All of Google’s cloud database services are now out of beta

Google is making a number of announcements around its Cloud Platform today. Most of these focus on its various cloud database services, but the company is also making a major update to its low-cost Nearline cloud storage service for cold data, making its disk volumes faster, and allowing its users to bring their own encryption keys to Cloud Storage.

The overall message Google is clearly trying to send here is that its cloud computing services are ready for production use.

On the database side, the big news is that all of Google’s cloud database services are now out of beta. That means the company’s second generation version of Cloud SQL, which allows you to easily run and manage MySQL databases in the cloud, is now generally available after about nine months in beta.

Cloud Bigtable, another NoSQL database, but with a focus on very large analytics and operational workloads, is now also generally available.

Also out of beta is the API forGoogle Cloud Datastore, Google’s NoSQL database for web and mobile app workloads. Cloud Datastore itself was already generally available for a while, but developers were only able to use it as part of Google App Engine. With the API, developers can use it for applications outside of App Engine as well. The company says Cloud Datastore, which is used by the likes of Snapchat, currently handles one trillion requests per month.

Google notes that it had added various features to these services over the course of their betas, but what will likely matter even more to its users is that these services are now backed by an SLA (for Cloud Datastore, that’s 99.95% monthly uptime, for example).

For those who want to use Microsoft’s flagship database server in the Google Cloud, the company now also offers SQL Server images with built-in licenses (currently in beta) and the ability to bring existing licenses to its platform. Running SQL Server images incurs some extra cost on top of Google’s normal instance costs, though. That’s $0.1645 per core/hour for SQL Server Standard and $0.011 per core/hour for SQL Server Web. Using SQL Server Express, though, is free.

While Microsoft may have an edge when it comes to running SQL Server in the cloud, Google knows that it needs to offer its enterprise users the option to bring their existing applications and workloads to its cloud if it wants to wean them off Microsoft’s cloud services (which, for the time being, remain significantly more popular than Google’s among enterprise customers).

As for storage, Google today announced that its low-cost Nearline storage service for “cold” data is getting much faster. Nearline competes directly with Amazon’s Glacier storage and like that service, it provides lower availability guarantees in return for significantly lower storage cost. Until now, Nearline users also had to contend with a 3 to 5 second latency when accessing data. That latency is now gone. As a Google spokesperson told me, access is now “almost real-time.”

Google’s Persistent Disk volumes are now also faster, with maximum read and write IOPS going from 15,000 to 25,000. That’s useful for both database applications and storing other types of data locally as well.

“Today marks a major milestone in our tremendous momentum and commitment to making Google Cloud Platform the best public cloud for your enterprise database workloads,” the Google team writes today. It’s not like we needed more evidence that Google is taking its Cloud Platform very seriously these days, but if you needed more evidence, now you have it.

FEATURED IMAGE: GOOGLE/GOOGLE

SOURCES: TECHCRUNCH

Google buys cloud platform

Google buys Orbitera, a platform for cloud marketplaces, for $100M+

Google today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services, and specifically selling enterprise services in the cloud: it has acquired Orbitera, a startup that developed a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but our sources close to the deal tell us it’s just north of $100 million.

This is an acquisition of talent, technology, and existing business. The CEO Marcin Kurc (tellingly) is an alum of AWS. And Google notes that some 60,000 enterprise stacks have already been launched on Orbitera. These include the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Metalogix, who all resell cloud services from third-party vendors as part of their larger enterprise businesses.

“This acquisition will not only improve support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform but also provides customers with more choice and flexibility in today’s multi-cloud world,” Google said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Kurc notes in his announcement that Google will keep everything running as is, “at this time.”

The startup says its focus is on providing four (end-to-end) aspects of building cloud marketplaces: Packaging and Provisioning, Billing and Cost Optimization, Marketplace and Catalogs, Trials and Lead Management.

It looks like Google will continue to operate that business on behalf of existing users, and maybe to help out its own marketplace for cloud services on its own cloud platform.

“Looking to the future, we’re committed to maintaining Orbitera’s neutrality as a platform supporting multi-cloud commerce. We look forward to helping the modern enterprise thrive in a multi-cloud world,” writes Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google.

