background preloader

Tech

Facebook Twitter

‘Andromeda’ will be Google’s Windows NT. If you were to design a client operating system with the goal of being used by two billion people, what would it look like?

‘Andromeda’ will be Google’s Windows NT

We might soon find out what Alphabet’s looks like. Today’s announcement’s from Alphabet’s Google is expected to reveal "Andromeda", the merged Android/Chrome OS. Executives have been hyping today’s event as the most "significant" since the first Android device in 2008, and we already know they’re writing a new operating system from a clean slate. We can also have a good guess about what it looks like.

Google’s goal for the successor is to unify the rival Chrome and Android platforms while providing a clean code base free of the Java legacy. Shark attack! Google wraps underwater cables in Kevlar-like vests. Google has to wrap its trans-Pacific underwater fiber cables in a Kevlar-like material, because sharks are quite partial to having a munch on them.

Shark attack! Google wraps underwater cables in Kevlar-like vests

Dan Belcher, a product manager on Google's cloud team, said that the company goes to great lengths to protect its infrastructure, including wrapping underwater cables to protect against shark attacks, NetworkWorld reports. In fact, Google has a good amount of infrastructure to protect. The company last week announced that it was investing in a new, $300 million undersea fiber optical cable system running between the US and Japan, called FASTER, that's designed to provide much higher broadband speeds to countries in Asia. How Google plans to encrypt the web. Today Google announced that websites using HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, will have a better chance of ranking well in Google searches than those that don't.

How Google plans to encrypt the web

In the vernacular, HTTPS is now a ranking signal for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It could be an inflection point for web security. Security is a top priority ... over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. Google's Nexus devices get stealth Android update. Google has quietly begun rolling out a new version of Android to its flagship Nexus devices, but so far it has remained shtum on just what has changed.

Google's Nexus devices get stealth Android update

Support pages from US wireless player T-Mobile reveal that the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 handsets and the 2013 version of the Nexus 7 tablet all began receiving over-the-air updates to Android 4.4.3 on Monday. Google has also updated its page of factory firmware images to reflect the new version, which is identified as build KTU84L or KTU84M (for the Nexus 5). From the look of it, the Nexus 10 and the 2012 version of the Nexus 7 will also be getting the update. Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa, page 2.

Reply to post by tanda7 But I still want to know what Project Watchtower is!!!

Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa, page 2

Done some digging on my own and maybe i coming up with something. Its a PDF document about cyber defense project named --> Project Watchtower And Google seem to be involved. Link to PDF The Nature of the Threat. MPC8541 - Freescale Wiki. From Freescale Wiki Overview Leveraging Freescale’s system-on-chip (SoC) PowerQUICC III platform architecture, the MPC8541E combines the powerful e500 core, built on Power Architecture™ technology, and peripheral technology to balance processor performance with I/O system throughput.

MPC8541 - Freescale Wiki

In addition to the e500 core and 256 KB of Level 2 (L2) cache memory, the MPC8541E features an integrated security engine, a double data rate (DDR) SDRAM memory controller, dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers, a four-channel DMA controller, dual asynchronous receiver/transmitters (DUART), local bus controller and a 64-bit PCI controller that can also serve as two 32-bit PCI ports. Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa, page 2. View topic - Exclusive Pictures of Google's Pluto Switch. Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa.

A closeup of the “Pluto Switch,” a mystery hardware device that landed on the edge of Iowa this past winter.

Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

Images: networking-forum.com Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. “Pluto Switch,” the label said. The images were posted by two men who said the device had unexpectedly turned up at a branch office in the tiny farmland town of Shelby, Iowa — population: 641 — and they were hoping someone could tell them what it was. Clearly, these two men were familiar with the ins and outs of computer networking, and clearly, this was a networking switch, a way of shuttling data between machines.

According to posts they made to an obscure web discussion forum dedicated to networking hardware — networking-forum.com — they couldn’t actually get the thing to work. It belonged, they said, to Google. Google says it's sorry for Monday's hours-long Gmail delays. Google apologized on Tuesday for a networking glitch that prevented emails from reaching many Gmail users' accounts for as much as two hours or even longer.

Google says it's sorry for Monday's hours-long Gmail delays

"The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure," Gmail site reliability engineer Sabrina Farmer wrote in a blog post. "This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time. " Email delivery broke down at around 5:54am Pacific time on Monday, Farmer said, and the online ad giant didn't get on top of the problem until around 1pm the same day. The full message backlog wasn't cleared until around 4pm. The service interruption only affected around 29 per cent of messages passing through Gmail, Farmer said, and of those, the typical message was only delayed by 2.6 seconds.

Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary. Six years ago, in November 2007, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was announced.

Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary

The original iPhone came out just a few months earlier, capturing people's imaginations and ushering in the modern smartphone era. While Google was an app partner for the original iPhone, it could see what a future of unchecked iPhone competition would be like. Vic Gundotra, recalling Andy Rubin's initial pitch for Android, stated: Google 'fesses up: Yup, we're KILLING OFF IE9 support for Gmail, Apps. Google has finally revealed its plans for Gmail and Google Apps to stop working with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9.

Google 'fesses up: Yup, we're KILLING OFF IE9 support for Gmail, Apps

The internet ads and search giant said it has stopped all testing and engineering work to make Gmail and Apps work with IE9. Microsoft’s customers will start receiving notifications in the next few weeks that IE9 is an unsupported browser and telling them to upgrade to a “modern” browser. Google is killing IE9 in line with its policy announced in June 2011 for its apps and services to only work with the current and prior major releases of browsers. The policy applies to IE, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari. Greater than the sum of its specs: Google’s Moto X reviewed. I'll admit that I didn't get the excitement about the Moto X when it launched. A so-called "Google phone" was something that people have speculated about since Google's purchase of Motorola closed last year. And yet, much of the breathless pre-release coverage (and several early reviews of the phone) seemed to treat the phone as special because Google was saying it was special, not because it was earth-shattering hardware in and of itself.

We're now about two weeks out from our first hands-on session with the phone. After living with it for a while, I get it—at least a little. There are still things about the phone that I don't understand, but I can see why people would walk into a store and walk out with the Moto X instead of a Galaxy S 4 or an HTC One or even an iPhone 5. But the Moto X doesn't need to melt anyone's face or sweep Samsung under the rug. Body and build quality The short version: Finally, a flagship phone that feels great to hold. Google swaps out MySQL, moves to MariaDB. 10 Ways to Build a Better Big Data Security Strategy Updated Google is migrating its MySQL systems over to MariaDB, allowing the search company to get away from the Oracle-backed open source database.

The news came out at the Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) conference in Stanford, California on Wednesday, one month after El Reg reported that Google had assigned one of its engineers to the MariaDB Foundation. News of the swap was not an official announcement by Google, it came out during a presentation by Google senior systems engineer Jeremy Cole on the general state of the MySQL ecosystem. It turns out that far from being a minor initiative to keep MariaDB alive, Google is actively patching and upgrading MariaDB 10.0 to be fit enough so that Google can migrate all of its thousand-plus MySQL instances onto the technology.

Cole said that the migration involves thousands of MySQL servers. When we asked Sallner to quantify the scale of the migration he said, "They're moving it all. How Google's Autocomplete Was ... Created / Invented / Born - Megan Garber. Autocomplete was created ... in 2004. Autocomplete was created ... by Google. Autocomplete was created ... by a guy named Kevin Gibbs. Autocomplete was created ... on a bus. Few things merge technology and philosophy as elegantly as autocomplete. The feature is not merely one of the microinteractions that subtly standardize our experience of the Internet; it's also a kind of meta-interaction -- one that puts the "world" in "World Wide Web. " The autocomplete function as we know it today, All Things D's Liz Gannes reports, had humble origins.

The junior software engineer, it turned out, was interested in URL completion. Gibbs showed his new feature to his coworkers. Just add creepiness: Google Search gets even more personal. High performance access to file storage Google will soon be interrogating its users' Gmail, Google Calendar and Google+ accounts to try and predict the questions they enter into Google Search, bringing the Chocolate Factory's Now functionality into the mainstream.

The personalised search is being rolled out slowly, with the US getting it first, but it will respond to queries such as "is my flight on time" and "show my photos of sunsets" with results culled from the Google suite of applications. So, it's not much good if your photos are on Facebook and your flight details in Evernote. But that is, of course, beside the point. Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic. High performance access to file storage You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google's services for a brief time on Friday is over. The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm. The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond.

Big deal, right? But then, not everyone is Google. Google coding glitch locks Apple iOS users out of on-line accounts. Google has once again found itself all over the IT news for a spot of bother with its security software. The good news is that the problem isn't quite as dramatic as the recent code verification bugs in Android, because it doesn't open any security holes. Next Android Software Version Dubbed 'KitKat' Give us a break: Next Android version to be called 'KitKat' High performance access to file storage. Google's Project Glass headman answers most pressing question: 'Why?' High performance access to file storage. Exclusive: Google and Spotify launching Chromecast support later this month. While Chromecast has long supported Google Play Music, Netflix, Pandora, and other subscription services, Spotify — one of the most popular music streaming services — has long been left off the list. According to leaked internal documents that 9to5Google has seen, Google is preparing a slew of Chromecast announcements for later this month, one of which being Spotify support for Chromecast…

Google Shares Details of Its Security Infrastructure.