Oracle’s threat to Google mobile push

The legal war over software rights that Oracle launched against Google late on Thursday could hamper the internet company’s successful push into the smartphone market, industry analysts warned on Friday.

Oracle’s aggressive move was also a “nuclear deterrent” that would spread much more widely across the mobile devices industry, with long-term implications for many handset makers and carriers, said Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, accuses Google of patent and copyright infringement over the inclusion of parts of Oracle’s Java software in its Android smartphone operating system.

Android, which Google makes available free of charge, has been taken up by handset makers including Motorola and HTC, and in the most recent quarter phones carrying the software overtook Apple’s iPhone in global sales.

Oracle acquired rights to Java, a set of tools that make it easier for software developers to write applications that run on many different operating systems, as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

The lawsuit shows that Oracle will seek to make more money from the rights to the widely used Java than Sun did, analysts said.

“You’re definitely going to get a stronger licence enforcement policy – and rightly so, perhaps,” said Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC.

The lawsuit also serves as a warning to handset makers that are using Android and could tilt the balance in favour of other operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software, which is due to be launched later this year, Mr Hilwa said.

If Google is forced to pay Oracle for the use of its technology, it could lead it to charge for Android, also making the software less attractive to handset makers, he added.

Many handset makers already have a licence that allows them to use Java. The prospect that Android would continue to grow fast raised the danger for Oracle that it would lose its power to charge a royalty on many new handsets, said Mr Driver.

However, some experts also warned that Oracle’s lawsuit could backfire, encouraging companies to look for alternatives to the Java technology.

At the time it bought Sun, Oracle executives said they would tread carefully in how they exercised their Java rights, since a heavy-handed approach could undermine the software’s standing as a de facto industry standard.

Legal battles over patents are rare between the technology industry’s leading players. Most maintain large portfolios of rights and have enough mutual self-interest to agree broad cross-licensing deals that give companies access to each others’ patents.

Oracle’s attack on Google highlights the internet company’s relatively weak patent portfolio, Mr Driver said.

Power of Google

Mashable news : YouTube Removes Cookies From the White House

Recently, we wrote about the White House taking measures to ensure that the videos that appear on Whitehouse.gov do not set cookies that retrieve information about viewers’ online habits - something that embedded YouTube videos do.

In response, YouTube added an option to set cookies to delayed mode, making sure that YouTubeYouTube reviews tracks information only from those visitors who actually click on the video.

Now, YouTube has taken it a step further, completely ignoring the cookies collected from visitors to Whitehouse.gov. It’s a step in the right direction, but once again, it’s only an exception that’s been made solely to satisfy the White House’s demands. Thus, the question from the original article still stands: if YouTube’s privacy policy isn’t good enough for the US government - to the extent that YouTube has to make exceptions to its rules - is it good enough for the rest of us?

Source = mashable

Want To Save Money? --> GOOGLE TIPJAR

Google hopes people will use the Tip Jar, which acts somewhat like a forum, to offer up, comment on, and rank money-saving ideas that people can use in their daily personal and professional lives.

Take a Tip. Share a Tip.

Tip Jar is a collection of money saving tips submitted and ranked by the web community. Choose a category below to get started. Learn more
At home	At work	Finance	Kids & Family	Shopping	Food	Cars & Transit

I took a peek at several of the tips under the "home" category. Some that were highly ranked include:

• "Install CFL (or, even better, LED) bulbs wherever it makes sense. These bulbs might cost more initially, but they both have a longer life than normal incandescent bulbs and they both eat far less electricity."
• "Turn off the TV! Did you know that leaving the television on is the No. 1 electricity waster in the world? When everyone is finished watching television, especially before going to sleep, turn it off."
• "Drive your car longer. The buy new versus used debate often overlooks the most important factor -- how long you own your car. Drive it as long as you safely can for substantial savings."

Lively, and Three Other Google Flops

Google was once invincible and unable to make a mistake. Well, although its share price is not what it used to be, one can argue they’re still invincible in most areas they’ve dabbled in, but the mistakes and flops are now piling up.

Google Lively, a virtual world in which users can create their own environment and avatar and communicate with each other, is about to be shut down. True, this was one of Google’s 20% projects, meaning that it was created by one of Google’s engineers in their “spare” time, but still, time and money were invested in it and it flopped badly, with hardly anyone ever using it. Competing with Second Life is obviously not something that can be done casually.

The most clear example of a Google failure, however, is Google Answers. A high profile project and a direct competitor to Yahoo Answers - which, by the way, is still operational - Google Answers was shut down back in 2006. Its model of experts answering questions (instead of just having an open model with everyone answering, like on Yahoo Answers) didn’t hold up too well, and although the service is still a valuable resource, it wasn’t meant to be.

