El mejor consejo del mundo

microsiervos
El mejor consejo para cualquier cosa es: «Búscalo en Google».

– Adam Newman
(vía @unmundolibre)

Google shows off its driverless cars in California

ITN

Google codifies its right to crawl through your emails..fuck you Google!

Follow The Money

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/google-codifies-its-right-to-crawl-through-your-emails-20140417-zqvok.html?google_editors_picks=true

It’s no secret that Google keeps an eye on what users of its services are into. But on Monday, the company updated Gmail’s terms of service to spell out its relationship with users in no uncertain terms:
“Our automated systems analyse your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

A Google spokesman told The New York Times that the changes “will give people even greater clarity and are based on feedback we’ve received over the last few months.”

By feedback, Google might mean a federal judge’s swift denial of the company’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Gmail users and non-users who’ve sent emails to Gmail accounts. The lawsuit claimed Google violated federal and state wiretapping laws by scanning emails without consent.

In its motion to dismiss, Google argued that Gmail and non-Gmail users had given express or implied consent to have their e-mails scanned. Northern California US District Judge Lucy Koh rejected Google’s claims, noting that Google’s terms of service didn’t explicitly say they scanned emails.

Military Official Says Robots To Replace Troops On The Battlefield

Mary Greeley

Google Builds a 'Nest' for Future of Smart Homes

breitbart

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
AP Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO
When our Internet-connected gadgets and home appliances all learn to talk to each other, Google wants to be at the center of the conversation.

This imagined future is still a few years away, but Google is already preparing with its $3.2 billion acquisition of high-tech thermostat and smoke-detector maker Nest Labs.

The surprise deal announced earlier this week will provide Google Inc. with more tools to build a valuable hub for homes. It's a world of network-tethered toasters and tea kettles, or a so-called "Internet of Things," that is destined to reshape society, experts say, in the same way that smartphones have done in the seven years since Apple Inc. unveiled the iPhone.

The research firm Gartner Inc. expects more than 26 billion objects to be connected to the Internet by 2020, a figure that doesn't include personal computers, smartphones or tablets. That would be a nearly 30-fold increase from roughly 900 million Internet-connected things in 2009.

Google established itself as an instrumental player in smartphones with the 2008 release of Android, a free operating system that runs on more mobile devices than any other piece of software. Now, the company is gearing up for the advent of the smart home with the help of Nest Labs, a 300-employee company started in Palo Alto, Calif. less than four years ago. Tony Fadell, Nest's founder, is an Apple veteran who helped design the iPod and the iPhone.

As influential as smartphones have become, their role in understanding people's habits and preferences could be eclipsed once everything in the home has a computer chip and is connected to the Internet.

"Google bought Nest in order to learn about this world where even more information is going to be accessible by computers," said Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett.

Nest Labs quickly won over gadget lovers with its 2011 release of an Internet-connected thermostat that learns to cool and heat homes to suit the needs of the inhabitants. Late last year, the company followed up with a smoke and carbon-monoxide detector equipped with voice technology and the ability to communicate with the company's thermostat. Nest hasn't said how many of its devices have been sold, though analysts believe they are in just a small fraction of homes. The products have only been available in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.

Google hasn't disclosed its specific plans for Nest, but analysts anticipate an entire line of Internet-connected home products will be coming to countries around the world. Some of those Nest devices could be melded with existing Google services in an effort to make people's lives easier. Such a move also would provide Google with the means to gather more insight that could be used to sell the digital advertising that generates most of the company's revenue.

In a blog post about the Google acquisition, Nest Labs co-founder Matt Rogers promised that customers' personal information will only be used for "providing and improving Nest's products and services. We've always taken privacy seriously and this will not change."

But that pledge won't preclude Google from incorporating its services with Nest's products, said Gartner analyst Angela McIntyre. For instance, Google already makes a digital assistant called "Google Now" that strives to learn what its users like and where they tend to go so it can provide helpful information without prompting. McIntyre believes Nest's products will teach Google Now to become more helpful so it can increasingly take over more of the mundane tasks in people's lives.

"They need to gather as much information as they can to understand the context in how we live our lives," McIntyre said.

Google also could plug its digital mapping software into Nest products so it could learn the layout of a home, said Brian Proffitt, a technology analyst who is also a management instructor at the University of Notre Dame. That knowledge could then be deployed to delegate such household chores as vacuuming to a robot that would be able to rely on the interior maps to navigate its way through an entire home without human help, Proffitt said.

