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Sculpting an interactive doodle for Alexander Calder's birthday
July 21, 2011
Our homepage doodle today celebrates the birthday of
Alexander Calder
, an American artist best known for inventing the mobile.
Last year I wandered into a white room at
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
full of Alexander Calder’s delicate “objects,” all beautifully balanced and proportioned, moving gently in the air currents like a whimsical metal forest. Calder took ordinary materials at hand—wire, scraps of sheet metal—and made them into brilliant forms, letting space and motion do the rest. As an engineer, I work with abstractions, too, so this really struck me.
But you kind of want to play with the things. They do not let you do that at museums.
So I coded up a very basic demo of a mobile and showed it to a friend, who showed it to one of our doodlers—and then this amazing thing happened: talented artists and engineers who liked the idea just started to help! What we ended up with is way cooler than anything I could have built on my own. I’m proud to work for a company where an idea like this can actually happen.
This is Google’s first doodle made entirely using
HTML5 canvas
, so you need to use a modern browser to interact with it. It runs a physics simulation on the mobile’s geometry, and then does realtime 3D rendering with vector graphics. Only recently have browsers advanced to the point where this is possible.
I like to think Calder would have appreciated today’s doodle, since we’re setting up shapes and abstractions and letting them act on their own. Hint: try it out on a laptop with an accelerometer!
Posted by Jered Wierzbicki, Software Engineer
More wood behind fewer arrows
July 20, 2011
Last week we
explained
that we’re prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we’ve decided to wind down Google Labs. While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead.
In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments—in others we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on
Android Market
. We’ll update you on our progress via the
Google Labs website
.
We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the
Google+ field trial
last month showed.
Update
3:36pm:
To clarify: we don't have any plans to change in-product experimentation channels like Gmail Labs or Maps Labs. We'll continue to experiment with new features in each of our products.
Posted by Bill Coughran, SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure
Faculty from across the Americas meet in New York for the Faculty Summit
July 20, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Research Blog
)
Last week, we held our seventh annual
Computer Science Faculty Summit
. For the first time, the event took place at our
New York City office
; nearly 100 faculty members from universities in the U.S., Canada and Latin America attended. The two-day Summit focused on systems, artificial intelligence and mobile computing. Alfred Spector, VP of research and special initiatives, hosted the conference and led lively discussions on privacy, security and Google’s approach to research.
Google’s Internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, opened the Summit with a talk on the challenges involved in securing the “
Internet of things
”—that is, uniquely identifiable objects (“things”) and their virtual representations. With almost 2 billion international Internet users and 5 billion mobile devices out there in the world, Vint expounded upon the idea that Internet security is not just about technology, but also about policy and global institutions. He stressed that our new digital ecosystem is complex and large in scale, and includes both hardware and software. It also has multiple stakeholders, diverse business models and a range of legal frameworks. Vint argued that making and keeping the Internet secure over the next few years will require technical innovation and global collaboration.
After Vint kicked things off, faculty spent the two days attending presentations by Google software engineers and research scientists, including John Wilkes on the management of Google's large hardware infrastructure, Andrew Chatham on the self-driving car, Johan Schalkwyk on mobile speech technology and Andrew Moore on the research challenges in commerce services. Craig Nevill-Manning, the engineering founder of Google’s NYC office, gave an update on Google.org, particularly its recent work in crisis response. Other talks covered the engineering work behind products like Ad Exchange and Google Docs, and the range of engineering projects taking place across 35 Google offices in 20 countries. For a complete list of the topics and sessions, visit the
Faculty Summit site
. Also, a few of our attendees heeded Alfred’s call to recap their breakout sessions in verse—
download a PDF
of one of our favorite poems, about the future of mobile computing, penned by NYU professor Ken Perlin.
A highlight of this year’s Summit was Bill Schilit’s presentation of the Library Wall, a Chrome OS experiment featuring an eight-foot tall full-color virtual display of ebooks that can be browsed and examined individually via touch screen. Faculty members were invited to play around with the digital-age “bookshelf,” which is one of the newest additions to our NYC office.
