Google Archive

Well, that was all rather much. Google just held its keynote speech thing during the opening of the company's I/O conference, and they announced some pretty spectacular stuff. Aside from Android 3.1 for tablets and Android Icecream Sandwich which will unify the tablet and phone versions of Android in Q4 in 2011, Google announced an internet-based music service. And a video service. And an Arduino-based accessory development kit. And Android@Home. And an alliance of device makers and carriers to bring timely Android updates to devices for a minimum of 18 months.

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.

The revolution has begun! Web video will be freed from the shackles of the MPEG-LA and the dreaded claws of patents and incomprehensible licenses! Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Anywho, YouTube has announced all new videos uploaded to the site will be transcoded into WebM, and that the most important part of the site's catalogue is already available in WebM.

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?

Andy Rubin, the head of Android at Google, has responded to all the talk going on across the web over Android's openness. I would almost say he sounds a bit irritated, but that's probably my own imagination. In any case, his opinion is clear - "I think I'm having a Gene Amdahl moment", referring to the man who coined the term 'fear, uncertainty, and doubt'.

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.

Playtime is over in Android Land. Over the last couple of months Google has reached out to the major carriers and device makers backing its mobile operating system with a message: There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google's purview. From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google's most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans. And they will seek that approval from Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android group.

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.

And so the story regarding Android supposedly violating the GPL continues. Linus Torvalds has responded to the story in his usual straightforward manner - he thinks it's "totally bogus". In the meantime, Groklaw - not exactly my favourite place but alas, good points are good points - found out that the IP lawyer who started this story, Edward Naughton, used to be a lawyer for Microsoft in dozens of cases, a fact he tried to erase from his online resume.

Does Google's Android violate the GPL? This bold claim is being made by Edward Naughton, and was picked up here and there across the web. The problem seems to be that Android's Bionic, a glibc alternative, supposedly violates the GPL by stripping the Linux kernel header files of all comments and other extraneous information and relicensing them under a more permissive license so that non-GPL programs can be written. Bradley Kuhn, former FSF executive director and expert on GPL violations, believes the claims are way overblown.

"Google has released a preview WebM filter for Windows Vista and Windows 7. When installed, the filter will allow Windows programs - including Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, and perhaps most importantly of all, Internet Explorer 9 - to play back WebM-encoded video." This is simply a Media Foundation codec - not a browser plugin.

"Google has issued a new stable release of the Chrome Web browser and is rolling it out to users. The new version introduces some noteworthy JavaScript performance enhancements, new plug-in security features, improved support for synchronization, and a new user interface for managing the browser's settings."

"We are pleased to announce that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers. The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11. For an overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights. Together with the new platform, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r10) and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (10.0.0)."

"Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we've reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client .In the coming months we will be adding APIs for 3D graphics, local file storage, WebSockets, peer-to-peer networking, and more. We'll also be working on Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs), a feature that will eventually allow us to provide Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability."