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Monday, January 18, 2021
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Google, Apple Offer New Deal to Settle U.S Poaching Lawsuit

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Google Intel lawsuit

Finally, four firms of Silicon Valley technology have reached a settlement for a lawsuit. The court case alleges that the four tech companies have infringement antitrust lawsuits.

Google, Intel, Apple and Adobe system were involved in the lawsuit which claims that the companies agreed that they would not poach workers of each other. Such kind of agreement is against the antitrust laws of the country.

The analysts were closely observing the lawsuit which was filed in 2011.  Lucy Koh, the U.S District Judge rebuffed a settlement offer of $324.5 million. He stated that the offered amount was low as compared to the violation of antitrust laws.  Hence, it was expected that the case would cause big damages to the four big tech companies of the world.

The emails of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and other companies are the biggest evidence for the lawsuit.  In that emails, the head of the four tech companies agreed to avoid poaching each other’s engineers. The agreement allowed companies to keep low salary scale of the high engineers.

Surprisingly, the court filing of Tuesday verified that the case is resolved. However, the companies have kept the terms and conditions of the settlement in dark.

The spokesman of Google, Intel and Adobe refused to make any comment on the issue. Nonetheless, Intel’s spokesman confirms that the company does not wish to disclose the amount of settlement.

Microsoft Slams Google for Unveiling Windows 8.1 Security Flaws.

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microsoft and Google

Microsoft filed a public complain against Google. The largest software developer alleges that Google has intentionally published the security flaw of Windows 8.1 system when the company was Microsoft was all set to release a fix.

Microsoft intends to roll out the fix on 14th of Jan. However, Google unveiled the issue on 11 of Jan two days before the fix released.

Earlier, A Washington based company asked Google not to release details regarding the flaw until the fix was ready.

On the other hand, Google states that it followed the regulation of its security research project known as “Project Zero”.  The main objective of the team is to protect the world’s web users from malicious spies and hackers.  Hence, the group scans all kinds for bugs and informs developers privately. Afterwards, the company gives a time period of 90 days to the developers to release the fix.

Google dealt with Microsoft in the same way. The company informed Microsoft about the bug on the 13th of October 2014. After Microsoft reached the deadline of 90 days, Google publicly revealed the bug.

Google believes that security flaws in software should be disclosed before the fix. The prior revelation increase the pressure on particular company otherwise, companies take a lot of time to handle the issue. Hence, the move will compel firms to work faster on the bugs.

Obviously, Microsoft does not consider Google’s reasons as valid. The American multinational corporation called it “less like principles and more like gotcha”.

Microsoft not Happy with Google blabbing over Windows 8.1 login bug

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Microsoft is quite disgusted with Google for disclosing a 90 day old vulnerability in Windows 8.1 just a couple of days before the Redmond based tech giant was about to fix the bug.

Google just revealed this bug on the 11th of January stating that the flaw allowed non privileged users to elevate their rights to administrator level especially during the Windows 8.1 login process.

This wasn’t the first revelation by Google in terms of Windows 8.1. The company reported a nasty takedown of Windows 8.1 in September then revealing it on December the 30th.

Google took the above steps in accordance with its own policies, which states that the tech giant reveal flaws 90 days after it reports them to vendors. In this case, the flaw was first reported to Microsoft on 30th October.

Microsoft says that Google acted quite irresponsibly because the company not only planned a solution for the problem on January 13th but also asked Google not to go public until that day.

Microsoft’s senior director for trustworthy computing Chris Betz wrote “Specifically, we asked Google to work with us to protect customers by withholding details until Tuesday, January 13, when we will be releasing a fix.”

He added that “Google’s 90 day disclosure policy feels less like principles and more like a ‘gotcha’, with customers the ones who may suffer as a result.”

“Google needs to understand that what’s right for them may not always be right for the customers.”

Betz also called on the Mountain View based tech giant along with others to sign up to Redmond’s Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure policy.

Much needed update to Google Translate mobile app coming soon

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According to insider reports from Google, the tech giant would be releasing an update for its Google Translate mobile app pretty soon as the app currently performs below par in much of its tasks.

Google Translate as of now is more of an antique app rather than the everyday use app for most of the users in the present real world scenarios. Speech conversion as of now employees the app to start recording and then wait for a few moments after the app finishes translating and displaying translated text which the other person said in a foreign language. This as most of us found was not the most helpful way to cross the language barrier.

However, a new app is in on the making scenes by Google which would considerably speed things up a bit, which obviously what we want if we happen to be touring Europe especially Paris where a beautiful French brunette is waiting to be asked out and we do ask her, but don’t understand a word coming out of her mouth.

