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Google Adds Speech To Newly Stable Chrome 11, Pays Big Bounty

Posted by timothy on from the tastiest-part-of-the-operating-system dept.

CWmike writes "Google patched 27 vulnerabilities in Chrome on Wednesday as it boosted the stable build of the browser to version 11 on Windows, Mac and Linux. The company paid out a record $16,500 in bounties to researchers who reported a majority of the bugs, beating the previous biggest payday by several hundred dollars. While Google listed more than 3,700 changes in Chrome 11, the only one it highlighted was the speech input feature. The combination of Chrome and Google Translate isn't flawless. In several quick tests by Computerworld, the browser and service transcribed most phrases accurately, but in one instance heard 'Good morning, sister ship' when the line was actually 'Good morning, Mr. Smith.'"

61 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Lisp? by SIR_Taco · · Score: 5, Funny

    Seems that maybe they should have programmed it in Lisp?

    Thanks, I'm here all week!

    --
    I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
    1. Re:Lisp? by syousef · · Score: 2

      Seems that maybe they should have programmed it in Lisp?

      Thanks, I'm here all week!

      Children's version should be in Smalltalk.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    2. Re:Lisp? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Reptiles' version should be in python.

    3. Re:Lisp? by syousef · · Score: 1

      Reptiles' version should be in python.

      ...and have a Corba interface

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    4. Re:Lisp? by stewbacca · · Score: 1

      Reptiles' version should be in python.

      Don't you mean parseltongue?

    5. Re:Lisp? by IntentionalStance · · Score: 1

      Back when I was at University my supervisor was doing Natural Language research using LISP.

      They would type in short stories then ask the computer questions about the stories

      One story included something about John's driving his car and crashing into Mary
      This uncovered a bug in the code where they were try to access the first element of an empty list

      The LISP engine errored with.... drum roll....

      "Illegal CAR usage"

    6. Re:Lisp? by Seumas · · Score: 1

      Seems like the Leave it to Beaver version should be written in Haskell.

      (Hey, what do you want, all the funny shit was taken.)

  2. Error is excusable by Flyerman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sister Ship is a much cooler band name than Mr. Smith.

  3. Chrome. by demonbug · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now it goes to 11.

    I sure hope they don't have armadillos in their trousers.

    1. Re:Chrome. by halowolf · · Score: 1

      I liked the old icon better than the new v11 one.

    2. Re:Chrome. by rwa2 · · Score: 1

      Well, that's just one more, isn't it?

      Why don't they just make 10 a little better?

      I guess they just want to drive home the FACT that it's better than Firefox or IE. And maybe that it's almost as good as Opera, which just hit 11 late last year ;-)

  4. Re:How generous of them. by PinchDuck · · Score: 2

    Fight the Man! Go find a bug but don't tell anyone.

  5. Re:Chrome sucks juice! by biryokumaru · · Score: 1

    Ya, it's much more efficient to just have all your ram sitting around doing nothing all the time.

    --
    When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
  6. Nothing new or innovative really by ya+really · · Score: 4, Informative

    Opera has had a similar feature for years now

    1. Re:Nothing new or innovative really by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Except no one cares about Opera.

    2. Re:Nothing new or innovative really by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I and three other people care. You insensitive clod.

    3. Re:Nothing new or innovative really by SheeEttin · · Score: 1

      You know it's time to go to bed when the comments start to run together and you think that similar feature is "armadillos"...

    4. Re:Nothing new or innovative really by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      and speech input shouldn't be a part of the browser. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE THE BROWSER KEEP A MIC LINE OPEN.

      anyways, it sucks for using unless you're disabled and if you were then you'd have had this already for years since os/2 warp(and the windows port of the ibm speech stuff, it actually worked pretty well, too bad using voice commands actually sucks big time).

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:Nothing new or innovative really by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 1

      and speech input shouldn't be a part of the browser. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE THE BROWSER KEEP A MIC LINE OPEN.

      Google's still living in the late 90's world of "the browser will become the OS." Because you know: if you only have a hammer ...

      --
      If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
  7. Re:How generous of them. by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

    Seems to be lucrative enough; I think ive seen Wushi of team509 in the bounties just about every time. Seems hes making a decent amount of money off of this, esp if its a hobby-- this time around he netted $2500. There may be other folks who focus on this for the bounty, but his name stood out for some reason.

    All that aside, how much do you propose Google offer as a reward for what seems to be a weeks worth of hobby time? Isnt it enough that they offer something?

