The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'google'

2008/1/9

Facebook and Google anounce that they are joining the Data Portability Workgroup, a body advocating open standards allowing users of social web sites to easily move their data from one site to another. (This is not long after Facebook suspended Robert Scoble's account for attempting to, well, port his data from their site.) More interesting is who's Google's representative in this organisation: none other than Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal and one of the originators of OpenID, who more recently has turned his attention to the social graph problem.

(via /.) brad fitzpatrick data portability facebook google openid social graph social software [no comments]

2007/9/1

Another front has opened in Google's assault on Microsoft's software dominance, with it emerging that Google Maps contains a hidden flight simulator. The flight simulator is activated by pressing Command, Option and A (on a Mac) or Ctrl, Alt and A (on a PC), and gives you the choice of two planes and several runways. Instructions are here. As you can probably imagine, going anywhere other than into the ground when using a keyboard is somewhat tricky.

(via alecm) google google earth microsoft software [no comments]

2007/5/12

Meanwhile, Google has filed a patent for using online games to build up psychological profiles of users, and using these for targetting ads:

The company thinks it can glean information about an individual's preferences and personality type by tracking their online behaviour, which could then be sold to advertisers. Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use, it says.
The patent says: "User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc)."
Players who spend a lot of time exploring "may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations". And those who spend more time talking to other characters will see adverts for mobile phones.
Not all the inferences made by monitoring user activity rely on subtle psychological clues, however. "In a car racing game, after a user crashes his Honda Civic, an announcer could be used to advertise by saying 'if he had a Hummer, he would have gotten the better of that altercation', etc," the patent says. And: "If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for Pizza Hut, Coke, coffee."
And on a related note, Bruce Schneier on how today's likely surveillance dystopias differ from Orwell's totalitarian vision:
Data collection in 1984 was deliberate; today's is inadvertent. In the information society, we generate data naturally. In Orwell's world, people were naturally anonymous; today, we leave digital footprints everywhere.
1984's Big Brother was run by the state; today's Big Brother is market driven. Data brokers like ChoicePoint and credit bureaus like Experian aren't trying to build a police state; they're just trying to turn a profit. Of course these companies will take advantage of a national ID; they'd be stupid not to. And the correlations, data mining and precise categorizing they can do is why the U.S. government buys commercial data from them.
And finally, the police state of 1984 was deliberately constructed, while today's is naturally emergent. There's no reason to postulate a malicious police force and a government trying to subvert our freedoms. Computerized processes naturally throw off personalized data; companies save it for marketing purposes, and even the most well-intentioned law enforcement agency will make use of it.

advertising dystopia gaming google psychology surveillance [no comments]

Google's shareholders say, alright, let's be evil where it's profitable:

A majority of Google shareholders today voted against an anti-censorship proposal that took aim at the way the search giant conducts its business in China and other countries that engage in active censorship.
The specific text of the failed proposal, available in the company's online proxy statement, stated:
  1. Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet-restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
  2. The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
  3. The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
  4. Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
  5. Users should be informed about the company's data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
  6. The company will document all cases where legally binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Google will give up the slogan "don't be evil"; given that, in the context of what they do, "evil" is a fairly vague term (even harder to nail down than Apple's environmental record, a subject of some debate), if they do start shopping dissidents to the Chinese government and propping up totalitarian regimes in the interests of profits, if anything, they're more likely to start spinning heavily on the we're-nice-guys angle; sort of like Nestlé.