Furthermore the update would certainly make things go much smoother. According to inside reports we could certainly listen, or read in this case, to what the pretty French dame has to offer just by merely letting the app run while we held our phone up to the person speaking and the rest is up to the app as it automatically detects the speech and translates it on the fly, displaying the result on our screen.

This concept of instantaneous translation is not new in the market and services like Skype and DoCoMo, a Japanese mobile carrier, offer these kinds of services as well. But the Google app would be different, firstly because it would be backed by the search engine giant’s cloud computing power, and secondly it would be secure as there are reports that both incoming speech would be saved on a different file location as well outgoing text.

Microsoft Set To Launch Windows 10 With A New Browser, Spartan, Would Retain IE

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Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 10 would launch with an entirely new web browser code-named Spartan, according to an anonymous report.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has reported that this new browser is a total departure from the Internet Explorer mindset. She said that the “lightweight” browser would have a look and feel similar to that of Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers. But her sources also suggested that the new Spartan browser will be offered alongside IE when Windows 10 debuts next year.

While Chrome and Firefox lead on desktops and Apple’s Safari along with Chrome and Android’s default browser are smartphone browser leaders, Internet Explorer is no longer the force it once was. Once there was a time when IE handled about 90 percent of all web traffic on desktop and laptop machines, but according to research outfit Net Applications, its share has now dropped to 58 percent. On mobile, its share is less than 2 percent.

Spartan attempts to address both of these worlds, smartphone and desktops. Windows 10 is designed to be cross platform and would run across a wide range of devices and therefore, the new browser Spartan will be available on phones and tablets as well as laptops and desktops. It’s not clear up till now that whether Spartan will run on Android, Apple’s iOS or any other operating systems that compete with Windows, but there is a good chance that it might.

Altercation between Google and the Mississippi Attorney General on Privacy issues

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google-mississipi

The ongoing skirmish between Google and the Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has novel players, as number of new groups waded in, digging the Motion Picture Association of America, They said “coordinated campaign to shut down and block access to individual websites through backdoor methods resoundingly rejected by the public and federal lawmakers.”

Continuing their talk on Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), perhaps the undaunted, the MPAA, one of the bill’s advocate, want to put his impression on smaller stages.

The key excerpts in the letter, signed by the EEF, Freedom Works and Demand Progress among others were:
Publications including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and The Verge are reporting that the MPAA responded to the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012 by quietly searching for alternate means to accomplish key provisions of the bill, such as website blocking and search filtering. It is our understanding that those efforts include developing legal theories and even drafting civil investigation demand letters for state attorneys general to facilitate actions against websites and search engines. The goal of these efforts mirrors the goal of SOPA: to create new legal tools that will compel online service providers to remove content from the Internet with little, if any, meaningful due process.

Despite these risks, you told the Huffington Post you agreed with the methods of the ill¬fated SOPA legislation. We beg to differ, as do the engineers who created the Internet, the organizations and businesses that depend upon a secure and robust Internet infrastructure, and the legions of Internet users who spoke out against SOPA in 2011 and 2012. […] SOPA was a bad idea at the federal level, and any SOPA revival on a state level is an equally bad idea.
Hence Google, making its displeasure public has taken a private effort by the MPAA. We should assume that the next congress would take care of the matter.

Google Working on Kids Friendly Version for Users Under 12

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Google new version for kids

Google intends to launch special versions of its famous products for children under 12.

The biggest software developer wishes that the new version of YouTube and Google Chrome will gain popularity among children.

The major goal of Google is to make internet a safe and secure place for children.

Pavani Diwanji, Google’s vice president of engineering stated that the firm wants to offer appropriate tools to parents so that they can keep a safety check on their children. Despite this, it is quite fun to develop things for kids since engineers can get ideas from the personal experiences of their colleagues.

Generally, children are the last one on the list of targeted audience of a biggest tech giant like Google. However, a spokesman of Google informed that numerous children are currently using different products of the company.  It is pretty obvious that these kids need supervision for the ordinary version of Google. Therefore, the firm plans to roll out a new version of Google for kids with special privacy control options and filtering systems.

It seems like Google really want children to enjoy technology and other science program.  Earlier, the company released maker camp, Google Doodle competition, and annual science fair.   Such kind of activities attracts a large number of children towards education and learning process.

On the other hand, a few video streaming sites like Netflix already filters its content for kids. The site displays videos to kids in an extremely visual manner. It attracts large number of kids to the internet.

Google Presents Inbox For Gmail: A Thread Based App For iOS & Android Users

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google-launches-new-app-for-email

Google Corporation. has launched a brand new email client application for Android and iOS that will redefine the way we will email. Mailbox by Gmail application allows you signal and receive emails much like threaded text conversations. The application is yet only provided on invite basis, and it is likely to achieve the planet customers soon. Gmail, that has half a billion customers on its booty and an ever increasing user rate of just one million each week, always keeps customers up on and on with accumulated additional features.