As Google has grown well beyond its earliest roots as a search company, its reached an interesting relationship with companies that are at turns friends and rivals to its own business interests.

Buying a platform company that works with so many of these in the area of cloud services is an interesting development for Google, and one that it’s keen to try to tread carefully in making.

In this case, Google is trying to reassure customers that even as it sells a platform to sell products, it recognises that the ultimate repository of those products might not be Google itself.

(Whether or not that is the case longer term is another question — in other areas like ads, Google has walked an impartial line and then changed course — but for now there is a viable enough business for Google in remaining a neutral party.)

“We recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles,” Boden notes.

“Orbitera has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software to multiple clouds. This acquisition will not only improve the support of software vendors onGoogle Cloud Platform, but reinforces Google’s support for the multi-cloud world. We’re providing customers with more choice and flexibility when it comes to running their cloud environment.”

Orbitera was co-founded by Firas Bushnaq and Brian Singer, who came up with the idea for the company to fix some of the “transactional and operational challenges associated with selling software” that they encountered while founding and working at previous tech companies.

Based out of West Hollywood, CA, Orbitera had raised some $2 million in funding from angels like Hiten Shah and Arjun Sethi, Double M Partners and Resolute.vc

SOURCES: TECHCRUNCH

Google wants to help you

Google wants to help you manage your passwords

The search giant intends to use password managers to log you in to your Android apps, a process that could expand to other devices and operating systems.

Google is looking to rid you of the burden of remembering passwords.

Password manager Dashlane said Thursday it's partnering with Google on a project that will enable Android users to easily and securely log in to their mobile apps via stored passwords. It's called Open Yolo -- you only log in once. The project would involve other companies that make password managers, which automatically create, store and apply passwords for websites so you don't have to remember them.

Passwords have become a necessary evil for logging in to websites and apps. It's tough to create and recall them, and they're not fail-safe. Other security methods, such as fingerprint and iris scanning, are simpler and more secure, but they're still in their infancy. Integrating password managers directly into your website and app logins could prove to be the best solution.

Password managers are a viable way to avoid dealing with passwords. But multiple password managers -- including Dashlane, Roboform, LastPass and 1Password -- all try to do essentially the same job. Which one should you use? Well, the goal behind Open Yolo is to come up with a single, more seamless login process that taps into whichever password manager you use.

So far, such leading password managers as 1Password, LastPass, Keeper and KeePass are either already participating in the project or have expressed a strong interest in it, a Dashlane spokeswoman told CNET. One password manager ideal for the project is Smart Lock, a tool already built into your Google account. Introduced last year, Smart Lock can automatically log you in to an Android app and apply your username and password to websites opened through the Chrome browser.

Open Yolo currently exists as an open API (application programming interface), which allows app developers to support different password managers. Any maker of a password manager can contribute its own technology and expertise to try to enhance and develop the API. With the open API, a password-protected app would be able to query other sources of credentials -- such as Dashlane, another password manager or even another browser -- if it contains a credential for the app, the spokeswoman said.

"The big picture is to make password managers more proactive and more transparent, which means it will be seamlessly available every time you need it," the spokeswoman said. "This project is the first big step towards making security simple and accessible for every user, on every device."

Google is expected to approve the API by next month.

For now, Open Yolo's focus is to create a login process for Android apps, but the project has bigger aspirations.

"In the future, we see this open API going beyond just Android devices, and becoming universally implemented by apps and password managers across every platform and operating system," Dashlane said in Thursday's blog post. "Ultimately, we look forward to expanding this collaborative project, so that it will benefit the entire security ecosystem as a whole."

SOURCES: CNET

What would happen if there was no Google?

Ever imagined what’d happen if Google was not there?

In just a short time, Google has become a seamless part of our lives, ranking somewhere between Jesus and bacon in importance. The brand has joined the ranks of Kleenex and Xerox (and if you’re in the South, Coke), with its name becoming synonymous with its product and somewhat generic as we “Google” this or that. Most of the world can’t use a smartphone without using a Google product. Some people can’t even travel across their own city without using Maps. It’s hard to fathom a life without it. Google Reader users, however, got a small taste of life would be like without the Big G in our lives.

