The government of Vietnam has refused to acknowledge the ‘groundless’ accusations made by Google’s Neel Mehta and McAfee Chief Technical Officer George Kurtz.

They had both hinted that the government was involved in cyber attacks on blogs and websites belonging to protesters of a controversial mining project in the country.

The blog post made by Neel Mehta, who is a member of Google’s security team, suggested that the Vietnamese government had used a malware, in the form a Vietnamese language keyboard driver, which was then used to hack into the websites and systems of unsuspecting activists.

However, the Vietnamese government broke its silence by declaring that the claims made by Google and McAfee were baseless.

Commenting on the allegation made by the companies, Nguyen Phuong Nga, a government spokesperson said in a statement that “We have on many occasions clearly expounded our view on issues relating to access to and use of information and information technology, including the Internet.”

Interestingly, the Vietnamese cyber attacks were discovered by the two companies during their investigation into last years sophisticated cyber attack on Google which was said to be originated from China. The attack had prompted Google to pack its bags and leave the country for good.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

In an attempt to widen its hold on the online video market, search engine giant Google has acquired online video platform Episodic, which will be merged with Google’s popular YouTube video service, to provide better services to its users.

Episodic, which announced the acquisition on its official blog, is a US based online video platform used for broadcasting live and on-demand video to the web or any web-enabled device, which was started by Noam Lovinsky and Matias Cudich.

According to the blog post made by the start-up’s co-founders, the company was in talks with Google for a while before agreeing on the terms of acquisition and will work together with the company in order to merge Episodic’s technology with that of YouTube for delivering an innovative video platform.

The acquisition will see Episodic staff members joining Google offices from next week and will not affect the quality of services being offered to existing customers.

However, the company has stopped taking in new customers, but has allowed them to register themselves with the website so that they can be contacted once the acquisition process is over.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google is set to emulate Microsoft’s trial two years ago of a cashback offering that will allow people to earn tax-free money simply by purchasing products listed in Google Shopping (formerly known as Froggle), from any of the partners listed.

According to plans drawn up following the arrival of the former Microsoft VP of Web Business Development, Scott McPherson, Google will offer up to five percent cashback on some purchases.

Users will get the money through their Google Checkout account directly in the same way as millions do through Google Adsense. They will also be able to access a dashboard that will show them how much they made and what are the latest deal.

Shares of major affiliates companies such as Affiliates4U, Tradedoubler and Webgain fell significantly on the news as it is understood that the worldwide roll out of the scheme could literally put them out of business.

A source at Google said that for years now, Google wanted to launch such a solution but it was under the impulse of McPherson that the project finally turned from a pet project to a fully fledge Google major.

Google did not reveal any specific time window other than sometimes in Q3 2010. It has not said whether this new cashback feature will be somehow tied with the Google Comparison that was trialled in the UK at the beginning of the year.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search giant Google is on the verge of cleaning its giant index and is set to introduce a new version of its algorithm called “Super Caffeine” (more about Caffeine here).

According to snippets of information gathered from sources at Google UK’s HQ in London, a “significant portion” of the 10 billion or so pages will be downgraded because they are either no “longer relevant” or because they are considered as “potentially harmful”.

Rather than deleting them, Google will apparently move them to a secondary index and will push them completely down the queue in search engine results page.

Simultaneously, Google will proceed to a crackdown on so-called scrapper websites that generates millions of near-useless pages.

Bizarrely, we heard that some price comparison websites or sites that only rely on third party feeds could be affected by this.

Our Google sources showed us a SERP using the old algorithm and the new one side by side and there is a significant difference for a search on Intel Q8300 reviews.

Gone are the endless pages that promise reviews without actually delivering them. There were a lot less pages (roughly half the original number) but at least they were pertinent.

Apparently, the search giant is responding to the growing threat of Microsoft’s Bing and will focus on quality rather than quantity.

We’ve been told that it is all part of making Google much better and to a certain extent, going back to its roots.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine giant Google has upgraded its Google Message Security tool, an email filtering feature based on pre-set policies and secures email systems against spam and virus. The update includes two new features, namely, Dual Delivery and Health Check.

According to a blog post on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Postini team member Gopal Shah, explained that the new Dual Delivery will allow organisations to send an email message to two different platforms, which will make it easier for them to shift to a different platform if they want to.

The company also reported on the blog post that the new Health Check feature will allow email admins to beef-up the security of the email systems, by maximising the effectiveness of its spam filter.

Citing it has a ‘self-service tune-up’, Google explained that the Health Check feature will allow admins to view ‘health’ report related to the impact of their current security configuration on the level of spam and viruses.

Commenting on the Google Message Security client, which is based on Postini technology, Gopal Shah wrote on the blog that “Google Postini security services work in the cloud to help prevent spam and viruses before they hit your servers. These services also make it easy for admins to fine-tune filtering options to get the right level of protection.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google China users were faced with error messages when they tried accessing the site for queries in what has been touted as the Beijing’s rejoinder to Google’s last week blatant move in which the search company leave the country over Chinese web censorship rules.

