Slashdot Mirror

Nyder writes "Kim Dotcom posted via Twitter, with a link to Torrentfreak, that he owns a security patent US6078908, titled 'Method for authorizing in data transmission systems.'" Techdirt points out that Dotcom isn't just asking for financial help: Instead, he's asking companies which use two-factor authentication "to help fund his defense, in exchange for not getting sued for the patent. He points out that his actual funds are still frozen by the DOJ and (more importantly) that his case actually matters a great deal to Google, Facebook and Twitter, because the eventual ruling will likely set a precedent that may impact them -- especially around the DMCA." Update: 05/23 14:23 GMT by T : Why is this relevant to Twitter? If you're not an active Twitter user, you might not realize that (after some well publicized twitter-account hijackings), the company is trying to regain some ground on security. Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter is now offering two-factor authentication, a feature that could help prevent embarrassing security breaches. Twitter users interested in activating two-factor authentication will need to head over to their account settings page and click the checkbox beside 'Require a verification code when I sign in.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. The speed improvement is thanks to the introduction of 'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,' according to Google. Starting with this release, the scheduler more aggressively uses an idle connection and demotes the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets."

richlv writes "Latvian police recently raided the home of a history teacher and confiscated his computer. The crime? Scanning a history book and making it available on his website covering various topics on history. The raid was based on a complaint from the publisher (Google Translate to English), which has a near-monopoly on educational materials in Latvia, often linked with shady connections in the Ministry of Education."

Cbs228 writes "During last week's Google I/O conference, the company announced a replacement for its aging Talk instant messenger: Google Hangouts. Hangouts, which is only available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, offers closer integration with Google+. Unfortunately, the new product drops support for the XMPP instant messaging protocol, which has been an integral part of Talk for over ten years. XMPP delivers instant messages to desktop clients, like Pidgin, and enables communication between users on different instant messaging networks. Hangouts users attempting to communicate with contacts on non-Google servers, such as jabber.org, have found that all communications have been suddenly and inexplicably severed. A Google account is now required to communicate with Hangouts users. Google Hangouts joins the ranks of an already-crowded ecosystem of closed, incompatible chat products like Skype." Interesting, because Google Wave was based on XMPP and Google was integral to the creation of the Jingle extension that enabled video chatting over XMPP. Note that no end date has been set for Talk yet, but the end must surely be nigh given Google's recent history of axing products like Reader and CalDAV support from their calendar app without much notice.

LeadSongDog writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that the 'Pebble' smartwatch has matched the $15M record for Kickstarter funding after initially being panned by the VC crowd." One advantage that the Pebble has over rumored watches from big names like Google and Apple is existing.

New submitter SessionExpired writes "Five 9th graders from Denmark have shown that garden cress won't germinate when placed near a router (Google Translation of Danish original). Article text is in Danish, but the pictures illustrate their results. The exact mechanism is still unknown (Danish original), but experts have shown interest in reproducing the experiment."

New submitter SessionExpired writes "Five 9th graders from Denmark have shown that garden cress won't germinate when placed near a router (Google Translation of Danish original). Article text is in Danish, but the pictures illustrate their results. The exact mechanism is still unknown (Danish original), but experts have shown interest in reproducing the experiment."

Newegg's policy of not backing down from patent trolls, even ones as large as Alcatel-Lucent, continues to result in victory. Earlier this year, Overstock and Newegg successfully defended themselves with a jury invalidating Alcatel-Lucent's main patent used to force companies as large as Amazon to settle. Naturally, Alcatel-Lucent appealed, but the appeals court quickly ruled in favor of Newegg and Overstock.com. From Ars: "Federal Circuit judges typically take months, and occasionally years, to review the patent appeals that come before them. Briefs in this case were submitted last year, and oral arguments were held last Friday, May 10. The three-judge panel upheld Newegg's win (PDF), without comment — in just three days. ... Alcatel-Lucent dropped the case over its other two patents, desperate to get back the '131 patent that Newegg and Overstock had killed at trial. 'If they had been able to revive this patent, the litigation machine would have continued on,' Reines told Reuters after the win."

Google's I/O annual conference is ramping up at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Last year, in the conference keynote, the company took its biggest-yet dive into hardware when it introduced the Nexus 7 tablet, Google Glass, and the ill-fated Nexus Q. The secret is out on Glass, of course: this year, there's a pavilion inside the conference center where I'm sure they'll be showing off applications for it. (Quite a few of the people in the endless lines here are wearing their own, too.) Anticipating the announcements at I/O is practically its own industry, but it's easy to guess that there will be announcements from all the major pots in which Google has its many thousands of (tapping) fingers. Android, search, Chrome, mapping, and all the other ways in which the behemoth of Mountain View is watching what you do. You can watch the keynote talk (talks, really) streamed online from the main conference link above, but this story will be updated with highlights of the announcements, as well with stories that readers contribute. Update: 05/15 16:22 GMT by T : Updates below. Update: 05/15 19:02 GMT by T :Update details: Notes (ongoing) added below on maps, gaming, the Play store, Google+, and more. And, notable, Larry Page is (at this writing) on stage, with an unannounced Q & A session. Front Matter

After some splashy demos of Android apps and Chrome (Pong played with active windows as the playing pieces is one that stuck out) Vic Gundotra, Senior VP opens the show. Welcomes the 6000 people here, and 40,000 people at viewing parties world wide. (More than a million on YouTube, he says.)

Introduces Sundar Pichai SVP: Android, Chrome, Apps, who reviews the time since the PC revolution: Most people used Windows, boring form factors. Starting seven or so years ago, phones, tablets, etc, really jumped. Two pictures from St. Peter's Basilica: John Paul II's funeral, vs. announcement of new pope: In the first, one person is taking a photo with a clamshell phone; in the second, everyone has a phone or tablet out to record the event. Chrome, he says, is now the most popular browser in the world.

Then it's time for more splashy demo: map shows how much of the world has a penetration of less than 10 percent. Bringing the next four and a half billion" online the next theme.

New Android features and APIs:

Hugo Barro, VP, Product Management Android, shows off some of the new features for developers:

• First, an improved Google Maps Android API (v2), with 3-D building outlines, fast scrolling, etc. A fused location provider, more battery efficient, faster -- should mean less waiting for GPS signals etc. for mapping.
• A new API for activity recognition uses various sensors etc. to track and notice things like whether a user is driving, walking, or doing other activities. Looks both very useful and a bit scary; opt-out needs some attention on this front!
• Google+ sign-in updates and cross-platform single-sign-in. Now users "don't have to remember to find and install" certain apps, because signing in and downloading it on one device can activate doing the same on linked devices.
• Google Cloud Messaging came out last year; this year, it's been updated to give more upstream capabilities. Lets you push data from a service to an app. Upstream messaging, GCM to send messages. Syncs notifications (good for developers, but also for users: if you dismiss a notification on one device, it goes away on all account-linked devices.)