It is very difficult to say exactly how the entire world would be able to work without Google – which is the most frequently visited website in the world. Google is a huge company which employs more than 30,000 people. There are a wide range of applications offered by Google and many of them are completely free. Users have the flexibility of using e-mail or Gmail and Google Docs for the purpose of sharing different types of documents. Google offers maps for the purpose of navigation, Calendar for organizing different activities during the week. Apart from this, Google offers Analytics for the purpose of tracking statistics about a website and Blogger for setting up an attractive blog for professional as well as personal purposes. Lineup of services offered by Google also includes Google Patents, Scholar, Finance, Groupsand Google+ for social networking. You also get the Image search option which enables you to get hold of the best images that you would like to use. Not to mention, Google search engine which has completely revolutionized the whole procedure of getting useful information on the internet. There are a lot of things offered by Google for accomplishing a number of tasks without putting in much effort and also without spending much money.

The use of library card catalogs would increase because people would actually visit libraries for getting required information on different topics. Carrying out a research on a particular topic would take a long time because researchers would not get the flexibility of carrying out their researches from home. This actually means that you would have to make good efforts in trying to find an answer for even some of your minutest queries. You can use other search engines but you would not get the results as fast and as accurate as Google. It would be a financial implosion for people who work for Google and the companies who carry out their advertising campaigns of Google. Almost all the websites or online stores promoting and selling their products and services online would lose web presence.

Having lost the power to find everything on search engine, people would need to talk to each other more. Forums will start to be bombarded with small queries. People would often meet up in big groups to discuss things as there was no Google to tell them stuff. Instead of Googling everything whenever they wanted, people would try and remember more stuff. As is the case with phone book in mobiles, we no longer remember phone numbers of our family or friends. Same is with Google. We don’t even make an effort to remember stuff because we know we can Google it any time we want.

But we are glad that Larry Page invented Google.

Can you think of other fun things that might happen if there was no Google? Tell us in the comments below.

SOURCES: TECHWORM

There was a time when Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million

Yahoo Sold for $4.83 billion to Verizon, Sergey Brin and Larry Page approached Yahoo to sell Google for $1 million

The very Yahoo which was sold to Verizon for $4.83 billion was offered Google on the platter by its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page for a measly $1 million. And today while Yahoo is nowhere in the Internet landscape save its email and some other services, Google and its parent company, Alphabet are valued at nearly $500 billion.

You can call it an irony of sorts but Yahoo is responsible for its own demise. After making several attempts to reinvent itself since it lost relevance, Yahoo has finally announced that it is selling most of its core services to US telecommunications giant Verizon.

Yahoo was one of the companies that defined Internet. In fact, in some ways, Yahoo was the harbinger of the famous Dot.com era when it was valued at over $100 billion. Yahoo was the king of search and mail in 1990s but failing to adapt to the new changes contributed to its downfall.

A few insiders know that Yahoo missed several big ticket opportunities to make it to the big league. One such opportunity came to it on a platter in 1998 when Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin had approached Yahoo with an offer to sell their PageRank system for as little as $1 million. At that time both Page and Brin had just developed PageRank but wanted to focus on their studies at Stanford. Yahoo being dimwitted or extra smart refused their offer because it wanted to develop its own platform.

PageRank is the very same algorithm that powers Google search today. PageRank algorithm was designed by Brin and Page that ranked websites in the order they are displayed in Google search results. Brin and Page named it after Larry Page and first proposed the idea of codifying how a search engine measures the importance of websites. While PageRank helped in showing up search results of relevant third-party sites based on keywords. Yahoo did not want users to leave their platform at all. It had directories that were designed to answer questions, view email, shop and even play games on its platform – something that seemed to work well for them at that time.

Yahoo at that time had other ideas. Brin and Page’s PageRank took visitors away from the page once the results were displayed but Yahoo executives did not want users to leave their platform at all. It had directories that were designed to answer questions, view email, shop and even play games on its platform. This all in one technique worked well in 1990s but with time, Internet users demanded specialised websites for each feature and Yahoo fell to the wayside.

