Google launches Google Drive, upgrades Gmail to 10 GB for all users

Google has launched Google Drive, a cloud storage service where users can upload and access all of their files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond. The service is offering new users 5GB of storage for free with upgrades starting at 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. Google also increased the free storage in Gmail from the existing 7.5 GB to 10 GB to all users.

“Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future,” Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps, Google has said.

Google’s Dropbox competitor ‘Drive’ to launch today?

Google is preparing to roll out a service to let consumers store photos and other content online, a source familiar with the matter said, pushing into a market now dominated by the likes of Dropbox and Box.

The service, to be called Google Drive, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and would be offered with both free and premium for-pay versions, the source said.

Google’s “cloud storage” offering will incorporate search capabilities and allow users to store pictures, notes and other documents on the Internet and access them from any Web-connected device.

Consumers will get 5 Gigabytes of storage for free with Google Drive, while various versions with incrementally more storage capacity, topping out at about 100 Gibabytes, will be available for monthly fees, the source said.

It was not immediately clear how much Google will charge for the premium versions.

A Google spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation.

The move turns up the competitive heat with high-profile Web startups such as Dropbox, Box and Evernote, as well as with Microsoft Corp and its SkyDrive service.

Some of those services, such as Box, have offered an increasing array of business-oriented features such as online collaboration capabilities.

Google is increasingly developing services to let consumers store their personal information, from digital music to photos, on remote internet servers and access the data any time with any device, such as smartphones, tablets and desktop computers.

The world’s No.1 web search engine with roughly $38 billion in 2011 revenue, Google generates 96 per cent of its revenue from advertising, such as the small ads that appear alongside its search results.

Google Drive will work with sophisticated image search technology to let consumers sift through a wide variety of document types, which could include the likes of Adobe PDF files and photographs, the source said.

Some details of Google Drive have appeared in various online blogs in recent months, including The Next Web, which first reported that the service could be rolled out this week.

Mozilla, Google Patch Browsers Before Hacker Fest

Google and Mozilla have been preparing for the Pwn2Own contest by patching their browsers. This is in anticipation to the contest, where hackers congregate to find and exploit vulnerabilities, especially in browsers. The same contest in the past had hackers holding on to existing but undiscovered vulnerabilities they knew about until the contest, when they exploited the same to save time. It’s little wonder that the Internet majors have patched up their browsers, as Google had paid $1,000 for their troubles last year. Google had also announced a $20,000 reward last month to anyone who can compromise its Chrome browser, which wasn’t be exploited in the last contest.

Google was the first to release a patch fixing 19 flaws in the Chrome browser; of which three bugs were classified as “medium” while the rest were marked as “high” risk vulnerabilities. This was followed by Mozilla publishing fixes for 10 security flaws in Firefox that included eight rated “critical,” while the remaining two were rated “High” and “Moderate”. One of those was particularly malicious, with the hackers being able to code a JPEG image that could save malicious code onto the system memory.

Speaking on the vulnerability, Mozilla warned its users, “Security researcher Jordi Chancel reported that a JPEG image could be constructed that would be decoded incorrectly, causing data to be written past the end of a buffer created to store the image. An attacker could potentially craft such an image that would cause malicious code to be stored in memory and then later executed on a victim’s computer.”

The Pwn2Own hacker contest has been an annual event since 2007, where hackers are encouraged, and even paid to compromise software, computing platforms and web browsers. However, it’s nothing illegal. The event sponsor pays reward money to the hacker and it in turn profits by alerting the vendors of vulnerabilities in their software/OS. The browsers targeted include Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Opera hasn’t been targeted because of the lack of widespread usage and the fact that the contestants use the browser for the same reason.

Successful hackers are asked to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding the vulnerabilities, and the vendors are free to patch their code with the information on vulnerabilities provided the sponsor. Think of this as a monetised form of ethical hacking, and everyone profits at the end of the day.

Will IE9 change the way we use the web?

Microsoft’s newest web browser, Internet Explorer 9, sees the technology giant wrest some of the initiative from its rivals

The internet of the future is likely to look very different from the distinct pages and sites we visit today – that was the message as Microsoft launched the latest version of their much-maligned Internet Explorer web browser. And while every major manufacturer always claims that theirs is a revolutionary product, the company that remains best known for Windows and Office might just be on the right track this time. Headlines around the world greeted IE9 as Microsoft’s most ambitious yet, while others called it revolutionary. Respected British website Techradar.com went so far as to call it “ie-mazing”.

Almost since it launched Internet Explorer in 1995, the browser has been troublesome for Microsoft. Even when it was in use by 95 percent of all web users in 2002, a tech-savvy audience maintained that it was not the best option available. Firefox, the now-defunct Netscape Navigator and more recently Google Chrome have set the pace for speed and ease of use. With usage now down to less than two-thirds of the online population Microsoft has staged a fightback that, for once, appears to be winning many experts round, even if browsers are all starting to look more similar anyway.