(via jwz) business capitalism censorship china google realpolitik [no comments]

2007/3/19

The Reg digs up some corroboration of the rumoured Google mobile phone:

We've been making enquiries too, and a picture is beginning to take shape. In August 2005 Google acquired a stealth-mode startup called Android, founded by Andy Rubin. Rubin was a veteran of Apple and General Magic, but is best known for leading WebTV and subsequently Danger Inc. Danger produced one of the most-photographed phones of recent years, thanks to Paris Hilton: its Hiptop was marketed by T-Mobile as the Sidekick.
But plans have become more ambitious, as the recruitment of Apple veteran Mike Reed and Canadian mobile app company Reqwireless suggests. Graphics expert Reed worked on the ill-fated QuickDraw GX and on font technology at Apple. Google acquired his start-up Skia, which produced a vector graphics suite for resource constrained devices.
Meanwhile, Alec Muffett reckons that Apple's solid-state laptop may be the reason for them adopting Sun's next-generation filesystem, ZFS, which has, as one of its many features, the ability to ensure that all blocks of storage are used evenly, something that is important when writing to devices that can only stand a fixed number of write cycles.

(via alecm) apple google mobile phone tech zfs [2 comments]

2007/3/16

Last night, I went to the London Open Source Jam, a Linux-themed show-and-tell hosted at the Google offices near Victoria Station.

They had various speakers who came in, bringing in variously interesting Linux-based projects, talking (very) briefly about them and then letting people poke around with them. They had some people from the One Laptop Per Child project, who brought along two prototypes of the US$100 laptops which they are going to build and distribute to children in the developing world. The machines are very well designed (they're full of innovative design features, they're reportedly almost indestructable, and they look desirably good); they're based on Linux and Python, look nothing like the machines used elsewhere, and are designed to encourage tinkering and exploration. They even have a key (labelled with a graphic of a cog) which, when pressed, takes you to the source code for the currently running program so you can hack and modify it. (That didn't seem to be working on the laptop I looked at, though that prototype wasn't working perfectly.)

Someone also brought along a Trolltech Greenphone; that's a new mobile phone, created by Trolltech (the Norwegian company that makes the Qt toolkit (a rather elegant GUI library) and the Qtopia interface for portable devices), and based entirely on open-source(ish) software. It looked much like a regular phone, albeit with some developer features. I saw no evidence of it containing WiFi, though, so it may be lacking in that department.

Sony sent along a representative with a PS3 console, to show that it could boot Linux (and not only from special Sony-approved distributions, as the PS2 could, but from any distribution of your choice). Of course, the catch is that when the PS3 boots an untrusted Linux disc of your own providing, it runs it in a sandbox (under a Xen-style hypervisor), isolating it completely from the nifty graphics chip (so that game developers can't evade Sony's game-licensing fees by distributing full-featured games as bootable Linux live DVDs), and reducing it to a generic computer with a somewhat unusual CPU. They had a demo, which rendered a Mandelbrot set and let you zoom around on it; it was like a faster version of something I saw on a 386 PC in 1989. All in all, I found this demo underwhelming; when asked why anyone would want to run Linux in a sandbox on a PS3 when one could build a PC for less and get access to better graphics capabilities, the Sony rep didn't have a good answer; it was intended, she said, for people who already have a PS3 and, for some reason, are seized with the desire to run Linux on it. Though I suspect that, the fact that doing so doesn't involve breaking locks or using the hardware for anything more than it was designed for (the fact that the PS3 can be a mediocre Linux box is about as exciting as the fact that an iPod can be a mediocre PDA, or a mobile phone can be a mediocre MP3 player), will largely leach any such endeavour of any hack value it may have had.

first-person google linux open-source tech [no comments]

2007/3/12

First Google provided a search engine, then they started handing out gigabyte-sized webmail accounts and then gave the world zoomable maps, and now Google have created their own sophisticated mass transit system. The system is a workaround for the transport woes of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its Californian sprawl, various disjointed transport systems run by different municipalities and levels of government, and consequent commuting headaches. In typical Google fashion, it innovates the idea of mass transit. The buses run on biodiesel, are equipped with wireless internet access, and are tracked in real time, with commuters being notified by mobile phone of their positions, and routes are constantly being revised.

