Google takes aim at slow web pages

Google announced a new service Thursday that it hopes will make slow web pages as anachronistic as manual typewriters.

The web—search giant unveiled a new option called Page Speed Service that accelerates web page loading times by running them through a special application that rectifies bottlenecks and loads the pages to end users through Google’s global network of servers.

Google engineering manager Ram Ramani said in a blog post that in tests the service had increased load times by 25 to 60 per cent.

“To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google,” Ramani wrote.

“Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying Web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times.”

The service is currently available to a limited number of website operators at no cost. Google plans to roll out a fee—based service later this year, Ramani said.

New anti-hacking tool from game theory

How can any organization detect the onset of an attack on its computer network, giving it time to respond quickly and block any intrusion or compromise of its data? The answer could lie in game theory.

Modern firewalls and other technology are already in place, but these have not prevented major attacks on prominent networks in recent months. Now, information technologist Heechang Shin of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, has used game theory to develop a defense mechanism for networks that is more effective than previous approaches.

Shin explains that each incident might not only severely disrupt services affecting thousands of people, but for a commercial operation it can take as much as one percent of annual sales, per incident, amounting to tens of millions of dollars, according to an Iona statement.

Shin has now developed an effective anti—hacking tool based on a game theoretic model, called defensive forecasting, which can detect network intrusions in real time, the International Journal of Business Continuity and Risk Management reports.

The tool, by playing a “game” of reality versus forecast, wins when reality matches its forecast and it sends out an alert to block the intrusion.

Importantly, the tool works on real—time data flowing in and out of the network rather than analyzing logs, an approach that can only detect network intrusions after they have taken place.

The game theoretic model continuously trains the tool so that it can recognize the patterns of typical network attacks: denial of service attacks, unauthorized access from remote machines in which login passwords are being guessed or brute—force tested, attacks by insiders with “superuser” etc.

Transparent battery makes see-through phones possible

A see-through smartphone you can roll up and stick in your pocket – how about that for a must-have product? It's now one step closer to reality, thanks to the development of a transparent battery.

Transparent screens, circuitry and keyboards have already been developed in an effort to produce see-through devices, but the bulk of any phone is its stubbornly opaque battery. Now, Yi Cui, who led the research at Stanford University, California, says his new battery is the last piece needed to make transparent gadgets.

Other transparent components are essentially just ultra-thin versions of their opaque counterparts, but an equivalently slimmed-down battery wouldn't store much energy. Instead, Cui and colleagues created a grid of electrodes, embedded it in a transparent electrolyte gel and sealed it in plastic. The grid lines are smaller than the resolution of the human eye, rendering the entire thing transparent, while the gel allows the battery to be flexible.

"The transparency is tuneable, so it could be as transparent as glass, in principle," explains Cui. "However, there is a trade-off between transparency and energy density. A reasonable transparency is 50 to 80 per cent." Such batteries store between a third and a half of the energy of an ordinary battery of the same size, but Cui says increasing the thickness would allow them to provide comparable levels.

Cui believes we could see transparent batteries in consumer devices in the next two to four years, depending on how easy it is to scale up the manufacturing process. The see-through components also have a scientific application, however: researchers can use optical detecting tools to study a battery's chemical reactions as they happen, which previously was impossible.

Andrew Flewitt, who researches plastic electronics at the University of Cambridge, says the battery will be key in producing transparent devices. "It's a really important step along that road. I've not seen anyone even attempt to put that piece of the jigsaw in yet," he says, though he adds that integrating the battery into a fully flexible device is likely to be an extra challenge.

Google: Patent war is assured destruction

Google Inc General Counsel Kent Walker said the smartphone industry is using patents in an arms race that hurts consumers, leaving the company trying to "sort through the mess" of litigation.

"It's hard to find what's the best path -- there's so much litigation," Walker said in an interview. "We're exploring a variety of different things."

Google is seeking to buy patents that would put it on a level plane with its rivals, and the company will continue to push to have the US Patent and Trademark Office take a closer look at issued patents that are being used in litigation, Walker said. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission also need to do more to rein in software patents and lawsuits, he said.

