Google cyberattack hit password system: report

NEW YORK: A December cyberattack on Google Inc computers hit the company”s password system that millions of people worldwide use to access almost all of the company”s Web services, The New York Times reported, citing a person with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The closely-guarded program is considered a crown jewel at Google, enabling users and employees to sign in with their password only once to operate various services including e-mail and business applications, the newspaper said in its April 20 edition.

Google did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Code-named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, and still in use under the name Single Sign-On, the program was described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the newspaper said.

The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and Google quickly started to bolster security, the newspaper said.

But the theft leaves open a possibility, perhaps faint, that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not know about, the newspaper said, citing independent computer experts.

Google disclosed the hacking on January 12, reporting a detection of “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.”

The Mountain View, California-based company said the attack appeared to target Chinese human rights activists, and that only two Gmail accounts appeared to have been accessed.

Google at the time said it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. In March, it closed its China-based Web search service and began redirecting users to an uncensored portal in Hong Kong. That decision came amid heightened tensions between China and Washington, D.C.

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Google To Expose traffic Chokers

Google has begun offering tools to expose Internet service providers that choke traffic or shift users into slow lanes while allowing others to zip along at high speeds.

The online search and advertising king is an unabashed champion of “net neutrality” in which all Internet traffic is treated equally instead of letting service providers give preferential treatment to privileged clients.

“At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation,” Google chief evangelist Vint Cerf and principal engineer Stephen Stuart wrote in an online posting.

“No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband.”

The PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers to create an online Measurement Lab (M-Lab) that researchers can use to detect Internet traffic manipulation.

“When an Internet application doesn’t work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else?” Cerf wrote.

“It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today.”

M-Lab went online Wednesday with three diagnostic tools running on computer servers near Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The tools are available to help users “diagnose common problems that might impair their broadband speed, as well as determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled by their ISPs,” according to Cerf, a computer scientist often called “father of the Internet.

ISPs argue that such measures are necessary to manage growing congestion on the Internet highway. Google has been among those advocating against fettering online traffic, saying that doing so stifles Internet innovation and growth.

M-Lab is in a nascent phase and through the year Google will add servers in a dozen locations in Europe and the United States. More diagnostic tools will be added and results made public, according to Google.

“M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish,” Cerf wrote.

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Google To Expose traffic Chokers was first posted on January 29, 2009 at 10:57 am.

Online News Reader Fast Flip Launched By Google

WASHINGTON: Internet giant Google unveiled its “Fast Flip” online news reader on Monday, featuring stories from major media outlets, including the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Google, which launched Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco, compared using the quick-loading product to flipping through the pages of a magazine “really fast without unnatural delays.”

Fast Flip allows users to quickly browse through news stories from the websites of Google’s three dozen partners.

A Web surfer can quickly jump from one article to the next using large arrows at speeds significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page.

“As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting,” Fast Flip developer Krishna Bharat, a Google engineer, said in a blog post.

Other companies supplying content include magazines such as the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Newsweek and Popular Mechanics, as well as online news sites TechCrunch, Salon and Slate.

The Mountain View, California-based Google has had a strained relationship with some US publishers and Bharat said the Internet company would share advertising revenue from Fast Flip with its media partners.

The firm’s popular news aggregator website Google News has drawn fire from a number of US newspaper owners for linking to their articles without payment.

The Internet search and advertising heavyweight has dismissed the criticism and countered that it is providing newspapers a free service by driving traffic to their websites.

“Partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads” on Fast Flip, Bharat said. “This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content.”

The new feature, the Google engineer argued, will allow readers to scan articles faster, thus reading more of them and bringing more ad revenue to publishers.

“The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet,” he continued. “However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution.”

With print advertising revenue and circulation declining, US newspaper publishers have been actively searching for ways to earn more money from the Web, including possibly charging for content online.

Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by topic, by publication or by “most viewed,” “most popular” or even “recommended.”

It shows only the first page of a story and users who want to read more have to click through to the website of the host publication.

Through the feature, users can share content with friends or members of a social network and Google said it is offering a mobile version.

For the moment, Fast Flip is considered an experimental “Google Labs” product. It is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com.

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Online News Reader Fast Flip Launched By Google was first posted on September 15, 2009 at 3:16 pm.
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