The shuttles, which carry up to 37 passengers each and display no sign suggesting they carry Googlers, have become a fixture of local freeways. They run 132 trips every day to some 40 pickup and drop-off locations in more than a dozen cities, crisscrossing six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and logging some 4,400 miles.
At Google headquarters, a small team of transportation specialists monitors regional traffic patterns, maps out the residences of new hires and plots new routes -- sometimes as many as 10 in a three-month period -- to keep up with ever surging demand.
The system is for employees only, though. Meanwhile, other Bay Area technology companies such as Yahoo! have implemented similar systems.

(via /.) google public transport san francisco [no comments]

2007/2/8

Google Maps has finally launched a full Australian edition. The site, located here, doesn't provide any more actual map data than Google has had for a year or two, but does now have an index of businesses, so searches like "cafes in 3068" or "computers in melbourne" will yield useful results.

australia google web [4 comments]

2006/11/28

Google Earth has given ordinary people easy access to satellite images of where they live. In Bahrain, this technology is proving disruptive, as ordinary Bahrainis visualise the glaring inequality between them and the aristocracy who own most of the land:

Opposition activists claim that 80 per cent of the island has been carved up between royals and other private landlords, while much of the rest of the population faces an acute housing shortage.
"Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages nearby and block access to the sea for fishermen. People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were the surrounding walls," said Mr Yousif, who is seen in Bahrain as the grandfather of its blogging community.
The house of al-Khalifa has responded by knocking down the walls of its palaces and handing the land over to the people.. whom am I kidding; they, of course, responded by configuring the national firewall (and every authoritarian regime should have one of those!) to block access to Google Earth. Which, given the number of internet-savvy Bahrainis, failed, and had the opposite effect, encouraging more people to look at this Google Earth thing.
For those with insufficient bandwidth to access Google Earth, a PDF file with dozens of downloaded images of royal estates has been circulated anonymously by e-mail. Mr Yousif, among others, initially encouraged web users to post images on photo-sharing websites.
It'll be interesting to see what happens: whether this will result Bahrain's democratic reform programme to be accelerated, or result in violent unrest and a Nepalese-style crackdown.

(via Boing Boing) authoritarianism bahrain censorship disruptive technologies google society streisand effect technology unintended consequences [no comments]

2006/10/10

It's confirmed: Google has bought YouTube, for US$1.65bn, snatching it from the grip of old-media behemoths like Viacom and News Corp. Which means that it stands a decent chance of maintaining its existing principles, rather than turning into some kind of ad-spammy, contributor-hostile conduit for corporate marketing.

business google web youtube [no comments]

2006/8/4

Joining the cornucopia of vaporware Skype WiFi phones (and the occasional phone using the SIP industry standard which no-one seems to actually use outside of the enterprise) is a Google Talk phone; that's a WiFi-enabled mobile-phone-sized unit that connects to Google's voice-over-IP network. The advantages: the unit will have "Gmail capabilities" built in (which means that all they'd have to do is widen the keybad and they could call it a Googleberry). The disadvantage, of course, is that all your friends are on Skype, which refuses to connect with other networks (other than the analogue phone system).

(via Engadget) google google talk skype tech voip [no comments]

2006/6/13

Google have just released a MacOS X version of their amazingily intuitive CAD package SketchUp. This program is rather nifty, and seems to use various human-interface heuristics to disambiguate what the user is trying to do, and consequently making 3D drawing a lot less painstaking than with traditional CAD/modelling programs. It also has some rather nifty rendering modes (such as pencil sketch, or precise-yet-cartoonish-looking textures), and looks good for everything from designing DIY projects to making comics. And it's free.

Also from Google: a new beta of Google Earth, now with a Linux version. (For some reason, though, the view window is all black on this machine, even though it does have OpenGL.)

(via Make, /.) google google earth linux osx sketchup software [no comments]

2006/5/18

In light of Google Maps launching their Australasian coverage, I am of the opinion that one geographical innovation Australia could do with is street-level post codes.