Barro also introduces Google Play game services, and some of its features:

• Cloud save; you can finish a game level on one device, and pick up on it on another.
• Achievements, leaderboards to connect players. Demos with World of Goo, shows how one can instantly check one's status among friends (fun), and globally (humbling) for a particular game.
• Multi-player. Feature announced to huge applause, but demo failed, despite the intent to overcome the very things that make multiplayer games hard for mobile. (This room, he says, isn't very "network friendly" -- true, but then, neither is a huge chunk of the world.)

Shows off a new IDE, Android Studio (big applause, just at the name) for a quick demo. Has some neat features; colors used in code, for instance are parsed and shown in thumbnail next to the line that contains it. Devices' screens can be demoed instantly, on the developer's desktop screen, so developers can see how an app will appear on different sized devices, and in different languages, useful for internationalization and cross-platform building.

For a few dollars more (per month)

Chris Yerga, Engineering Director for Android's most exciting announcement: Google Play Music All Access. This is a $9.99/month subscription service, with a 30-day free trial, launching today. Hook: if you start by June 30th, $7.99.

It's an online streaming music app, music organizer, and music suggestion engine.

Personalized recommendations based on listening habits, and eavesdropping on opted-in friends' lists. Yergo demonstrates that the playlist which it can create shows the *upcoming* choices that the AI bots at Google think you'll want to listen to; the look into the upcoming playlist got many happy shouts, even more so when he shows unwanted items in that list just being wiped off the list with gestures.

Linus on Chrome

(Sorry, not that Linus.) Linus Upson talked about Chrome, and focused on APIs for mobile web. Started with JavaScript speed improvements; says Javascript can be now rendered 57 percent faster through optimizations than this time last year, with "tons more optimizations to come."

Notes that When you download a web page, more than 60pct of the stuff downloaded is images and shows some examples of WebP - open source, royalty-free compression -- with similar quality image compression results at 30+ percent smaller than JPEG. It features like transparency, metadata, etc, and "unfortunately also animated images." But video is the real hog; more than animated cat pictures, there's a need to make video smaller. Upson shows H.264 vs VP9 -- for the demo video shown, 343 vs 125MB for equivalent quality; this will be rolling out for YouTube later this year.

Shows a data compression proxy tool with a user-facing chart on Chrome for Mobile, shows how much data you're using (or saving) by turning on a remote data compression tool.

Another: Using HTML5 autocomplete spec, shows a simple checkout system vs. the typical complex one required to buy from any online merchant with whom a user does not already have an account. "Chrome already knows all your payment information," he says. "This is going to make shopping from your phone much, much easier." (And scarier, IMO.)

Cool Chrome demo: Racer: a Multi player, multi-platform game experiment; stylized, overhead view of a slot-car racing setup; all you need to play is a device running Chrome. (Players have only one thing to control: their cars' speed. Go too fast on a curve, and the car flies off.( The coolest part of the demo, is that various devices places next to each other (tables of various sizes, phones) combine to form a single playing screen across the devices.

Mark of the friendly beast, now for kids!

Chris Yerga back on stage to introduce Google Play for Education. Launching in the fall (apps being accepted starting this summer), for "awesome K-12 apps." This is a single purpose, curated sub-store, with all apps intended for primary and secondary education, and approved by / endorsed by groups of teachers, "because teachers trust other teachers," with apps from private developers, schools, government entities like NASA. Sounds nice, in some ways, but also takes every kid in the schools covered having a Google account, and being part of Google groups. This will take a lot of opt-in-by-proxy. Google does a lot of things well, but should kids be required to have accounts with a particular company to use software required for education? Even with vetting, malware in this context looks particularly troubling.

6,000 new toys, all alike.

Looks like attendees at this year's I/O will land a Pixel laptop running ChromeOS.

Google+ at the age of a late-stage toddler

New design for Google+, and "41 new features," rolling out this afternoon.

User-facing features included Animated sliding menus, animated windows, and other such UI candy.

More depth to be made available through automatic tagging applied by Google to posts; "We also then rank and search the entire universe of Google Plus content, and we rank it just for you."

This automatic hashtagging includes not just text scanning for content, but image recognition; coupled with landmark recognition engine that already exists, a photo of the Eiffel tower is automatically recognized; clicking on that photo can being you to more Eiffel-tower related photos. A little spooky.

You will always have the option of telling Google, either on a particular post, or globally" whether you want to opt-out of all this automatic scanning, tagging, and ranking.

Re: richer communications: "Frankly, even Google's services have been fragmented." Introducing today, new Google+ Hangout app, broken out from general Google+ service. Demo shows how new standalone app by default shows a list of conversations, "not contacts." Group or one-on-one. Contacts are "one tap away," if you want a different lens. The conversations can be long lasting; you can have a group conversation with lots of people, photos, etc. "Of course we give you the ability to turn off history!" Photos attached to conversations are stored in albums. Shown (the slipped-in applause line) on iOS, in a web browser, and on Android.

New features include, too, group video at no charge. And, with the tagline "your darkroom is now a datacenter," cloud-based photo management, with tools for photo retouching and editing, not just storage / backup.

New Auto-Enhance tool which throws photos against a wall of image enhancement algorithms (for tonal distribution, noise reduction, vignetting, sharpening, etc.) A bit like Instagram in simplicity, but with the intent to make photos look "just right" rather than "vintage." Slightly creepy, to have the equivalent of an automatic airbrush on photos.

Somewhat creepier, an automatic highlights-reel creator that does a different kind of automatic enhancement: feed it a few hundred photographs, and AI bots look for smiling faces, good focus, etc, and Google tells you which ones to leave on the cutting-room floor. A nice triage step, but one that will need human scanning in case your opinion differs from the Google AI.

Finally, Auto Awesome: "creates a new image that did not exist!" -- scans for similar, related photos, creates mini movies of them.

The available gratis storage for Google accounts has this week gone to 15 GB rather than free. That will be a lot of storage for some people (my mom), not so much for others (you know who you are). All these neat back-end photo enhancement tools require as much bandwidth as it takes to transmit your photos up and down whatever pipe you're using for that, though. Local photo manipulation isn't going away; it's just being nudged gently by the online adjuncts.