  8. Computer: by Ancantus · · Score: 1

    Computer: open slashdot.org Computer: read first article I think we have found a better User Interface replacement for Slashdot 3.0

    --
    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
  9. Nah, we won't secretly turn on the Microphone! by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 1, Insightful

    There's absolutely no way no way I tell you to use a hook for a specially delivered payload to turn that ol Microphone on when you didn't know it!

    1. Re:Nah, we won't secretly turn on the Microphone! by Sinthet · · Score: 1

      Recording audio at all times during web-browsing is clearly for your own good and required for Google to continue providing the best service possible for its users. I can see it now.

    2. Re:Nah, we won't secretly turn on the Microphone! by sincewhen · · Score: 1

      Also, even if Google are entirely trustworthy, is there absolutely zero chance that it could be subverted by malware?

      --
      -- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
  10. Re:Chrome sucks juice! by leamanc · · Score: 1

    No doubt...if programs would actually load themselves completely into RAM, you'd see an overall performance increase AND battery life would improve. It's apps that are constantly writing out to disk and hogging the CPU that drain battery life.

    --
    :q!
  11. Hello Computer by FrootLoops · · Score: 1

    Does it work like this yet?

  12. Bounty hunting steps. by w0mprat · · Score: 1

    1) Submit code under a fake identity to an open-source project that pays a bounty on security vulnerabilities. (Are any OSS contributors vetted?)
    2) "Discover" the flaw(s) in your code and report it.
    3) ???
    4) Profit

    --
    After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
    1. Re:Bounty hunting steps. by BZ · · Score: 1

      > Are any OSS contributors vetted?

      Not necessarily, but their code sure is, before it's included in the product!

  13. They're ignoring the largest bug by Posting=!Working · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did they fix the bug that makes the bookmarks suck? You know, the one that makes you choose between the incredibly clunky bookmarks sidebar or the waste of space that is a bookmarks toolbar.

    No?

    I'll wait for Chrome 12 and hope they've fixed it by then.

    Bookmarks are probably the best example of a drop down menu usage - a menu you occasionally want, and once you make a selection, it goes away.

    I've seen so many people try Chrome and delete it because of it's stubborn idiocy in handling one of the most commonly used functions in a web browser.

    --
    This sentence no verb.
    1. Re:They're ignoring the largest bug by strength_of_10_men · · Score: 1

      As someone who doesn't mind using a toolbar for bookmarks, I can't say that I really identify with your reasoning for not using chrome. But to each his own. But maybe this can get you over the hate: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nnancliccjabjjmipbpjkfbijifaainp#

  14. Still a shit browser by Snaller · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Are you sure you wanna leave this page?"

    Yes! Why the fuck can't I disable that crap?

    Shitty browser. And you still can't zoom the font size, only the whole damn page as an image.

    --
    If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
    1. Re:Still a shit browser by Asdanf · · Score: 1

      And you still can't zoom the font size, only the whole damn page as an image.

      Really? ctrl-+ is working fine for me.

    2. Re:Still a shit browser by PwnzerDragoon · · Score: 2

      Which scales the entire page, not just the text - exactly what he was complaining about.

    3. Re:Still a shit browser by Asdanf · · Score: 1

      Oh. He said "as an image", which is not the case and threw me off. Yes, it does scale the whole page, seemingly as if the developer had been a good person and specified their layout in ems instead of pixels. Seems like a really good feature to me.

    4. Re:Still a shit browser by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      you know the only way google could get a browser on the market that didn't have a one click disable for google ads..? exactly..

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:Still a shit browser by adolf · · Score: 1

      Seems like a good feature to me, too. Just about every browser behaves this way, these days.

      It's been awhile (long enough that I am perhaps showing my age), but IIRC some of the last useful versions of pre-AOL Netscape browser zoomed text alone, instead of text+images.

      This may have even lasted into the next iteration: I seem to recall a special method or add-on for early Mozilla or Firefox which added the ability for the browser to zoom both text and images at the same time. (I also seem to recall installing such an addon, and preferring it.)

      Perhaps the complaint is from a user from Way Back When.

      To the OP: Would you mind if I borrow your time machine?

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
    6. Re:Still a shit browser by bheer · · Score: 1

      > you still can't zoom the font size, only the whole damn page as an image.

      Indeed. That bug's been marked as WONTFIX for 2 years now.

      --
      Go somewhere random
    7. Re:Still a shit browser by dOxxx · · Score: 1

      There are still designers who size text as if everybody has perfect 20/20 or better eyesight. The images are fine, I just want to make the damn text bigger so I don't have to squint.

