Chinese Gmail Attack Targets 'Senior' U.S. Officials

Google revealed the suspected source of a hacking attack on Gmail accounts: users originating in China.

Eric Grosse, engineering director on the Google Security Team, said in a blog post Wednesday that specific user account credentials were targeted.

Targets included government officials from the U.S. and "several Asian countries" as well as political activists, journalists, and military personnel, Google said.

"The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users' e-mails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples' forwarding and delegation settings,"

"It's important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected--these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online," Grosse continued.

Google says it's notified those with affected accounts and has also secured the accounts. The company is encouraging users to add extra layers of security including designing more complex passwords, turning on two-step account verification, and only going through the company's secured "https://www.google.com" domain when logging on from a Web browser.

Google's blog post notes that "internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself."

Related articles

• Google says "hundreds" of Gmail accounts hijacked (marketwatch.com)
• Google: Chinese attackers monitoring Gmail of activists, journalists, officials (arstechnica.com)
• Chinese Hackers Targeted U.S. Officials in Gmail Phishing Attack (mashable.com)
• Google: Gmail Attack from China Affects 'Senior U.S. Government Officials' (techland.time.com)
• Gmail Hit by Phishing Hack (money.cnn.com)

Flight Schedules on Google Search

If someone were to tell you that Google just launched flight travel search results without using data it culled from ITA Software, you'd probably think it a joke.
You'd be wrong.

Google has added the ability to obtain flight schedule information for all airports directly on Google search results page.

Although, you’ll still need them to book your tickets, but for a quick search for available flights, you no longer have to open another website.

To quickly find out which airlines serve a specific route and when they fly, simply type “flights from "your city" to "destination city" ”.

So Google's flight search move is clearly aimed at planting a seed for the summer vacation rush, which yields millions of searches and ads to pair with them. And that's Google's play here.

Related articles

• Google Search Now Shows Flight Schedules [News] (makeuseof.com)
• Google starts adding flight schedules in search results (lookatvietnam.com)
• Google Starts Adding Flight Schedules And Airline Routes In Search (techcrunch.com)
• Google Adds Flight Info to Search Results (searchenginewatch.com)

Google Cooling Entire Data Center With Seawater

In 2009 Google purchased a former building of a paper mill in Finland. Since then, the search giant has been hard at work designing a water cooling solution that would take the seawater into the data center and then channel it back out with minimal environment impact.


Any PC building enthusiast will know the merits of water-cooling.

Check out the video that Google made on its new location:

Related articles

• Google to Switch on World's First Seawater-Cooled Data Center This Fall (gigaom.com)
• Google Operates Sea-Water Cooled Server Farm (blogs.wsj.com)
• Google opening seawater-cooled data center, finally glad it applied for that Wave trademark (engadget.com)
• Greenovation: Google's New Data Facility Cooled by Seawater (techland.time.com)

ALL Your Music From the Cloud With Google Music Streams

Google Music, the streaming music answer to Amazon, MOG and Rdio, is here.

You can access music in the cloud and stream to devices. But unlike MOG and Rdio, you can only play what you upload.

How do you use it? You use Google's Music Manager on your desktop to add your songs to the service. It adds play counts and ratings as well. It's a "full featured music manager", so you can search and do all the other things you could in iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Here's a look at some of its features:

• Library Upload: With the Music Manager app, you can upload your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries with one click. You can also upload by file or folder.

• Offline Listening: It's a pretty standard feature, but Google's gives this feature a neat twist by automatically caching songs you've recently listened to. I'd also love to see them do this for most listened songs. And of course, you can also cache specific songs you select. Necessary, since you can't re-download music from the service.

• Seamlessness: Any change you make to your Google Music library on one device is automatically pushed to other devices.

• Playlists: Once you upload your tracks to the Google Music cloud, you can play around with it just like it was in a music app. That means playlists which automatically sync across all your connected devices. They also have a smart playlist feature called instant mix, which will automatically build a list for you based on one song. It's like iTunes' genius or Pandora's recommendation bot. Google says that they have servers actually listening to the songs to make their playlist selection.

