Google mail gets new security features

GOOGLE SEEMS TO BE trying to prove it does, in fact, give a
hoot about people’s privacy, after a judge’s order on Thursday forced the
company to turn over all Youtube user records had privacy groups spitting teeth.

To make good, Google says it has started rolling out a new privacy feature to
let Gmail users see how many computers their account is open on, and let them
sign-out remotely. This will be a fairly welcome development because, until
today, the only way to log out after stupidly forgetting to properly log off on
a public computer was to change passwords. That is, if a user was even aware
that his/her account was freely accessible on another computer in the first
place.

Now, not only can a user log off remotely from other computers, he can also
apparently check to see if anyone has been snooping in his account.

In a footer link which says 'details', users can purportedly check their
'concurrent session information', showing them all open sessions, along with IP
address and 'access type', whether the email was opened through iGoogle, POP3 or
a mobile phone. For example, if you see that your email is being accessed
through POP3 and you don’t access your mail this way, it’s fairly safe to assume
someone else is sifting their way through your hundreds of thousands of soppy
love letters, embarrassing pics, and spam.

Under 'Recent activity', paranoid users can even apparently check whether
there was any suspicious activity on their Gmail account at times when they
weren’t using it. The table shows all recent account history along with times of
access and IP numbers used to access the account.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to take Google’s word for it for now, as
none of the Gmail accounts we checked had the mysterious 'details' tab in the
footer.

Hopefully Google won’t be keeping the privacy options private for too long
though. µ

Google Chrome ads on TV

A couple of months ago, the Google Japan team produced a fun video to demonstrate how clean and simple our Google Chrome user interface is. After releasing this video on the web, we got lots of positive feedback and thoughtful comments. In order to keep that conversation going, we invited some of our creative friends to make a collection of short films celebrating our browser. We released Chrome Shorts last week on our YouTube channel.

At the same time, we talked to our Google TV Ads team to see how we could show the video that our Japan team developed to a wider audience in a measurable way. Using some of the results from our placement-targeted ads on the Google Content Network, we designed a Google TV Ads campaign which we hope will raise awareness of our browser, and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns.

So today, we’re pleased to announce that we're using Google TV Ads to run our Chrome ad on various television networks starting this weekend. We're excited to see how this test goes and what impact television might have on creating more awareness of Google Chrome.

Check out the video below if you haven’t already seen it, or wait and you might see it on TV while you’re channel surfing!

Google Chrome Browser -- A new Look at the Browser

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries. So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web. All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build. On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go. Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers. This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust. We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward. The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better. So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready. Update @ 3:30 PM: We've added a link to our comic book explaining Google Chrome. Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

Firefox's wildfire

After months of waiting and minutes of technical hurdles, Mozilla finally released Firefox 3, its open-source browser challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer crown.

While faster performance and better memory handling are sigificant Firefox 3 improvements, the real star is its Smart Location Bar, better known as the "awesome bar," which lets users type real words rather than sometimes-abstruse URL addresses to call up Web sites.

Other features of Firefox include a prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware; offline data access, a feature that can make Web applications usable, even when the network is unavailable; a better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser; and a star button to quickly add bookmarks. (Read the in-depth review by CNET's Robert Vamosi here.)

The foundation was aiming to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox's release, and, after site issues delayed the release for nearly an hour, Mozilla said more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

It's likely, however, that the majority of those who downloaded Firefox 3 at this stage will just use it to replace Firefox 2, not a competitor such as Microsoft's still-dominant Internet Explorer or Apple's third-place Safari.

As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox--the heir to the Netscape legacy--that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.

Yahoo bleeding executives
A Delaware court denied a fast-track schedule to hold a trial on whether to invalidate Yahoo's controversial employee severance.

The shareholders had sought to have a trial on the severance plans, prior to Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting on August 1, at which time investor activist Carl Icahn is currently planning to run a dissident slate to unseat Yahoo's entire board. The pension funds were concerned that unless the severance plans were invalidated, a successful election by Icahn would set off the first of two triggers needed to activate the plans.

If Microsoft was holding out any hope of enlisting Icahn to its side of the table with a partial acquisition of the search pioneer's business, Icahn apparently isn't budging. Icahn, as quoted in a Reuters report, said he believed Yahoo's advertising partnership with Google "might have some merit."

Icahn, in the interview, declined to comment on whether he would continue with his proxy fight to unseat Yahoo's entire board with his own slate of dissident directors, or scale it back and seek only a minority representation on Yahoo's board.

Having failed to buy all of Yahoo, or even its search business, Microsoft is now looking to take an even more piecemeal approach: hire Yahoo's workers. The company took out an ad in the San Jose Mercury News touting the fact that it has search jobs available in Silicon Valley.