OK computer

Amit Singhal announces what he says is "the end of search as we know it"; the upshot is moving to natural language (whether typed ina search box or spoken into a mic), emphasizing intuition and eroding the need for special searching tricks.

Coolest new thing about search: Search by voice coming to all platforms via Chrome. Talk to your computer; let google answer.

Cards (cute, compact single-topic search result capsules) were shown last year, but now enhanced with more categories and examples -- things like games, books, and public transit commute times.

Search & Assist VP Johanna Wright steps up to demo this voice feature, labeled "Hotwording." "OK Google, show me things to do in Santa Cruz" gets search results richer than plain google search, and "OK Google, how far is it from here?" Gets a link to directions and map, Google Maps' version is the nicely formatted direction source, but the search results include other on-topic hits, too. I can see some SNL sketches showing everyone mumbling to Google as they walk down the street, on Segways, wearing Glass headsets. "OK Google ... OK Google ... "

You are here, or you are someplace else.

Daniel Graf on next generation of google aps for mobile. Last December, they launched maps on iPhone: "sleek, beautiful, and let's not forget, accurate." [Laughline] Today, announcement / sneak peak at next gen version (due out this summer), for both Android and iOS. "Let's go on a little walk in San Francisco."

3D buildings, smooth scrolling, and a 5-star rating system now integrated across all map products -- phone, web, etc -- as a first-class option.

Also -- nice, but a little pat -- integrating "The Zagat experience" integrated with maps searches, too; because "it's nice to have an expert opinion." Also integrated, and in my view also a bit off-putting, special offers related to searches. Starbucks is one company in on this action "but there are many many more."

Fun stats: Over a million transit stops. 50 billion km of turn-by-turn directions for bikes.

Adding live coverage of incident alerts around the world. Dynamic rerouting; if something happens ahead on a scheduled route, navigation app for smart phones will alert the user.

Mobile today, just just about phones, too: brand now, fully-integrated map interface for tablets. "Explore" option lets you browse maps through categories like Eat, Relax, etc. Empashsis on exploration and discovery.

Adding more and more inside views for buildings.

Maps now better labeled, and more directly -- no more jillions of pins to mouse-over for pop-ups. Searching maps integrating more social data (like looking for places that friends have reviewed positively), and many more businesses now have fly-through photo imagery available.

Public transit options much more prominent, directly on map when looking for directions. Most exciting to me, the new scheduling visualizer shows when trains, buses, ferries, etc. will be leaving, and how long each trip takes. Beautiful Gantt-chart UI; simple, scrollable timelines.

More and more interior imagery (inside St. Peter's, etc), but (biggest crowd pleasing moment so far), you can also zoom out as well as in, until you get to a whole Earth globe, from space. Spinnable, with physics. And those clouds? The gloating announcement "Those are in real time." The fawning and clapping continue, as even more zoom continues. View the earth in Eclipse, the Milky Way, etc. Jaw-dropping as a browser-based experience.

Heeeeeere's Larry!

Larry Page's voice is softer and more labored, but he's on stage talking, to great applause.

On the future of Google Fiber, Larry says: "from an engineering standpoint, it's kind of a no-brainer." In a sense, most of the computers we have in the world, most of them are in people's shouses; msot fo them can't be used for anything useful." (I'll take that as creative license.)

"We need these low latency connections that operate a computer speed, no matter what that is."

Encourages other companies to do more things "outside their comfort zone," with both Fiber and Gmail as an example. Cross-pollication. "Almost every time we've tried to something crazy, we've made progress."

Has some politic but unflattering things to say about Oracle, but hedges on the question of how Oracle's tightening control on Java affects Android.

Page made at least five references to untapped efficiencies in transportation; I keep expecting Elon Musk to drive up the auditorium's center aisle in a Tesla in Google Street View livery.

Healthcare: Why are people so cagey about medical history? Insurance, he surmises -- afraid they don't be covered. "We should change the rules around insurance, so they have to insure people," he says, drawing great applause. DNA Sequencing, we're all gonna have that, it'll cost a dollar ..." To a followup question, he says that he has nothing to announce on this front from Google, though. On the company's own health care initaitves? "We had Google Health, we didn't make that much proress on it ... [It's only] one percent of where we can be."

On women in the development community: Says this is a serious concern. He and Sergey, he says, want "to make sure out company doesn't end up all male." Encouraging young girls to be interested is the key.

Google's I/O annual conference is ramping up at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Last year, in the conference keynote, the company took its biggest-yet dive into hardware when it introduced the Nexus 7 tablet, Google Glass, and the ill-fated Nexus Q. The secret is out on Glass, of course: this year, there's a pavilion inside the conference center where I'm sure they'll be showing off applications for it. (Quite a few of the people in the endless lines here are wearing their own, too.) Anticipating the announcements at I/O is practically its own industry, but it's easy to guess that there will be announcements from all the major pots in which Google has its many thousands of (tapping) fingers. Android, search, Chrome, mapping, and all the other ways in which the behemoth of Mountain View is watching what you do. You can watch the keynote talk (talks, really) streamed online from the main conference link above, but this story will be updated with highlights of the announcements, as well with stories that readers contribute. Update: 05/15 16:22 GMT by T : Updates below. Update: 05/15 19:02 GMT by T :Update details: Notes (ongoing) added below on maps, gaming, the Play store, Google+, and more. And, notable, Larry Page is (at this writing) on stage, with an unannounced Q & A session. Front Matter

After some splashy demos of Android apps and Chrome (Pong played with active windows as the playing pieces is one that stuck out) Vic Gundotra, Senior VP opens the show. Welcomes the 6000 people here, and 40,000 people at viewing parties world wide. (More than a million on YouTube, he says.)

Introduces Sundar Pichai SVP: Android, Chrome, Apps, who reviews the time since the PC revolution: Most people used Windows, boring form factors. Starting seven or so years ago, phones, tablets, etc, really jumped. Two pictures from St. Peter's Basilica: John Paul II's funeral, vs. announcement of new pope: In the first, one person is taking a photo with a clamshell phone; in the second, everyone has a phone or tablet out to record the event. Chrome, he says, is now the most popular browser in the world.

Then it's time for more splashy demo: map shows how much of the world has a penetration of less than 10 percent. Bringing the next four and a half billion" online the next theme.