 The service can store up to 20,000 songs per user on up to eight authorized devices and took five minutes or so for the first 150 songs to upload.

But you don't always have an internet connection, or a good enough one to stream music. So you can either select certain music to cache on your device, and the service automatically caches your recently listened-to music as well.


You can request an invitation to Music Beta here.

How To Embed MP3 Files On Website Or Blog

How can you embed mp3 files into web pages?
Google audio player is a cool way to embed and play any music mp3 file on your website. This will allow your readers to play audio files directly from web pages.

To embed an MP3 file, add the following code to your web page or blog post.

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" quality="best" flashvars="audioUrl=LINK" width="500" height="27"></embed>

Replace LINK with the URL of the MP3 file. The file can be uploaded to any server or file hosting services including your own, as long as the file is directly accessible.

You can change the width of the Google audio player to fit your content width. If you increase the height, a black empty zone starts to appear, so best keep it at 27px.


Try to play the audio file below. It is embedded using the above code.

The Woz Tells Paul Allen To Stop Trolling

Apple and Microsoft have battled it out on many fronts over the years, but now there's a new one: the battle of the lesser-known co-founders.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak isn't entirely happy with the behavior of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and decided to tell him so.

Wozniak dedicated some pointed, if not poignant, remarks toward Allen at the Embedded System Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose, Calif., last week.

He reportedly declared: "That patent-troll thing...the other night Paul Allen was speaking at the Computer History Museum and I had four tickets.  And I decided at the last minute not to go, because I remembered he's suing all these companies like Apple and Google but he's not suing Microsoft because he bought all these patents."

Wozniak later said that Allen should be "investing in companies that are doing something, making products, actually making a new future for the world," rather than "get in bed with the lawyers to make my money."

Still, you might be wondering what Wozniak did instead of going to see Allen at the Computer History Museum. He reportedly wandered off with some friends to Marie Callender's. Not so much because he loves the pies, but because he loves the split-pea soup with ham.

Related articles

• Woz snubs Paul Allen, praises pea soup (go.theregister.com)

Speech to Text Recognition For Google Chrome

Chrome browser version 11 has a cool new feature:
speech input through HTML.

This means that you can now talk into your microphone and order commands on websites that support the new speech API.

Only limited to Google Translate at the moment and in the English language.

The use the speech feature first make sure that you have a microphone hooked to your computer and using Chrome 1
Next, go to Google Translate and change the “From” language from “Detect language” to “English”.

You should now see a microphone icon appearing at the lower-right corner of the input box.

Click the microphone icon and speak what you want translated. When you're done talking, Google will automatically translate the spoken words. You can even click on the “Listen” button to hear the translated words spoken back to you.

Other sites where you can test the new speech feature is Web2Voice and HTML5 demos.

Windows Phone 7 Also Collects Location Data

Image by clintonjeff via FlickrAfter Google and Apple now Microsoft has admitted that Windows Phone 7 tracks users locations.

Microsoft revealed that it collects data such as the signal strength, the radio type, and if GPS is available also logs latitude, longitude, direction and speed and also the BSSID, which is the MAC address of the device.

Microsoft said it does not collect information sent over private, non-protected wireless networks. It said that its software specifically only picks up publicly broadcast data from WiFi access points and that packets sent over encrypted or unencrypted networks remain safe from its location tracking.

They reassured customers that it does not collect emails, passwords or similar information from open networks. It also does not monitor devices connected to access points, nor the SSID name of an access point, which could reveal the identiy of the user since many people name their networks with personal information.

Microsoft said that it does not share the data with mobile operators.

Microsoft also stressed that users can turn off this location tracking feature

Many of these questions are likely to be similar to those asked by US lawmakers recently as they probe Microsoft and a number of other companies about their location tracking policies. The fact that Microsoft is publishing the information for all to see might go down well with investigators, as the company apparently is tackling the problem head on.