The search giant said earlier in the day that its search engine fell foul to a technical glitch, but later on it claimed that “the Great Firewall of China” was to blame for the outage.

A Google spokesman said it was still not clear whether the search engine had been blocked intentionally, or due to a technical glitch in China. However, Google said that its search site is now up and running, and that it is still probing into the matter.

This issue actually pivots around a set of letters in its coding that carried the letters “rfa”, which the search company thinks were mistaken for “Radio Free Asia”, a non-profit media company banned in China, by the Chinese filters.

The company believed that by adding those characters into the coding, the search site ran into filters, which eventually resulted into service outage.

However, since the coding was done around a week ago, it didn’t seem to be explicitly related to that issue, according to the company. “So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the great firewall”, a Google spokesman said.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

According to a recent research conducted by Google, a new cyber-attack, somewhat similar to the one that targeted the search giant, has been reported.

It was implemented with the intention of hacking into the computers of critics of a Vietnam-based mining project.

In a post on the official Google online security, Neel Mehta, member of the security team, wrote that in order to a hack into the computers of the activists protesting against the mines, cyber criminals infected ‘potentially tens of thousands of computers’ belonging to Vietnamese speaking people around the globe.

Mr. Mehta explained on the blog that the hackers had used the infected machines in order to spy on their owners and target blogs which criticised the Vietnamese mining project, that was backed by the People’s Republic of China.

Google also reported that the malware used to infect the computers wasn’t a sophisticated one, but was nonetheless harmful.

Meanwhile, internet security company McAfee, confirming Google’s findings, reported that the cyber criminals, who mounted the attacks, may have been working for the government of Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

McAfee’s reported declared that “This incident underscores that not every attack is motivated by data theft or money. This is likely the latest example of hacktivism and politically motivated cyberattacks, which are on the rise.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google and Adobe will be soon joining hands in order to make Chrome browser and Chrome OS more compatible with Adobe’s popular multimedia platform, Flash, which is widely used for adding videos and animation to websites.

Industry experts believe that this move will further fuel the ongoing war between Google and Apple, which has openly opposed Adobe’s Flash in the past and has even refrained from making its iPad tablet device compatible with Adobe’s software as it feels that it is full of holes and vulnerabilities.

Commenting on the search engine giants move, Sundar Pichai, Google vice president of product management, said in a statement that “This initiative supports our common goal to move the Web forward as a platform and to spur innovation in the industry through technology such as Adobe Flash.”

Technology website ZDNet has reported that in the coming weeks, Google will release an Adobe Flash plug-in for its Chrome Web browser and will start working towards integrating Flash with its much awaited Chrome OS.

Google, the company behind the Android OS, has been a long standing supporter of Flash as the company’s popular video sharing website YouTube runs on Flash and it is also a member of the Open Screen Project, which strives to promote Flash as the ideal platform for creating media rich web content.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Technology blog Endgadget has reported that Google is planning to end the fragmentation problem faced by its Android mobile OS by making its core features downloadable so that Android device users are able to access them on time.

As of now, there are 20 Android based smartphones in the market, which feature different versions of the operating system, based on what the service providers have to offer. This has resulted in some Android users having old versions of the popular device.

Quoting people familiar with the matter, the article on Endgadget reported that Google will begin separating core Android applications and features from the main OS, allowing users to equip their old Android OS with new features.

However, it is still not clear how the company plans to offer rest of the updates to users, as updates for apps will only update the specific apps and not the whole OS.

Interestingly, Google’s Android OS, due to being open source, has been modified several times in order to make it compatible with various devices such as eBook readers and tablets.

Google is expected to begin the process of individually updating Android app with the launch of the next version of Android OS, which is code-named Froyo.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine giant Google has confirmed that its mobile service operations in China have been partially blocked by the government, after it defied its wishes of running a censored search service and shifted its core backend to Hong Kong.

The company confirmed the disruption in its mobile services on its China status page which was set-up specially by the company in order to keep its users updated about the on-going struggle it had with the Chinese government.

Reports confirmed that popular Google services like Maps, search and News were inaccessible from China Mobile’s GPRS connection, which is used by millions of Chinese mobile phone users. Other Google services include Google Groups, Docs and Picasa while YouTube and Blogger continue to be blocked by the country.

A Google spokeswoman, commenting on the present state of affairs, said in a statement that “We can confirm that our status page indicates that mobile services are partially blocked from within mainland China.”

Google’s move to defy the Chinese government had left Chinese users and government officials shocked as both parties condemned the company’s actions and with many referring to it as a “highly politicised decision”.

The most popular web portal in Hong Kong, Tom Online, has announced that the company will discontinue from using Google’s search services while popular mobile services provider China Unicom has said that it will not include Google search in its mobile phones.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com