New Android features and APIs:

Hugo Barro, VP, Product Management Android, shows off some of the new features for developers:

• First, an improved Google Maps Android API (v2), with 3-D building outlines, fast scrolling, etc. A fused location provider, more battery efficient, faster -- should mean less waiting for GPS signals etc. for mapping.
• A new API for activity recognition uses various sensors etc. to track and notice things like whether a user is driving, walking, or doing other activities. Looks both very useful and a bit scary; opt-out needs some attention on this front!
• Google+ sign-in updates and cross-platform single-sign-in. Now users "don't have to remember to find and install" certain apps, because signing in and downloading it on one device can activate doing the same on linked devices.
• Google Cloud Messaging came out last year; this year, it's been updated to give more upstream capabilities. Lets you push data from a service to an app. Upstream messaging, GCM to send messages. Syncs notifications (good for developers, but also for users: if you dismiss a notification on one device, it goes away on all account-linked devices.)

Barro also introduces Google Play game services, and some of its features:

• Cloud save; you can finish a game level on one device, and pick up on it on another.
• Achievements, leaderboards to connect players. Demos with World of Goo, shows how one can instantly check one's status among friends (fun), and globally (humbling) for a particular game.
• Multi-player. Feature announced to huge applause, but demo failed, despite the intent to overcome the very things that make multiplayer games hard for mobile. (This room, he says, isn't very "network friendly" -- true, but then, neither is a huge chunk of the world.)

Shows off a new IDE, Android Studio (big applause, just at the name) for a quick demo. Has some neat features; colors used in code, for instance are parsed and shown in thumbnail next to the line that contains it. Devices' screens can be demoed instantly, on the developer's desktop screen, so developers can see how an app will appear on different sized devices, and in different languages, useful for internationalization and cross-platform building.

For a few dollars more (per month)

Chris Yerga, Engineering Director for Android's most exciting announcement: Google Play Music All Access. This is a $9.99/month subscription service, with a 30-day free trial, launching today. Hook: if you start by June 30th, $7.99.

It's an online streaming music app, music organizer, and music suggestion engine.

Personalized recommendations based on listening habits, and eavesdropping on opted-in friends' lists. Yergo demonstrates that the playlist which it can create shows the *upcoming* choices that the AI bots at Google think you'll want to listen to; the look into the upcoming playlist got many happy shouts, even more so when he shows unwanted items in that list just being wiped off the list with gestures.

Linus on Chrome

(Sorry, not that Linus.) Linus Upson talked about Chrome, and focused on APIs for mobile web. Started with JavaScript speed improvements; says Javascript can be now rendered 57 percent faster through optimizations than this time last year, with "tons more optimizations to come."

Notes that When you download a web page, more than 60pct of the stuff downloaded is images and shows some examples of WebP - open source, royalty-free compression -- with similar quality image compression results at 30+ percent smaller than JPEG. It features like transparency, metadata, etc, and "unfortunately also animated images." But video is the real hog; more than animated cat pictures, there's a need to make video smaller. Upson shows H.264 vs VP9 -- for the demo video shown, 343 vs 125MB for equivalent quality; this will be rolling out for YouTube later this year.

Shows a data compression proxy tool with a user-facing chart on Chrome for Mobile, shows how much data you're using (or saving) by turning on a remote data compression tool.

Another: Using HTML5 autocomplete spec, shows a simple checkout system vs. the typical complex one required to buy from any online merchant with whom a user does not already have an account. "Chrome already knows all your payment information," he says. "This is going to make shopping from your phone much, much easier." (And scarier, IMO.)

Cool Chrome demo: Racer: a Multi player, multi-platform game experiment; stylized, overhead view of a slot-car racing setup; all you need to play is a device running Chrome. (Players have only one thing to control: their cars' speed. Go too fast on a curve, and the car flies off.( The coolest part of the demo, is that various devices places next to each other (tables of various sizes, phones) combine to form a single playing screen across the devices.

Mark of the friendly beast, now for kids!

Chris Yerga back on stage to introduce Google Play for Education. Launching in the fall (apps being accepted starting this summer), for "awesome K-12 apps." This is a single purpose, curated sub-store, with all apps intended for primary and secondary education, and approved by / endorsed by groups of teachers, "because teachers trust other teachers," with apps from private developers, schools, government entities like NASA. Sounds nice, in some ways, but also takes every kid in the schools covered having a Google account, and being part of Google groups. This will take a lot of opt-in-by-proxy. Google does a lot of things well, but should kids be required to have accounts with a particular company to use software required for education? Even with vetting, malware in this context looks particularly troubling.

6,000 new toys, all alike.

Looks like attendees at this year's I/O will land a Pixel laptop running ChromeOS.

Google+ at the age of a late-stage toddler

New design for Google+, and "41 new features," rolling out this afternoon.

User-facing features included Animated sliding menus, animated windows, and other such UI candy.

More depth to be made available through automatic tagging applied by Google to posts; "We also then rank and search the entire universe of Google Plus content, and we rank it just for you."

This automatic hashtagging includes not just text scanning for content, but image recognition; coupled with landmark recognition engine that already exists, a photo of the Eiffel tower is automatically recognized; clicking on that photo can being you to more Eiffel-tower related photos. A little spooky.

You will always have the option of telling Google, either on a particular post, or globally" whether you want to opt-out of all this automatic scanning, tagging, and ranking.

Re: richer communications: "Frankly, even Google's services have been fragmented." Introducing today, new Google+ Hangout app, broken out from general Google+ service. Demo shows how new standalone app by default shows a list of conversations, "not contacts." Group or one-on-one. Contacts are "one tap away," if you want a different lens. The conversations can be long lasting; you can have a group conversation with lots of people, photos, etc. "Of course we give you the ability to turn off history!" Photos attached to conversations are stored in albums. Shown (the slipped-in applause line) on iOS, in a web browser, and on Android.

New features include, too, group video at no charge. And, with the tagline "your darkroom is now a datacenter," cloud-based photo management, with tools for photo retouching and editing, not just storage / backup.

New Auto-Enhance tool which throws photos against a wall of image enhancement algorithms (for tonal distribution, noise reduction, vignetting, sharpening, etc.) A bit like Instagram in simplicity, but with the intent to make photos look "just right" rather than "vintage." Slightly creepy, to have the equivalent of an automatic airbrush on photos.

Somewhat creepier, an automatic highlights-reel creator that does a different kind of automatic enhancement: feed it a few hundred photographs, and AI bots look for smiling faces, good focus, etc, and Google tells you which ones to leave on the cutting-room floor. A nice triage step, but one that will need human scanning in case your opinion differs from the Google AI.