A Google division run by Android creator Andy Rubin is working on various ideas for robots, though the Mountain View, Calif., company hasn't shared many details about its goals. Google's expansion into robotics is also being bolstered by a spate of acquisitions that included the recent purchase of Boston Dynamics, a U.S. military contractor that has already built a variety of contraptions that can be programmed to run at rapid speeds, leap high into the air and climb rocky terrains.

Even as it explores various technological frontiers, Google still makes most of its money from advertising tied to search requests. Acquiring and developing products with Internet connections and environmental sensors can only help Google get an even better grasp on people's interests. 
Pocketnow

Today Google Starts Using Your Name and Face in GoogleAds

breitbart

By Elizabeth Sheld

Google has officially updated their terms of service to allow the company to use your name and image on their ads that populate the internet. 

YOU CAN OPT OUT OF THIS HERE. 

The new terms of service read:

If you have a Google Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1’s, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Services, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Google Account. For example, you can choose your settings so your name and photo do not appear in an ad.

The Wall Street Journal provides this nifty chart to see what your social networks are using you to promote. 

The new "shared endorsements" are ruffling some privacy feathers. "We think it's a problem," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's a commercial endorsement without consent and that is not permissible in most states in the U.S."

Facebook tried something similar and was forced to pay a $20M settlement, when they were sued in a class action suit. Facebook had used "endorsements" in the ads run on the social network, but they did not provide a way for users to opt out. 

NSA Uses Google Tracking Cookies to Spy on Potential Targets

breitbart

irwebreport.com

A new information leak from Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA is using Google's tracking cookies to identify targets for government hacking. The Washington Post reports that Snowden's documents "show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations."

These tracking cookies allow a website to identify a user's browser, but do not contain any personal information.  "This cookie allows NSA to single out an individual's communications among the sea of Internet data in order to send out software that can hack that person's computer."

The slides released by Snowden do not say how the government accesses Google's tracking cookies, "but other documents reviewed by the Post indicate that cookie information is among the data NSA can obtain with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order."

Babbage: What is Google up to?

The Economist

How the feds snoop: What happens when you hit send on your email

usnews

www.zerohedge.com

By Stephanie Gosk and Jeff Black, NBC News

The Internet makes it easy to send information to far flung places in an instant – hit “send” and poof there it goes. But where does that information go, how does it get there and who gets access to the data?

Every second of every day billions of bits of data speed through an elaborate network, many created and controlled by companies such as Yahoo and Google.

Indeed, the latest leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, say that NSA has tapped into Google and Yahoo's data cables and vacuumed up emails and phone records, although security official say Americans are filtered out.

Big tech companies — among them Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, in addition to Google and Yahoo — say the worry they’re losing an arms race to secure their users’ information and have called on new laws to stop U.S. intelligence agencies from breaking into data centers.

Those data centers, often misleadingly called the “cloud,” in reality have nothing ethereal about them. They’re thousands of miles of cables and high-tech switchers and computers. They’re warehouse-sized buildings that hum with servers to collect and store huge reams of data.

“For your email account you know you can have years worth of data stored in your account,” Kim Zetter of Wired magazine told NBC News.

Google alone has six such large datacenters in the United States, and another seven are overseas.

“A lot of people think if I'm in the U.S., my data is stored in the U.S., and that's really not the case,” Zetter said.

Jim Stickley, a cyber security expert, said it's those cables where the vulnerability lies.

“You have thousands and thousands of miles of cable out there of this fiber optic cable,” Stickley said. “And so presumably the NSA has founds somewhere to gain access to this cable and physically attach some sort of device to capture date on this network.”

On Thursday, Google issued a statement, which said, in part: "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks" 

Google said it is now working to encrypt its high-speed fiber optic lines in order to counter NSA snooping.

But even if that company’s system is secure, it’s clear that these internet giants have become the gatekeepers of our digital lives.

“We have put all of our digital eggs into their baskets, they're not in ours anymore,” Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NBC News. “and whether that's wise in terms of privacy and security is, I think, a very open question.”

Bruce Schneier, a Harvard Law School fellow who writes frequently on cybersecurity, said there's only one sure fire way to protect yourself from snooping, and it’s an idea most people won’t like: Give up your email.

