Well after a bit of a roundup of some of the security news items the last week, it’s time to sum up the Google front…. Googling Google tells us that Infinite storage is on the horizon…. they cite a translator that has done work for google. He has been asked to translate “The result?… from today we are starting our infinite storage plan” Now, they surmise that this could be related to the “platypus” project which has been known as gdrive which appears to be an online file synchronization/backup solution. It could be and would certainly be interesting. However, it could be a gmail upgrade for that matter.
Category: Google
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Google search for malware accessible to all…
The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…
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Google Maps upgrade
I’ve seen a couple places referring to some improvements in the way google maps handles zooming and so I decided to take a look in Firefox. The zoom handling of Google maps is the one thing that I’ve wished for an improvement in for some time. After noticing MSN’s virtual earth had the capability of scroll wheel zooming, I really wanted it in Google Maps.
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GDrive rumors and screenshot – Platypus
I saw this ZDNet post today with a tantalizing glimpse of Gdrive. It comes originally from cocaman.ch where he found a login page for something called Google Platypus, which is essentially a remotely used file storage. Now, from the page there are a couple of items that can be gleaned. Currently it’s something that’s in use internally (by the Googler’s…) Also, there is a download client for Windows/Mac/Linux that is used to synchronize files somehow. The benefits of it as it is advertised in the screenshot….
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Google has been verbed….
Looks as though Google (as in… “I’ve spent the afternoon googling for information on ski vacations.”) is now officially part of the English language according to the Oxford English dictionary. Of course, many people realize that google had another meaning. (Was this terminology from the game of cricket?)
intr. Of the ball: to have a ‘googly’ break and swerve. Of the bowler; to bowl a googly or googlies; also (trans.), to give a googly break to (a ball). Hence googler, a googly bowler
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Google Checkout
Gbuy, Gcheckout, Google Payments etc…. the news has been circulating for months – Google will compete with Paypal. Well, Google Checkout has finally launched and is being covered by most every outlet covering online news (including several of Google’s blogs are talking about this latest product launch from google. It seems to be US only at this point and there are a couple of interesting twists.
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A few Google improvements
I thought it might be worth mentioning a few little bits of Google news. Much like the Linux and Windows search areas at google (linux search and windows search)… They’ve launched a Portal (?) giving access to the comlete works of William Shakespeare and a way to search US Government web sites at usgov.google.com. This last one appears to be a customized home page (like one you might be able to customize yourself if you log into google and create a custom home page.) But it appears that the search specializes in .gov sites as well.
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Google Earth for Linux
One of the big linux news stories yesterday was the release of google earth for linux. Essentially the Google earth team has released “release 4” which is a beta version of the next release. It looks like there are greater “user contribution” capabilities with this release. I’ve tried the download for linux and can say that it installs well, the user interface looks fine (it’s not a wine-wrapper application – it’s a true linux port.) It’s not usable yet (for me…)
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Get ready for GBuy?
A while back there were rumors of Google Payments, a Paypal competitor on the way. Well, if this is right, it will be named GBuy and will be launched June 28th. Also, it sounds as though there may be no fee for merchants during the test. After that, there will be a percentage fee on each transaction – they’re saying 1.5-2% which is less than paypals rate currently.
Sounds like things could heat up quickly between Ebay/Paypal and Google this summer. Google Base, with an integrated GBuy….