You will find a large quantity of features that Gmail has introduced directly into this update. Memory joggers could be set very easily about this application. You may also setup occasions to transmit within the mail. There’s lots of scope for arranging mails according to the preferred time using these additional features around the application. The brand new tag to which emails could be effectively organized and clustered is known as ‘bundles’. With bundles, customers can segregate the mails in sections for example promotions, travels, or something that suits the benefit from the user. We have seen the application is extremely focused to user convenient design.

There’s additionally a further step taken when it comes to the custom keyword search within the mailbox. Now you can explore for something, and obtain associated with Google to locate particulars. To have an instance, if you are planning to choose a celebration, you can type the title from the event inside your mail application, and obtain memory joggers about this from Gmail, also other relevant details about the big event for example address, or timings, with the Google internet search engine. The internet search engine will be from the Gmail application.

Because the primary utilisation of the application would be to serve mails, in and outgoing, there’s more enjoyable put into the mailing services. It can make the procedure much more simpler compared to previous Gmail. On invite, this particular service could be received after queuing up by delivering a mail to mailbox@gmail.com.

Intended buyers of Nexus 6 in UK and Europe have to wait a little more as the preorders for Nexus 6 might face a delay till 18th of November

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nexus-6

 

After the official announcement by Google that Pre-orders of Android 5.0 Lollipop powered handsets and Nexus 6 will begin from November 3rd in United States, it appears to be delayed till 18th November for UK and Europe.

Moreover its information page could not announce any release date till now but it has revealed a lot more about the features and specs of the upcoming handsets. The specifications revealed by Google’s information page suggested that, ”Nexus 6 will be powered by a 2.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 805 processor and an Adreno 420 GPU. The display is sized at 5.96-inch and is capable of 2,560 x 1,440 pixel resolution that translates into a 493 pixels-per-inch (ppi). You can get it in 32GB and 64GB internal storage options and packs a 13-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization and 2-megapixel front snapper.”

Moreover, Google also revealed that it will have a turbo charger, which will be able to charge the whole battery in 15 minutes and the users will be able to use that battery for running six hours.

Sources have confirmed the delay in UK and Europe claiming that the pre-orders have been delayed from November 3 to November 18. The November 3 pre-order date isn’t far away and there has been no official confirmation from Google about the delay in Europe and UK.

There is one more thing to it. Earlier when it was announced for the first time, there was an option through which intended buyers can signup for an email update on availability of the Smartphone in the UK, but this option has since been taken down.

Interested buyers in United States can preorder the Nexus 6 through Google Play Store from October 29. They will get the shipment date of November. As for this the stock sold out just in few hours and people are still waiting to hear about the restocking but there isn’t any as yet. Lets see when Google comes with a good news for those who want to buy it.

 

Google’s Employers Found Security Loop-Hole in Legacy SSL 3.0

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New security vulnerability after Heartbleed has been discovered on the protocol. It is named as POODLE. Poodle stands for Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption which is used by the hackers for encrypting web traffic. It was discovered by Thai Doung, Krzysztof Kotowicz and Bodo Moller. All of them are security researchers at Google. They also published details about this vulnerability in the form of a paper today.

It attacks directly on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol and encrypt the traffic between the mail server and email client used by the user or else between a website and a browser. It is not as much intense as the Shellshock or Heartbleed but it enables the attacker to hijack and decrypt the session cookie which is meant to determine you as a user for Google or twitter and it does not even needs your password for that.

One way to defy the vulnerability is to run JavaScript which can be done only when the attacker is on the same Wi-Fi as yours. It will reduce the intensity of the attack as compared to the intensity of the attack made for any other computer using another internet.

As the matter of facts POODLE can affect only SSLv3 so the security administrators at Google recommended all systems administrators to simply turn off support for SSLv3 to protect yourself against the issue.

Rob Graham, CEO of Erratasec said that, “This attack is really against clients, you have to worry about it if you’re in a place like Starbucks. If you’re at home there’s probably no one man-in-the-middling you except the NSA. So as a home user, you don’t need to panic. As a server administrator, you probably don’t need to panic if your customers are coming in over home connections. Only if they are coming in something like a Starbucks Wi-Fi.”

Heartbleed and Shellshock were vulnerabilities that allowed an attacker to hack a server. POODLE instead targets the clients.

“The fear of rushing to go fix this is very low because of that,” Graham says. “People with servers can’t get hacked, and people with [vulnerable] clients also can’t get hacked unless they’re on an open Wi-Fi.”

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