Over on the Research Blog, we’ve posted deeper dives on a few of the talks—including
cluster management
,
mobile search
and
commerce
. We also collected some interesting
faculty reflections
. For more information on all of our programs, visit our
University Relations website
. The Faculty Summit is meant to connect forerunners across the computer science community—in business, research and academia—and we hope all our attendees returned home feeling informed and inspired.
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations
Using data to protect people from malware
July 19, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Google Online Security Blog
)
The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. We believe in the power of the web and information, and we work every day to detect potential abuse of our services and ward off attacks.
As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results:
This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.
We hope to use the knowledge we’ve gathered to assist as many people as possible. In case our notice doesn’t reach everyone directly, you can run a system scan on your computer yourself by following the steps in our
Help Center article
.
Update
July 20, 2011:
We've seen a few common questions we thought we'd address here:
The malware appears to have gotten onto users' computers from one of roughly a hundred variants of fake antivirus, or "fake AV" software that has been in circulation for a while. We aren't aware of a common name for the malware.
We believe a couple million machines are affected by this malware.
We've heard from a number of you that you're thinking about the potential for an attacker to copy our notice and attempt to point users to a dangerous site instead. It's a good security practice to be cautious about the links you click, so the spirit of those comments is spot-on. We thought about this, too, which is why the notice appears only at the top of our search results page. Falsifying the message on this page would require prior compromise of that computer, so the notice is not a risk to additional users.
In the meantime, we've been able to successfully warn hundreds of thousands of users that their computer is infected. These are people who otherwise may never have known.
Posted by Damian Menscher, Security Engineer
g.co, the official URL shortcut for Google websites
July 18, 2011
In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by
launching
our public URL shortener,
goo.gl
. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will link only to official Google products and services:
g.co
.
The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember. The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll use g.co to send you only to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.
There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.
We’d like to thank our friends at
.CO Internet SAS
who operate .co domain names for facilitating the acquisition of g.co, and keep your eyes open as we start rolling out g.co as our official URL shortcut for Google websites.
Posted by Gary Briggs, VP Consumer Marketing
Shareable Google News badges for your favorite topics
July 14, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Google News Blog
)
On Google News, the average reader of political news has read 20 articles about politics in the last six months. Where do you stand?
Starting today, in the U.S. edition of
Google News
, you can see how voracious a news reader you are by earning Google News badges as you read articles about your favorite topics. The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate.
We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you. Here’s a taste:
Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are. You can also add custom sections by hovering on a badge and clicking “add section” to read more about your favorite topics. To get started with badges, visit Google News from a signed-in account with
web history
enabled and then visit this page on our
Help Center
for instructions.
This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges. Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.
In the spirit of continually trying to improve Google News, we have heard loud and clear from the many of you who asked us to separate our Sci/Tech section into two distinct sections. We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon. We also combined some personalization settings from the “News for you” and News Settings menu into one handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.
We hope you’ll badge up on Google News to keep track of what you’re reading, read more of what you love and share your passions with your friends.
Posted by Natasha Mohanty, Engineer, Google News
What Do You Love?
July 12, 2011
A while back, a few of us wanted to make a little tool that we could use to show just about anybody more of what Google makes. That led to some simple ideas, and then a few more ideas and ultimately, to a challenge: how we could connect people to products they might not know about and may find useful, but make the discovery relevant to them and keep it fun.
Playing about with that challenge produced a website—
What Do You Love?
—that we hope meets at least some of the challenge by demonstrating how different Google products can show you different things about any particular search query. Like always, you’re the judge, so
give it a go
. Type in something that you love—polar bears, space travel, pickup trucks, Lady Gaga, early Foghat—whatever strikes your fancy (for some reason, the results for
cheese
always crack us up, so try that if you’re momentarily stumped). No matter what it is, we’ll give you back something that will let you get even more into what you love.
Posted by Andy Berndt, VP, Creative Lab
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