“You cannot be on the systems. That’s what you can do,” he said in a telephone interview. “Whenever you go into a cloud, you have to trust the cloud provider. There’s nothing you can do. It’s not your data. It’s their data.”

One reason there is so much data collection, Schneier said, is that “Surveillance is very, very cheap, that’s the problem."

He added, "Adding encryption makes surveillance more expensive, Which means they can’t do it as much.”

So, for anyone feeling a little digitally vulnerable, there appears to be only one way around it:  Write a letter and get a stamp.

Andrea Mitchell and Erin McClam of NBC News contributed to this report.

Related:
NSA, British intelligence secretly tapped into Google, Yahoo cable links, officials say

Also: PRISM (surveillance program) - Wikipedia

Google photo: Jesus just spotted in sky?

Read on wnd >>

uProxy: How Google hopes to beat countries cracking down on Internet freedom

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

Google hopes a little browser tool will help change the world.

The company that revolutionized Internet search is now unveiling a sort of online underground tunnel — a way for people in restrictive countries like Iran and Syria to get around digital censorship and surveillance.

The idea behind the tool — essentially a button for browsers — called uProxy, is simple: People in countries such as the United States provide their trusted friends a secure connection so that they can see and use the unrestricted Internet.

Google showed it off earlier this week at a conference called “Conflict in a Connected World.” Google also rolled out technology to map cyberattacks around the world, including by repressive governments.

Keep reading on nbc >>

Google wants to use your face to sell ads

The Washington Post

By Cecilia Kang

Uno de los centros de datos de Google

Google has made a fortune selling ads. Now it’s trying to put its hundreds of millions of users to work as company pitchmen, using the profiles, pictures and recommendations of ordinary people to endorse products and services across the Web.
After the policy takes effect Nov. 11, users who review a video on YouTube or a restaurant on Zagat.com could see their name, photo and comments show up in ads on any of the 2 million Web sites that are part of the company’s display advertising network.

The controversial practice, announced Friday by Google, is part of an emerging trend on the Internet. Advertisers believe that consumers place enormous value on product endorsements that come from a friend or family member, and growing numbers of Web companies are trying to capture that social advertising in a systematic way.
But critics say tactics that further exploit the data people leave online amount to a bait-and-switch. People signed up for Google’s services because they were free and convenient. They probably never thought their words and identities would be put in front of strangers to sell a product.
Users who casually endorse a product or song on Facebook or Google “may be exposed to unwanted, and possibly misunderstood, implications,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet law at Santa Clara University law school.
Google said the launch of “shared endorsements” will help consumers make better choices. “We want to give you — and your friends and connections — the most useful information. Recommendations from people you know can really help,” the company wrote in its announcement.
It added that users can opt out of the ads and that it will automatically exclude anyone under the age of 18.
The announcement follows a similar advertising feature by Facebook called “sponsored stories,” which turns a recommendation made through the social network’s “like” button into an advertising endorsement on a friend’s Facebook page. The company has said its users cannot opt out of the practice. About 1.2 billion people are on Facebook.
Last month, the Federal Trade Commission said it would review whether Facebook’s push into sponsored stories violated the company’s 2011 privacy settlement with the federal government. That agreement required Facebook to give adequate notice of changes in privacy policies and to make sure users aren’t misled about how their data is being used.
Due to the government shutdown, the FTC said it could not respond to a question on whether its investigators would also examine Google’s new advertising practice.
Google said its new advertising policy would apply only to the 390 million people who have signed up for Google Plus, the company’s social network. The company can also draw on endorsements made with Google’s +1 button, which is similar to Facebook’s “like” button and appears on sites across the Web.
A user who wants to limit the reach of his or her advertising endorsements could adjust settings so that a positive review for, say, a car is shared only with a small circle of friends on Google Plus, the company said.
Some privacy experts commended the way Google is rolling out the feature by giving users a month’s notice of the changes and options to decline.
“Some people may like the fact that their reviews will be promoted and more influential. Others have a pretty easy way to opt out,” said Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum.
In May 2012, Google agreed to a $22.5 million FTC fine for misrepresenting its tracking practices on the Safari browser used on Apple devices. The settlement included continued supervision of the firm’s disclosures about how it handles users’ data.
Google said it will display the latest change in its privacy policy on its main home page, through Google Plus notifications and in other prominent places.
Still, some privacy advocates remained skeptical of the search giant.
“This move by Google reflects the growing and unchecked expansion of online data collection by the industry,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Hayley Tsukayama contributed to this report.