    8. Re:Still a shit browser by KiloByte · · Score: 1

      No usable AdBlock. No way to easily find all hidden ads and trackers. No way to sanely manage cookies. Slow like hell on slow machines (being faster without ads blocked doesn't mean shit to me). Crashing when the last tab is closed (with a "successful" return code). Self-DOSing once it sees several errors on a page in a row (ERR_TEMPORARILY_THROTTLED, currently "temporarily" fixed but they want to break this again).

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    9. Re:Still a shit browser by adolf · · Score: 1

      My eyesight is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20/300 on that scale. Corrective lenses (disposable contacts, in my case) work fine: I can see pixels on an iPhone 4 pretty plainly, despite what Steve Jobs might say about that. My vision has, pretty much, always been shit: I got glasses at around age 8, and contacts at 10. Perhaps I'm just lucky that my vision is usefully-correctable, but I digress:

      I run my PC displays at absurdly-high resolutions (1920x1200 on a 15.4" laptop at the most extreme), and always have. I've even spent my share of time tweaking Modelines in XFree86 to get a few more lines out of a good CRT while maintaining a reasonable refresh rate and video quality, often to the extent that I found myself banging against the abilities of the RAMDAC in the video card to produce a good, clean waveform at such frequencies.

      I wish I could afford a modern desktop display with higher DPI than the 20.3" 1600x1200 NEC IPS LCD before me, just so I could fit more pixels (and therefore more well-formed words) onto the screen.

      These days, I often find myself making things smaller, instead of bigger, in web browsers. And, frankly, I haven't found much desire to make things bigger in many, many years -- ever since Windows XP started doing a reasonable job of configuring display resolution out of the box, Web designers have tended to use more reasonable layouts.

      It used to be pretty bad, when Windows 98 would come up at 640x480 or 800x600 at default font size by default, even on a (then) big 17" monitor: Well-meaning designers/authors would shrink their font sizes on their pages to make the text and layout appear reasonable from the visual standpoint, just for themselves and without ever considering how it might look on a properly-configured display.

      I believe this is about the time that browsers grew zoom functions. :)

      But, as I said, that's been a lot better for a long time. Absurdly-small fonts still happen, to be sure, but so infrequently these days that I don't think about it much.

      No offense, but: Is there something wrong with your eyes?

      And meanwhile: Please check out Readability. I've got no relation to them, except that I've kept it on my Firefox toolbar for ages. AFAICT, it also works fine in Chrome. It turns horribly-designed web pages (hopefully with good information!) into completely-legible texts. I mostly use it to convert (the more modern trend of) pages that have light-grey text on a slightly-darker grey background into something other than mostly-invisible, but it also sanitizes font sizes/styles and (usually!) retains the important images in a page at a reasonable size.

      It is also useful to me, even with my corrected vision, when I am either very tired, very drunk, or both, even on well-designed layouts.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  15. Re:Chrome sucks juice! by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

    That's funny, because I am currently switching my users from FF to Dragon (Chromium based) as the latest FF seems to slam the CPU too much for my taste. All of my users and myself have plenty of RAM, but slamming the CPU isn't good, especially for the nettops and netbooks. Certainly a lot easier to add a RAM stick than to yank out the CPU on some of the lower end power sippers.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  16. chrome 11 - major version changes are a joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I have no idea how can google release a set of bugfixes and update the major version.

    And when are they going to:

    1. Allow stopping animated GIFs or make them play once. Makes my laptop drain much faster than firefox.
    2. Fix tonnes of memory leaks which make it eat 2GiG of RAM with only few tabs open. Makes my system crawl because it goes low on memory.

    You can search issues page to get more info on these issues.

    Every time I install chrome and use it, I end up uninstalling it.

    1. Re:chrome 11 - major version changes are a joke by icebraining · · Score: 1

      "A dozen"? Sometimes I have 50+ tabs open, and Firefox doesn't use more than 700MB.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
  17. Re:Riddle me this: by rwa2 · · Score: 1

    I dunno, Obama's actually been parading GE around as the model corporation, so the other corporations can learn to do things the same way. Maybe he has a lot invested in overseas stocks (I know I do :P )

    But really, the majority of the US budget is split roughly in half between defense and entitlements, which pretty much follows the model of the ancient Roman empire, where they pretty much used their military force to make the rest of the known world work to support Roman citizens. Living on welfare here still seems to beat the heck out of working in a developing nation. But the cost of living is too high, so no point in investing domestically.

  18. Re:How generous of them. by rta · · Score: 1

    I'd say that these amounts are little more than chump change. Google software developers cost google probably ~$150k - $300k fully loaded.

