, chairman Eric Schmidt has decided to deflect criticism by saying that Amazon is its biggest search rival.

In a speech in Berlin, Schmidt – who has repeatedly denied that Google is a monopolistic player – he also took time to diss rivals Bing and Yahoo, saying they don’t matter at all.

According to the BBC, Schmidt said that people didn’t see Amazon as a search engine but most people go there when they want to buy something, rather than Google.

How Schmidt thinks this kind of argument will have any weight with the European Union is hard to fathom.

He said: “Amazon is answering users’ questions and searches, just as we are.”

Google isn’t the be and end of it all, added Schmidt. In a note of paranoia he suggested that somewhere will be new technology that will topple it from its premier position.

Councils snoop on employees, residents

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

fingerprintHard evidence shows that UK councils behave far worse than Google and employ cameras to check whether their own employees and residents follow the made up rules council officials operate.

It has emerged CCTV cameras follow every movement of the binmen as they pick up wheelie bins, and binmen are called to task if they get a tiny iota wrong.

A letter from a man called Robert Brown – waste and recycling operations manager at Oxford City Council, a functionary for the body  – confirms that a corporation operating binmen has cameras watching all the time to see what both their employees and residents are up to.

We have asked for full YouTube footage of the probably daily snooping, by back door cameras watching both employees and residents, in the hope there might be transparency.

Brown said to a resident of back water Mill Street, in Oxford: “We have taken the time to check out our inboard cameras and can confirm that your bin was not presented correctly when our operatives came to service your street.”

The resident told TechEye: “My bin was where it had been for the last four and a half year years. It is a narrow street and I would not care to put a bin on the pavement because people are trying to take their children to school and walk on the narrow street.”

Oxford City Council’s Brown produced one sample of video and four photographs to demonstrate the local resident was in the wrong, but posed the question to TechEye about surveillance of both staff and the people that pay Oxford City Council’s functionary bills.

A local resident told TechEye – on conditions of anonymity – that the binmen had been happy to deliver the blue bin to its inevitable consignment in a Grunwald’s vehicle but that he was puzzled that what she thought was a mistake on the behalf of the binmen, turned out to be an act of mass surveillance.

At press time, Oxford City Council was unable to reply because they only operate between the hours of nine to five, Monday to Friday. We’ll try tomorrow to get a definitive answer from Robert Brown – that is to say his representatives on earth, the press officers at Oxford City Council.

As you can see, from the pictures, below  there is a lack of cohesive advice to both binmen and residents.  We at TechEye are also concerned at the lack of transparency and intrusion from Oxford City Council and its representatives.  More on Tuesday.

morebins

bins

UK high on Google purge lists

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

OgleThe European Court of Justice told Google that it had to remove information under its so-called “right to be forgotten” law and now it has emerged that one in 10 requests came from the UK.

According to the BBC, Google has taken down nearly 500,000 links from its search engine since May.  And, of those, 63,616 were UK requests.

Google doesn’t have to take down sites on requests, but people have a right to appeal if it decides not to.

Out of the 498,737 URLs it looked at, based on 146,357 requests, France accounted for the most requests, followed by Germany and then the UK.  Of the requests it received, Google removed 41.8 percent, and left 58.2 percent of them online.

Google said it gt a request from a defrocked vicar to remove two links covering an investigation of sexual abuse accusations.  It didn’t remove the pages.

Facebook accounted for most requests to remove references, followed by profileengine.com

Google avoids Texas patent troll fight

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

alamo-paintingGoogle has managed to avoid having to fight patent troll Rockstar Consortium in a Texas court that lawyers consider nicer toward plaintiffs

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday ordered proceedings stayed in Texas over whether handsets made by Samsung Electronics, HTC,  AsuSTEK,  LG Electronics and ZTE infringed on Rockstar’s patents because they used Google’s Android.

Rockstar had filed the lawsuits in a Texas federal court and Google filed a lawsuit in northern California in which it asked a judge to rule that devices using the Android platform had not infringed the patents cited by Rockstar.

The overlaps led the appeals court to rule that the spat should be decided first in California.

The court said that there was no need to proceed with the five Texas actions because the one California action would do. “There will be substantial similarity involving the infringement and invalidity issues in all the cases”, whatever that means.

Rockstar which as Apple as an investor, outbid Google and paid $4.5 billion for thousands of former Nortel Network patents as the networking products supplier went bankrupt in 2011.