That is not all. In 2002, Brin and Page again approached Yahoo. This time to raise funds for Google’s expansion. Giving $3 billion to Brin and Page would have meant Yahoo getting a substantial pie of Google but Yahoo refused. Then Yahoo Chief Terry Semel refused the offer as it looked to again build its own search engine to compete with Google. Yahoo acquired search engine Inktomi and ad revenue maker Overture in its mission to build the search engine that would topple Google.

Again, Yahoo failed in execution while Brin and Page brilliantly took Google to new heights. It all started with Yahoo being valued at $100 billion its heydays and ended with it being sold for just $4.83billion to Verizon while Google is giving its stakeholder the best value for money on Nasdaq.

SOURCE: TECHWORM

Google’s new Play Store algorithm to halve size of updates

The amount of data required for updating Google Play apps can really send your mobile bill through the roof, especially if you aren’t using Wi-Fi. Fortunately, Google has heard your concerns, and rolled out a new Delta algorithm, bsdiff, which reduces the app update size and lets you save on the data required for updating them.

Google’s new algorithm does this by further compressing the size of patches for apps and games. According to a blog post by Anthony Morris, SWE Google Play, for about 98 percent of app updates from the Play Store, only deltas to APK files are downloaded and merged with the existing files to reduce the size of the updates. Now, Google’s new algorithm will further reduce the patches by up to 50 percent. As he explains in the post,

“For approximately 98 percent of app updates from the Play Store, only changes (deltas) to APK files are downloaded and merged with the existing files, reducing the size of updates. We recently rolled out a delta algorithm, bsdiff, that further reduces patches by up to 50 percent or more compared to the previous algorithm. Bsdiff is specifically targeted to produce more efficient deltas of native libraries by taking advantage of the specific ways in which compiled native code changes between versions. To be most effective, native libraries should be stored uncompressed (compression interferes with delta algorithms).”

Google has also applied the new algorithm to APK Expansion Files to allow users to include additional large files of up to 2GB in size with their apps. This means that the download size of your initial installs will now be lower by about 12 percent, and your updates by approximately 65 percent.

“APK Expansion Files allow you to include additional large files up to 2GB in size (e.g. high resolution graphics or media files) with your app, which is especially popular with games. We have recently expanded our delta and compression algorithms to apply to these APK Expansion Files in addition to APKs, reducing the download size of initial installs by 12 percent, and updates by 65 percent on average.”

Google really cares about you and doesn’t want you to pay unnecessarily high data charges when you update your favorite apps. So it has also updated the Play Store descriptions to include the actual download size of the apps instead of the size of their APKs. So instead of seeing just the app size earlier on Google Play and remaining in the dark about how much data and storage the update would actually consume, you’ll now get to see the precise size of the app you want to install or update. Cool, huh?

If the changes made to Google Play aren’t reflecting on your screen yet, don’t panic because, as always, they are being rolled out to all users and should reach you sometime in the coming weeks.

Let us know in the comments below if you think Google Play’s new algorithm will help reduce your data usage!

SOURCES: ANDROIDAUTHORITY.COM

Google launches new API to help understand machine language

Google launches new cloud service that will help you parse natural language

Google launched a new open beta Cloud Natural Language API on Wednesday to expand its intelligent cloud developer tools and help developers create applications that understand human language. This new API will give developers entrance to Google-powered view analysis, syntax analysis, and entity recognition.

This new API joins Google’s other pre-trained machine-learning APIs like a Cloud Speech API, that is now also accessible in open beta, a Vision API and a Translate API.

Currently, the new Cloud Natural Language API supports texts in English, Japanese and Spanish. Google here is looking to offer a service “that can meet a scale and opening needs of developers and enterprises in an extended operation of industries.”

It’s an important move for Google, as public cloud providers are competing to host new applications put together with intelligent capabilities. Natural language processing allows developers to build apps that can tackle the challenging task of understanding how humans communicate, and it is important for things like building intelligent assistants and chat bots.

The new API as previously stated will support three different types of analysis. Sentiment analysis will help you understand the overall sentiment of a block of text, entity recognition will allow you to identify the most relevant entities for a block of text and label them with types such as person, organization, location, events, products and media and will perform the basic function of identifying parts of speech and creating dependency parse trees for each sentence to disclose the structure and meaning of text.

