Autonomía digital y tecnológica

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Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web

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Google’s newest proposed web standard is… DRM? Over the weekend the Internet got wind of this proposal for a «Web Environment Integrity API. » The explainer is authored by four Googlers, including at least one person on Chrome’s «Privacy Sandbox» team, which is responding to the death of tracking cookies by building a user-tracking ad platform right into the browser.

Perhaps the most telling line of the explainer is that it «takes inspiration from existing native attestation signals such as [Apple’s] App Attest and the [Android] Play Integrity API.» Play Integrity (formerly called «SafetyNet») is an Android API that lets apps find out if your device has been rooted. Root access allows you full control over the device that you purchased, and a lot of app developers don’t like that. So if you root an Android phone and get flagged by the Android Integrity API, several types of apps will just refuse to run. You’ll generally be locked out of banking apps, Google Wallet, online games, Snapchat, and some media apps like Netflix. You could be using root access to cheat at games or phish banking data, but you could also just want root to customize your device, remove crapware, or have a viable backup system. Play Integrity doesn’t care and will lock you out of those apps either way. Google wants the same thing for the web.

pixel 4a crack top right corner

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So i just took my phone out from the case for cleaning and found that the top right corner has a crack, the phone has not been dropped since last 3 months. there is no crack on the screen as well. Google says that there is no warranty that covers this and it will go into repair.

My power button failed and they will not warranty because of this same crack being present with no other damage. I have to pay $130 to replace it at a Google repair partner and then they did say that they would warranty the power button issue. With that said, it makes me feel they are more than aware of the issue as the repair partner has multiple back covers in stock.

How To Challenge Android’s Monopoly? Is It Even Possible?

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Google’s vision for Android is to present it as a unified platform across devices. It has created an Open Handset Alliance (OHA) with over 84 members. Companies who are a part of it can actively contribute to the development of the “open” Android.

But they’ll have to settle their dreams of having an Android fork of their own someday. If they want to do so, they’ll have to quit the alliance.

But are AOSP-based operating systems really an alternative?

The answer is ‘No’ if you consider them at the fundamental level. Duval also didn’t consider it an alternative right away. But he says Google is restricting the use of apps on AOSP is one of the reasons for that.

He also said that “in 2019 you cannot consider only the mobile Operating System. You need to think about the “whole ecosystem” including the operating system, applications, and online services. That makes complete sense.

In fact, I read a detailed piece on Ars Technica, and came to know that Google has many legal weapons in its arsenal which make it virtually impossible for some company to create an Android fork (with Google Apps), pre-load it on devices, and sell to the people without Google’s approval.

One might plan to build an Android alternative without Google Apps. But the apps that we run on Android rely on the Google Play Services API for much of their functionality.

To get the Google apps on your Android fork, you (company) need to have a license from Google. And it’s believed that getting the license is a lot easier if you become a part of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). But companies that are part of the OHA are legally restricted from building non-Google approved devices.

Download link for Google Spreadsheets CSV export – with Multiple Sheets

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Every document in Google Sheets supports the «Chart Tools datasource protocol», which is explained (in a rather haphazard way) in these articles:

«Creating a Chart from a Separate Spreadsheet»
«Query Language Reference»
«Implementing the Chart Tools Datasource Protocol»

To download a specific sheet as a CSV file, replace {key} with the document’s ID and {sheet_name} with the name of the sheet to export:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{key}/gviz/tq?tqx=out:csv&sheet={sheet_name}

The datasource protocol is quite flexible. Various other options include:

Response Format: Options include tqx=out:csv (CSV format), tqx=out:html (HTML table), and tqx=out:json (JSON data).

Export part of a sheet: Supply the range={range} option, where the range can be any valid range specifier, e.g. A1:C99 or B2:F.

Execute a SQL query: Supply the tq={query} option, such as tq=SELECT a, b, (d+e)*2 WHERE c < 100 AND x = 'yes'. Export textual data: Supply the headers=0 option in case your fields contain textual data, otherwise they might be cut out during export.

Google wants to unfork Android back to the Linux kernel

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GOOGLE HAS SAID it wants to bring Android into line with the main Linux kernel.

Although Android already works on a Linux kernel, it’s been so heavily modified over the years, it’s almost unrecognisable, and certainly no longer compatible with the main Linux operating system.

it would mean that both Android and Linux would benefit from the advances we’ve seen in both since the two parted company, meaning more advanced Linux powered computers, and more agile Android builds.