    From TFA "So far this year, Google has spent more than $77,000 on bug bounties."... so since we're about 1/4th through the year we're talking about 1/2 FTE for ~50-100 bugs that made it all the way through whatever QA and security engineering they already do. This $77k is negligible. It would probably cost them at least 10x that (and probably more like 50x ) to find all those in-house.

  19. Re:Chrome forces the use of tabs, thats a huge bug by Z34107 · · Score: 1

    Lots of people just love tabs in web browsers, but not everyone.

    I'll bet your mouse only has one button, too.

    --
    DATABASE WOW WOW
  20. See-through flash still a problem? by ldephil · · Score: 1

    Wonder if they have fixed their flash implementation so that it stops randomly turning that part of a web page into a window through to applications/windows behind Chrome.... This is my biggest problem with the browser on OS X, and I wish I could find a way to reproduce it reliably.

    1. Re:See-through flash still a problem? by Zebedeu · · Score: 1

      In Ubuntu, if I load a page in the background with a flash animation on it, I get a weird semi-transparent/screen corruption on the top left corner of whatever page I'm looking at, until I open the tab which contains the flash animation.
      Then it all goes back to normal.

      I've also had numerous instances of flash crashing every tab in the browser (but not the browser itself). I thought they'd found a way to sandbox the flash plugin, but apparently it's not perfect yet.
      This is Chromium, so it might differ from the Google version.

      I still love the browser, and you can't really blame the Chrome guys for the buggy POS that is flash, but those bugs are a bit annoying, and they've been there for a while now.

    2. Re:See-through flash still a problem? by Zebedeu · · Score: 1

      No, you can't, for the simple reason that they don't have access to the source code.
      No amount of integration is going to fix the fact that flash sucks.

      Besides, in Ubuntu 11.04 I got some "flash not found" errors and had to install the plugin separately. It might be that only Chrome has flash integrated and I'm using Chromium, or maybe the integration isn't working that well, but as far as I know, I'm currently using an external flash plugin.

      I'm using the chromium-stable repository, so it should be the latest version.

  21. Re:Chrome forces the use of tabs, thats a huge bug by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I love that Firefox can open links in both new tabs and windows. I also love that it's possible to move tabs between windows.
    Much more manageable to have 3+ windows with 10 tabs each instead of 1 window with 30+ tabs.

    Can chrome do this?

  22. Re:Chrome forces the use of tabs, thats a huge bug by BlueScreenO'Life · · Score: 1

    Yes.

  23. 11, only ? by alnicodon · · Score: 1

    Emacs is at 23, with 24 in beta... and comes bundled with a text editor and an operating system. Still some way to go, Google !

  24. the engine by stewartjm · · Score: 2

    I was wondering what speech recognition engine they were using. So I dug around a bit. At first glance, it appears they record some speech, convert it to flac, and then send the speech off to google servers to do the actual transcription.

    There are some interesting privacy implications for this new feature, if it is indeed sending all of your speech to a server.

    Does anyone have a clearer picture of how it works and/or what engine google is using?

    1. Re:the engine by stewartjm · · Score: 2

      To answer my own question, I found a post on ycombinator it looks like they are sending the speech server side for transcription.

  25. That's nice, but what about PRINT PREVIEW? by Alzheimers · · Score: 1

    Is this the version where they finally, FINALLY, implement Print Preview?

    1. Re:That's nice, but what about PRINT PREVIEW? by Shad0wFyr3 · · Score: 1

      I was able to use your link and in about 30 seconds find the following setting (write up here):

      Type about:flags into the omnibar. Click Enable under Print Preview.

  26. Re:How generous of them. by nschubach · · Score: 1

    Are you jealous that you didn't think of it and just hired some developer to sit on Slashdot all day long? /duck

    --
    Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  27. seriously chrome? by aahpandasrun · · Score: 1

    Speech input? Is anyone going to use this? Still no way to customize the address bar btw.

  28. Re:Chrome forces the use of tabs, thats a huge bug by VGPowerlord · · Score: 1

    Lots of people just love tabs in web browsers, but not everyone.

    I'll bet your mouse only has one button, too.

    I use a Mac, you insensitive clod!

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  29. Interpreted by the article: by DaVince21 · · Score: 1

    1 of the features of google translate that uses android mostest utility to listen to that accept just translated in audio form to play in audio version of translate text we use the speech synthesizer the computer algorithms that converts texting to speech today we apple on this new speech synthesizer voices

    This is the first paragraph from the article linked in the link, translated through me saying it in the mic.

    I must say, I didn't expect it to come up with Android and Apple when the original paragraph never contained those words.

    --
    I am not devoid of humor.
  30. Re:How generous of them. by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

    The bug hunters seem happy to do it. Why do you feel the need to be outraged on their behalf?