thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/21/10

Posted on 21. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

The first Chromium Extension Sync release was not without problems; a fast response to some bugs has helped developers.

John Paczkowski of the Digital Daily has his own take of Dell’s Chrome OS ambitions, complete with a quote from a company honcho.

Here’s a review from another blog about GoogleSharing – it allows you to hide user information for privacy purposes.

Can the cloud support the needs of scientific computing?

Inside Google’s John Simpson queries Google Chief Counsel Kent Walker on openness from the company’s perspective in a short clip.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/7/10

Posted on 07. Jun, 2010 by Greg Farnum. 0 Comments

Google agrees to hand over privacy information to European regulators.

Google TV teaming with Logitech to expand home entertainment options.

Can’t spell? Google can help.

James Fallows looks at Google and the future of journalism.

Consumer Watchdog says Google has “Microsoft-like monopoly.”

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/2/10

Posted on 02. Jun, 2010 by Greg Farnum. 0 Comments

Google rules online search advertising, but TechCrunch Disrupt attendees aim to crack the social media ad market.

Google’s Wi-Fi incident is under more scrutiny from Canada’s privacy commissioner.

Inspired by Ask.com and Bing, Google will allow users to add a background image to the Google homepage.

Google Search for Mobile now includes mobile app results.

Google Chrome OS could shake up PC market predicts PCWorld’s Tony Bradley.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/1/10

Posted on 01. Jun, 2010 by Greg Farnum. 0 Comments

Computerworld asks, has the Microsoft-backed Bing search engine actually aided Google?

Chrome adds Opera-like Trash Can extension for better tab reopening.

Will Google really become more secure by moving away from Windows?

House Judiciary Committee to look at Google and Facebook privacy practices says Huffington Post.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/28/10

Posted on 28. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Will Google be able to make billions from its enterprise Apps services within the next four years?

Google Apps Migration has been announced, allowing a smoother transition from Office over to Gmail and Google Calendar.

Computerworld has a interesting article titled, “The Smart Paranoid’s Guide to Using Google”.

As the cloud grows, what will Google do to keep it interconnected worldwide? “We want 100Gbit/s”.

Visual travel guide Ruba, which mixes blogging, photos and maps into a unique social mash-up has been acquired by Google.

Inside Google? Really? Seems More Like Outside

Posted on 22. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit organization whose mission is to fight on the behalf of “American consumers and taxpayers” has launch a blog called Inside Google where they intend to keep in check some of the privacy issues that the search engine giant has been encountering recently. From a few of the articles that I have read on the site, Inside Google clearly believes that the folks at Google need to be more open about the way they do business, and one of the issues highlighted is the way their search algorithm is calculated to bring back query results.

This is especially true when looking at the post fuming about the fact that the term “Inside Google” doesn’t come up on the first few pages of a Google Search, yet does when querying Bing. The opposite end of this is perhaps Microsoft should be asked if they are trumping up the Inside Google site while Google is giving it a representative ranking since the Inside Google site is very new; the domain was only registered three months ago and currently has no PageRank.

Plus, there is no update on this post since it was written to point out that searching the term Inside Google appears in the first page of Google Search, at least when I queried it today. Even when done in Incognito Mode or another browser with cleared history. Looks like the “lack of transparency” tag placed on these posts doesn’t apply to Inside Google.

I know that I have not always written rosy things about Google, and they still rank me well, probably because their engine is based on a specific system to return the best results for a query, not by humans directly manipulating search results.  Here are some examples of things I’ve written:

Concerned About Privacy? Scroogle Scrapes Your Searches
Do You Know Why Google Wants to Trade Energy?
Maybe Google Knows Too Much, GoogleSharing Can Help
Google Invests in Recorded Future

Inside Google is based on the foundation that because Google has seventy percent of the United States market of online search it should be investigated because it is a monopoly. But there are other competitors in the search market. In reality if Bing, Yahoo or Ask were actually better search engines than Google, I would use them. But they are not. Hence the reasoning behind the fact that I use Google Search as I’m sure others who read this post would agree.

If serious privacy or security issues arose that Google was not willing to face or to make amends for, I would be all for going after them, as would a great deal of others. In that regard perhaps Inside Google is on the right track with what they are doing but some of these articles posted on the site seem, well, a bit angst driven for some reason.  Is there a motive to why Inside Google feels like they’ve been left on the outside? Possibly because its journalists were formally a part of the once dominant print media industry?

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/20/10

Posted on 20. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Android 2.2 has been announced with Adobe Flash integrated in the browser, new developer tools and new ways to connect to your PC.

Here is the official blog post on Google TV, complete with a video overview of the new technology.

Everyone at Google I/O got one of Sprint’s HTC Evo smartphones, which is loaded with features and runs on 4G.

According to a chart shown at Day One of Google I/O, the number of Chrome browser users is now at 70 million.

The Consumer Watchdog group has launched Inside Google “to educate the public and opinion leaders about Google’s dangerous dominance”.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/15/10

Posted on 15. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

The Chrome Extensions Directory now has six categories to help better organize the over 4,000 extensions that are now available.

