News

The article sites the inspiration from it's tablet email interface, but I notice that it looks a lot like Outlook, Thunderbird, or just about any other desktop email client. I happen to like the feature and have already turned it on.

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Preview Pane, which is now available in Gmail Labs, allows users to simultaneously preview parts of an email while reading or replying to others. Users of Gmail for iPad or Android will instantly recognize the interface — its design is directly inspired by the email service’s mobile web apps.

http://mashable.com/2011/08/04/gmail-preview-pane/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Does this really surprise anyone? More Android phones are activated every day than any other phone. That alone paints a huge bullseye on it for hackers. If you use an Android phone, you really need to be careful as to what applications you're installing...

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In the study, Dasient analyzed the live behavior of Android apps to determine their security posture. Of the 10,000 applications evaluated, more than 800 were found to be leaking personal data to an unauthorized server, Daswani says.

In addition, the researchers found that 11 of the applications were sending potentially unwanted SMS messages out to other smartphones--the mobile version of spam, Daswani says.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/231002162?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL

I haven't had a lot of time to post new news, but there's been some good stuff happening this week. So I figured I'd post a single news article with some interesting things that happened this week.

First, if you're a Netflix subscriber that has a plan using streaming and DVDs, you're probably pissed. Netflix split it's streaming and DVD plans into two separate billable items. Now, you'll have to pay $7.99 for each service totalling $15.98 for both at the base level. That's a significant hike from the $9.99 that was billed before. I'm in this group and I'm not thrilled with it, though I do understand that what Netlix has to pay more and more to license all of the selections. But I think they need a lot more selections to justify an increase this high. Everyone used social media to show just how pissed they were about the change. Hopefully, Netflix will reconsider. In the meantime, here's an article reviewing the alternative options:

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20079003-285/nine-netflix-alternatives/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

T-Mobile also launched their new caller ID feature. This would be awesome if it was free, but I don't think it's worth the $3.99/month they're asking for it. I think it's easier and cheaper to just let things to to voicemail and it it's important enough, they'll leave a message...

http://www.tmonews.com/2011/07/t-mobile-introduces-name-id-caller-id-for-everyone/

Google began testing the new Google + social media site. I haven't gotten an invite yet, so I guess I'll have to wait... Apparently, it's mostly dudes right now. That sucks. You'd figure since women are more social creatures by nature, that they would have jumped at the chance to try it. I suppose that if invites were given to a bunch of nerdy dudes, then there weren't going to be too many women that they knew who could get an invite.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20079285-71/google-its-a-man-thing/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

The Demo for "Catherine" became available on Xbox Live. I'm not one for puzzle games, but this was really an interesting game. It's certainly one of the most unique games I've seen in a long time. I'll likely get it when it comes down in price. I don't think I can justify $60 bucks on it.

http://majornelson.com/2011/07/12/demo-catherine/

So, there you have it. A weeks worth of news in one post. Hopefully, I'll get more time to keep up.

I've used Miro a long time ago for viewing free internet TV. It looks like their branching out. You can see the iTunes influence in the new application (a bit too much if you ask me). Evidently, it will sync media with your Android device. Which is one of the few things that Android hasn't accomplished on it's own yet. I used to own a Cliq XT from Motorola. Motorola had it own syncing software similar to this, but it could only be used with Motorola phones. Recently, Google unveiled it own cloud music storage solution which I imagine will sync with Android. It will be interesting to see which way consumers choose to go. Desktop apps or the cloud......

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"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro and the Miro Video Converter, a separate program that also comes baked into the standard Miro. "Millions and millions of people use iTunes and they do because they accept the restrictions, like with Internet Explorer. We see ourselves as the new Firefox." He also added that Miro has "around two million" monthly users.

Except for the lack of over-the-air synchronization, the new Miro is basically the old Miro plus DoubleTwist. If you haven't checked out Miro in a while, since Miro 3's redesigned interface the feature-heavy program has gotten much easier to use. It heavily resembles iTunes, with a left nav for navigating between your audio, video, connected devices, Amazon MP3 store, and Android marketplaces. The new right nav links to recently watched videos, recently songs played, and recent downloads, while the center of the program is where your media discovery and playback happen.

