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Vietnam Rejects Google Claims Of Cybercrime
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.
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Google Buys Video Firm Episodic For Youtube
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.
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Google To Follow Bing With Cashback Feature
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.
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Google To Purge Index, Introduce “Super Caffeine”
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.
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Google Reports Yet Another Cyber Attack
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.”
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Google To Solve Android Fragmentation Through Selected Downloads
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.
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Google Says Technical Issue To Blame For Youtube Outage
After Wikipedia, it was YouTube that suffered a minor outage yesterday morning that lasted for around a couple of hours or so, leaving many users temporarily unable to access the video portal for that span of time.
The world’s largest online video sharing website presented a “service unavailable” message to the users who attempted accessing the site at around 1100 GMT. However, the service was resumed at 1230 GMT, according to reports.
Google has confirmed the outage, saying it was relating to technical glitches and no external tampering was involved in it. The search giant thereby allayed concerns that the outage was anywhere related to its move to stop censoring search results in China.
Quoting the same, a Google spokeswoman said: “YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved. We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.”
At the time of the outage, YouTube users were able to access the individual videos though, but the site’s homepage was flashing “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error message.
Furthermore, the sources claimed that it’s Google’s default policy not to discuss the technical reasons underlying any outage or crash. Access to Youtube has since returned to normal.
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Google Fined By Brazilian Court Over Orkut’s Dirty Jokes
Search engine giant Google has been served with a hefty fine by a Brazilian court in the state of Rondonia for inadequate monitoring of pages on its Orkut social networking service, which contained dirty jokes.
The court has asked the US based company to cough-up 2,700 dollars for each day the pages remained hosted on the social networking platform.
According to reports, the court rejected Google’s plea, which claimed that the company did not have the technical means or the manpower required to monitor every page on Orkut, which is highly popular in Brazil.
Orkut, which is owned and operated by Google, was developed by Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten and as of December 2009, almost 52 percent of Orkut’s users were based in Brazil with India and US having 20.02% and 17.28% respectively.
The lawsuit against Google was the result of a complaint made by two teenagers against Google, who claimed that the sleazy material hosted on Orkut’s pages had offended them.
The Brazilian court has explicitly ordered Google to block inappropriate content from Orkut as it had done in China, but did not mention Google’s tiff with China.
In related news, Google has put a stop on its China services and has started redirecting users to a Hong Kong based server which is offering uncensored search results for its users.
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UK Government Orders Google To Take Down SAS Images From Street View
Search engine giant Google’s controversial Street View service has earned itself a slap on the wrist by the UK government after it was discovered that the company had managed to take photographs of secret government establishments and posted them on the internet.
However, the company has now been ordered to remove some of the photographs as they breached the breached the Official Secrets Act, that prohibits ‘loitering, photography, sketching’ of secret intelligence buildings.
According to a report on the Daily Telegraph, Street View had posted quite a detailed collection of the secret British military and research buildings including the Special Air Services (SAS), Special Boat Services, Mi5 headquarters and other top-secret research locations and buildings.
Interestingly, all of the above mentioned buildings have put a warning sign outside there entrance, prohibiting photography or imaging of any kind. However, Google chose to photograph these secret buildings any ways, happily ignoring the laws of the country, in which it has a 95 percent share in the search engine market.
More importantly, several government representatives fear that the photographs posted on Street View, can be used by terrorists and other anti-social elements to plan violent and disruptive acts of terrorism.
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Google Launches Smart Rescheduler Tool For Calendar
Google, the company behind the popular Android OS platform, has dished out a new tool for its Google Calendar service, coined ‘Smart Rescheduler’.
This nifty service automatically reschedule meetings created by Google Calendar users by grabbing information from the schedules of the people involved in the meeting or event.
According to a blog post on the official Gmail Blog, the feature, which is now available for download from the Google Calendar Labs, will present users with a ranked list of best possible timings for the meeting to be rescheduled, by ‘investigating’ the Calendars of other members who have shared them with the meeting group.
Google explained that once the tool has been downloaded, in order to reschedule a meeting, all the user has to do is select a meeting and click the ‘Find a new time’ button. The tool has been devised after months of research and finding the best possible algorithm for automating the date finding process.
Commenting on the capabilities of the new Calendar tool, David Marmaros, Software Engineer, Gmail software engineer at Google, wrote on the blog that “Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby.”
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