Finally, Auto Awesome: "creates a new image that did not exist!" -- scans for similar, related photos, creates mini movies of them.

The available gratis storage for Google accounts has this week gone to 15 GB rather than free. That will be a lot of storage for some people (my mom), not so much for others (you know who you are). All these neat back-end photo enhancement tools require as much bandwidth as it takes to transmit your photos up and down whatever pipe you're using for that, though. Local photo manipulation isn't going away; it's just being nudged gently by the online adjuncts.

OK computer

Amit Singhal announces what he says is "the end of search as we know it"; the upshot is moving to natural language (whether typed ina search box or spoken into a mic), emphasizing intuition and eroding the need for special searching tricks.

Coolest new thing about search: Search by voice coming to all platforms via Chrome. Talk to your computer; let google answer.

Cards (cute, compact single-topic search result capsules) were shown last year, but now enhanced with more categories and examples -- things like games, books, and public transit commute times.

Search & Assist VP Johanna Wright steps up to demo this voice feature, labeled "Hotwording." "OK Google, show me things to do in Santa Cruz" gets search results richer than plain google search, and "OK Google, how far is it from here?" Gets a link to directions and map, Google Maps' version is the nicely formatted direction source, but the search results include other on-topic hits, too. I can see some SNL sketches showing everyone mumbling to Google as they walk down the street, on Segways, wearing Glass headsets. "OK Google ... OK Google ... "

You are here, or you are someplace else.

Daniel Graf on next generation of google aps for mobile. Last December, they launched maps on iPhone: "sleek, beautiful, and let's not forget, accurate." [Laughline] Today, announcement / sneak peak at next gen version (due out this summer), for both Android and iOS. "Let's go on a little walk in San Francisco."

3D buildings, smooth scrolling, and a 5-star rating system now integrated across all map products -- phone, web, etc -- as a first-class option.

Also -- nice, but a little pat -- integrating "The Zagat experience" integrated with maps searches, too; because "it's nice to have an expert opinion." Also integrated, and in my view also a bit off-putting, special offers related to searches. Starbucks is one company in on this action "but there are many many more."

Fun stats: Over a million transit stops. 50 billion km of turn-by-turn directions for bikes.

Adding live coverage of incident alerts around the world. Dynamic rerouting; if something happens ahead on a scheduled route, navigation app for smart phones will alert the user.

Mobile today, just just about phones, too: brand now, fully-integrated map interface for tablets. "Explore" option lets you browse maps through categories like Eat, Relax, etc. Empashsis on exploration and discovery.

Adding more and more inside views for buildings.

Maps now better labeled, and more directly -- no more jillions of pins to mouse-over for pop-ups. Searching maps integrating more social data (like looking for places that friends have reviewed positively), and many more businesses now have fly-through photo imagery available.

Public transit options much more prominent, directly on map when looking for directions. Most exciting to me, the new scheduling visualizer shows when trains, buses, ferries, etc. will be leaving, and how long each trip takes. Beautiful Gantt-chart UI; simple, scrollable timelines.

More and more interior imagery (inside St. Peter's, etc), but (biggest crowd pleasing moment so far), you can also zoom out as well as in, until you get to a whole Earth globe, from space. Spinnable, with physics. And those clouds? The gloating announcement "Those are in real time." The fawning and clapping continue, as even more zoom continues. View the earth in Eclipse, the Milky Way, etc. Jaw-dropping as a browser-based experience.

Heeeeeere's Larry!

Larry Page's voice is softer and more labored, but he's on stage talking, to great applause.

On the future of Google Fiber, Larry says: "from an engineering standpoint, it's kind of a no-brainer." In a sense, most of the computers we have in the world, most of them are in people's shouses; msot fo them can't be used for anything useful." (I'll take that as creative license.)

"We need these low latency connections that operate a computer speed, no matter what that is."

Encourages other companies to do more things "outside their comfort zone," with both Fiber and Gmail as an example. Cross-pollication. "Almost every time we've tried to something crazy, we've made progress."

Has some politic but unflattering things to say about Oracle, but hedges on the question of how Oracle's tightening control on Java affects Android.

Page made at least five references to untapped efficiencies in transportation; I keep expecting Elon Musk to drive up the auditorium's center aisle in a Tesla in Google Street View livery.

Healthcare: Why are people so cagey about medical history? Insurance, he surmises -- afraid they don't be covered. "We should change the rules around insurance, so they have to insure people," he says, drawing great applause. DNA Sequencing, we're all gonna have that, it'll cost a dollar ..." To a followup question, he says that he has nothing to announce on this front from Google, though. On the company's own health care initaitves? "We had Google Health, we didn't make that much proress on it ... [It's only] one percent of where we can be."

On women in the development community: Says this is a serious concern. He and Sergey, he says, want "to make sure out company doesn't end up all male." Encouraging young girls to be interested is the key.

theodp writes "Last summer, unspecified voice problems caused Google CEO Larry Page to miss Google's Annual Shareholder Meeting, the I/O conference, and a quarterly earnings call. Now, Page has come forward and revealed that he suffers from partial paralysis of each of his vocal chords, an 'extremely rare' condition. Not unlike what Sergey Brin and his wife are doing with Parkinson's research, Page and his wife will be funding and overseeing 'a significant research program' led by Dr. Steven Zeitels of Harvard Medical School."

anzha writes "Horst Simon, Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has stood up at conferences of late and said the unthinkable: supercomputing is hitting a wall and will not build an exaFLOPS HPC system by 2020. This is defined as one that passes linpack with a performance of one exaFLOPS sustained or better. He's even placed money on it. You can read the original presentation here."

An anonymous reader writes "A Microsoft server accesses URLs sent in Skype chat messages, even if they are HTTPS URLs and contain account information. A reader of Heise publications notified Heise Security (link to German website, Google translation). They replicated the observation by sending links via Skype, including one to a private file storage account, and found that these URLs are shortly after accessed from a Microsoft IP address. When confronted, Microsoft claimed that this is part of an effort to detect and filter spam and phishing URLs."

redletterdave writes "A German court rejected eight out of 15 provisions in Apple's general privacy policy and terms of data use on Tuesday, claiming that the practices of the Cupertino, Calif. company deviate too much from German laws (Google translation of German original). According to German law, recognized consumer groups can sue companies over illegal terms and conditions. Apple asks for 'global consent' to use customer data on its website, but German law insists that clients know specific details about what their data will be used for and why."