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20064507-12.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

According to Juniper Networks Android malware is up 400% since the summer of last year. That's pretty significant, but considering Android's growth in the market, not really suprising. Evidently, it's easy to develop malware for Android, and most people don't secure their devices with anti-virus (myself included). I just try and stick to one rule: don't download applications or visit websites unless they're reputable.

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The volume of attacks that target the Android mobile operating system has increased by 400% since the summer of 2010. Also in that timeframe, one in 20 enterprise mobile devices has gone missing.

Those two findings come from the "Mobile Malicious Threats" report released Tuesday by Juniper Networks, which sells networking hardware and security products.

While significant, the four-fold increase in malware targeting Android isn't unexpected. "You don't have to be extraordinarily smart to write mobile malware these days because most devices don't have any security tools to stop the malware," said Dan Hoffman, chief mobile security evangelist at Juniper Networks, in a telephone interview.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/229500572?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL

The Android Market seriously needed a redesign. There's way too many applications without an effecient way of sifting through all of the crap. Unfortunately, having a relatively open market leads to a lot of garbage getting through. I don't like that Apple has an extensive review process that keeps everyone kissing their ass, but it's kept nonsense from crowding the AppStore.

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The Web-based version of the Android Market is receiving five new categories to help sort through applications: Top Apps, Editor's Choice, Top Developers, Related Apps, and Trending Apps. Each presents apps in a different way to make the discovery process more compelling and less annoying. Despite these improvements to the Web interface, the more important story is being told on Android devices directly.

Google announced a significant refresh to the Web interface of the Android Market on Wednesday and plans to push out an update to the Market on Android devices in the coming weeks. The goal of the update is to increase the visibility of the best applications and give developers (more) credit for their hard work.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/mobile-apps/229500075?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL

If Google actually expects people to buy these things, they better make them a lot cheaper. Different models will range from around $350 to $500 bucks. Netbooks and laptops with more capability can be had for the same price. Google's own products are going to start cannibalizing one another. Who needs Android for phones, Android for tablets, AND Chrome OS. I don't think they're taking the right approach. If they want to do anything with Chrome OS, they should just make it a free download and allow folks to just install it on their own hardware.

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Samsung and Acer will each be offering the first Chromebook laptops starting June 15. The Samsung Chromebook will cost $429 for the Wi-Fi only version and the 3G version will cost $499. Acer's Wi-Fi only Chromebook will cost $349.

The devices will be available for sale in the U.S. from Amazon and Best Buy starting June 15.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20061896-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Google will be pushing new programming APIs into Android 3.0 to allow closer to hardware manipulation. The higher you get in abstraction, the slower the programs will be (to a point). This will allow developers to get closer to the hardware to make more high performance programs.

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he new interface, is called Renderscript, said R. Jason Sams, an Android performance and graphics programmer at Google. He didn't say so in so many words, but the goal for the feature has to be better games on Android. It's a broader feature, though: it's used in Honeycomb's YouTube and Books apps.

"The target audience is the set of developers looking to maximize the performance of their applications and are comfortable working closer to the metal to achieve this," Sams said in a blog post yesterday. "The target use is for performance-critical code segments where the needs exceed the abilities of the existing APIs."

To that end, Renderscript exposes two hardware-accelerated interfaces, one for rendering 3D graphics and one for for power-efficient computing operations. To use it, Renderscript relies on a variant of the C99 version of the C programming language. And the Renderscript plumbing that comes along with Honeycomb, aka Android 3.0, makes the decisions about whether to run the computing jobs on regular or graphics processors.

Sounds like a bit of OpenCL is thrown into the mix.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20031301-264.html

Google has released a new image format for the web. It is called "WebP" and it originates from the WebM video codec. It also looks worse than JPG images in the examples. I guess they need to work on the encoder a bit more.

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As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html

If I had to guess, I would suspect this would be a push to incorporate WebP decoders into smartphones and such to allow faster browsing... When that happens, Google's WebM video codec has an easy entry since the frames can be decoded by the WebP decoding hardware. Win-win for Google.

Google may be purchasing Valve (the game maker) primarily for its Steam DRM distribution system. Google is starting to branch out into all kinds of different areas. Maybe Google will start bringing more Linux games out natively, but I doubt it.

