Web Concepts

Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

The research team, which is the same group that's behind the tech used by Google Earth to create three-dimensional cityscapes, has adopted their mapping tech for the individual person. While wearing the pack, humans take on the role of those Google Street View cars that roll around cities snapping images that can be laid over maps.

But while Google Earth uses GPS to create its 3-D renderings, the team had to figure out another way to model interiors in 3-D (GPS isn't very reliable indoors). The solution was an inertial management unit (IMU) like those used in guided missiles. The IMU figures out where the backpack is relative to where it just was, the cameras gnerate a four-direction view, and the lasers record the geometry of the world around them.

The backpack is part of a larger effort to map the entire world, inside and out. But cartography isn't the only field that can benefit from such detailed 3-D models of interiors. Data gleaned from the pack could help generate video games that are played in better real-world environments, and the models could be used to make buildings more energy efficient.

[UC Berkeley via KGO-TV]

As we watch the future of the internet drastically moving toward wireless broadband access, a joint policy proposal by Verizon and Google could spell doom for openness on anything but the traditional wired web

For those that may be unaware of the issue, an exceedingly simplified fifteen-second net neutrality primer: The debate pits network providers (like Verizon) against companies and individuals who use said networks to deliver products and services to customers (like Google). As web applications become more central in nearly every aspect of public and private life, the network providers have grown increasingly interested in recouping the massive amounts of money they spend on building and maintaining network infrastructure by charging those companies who use an inordinate amount of bandwidth (like Google) for privileged access and delivery to customers. The internet has never worked this way, so the idea is obviously upsetting to many people, who cite the web's inherent openness as a key, if not the key detail that has allowed it to fundamentally change all of our lives in such a powerful way, and will allow it to continue to do so at the same breakneck pace in the future.

Google and Verizon's plan lays out specific rules to ensure that wireline internet services can not be used for any such tiered or paid access, and that all applications and services delivered over them (as long as they're legal) can be given no preference over any other traffic. That means established bandwidth hogs like YouTube and brand new bandwidth hogs built by Russian teenagers in their bedrooms like Chat Roulette will all get equal access to your eyeballs. This will also theoretically prevent broadband providers from intentionally limiting the speed of all BitTorrent traffic, something they've shown interest in doing in the past to avoid clogging their network with copyrighted materials; the protocol can just as easily be used legally.

But what has net neutrality activists worried--in my opinion, rightly so--is that in the new plan, almost none of these protections apply to wireless networks. Nor do they apply to a more ambiguously defined category of "additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV)" using current wireline networks.

But it's the wireless exemption that strikes the most worry in the hearts of free-internet proponents. As anyone watching the future of telecommunications and the internet will tell you, wireless web access will almost certainly one day overtake traditional wired networks as most people's primary means of getting online. With the last five years' explosion of smartphone usage, we're already watching this happen. Heck, if your home is in a good coverage area, it's entirely feasible today to scrap your monthly cable or DSL broadband services for something like a wireless MiFi hotspot from Verizon or Sprint for all but the most intensive surfing.

Should Google and Verizon's suggested plan be implemented, whoever beams the signal to your MiFi hotspot can shape the traffic of the web however they choose. This means blocking high-bandwidth sites like YouTube, giving preference to one streaming service over another (like only allowing Netflix's Watch Instantly vs. any other movie-streaming service), or blocking certain protocols like BitTorrent altogether.

Their reasoning for this proviso is that current-generation wireless networks are exceedingly fragile to maintain and expensive to build. No one's debating that--just ask anyone who uses an iPhone on AT&T in San Francisco or New York City. But why many see this as shortsighted is because as technology marches on, wireless broadband bandwidth will become a less precious commodity. Remember when we all exclusively used our phone lines to access the internet? It's pretty easy to see that if we were all still connecting with 28.8 modems, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. And the Verizons and the AT&Ts of the world wouldn't have to be fighting nearly as hard to maintain control of their networks at the expense of good old fashioned voice telephone calls.

But what happened was, DSL and fiber optic cable technologies sprung up. That shifted the burden and changed the issue from one of maintaining century-old copper wiring to building and maintaining satellite links and fiber optic cables with exponentially more capacity. Still a burden, yes, but a completely new and different one. The wireless space could change just as quickly. We could, one day, be swimming in more wireless bandwidth than we currently know what to do with.