Google Timelapse: Urban Explosion

TIME

Google's Plan to Track You Like Cattle

TheAlexJonesChannel

Is Privacy Overrated? Cyberattack in the New Digital Age

ForaTv

Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, authors of the book "The New Digital Age," explain why it might be time to have  "the talk" about cyber security, at home, at work, all over the country. 

Melting Glaciers, Sprawling Cities: the Google Project

What Are These Strange Barcode-Like Images Visible in Aerial Pictures of the U.S.?

theblaze

By Liz Klimas

Many might not know it, but there are dozens of large, barcode-like paintings across the United States. Just how long have they been there though and what do they do?

Fort Huachuca in Arizona. (Image: Google Earth/Center for Land Use Interpretation)

You might remember the strange structures spotted via Google Earth in China’s Gobi desert a couple years ago that were ultimately thought to be satellite calibration structures. According to a recent report by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, these two-dimensional structures in America perform a similar function.

A target in Maryland. (Photo: Google Earth/ Center for Land Use Interpretation)

They’re aerial photo calibration targets, most of which were put in their current locations in the 1950s and 60s by the Air Force and NASA and some are still in use today.

Here’s more about the targets:

The targets function like an eye chart at the optometrist, where the smallest group of bars that can be resolved marks the limit of the resolution for the optical instrument that is being used. For aerial photography, it provides a platform to test, calibrate, and focus aerial cameras traveling at different speeds and altitudes. The targets can also be used in the same way by satellites.

Eglin Air Force Base, Florida (Photo: Google Earth/ Center for Land Use Interpretation)

The report stated that most of the targets fall within restricted groundspace: Eglin AFB, Florida; the Nevada Test Site; St. Inigoes, Maryland; and Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio; Travis AFB, California; Beaufort Marine Corps Base and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation reported the largest concentration of the barcode targets — 15 in a 20 mile range — falls within Edwards Air Force Base.

Edwards Air Force Base (Photo: Google Earth/ Center for Land Use Interpretation)

“There is some variation in the size and shape of the targets at Edwards, suggesting updates and modifications for specific programs,” the report stated. “A number of the targets there also have aircraft hulks next to them, added to provide additional, realistic subjects for testing cameras. Some of these planes are themselves unusual and rare military jets, officially in the collection of the base museum, despite being left out on the range.”

The ones in the Mojave desert, the report stated, have been used to calibrate A12, SR-71 and U-2 planes. Drones also could use these targets to calibrate their surveillance cameras and sensors.

Most of the targets, CLUI stated are on concrete or asphalt consisting of black and white paint in a 78 foot by 53 foot pattern of parallel and perpendicular bars at different sizes.

The CLUI stated that it picked out images of the barcode-like calibration targets from The Art of Citizen Space Exploration, which is running at the University of California Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery from January 19 to May 18.

North Korea and Cuba: Not so different

babalublog

By Alberto de la Cruz

Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of Eric Schmidt, one of Google's founders, accompanied her father and Gov. Bill Richardson on a trip to North Korea. She took some amazing photographs and amongst her many observations documented on a site she created, this one in particular sounds eerily familiar:

It's impossible to know how much we can extrapolate from what we saw in Pyongyang to what the DPRK is really like. Our trip was a mixture of highly staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments. We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders (2, so one can mind the other).
The longer I think about what we saw and heard, the less sure I am about what any of it actually meant.

Sounds a lot like those "people-to-people" contact Cuba vacations made possible by the Obama administration, doesn't it?

Here's another observation:

Looks great, right? All this activity, all those monitors. Probably 90 desks in the room, all manned, with an identical scene one floor up.
One problem: No one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in--a noisy bunch, with media in tow--not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.
Of all the stops we made, the e-Potemkin Village was among the more unsettling. We knew nothing about what we were seeing, even as it was in front of us. Were they really students? Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.

Of course, the communist propaganda favorite; The Potemkin Village. We have plenty of those in Cuba as well.

Read Sophie Schmidt's entire report HERE.

Google releases detailed map of North Korea

By Chico Harlan/

Until Tuesday, North Korea appeared on Google Maps as a near-total white space — no roads, no train lines, no parks and no restaurants. The only thing labeled was the capital city, Pyongyang.