Killed by Google

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Captura de pantalla de killedbygoogle.com

Killed by Google is the Google graveyard; a free and open source list of discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps. We aim to be a source of factual information about the history surrounding Google’s dead projects.

How to Submit My Website to DuckDuckGo Search Engine?

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Unlike other search engines, DuckDuckGo doesn’t offer any kind of webmaster tools.

Duckduckgo also not offers URL submission.

So, Is there any way to submit your site to DuckDuckGo. Yes, they don’t have any kind of a crawler that is going to crawl your website. To index your site, you have to rely on the search results from other search engines and come up with a way to index your site.

There is no need to submit your site to duckduckgo also there is no way to submit.

As duckduckgo automatically index your site.

So, It might take some time to show your site on duckduckgo search Engine.

I have made a Youtube Tutorial on Google, Bing and Yandex Webmaster Submission. Have a look at that.

Educación patrocinada por Google

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“Google y Microsoft ponen tantas facilidades a todos los centros educativos del mundo para que sean las primeras herramientas con las que los niños trabajen porque están creando consumidores, más que personas que sepan cómo funciona la tecnología”

Librezale, el colectivo de informáticos y traductores que se encarga de traducir al euskera el software libre. Han preparado un manifiesto que van a lanzar a los centros educativos de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca y Navarra con la esperanza de concienciar a los docentes sobre la importancia de trabajar desde el software libre. En el documento destacan cuatro puntos: la privacidad, la obsolescencia programada de los ordenadores con licencias de cinco años –pasados los cuales el Chromebook ya no recibe actualizaciones y empieza a fallar–, la dependencia que se genera hacia las grandes multinacionales tecnológicas y el euskera. “Es incongruente que las instituciones vascas promocionen software que no está traducido al euskera”, alerta este informático y traductor.

If Google Were Mayor

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“Quayside,” a 12-acre slice of Toronto waterfront in line to be developed by Sidewalk Labs, the urban-tech-focused subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Launched in 2015 by its CEO, Dan Doctoroff, and a number of other Michael Bloomberg affiliates, Sidewalk Labs makes much of its urbanist bona fides. The company is now primarily focused on turning the patch of Toronto-owned land into what it calls the “world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up.”

Quayside would test a novel “outcome-based” zoning code focused on limiting things like pollution and noise rather than specific land uses. If it doesn’t bother the neighbors, one might operate a whiskey distillery in the middle of an apartment complex.

a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on” to an astonishing level of detail, as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all.

Those residents might not have a choice in how much privacy they give up to call Quayside home, even if they don’t like the terms of use. The same could be said for anyone who uses its public spaces.

Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to

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Chrome itself has about 72 percent of the desktop-browser market share. Edge has about 4 percent. Opera, based on Chromium, has another 2 percent. The abandoned, no-longer-updated Internet Explorer has 5 percent, and Safari—only available on macOS—about 5 percent. When Microsoft’s transition is complete, we’re looking at a world where Chrome and Chrome-derivatives take about 80 percent of the market, with only Firefox, at 9 percent, actively maintained and available cross-platform.

The mobile story has stronger representation from Safari, thanks to the iPhone, but overall tells a similar story. Chrome has 53 percent directly, plus another 6 percent from Samsung Internet, another 5 percent from Opera, and another 2 percent from Android browser. Safari has about 22 percent, with the Chinese UC Browser sitting at about 9 percent. That’s two-thirds of the mobile market going to Chrome and Chrome derivatives.

Back in 2009, Google introduced SPDY, a proprietary replacement for HTTP that addressed what Google saw as certain performance issues with existing HTTP/1.1.

SPDY was subsequently used as the basis for HTTP/2, a major revision to the HTTP protocol developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the consortium that develops Internet protocols with members from across the industry. While SPDY did initiate the HTTP/2 work, the protocol finally delivered in 2015 was extensively modified from Google’s initial offering.

YouTube uses a feature called HTML imports to load scripts. HTML imports haven’t been widely adopted, either by developers or browsers alike, and ECMAScript modules are expected to serve the same role. But they’re available in Chrome and used by YouTube. For Firefox and Edge, YouTube sends a JavaScript implementation of HTML imports which carries significant performance overheads. The result? YouTube pages that load in a second in Chrome take many seconds to load in other browsers.