Jaiku has not officially flopped yet. But, the fact remains that after acquiring the service back in 2007 Google has done absolutely nothing with it, while Twitter - Jaiku’s direct competitor - has grown immensely. Hell, even other competitors in the space, such as Pownce, have experienced better growth than Jaiku, which can be seen from the Compete traffic comparison below.

No innovation, no new features; in fact, after the service was acquired by Google, its official blog has had only two updates: one to say that the service is back up, and another to warn about maintenance downtime. Perhaps Google has something huge in stock for Jaiku, but from what can be seen on the surface, it’s going nowhere.

Directly related to the Jaiku-Twitter story is Dodgeball, another short messaging service that Google had acquired in 2005. Unlike other Google flops, this one wasn’t entirely wrapped in nice, apologetic words. Dennis Crowley, the founder of Dodgeball, was frustrated with his experience working with Google, and he claimed that Google simply didn’t think Dodgeball was worth investing any resources in. It’s no secret that every startup’s wet dream is getting acquired by Google, and the Dodgeball incident has so far been the only stain on Google’s near perfect resume.

Is there a lesson that can be learned from these mistakes? Perhaps it’s still too early to tell, but if you add Orkut - Google’s social network which is arguably doing well, but also hasn’t done anything revolutionary lately - to the mix, it becomes fairly obvious that Google is not good at building communities. One more reason to bet on Facebook one day being bigger than Google, if you’re the betting type.

Gmail exploit may allow attackers to forward e-mail

A Gmail security vulnerability may allow an attacker to set up filters on users' e-mail accounts without their knowledge, according to a proof of concept posted Sunday at GeekCondition.com.

In his post, Brandon writes that the vulnerability has caused some people to lose their domain names registered through GoDaddy.com.

Without posting the full exploit, here is the key as Brandon explains it relies on obtaining the variables that represent the user name and "at":

When you create a filter in your Gmail account, a request is sent to Google's servers to be processed. The request is made in the form of a url with many variables. For security reasons, your browser doesn't display all the variable contained within the url. Using FireFox and a plugin called Live HTTP Headers, you can see exactly what variables are sent from your browser to Google's servers.

After that, an attacker just needs to identify the variable that is the equivalent of the username.

"Obtaining this variable is tricky but possible," he writes. "I'm not going to tell you how to do it, if you search hard enough online you'll find out how."

The "at" variable can be obtained by visiting a malicious Web site, writes Brandon, who suggests that Google make the "at" variable expire after every request rather than after every session.

To avoid being a victim of the vulnerability, users should check their filters often, Brandon suggests. Firefox users can download an extension called NoScript that helps prevent these attacks, he said.

Of course, any Web site that uses cookies for authentication requests can be taken advantage of in the same way. To avoid becoming a victim to this type of exploit, Gmail users should logout of their accounts when they are not in use, and--of course--not visit Web sites that they don't trust.

Google representatives did not immediately return a request for comment.

Firefox Counters Chrome's Speed Test

To counter Chrome, Google's new browser Mozilla released some performance results of the forthcoming version of Firefox. And according to those results, it outpaces Chrome, reports Cnet.

At the Chrome launch, Google showed performance results of the browser using its collection of 5 JavaScript benchmarks and V8 - Chrome's JavaScript engine. To counter this, Mozilla, a competitor to Google in the Internet browser space has come up with a different test called SunSpider.

SunSpider shows that the forthcoming Firefox 3.1, which uses a JavaScript acceleration technology called TraceMonkey, is faster than Chrome for JavaScript programs. It was 28% faster than Chrome on Windows XP and 16% faster on Vista.

Google CEO Could Be Obama's Tech Advisor

Rumor has it that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be occupying the newly-formed tech advisor position to the president of the United States. Barack Obama created this position just shortly before visiting the Google headquarters during his campaign, and some believe that the reason this happened was because the job was promised to Schmidt.


The president-elect announced his support for maintaining the Internet neutral, meaning that he (and Google) opposed the addition of more fees for data transfer to end-users. Under Obama's tech policy, ISPs will be strictly prohibited from hampering data flow around the web. He says that the network is an indispensable tool in today's economy, and that it motivates growth by making trade simpler and easier, so any obstacle will mean a loss of capital.

The head of Google endorsed the Democratic candidate throughout the elections, though the ads the company posted on various sites were mostly Republican. However, Google employees donated far more to Obama's campaign than they did for John McCain – about $487,355, and $20,600 respectively, as estimated by the Wall Street Journal.

The naming of the Democratic candidate as the new president comes at the same time as the decision of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open up unused TV broadband frequencies to wireless Internet traffic. They will enter use when the entire television grid moves to the digital format.



No one can be sure that Eric Schmidt will be named as Obama's tech advisor until the event actually happens. But, in light of the relation they had during the campaign, and the earnings that Schmidt's endorsement brought the new president, it stand to reason that he will be, at the very least, considered for the job. In addition, Google's efforts to go "green" are in line with Obama's policy towards climate change and global warming, so this is another common ground for the company and the White House.