The natural language API entered public beta along with Google’s already-announced Speech API, which allows applications take in recorded voice clips and get text back. It is possible for developers to build an app by connecting the two APIs that can listen to a user’s voice and then understand what that person is saying. The service is available in 80 different languages and it is the core that powers products such as Google Search and Google Now. Apparently, more than 5,000 companies signed up for Speech API alpha.

By launching these two services in beta, Google carries on its competition against the Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, which are also introducing intelligent capabilities in their public cloud platforms.

SOURCES: TECHWORM

Google Uses AI To Cut Energy Used To Cool Its Data Centers

Google uses AI to cool data centers, save energy

Data centers are a large group of networked computer servers typically used by organizations for the remote storage, processing, or distribution of large amounts of data. They power most of our day-to-day life services, apps and systems that we depend upon. However, running thousands of hard drives, processors, networking equipment and magnetic tapes takes a real toll on the grid, which results in poor energy efficiency in data centers. To make things worse, all of that equipment also needs a powerful cooling system to keep it running.

However, Google has found a way to ease that problem. For the last few months, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division, DeepMind, has been using machine-learning algorithm at its two datacentres, which has helped the search giant reduce the energy used for data center cooling by 40% and overall energy usage by 15% in power usage efficiency (PUE).

“We accomplished this by taking the historical data that had already been collected by thousands of sensors within the data center – data such as temperatures, power, pump speeds, setpoints, etc. – and using it to train an ensemble of deep neural networks. Since our objective was to improve data center energy efficiency, we trained the neural networks on the average future PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), which is defined as the ratio of the total building energy usage to the IT energy usage. We then trained two additional ensembles of deep neural networks to predict the future temperature and pressure of the data center over the next hour. The purpose of these predictions is to simulate the recommended actions from the PUE model, to ensure that we do not go beyond any operating constraints,” Google explained in a blogpost.

It resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the amount of energy used for cooling, which was equal to a 15 percent reduction in overall PUE after accounting for electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies. The results were so impressive that Google plans to deploy the system inside all of its data centers by the end of the year.

The use of the AI technology is “a phenomenal step forward” to help cut down energy usage in data centers, DeepMind research engineer Rich Evans and Google data center engineer Jim Gao said on Google’s blog.

According to Evans and Gao, the energy reduction was realized by training DeepMind’s self-learning algorithms to predict how hot data centers were going to get within the next hour. Equipped with that data, the coolers were only able to run at the maximum temperature necessary to keep the servers sufficiently cool. Google’s data centers are used to run such services as Search, YouTube and Gmail.

Using a system of neural networks that zero in on different operating scenarios and limits within the data centers allows DeepMind to make a more efficient and adaptive framework to comprehend data center dynamics and enhance efficiency, according to Evans and Gao.

“The implications are significant for Google’s data centers, given its potential to greatly improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions overall,” Evans and Gao said. “This will also help other companies who run on Google’s cloud to improve their own energy efficiency.”

However, the best thing about the system is it can be deployed in other data centers and environments with no changes, according to Evans. It can even be applied to other domains like the national energy grid, or optimizing water usage.

Google claims that its data centers are already among the most energy-efficient in the world. The company has claimed that its data centers use hardly 50 percent of the energy consumed by most other data centers of comparable size.

“I really think this is just the beginning. There are lots more opportunities to find efficiencies in data centre infrastructure,” said DeepMind’s co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman. “One of the most exciting things is the kind of algorithms we develop are inherently general … that means the same machine learning system should be able to perform well in a wide variety of environments [such as power generation facilities and energy networks].”

With its algorithm being a perfect candidate for many industrial facilities, Suleyman explained that the team is already in talks with interested parties outside of Google.

The team announced it would be releasing a white paper describing its results and how the system was built and implemented in the near future.

SOURCES: TECHWORM

Facebook's Aquila Internet Drone Completes First Flight

WiFi takes to the skies in the form of Aquila, a self-piloting Facebook drone with a wingspan greater than that of a Boeing 737. It's another move by companies such as Facebook and Google to deliver internet services through unconventional means.

On the heels of its announcement this week for a laser-based solution to routing the wireless web, social media titan Facebook completed the first successful flight of Aquila, the company's solar-powered plane designed to beam the internet to remote parts of the world.