Microsoft is committed to shipping and supporting whatever proprietary tech Google wants to develop, whether Microsoft likes it or not. Microsoft has been very explicit that its adoption of Chromium is to ensure maximal Chrome compatibility, and the company says that it is developing new engineering processes to ensure that it can rapidly integrate, test, and distribute any changes from upstream—it doesn’t ever want to be in the position of substantially lagging behind Google’s browser.

But this commitment ties Microsoft’s hands: it means that the company can’t ever meaningfully fork Chromium and diverge from its development path, because doing so will jeopardize that compatibility and increase the cost and complexity of incorporating Google’s changes. This means that, even if Google takes Chromium in a direction that Microsoft disagrees with or opposes, Microsoft will have little option but to follow along regardless.

Measuring the «Filter Bubble»: How Google is influencing what you click

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The filter bubble is particularly pernicious when searching for political topics. That’s because undecided and inquisitive voters turn to search engines to conduct basic research on candidates and issues in the critical time when they are forming their opinions on them. If they’re getting information that is swayed to one side because of their personal filter bubbles, then this can have a significant effect on political outcomes in aggregate.

 

Première sanction contre Google suite à nos plaintes collectives

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…la CNIL vient de sanctionner Google à hauteur de 50 millions d’euros, considérant que le ciblage publicitaire qu’il réalise sur son système d’exploitation Android n’est pas conforme au règlement général pour la protection des données (RGPD), la nouvelle loi européenne entrée en application le 25 mai 2018. Cependant, cette sanction n’est qu’une toute première partie de la réponse à notre plainte contre Google, qui dénonçait surtout le ciblage publicitaire imposé sur Youtube, Gmail et Google Search en violation de notre consentement.

If Google Were Mayor

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“Quayside,” a 12-acre slice of Toronto waterfront in line to be developed by Sidewalk Labs, the urban-tech-focused subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Launched in 2015 by its CEO, Dan Doctoroff, and a number of other Michael Bloomberg affiliates, Sidewalk Labs makes much of its urbanist bona fides. The company is now primarily focused on turning the patch of Toronto-owned land into what it calls the “world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up.”

Quayside would test a novel “outcome-based” zoning code focused on limiting things like pollution and noise rather than specific land uses. If it doesn’t bother the neighbors, one might operate a whiskey distillery in the middle of an apartment complex.

a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on” to an astonishing level of detail, as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all.

Those residents might not have a choice in how much privacy they give up to call Quayside home, even if they don’t like the terms of use. The same could be said for anyone who uses its public spaces.

Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

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Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.

Documents seen by The Intercept, marked “Google confidential,” say that Google’s Chinese search app will automatically identify and filter websites blocked by the Great Firewall. When a person carries out a search, banned websites will be removed from the first page of results, and a disclaimer will be displayed stating that “some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements.” Examples cited in the documents of websites that will be subject to the censorship include those of British news broadcaster BBC and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Google launches new search engine to help scientists find the datasets they need

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The service, called Dataset Search, launches today, and will be a companion of sorts to Google Scholar, the company’s popular search engine for academic studies and reports. Institutions that publish their data online, like universities and governments, will need to include metadata tags in their webpages that describe their data, including who created it, when it was published, how it was collected, and so on. This information will then be indexed by Dataset Search and combined with input from Google’s Knowledge Graph. (That’s the name for those boxes that pop up for common searches. So if dataset X was published by CERN, some info about the institute will also be included in the results.)

Is Google’s Next Move to Help You Lose Weight and Eat Better?

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Google is reportedly working on an A.I.-based health and wellness coach.

Thanks to its spectrum of hardware products, Google would have a notable advantage over existing wellness coaching apps. While its coach, as reported, would primarily exist on smartwatches to start, Android Police noted that the company could include a smartphone counterpart as well. The company could also eventually spread it to Google Home or Android TV. The latter is unchartered territory for these kinds of apps, which are typically limited to smartphones and wearables. With availability in the home, lifestyle coaching recommendations could become increasingly contextual and less obtrusive. If you ask for a chicken parmesan dinner recipe, it could offer a healthier alternative instead; or if you’re streaming music at 10 p.m. and have set a goal to get more sleep, perhaps it could interrupt your music playback to remind you start getting ready for bed. A smartwatch or phone could do this too, of course, but by linking up its product ecosystem, Google could deliver helpful notifications in the context that makes the most sense.