Think the Microhoo drama is starting to grate on Yahooers? It seems that top executives are voicing their angst with their feet.

Since we learned last week that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network division and leader of many of the company's core products, plans to leave the company, there has been a steady stream of top executives jumping ship.

Weiner, who is joining venture capital firms Accel Partnerse and Greylock Partners as "executive in residence," was joined in the executive exodus early in the week by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of the photo-sharing site Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in 2005. Fake's last day with Yahoo was June 13, and Butterfield's will be July 12.

After this news had a couple of days to settle on the Yahoo campus in Mountain View, Calif., three more executives announced plans to leave the company: Qi Lu, executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology; Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications; and Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of search.

Other recent defections from Yahoo include Usama Fayyad, chief data officer, and Jeremy Zawodny, a top programmer and advocate of what's now become the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Making the broadband connection
Sprint Nextel plans to launch its first commercial WiMax service in Baltimore in September, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said during a speech at the Nxtcomm trade show in Las Vegas. Sprint will turn up WiMax service in two other cities, Chicago and Washington, before the end of the year, Hesse added. But he didn't give a specific time frame for these deployments.

The much-anticipated WiMax service has been delayed several times. Initially, the company had said it would launch the service in the first half of the year. More recently, it has been vague about when it would deploy the service. It's been testing the mobile WiMax service with download speeds of between 2 megabits per second and 4Mbps since the end of last year in Chicago and the Washington-Baltimore area.

Verizon Communications is also looking toward big cities as the next big opportunity for its Fios broadband and TV service. The company said it expects to get approval from the New York Public Service Commission to offer its Fios video service in New York as early as next month.

The company sees cities as a huge opportunity for the Fios service, which provides high-speed Internet service, telephony, and cable TV service over a super-fast fiber connection. Because most customers in big cities such as New York live in large apartment buildings, Verizon has had to adapt its installation process.

Verizon is also boosting speeds for Fios. As part of the upgrade, all Fios customers will now have access to download speeds of 50 megabits per second and uploads of 20Mbps for about $140 a month.

Meanwhile, a group of investors has agreed to take over Philadelphia's Wi-Fi network just as EarthLink was set to pull the plug on it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the group plans to change the business model. Instead of charging $20 a month for network access, the group will offer free Wi-Fi based on advertisements.

EarthLink announced on June 10 that it was abandoning the project after being unable to find a buyer for the network, 80 percent of which is complete. It also claimed that after months of negotiations with the city and a nonprofit group interested in running the network, it was unable to close the deal.

Also of note
Hewlett-Packard announced a significant reorganization of its most profitable division, paring five groups down to three within the printing-and-imaging division. ..A Missouri woman accused of contributing to a teenager's suicide by creating a fake MySpace account to taunt the girl pleaded not guilty in federal court...The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is expected to support the $5 billion merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio...Google is developing a suite of tools to help broadband users identify traffic discrimination by their Internet service providers.

Google plugs in

Silicon Valley came to Washington this week to talk about plug-in hybrids at a great conference organized by Google.org with Brookings. The combination of tech visionaries, electric cars on display, Washington heavy hitters such as John Dingell, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and even a couple of film stars, Peter Horton and Anne Sexton of Who Killed the Electric Car?, made for a great meeting.

Here are my notes from the standing room only event ...

Strong keynotes from Dan Reicher of Google, who laid out Google's road map for work on plug-in hybrids and renewable energy, Peter Darbee, the CEO of PG&E who gave an information packed speech on the role of the power industry as energy producer, Jim Woolsey, who pulled no punches on the Saudis and the Wahabi philosophy as it pertains to our need to achieve energy independence, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-S.C.), who pointed out that government should watch out for unintended consequences of its policy as in the impact on food prices due to support for ethanol, and Chairman John Dingell, who, noting that the auto industry is the only industry that now regulates low carbon, told his friends in other industries, "We're coming to get you next."

The conference was full of optimism, as it should have been, but PHEV pioneer Prof. Andy Frank reminded everyone that the oil industry is not going away any time soon and may have different ideas about the future of the electric car.

Shai Agassi gave his usual awesome presentation on Project Better Place, which is moving full speed ahead in Israel and Denmark with its zero-zero approach to no gas costs through a pure electric car and a free car with a contract. Other interesting speakers included Alan Madian, who laid out a road map for emissions reductions that was pessimistic, only because it assumes very slow turnover of cars.

Jack Hidary and Jim Woolsey asked why the U.S. can't stimulate the retirement of older, gas guzzling vehicles as other countries do, and Jack pointed out this would also help the beleaguered U.S. auto industry.