"The tech industry has a significant problem," Walker said. "Software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation."

Google, which had $39.1 billion in cash and short-term investments as of June, put in an initial $900 million offer to buy the patents of bankrupt phone-equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp. It was outbid by a group that includes Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp and Research In Motion Ltd, which all make devices that compete with phones running Google's Android operating system.

More discipline?
Walker declined to say whether Mountain View, California-based Google will bid on InterDigital Inc, the digital-imaging patents of Eastman Kodak Co or any other specific portfolio. He said it's unclear if the $4.5 billion winning bid for the Nortel patents is a sign that other sales will be equally large.

"We want to be disciplined about how we approach all this stuff," Walker said. "We're looking for a reasonable alternative, but we want to make sure Google and the companies Google partners with aren't shut out of the opportunity to bring great new products and features to consumers."

Google's Android software is now the most widely used mobile operating system, with 38.9 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market, compared with 18.2 per cent for Apple's iPhone, according to research firm IDC.

Apple has patent cases against Samsung Electronics Co, HTC Corp and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc over their Android-based phones, and each of them has filed patent suits against Apple. Microsoft and Motorola Mobility also have filed patent suits against each other, and the Redmond, Washington-based software maker has a pending complaint against Barnes & Noble Inc over the Nook reader.

5 reasons why you should switch to Google Plus

Although it's too early to speculate on the fate of Facebook, Google Plus, the social networking arm from the internet giant Google, offers many a thing from ease of use to data privacy that are worth to switch over to it. Creating a new breakthrough, Google has finally come up with its own social networking platform which is rich in content and features. ComScore has revealed that Google Plus has received 20 million viewers in the first three weeks of its operation. Predicted to become the vital part of Google's whole identity, certain features of Google plus give us a valid reason to consider leaving Facebook for Google Plus.

1. Integration with Google services

The integration capability of Google Plus is regarded as the biggest factor that drives people close to this social networking website. It's being integrated with all the products and services from Google which allows the users to monitor all Google Plus events while being tuned to any of its services.

2. Data backup

Personal data protection has always been a nightmare for Facebook users and Google Plus is all equipped to solve this trouble in their social networking platform. While Facebook demands you to make some of your personal data public which is hard to delete, Google Plus provides the freedom take back all the data you have entered in the website. The site has a special tool named ?Data Liberation? with which you can download data from different Google services such as Google profile, Picasa, Google+ stream etc.

3. Group chat
Google plus has added greater value to its social networking arm with the strong group chat feature which is said to be one of the biggest disadvantages of its rival Facebook. The webs
ite has made it very simple to create a special group video chat with its Hangouts features. Hangouts features a very sleek interface that does not need additional downloads and it's free forever. 

4. Great mobile app
Migrating content from your mobile phone to Google plus is created in such a way that it?s very effortless, cleaner and is a lot more functional with Google+ mobile app. Goo
gle Plus is eying to attract the huge Android user base with its mobile app that is fast becoming a seamless appendage of the social media.

5. Privacy settings
Google Plus has created the concept of privacy settings much simpler in comparison with the settings in various websites which may lead the users to great blunders. With the f
eature known as Circles, you can create a different page of yours for different groups of people. This gives you the freedom to share the content with the friend circles that you want to. Separate circles for your family, friends, colleagues etc can be created here.

Google+ a little more............

In just two weeks, Google's much-anticipated and delayed foray into the ‘social' Web, Google Plus, crossed the 10 million mark. Despite being launched in an exclusive by-invites-only mode, no less than 1 billion items were shared in a single day and the +1 button (similar to Facebook's ‘Like') is already all over the Web.

Google may finally have got third time lucky with Plus. After two failed attempts to enter the ‘social' sphere on the Web — the lukewarm Google Wave and the controversial Buzz — Plus' “field trial phase” appears to be going down well with users. Amidst reports of Facebook (the social networking giant that has over 750 million users worldwide) losing users — which has been rubbished by the firm — Plus hopes to give users more privacy, more control over their data stream and an integrated Google experience by weaving together its plethora of existing services.