The flight, which took place before dawn in Yuma, Ariz., on June 28, was only meant to last for 30 minutes, but the test went so well that the team decided to keep the plane flying for up for 96 minutes.

The eventual goal is to have a fleet of the drones flying at 60,000 feet, communicating with each other with lasers and staying aloft for months at a time. That duration would allow Facebook to break the record for the longest unmanned aircraft flight.

While Aquila has a wingspan wider than a Boeing 737, it has to weigh as little as possible to stay up for as long as possible. The design team solved the problem by constructing a carbon fiber composite body. This means the drone weighs less than 1,000 pounds.

                                                (Image: Facebook)

Although the drone is in some ways self-piloting, Aquila relies on a ground crew of about a dozen engineers, pilots, and technicians who direct, maintain, and monitor the aircraft. The team controls the craft through software that allows them to determine heading, altitude, and air speed, or even send Aquila on a GPS-based route.

Aquila's communications payload uses lasers to transfer data, and will be able to aim its beams accurately enough to hit a dime more than 11 miles away while in motion.

"Over the next year we're going to keep testing Aquila -- flying higher and longer, and adding more planes and payloads," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a July 21 blog post. "It's all part of our mission to connect the world and help more of the 4 billion people who are not online access all the opportunities of the internet. As we make progress, we'll continue sharing what we learn."

The company is not alone in its quest to bring WiFi to the sky.

Google is expanding its ambitions for WiFi in the sky with Project SkyBender, which aims to deliver 5G wireless internet from solar-powered drones, according to a January report in The Guardian.

Earlier this week Facebook announced it had developed a laser-powered internet connectivity technology that detects optical communication signals traveling through the air.

[Read more about Facebook's other projects to create high-speed internet access.]

The development, announced on July 19 by the company's Connectivity Lab and published on The Optical Society, indicates there may be a future for license-free communications systems.

The experiment offered data rates of more than 2 gigabits per second (Gbps), but Tobias Tiecke, the leader of the research team, wrote that the new approach could theoretically allow free-space optical data rates of more than 10 Gbps if materials were developed that operate in the infrared part of the spectrum, invisible to human eyes.

The research team plans to move the technology out of the lab and into the real world through the development of a prototype that could eventually lead to a commercial product.

Nathan Eddy is a freelance writer for InformationWeek. He has written for Popular Mechanics, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, FierceMarkets, and CRN, among others. In 2012 he made his first documentary film, The Absent Column. He currently lives in Berlin. View Full Bio

SOURCES: INFORMATIONWEEK

Pokemon Go not supported on Intel Atom processors

Pokemon Go no-go: hot new game won't work on Intel Atom-powered phones or Windows phones

Pokemon Go doesn't work on Android mobile devices with Intel Atom chips, the latest issue for the chip maker as it pulls away from handset market.

As Intel drifts away from smartphones and tablets, users with Android devices are starting to feel the pinch.

The hot Pokemon Go app won't work on Android devices with Intel Atom processors, and that's an issue for some users.

A petition to make the popular augmented reality game compatible with Atom chips attracted close to 22,000 signers by Monday. The app isn't working on devices like Asus' Zenfone 2, which runs on an Atom CPU. Pokemon Go maker Niantic Labs didn't respond to questions about whether they would release an Atom-compatible version of the game.

Pokemon Go also won't run on Windows phones, though that's due to Niantic's decision not to support that particular OS at the moment.

The issue arises as Intel pulls back from the smartphone chip market, after failing to catch up with ARM, whose processor designs are in most handsets. Atom chips for mobile devices are already being phased out. 

Meanwhile, Dell has stopped selling its Android-based Venue devices that ran on Intel chips. It also won't deliver Android OS upgrades to its existing Venue tablet users.

If you have an Android tablet or smartphone with an Intel Atom chip, things may not get better. Other issues will likely arise with as the number of apps and OS upgrades for Android on Intel Atom decline. Device makers usually work on Android upgrades with Intel, which is scaling back Android development.