At the heart of IE9, however, are two key features: the first is a bid to make websites more like applications, which means that the depth of features of, say Microsoft Word, could also be available to any site where developers have sufficient resources. In practice a chunk of that is largely cosmetic, but it’s a visual change that makes a genuine difference to the way people use the web. In the words of Microsoft’s Leila Martine, head of Windows in the UK, “it’s making web pages first class citizens”. Given that users spend around half their time using a computer online, some might argue this is rather overdue.

Secondly, however, is the integration between hardware and software: with the advance of new web programming language HTML5, Microsoft is now able to offload much of the burden of processing graphics onto computer hardware that’s built for the job, the graphics processing unit (GPU). This means that web pages are rendered at significantly greater speed – in a demo, the company showed IE9 to be at least five times quicker than Google Chrome.

It’s the combination of these two features, primarily, that Microsoft hopes will have a transformative effect on the internet: the download site for IE9 is called “beautyoftheweb.com“, and in some of the company’s demos there clearly are new possibilities. Amazon, for instance, has built a site called Bookshelf, which combines the best bits of browsing in a bookshop – looking at covers, getting a sense of what else is around – with providing useful additional information about titles and genres. The effect is genuinely unlike anything else that other browsers can produce successfully.

All this is not to say, however, that the web will change instantly. And anyway, Google, Firefox and other browsers are all heading in the same direction. But what’s certain is that the development of applications, both for the web and for the iPhone and other mobile devices, has made many companies notice that the internet on a desktop or laptop PC was starting to feel strangely limited: Microsoft has tried to solve this by tightly integrating IE9 with Windows 7, as Google will when it launches its equivalent Chrome operating system. What that means is that, in future, the line between being online and simply using a computer may become indistinguishable – but broadband, mobile phone and wifi providers will have to sort out getting us all connected first.

Google’s Gmail under phishing attack

India’s 71 million internet and close to 10 million broadband users are increasingly becoming the victims of vicious phishing attacks that can result in identity theft, danger to life and even crippling financial fraud.

On Wednesday, users of Google’s email services received a legal notice from the gmail team asking them to update their account details for security reasons.

“Gmail Team is working on total security on all accounts in order to make Gmail better as ever and as a result of this security upgrade we require all Gmail members to verify their account with Google. To prevent your account from disability you will have to update your account by clicking the reply button and filling the space below,” the mail read.

The legal notice from Gmail wanted users to refurbish their account name, password, occupation, birth date and country of residence. It also carried a threat that users who did not update their details within 7 days of receiving the warning would lose their account permanently.

However, when contacted, a Google spokesperson said, “Some spammers send fraudulent mass-messages designed to collect personal information, called ‘spoofing’ or ‘password phishing’. We always advise our users to be wary of any
message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information. Google or Gmail does not send unsolicited mass messages asking for passwords or personal information; even if the message asking for it claims to be from us, please don’t believe it.”

This information is publicly available in the Gmail support center at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8253

According to Rakshit Tandon, consultant safe surfing with the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI ), “Phishing activity has been on the rise across India since December. The biggest targets for cyber criminals
are banking sites followed by free email sites like Gmail and Yahoo and social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut,” he said.

The IAMAI runs cyber safety programmes and has already worked with 3,50,000 students in 185 schools across 43 cities and 13 states.

“A schoolteacher in Mumbai lost close to Rs 10 lakh after phishers got into her netbanking account. Internet penetration is going up which is inviting more criminal attacks as awareness levels are very low,” adds Tandon.

His advise is to be investigative and use logic (BIUL) when using the Net in order to improve your personal Internet security levels.

Secure File Permissions Matter

Summary: A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each other’s configuration files, and some members of the “security” press have tried to turn this into a “WordPress vulnerability” story.

WordPress, like all other web applications, must store database connection info in clear text. Encrypting credentials doesn’t matter because the keys have to be stored where the web server can read them in order to decrypt the data. If a malicious user has access to the file system — like they appeared to have in this case — it is trivial to obtain the keys and decrypt the information. When you leave the keys to the door in the lock, does it help to lock the door?

A properly configured web server will not allow users to access the files of another user, regardless of file permissions. The web server is the responsibility of the hosting provider. The methods for doing this (suexec, et al) have been around for 5+ years.

I’m not even going to link any of the articles because they have so many inaccuracies you become stupider by reading them.

If you’re a web host and you turn a bad file permissions story into a WordPress story, you’re doing something wrong.

Facebook shut its Lite site after just seven months

Facebook has shut down its Lite site aimed at users with slow or poor internet connections.

The stripped down version of the original ran for around seven months.

Facebook posted a note on its own fan page thanking those who used Lite, adding that it had “learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site”.

“I think a lot of the Facebook experience was left out of Lite, especially the monetisable parts,” said Ray Valdes of Gartner Research.

“The other part of this decision is probably because they have improved the performance sufficiently with the main part of Facebook and made things run better that they didn’t need this back-up approach to cover a situation of low performance,” Mr Valdes told BBC News.