If one thinks of postcodes as merely a bit of stuff you write on a letter to help the postman, it may not seem like such a big deal. Though once postcodes are seen in a broader context, as coordinates optimised for specifying how to get to a location, they really come into their own. A 4-digit Australian postcode gives a few square kilometers of urban area, or several times that in the outback. A 6-7 character British postcode, however, can home in on a street or a segment of a street, down to a few dozen houses. Type in a postcode like "NW6 7JR" into Google Maps and you'll get a map showing you where your destination is; enter it into something like the Transport for London Journey Planner, and it has enough information to determine an optimal route for getting to the location in question, getting you close enough to find your destination without any further help. Because the postcode is a code in a very specific format, there is no need for guesswork, address parsing, or the computer asking you to select which location you meant from a list of alternatives.

I modestly propose that Australia would benefit from street level postcodes. The increased efficiency in mail delivery would save the Post Office money, and the streamlining of computer-based navigation technologies would boost the increasingly high-tech, high-speed economy, not to mention provide a valuable public utility. One could possibly even make an environmental argument for finer-grained postcodes, that in optimising navigation, they would reduce the amount of fuel used and pollution emitted. The street-level information could be added on as a suffix to existing postcodes, much in the way ZIP+4 was added to US ZIP codes in 1983, and could consist of an alphanumeric suffix. For example, a segment of a street in Fitzroy could be designated by something that looks like 3065-AB3. (They could also be purely numeric, though alphanumeric suffixes would allow for more information in fewer characters, and keeping the total length to 7 characters or less (as per The Magical Number Seven +/- 2, this being the capacity of human immediate memory) Punch that into a website or mobile phone application and you can get detailed instructions on how to get to your desired location.

Of course, proposing such a scheme is one thing, and getting bureaucrats, politicians and various vested interests to run with it is another, so one probably shouldn't hold one's breath.

And if it never happens, we could always move to a purely latitude/longitude-based coding system like the Natural Area Coding System. The problem with that is that, being purely physical, it does not take into account local geographical features, such as whether two points are adjacent houses on a street or houses in two streets only reachable by a long detour.

australia google google maps ideas postcodes uk [4 comments]

Google Maps has added Australia. (And New Zealand as well, while they were in the neighbourhood.) It looks like a fairly comprehensive map covering the entirety of the vast country, from the major cities to small country towns and rural roads. Interestingly enough, their Australian maps actually show property boundaries in grey; perhaps a lot of the data comes from land titles databases? There don't seem to be any discontinuities along state borders, of the sorts that happen on the borders of European countries, so presumably the data is fairly uniform across Australia.

There is not yet a maps.google.com.au, and searches for Australian locations yield little ("melbourne australia" will get you on the right page, though anything below that, like, say, "northcote australia", a street name or a post code, draws a blank), though if you go to the US, UK or Japanese site and drag, you can get to the wide brown land with green bits around the edges.

(via gths) australia google google maps [3 comments]

2006/4/25

Google Maps has expanded its coverage again. It now covers all most of the EU (excluding Slovenia), Scandinavia and Finland (though not Iceland or the Faroes). Some parts of Europe (France, Germany, the Czech Republic and such) are more densely covered than others (Poland and Hungary, for example), and map coverage cuts off altogether at the EU's eastern frontier, though as a bonus, you get greater Moscow (or "Москва", as Google Maps, ever sensitive to local ways, labels it), plus an orange umbilicus of a highway connecting it to the rest of the known world, via the Belarussian wilderness. Greece and Istanbul are connected in a similar fashion through Serbia and Montenegro. Oh, and the Canary Islands get covered, presumably to cater to all the Europeans catching cheap flights there.

google google maps [1 comment]

2006/4/5

Google Maps' long-awaited expansion into Europe may be coming; the mapping service has just added maps of a patch of north-western Italy, which joins North America, the UK and Japan in the mapped world. The map cuts off on a suspiciously vertical line just east of Alessandria, though; perhaps the rest of Italy will show up in the next day or so?