Google has decided to stop collecting wi-fi information from its Street View project, citing internal privacy concerns with the information gathered.

In addition to this announcement comes the revelation that Google Search will become encrypted, possibly starting next week.

Is simply apologizing enough when Google announces privacy breaches?

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/10/10

Posted on 10. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Total sales last quarter for Android phones have topped Apple’s iPhone sales for the first time, according to Business Insider.

Conan O’Brien’s performance at Google HQ has been posted on YouTube.

Aaron West has an article showing you how to debug Flash in Chrome now that it has been integrated into the browser.

With the speculation persisting that Google may buy ITA Software, here are six things that Google could do in the travel space.

Google’s response, plus analysis by our friends at ReadWriteWeb about the recent privacy issues the company has faced, especially with Buzz.

Reports of Trojan as a Chrome Extension Emerge

Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

There is a reason why Google has set up their own extension site, where they make sure that they do a security review of each “plug-in” that is submitted for their browser to check potential security problems. As more people use Chrome browser, the threat of malicious software increases. Think of the problems that Internet Explorer has had to deal with in the past. Because of those headaches, Google has tried really hard to start initiatives to thwart security issues in their own browser ecosystem before it gets too big.

The easiest way to obtain access to Chrome? One is through Flash, but Google has decided to add that as an integrated feature. Another way is through extensions. That’s why it’s a big deal when the Romanian antivirus company BitDefender reports that an extension now exists that has intentions on exploiting a user’s system, typical of a trojan virus.

The Malware City blog by BitDefender describes the situation whereby a user gets an email to download a Chrome extension that has not-so-good intentions. The user is led to a site that looks the same as the official Google extension site, but the URL is not the same, something akin to phishing. They also talk about the fact that some of the more savvy users will know that an extension will come as an install file with a .crx extension, as opposed to this malicious extension that has an .exe extension.

Herein lays the problem with extensions. Everyone must realize that the only place to install an extension is from Google’s official extension site. At the beginning of 2010, McAfee released a report that reiterated this point: the problem is that now the Chrome platform is reaching a stage of major adoption – starting with the browser. Fortunately Google has set up an extension site where we know we can get added functions to our browser without the worry that they will totally screw up our system.

What Does Your Browser Say About You? Find Out With BrowserSpy

Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

Your browser is very telling. And I don’t mean just what type of browser you use, but also your screen resolution, what version of Adobe Reader you have installed, whether you have Java installed and if so what version, what CPU you are running and CSS information that can show what sites you usually frequent:

All thanks to BrowserSpy. With this little website you can see just how much of you PC’s information is leaking all over the internet like a water balloon with a slight tear in it. Many people don’t realize this, and that’s why BrowserSpy’s founder, Henrik Gemal, set out to start a site that offers this information to the world. He keeps it updated, and keeps adding things that he finds which you may not know is available just by surfing the web.

Concerned about your privacy on the web? Chrome has options that allow you to turn off JavaScript, go into what’s know as Incognito Mode and there are also variations of Chromium open source builds that are built with privacy in mind. When I went to the BrowserSpy site with one of such browsers, known as Comodo Dragon, a few things were left undetected as I went through the list of tests on the left hand site of the site – but not everything.

At the same time, using Chrome with no privacy settings turned on, BrowserSpy pinpointed my IP address to somewhere north of Wichita Kansas on a Google Map. Which is highly incorrect. Maybe they don’t know that much about me.

Microsoft Takes Issue With Chrome Feature That Can be Turned Off

Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

In a video that is meant to show off the security features of Internet Explorer 8, Product Manager Pete LePage takes aim at the Chrome browser, claiming that because IE8 allows users to search in a separate box rather than doing so in an all-in-one inbox box that Google is possibly compromising a user’s security by reporting every term back to Google.

“By keeping these boxes separate, your privacy is better protected and the addresses of the sites you’re visiting aren’t automatically shared with Microsoft, or anyone else,” LePage says in the video.

“As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a Web debugging proxy] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google,” LePage says. “I haven’t even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I’m visiting.”

This only partially true. You are capable of changing your search provider in Chrome, and when you do the information that you search for in the Omnibox will send it back to the engine of your choosing. Just because IE8 has two separate boxes for these functions does not make it safer.

The option for sending information back to Google when you start typing into the Omnibox can be turned off by following these instructions. I know this because I downloaded Fiddler myself and tried it to make sure.

LePage also goes on to promote the virtues of IE8′s InPrivate feature, which allows users to surf the web anonymously. Interestingly, this feature sounds eerily similar to Chrome’s Incognito mode which has been a part of Google’s browser since 2008.

Look, there’s no doubt here that Internet Explorer is facing a decline in market share. A recent graph out by Net Applications shows that Internet Explorer is dropping while Chrome is gaining. At the same time, competitors like Safari (which can be traced to Mac adoption), Firefox and Opera are filling in the space where users once had Internet Explorer as their preferred browser. If Microsoft does not go on the offensive with videos like this they risk losing even more market share.

Expect Microsoft to heavily market IE8 and eventually IE9. They will also do well if they keep copying key elements of other popular browsers if they hope to stay relevant, one of the other “industry standard” practices LePage talks about in the video.