Creepy reality: Google reveals it is developing a computer so smart it can program ITSELF. Google's secretive artificial intelligence researchers have revealed a computer that they hope will one day be able to program itself. Developers at Google's secretive DeepMind start-up, which it bought for $400 million earlier this year, are attempting to mimic some of the properties of the human brain's short-term working memory. By combining the way ordinary computers work with the way the human brain works, the researchers hope the machine will learn to program itself.
Described as a 'Neural Turing Machine', it can learns as it stores memories, and later retrieve them to perform logical tasks beyond those it has been trained to do.'We have introduced the Neural Turing Machine, a neural network architecture that takes inspiration from both models of biological working memory and the design of digital computers,' the researchers wrote. The California-based group has teamed up with leading physicist John Martinis to build processors based on quantum theories.
An update on our war against account hijackers. Have you ever gotten a plea to wire money to a friend stranded at an international airport? An oddly written message from someone you haven’t heard from in ages? Compared to five years ago, more scams, illegal, fraudulent or spammy messages today come from someone you know. Although spam filters have become very powerful—in Gmail, less than 1 percent of spam emails make it into an inbox—these unwanted messages are much more likely to make it through if they come from someone you’ve been in contact with before.
As a result, in 2010 spammers started changing their tactics—and we saw a large increase in fraudulent mail sent from Google Accounts. Spammers’ new trick—hijacking accounts To improve their chances of beating a spam filter by sending you spam from your contact’s account, the spammer first has to break into that account. With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services.
Research Publication: Spanner. Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database James C. Corbett, Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, Andrey Gubarev, Christopher Heiser, Peter Hochschild, Wilson Hsieh, Sebastian Kanthak, Eugene Kogan, Hongyi Li, Alexander Lloyd, Sergey Melnik, David Mwaura, David Nagle, Sean Quinlan, Rajesh Rao, Lindsay Rolig, Yasushi Saito, Michal Szymaniak, Christopher Taylor, Ruth Wang, and Dale Woodford Abstract Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty.
Published in the Proceedings of OSDI'12: Tenth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, Hollywood, CA, October, 2012. Replication on OSDI '12. With Google Fiber, Search Giant Issues Public Challenge: Get Up To Speed! Six years ago this month, Google moved into one of the largest buildings in New York City. Google had only been public for two years and its stock price was soaring. By 2006, speculation was running rampant about Google’s ultimate goals. In addition to building the world’s largest Internet search engine, Google was furiously buying up so-called “dark fiber,” the unused long-haul underground cable left dormant by the dot-com crash. When Google moved into 111 Eighth Avenue, the former Port Authority building, New York took notice because that giant facility is one of the most important “telecom carrier hotels” on the East Coast.
A “telecom carrier hotel” or colocation center, is a major physical network node that allows tech and telecom firms to share space in proximity to improve network service and speed. (MORE: The 12 Best Android Widgets for 2012) So why was Google buying up all that “dark fiber” and situating itself on top of key points in the nation’s telecommunications grid? November ISP Rankings for the USA. Our 30 million members view over 1 billion hours of Netflix per month, so we have very reliable data for consumers to compare ISPs in terms of real world performance. Starting today, we’ll publish monthly rankings of major ISPs based upon their actual performance across all Netflix streams.
Google Fiber is now the most consistently fast ISP in America, according to actual user experience on Netflix streams in November. Broadly, cable shows better than DSL. AT&T U-verse, which is a hybrid fiber-DSL service, shows quite poorly compared to Verizon Fios, which is pure fiber. Charter moved down two positions since October. Verizon mobile has 40% higher performance than AT&T mobile. The average performance is well below the peak performance due to a variety of factors including home Wi-Fi, a variety of devices, and a variety of encodes. -Ken Ken Florance is Vice President of Content Delivery at Netflix. Google Fiber Installations Have Begun in Kansas City.
After much fanfare and holding of breath, Google has finally started to connect the general public of Kansas City to Google Fiber. That means that homes can finally get in on those sweet pricing plans, which includes a tier of free Internet with a one-time construction fee. The first area to receive installations appears to be Hanover Heights, but all the neighborhoods receiving Google Fiber can rejoice as their time will come shortly. Kansas City’s never been such a tempting locale. Good Guy Google explains how they’re going to make the entire process as friendly as possible: We’ve found that the difference between dreading an installation and feeling like you had a good experience comes down to us caring about the details that matter the most to you.
For example, we’ll show up when we’re supposed to—at the start of your appointment, not somewhere in the middle. That all just sounds marvelous, and almost too good to be true. (via Google) Relevant to your interests. Your Facebook Comments, Coming Soon to a Google Search Near You. Mind what you say in Facebook comments, Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results.
Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on a other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google. The new indexing plan isn’t just about Facebook comments, but applies to nearly any content that’s previously been accessible only through an HTTP POST request. Google’s goal is to include anything “hiding” behind a form — comment systems like Disqus or Facebook and other JavaScript-based sites and forms. Typically when Google announces it’s going to expand its search index in some way everyone is happy — sites get more searchable content into Google and users can find more of what they’re looking for — but that’s not the case with the latest changes to Google’s indexing policy.
[Photo by Glen Scott/Flickr/CC] Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support. The announcement that Nexus One users won’t be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google’s support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I’ve been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers. I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1 up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device - be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch - as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today.