Between You, Me, and Google: Problems With Gmail’s “Confidential Mode”

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Confidential Mode will push users further into Google’s own walled garden while giving them what we believe are misleading assurances of privacy and security.

It’s important to note at the outset that because Confidential Mode emails are not end-to-end encrypted, Google can see the contents of your messages and has the technical capability to store them indefinitely, regardless of any “expiration date” you set. In other words, Confidential Mode provides zero confidentiality with regard to Google.

But that’s only the beginning of the problems with Gmail’s new built-in IRM. Indeed, the security properties of the system depend not on the tech, but instead on a Clinton-era copyright statute. Under Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA 1201”), making a commercial product that bypasses IRM is a potential felony, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. DMCA 1201 is so broad and sloppily drafted that just revealing defects in Google IRM could land you in court.

We believe that using the term “Confidential Mode” for a feature that doesn’t provide confidentiality as that term is understood in infosec is misleading.

Fuck off Google

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Logo Fuck off Google

Search results without being spyed on.

Results are obtained -via proxy- from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to ensure you will not disclose any personal or behavioural data to these companies. These results are «neutral» ie. not influenced by your profile (you are out of the «filter bubble» designed to serve you ads you are more likely to click…).

L’archivage de nos données personnelles par les géants du web

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…vos signets, vos courriels, vos contacts, vos fichiers sur Google Drive, toutes les informations citées ci-dessus, vos vidéos YouTube, les photos que vous avez prises sur votre téléphone, les produits que vous avez achetés en passant par Google et les sociétés qui vous les ont vendus…

La société détient également les informations de votre calendrier, vos hangouts Google, l’historique de vos déplacements, la musique que vous écoutez, les Google books que vous avez achetés, les groupes Google dont vous faites partie, les sites Internet que vous avez créés, les téléphones que vous avez eus, les pages que vous avez partagées, combien de pas vous faites par jour…

Google collects Android users’ locations even when location services are disabled

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Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.

The section of Google’s privacy policy that covers location sharing says the company will collect location information from devices that use its services, but does not indicate whether it will collect data from Android devices when location services are disabled

Fuck off Google. Don’t let Google take over Berlin!

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Google plans to implant a «Google Campus» in Kreuzberg, Berlin. We, as a decentralized network of people are committed to not letting our beloved city be taken over by these tax-evading criminals who are building a dystopian future.

Google is trying to open a 2500m² “campus” in Kreuzberg to attract, detect and buy profitable companies and ideas.

Sold as a “community” project, in reality it aims at attracting “entrepreneurs” who will increase Google’s profit.

This project will turn the neighborhood into a large-scale laboratory for the deployment of their new invasive technologies.

Instead of a nice friendly “campus” we see a Google farm for harvesting Kreuzberg’s brains and talents, or a Google mine in which ideas and data will be extracted out of Berlin.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, would provide services in response to data harvested

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a plausible urban future based on cities acting as important sites for ‘data extractivism’ – the conversion of data harvested from individuals into artificial intelligence technologies, allowing companies such as Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to act as providers of sophisticated and comprehensive services. The cities themselves, the project insisted, would get a share of revenue from the data.

Open Data Barcelona vs Google Sidewalk Labs

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La Oficina [Open Data Barcelona], que es parte del Plan de Transformación Digital del Ayuntamiento que dirige la Comisionada de Tecnología e Innovación Digital, Francesca Bria, pretende el gobierno público de los datos en un trabajo en tres líneas: captación y almacenamiento, analítica y predicción, y comunicación y difusión. Es decir, el organismo captará información por sus propios medios y sensores pero también los pedirá a compañías que operan en el entorno urbano (telefónicas, energéticas y otras), los analizará y empleará para hacer con mejor tino sus políticas y los podrá a disposición de la ciudadanía, la universidad o quien los requiera.

Una oficina para «remunicipalizar la información» y convertir los datos en lo que son, un bien común.

[Sidewalk Labs] …el modelo urbanístico de Google no está tan lejos del de Blackstone (recuerdo: uno de los grandes imperios inmobiliarios del mundo) pero suma a éste la apropiación de la información, su gestión y su uso. Es decir, ya no sólo se trata de privatizar el espacio público, sino los datos que se generan en él (y en los espacios privados de cada familia y empresa que habite el barrio).