Tag: Google

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Google plans New live streaming services

YouTube

YouTube will launch a live streaming service later this year, which will mean users will be able to create live feeds of events and broadcast them around the world.

The Google-owned site said lack of resources has stopped it offering the service to screen live footage previously, but it is something that will launch later in 2008.

Users will be able to film events and upload them directly onto YouTube. Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, said: “We’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google we hope to actually do it this year.”

source:pocket-lint

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Google’s New Product “Voice mail for Homeless”

 Google

The company’s philanthropic efforts right alongside its new technologies, including a plan called Project CARE to provide phone numbers to the homeless. Another piece of that plan came to fruition on Wednesday, when the mayor of San Francisco announced that Google would use GrandCentral to provide phone numbers and voicemail to homeless citizens across the entire city.

Since potential employers usually require telephone contact information, not having a home phone number can be a major barrier to employment for many homeless people, along with making them inaccessible to family, friends, social workers, health care providers. With Project CARE, those without home phone numbers will be able to visit homeless shelters and set up and accounts for free, receiving both a dedicated phone number and a voicemail account.

Google partnered with Project Homeless Connect to make the program happen. Although only San Francisco homeless shelters are currently able to set up accounts, the company eventually hopes to push the service nationwide.

Hop all world will get this facility soon.

source:digitaltrends 

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Google with Web site publishing service

Google Sites

Google Inc said on Wednesday it is offering a simple Web site publishing tool for office workers to set up and run their team collaboration sites, taking aim at Microsoft Corp’s rival SharePoint franchise.

Google Sites, as the new site publishing service is known, is a scaled back version of JotSpot, an easy-to-edit service for organizations and individuals to set up and edit Web sites that Google had acquired 16 months ago for undisclosed terms.

The new service, the latest stage in the Internet leader’s push into the market for business and educational users, allows non-technical users to organize and share digital information such as Web links, calendars, photos, videos, presentations, attachments and other documents in an easy-to-maintain site.

Google Sites is a stripped-down version of Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software, which lets users inside an organization share documents and maintain calendars on secure Web sites, but is far more complex to set up and maintain.

Unlike SharePoint, which typically requires organizations to buy and maintain their own hardware and software at costs that can run from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve one hundred users, Google Sites is hosted on Google computers and is free to users of Google Apps, which the company offers at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft tools.

source:reuters

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Google Ads Traffic Dropping?

G-Ads

A report by Internet market researcher ComScore detailing a 7 percent decline in the number of times U.S. consumers clicked on ads next to Google search results in January sent analysts scurrying to explain the decline.

Some analysts say the decline, the second straight for Google, shows that business on the Web is slowing down.

But rival Internet number cruncher Hitwise says there may indeed be no problem at all, and pointed to different data to support the idea that the amount of Web traffic going from Google to retail sites continues to rise.

“Google traffic to retail, on a monthly basis, is on the increase compared to previous years. If we focus in on daily data (year-over-year comparison) we see that Google traffic to retail is also up on a daily basis when we compare January/February 2007 with 2008,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, in a blog posting.

source:pcworld

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Google Scan Password Hunter Hacking Tool

G-hack-tool

The hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) this week released a tool that turns Google into an automated vulnerability scanner, scouring websites for sensitive information such as passwords or server vulnerabilities.

CDC first achieved notoriety ten years ago with its backdoor Back Orifice, which demonstrated in a highly public way just how easy it was to take unauthorized control of a Windows PC.

The new tool, called Goolag Scan, is equally provocative, making it easy for unskilled users to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on specific websites or broad web domains.

This capability should serve as a wake-up call for system administrators to run the tool on their own sites before attackers get around to it, according to CDC.

The tool is a stand-alone Windows .Net application, licensed under the open source GNU General Public License, that provides about 1,500 customized searches under categories such as “vulnerable servers,” “sensitive online shopping information” and “files containing juicy information.”

The results are displayed as a list of links that can be opened directly in a browser. Example results include tell-tale error messages and Java applets for the remote control of surveillance cameras, according to CDC.

Goolag Scan is based on “Google hacking,” the practice of exposing vulnerabilities via Google, which CDC says has been pioneered by a hacker going by the handle “Johnny I Hack Stuff.”

Goolag Scan is, however, the first time such vulnerability searches have been built into a simple tool, according to CDC.

source:pcworld 

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Google Updates Mobile Phone OS Android SDK

Android

It’s the Google’s first update since the SDK was released in November and includes changes requested by developers.