Google downs celebrity pics

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

Hollywood, Wikimedia CommonsAfter receiving legal threats from a top notch Hollywood lawyer, Google has downed tens of thousands of pictures of celebrities.

Celebrities who had their accounts hacked include Rihanna, Kate Upton and Kim Kardashian.

Google denied that it had failed to act speedily enough. As we reported yesterday, a letter from lawyer Marty Singer threatened Google with legal action.

But a statement from Google said it had deleted many photographs within hours of being notified and had also shut down the accounts of people who had posted the pictures.

Google said it responded to requests to down material within hours and relied on people telling them or filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests.

Google has taken down material on both YouTube, Blogger and Google+.

Google legalled over nude photos

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

OgleGoogle has been accused of “blatantly unethical behaviour”  for failing to remove nude or private images of celebrities hacked and distributed online.

Stars whose images were hacked include Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna and Selena Gomez.

Marty Singer, a senior lawyer who represents Hollywood celebs, wrote a sharp letter to Larry Page, Serge Brin, Eric Schmidt and Google lawyers and threatened to sue the firm for $100 million.

The New York Post reports that the letter accused Google of victimising women and failed to remove the images fast enough.

Google was asked to remove the images a month ago and lawyers have repeated the request several times.

The letter claimed that because the victims of the hack were celebrities, Google had done nothing apart from collect money from advertising.  Google had turned a blind eye to the scandal and repeatedly exploit these women, Singer continued.

Internet Explorer still popular, shock

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

shockData gathered by Net Applications has revealed that despite the domination of press by its rivals, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular browser.

Microsoft’s product accounts for almost 60 percent of the market and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Chrome, which is IE’s main rival, has been expanding its reach and has grown to 21 percent up from 19 percent just a month earlier. That growth has mainly been at the expense of Firefox, which now accounts for only 14 percent, down from around 20 per cent a year earlier. Finally, Safari is holding steady at the five percent mark while other browsers are also slowly declining in usage.

Internet Explorer IE 8, which is the default browser in Windows 7, has slowly gained users and now accounts for over 22 percent of the market.

Newer versions of the browser, such as 10 and 11 have declined in numbers. IE 11, the current browser version only accounts for 17 percent.

As Internet Explorer 12 coming as part of Windows 10, formerly known as Windows 9, Microsoft may soon find itself in a situation where it’s desperately trying to get its users to upgrade.

Also it is telling that the impact of mobile browser use is negligible – both Apple and Chrome do not seem to benefit much from a “mobile effect” on the figures.

 

Microsoft turns on the heat on notebooks

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusA report said Microsoft is cutting the licence cost on Windows 8.1 in a bid to offer notebooks costing $250 or less.

Digitimes Research said manufacturers will be offered Windows 8.1 with Bing with a tentative release date of February next year.

Microsoft has the problem that people who already produce notebooks running the Windows 8.1 operating system can’t compete with tablets at retail prices of $250 or lower.  So it is aiming to mollify its partners by limiting the cheap version to notebooks with screen sizes 14-inches and below.

That’s unlikely to mollify manufacturers of notebooks – their margins are already cut to the bone.

Microsoft has been pursuing this strategy since the Computex show in June last year, but so far there hasn’t been much sign of progress.  It is worried about Google with its Chromebook device but Microsoft’s core revenues depend on fat Windows licensing fees.

FBI worried about unsearchable phones

Posted on September 26, 2014 by - News

untouchablesThe Untouchables are worried about Apple and Google’s smartphones which cannot be searched by the FBI.

James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said he was “concerned” over Apple and Google marketing smart phones that can’t be searched by law enforcement which would force them to investigate criminals like the old days.

He told hacks that the companies are marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.

Comey said the bureau has “reached out” to Apple and Google “to understand what they’re thinking and why they think it makes sense”.

Phone makers have moved to encryption in the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive US government surveillance.

Apple announced the enhanced encryption for iOS 8, which Apple says makes it impossible for the company to decrypt a locked device, even for law enforcement. While Android’s encryption was optional, it works similarly. In its upcoming Android L release, encryption will be enabled by default.

Of course the actual ability for Google and Apple to keep the spooks out of communication is limited.  Both companies store data on the cloud and it can be obtained using a court order.

Encryption will probably protect users from individuals trying to snoop in on a stolen or resold phone, but there’s nothing to stop the FBI from getting a warrant for data on your phone or for data stored in the cloud connected to your account.