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That rationale makes some sense to me as well, in part because getting into the video game business in and of itself doesn't sound terribly well aligned with Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Steam is an online foundation for selling and distributing games, updating patches, enabling multiplayer online chat, and using digital rights management to control who has permission to use elements like game versions or game terrain. While a lot of that is specific to games today, I see no reason why it might not apply more broadly. Google, of course, likes to be the clearinghouse for online activity, and this could add some expertise. Steam Powered shows 448 games available now, and in February, Valve said Steam had 15 million account holders. But this is the more telling statistic: During peak hours, online activity crests at about 1.2 million users every day. That's clearly a lot of activity.

So, Google Chrome came out yesterday, and most people blindly flocked to it en masse. However, many began noticing a disturbing message written in the EULA that made it sound like anything you do with the browser is the property of Google.

Today, Google said that was a mistake.

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Google's new web browser Chrome is fast, shiny, and requires users to sign their very lives over to Google before they can use it. Today's Internet outrage du jour has been Chrome's EULA, which appears to give Google a nonexclusive right to display and distribute every bit of content transmitted through the browser. Now, Google tells Ars that it's a mistake, the EULA will be corrected, and the correction will be retroactive.

As noted by an attorney at Tap the Hive and various and sundry other sites, the Chrome EULA reads like a lot of Google's other EULAs. It requires users to "give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

Linky.

I dunno if I like the idea of a Google web browser, especially with the Feds constantly trying to get Google to turn over private information. I'm glad that they clarified what everything meant in the EULA, but it also seems to me like they still have that information regardless. I think I'll stick to using Google only as a search engine.

Get this one. Yahoo is looking to use Adsense for advertising. I guess they are admitting that their own network isn't good enough?

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Yahoo! Inc. , a leading global Internet company, announced today that it will begin a limited test of Google Inc.'s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo!'s own search results. The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!'s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries.

They should just use my new service: http://www.ase.cc

I don't mind people finding ASE Labs from Google (in fact I want that to happen). I have a problem when Google indexes my content and shows ads in its search on my site. Google shouldn't be doing this on a second site search after the main search. I'm not sure when to drawn the line on this.

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Donna L. Hoffman, co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing, at the University of California, Riverside, predicted that Internet users "will really like this because it's probably a better way to search a site than going to the sites themselves. " "But as consumers appreciate this more, there'll be more and more outcry from companies." Ms. Hoffman said. Consumers who see advertisements on Google when they search The Post's or The Times's content might view the ads as carrying the endorsement of those news publishers. "Why would I advertise on those other sites when I could just advertise on Google and piggyback on the equity of the other brands?" Ms. Hoffman said.

At CES, expect cool things. Here's a PR for Google's new gOS 2.0 "Rocket."

LOS ANGELES, California-January 3, 2008-Good OS, the open source startup that introduced gOS, a Linux operating system with Google and web applications, on a $199 Wal-Mart PC last November, today announced that gOS Rocket will debut Monday, January 7 at 11:30 a.m. at the exclusive press preview, Lunch@Piero's, during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and online at http://www.thinkgos.com. Rocket is packed with Google Gears, new online offline synchronization technology from Google that enables offline use of web apps; gBooth, a browser-based web cam application with special effects, integration with Facebook and other web services; shortcuts to launch Google Reader, Talk, and Finance on the desktop; an online storage drive powered by Box.net; and Virtual Desktops, an intuitive feature to easily group and move applications across multiple desktop spaces.

gOS Rocket introduces gBooth, the first of many web apps to come specially customized for gOS. gBooth is powered by gOS spin-off, meebooth, a browser-based web cam application that makes it fun and easy to capture photos, add special effects, and share across Facebook, YouTube and other web services. To introduce a gOS compatible web cam, gOS and meebooth partnered with leading web cam manufacturer Ezonics to create the "gCam," a web cam compatible with gOS and gBooth.
Next Page »

Google's new phone software will be called Android. Many carriers are on board already except AT&T and Verizon. Verizon just sucks since they treat their customers horribly. Don't buy phones from Verizon, always get unlocked phones.

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In essence, Google hopes to do to the mobile market what it has helped do for the traditional Internet, which is bring people closer to content on the Web in a easy and organized way. At the most basic level this means making Web surfing on a cell phone look and feel a lot like it does on a PC at home. But despite its lofty ambitions, Android faces many obstacles. For one, mobile operators must be willing to allow the new, open devices on their networks. Android also must compete with a long list of mobile operating systems already entrenched in the market.

