The planned class-action grievance filed on Thursday touching Google in B.C. Supreme Court is only the latest salvo in a enduring war that is pitting online patrons against the enormous companies that profit from users delicate in sequence. Earlier this year, a B.C. woman launched a court achievement alongside Facebook for using her name and photo on that social network site’s. Woman launched a court achievement alongside Facebook for using her name and photo on that social network site’s.
When she hit the “like” button for a product or examine. It wasn’t the first case touching Facebook by users infuriated at how the networking enormous was using their in sequence. And Google previously faces a lawsuit in California alike to the achievement taken in B.C. over data withdrawal of its users’ in sequence. At the heart of these court fights are the commerce models of Google, Facebook and other Internet company that offer patrons a host of so-called free services.
They are fundamentally promotion companies, for whom data-mining is their stock-in-trade. Their clientele turn over mountains of individual data in swap over for in receipt of a service whether it’s the capability to email friends, post photos, or keep a calendar. On the one hand, you can look at it from the point of an enduring deliberate amongst users against companies.
There is a confident agreement amongst users: We’ll give up our data if you give us these free services even though it’s not really free. What sets the B.C. case apart from before lawsuits is that the petitioner isn’t a Gmail user, but rather a journalist who, by emailing a Gmail user, had his information subjected to data-mining. This crate shows that even if you don’t contribute, your information is still at risk. It can unmoving be mine by Google or other information companies,” said Chow-White. “In conditions of information, it’s like the Wild West.”
“The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there.” It’s a saying that rings particularly true in the world of technology. But while innovating requires us to focus on the future, there are times when it’s significant to look back. Today—the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth—is one such moment.
Turing’s life was one of astounding highs and overwhelming lows. While his wartime code breaking saved thousands of lives, his own life was shattered when he was convicted for homosexuality. But the disaster of his story should not overshadow his legacy. Turing’s insight laid the foundations of the computer age. It’s no overstatement to say he’s a founding father of every computer and Internet company today.
Turing’s breakthrough came in 1936 with the publication of his seminal paper “On Computable Numbers” (PDF). This introduced two key concepts, “algorithms” and “computing machines”—commonplace terms today, but truly innovative in the 1930’s:
* Algorithms are, in simplest terms, step-by-step instructions for carrying out a mathematical calculation. This is where it all started for programming since, at its core, all software is a gathering of algorithms.
* A computing machine—today better known as a Turing machine—was the hypothetical device that Turing dreamed up to run his algorithms. In the 1930’s, a “computer” was what you called a person who did calculations—it was a profession, not an object. Turing’s paper provided the blueprint for building a machine that could do any calculation that a person could, marking the first step towards the modern notion of a computer.
Considering the role computers now play in everyday life, it’s clear Turing’s inventions rank among the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century. In the development of computing, all paths trace back to Turing. That’s why Turing is a hero to so many Google engineers, and why we’re so proud to help commemorate and preserve his legacy.
In 2010, Google helped Bletchley Park raise funds to purchase Turing’s papers so they could be preserved for public display in their museum. More recently, we’ve been functioning closely with curators at London’s Science Museum to help put on a stunning new exhibition “Code breaker - Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.” This tells the story of Turing’s vast achievements in a intensely moving and personal way, through an amazing collection of artifacts—including items loaned by GCHQ, the U.K. government intelligence agency, never before on public display. Topics addressed include Turing’s early years, his code-breaking at Bletchley Park, and his designs for the Pilot Ace computer, his later morphogenesis work, as well as his sexuality and death. The exhibition opened on June 21 and is well worth a visit if you’re passing through London in the next year.
And finally, we couldn’t let such an important occasion pass without a doodle. We thought the most fitting way of paying tribute to Turing’s unbelievable life and work would be to simulate the theoretical “Turing machine” he proposed in a mathematical paper. Visit the homepage today— we invite you to try your hand at programming it. If you get it the first time, try again... it gets harder!
Turing was born into a world that was very dissimilar, culturally and technologically, from ours—but his contribution has never been more significant. I hope you’ll join me today in paying compliment to Alan Turing, the forefather of modern computing.