This all changed when Google, on Tuesday, rolled out a detailed map of one of the world’s most secretive states. The new map labels everything from Pyongyang’s subway stops to the country’s several city-sized gulags, as well as its monuments, hotels, hospitals and department stores.

Screenshot: Washington Post

(See a before and after map comparison of North Korea.)

According to a Google blog post, the maps were created by a group of volunteer “citizen cartographers,” through an interface known as Google Map Maker. That program — much like Wikipedia — allows users to submit their own data, which is then fact-checked by other users, and sometimes altered many times over. Similar processes were used in other once-unmapped countries like Afghanistan and Burma.

In the case of North Korea, those volunteers worked from outside of the country, beginning from 2009. They used information that was already public, compiling details from existing analog maps, satellite images, or other Web-based materials. Much of the information was already available on the Internet, said Hwang Min-woo, 28, a volunteer mapmaker from Seoul who worked for two years on the project.

Screenshot: Washington Post

North Korea was the last country virtually unmapped by Google, but other — even more detailed — maps of the North existed before this. Most notable is a map created by Curtis Melvin, who runs the North Korea Economy Watch blog and spent years identifying thousands of landmarks in the North: tombs, textile factories, film studios, even rumored spy training locations. Melvin’s map is available as a downloadable Google Earth file.

Google’s map is important, though, because it is so readily accessible.  The map is unlikely to have an immediate influence in the North, where Internet use is restricted to all but a handful of elites. But it could prove beneficial for outsider analysts and scholars, providing an easy-to-access record about North Korea’s provinces, roads, landmarks, as well as hints about its many unseen horrors.

Screenshot: Washington Post

In the country’s northeast, for instance, Google has labeled what it calls the “Hwasong Gulag.” One street, called Gulag 16 Road, cuts through it. And at the end of Gulag 16 Road is a train station. Beyond that, little else around the gulag is marked.

The map’s publication comes just weeks after the visit to North Korea of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who toured the country in a series of highly staged encounters that included a stop at a computer library, which Schmidt’s daughter later described in a blog post as the “e-Potemkin Village.” Schmidt’s visit was unrelated to the map roll-out, a Google spokesman said.

Google, in its blog post about the new North Korea map, acknowledged that the information is “not perfect.”

Keep reading on washingtonpost >>

Google Bamboozled by North Korea?

pjmedia/ Claudia Rosett

huffingtonpost.com

As if there isn’t enough trouble in the world, the executive chairman of Google Inc., Eric Schmidt, has taken it into his head to visit North Korea. Schmidt is touring the world’s leading totalitarian state as a member of a private group led by a former U.S. congressman, cabinet secretary, United Nations ambassador and New Mexico governor rolled into one, Bill Richardson — whose previous trips to North Korea have served mainly to dignify the Pyongyang regime.

Richardson’s current roadshow, with Google’s Schmidt in tow, seems to have generated some excitement at North Korea’s state propaganda organ, the Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA. KCNA has revamped its web site, including a new gmail contact address (though the address apparently doesn’t work) and more colorful variations on the same old propaganda, including a special section on North Korea’s recent
ballistic missile test   “Successful Satellite Launch.” The site also features such classics as an account of the launch in Ecuador of the works of third-generation dictator Kim Jong Un, glorifying the revolutionary accomplishments of his late father, tyrant Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather, the Stalin-installed founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il Sung. On this same retooled KCNA web site, the private visit led by Richardson is heralded as “Delegation of Google Corp. of U.S. Arrives.”

Schmidt has been secretive about what exactly he hopes to accomplish on this trip. Richardson, who wants to meet with an American that North Korea, as part of its chronic shakedown racket, is now holding hostage in its prison system, has hinted to the press that Schmidt is tagging along to North Korea because he is “interested in some of the economic issues there, and the social media aspect.”

If anything here sounds like the beginning of some glorious new era in which North Korea is about to throw open its digital gates to the world wide web, and invite the starving inmates of Kim’s gulag to post their personal opinions on Facebook, think again. North Korea’s regime loves technology — but on its own terms, for carefully restricted use, for specially selected purposes, which boil down to keeping the Kim regime in power. North Korean officials are expert at hornswoggling American dreamers who arrive in Pyongyang hoping to promote some peace-loving bargain, from former president Jimmy Carter in 1994, to the New York Philharmonic, which, between North Korea’s 2006 and 2009  nuclear tests, serenaded the Pyongyang elite in 2008.

Keep reading >>