Google Archive

"Google Chrome OS is designed around the concept of "expendable" terminals that you can lose, drop or simply throw away without fear of losing your data, which is safely stored into the cloud. thing is certain, with all your data being available into the cloud, in one place, available 24/7 through a fast internet link, this will be a goldmine for cybercriminals. All that is necessary here is to get hold of the authentication tokens required to access the cloud account."

"At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, Google said that Chrome OS notebooks, now called 'Chromebooks', will be available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain starting June 15, and that it will be offering a combined software and hardware subscription service for businesses, schools, and government customers. The pricing of Google's subscription plan is modest: For $28 per user per month, businesses will receive Chromebooks, Web-based administration controls, enterprise-level support, a warranty, and hardware replacement upon subscription renewal. Schools and governments have access to the subscription package for $20 per user per month." Look at the concept here.

Surprising it is not, but unfortunate it remains. Carriers in the United States have started working together with Google to block tethering applications in the Android Market from running on certain Android devices. While this pretty much seems like a US-only thing, it's still bad.

So, Google has been working on setting up an internet music service for a while now, and we even know some of the details about what Google wants it to look like. Sadly, however, rumour has it the negotiations with the music industry have been so frustrating, Google is contemplating abandoning the entire project altogether. This has led some to wonder - why doesn't Google, or a consortium of technology companies, just buy the music industry outright?

Is Android still open now that Google has postponed the source code release of Honeycomb, version 3.0 of the mobile operating system? I've been reading a whole boatload of articles and blog posts on the web claiming Android is no longer open, but it seems like very few people seem to actually understand what 'open' really means when it comes to the GPL and the Apache license. Here's a short primer.

Google will be subjected to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years over charges that it "violated its own privacy promises". The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that the search giant wrongly used information from Google Mail users last year to create its social network Buzz. The FTC ruled that "the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective". "Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards," Google said in a blog post. "While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. "Today, we've reached an agreement with the FTC to address their concerns." That agreement will require Google to undergo a privacy review once every two years for the next 20 years.