Also worth noting that each bar in the chart starts from the first day of release - so it only gets worse for people who bought their phone late in its sales period. Why Is This So Bad? Consumers Get Screwed. Why I Hate Android. Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse. I should probably explain. Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. What I hate is what Android has become. Let’s turn back the clock. Then on January 9, 2007 — exactly 5 years ago today — Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld to unveil the iPhone.
Apple and Google were great allies at the time. A few months later, on November 5, 2007, Google teamed up with many of the big players in the mobile/telecom space to announce the Open Handset Alliance. In hindsight, Steve Jobs was clearly not happy about this and the subsequent iPhone-ification of Android. Let’s back up for a second. But there was more. Introducing Google JS Test. Wave-protocol - Project Hosting on Google Code. This project is currently in the process of moving to the Apache Foundation, as an Incubator project. We are moving the issue tracker this coming week followed shortly by the code base. All activity will soon move to the new project found here: This project contains a Java implementation of the Google Wave Federation Protocol and a prototype server, web, and console clients.
We're currently working to round out the prototypes for the Wave in a Box effort. Code The libraries repository contains the wave model, including the wave operations, operational transform (OT) code, and federation protocol. The default repository contains the protoype server and clients. There's an alternative, lightweight Wave client, called Splash, which is built on the Wave Data APIs: Starting points Get Involved If you'd like to get involved with the Wave protocol please take the time learn more at. The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave - A note to Google recruiters (and on Google hiring practices) Writing this in part to let off steam, and in part so I can point the next recruiter at it. Time from my leaving Google til getting the first unrelated contact from a Google recruiter: 6 days.
Interest I have in going through Google’s hiring process again: zero. When Metaweb/Freebase was acquired by Google last year, we came in as part of the Search team. As a community/developer relations person, Search didn’t really have a place for me, but they brought me in on a fixed term offer, giving me a year to figure out how I might fit in at Google, perhaps by transferring my work to a more appropriate group or finding another role that made more sense. I’m going to handwave a bit, but in short, we shuffled things around so that I could continue doing my job by moving to a more appropriate part of the organisation. Now, I’m 100% confident that Google wouldn’t have hired me straight off the street. (True story: in my interview I was asked how I would extract entities from an HTML page. Google Plus Deleting Accounts En Masse: No Clear Answers.
A striking number of Google+ accounts have been deleted in the last 24 hours as the new social network struggles with its community standards policy around real names - alienating and frightening the people it aims to serve. Removed but restored through influence is Limor Fried - AKA Lady Ada / Adafruit Industries: She was recently featured on the cover of WIRED Magazine. Google suspended Limor Fried “Ladyada” Google+ profile, no show-and-tell tonight… Her account has just now been mysteriously restored, though only after a groundswell of complaints. Suffice it to say, the rest of the deleted accounts will not have such well-placed advantages.
Many have now been purged and not restored. The message I received this morning from the source in my previous Google+ article summarized it, Google+ suspended my acct "After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards. " Just Like Facebook's Real Name Hypocrisy Bill Noble writes,
Suspended Google+ Accounts. Publications by Googlers. Google publishes hundreds of research papers each year. Publishing is important to us; it enables us to collaborate and share ideas with, as well as learn from, the broader scientific community. Submissions are often made stronger by the fact that ideas have been tested through real product implementation by the time of publication. We believe the formal structures of publishing today are changing - in computer science especially, there are multiple ways of disseminating information. We encourage publication both in conventional scientific venues, and through other venues such as industry forums, standards bodies, and open source software and product feature releases.
Open Source We understand the value of a collaborative ecosystem and love open-source software. Product and Feature Launches With every launch, we're publishing progress and pushing functionality. Industry Standards Our researchers are often helping to define not just today's products but also tomorrow's. Resources Impact. Google Employee No. 59 on Google+, Privacy and Why He Left. Google Rumored Preparing $10/Month Chrome OS Laptop Rentals. Google Doing Some Profile Unification Leading Up To… Well, Something. Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear. The first was the redesign of the toolbar. While Google claimed it doesn’t directly point to the social strategy (even though it looks exactly like the verified +1 leaks we’ve seen), it is a first step. As The Next Web spotted a couple weeks ago, Google quietly announced that it would be deleting Google Profiles that weren’t public starting in July.
The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. And that’s important because other Google properties are also being woven into these profiles. Google Groups-specific profiles will no longer be supported. This type of unification will also take place across other Google properties as well, we hear. APIs & Developer Products - January 2011 - code.google.com. Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast - an alert for web app designers. Google’s web accelerator seems like a good thing for the public web, but it can wreak havok on web-apps and other things with admin-links built into the UI. How’s that? The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.”
And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” This wouldn’t be much of a problem on the public web since it’s pretty tough to be destructive on public web pages, but web apps, with their admin links here and there, can be considerably damaged. Update: If you use Ruby on Rails for your web-apps, here’s some code to just say no to Google Accelerator. Opinion: Google Android is only 'open' if you're the phone company. Google Chrome OS: unlike Android, it's open source. Chrome. YouTube Feeds. GoogleSharing :: A Special Kind Of Proxy. How To: Escape From Google's Clutches, Once and For All - How to leave google - Gizmodo. Advertising and Privacy – Google Privacy Center. In Praise of Google. Scoop: Google Responds To Rep. Joe Barton's 24 Privacy Questions.