The Miami-Illinois language was measured by some to be extinct. Once spoken by Native American communities throughout what’s now the American Midwest, its last fluent speakers died in the 1960s. Decades later, Daryl Baldwin, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, began teaching himself the language from historical manuscripts and now works with the Miami University in Ohio to carry on the work of stimulating the language, publishing stories, audio files and other educational materials. Miami children are once again learning the language and—even more inspiring—teaching it to each other.
Daryl’s work is just one example of the efforts being made to protect and strengthen languages that are on the brink of disappearing. Today we’re introducing something we hope will help: the Endangered Languages Project, a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and inclusive information about endangered languages. Documenting the 3,000+ languages that are on the verge of extinction (about half of all languages in the world) is an important step in preserving cultural diversity, honoring the information of our elders and empowering our youth. Technology can make stronger these efforts by helping people create high-quality recordings of their elders (often the last speakers of a language), connecting diaspora communities through social media and facilitating language learning.
The endanger Languages Project, backed by a new coalition, the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, gives those interested in preserving languages a place to store and access research, share advice and builds collaborations. People can share their knowledge and research directly through the site and help keep the content up-to-date. A diverse group of collaborators have already begun to contribute content ranging from 18th-century manuscripts to modern teaching tools like video and audio language samples and knowledge-sharing articles. Members of the Advisory Committee have also provided guidance, helping shape the site and ensure that it addresses the interests and needs of language communities.
Google has played a role in the development and launch of this project, but the long-term goal is for true experts in the field of language preservation to take the lead. As such, in a few months we’ll officially be handing over the reins to the First Peoples' Cultural Council (FPCC) and The Institute for Language Information and Technology (The LINGUIST List) at Eastern Michigan University. FPCC will take on the role of Advisory Committee Chair, leading outreach and strategy for the project. The LINGUIST List will become the Technical Lead. Both organizations will work in coordination with the Advisory Committee.
South African rock designs. Brazilian street graffiti. Australian aboriginal art. Today we’re announcing a major development of the Google Art Project. From now on, with a few simple clicks of a finger, art lovers around the world will be able to find out not just paintings, but also sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries.
Since we introduced the Art Project last year, curators, artists and viewers from all over the globe have accessible exciting ideas about how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions worldwide asked to join the project, urging us to augment the diversity of artworks displayed. We listened.
The original Art Project counted 17 museums in nine countries and 1,000 images, almost all paintings from Western masters. Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student deficient to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.
The expanded Art Project embraces all sizes of institutions, specializing in art or in other types of civilization. For example, you can take a look at the White House in Washington, D.C., discover the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and continue the journey to the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. In the United States alone, some 29 partners in 16 cities are participating, ranging from exceptional regional museums like the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina to top notch university galleries such as the SCAD museum of art in Savannah, Georgia.
Here are a few other new things in the prolonged Art Project that you might enjoy:
* Using completely new tools, called Explore and Discover, you can find artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, displaying works from different museums around the world.
* Google+ and Hangouts are included on the site, enabling you to create even more engaging personal galleries.
* Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specifically designed Street View “trolley” took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also discover the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
* We now have 46 artworks obtainable with our “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be not possible to see with the naked eye.
* An enhanced My Gallery feature lets you select any of the 30,000 artworks—along with your favorite details—to build your own personalized gallery. You can add comments to each painting and share the whole compilation with friends and family. (It’s an ideal tool for students.)
The Art Project is part of our hard work to bringing culture online and making it accessible the widest possible audience. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re presenting high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities.
For more in sequence and future developments, follow the Art Project on Google+. Together with the fantastic input from our partners from around the world, we’re pleased to have created a convenient, fun way to interrelate with art—a platform that we hope appeals to students, aspiring artists and connoisseurs alike.
Last year we announced a $1.25 million grant to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory to help conserve and digitize thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Nelson Mandela. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) is committed to documenting the life and times of one of the world's greatest statesmen and dispersion his story to promote social justice throughout the world.