New submitter briancox2 writes with news that all internet traffic from Syria has disappeared. Umbrella Security Labs explains: "Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the Internet know how to get to a certain IP address. When an IP range becomes unreachable it will be withdrawn from BGP, this informs routers that the IP range is no longer reachable. For example, one of the name servers for the DNS zone .SY is ns1.tld.sy with IP address 82.137.200.85. Normally our routers would expect a BGP route for 82.137.192.0/18. Currently that route has disappeared and we no longer have a way to reach the nameservers for .SY that reside in Syria. ... Currently there are just three routes in the BGP routing tables for Syria, while normally it’s close to eighty. ... Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world."

wiredmikey writes "A new report from the Pentagon marked the most explicit statement yet from the United States that it believes China's cyber espionage is focused on the U.S. government, as well as American corporations. China kept up a steady campaign of hacking in 2012 that included attempts to target U.S. government computer networks, which could provide Beijing a better insight into America's policy deliberations and military capabilities, according to the Pentagon's annual assessment of China's military. 'China is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs,' said the report to Congress (PDF). The digital espionage was part of a broader industrial espionage effort that seeks to secure military-related U.S. and Western technology, allowing Beijing to scale back its reliance on foreign arms manufacturers, the report said. One day later, Beijing dismissed the Pentagon's report that accused it of widespread cyberspying on the U.S. government, rejecting it as an 'irresponsible' attempt to drum up fear of China as a military threat."

An anonymous reader writes "German IT magazine Heise reports (original in German) that the Ministry of Education in Schwerin had a Conficker virus infection on 170 machines, that was dealt with by simply throwing them on the trash. Other German authorities have now decided that 'the approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy' and that the 187,300 Euro invested in this radical form of virus removal were inappropriate. The ministry had earlier estimated the cost of cleaning their desktops and servers by more conventional means to 130,000 Euro."

hypnosec writes "Google has released the kernel source code of Google Glass publicly just a couple of days after the wearable gadget was rooted by Jay Freeman. Releasing the source code, Google has noted that the location is just temporary and it would be moving to a permanent location soon saying: 'This is unlikely to be the permanent home for the kernel source, it should be pushed into git next to all other android kernel source releases relatively soon.'"

New submitter apenzott writes "According to the BBC, a Dutch citizen has been arrested by Spanish police who suspect he was behind the recent Spamhaus DDOS attack, one of the biggest such attacks ever. 'The man arrested is believed to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker that has been implicated in the attack.' According to a press release from the Dutch Public Prosecutor (Google translation of Dutch original), the 35-year-old man's computers and other devices have been seized as evidence. The man will be transferred from Spain to the Netherlands shortly. 'Spamhaus is delighted at the news that an individual has been arrested and is grateful to the Dutch police for the resources they have made available and the way they have worked with us,' said a Spamhaus spokesman."

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today that they intend on purchasing the existing iProvo fiber network to make Provo the third U.S. city to have Google Fiber. If approved by the city council, implementation would begin later in 2013. 'As a part of the acquisition, we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber.'" Also at SlashCloud

First time accepted submitter Landy DeField writes "Tried accessing your Gmail today? You may be faced with 'Temporary Error (500)' error message. Tried to get more detailed information by clicking on the 'Show Detailed Technical Info' link which loads a single line... 'Numeric Code: 5.' Clicked on the App status dashboard link. All were green except for the Admin Control Panel / API. Took a glance 2 minutes ago and now, Google mail and Google Drive are orange and Admin Control Panel / API is red. Look forward to the actual ...'Detailed Technical Info' on what is going on." The apps dashboard confirms that there is a partial outage of many Google Apps. The Next Web ran a quick article about this, and in the process discovered there was an outage on the same date last year.

ndogg writes "Mozilla is considering pulling TeliaSonera from its list of root certificate SSL providers. They have asked for comments on this on their mailing list. They're concerned about the use of the certificates by those governments for spying on its citizens, particularly in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — where TeliaSonera operates subsidiaries or is heavily invested. Mozilla's concern is that TeliaSonera has possibly issued certificates that allow hardline government servers to masquerade as legitimate websites — so-called man-in-the-middle attacks — and decrypt web traffic. This alleged activity would contradict Mozilla's policy against 'knowingly issuing certificates without the knowledge of the entities whose information is referenced in the certificates.'"

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google has issued the specifications for its spectacles. The search-engine giant's Google Glass, an augmented-reality headset that allows wearers to view information on a tiny screen embedded in one of the lenses, features a camera capable of snapping 5-megapixel photos and 720p video. That aforementioned screen, in the words of Google's just-released specs sheet, "is the equivalent of a 25-inch high definition screen from eight feet away." Google Glass is compatible with any Bluetooth-capable phone. Its MyGlass app, which enables SMS messaging and GPS, requires a companion device running Android 4.0.3 (the "Ice Cream Sandwich" build) or higher. Google claims the battery will provide a "full day of typical use," although the company warned in the specs sheet that certain functions—most notably video recording and Hangouts—could drain the battery faster. Despite those neat features, Google Glass also raises some thorny questions about surveillance culture, and whether people really want whole crowds recording every moment of our collective lives. But those are the sort of conundrums that will only become more clear when Google Glass is actually released sometime later this year."

An anonymous reader writes "That was quick. Mere hours after Facebook Home arrived on Google Play, the launcher has been modified to remove the device-specific limitation. This means you can use the latest Facebook service on any Android device. The brilliant hackers at XDA Developers have done it again. This particular hack was performed by XDA Senior Member theos0o; who provides details and download links."

mikejuk writes "This is a strange story. AMD Vice President of Global Channel Sales Roy Taylor has said there will be no DirectX12 at any time in the future. In an interview with German magazine Heise.de, Taylor discussed the new trend for graphics card manufacturers to release top quality game bundles registered to the serial number of the card. One of the reasons for this, he said, is that the DirectX update cycle is no longer driving the market. 'There will be no DirectX 12. That's it.' (Google translation of German original.) Last January there was another hint that things weren't fine with DirectX when Microsoft sent an email to its MVPs saying, 'DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.' That statement was quickly corrected, but without mentioning any prospect of DirectX 12. So, is this just another error or rumor? Can we dismiss something AMD is basing its future strategy on?"