Figures quoted by third-party analytics service provider, Google Analytics, project that India is the second largest country in terms of Google Plus users, comprising over 5.6 per cent of the total share, following the U.S. at 49.3 per cent. The number of active users is pegged at around 18,000 in India. While the accuracy of this statistic cannot be vouched for, experts say this is plausible given that Google dominates the Internet in emerging markets.

Indeed, Google appears to have learnt its lessons. But can it replace the wide appeal of Facebook or provide the simplicity and speed of Twitter? Plus will have to do a lot more than it is doing now to actually get people to make that shift. So what does Plus offer? For starters, Google Plus' Beta already appears to score over its competitors on privacy. Learning its lessons from Buzz, which creeped out Gmail users, privacy controls are fairly ubiquitous. This is particularly important, because unlike Facebook, Google users are bound to be paranoid about the fact that their personal email is closely linked to this new social media platform.

The interface is clean. Not as cluttered as Facebook yet, the minimalist interface offers three principal choices: Circles, Hangout and Sparks. Of these, both Circles and Hangouts score over what's already on offer, while Sparks appears to be attempting to offer you a steady stream of content from the Web, based on your ‘interests'.

In Circles, Plus takes a cue from Diaspora, the Free and distributed social networking alternative to Facebook. Like ‘aspects' on Diaspora, which allows you to compartmentalise your friends and control what you share with whom, Circles allows you to create your own groups too. And discreet it is, for your ‘circles' are only visible to you. This, to date, is the most appealing feature of Plus.

Hangouts, too, are great, and scores over Facebook's recent Web-chat feature, because it allows you to Web-conference with 10 users at the same time.
For brands

Google has announced that Plus is currently only for individual users. However, its separate registration process for brands and businesses has already drawn over 35,000 applications.

Gaurav Mishra, social media expert and Asia Director of Social Media at MSLGroup, says, “In the long term, there are two important players: You Tube, a possible marketing tool, and Blogger, still the biggest blogging platform. It will be interesting from a marketing perspective to see how it integrates with Blogger, Adwords and Search.”

Intel chips to power servers for cloud computing

World's largest chip maker Intel Corporation has developed microprocessors to power modular and scalable servers for cloud computing - that enables use of multiple servers as a single platform - by data centres and infrastructure management service providers, a senior official said Friday.

"As part of our second generation multi-core Xeon processors, we have designed and developed chips that can be used for servers by cloud computing providers and builders to offer high performance and energy efficient solutions to end-customers with security, scalable storage capacity," Intel marketing programme manager Nick Knupffer told reporters here.As the next wave of technology revolution, cloud computing enables use of multiple servers as a single platform through a digital network (website) under secured environment with access to a range of applications and tools for reducing the cost of IT operations.

"Our Xeon processor-based servers can be deployed by data centres and enterprises offering infrastructure management services to end-customers across verticals, especially small and medium businesses (SMBs) which cannot afford to invest in capital intensive IT infrastructure and hire personnel to run it," Intel South Asia director R. Ravichandran said.

According to global market research and analysis firm IDC (International Data Corporation), an estimated 2.5 billion people with over 15 billion devices will access the internet by 2015. The same year, the internet traffic is expected to reach a zettabyte or one million, million billion bytes.

"Under our multi-year vision for cloud computing (Cloud 2015), cloud data centres will be seamlessly and securely connected and fully automated. The centres will also provide secure access and optimal experience across a range of devices from smartphones to powerful notebooks," Knupffer pointed out.

With about 70 percent of chief information officers (CIOs) concerned about cloud security, Intel is working on providing trusted execution technology (TXT) to enhance security at the processor level by ensuring a server is not tampered with at the hypervisor level.

The $44-billion Intel acquired global security solutions provider McAfee in August 2010 for $7.7 billion to enhance security of its processors by embedding the features in the chips.