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.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

In an attempt to address one of the soaring concerns pertaining to the reliability of cloud computing services, Google has beefed up the security capability of its email service Gmail with the incorporation of an ‘intruder alarm’ that provides information about bizarre account activities.

The newly integrated warning system boasts of the capability to notify users when some unusual activity happens with their account that may eventually end up with potential hacking attacks.

However, since back in July 2008, Gmail has incorporated a link named “Last account activity”, which provides important info, like when the account was last opened, along with the internet addressed used.

Apparently, with this new feature, Google is further taking the aforementioned feature a step ahead, to help the users have information about any existing potential threat to their email accounts.

Describing the new functionality, the official Gmail blog reads: “If it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we’ll also alert you by posting a warning message saying, “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…” along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access”.

The sweet irony of course is that this feature is being added a few months after Google revealed that the Gmail accounts of some of its Chinese users had been compromised by hackers, something that could have triggered this new intruder alarm.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine behemoth Google has been lambasted from a section of its own Chinese web users, who have started boycotting the search engine and switched their allegiance to rival Baidu.

This comes after Google has been criticised by the Chinese government for moving its base to Hong Kong in order to defy Chinese internet censorship laws.

The BBC reported that Chinese internet forum website Sina.com is overflowing with angry remarks from people, who were once avid Google users, criticising the highly politicised move. The comments posted on the web site include “Google, out of China” and “Go away, we have Baidu”.

However, the company has turned a deaf ear to the outrage of its Chinese users and has assured that it will continue to fulfil its existing contractual obligations.

Meanwhile, TOM Online, the popular internet and mobile phone company based in Hong Kong, has announced that it will refrain from using Google’s service in the future.

According to BBC journalist Jasmin Gu, who is presently based in China, said in a statement that “I think Chinese people are offended by Google’s action. It has aroused nationalistic fervour. Many people choose to stop using Google and support Chinese search engine Baidu.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

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.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Google plays such a big role in the lives of millions that it would be hard to imagine how to cope without one of the most pervasive technology firms in the world.

Yet for millions of Google users in China, losing Google may be a looming threat despite the fact that the combined traffic to Google.com and Google.cn rivals the two biggest sites in China, QQ.com and Baidu.com.

Google.com will still be available it seems although quite a few services including Google sites, Youtube and Blogger will be totally blocked while the likes of Picasa, Docs and Groups will be “partially blocked”.

Only search, images, news, ads and Gmail are unblocked and even then, the first three are likely to be censored. Yet HufPo points out an interesting fact, that Google moved its servers to Hong Kong, the territory that Britain returned to … China back in 1997.

Could China and Google have mutually accepted to allow each other to save face and their oversized ego? Google pulls out of mainland China thereby showing that it is still sticking to its “do good, be good, don’t be evil” motto.

China on the other hand can put forward that Google is outside mainland China and decide not to censor or block the search engine services. Google will be the bigger loser of the two because the Chinese market is essential for the growth of the company.

The country will have more than 300 million internet users soon and this is set to explode as smartphones, many based on Google’s own Android platform, will flourish over the next few months.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

The Chinese government has expressed its disappointment over Google’s decision to start providing uncensored search results to its users in China by redirecting them to their servers in Hong Kong.

Calling it an attempt to politicise a commercial issue, China said that the company is ‘totally wrong’ in its move to lift the censors from its search results and criticised it for breaking a written promise made by the company when it had first entered the Chinese market.

Representatives of the Chinese government said that Google’s move to close its China operations was an ‘isolated act’ by a multinational corporation, which should not affect ties between China and US.

Earlier, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, had explicitly condemned China’s strict internet censorship laws and had vowed to rally for the freedom of information over the internet.

Google, however, seems oblivious to the criticism from the Chinese government and has happily announced the initiation of its censorship-free Hong Kong website.

Announcing the move, the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement that “We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Search engine giant Google has shut down its Google.cn website and has started redirecting users to a server in Hongkong, offering users uncensored search results, much to the disappointment and anger of the Chinese government.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has decided to strengthen its position in the Chinese market in the absence of Google and released a statement.

In it, the software giant assured Chinese users that it will continue to offer its services in the country and will adhere to the laws of the nation, but will also advocate for freedom of information over the internet when the need for it arises.

The company made it clear that it no plans to follow Google out of China and added that “We believe engagement in global markets is important, as an open and healthy Internet involves not only access to information, but access to network connectivity.”

The move by Google has not come down well with the Chinese government, as it was ‘shocked’ by the antics of the company and has criticised it for violating written promises it had made when entering the Chinese market a few years back.

Google was also accused of expanding a commercial issue into a political one, with other governments criticising China over its censorship policies.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

The ongoing tussle between Google and Chinese Government over the web search censorship issue gain in intensity on Monday, with the search engine behemoth decided to cease search filtering by re-routing the Chinese traffic to its uncensored servers in Hong Kong.

This blatant move from the US-based search company in fact would thrash the Chinese Government’s attempts to control online search in the country, and henceforth could result in the search giant being frozen out altogether in the Chinese market.

Google has been threatening to pull out of the market that has the largest number of internet users, due to the continuous pressure from the state for web search filtering.

Eventually, the search giant has taken a bold move by shutting down its China-based website and redirecting traffic to servers in Hong Kong; one which wouldn’t substantially affect its bottom line.

Chinese authorities slammed the move by Google, and alleged that the company has reneged on the written promise it made about web search filtering while entering the Chinese authorities. However, Google, in response to the Chinese Government’s reaction, said that the move is ‘entirely legal’.

Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, wrote in a blog post: “It’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

In a bid to spruce up the capabilities of its Chrome web browser, Google has come up with a novel project for it that will enable the browser to run a wide range of 3D graphics without forcing the users to download additional drivers.

The new open source project, dubbed as ‘Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine’, or simply ‘ANGLE’, aims at allowing the web browser to run the WebGL content on Windows systems, as quoted by Henry Bridge, product manager, on the Chromium blog.

WebGL standard, which is put forth by Mozilla Foundation and the Khronos Group around a year ago, is a cross-platform browser-based web standard that is still in its developmental phase.

The WebGL standard has been laid down for accessing 3D graphics utilising the OpenGLES 2.0 API that can be put through by the browser directly without requiring the plug-in.

Earlier, OpenGL standard – an API for 2D and 3D graphics rendering – emerged as a significant competitor to Microsoft’s Direct3D API, which is part of the company’s DirectX technologies.

Mentioning the same, Bridge pointed out: “Unfortunately, this situation means that even if they have powerful graphics hardware, many Windows machines can’t render WebGL content because they don’t have the necessary OpenGL drivers installed.”

Originally published on ITProPortal.com

Apparently adhering to its popular “be no evil” motto, the search behemoth Google is working on a plug-in for its signature web analytics service that will enable users to opt out of being tracked by the service, it has been emerged.

Amy Chang, group product manager for Google Analytics, asserted that the engineers at Google have been working on “finalising and testing” the plug-in tool designed to allow users to safeguard their privacy on the web.

Citing the same, Chang quoted in a blog post: “As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy”.

She further went on to say that the web search company has been rigorously working on finding ways to offer users more choices on how their info is gathered by Goggle Analytics service.

Expected to be available to users worldwide in the coming few weeks, the new plug-in tool could be seen as Google’s response to surging concerns over grumblings that the company has increasingly been infringing on users’ privacy.

Incidentally, a Harvard Law School student has recently filed a class action legal suit against Google accusing that its new social networking service, Buzz, breached her privacy.

Originally published on ITProPortal.com