An anonymous reader sends news that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country's space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. "The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by a string of launch failures of unmanned probes and satellites, but Putin vowed Moscow would continue to ramp up spending. He said that from 2013-2020, Russia would be spending 1.6 trillion rubles ($51.8 billion, 38 million euros) on its space sector, a growth far greater than any other space power. 'Developing our potential in space will be one of the priorities of state policy,' Putin said at a meeting in the regional capital Blagoveshchensk. ... speaking to Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, currently commander of the ISS, Putin hailed cooperation in space which meant world powers could forget about the problems of international relations and think 'about the future of mankind.'"

skade88 writes "As earlier rumors suggested, Google Fiber will indeed roll out in Austin, Texas, with the first homes receiving service in mid-2014. The delay is due to the need for a whole new fiber network to be deployed for the service. It will only be deployed within the Austin City limits. Google says in early 2014 they will allow people in Austin register their address for service. They plan to deploy to the neighborhoods with the most interest."

flok writes "There are a couple of commercial products which can tell you where you are by the MAC addresses of access points in your neighbourhood. E.g. the iphone uses a system like this. There's now an open offering for this: OpenWLANMap. With this website, you can enter your access point mac address with your GPS location and then others can use that to navigate. There is also an app for your mobile which automatically enters this data, and you can upload data from e.g. Airomap and other wardriving applications."

theodp writes "Rupert Murdoch's Amplify Education site is all about the kids, so it's understandable that the site's Terms of Use bans abusive, pornographic, obscene, and vulgar content. But if one uses Google to do a site search of Amplify.com (e.g., site:amplify.com donkey) you may get quite an unexpected eye-opener (redacted, but still NSFW). So, does someone at Amplify really want to "@&^$" your "a**"? Of course not. But this does serve as a cautionary tale of the perils of buying a second-hand domain name when pages of the shuttered site may live on in cache-land. Prior to its conversion to a site for kids' education, Amplify.com was a social sharing product that allowed users to clip favorite sites from the web and add their own commentary. Google does note that removed content may still show up in Google's search results in certain situations (removal requests can be made)." Update: 04/08 17:04 GMT by T : Stephanie Chang writes (in a comment below): "Hi, I’m the editor of Amplify.com. We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site. As a result, some old content dating back to the previous domain ownership still shows up as cached on certain search engines. Amplify Education, Inc. did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it. We’re working with Google and other search providers to make sure caches of our site are up to date. In the meantime, we apologize to anyone whose attempts to locate information on amplifying donkeys resulted in a negative browsing experience."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 20 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include per-window private browsing, a new download manager in the Firefox toolbar, and the ability to close hanging plugins without the browser hanging. The new desktop version was available as of yesterday on the organization's FTP servers, but that was just the initial release of the installers. Firefox 20 has now officially been made available over on Firefox.com and all users of old Firefox versions should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on the official Google Play Store. The changelogs are here: desktop and Android."

coastin writes "The folks at Google Labs have launched a new way to search with Google Nose BETA. The new condensation in search will have you "Coming to your senses" where you can go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation. Get acquainted with Your internet sommelier, expertly curated Knowledge Panels pair images, descriptions, and aromas. Take a whiff of the Google Aromabase — 15M+ scentibytes. Don't ask, don't smell! For when you're wary of your query — SafeSearch included. What's that smell? Google Nose BETA leverages new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available with: Street Sense (vehicles have inhaled and indexed millions of atmospheric miles), Android Ambient Odor Detection (collects smells via the world's most sensible mobile operating system), and SMELLCD 1.8+ (high-resolution compatible for precise and controlled odors)"

sfcrazy writes "ZFS on Linux has reached what Brian Behlendorf calls an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release. Version 0.6.1 not only brings the usual bug fixes but also introduces a new property called 'snapdev.' Brian explains, 'The snapdev property was introduced to control the visibility of zvol snapshot devices and may be set to either visible or hidden. When set to hidden, which is the default, zvol snapshot devices will not be created under /dev/. To gain access to these devices the property must be set to visible. This behavior is analogous to the existing snapdir property.'"

sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

netbuzz writes "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for [Linux] allegedly infringing upon [Uniloc's] patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: 'In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc's claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.'" You can't patent floating point math after all.

jrepin writes "Coffice is a new project that tries to make KDE's Calligra office suite available on mobile platforms like Android, Blackberry 10, Jolla SailfishOS and Ubuntu Phone. Calligra already has some presence on smartphones, since document viewer on Nokia N9 is based on it. The first release brings Calligra Words viewer for OpenDocument Text documents and is currently available for Android only. Plans for later releases include viewers for spredsheets and presentations. Editing and saving as well as support for proprietary Microsoft Office formats are coming later."

wiredog writes "Microsoft has released a report of all the subpoenas and other requests it got from law enforcement in 2012, and the way it responded to them. This is similar to the Google Transparency Report."

Today Google launched 'Google Keep', a mobile note-taking service to rival software like Evernote. It works on devices running Android 4.0 or later, and there's also a web interface (which is struggling under launch load as of this writing). Google describes the service thus: "With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand. If it’s more convenient to speak than to type that’s fine—Keep transcribes voice memos for you automatically. There’s super-fast search to find what you’re looking for and when you’re finished with a note you can archive or delete it." Fans of Google Reader will probably be a bit hesitant to pick this up.

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "Ian Hickson, author and maintainer of the HTML5 specification, comments about the real reasons for DRM. They're not what you might think. Ian nails it in my opinion. He wrote, 'The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices. Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted. ... Arguing that DRM doesn't work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM systems have all been broken, but that doesn't matter to the DRM proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity."

An anonymous reader writes "Previous reports of a Microsoft provided backdoor to Skype has been unconfirmed. However, there are now reports that Russian federal security service FSB is able to tap call and locate users. 'FSB and the Internal Affairs Ministry (MVD) have been capable to wiretap and locate Skype users for some years already, reported Vedomosti on Thursday [Google translation of Russian original]. The newspaper is citing experts on information security. "Special services have been capable for several years not only to wiretap but also to locate a Skype user. That's why, for instance, employees of our company are forbidden to discuss business-related topics on Skype," General Director of Group-IB, Ilya Sachkov, says to Vedomosti. "After Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011, it updated the software with technology allowing legitimate wiretapping," says Maksim Emm, Director of Peak Systems.'"

