Pop-ups not shown, but Advertisers billed?

It seems like Chrome’s new Pop-Up hider still loads the Pop-Up ads, but doesn’t present them to the viewer.

This is somewhat different to how traditional Pop-Up blockers work, in that they actually prevent the ad from loading. Our understanding of that approach is that this means the Advertiser wouldn’t be charged, as their ad is not loading.

The situation with Chrome may well be different, as the ad is being loaded but not shown, which could lead to advertisers still being charged for Pop-Ups that no one will ever see.

For Pop-Up haters that’s fine, but if true and if Chrome grabs a significant portion of the Browser market,  then this could well lead to changes in advertising methods.
 

Google promotes Firefox, oops!

In a very public spirited gesture, it seems that Google (via YouTube at least) is still advertising Firefox, even after the launch of Chrome.

Whether this is an oversight on Google’s part, or a requirement of their agreement with Mozilla we don’t know. Is Google still the default search engine bundled with Firefox installs, as per their agreement (which was re-negotiated earlier this year)? If so, how much longer will this arrangment last?
 

Thanks to Raja of MrFeedback.net for the heads up about the Firefox ad in Youtube.

We have seen privacy introduced in Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2 version) & Google Chrome, and Firefox has recently announced that private browsing will be incorporated into their browser in version 3.1 – currently you can get private browsing mode by downloading the Stealther 1.06 plugin available through Download.com, and there are similar solutions available from Mozilla’s add on website.

The concept behind Privacy mode is simple – any record of your browsing history is discarded once you close the browser session in IE or Google Chrome. Firefox plan to take this feature a few steps further and will have:

• no autofill for passwords
• all cookies will be discarded after browsing
• all downloads in Download Manager will be discarded after browsing
• Unlike IE, you won’t even be able to tell if you’re surfing in Private Mode. IE has a neon indicator to announce the activation of private mode. Firefox will keep the fact that you’re surfing in private mode, well..private. Nice feature.

Private surfing is useful, despite the obvious concern that it will assist people to do things on the internet which are questionable. As internet shopping becomes the norm, it will enable people to keep gift purchases, for example, and other activities private. It’s good that browsers are installing this feature, despite it inevitably being misused by a percentage of people.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback on Privacy mode and Browser security in general.

Raja Devanathan
Founder of MrFeedback.net

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The first vulnerability was found on Wednesday by researcher Aviv Raff, who discovered that the browser was open to a highly-publicised ‘carpet bombing’ attack first found in Safari. The Safari hole was patched earlier this year, but because Chrome uses Apple’s WebKit software, the flaw has reappeared in the Google browser.

A proof of concept page was published demonstrating how an attacker could embed malicious code on a web page and then use it to conduct a remote malware installation with a separate specially-crafted Java applet.

Then researchers Rishi Narang and JanDeMooij posted separate reports of a vulnerability in the browser’s chromium.dll component that was exposed through the browser’s URL bar. The flaw can be made to cause an application crash, though neither report mentioned the possibility of remote code execution.

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason. Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code.

It seems that far more data is in danger of being transferred than is required to satisfy Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing vs. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for much more than that, opening up the possibility of their taking legal action to sue individual users (or at least use the threat of a lawsuit) who have watched ‘copyrighted’ material on YouTube.

Adobe Systems, owner of Flash, has released a customised version of the Flash Player software that will allow Google (and other search engines) to see certain elements of Web pages embedded with Flash content in the same way a human would.

Search Engines currently have a difficult time “seeing” non-text formats such as Flash, which can lead to sites that make heavy use of the technology being ‘penalised’ in terms of their indexing.

Adobe’s new tool will help crawlers navigate dynamic Flash pages more easily. Google’s crawlers, for instance, will be able to click buttons along the way and remember the information for the index.

Google is already using the new tool and Yahoo plans to soon. Adobe also plans to extend support to other search engines.

The search giant will lease 1.2 million square feet of office space at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Google’s home town of Mountain View, California.

The 40-year lease will include a US$3.2 million annual payment from Google which will be adjusted according to market rates.