Today, the Mandela archive has become a actuality. Along with historians, educationalists, researchers, activists and many others around the world, you can access a wealth of information and knowledge about the life and inheritance of this extraordinary African leader. The new online multimedia archive includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the discussions that ended apartheid in South Africa. The archive will also include the earliest-known photo of Mr. Mandela and never-before seen drafts of Mr. Mandela's manuscripts for the follow-up to his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
We’ve worked closely with the NMCM to create an interactive online experience which we hope will motivate you as much as us. You can search and browse the archives to discover different parts of Mandela’s life and work in depth: Early Life, Prison Years, Presidential Years, and Retirement, Books for Mandela, Young People and My Moments with a Legend.
For example, you might be concerned in Nelson Mandela’s personal memories of the time he was incarcerated and click into the Prison Years exhibit. You can immediately see a curate set of materials threaded together into a broader narrative. These take in handwritten notes on his desk calendars, which show, for example, that he met President F.W. De Klerk for the first time on December 13, 1989 for two and a half hours in prison; the Warrants of Committal issued by the Supreme Court which sent him to prison; the earliest known photo of Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island circa 1971; and a personal letter written from prison in 1963 to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother was arrested, absolute with transcript.
From there, you might want to see all the letters held by the records, and click “See more” in the letters category, where you can find out all personal letters or use the time filter to explore his diaries and calendars written between 1988 and 1998, where you can see that in the last page of the last diary, he met with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda to swap over ideas about the situation in northern Uganda. If you were a researcher, you can search through various fragments of Madiba’s memory that narrate to Ahmed Kathrada, his long-time comrade, politician and anti-apartheid activist, where you can find photos, videos, manuscripts and letters that relate to him.
Finally, by clicking into the exhibit, My Moments with a Legend, you can go beyond Madiba’s personal materials to get a diverse viewpoint through photos, videos and stories, via the memories of people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, F.W. De Klerk and Nomfundo Walaza, a community worker.
The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive project is a proposal by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and the Google Cultural Institute, which helps to protect and promote our diverse cultural and historical heritage. Some of our other initiatives include the Art Project, digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls and bringing the Yad Vashem Holocaust materials online.
You can start exploring the Nelson Mandela archive right now at archive.nelsonmandela.org. We hope you’ll be enthused by this influential leader—the face of South Africa’s transition to democracy.
Can you teach old spider new tricks? Could better understanding alien superbugs cure diseases on Earth? These are the questions that will be asked by the two winning experiments of YouTube Space Lab, the science competition that challenged students from 14 to 18 years old to design a science experiment that might be performed in space. Your votes and our expert judges chose the winners from thousands of entries from approximately the world. Experiments submitted by Dorothy and Sara, from Troy, Mich., U.S. (winners in the 14-16-year-old age group) and Amr from Alexandria, Egypt (winner in the 17-18-year-old age group) will be performed aboard the International Space Station and live streamed to the world on YouTube.
Meet Amr from Alexandria, Egypt
Global Winner, 17-18-year-old age group:
Watch his entry: “Can you teach an old spider new tricks?”
Meet Dorothy and Sara from Troy, Mich., U.S.
Global Winners, 14-16-year-old age group:
Sunita Williams—the NASA astronaut who’ll fly to the International Space Station later this year and perform the winning experiments live on YouTube—announced the global winners at a special ceremony in Washington, D.C., where the six local winning teams were gathered. While in Washington, all the teams also took a ZERO-G weightless flight and a private tour of the the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum.
In addition to having their experiments performed in space, Amr, Dorothy and Sara get to choose connecting one of two awesome space adventures: a trip to Japan to watch their experiment blast off in a rocket bound for the ISS or, once they’re 18 years old, a week-long astronaut course in Star City, Russia, the training middle for Russian cosmonauts.
Subscribe to the YouTube Space Lab channel for all the best space playlists and to check out video of the winners on their ZERO-G flight. Stay tuned for the live stream from space, which will take position later this year.