I had a chance to try out Tesla, Chairman Elon Musk's personal roadster. Tesla delivered its first production models last month. Controls are a bit close, though ergonomically sleek ... the body features a good bit of light-weight carbon fibre but still smokes the coolness test. Moving around the floor of the conference, the car was utterly quiet. The range of 240 miles is impressive -- enough to travel from New York to Washington one-way or from San Francisco to San Jose and back -- though I would like to see about a hundred more miles to facilitate vacation trips -- fill in the blanks on where you like to go.

Everyone seemed proud of the Detroit-engineered Chevy Volt, due to go into production in 2010. The concept model is sharp. If only they would put it into production it would be the sharpest car on the road. Using a serial hybrid system -- electric and then gas in series, it will make trips under 40 miles gas-free but allow longer ranges using gas. But to remind everyone of the past, Peter Horton and Chelsea Sexton, stars of Who Killed the Electric Car?, were on hand.

The bottom line is that electric cars are coming. The question is how many people will buy them and whether the infrastructure will be ready. In this regard, Shai Agassi and Project Better Place's concept of building out networks of plugs and battery charging stations in Israel and Denmark seems particularly promising. A few speakers pointed out that many people live in apartments and may have trouble charging electric cars if they park on the street.

Regarding the deeper question of the power that will ultimately run them, while electricity is currently about one-fifth the cost of gas, important questions remain about the power industry's ability to produce the necessary power, clean or not. If people want to charge up during the day, hundreds of new, probably coal-fired power plants may be needed. On the other hand, if they charge up at night, today's capacity may be sufficient. To prompt the latter, time-of-use pricing is a necessary requirement and it is a very open question

Whether today's balkanized power industry can make the changes necessary to supply sufficient clean power is an open question. On the other hand, if America wants to do something, it can.

Ultimately it will come down to how seriously we want to make this happen.

Google modernizes Web software tool

Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.

"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.

App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.

Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.

GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.

"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."

GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.

Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.

Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.

GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.

It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

A Few Google Tips

In my last post, I talked a little bit about QuickBase’s non-typical Google Analytics implementation. During my time spent investigating how to properly implement the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code) on our site, I learned a few nifty things that I thought I’d share.
Make Tracking Dynamic Url’s Pretty

If your site does something like append a session ID to a page url, your probably seeing clicks to the same page look like clicks to different urls with the data showing up in Google like:

/page.php?sessionid=A2DB4BHe554ERG5
/page.php?sessionid=RG4577H891HH677
/page.php?sessionid=345J10R5BM56TH5

In reality, you want visitor data for page.php rolled up into just “page.php” and you probably don’t want to see the sessionid (or whatever dynamic data you have appended to the url).

Fixing this is pretty easy. In your GATC, you’re probably making a call that looks like this:

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pageTracker._trackPageview();

If you use the default GATC, like in the example above, Google will look at whatever the url is and go with that. In other words, pages with dynamic data appended will continue to look like different urls.

The solution is a rather easy one:

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pageTracker._trackPageview("page.php");

That’s pretty much it. Just feed in the string you want Google to call this page. You can tell Google to call the page whatever you want, even if the page was actually called page.php!

You can read more on this here.
Track Outbound Link Clicks

Google can track any clicks on outbound links you may have on your site, even if that site doesn’t have the GATC installed. This may come in useful if you’re purposefully driving traffic to a third-party for whatever reason. Here’s how you do it:

First, you need to turn on the feature. To do this, you need to add _setAllowLinker(true) to the default GATC implementation like so:

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Once you’ve made that modification, you can add some javascript to your outbound link and start getting the click data.

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Notice that you can specify how you want the click data to look in Google. If you follow the methodology used in this example, all of your outbound links will look like they were clicked from a folder on your domain called “outgoing”. This makes finding outbound click data much easier if you’ve got a lot of them.

Here’s the Google support page on this topic.
Keep Your Data Private

In April, Google launched a new data sharing policy at around the same time they updated the GATC with several new features. If you’re like us, you want to keep your site data private. Here’s how to do it:

* Login to your Google Analytics Account and select the account you wish to modify from the drop-down in the upper right
* In the upper-left, click on “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings”
* Selected your desired Data Sharing Settings and hit “Save Changes”

Of course, you don’t have to keep your data completely locked down.

Here are the options:

Share with Google Products only - For example, you would allow this if you wanted to share analytics data with Adwords (for use with Google’s Conversion Optimizer perhaps)

Anonymously Share with Google products and the benchmarking service
With this option enabled, Google will remove any identifiable information from your analytics information and use it for benchmarking and to improve upon its existing products/services.

Do Not Share will disallow Google from using your analytics data internally and it will disallow you from using the data within other Google products and services.

Hope you find these tips useful!