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119 postsGoogle invests $300,000,000 in FASTER, an underwater cable that will connect Japan and the United States in order to make internet connections faster in Asia.
At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it’s for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform. And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean.
Google announces that sites that use HTTPS encryption will rank higher on search results than sites that use HTTP. This is done in an effort to make the internet more secure. They say the initial boost in search rank is small, but they hope to increase it in the future:
We’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.
A representative of General Motors says they are testing three pairs of Glass to see what uses it has in their manufacturing process. He says about a dozen employees have used Glass on the factory floor and they may expand the project in the future:
We’ve barely touched the frontier of what this type of technology can provide to manufacturing.
Google develops the technology to scan Gmail accounts for photos that show evidence of child abuse. The existence of the software is revealed by police when it leads to the arrest of a pedophile in Texas. Google says they have the right to scan emails sent using their server:
A person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.
Google sends a letter to European data regulators saying they find it too challenging to enforce the ‘right to be forgotten’ regulation a European Union court established. The ruling says that people should be able to request that inaccurate search results about them be removed from search engines. However, Google says in the letter that people often misrepresent their situation to get legitimate results removed:
Some requests turn out to have been made with false and inaccurate information. Even if requesters provide us with accurate information, they understandably may avoid presenting facts that are not in their favour.
Google sells a barge it placed in Portland Harbor in late 2013, which was intended to be a fun place for people to go and learn about Google services. A towing service takes the barge away to be dismantled for scrap. A spokesperson from the city of Portland expresses disappointment:
I was hoping for something to come from this. Everybody was waiting to see what was actually going on.
Bluebox Security releases a report that shows that Android’s application ID system does not properly check to make sure application IDs are legitimate. This makes it so that, for instance, a fake Google Wallet application could be created to steal people’s money:
Every Android application has its own unique identity, typically inherited from the corporate developer’s identity. The Bluebox Security research team, Bluebox Labs, recently discovered a new vulnerability in Android, which allows these identities to be copied and used for nefarious purposes.
A federal judge dismisses Google’s bid to dismiss a privacy lawsuit. The lawsuit arises when Google creates a unified policy to merge data from all of its services. The judge dismisses part of the lawsuit that involves users who switched to non-Android devices after the policy change:
Like Rocky rising from Apollo’s uppercut in the 14th round, plaintiffs’ complaint has sustained much damage but just manages to stand
Over a dozen homeowners in Kansas City, Missouri file complaints alleging that Google Fiber installation damaged their property. The complaints include damaged lawns, driveways, and utility lines. A Google spokeswoman says they try their best to leave people’s property in better condition than it is in when they arrive:
Our crews also take that extra step to make sure that’s done. There are several steps along the way that we undertake to make sure folks are happy, and hopefully through that, they see Google as a company that wants to take care of people.
However, she admits that sometimes minor damage occurs to lawns and gardens that takes time to fix:
There are times we have to replant grass or a tree or something, and when you replace vegetation, it’s not going to have the same luster as it would have had for a long time before that.
Google is making web pages load faster with a new image format called WebP, which shrinks the size of graphic files by 35%. So far, Google has changed the Google Play store and Chrome Web store to the new format, while Facebook, Netflix, and eBay have begun supporting it. At its I/O developers conference last month, Google announced that it has converted most of YouTube’s thumbnail images to WebP, improving the site’s load time by 10%. Google says that alone has saved users a cumulative 140,000 hours each day.
A Google employee shows an early version of a Chrome OS redesign called Athena on his Google+ page. The design features multiple windows, which departs from the “browser window” feel of Chrome OS before Athena.
https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/7cTeMNvCc4z
The European Comission announces that Google agrees to classify games that offer in-app purchases as paid instead of free, even if they do not require any payment upfront. This is done to comply with a European Commission guideline set to prevent children from accidentally making in-app purchases:
Google has decided on a number of changes. Implementation is underway and will be completed by the end of September 2014. These include not using the word “free” at all when games contain in-app purchases, developing targeted guidelines for its app developers to prevent direct exhortation to children as defined under EU law and time-framed measures to help monitor apparent breaches of EU consumer laws.
Google Chrome begins blocking downloads of the latest build of uTorrent. It says the file is “malicious” and Chrome has “blocked” it from being downloaded. Users can override this and download the file anyway, but Chrome displays a second warning:
This file will harm your computer. Even if you have downloaded files from this website before, the website may have been hacked. Instead of recovering this file you can retry the download later.
Google does not say why they block uTorrent.
Google partners with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to include methane sensors on its Street View cars in Boston, Staten Island, and Indianapolis. They use this data to create a publicly available map of the location and severity of natural gas leaks, which they hope will motivate cities to take action. EDF associate vice president Mark Brownstein releases a statement:
Until now, these smaller leaks have not been a priority in most places. Yet we can see from these maps just how much they can add up. By pulling vast amounts of information together in a place that offers simple, clickable visualization, the platform is going to be an important advocacy tool, one that helps shift resources to an area of historic underinvestment.
The Guardian obtains an internal FBI report that says Google’s prototype for driverless cars could be used to kill people remotely, possibly even by terrorists:
Autonomy … will make mobility more efficient, but will also open up greater possibilities for dual-use applications and ways for a car to be more of a potential lethal weapon that it is today.
Google partners with digital wallet Coinbase to bring instant Bitcoin conversions to search results. Users can convert between Bitcoin and other currencies by, for instance, typing “1 Bitcoin to USD” into the search bar. Coinbase says:
Now that Coinbase’s API is being used on Google, anyone who uses Google can see a graph of current and past bitcoin values compared to US dollars. They can also use Google’s currency converter to determine how many dollars equal how many bitcoin, and vice versa.
A French court rules that food critic Caroline Doudet must pay a fine of €1,500 ($2,000) because her negative review of a restaurant is too high on the Google search results and may affect business. She also must rename her post, The Place to Avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino, to something that is less likely to drive business away from the restaurant. The owner acknowledges that the complaints in the blog are possibly true but says her post causes unwarranted harm:
Maybe there were some errors in the service, that happens sometimes in the middle of August – I recognise that. But this article showed in the Google search results and did my business more and more harm, even though we have worked seven days a week for 15 years. I could not accept that.
Google street view images capture two robbery suspects from a 2011 crime. The images show the pair walking down the street prior to the burglary of a woman’s Oklahoma City home. A friend of the victim found the images and recognized the two men from the descriptions. The victim confirms it is them and recalls her experience with the thieves.
He actually sat at my dining room table and said ‘I think my karma is going to catch up with me’ and I just looked at him like yeah.
Police are asking for the public’s help to identify the suspects.
Google and Adobe work together to create the first open-source font family that works for Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, and Korean. This requires tens of thousands of characters to be drawn, because these languages have differences from one another and also regional variation even within the same language:
Google, in cooperation with our partner Adobe, has released a free, high-quality Pan-CJK font family: Noto Sans CJK. These fonts are intended to provide a richer and more beautiful reading experience to the East Asian community in many OSes and software applications.
Google releases a course called Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals on the e-learning platform Udacity. The course is aimed at people who are new to developing for Android but have some programming experience. It is taught by three Android developers, Reto Meier, Dan Galpin and Katherine Kuan, and features videos, quizzes, and forums.