google google maps [1 comment]

2005/11/9

Google Local, formerly known as Google Maps, is now available for mobile phones. There are Java applets which will run on a variety of phones and allow you to scroll and zoom around the Google Maps map. For some reason, you can't zoom in to street level, at least for the UK. Also, being able to bookmark locations would be good. Other than that, it's pretty nifty, and could end up giving PDA-based static map software like Tube a run for its money.

google google maps mobile phones software [no comments]

2005/8/24

Google release their own instant messaging/VoIP system. It's called Google Talk, and, unlike proprietary competitors, is based on the XMPP ("Jabber") protocol. The Google client is Windows-only at the moment, so Mac and Linux users will have to content themselves with having text-only conversations using the various other XMPP clients, though clients for other platforms are under develop,ent. Google also say that they will fully document the VoIP protocol and support SIP as well, which is very promising; unlike Skype, it will be an open, user-extensible system, and there will be nothing stopping all-in-one multiprotocol clients like Gaim from integrating Google Talk functionality (which is just as well; having a separate window for each network you're on is a waste of screen space). All it needs is SkypeOut-style facilities for making calls to telephone numbers; though, with an open system, third parties could easily step in and provide those.

google google talk im open standards voip [1 comment]

2005/7/20

To commemorate the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Google have released Google Moon, a Google Maps for the moon. It's not searchable, and has only six locations in it (i.e., the six moon landings); when you zoom right in, however, it reveals the true composition of the Moon.

(via bOING bOING) google google earth moon [2 comments]

2005/6/21

Google Maps now has satellite imagery (of varying resolution) and coastlines/borders for the entire world. While Australia is probably far from getting anything like street maps (in terms of potential AdWords revenue per square kilometre, for example, it'd probably trail some way behind Europe and Asia, making it a low priority, unless they just do the major cities or something), it does have maximum-resolution satellite maps. Here, for example, is a view of Brunswick St. and the Fitzroy Pool. And here is Merri Creek and the last house I lived. (Searches on "fitzroy north" draw a blank right now, though; apparently there are no places by this name in the UK or North America. There are quite a few Brunswick Streets in Britain, though.)

Interestingly enough, much of Carlton/Parkville is shrouded in cloud, and the resolution drops off sharply just east of the State Library (it appears that they only have high-res photos for a chunk of Melbourne from Hobsons Bay to Geelong and some adjoining chunks). This, however, is a lot better than Sydney appears to have fared; I believe that this is the coathanger at the highest resolution they've currently got it; though things get much clearer below that for some reason. Meanwhile, Brisbane gets some nice photos, as do Perth and Adelaide. Darwin and Hobart, however, are blurred. It also manages to find Ballarat, Wollongong, Cairns and Albury (though be sure to put in "australia", otherwise it'll ask whether you want the one in Hertfordshire or Surrey), but draws a blank at suburbs and smaller places.

(via agnte) australia google google maps melbourne [1 comment]

2005/4/20

Google Maps now has a UK edition, in which, rather than consisting only of North America, the globe consists of only the British Isles. The site doesn't have satellite photos yet, though it does seem to have everything else the American site has. Seeing places you've actually been adds quite a bit to the experience.

google google maps [1 comment]

2005/4/5

Compulsively draggable click-toy Google Maps has added satellite imagery to its site; you can now switch between line-art maps and satellite photographs, all zoomable. Some regions don't have satellite imagery at the highest resolution.