The companies that Google is buying make it ripe for antitrust violations. I think they are getting to big for their own good. Even now they don't care about privacy.

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For its part, Google says it's confident that the threat to its business can be contained. "We're finding that the more we meet with policymakers, the more they are realizing that Google and DoubleClick are different types of companies, that we take significant steps to protect users' privacy, and that this acquisition will benefit both consumers and advertisers," said spokesman Adam Kovacevich. In addition to its full-time staff lobbyists, also involved in Google's efforts to fend off antitrust bureaucrats are four newly hired lobbyists in the Washington office of the law firm Brownstein Hyatt & Farber (including Makan Delrahim, a former top Justice Department antitrust official). Google's earlier hires include the now-renamed PodestaMattoon, which draws its name from longtime Democratic dealmaker Tony Podesta, and King and Spalding, home to former Republican Sens. Connie Mack and Dan Coats.

It turns out that Yahoo is having trouble against Google. Solution: Take over the world like Google.

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As expected, Yahoo posted disappointing second-quarter financial results on Tuesday and lowered its guidance for the remainder of the year. The company cited continuing slowed growth in display advertising and bigger-than-expected declines in search affiliate sales. As Google pulls further and further ahead in the ad market war, Yahoo executives keep promising big things. But so far, it appears, they're just promises, and vague ones at that.

Google has turned so evil that they are now patenting their WEBSITE USER INTERFACE! The fairytale is over and Google is evil. How can you patent a look and feel anymore? I thought there were court cases against this. I guess this shows the blatant stupidity of the USPTO.

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Distinguishing between the look and the function of an invention isn't always easy. But imagine that you're seeking a patent for a wine glass. If it's simply a combination of glass stem and bowl that has been done many times before, it would not be eligible for a patent. But if there is some sort of unique, fanciful etching on the glass, then it could theoretically be patented if that design feature is "inseparable from the article to which it is applied and cannot exist alone." The question of what makes a patent too obvious to merit protection, which the U.S. Supreme Court is currently mulling, applies to design patents as well as utility patents. The distinction with design patents is perhaps even more fuzzy, said Philip Mann, a Seattle-based patent attorney and author of the IP Litigation Blog.

Oops! Email from Google: Here's your worm. That will teach you to never trust email from any source.

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Three postings were made Tuesday evening to an e-mail list that sends out postings to the Google Video blog. "Some of these posts may have contained a virus called W32/Kapser.A@mm--a mass-mailing worm," Google said in a note on its Web site apologizing for the incident.

The primary reason that most people go to YouTube is now coming to an end. Google will start handing user data over for copyright violations. Now watch YouTube's traffic hit the bottom and move somewhere else.

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YouTube's actions in response to a subpoena it received in May show that it has been keeping tabs on users who post copyrighted material to its site -- and in one case shared the name of a user with lawyers from a Hollywood film studio. On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio's "Twin Towers," according to a copy of the document.

The place where teens and 40 year old FBI agents gather is going to use Google for search. Google has partnered with a piece of crap. Nice job Google.

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From October, MySpace users will be able to use Google to search for groups and friends through the site. Google will also provide text-based adverts triggered by keywords found on the websites. The deal ends speculation about which search engine would serve MySpace. Yahoo and MSN were also reported to have been in the running.

In yet another Google service that I refuse to use, Google now will be able to easily track your purchases. Everyone that thinks Google is this really good entity needs to take a better look at this publically owned company.

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Once they've purchased something through Google Checkout, consumers can track their orders through the system, which will be live starting Thursday at Checkout.google.com. Merchants using the system will be charged a processing fee of 20 cents per transaction, plus 2.2 percent of the relevant purchase price. Customers who pay for search-related keyword ads through Google AdWords will be able to process, free of charge, transactions that add up to 10 times the dollar amount of their AdWords spending, Kamangar said. Beyond that, they pay the 20 cents plus 2.2 percent. Kamangar said the regular transaction fees are less than those charged by credit card companies, which can be about 1 percent higher.

Censorship is wrong. Especially in communist countries.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.