Google Archive

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.

"A federal judge rejected Google's $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company's ambitious plan to build the world's largest digital library and bookstore. Judge Denny Chin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the settlement went too far in granting Google rights to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners, and that it was 'not fair, adequate and reasonable'." Here is a desk. Please to bang head against it repeatedly until world starts making sense.

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.

"At Google we're constantly trying to make the web faster - not just our corner of it, but the whole thing. Over the past few days we've been rolling out a new and improved version of show_ads.js, the piece of JavaScript used by more than two million publishers to put AdSense advertisements on their web pages."

"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."

Google has released a new set of tools for the WebP Image format. The release includes a completely rewritten encoder with improved image quality. Also available is a Windows Imaging Component providing WebP import to any application that supports WIC such as Microsoft Office 2010. There is a side-by-side comparison between the new encoder, the old encoder and JPEG here.

"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."

"Hot on the heels of Apple's subscription service announcement, Google has lifted the curtain on its own offering that will allow publishers to set a price for recurring content delivered via your Google login. The payment system is called 'One Pass', and it allows publishers to offer not only subscriptions, but also metered access, 'freemium' content, and even individual articles. So far, One Pass seems more flexible than Apple's offering, and the company will likely take a much smaller cut from publishers than Apple will."

"Google today posted a finished, stable version of Chrome 9. The update is the first non-beta to have the Chrome Web Store built-in and lets anyone in the US reach it through a new browser tab. The store packages apps in a way that Flash, HTML5 or other code behaves more like a conventional app download or sale with a list of installed apps to match."

Usually it's Apple doing the event thing, but today the thunder's on Google. It held a press event to officially unveil Android 3.0 Honeycomb for tablets, as well as a revamped Android market. Gizmodo has a hands-on of the Motorola Xoom running Android 3.0, as does Engadget. Also today, the Android Market has been updated with a web frontend which allows for the seamless purchase and installation of Android applications from within your browser, which are then pushed to your device(s). In-application purchases have been added as well.

It seems like the content industry has managed to score another hit in its 'fight' against piracy, and this time, it's a big fish. Announced a few weeks ago already, Google has started censoring its auto-complete and instant features for an arbitrary set of search terms - such as 'bittorrent', 'torrent', 'rapidshare', and any terms derived from those (e.g. 'ubuntu torrent' is censored as well).

"Sometimes the sheer wrongness of what is posted on the web leaves us speechless. Especially when it's picked up and repeated as gospel by otherwise reputable sites like Engadget. 'Google copied Oracle's Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it', they reported this morning. Sorry, but that just isn't true."

The WebM project - a VP8 video stream and a Vorbis audio stream wrapped in a Matroska container re-branded as a WebM container - launched by Google, openly supported by every major chip maker, is going to be the major codec for Google's Chrome web browser. Yes, Google is dropping H264 support from the Chrome web browser.

Stuff just keeps on piling up today - and I'm trying to work through my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2 on insanity (fourth playthrough overall). I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that nobody sympathises with my problems... Anywho, Google just unveiled the tablet user interface for Android 3.0, Honeycomb. Looks pretty decent I guess - somehow, it reminds me of Tron.