The plan does acknowledges the industry's potential for rapid change, calling for the Government Accountability office to "report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers."

Which is all well and good. But this isn't 2005. Some predict wireless access to significantly overtake wired networks in as little as five years. And if that happens, and the core philosophies of Google and Verizon's policy proposal make it into whatever net neutrality legislation we may soon see, the internet could be a very different place.

You can read Google and Verizon's own take on the plan on Google's Public Policy blog here, which also links to the official two-page policy proposal.

The drone, made by Microdrones GmbH, can stay in the air for more than an hour, photographing large swaths of territory autonomously as it goes. It can also hover, providing aerial surveillance over a single target area for just as long.

Google's interest in such a drone is most likely its ability to supplement its Google Earth service, which currently relies on aerial and satellite photos to overlay Google Maps with actual bird's eye images of the earth. But Google is in hot water -- particularly in Europe -- for its collection of personal Wi-Fi data by its army of Street View cars that drive around collecting all those street images provided by that service. Street View itself has been called an invasion of privacy because it photographs people without their knowledge or consent.

It's tough to make a case that shooting photos on a public street is an invasion of privacy, but adding an aerial surveillance drone to the mix could stir the ire of privacy advocates and could raise legal issues in some countries as well. Assuming Google is only toying with the idea of raising a drone air force to provide cheap and up-to-date aerial images for Google Earth, this doesn't seem like such a big deal.

But given the fact that Google has a history of prompting privacy complaints and that the drone it acquired was designed with a military/surveillance nature, it will be interesting to see what shakes out of this wrinkle in the Google story. UK aircraft regulations have already been amended to reflect the new and growing role of surveillance drones in society and the FAA is currently considering how the U.S. might integrate commercial drones into American skies. Somewhere out there privacy rights, aviation law, and commercial interests are going to collide, and should Google roll out a fleet of camera-laden drone aircraft, the ensuing reactions of citizens and state could mark the preliminary steps in defining which direction our drone culture is heading.

[Register]

The much-hyped, rarely understood Google Wave project--essentially an email application with more intensive real-time collaboration and communication tools bolted on--will be developed no longer, Google announced in a blog post this afternoon. Can't say that it's much of a surprise.

Wave was composed of several technically innovative individual parts, like its real-time, as-you-type chat, an advanced spellcheck algorithm and the ability for developers to build their own add-ons. Innovative enough, in fact, to receive a Best of What's New nod last year. But the service lacked cohesion. Put simply: no one knew what to use it for.

Here at PopSci.com, we looked at using Wave as our command central for running the site (we currently use the web chat service Campfire), but found it too complex and in many ways ill-suited to the task. Having co-workers see what you're typing each keypress at a time--mistakes, recasts, backspaces and all--was more awkward than useful. And I still don't think I understand the methodology of storing conversations and projects in "Waves."

We, apparently, weren't alone. Google says "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." It will be maintained through the end of the year, and for those rarefied few that understood the service enough to start using it, they'll have a way to export all their data before the plug is pulled for good.

[Google Blog]

A Chinese computer scientist has a suggestion: mimic the way search engines index Chinese characters.

Technology Review's blog helpfully describes why search engines like Google are so fast and why current bioinformatics search systems are not. Most search engines use an inverted index -- rather than compiling a list of every single Web page and all its words, for every single word, they compile a list of the places where it appears.

Bioinformatics searches, by contrast, use a couple algorithms that basically compare the data from one genome to the data from another. This is relatively fast when there are only a few genomes, but as they grow exponentially, the searches take much longer.

A simple solution would be to switch to the Google approach -- for every base pair "word," make a list of the genes where they appear. But words are easy to spot, because they have spaces between them. Base pairs do not.

As it happens, Chinese characters don't, either, but search engines have gotten around this. Wang Liang, a computer scientist at SOSO.com, one of the big three search engines in China, says the trick is to segment the words into "n-grams," words that are n letters long.

Tech Review explains: There are 1-grams for one-letter words, 2-grams for two-letter words and so on. A search for a 3-letter word, like ABC, can be done by searching for AB and BC. Some Chinese search engines work this way, by indexing all the 2-gram combinations.

OK, then, how many n-grams are in a genetic word? The nucleotides A, T, G and C are only 1-grams, which makes them pretty useless as search terms. So some fuzzy math is required. Liang says DNA sequences follow Zipf's law, which basically states that in any long document, half the words appear only once. This theory can be used to find an average length for DNA "words."

Liang studied the genomes of arabidopsis, aspergillus, the fruit fly and the mouse, and found that a good average word length is 12 letters. Therefore, the best way to index genome data is to use 12-grams -- that is, 12-letter combinations of A, T, G and C.

With that vocabulary, a Google-like inverted index becomes possible.

[Technology Review]

Recorded Future appears to be a data analytics company that tries to calculate what the future might hold by applying search-engine like capabilities to highly specific data sets in order to deduce what's probable to happen down the road. By scanning the Web for the frequency and nature of references to a certain person or occurrence, Recorded Future computes what it calls a "momentum value" for each entity in its database. From there, it tries to project future happenings, be they stock market swings or terrorist attacks.

A blog post on Recorded Future's Web site explains:

The momentum value indicates how interesting a certain event or entity is at a particular time, and is continuously updated. In computing the momentum value, we take into account the volume of news around an entity or event, as well as what sources it is mentioned in, what other events and entities it is mentioned together with, and several other factors.

The post continues:

The momentum measure is used to present the most relevant query results in our web user interface, but it can also be analyzed using statistical methods to predict possible future changes in momentum, which in turn can be valuable e.g. for trading decisions.

It sounds more reliable than a crystal ball, and honestly it sounds like a good fit for Google. Recorded Future's analytics tools could prove valuable to the search giant, especially if they prove useful at crunching large volumes of data into useful, actionable information -- a task that is Google's bread and butter. We'll try to guard our optimism and not dwell on the fact that such prediction models sounds vaguely similar to some of the risk management models employed by once-mighty investment firms.

Google plans to invest $100 million in startups through Google Ventures this year alone, so regardless of whether Recorded Ventures pans out, we predict Google will be just fine.

[ComputerWorld]

Germany’s data protection chief said he was “horrified” by the discovery – which has been rumored for a while now – and called on Google to delete what he claims was unlawfully collected personal data from wireless networks, as well as to cease cruising German streets for Street View.

What’s a bit baffling about all this is that several other companies have done the exact same thing without catching the backlash Google is currently enduring. Germany’s own Fraunhofer Institute has mapped the WiFi networks in parts of Germany going back as far as 2000 and firms like Skyhook Wireless use their own massive databases of wireless networks (gathered in a similar way) to provide location awareness in many mobile gadgets, including the iPhone and iPad.

Then again, Google is another story altogether. For one, some European nations have already expressed a disdain for the way Google’s tentacles are spreading throughout their cities. Street View has been a particular sticking point for several EU countries, as the idea of a bunch of Yankees cruising about snapping photos of the populace doesn't necessarily sit well with certain governments.

There have been other privacy concerns surrounding Google as well. A few days ago, information czars from a handful of nations including France, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands sent a strongly-worded letter to CEO Eric Schmidt criticizing the irresponsible rollout of Buzz (Canada, Israel and New Zealand also signed). So perhaps it's not so surprising that Germany is taking issue with this.

Further, the massive amount of data Google has at its disposal is enough to make anyone a bit paranoid. While Fraunhofer might be able to tell you how many WiFi networks are in a certain village in Bavaria, Google could – and we’re just speculating of course – associate your network name or MAC, your address, and a picture of your front door. That’s a bit creepy even for the most digitally open among us.

But perhaps the greatest objection is this: What is Google going to do with all that data? The intelligence community would love a means to cross reference MACs with locations and the people who reside there, so the fact that a foreign nation is wandering the streets of Europe gathering this data is understandably disconcerting from a security standpoint. It’s more likely Google wants to use that kind of data for targeted advertising or some such . . . did we say “targeted?” We meant highly-specific advertising. Now, give us the information we want.

[The Register]