Interestingly enough, while the maps are still North America-only, you can drag the satellite view to anywhere in the world; most parts of the world don't let you zoom in to any level that shows signs of habitation though.

google google maps [no comments]

2005/2/11

In the latest phase of their world-domination-through-doing-good strategy, Google are offering to host content for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. And about time that someone made such an offer, as half the time Wikipedia's servers seem to be in a world of pain.

google wikipedia [no comments]

2005/2/9

A fairly informative dissection and analysis of Google Maps and how it does its magic. It's pretty interesting; unlike GMail (the other example of an impressive DHTML-based interface from Google), Maps doesn't use XMLRPC, but instead just fetches tiles in JavaScript and uses a hidden frame to communicate with the server, and the browser's inbuilt XSLT engine to parse the result. Which all makes for some very impressive hack value.

ajax google google maps javascript programming tech web web 2.0 [no comments]

2005/2/8

Google once again raises the bar of what you can do with a web browser. Their latest is Google Maps, an entirely DHTML-based, instantly responsive, scrollable, zoomable map. Functionally, it doesn't seem to do anything that online street maps haven't done for a few years now, but that's not the point; it's the way it does it. Where street maps until now have been clunky and slow, Google Maps feels instantaneous; you can drag the map around, zoom it in and out, and new tiles load on demand. (On a fast connection, it's not slow enough to be annoying.) And the way it displays signposts, with composited Gaussian-blurred shadows, looks pretty cool too. Currently, they only have North America, and only have detailed maps for the United States, but then again, it's still in beta, so hopefully they'll add other parts of the world soon.

ajax google google maps web [3 comments]

2005/1/19

Google have developed a solution for stopping comment spam, or, more precisely, for denying spammers any search engine-related benefits from getting their URLs all over blogs, guestbooks and bulletin boards. From now on, any links on a web page with the rel="nofollow" attribute will be ignored by search engines. This has broad support; on the search engine side, Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search are heeding this tag, and various blogging tool providers, including SixApart, LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress, have added automatic support of this link to their comment/trackback mechanisms. (As, of today, has this blog.)

Which seems like a pretty elegant solution; rather than shutting down comments or removing functionality (such as the ability of commenters to include links to their sites or relevant pages or otherwise leverage the hypertextual nature of the web), marking the links as not endorsed by the site, and to be ignored by participating search engines (which should soon be all of them, given that it's an excellent indicator of potential link relevance, and not heeding it can impair the relevance of the engine's results).

google spam web [4 comments]

2004/11/23

Google have just launched a new search engine for academic papers. It allows one to search books and academic papers for terms, and uses a PageRank-style ranking algorithm which takes citations from scientific literature into account. Which looks pretty nifty.

google google scholar [4 comments]

2004/6/11

One of the batch of Gmail invites that has recently flooded the streets has ended up in my hands, and hence I've been able to have a look at it.

Aside: This site has some concerns about Gmail's privacy implications. Granted, the somewhat eccentric graphics on the site give off a paranoid-crackpot vibe; however, some of the issues raised are concerning:

If Google builds a database of keywords associated with email addresses, the potential for abuse is staggering. Google could grow a database that spits out the email addresses of those who used those keywords. How about words such as "box cutters" in the same email as "airline schedules"? Can you think of anyone who might be interested in obtaining a list of email addresses for that particular combination? Or how about "mp3" with "download"? Since the RIAA has sent subpoenas to Internet service providers and universities in an effort to identify copyright abusers, why should we expect Gmail to be off-limits?

Does anybody know whether the RIAA or an equivalent agency would have an easier time ordering Google to hand over a list of all people with the words "mp3" and "download" in their mail than they would of ordering an ordinary ISP to give them access to customers' mail spools? (Mind you, the latter happened in Australia; ARIA did get access to student mail at various universities.)

gmail google language paranoia psychoceramics surveillance [2 comments]

2004/2/9

New York Bloggers organise a gathering at a trendy restaurant; the management ejected the entire group. So the bloggers googlebombed the restaurant.

blogging google revenge [no comments]

2003/10/2

If you can read this, then we're back. A routine machine relocation didn't go quite to plan, but it's all fixed now (hopefully).

And below is the backlog of blog items that didn't get posted to The Null Device over the past few days:

chavs consumerism gibson's law google google file system retrocomputing scotland society speech synthesis tech terrorism the long siege videogames warren ellis websites [no comments]