Nasa plans to use the money for improvements and maintenance costs at the Ames Research facility.

The space agency also hopes that the deal will boost its presence in the tech world.

The pair hope to begin the first phase of the construction process by 2013. A second phase will begin in 2018 and the final construction project will start in 2022. Nasa will be responsible for the construction process.

In addition to the office and laboratory space, the project will see the construction of housing, child care, dining and recreational facilities for both Google and Nasa employees.

Google will be able to exercise three 10-year options when the 40-year lease ends, while Nasa and Google will have joint say over two further 10-year extensions, giving the deal a possible length of 90 years in total.

Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, made the announcement on a corporate blog as part of a “renewed effort” to open up the company’s secrets.

Manber claimed that competition and attempts to prevent abuse have been the main reasons for Google’s historic secretive stance.

Google has kept its search ranking formulas a closely guarded secret to make it more difficult for people to “game the system”, he wrote.

“But being completely secretive is not ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past,” said Manber.

“We will try periodically to tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news and engage in conversations. Let me start with some general pieces of information about our group. More blog posts will follow.”

Manber also outlined the ongoing challenges faced by the company, including the rapid growth in user expectations.

“Tomorrow’s queries will be much harder than today’s queries,” he said.

“Just as Moore’s Law governs the doubling of computing speed every 18 months, there is a hidden unwritten law that doubles the complexity of our most difficult queries in a short time.”

Source: iTNews

Google is apparently in discussions with an Israeli firm called Ormat Technologies, which already has a geothermal plant set up in the Nevada desert in the USA.

Geothermal energy, which harnesses energy generated by heat under the Earth’s surface, from the atmosphere and from oceans, is becoming an ever popular alternative energy source.

It involves pumping water underground, leading to increased rock permeability, which therefore allows for the release of more heat.

Haaretz, an Israeli news daily, said both Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s co founders, had visited the Ormat Nevada site recently, prompting speculation that a deal between the companies was in the pipeline.

In the past, Google has said it would commit one percent of all its profits to charitable and environmental causes though its Google.org portal.

The Search behemoth has also made grand sweeping statements recently about investing hundreds of millions of dollars in cleaner and renewable energy sources.

By acquiring or investing in Ormat’s Geothermal technology, Google could well be on its way to adding another capital G to the word ‘green’.

The addition of Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish brings the total number of languages to 23.

The service now has the option to translate text and web pages, as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages in the list.

Jeff Chin, a product manager for Google, wrote in the company’s official blog: “For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g. Chinese to French).

“So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing, you’ll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources.”

Google has also added a ‘Detect Language’ option to help automatically identify the language of the text being translated. Chin admitted, however, that the system is not perfect.

“Machine translation is a hard problem, but it plays an important role in helping people access content they might otherwise be unable to read,” he said.

A ‘Suggest a Better Translation’ feature allows users to correct inaccurate translations in an effort to refine the service.

The hosted service, called “Google Web Security for Enterprise”, protects corporate Web and e-mail users from viruses, spyware, malicious Web sites, and offers hosted e-mail archiving services.

The service offers a choice of cheap security features. The option of Google Message Filtering (e-mail filtering) is billed at AU$3.65 per user per year, while Google Message Security (scanning of inbound and outbound e-mail plus messaging controls) is charged at AU$14.63 per user per year.

The archiving of e-mails is somewhat more expensive — AU$30.47 per mailbox per year and AU$12.20 per mailbox per year thereafter. The service will be sold via Google channel partners, said Jason Senn, business development lead for Google Enterprise Asia Pacific.

The new Google offering is a direct competitor to messaging security pioneers MessageLabs, and recent market entrant SurfControl — which launched an on-demand Web security service in July 2007 after acquiring Black Spider Technologies.

Google’s key differentiator is its pricing model.

According to MessageLab’s Australian product marketing manager, Philip Routley, MessageLabs sells anti-spam and antivirus for under AU$5 per user per year.

Archiving, which is more expensive than security, is charged by MessageLabs on the basis of storage space required — 25GB, 50GB, 250GB and 1,000GB blocks — as well as functionality, rather than on a per year basis.