There may be exceptions. While Dell has suspended OS updates, Asus has said it will deliver upgrades to Android 6.0 for its Zenfone 2 handsets. But it's not known whether devices will get upgrades to Android 7.0, code-named Nougat.

As it exits the mobile phone market, Intel is also moving away from slate-style tablets, which are experiencing a decline in shipments. Intel will focus on 2-in-1 devices, which can be used as either laptops or tablets.

Intel is still offering a tablet chip code-named Cherry Trail, but the successor to that chip will be Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake, which will be aimed more at PCs and 2-in-1s.

The wholesale changes in Intel's mobile strategy came after the chip maker in April said it would lay off 12,000 people. It is now focusing on areas like connectivity, IoT and data center technologies.

While Intel's Android development has scaled back, the company is continuing to work with Google "on supporting their OS for different product lines including Chromebooks, tablets and IOT products," a spokeswoman said last week.

Intel will focus on Google's Brillo IoT OS, which has the underpinnings of Android. A lot of development will also go into Chrome OS, which is in Chromebooks.

Updated to indicate that Pokemon Go doesn't run on Windows phones at press time.

For comprehensive coverage of the Android ecosystem, visit Greenbot.com.

SOURCES: pcworld.com

Ransomware in Android Nougat

Android Nougat is taking the fight to ransomware

Well, it's a start.

Google is upping the ante with security protocols on Android. The upcoming version, Android N, is going to stop ransomware from resetting a device’s password, claims security firm Symantec. According to the firm, a new condition has been added Android N’s code, which prevents ransomware from using the resetPassword API. Symantec noted that the API on Android Nougat can only be used to set a password, but can’t be used to reset the same. This would prevent ransomware to reset lock screen passwords on phones powered by Android Nougat.

However, Symantec noted that while malware will not be able to reset your device password, it can still set a password. Also, the firm wrote that this new feature would affect disinfector utilitites. “The new feature will also affect standalone disinfection utilities, which also depend on the “resetPassword()” API. A disinfector utility is an automated tool designed to help users whose devices are infected with malware. The disinfector not only should clean the malware but also reset the arbitrary password set by the threat during its infection routine. Before Android Nougat, the disinfector calls the resetPassword() API to achieve this functionality. However, with Android Nougat’s new restrictions, the disinfector’s ability to call that API is bound to fail. This is likely to affect a small percentage of users who use disinfectors,” wrote Symantec employee, Dinesh Venkatesan, in a blog post.

Ransomware has been a growing threat for Internet connected devices over the past few years. For the uninitiated, ransomware is a kind of malware that holds the users’ data hostage, asking for money to be paid in order to regain the same. It does so by changing access passwords on devices that are infected.

SOURCES: DIGIT.IN

The battle between Oracle and Google ..!

Oracle asks judge to find Google guilty of stealing Java

Oracle’s $9 billion fight with Google continues, looks like software giant’s mantra is ‘not to give up’

Oracle for the last six years has been involved in a legal battle with Google over intellectual property theft of the Java programming language by the search giant. It has been asking the court system to fine Google over $9 billion in damages for the theft. However, a federal jury in May considered Google had properly used the Java code under the “fair use” provision in U.S. copyright law and closed the case.

However, it looks like the software company is not ready to hang its boots yet. On July 6, Oracle filed a motion in San Francisco U.S. District Court again asking the same judge that threw the decision out back in May, to chuck the verdict. The company referred to the case law suggesting use is not legal if the user “exclusively acquires conspicuous financial rewards” from its use of the copyrighted material. Google, said Oracle, has earned more than $42 billion from Android. Therefore, Oracle is insisting that this isn’t actually fair use and is instead infringement.

Oracle wants the judge to stick to the narrower and more traditional applications of fair use, “for example, when it is ‘criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching … scholarship, or research.'”

On the other hand, Google has constantly argued that the Java code was free and open to all and that its use of the code was transformative.

During the recent case, Google argued that Sun Microsystems, which created Java in the 1990s long before it was bought by Oracle, had no issues with Google using the code without a license.

“We didn’t pay for the free and open things,” Larry Page, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, testified during the trial.

Looking at the way things are shaping in this copyright infringement case, it appears like Oracle will probably be trying to pursue this case for at least another six years.

SOURCES : TECHWORM