The technology blog ReadWriteWeb.com had described the Lite site as a “Twitter-like experience” of the popular microblogging service because it offered a smaller number of features than the fully-fledged site.

The options on Facebook Lite were limited to letting users write on their wall, post photos and videos, view events and browse other people’s profiles. There were no applications or special boxes.

“In some ways the Lite version was like using ad block on their own site – it stripped the site down to the very basics,” said Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb.

The change was announced on Facebook’s own profile page and offered few details as to why the service has been closed down.

“It would seem not enough people were using it but then there was not a lot of awareness about the product. Tears will not be shed over the loss of Facebook Lite,” Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook.com told BBC News.

A number of commentators on the social media blog Mashable.com said that they used it because it was not blocked at their office while some said they thought it “would have been a nice support for low bandwidth nations”.

Maharashtra has most new AIDS cases in India

MUMBAI: “A true AIDS epidemic is not a future possibility for Maharashtra; it is a present reality”, warns a pamphlet brought out by an NGO fighting against the spread of HIV. And this is not an alarmist tirade. In the last three years, Maharashtra has registered the largest number of new AIDS cases in India. The 98,578 fresh cases registered in the state since 2007 make up 23%—almost a quarter—of the 4,19,982 AIDS patients registered across the country.

Maharashtra was one of the earliest states in India where the disease manifested itself, registering its first AIDS case in Mumbai, in 1986. Lack of awareness, a large migrant population and a thriving sex trade have made it extremely difficult to combat the spread of HIV in the state. The National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) has drawn up a list of 49 districts in India with a “high prevalence” of HIV/AIDS, of which 14 are in Maharashtra.

According to a study conducted by Population Foundation of India, a Delhi-based NGO funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, workers in the hotel and tourism industry had the highest HIV prevalence among groups tested in the state, followed by drivers and the unemployed. Truck drivers, who travel long distances, brought the infection with them, often to areas where the disease had not yet penetrated.

What is worrying is that in Maharashtra, HIV is not confined to high-risk groups such as sex workers, but has entered the general population. Moreover, the disease is no longer an urban phenomenon, but has spread to rural areas as well. Now, even places like Latur, Jalgaon, Chandrapur and Sangli fall under NACO’s list of “high prevalence” districts.

Experts say this is because “bridge groups” contribute to the spread of the virus, referring to husbands who use the services of sex workers and then infect their wives with HIV, who in turn pass on the infection to their babies.

Since 2007, 10,371 persons have succumbed to the disease in Maharashtra, second only to Andhra Pradesh, where 12,879 people have died due to AIDS.

Public health experts say the disease can only be fought through proper counseling, awareness-raising measures, and accurate testing. J J Hospital in Byculla is one of 10 centres of excellence that are battling the advent of AIDS in India. And Maharashtra has 30 anti-retroviral treatment centres—the most in the country.

Olive Announces Triple SIM QWERTY Phone

The Olive brand is now famous in the country for one device they launched last month. Remember the Olive FrvrOn handset? Probably the only phone in the world to come in dual power options. The phone, apart from having a normal Li-Ion battery, also packed in a slot for an AA battery that can be used to power the phone for a few minutes in an emergency.

The same company has now announced the launch of the Wiz VGC800, a new triple SIM QWERTY mobile for the Indian market. Olive claims it is the first triple SIM phone to arrive in a QWERTY keypad form factor. The VGC800 supports two GSM SIM cards and a CDMA connection.

The phone is social networking ready and comes with Facebook Twitter, MSN and Yahoo clients. It also comes preloaded with Opera Mini for browsing needs. Thanks to the QWERTY keypad and a decent e-mail client, it can double up as a capable e-mail device as well.

Other features include a basic 2.0 megapixel camera. The screen is a not so large 2.2-inch one capable of displaying 262K colors. Connectivity options include Bluetooth and USB. It has a built in FM radio, stereo headset and speaker phone.

The Olive Wiz VGC800 is priced at Rs. 6,000.

Google search using speed to rank sites

Google web search rankings are now partly affected by a site’s speed, the company has announced on the same day as it reveals its first UK acquisition.

Google search results are now being based partly on a website’s speed, the company has announced. Previously, ranking was purely based on the relevance of a site to the terms a user searched for, but the system has been adjusted after Google studies found that site visitors discriminated against slow web pages.

The search giant said, however, that only a very small number of sites would be affected. Writing on the company’s Webmaster Central Blog, engineers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote that “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1 per cent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.” The blog post also emphasised the importance of speed for web users and provided links to tools that site owners could use to speed up their web pages.

The news came on the same day that Google announced it had bought Plink, a two person start-up based in Cambridge. The company works on visual search, and its first application, PlinkArt, identified a painting if a user took a photograph of it using their camera phone.

Founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin will now go to work on Google’s Goggles visual search application. Google added that the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, marked the start of an ambition to buy one firm a month.