We consider that ads are useful and applicable information that can help you find what you’re looking for online—whether you’re comparing digital cameras or researching new cars. We also wish for you to be able to use Google and click on any ads that interest you with self-assurance. Just as we work hard to make Gmail free of spam and the Google Play Store free of malware, we’re committed to enforce rigorous standards for the ads that appear on Google and on our partner sites.
Like all additional Internet companies, we’re fighting a war against a huge number of bad actors—from websites selling counterfeit goods and fraudulent tickets to underground international operations annoying to spread malware and spyware. We must remain vigilant because scammers will all time try to find new ways to abuse our systems. Given the number of searches on Google and the number of rightful businesses who rely on this system to reach users, our work to take away bad ads must be precise and at scale.
We lately made some improvements to help ensure the ads you see comply with our strict policies, so we required giving you an overview of both our principles and these new technologies.
Ads that harm users are not allowed on Google
We’ve always approached our ads system with trust and safety in mind. Our policies cover a wide range of issues across the sphere in every country in which we do business. For example, our ads policies don’t allow ads for prohibited products such as counterfeit goods or harmful products such as handguns or cigarettes. We also don’t permit ads with misleading claims (“lose weight guaranteed!”), fraudulent work-at-home scams (“get rich quick working from home!”) or unclear billing practices.
How it all works
With billions of ads submitted to Google every year, we use a mixture of sophisticated technology and manual review to detect and remove these sorts of ads. We spend millions of dollars building technical architecture and higher machine learning models to fight this battle. These systems are intended to detect and remove ads for malicious download sites that contain malware or a virus before these ads could appear on Google. Our automated systems also scan and review landing pages—the websites that people are taken to once they click—as well as advertiser accounts. When potentially offensive ads are flagged by our automated systems, our policy specialists review the ads, sites and accounts in detail and take action.
Improvements to uncovering systems
Here are some significant improvements that we’ve newly made to our systems:
* Improved “query watch” for counterfeit ads: While any person can report counterfeit ads, we’ve widened our proactive monitoring of sensitive keywords and queries related to counterfeit goods which allows us to catch more counterfeit ads before they ever appear on Google
* New “risk model” to detect violations: Our computer scanning depends on detailed risk models to decide whether a particular ad may violate our policies, and we recently upgraded our engineering system with a new “risk model” that is even more accurate in detecting advertisers who violate our policies
* Faster manual review process: Some ads need to be reviewed physically. To increase our response time in preventing ads from policy-violating advertisers, we sped up our interior processes and systems for manual reviews, enabling our specialists to be more accurate and fast
* Twenty-four hour response time: We aim to react within 24 hours upon receiving a reliable complaint about an ad to ensure that we’re reviewing ads in a timely fashion
We also regularly review and update the areas which our policies cover. For example, we recently rationalized our policy for ads related to short-term loans in order to protect people from misleading claims. For short-term loans, we necessitate advertisers to disclose fine-print details such as overall fees and annual percentage rate, as well as implications for late and non-payment.
Bad ads are declining
The numbers show we’re having success. In 2011, advertisers submitted billions of ads to Google, and of those, we disabled more than 130 million ads. And our systems carry on improving—in fact, in 2011 we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with 2010. That means that our methods are working. We’re also catching the vast mainstream of these scam ads before they ever appear on Google or on any of our partner networks. For example, in 2011, we shut down about 150,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, and more than 95% of these accounts were exposed through our own detection efforts and risk models.
Here’s David Baker, Engineering Director, who can explain more about how we detect and take away scam ads:
What you can do to help
If you’re an advertiser, we give confidence you to review our policies that aim to protect users, so you can help keep the web safe. For everyone else, our Good to Know site has lots of advice, including tips for avoiding scams anywhere on the Internet. You can also report ads you believe to be deceitful or in violation of our policies and, if needed, file a complaint with the suitable agency as listed in our Web Search Help Center.
Online advertising is the commercial lifeblood of the web, so it’s vital that people can trust the ads on Google and the Internet overall. We’ll keep posting more in sequence here about our efforts, and developments, in this area.