New submitter NuclearCat writes "Polish security researchers have found a backdoor in TP-Link routers, allowing an attacker to not only gain root access to the local network, but also to knock down the router via a CSRF attack remotely. (Further information — Google translation of Russian original). According to the researchers, TP-Link hasn't yet responded to give an answer about issue. The good news: Users who replaced their TP-Link firmware with Open/DD-WRT firmware can sleep well."

hypnosec writes "The US government's National Vulnerability Database (NVD) maintained by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been offline for a few days because of malware infestation. The public-facing site has been taken offline because traces of malware were found on two of the web servers that house it. A post on Google+ containing an email from Gail Porter details the discovery of suspicious activity and subsequent steps taken by NIST. As of this writing the NVD website is still serving a page not found message."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Ukrainian Navy has a small problem on their hands. The Atlantic reports that, after rebooting the Soviet Union's marine mammal program last year with the goal of teaching dolphins to find underwater mines and kill enemy divers, three of the Ukrainian military's new recruits have gone AWOL. Apparently they swam away from their trainers ostensibly in search of a 'mate' out in open waters. It might not be such a big deal except that these dolphins have been trained to 'attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.' Dolphins were trained at Sevastopol for the Soviet Navy as far back as 1973 to find military equipment such as sea mines on the seabed as well as attacking divers and even carrying explosives on their heads to plant on enemy ships. The U.S. has its own dolphin program in San Diego with 40 trained dolphins and sea lions and another 50 in training. U.S. Navy dolphins were deployed in Bahrain in 1987 during a period when Iran was laying down mines in the Persian Gulf to disrupt oil shipments. No word yet on whether 'sharks with frickin' laser beams attached' have been added to the U.S. arsenal." Update: 03/14 14:55 GMT by T : Note that (as the Atlantic has updated their story reached via above link) while there really are militarized dolphins in use around the world, this particular story turns out to be an elaborate prank.

eldavojohn writes "Reporters without Borders has released a report on governments and the companies they employ to spy on their own citizens online. Syria and China were singled out as the worst with Iran, Bahrain and Vietnam not far behind. In addition, RSF named names when it came to the corporate entities (a market worth 5 billion dollars) that provided specific services to these oppressive governments: Gamma, Trovicor, Hacking Team, Amesys and Blue Coat. The report is aptly titled 'Enemies of the Internet' and, though lengthy, provides a detailed examination in the destruction of online rights as well as very specific attacks each government employs. RSF also noted the many attempted solutions to these problems and a link to their online survival kit."

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical Desktop and Mobile Engineer Christopher Halse Rogers explains in more detail the decision for Mir as apposed to Wayland. Although Halse Rogers 'was not involved in the original decision to create Mir,' he's had 'discussions with those who were.' 'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.' 'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.' In a separate post Halse Rogers answer the question: Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical Desktop and Mobile Engineer Christopher Halse Rogers explains in more detail the decision for Mir as apposed to Wayland. Although Halse Rogers 'was not involved in the original decision to create Mir,' he's had 'discussions with those who were.' 'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.' 'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.' In a separate post Halse Rogers answer the question: Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"

sfcrazy writes "Netflix is using HTML5 video streaming instead of using Microsoft's Silverlight on Chromebooks (which now supports DRM for HTML5). Recently Google enabled the much controversial DRM support for HTML5 in Chrome OS to bring services like Netflix to Chromebooks using HTML5." Still no word on general support for GNU/Linux, but x86 or ARM, what's the difference? (If you're ok with DRM at least.)

mikejuk writes "Today's Google Doodle celebrates the fact that today would have been Douglas Adam's 61st birthday. For any fans of Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this isn't to be missed. The interactive doodle takes us aboard the Heart of Gold spaceship where the towel — the essential travel item for any intergalactic voyager sits on the console besides the, also very necessary cup of tea, which is also a reference to a Dirk Gently novel, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. There are lots more tributes hidden including Marvin — the real one not the one in the film, a Babel Fish and more. Have fun exploring but make sure you click on the search symbol to find out more about Douglas Adams and his work."

TrueSatan writes "In an utterly craven move, the Canadian government has launched a bill to bring Canada into full compliance with the discredited, U.S.-led ACTA agreement — an agreement to which most of the world does not agree. To further pressure the acceptance of this awful bill, the U.S., on the same day, released their Trade Policy and Agenda Annual Report (PDF), which calls on Canada to comply with ACTA obligations. For ACTA to take effect, it would require six signatures from the major economic blocks. Tt appears to have no remaining possibility of getting them, yet the U.S., and now Canada, continue to push it forward. The Canadian bill features claims based on spurious health and safety concerns that have been thoroughly debunked by a U.S. report. Despite these claims being so dubious, they remain a cornerstone of the Canadian bill. Similarly, the claimed losses due to counterfeiting ($30 billion USD) stated in the bill have also been debunked. The Canadian bill seeks to give border guards an unprecedented level of control, without the possibility of judicial oversight. Despite a lack of evidence to suggest that Canada is a major source of counterfeit product, the bill puts at risk the fully-legal parallel import of generic items — pharmaceuticals, for instance. The bill would also change copyright infringement from a civil dispute to a breach of criminal law. Pity Canada if this bill is enacted!"

alphadogg writes "Google is open-sourcing a new general purpose data compression library called Zopfli that can be used to speed up Web downloads. The Zopfli Compression Algorithm, which got its name from a Swiss bread recipe, is an implementation of the Deflate compression algorithm that creates a smaller output size (PDF) compared to previous techniques, wrote Lode Vandevenne, a software engineer with Google's Compression Team, on the Google Open Source Blog on Thursday. 'The smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization, faster data transmission, and lower Web page load latencies. Furthermore, the smaller compressed size has additional benefits in mobile use, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use,' Vandevenne wrote. The more exhaustive compression techniques achieve higher data density, but also make the compression a lot slower. This does not affect the decompression speed though, Vandenne wrote."

Dystopian Rebel writes "A Stanford comp-sci student has found a serious bug in Chromium, Safari, Opera, and MSIE. Feross Aboukhadijeh has demonstrated that these browsers allow unbounded local storage. 'The HTML5 Web Storage standard was developed to allow sites to store larger amounts of data (like 5-10 MB) than was previously allowed by cookies (like 4KB). ... The current limits are: 2.5 MB per origin in Google Chrome, 5 MB per origin in Mozilla Firefox and Opera, 10 MB per origin in Internet Explorer. However, what if we get clever and make lots of subdomains like 1.filldisk.com, 2.filldisk.com, 3.filldisk.com, and so on? Should each subdomain get 5MB of space? The standard says no. ... However, Chrome, Safari, and IE currently do not implement any such "affiliated site" storage limit.' Aboukhadijeh has logged the bug with Chromium and Apple, but couldn't do so for MSIE because 'the page is broken" (see http://connect.microsoft.com/IE). Oops. Firefox's implementation of HTML5 local storage is not vulnerable to this exploit."