Google highlighted a couple of changes in the updated SDK, which was released midweek. It has a new user interface that the search giant said is still a work in progress.

In addition, developers can now support additional file formats in the Android media player. Also, applications can translate an address into a coordinate and the reverse, in location-based programs.

Even though developers said that the first version of the SDK was thin, Android has managed to gain momentum. Four chip makers, including Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, showed off prototypes that support Android this week in Barcelona at the annual Mobile World Congress.

Still, Android faces competition from the established mobile operating systems as well as companies that have rallied behind LiMo, the consortium that is developing an open Linux mobile operating system. At the conference in Barcelona, LiMo announced 18 phones that comply with the operating-system specification that are either on the market already or will be.

source:pcworld 

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The Web Is Scarier Than Most People Realize- Google

Hacker

The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.

The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.

These Web-based attacks, called “drive-by downloads” by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.

In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.

Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim’s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim’s PC. “The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,” said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.

In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.

Google’s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. “You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,” he said.

But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. “I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,” for the problem to go away, he said.

source:pcworld 

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Demonstrate prototype Google Android phone

Andriod

Google’s Android software platform for mobile phones is coming to life in Barcelona, with a number of chip manufacturers showing it running on prototype or proof-of-concept phones at the Mobile World Congress today.

Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year.

The device will also allow for the integration of different applications, a capability mostly limited to desktop computers. For example, a real-estate agent could combine information from its database with mapping software to let customers easily locate properties on the go, TI said.

The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.

Google had said on Friday that while a number of companies would demonstrate Android products at the wireless trade show, the prototypes would give no real indication of the actual devices customers would ultimately be able to buy.

source:pcworld 

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Microsoft,Google, IBM, Yahoo, VeriSign all in OpenID board

openID

At the beginning of 2006, there were less than 500 websites where OpenID could be used. Today there are well over 10,000, according to the Foundation.”OpenID has grown to be implemented by major open source projects such as Drupal, cornerstone Web 2.0 services such as those by 37signals and Six Apart, as well as a mix of large companies including as Apple, Google, and Yahoo!,” it said.

The move follows Yahoo! last month announcing that its accountholders would be able to use any web site supporting OpenID without creating a separate username and password. A year ago, Microsoft pledged to integrate OpenID 2.0 with the CardSpace identity management systems developed in conjunction with Windows Vista.

According to Technology Business Research, these heavies joining the board will accelerate the secure us of the Internet for commerce, communication, and social networking and go well beyond a one-size-fits-all user ID.  “TBR believes the major corporations that joined the OpenID Foundation board today will help OpenID address problems of security, provider trustworthiness, and user education. Eventually, there will develop a somewhat more complex identity environment than the single sign-on that the creators of OpenID first envisioned, one in which uses have several IDs, tailored to their business and social needs.”

While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building. However the Foundation claimed that “By bringing on these companies and their resources, the OpenID Foundation will now be able to better serve the needs of  the entire OpenID community. In 2008, we can expect to see a larger focus on making OpenID even more accessible to a mainstream audience, the development of a World-wide trademark usage policy (much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla have done), and a larger international focus on working with the OpenID communities in Asia and Europe.”

TBR said that such a multi-tiered ID scheme would “make it easy for the website provider to screen users without the burden of verification. In addition, an easy way to implement a user identification system makes it easier for providers to monetise their websites by blocking – or removing – content for anonymous users. Many providers have been unable to monetise their content due to the low willingness of users to register for every little website. With an easy-to-use and open system, every website could require a login.”

source:itwire

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‘Google Apps Team’ Edition Released

Google-app

Google has done it again! The world’s most popular company has released another free program suit which could directly impact Microsoft’s balance sheet. The Team Edition software is an answer to Microsoft’s money minting Office suit, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and calendar programs. One of the major benefit of Google’s program is that it lets people in the same organization to share documents and information over internet.

But Team Edition has very special feature, that it’s easier for groups within established organizations (colleges, offices, universities, business, etc.). It will help to Collaborate without getting their entire organization to buy into Google Apps.

Some main features –

* Work on the same document together, instead of sorting out changes in attachments
* Share documents and calendars securely with your co-workers with a click
* Access it all from any computer, and even from mobile phones
* Invite other team members to join and share with you

Google Docs – Create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Google Calendar – Arrange meetings, set schedules, and publish event information.
Google Talk – Instant message with co-workers and make PC-to-PC voice calls for free.
Start Page – Preview your calendar and docs, add gadgets and search the web from one place.

 source:techcrunch