Google , April's Fools

photo credit: Oops. John T Takai/Shutterstock

April Fools’ jokes are normally a bit of harmless fun. But that doesn’t seem to have been the case for one of Google’s latest pranks.

The Internet giant is known for its numerous annual April Fools’ jokes, but one seems to have failed spectacularly this year. They decided to install a “drop mic” button on Gmail that would send recipients of the email an animated gif of a Minion character “dropping a mic,” ending the email thread and blocking any future emails in the chain.

Things seem to have taken a turn for the worse, though, as unaware users who clicked the button – next to the normal “send” button – found that what were supposed to be serious emails became mocking replies.

“Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job,” said one user on Google’s Gmail Help Forum. “I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the email using the 'Mic Drop' send button.

“I just woke up to a very angry voicemail from her which is how I found out about this ‘hilarious’ prank.”

The orange button appeared next to the regular blue "send" button. Google

Other users reported similarly awkward instances, where what should have been professional emails were anything but. Google, realizing their error, has now removed the “drop mic” button from Google.

“Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year,” they wrote in a blog post. “Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page.”

It just goes to show that, while April Fools’ is normally all fun and games, things can occasionally not go to plan. Let’s just hope no one has spent the last few decades trying in vain to grow spaghetti trees.

*drops mic*

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Google’s New Modular Phone May Be the Last You’ll Need to Buy

At the Project Ara Developer’s Conference in Santa Clara, California, the moment of unveiling was a bit of a letdown. When project lead Paul Eremenko got ready for the big reveal — finally showing off Google’s vision for a modular phone with working, user-interchangeable components — he had to dampen expectations from the enthusiastic crowd. “You should temper your applause,” he warned, explaining that the device had been damaged the previous day. “We did crack the screen, and the phone doesn’t quite boot.” A disappointment, sure, but it did little to actually temper anything. Project Ara is Google’s attempt to reinvent the cellphone as we know it. Instead of a slab of glass and metal that you have no ability to upgrade, save for buying a new device, it’s an attempt to launch a phone where all of the main components are interchangeable via modules that click in and out, attaching via electro-permanent magnets. Despite being highly customizable, it will only come in three main sizes, helping to eliminate the kind of device fragmentation that currently plagues Android. Google plans to roll out a “gray model,” a very basic device that costs as little as $50, as well as higher-end handsets that could go for as much as $500 and up. The former will be released first — around this time next year if all goes according to plan — and will likely be a smaller, Wi-Fi-only version. This bare-bones model will be followed by the higher-end ones eventually. But Google’s initial objective is to ramp up a hardware ecosystem that moves at the same pace as the software it runs. It’s ambitious, to say the least. There’s a certain prescience to the damaged prototype. It bears one of the most common injuries you’ll see on a smartphone: a cracked screen. In theory, this is just the kind of issue Ara will solve. But because it came directly from Germany, and because there is no way to replace the module here in the United States, it’s just another broken phone. It also drives home another point: When Ara devices do hit the streets, they will only be as good as their support network. For the support to work, you’ve got to have a lot of modules, and a lot of access to those modules. Project Ara needs a network of retail stores where people can do things like pick up a new screen. It also needs enough developers making modules to sustain that kind of retail presence — and it needs it globally. Google is working to make things easy for programmers and hardware manufacturers to work with the Ara standards, but for many items — anything that uses radio frequencies and thus requires FCC approval for example — it’s going to need buy-in from consumers too. GOOGLE’S WILLINGNESS TO TRY SOMETHING SO AMBITIOUS IN PUBLIC IS ENERGIZING, PARTICULARLY IN THE ERA OF THE GET-RICH-QUICK SMARTPHONE APP. All of this makes for a heady and optimistic yet extremely uncertain future. Ara is a project from Google’s ATAP (advances technology and projects) group. ATAP is philosophically and structurally based on DARPA; it was one of the few things Google kept from Motorola when it sold the company to Lenovo. And honestly Ara, at least as a concept, is fantastic. Who wouldn’t want the ability to some day print out new parts for their smartphone at home, expanding its life expectancy to six years and beyond? Google’s willingness to try something so ambitious in public is energizing, particularly in the era of the get-rich-quick smartphone app. Project Ara’s goals could transform the industry, give people greater control over their own devices, and free them from the annual cycles of obsolescence. It’s flexible platform suitable for everyone, everywhere, from every walk of life. Or, it could be a catastrophic and very public failure. A huge embarrassment. This is what Google does best. Its willingness to take big risks and make big bets knowing they may not pan out is a remarkable attribute in a publicly traded company. The Project Ara conference is an important first step for the initiative. It’s the first time Google is looping in developers and laying out the technical groundwork. There will be two more conferences this year, where presumably we’ll see more modules and hopefully working prototypes. Whether or not Google can pull this off remains to be seen. But it will be one of the most exciting stories to watch in technology during the next year.

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Microsoft Should Be Worried About Google’s Chromebooks

Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Microsoft ramped up its FUD machine and  launched the next phase of its infamous anti-Google Scroogled campaign last week. This time, the company is targeting Chromebooks, Google’s cheap ChromeOS-based, web-centric laptops. Why is Microsoft worried about Chromebooks? Because it can see the writing on the wall.

For many mainstream users, the operating system they use is slowly becoming irrelevant, and even though Chromebooks are not right for everyone, they are slowly becoming a real alternative in the low-end laptop market.

Most Chromebook distractors will argue that there’s no need to even try to poke fun at these devices. Who, after all, wants a laptop that can’t do anything else but surf the web? Who would even buy one of these things? It’s the platypus of the notebook world, after all. But while most people think of Chromebooks as laptops that can’t do anything else but surf the web and aren’t “real laptops” (an idea Microsoft plays up in its Scroogled campaign), that perception is quickly becoming outdated and that’s why Microsoft has decided to go for the FUD.

Microsoft wants you to believe that you can’t do anything with a Chromebook when you’re offline. That’s just plain wrong at this point. Sure, Chromebooks make more sense in an always-on environment (which is where most people use them), but nobody is stopping you from playing Angry Birds while you’re offline. Indeed, while Microsoft specifically calls out Angry Birds as the kind of thing you can’t do on a Chromebook, Google would be more than happy if you downloaded it from its Chrome Web Store and played it offline.

More and more ChromeOS apps now work this way, which is great, but if you think about it, how much of what you do on a laptop these days actually happens offline? Unless you really need Photoshop or high-end CAD software or a similarly demanding program, the software you’re probably using most on your laptop is your browser.

Microsoft says you can’t play Call of Duty or Age of Empires on a Chromebook, and that’s fair enough. But you’re not going to enjoy playing Call of Duty on those sub-$250 Windows laptops that Microsoft highlights on its Chromebook vs. Windows laptop page, either. There may never be a Microsoft Office for ChromeOS, but there’s a pretty good version of it available on the web courtesy of Microsoft itself. You can’t do Skype, but Hangouts isn’t bad either. There’s no iTunes, but if you’re online, the Spotify web app works just as well as the desktop app.

At this point, it’s clear that Google and its hardware partners are in the Chromebook game for the long run. Google found an attractive niche for these devices in the education and low-end laptop market and it’s slowly building on this momentum.

The first versions of ChromeOS were indeed too limited and I could never quite recommend them to anybody. Ever since Google switched to a real window manager, however, and started adding more offline capabilities, Chromebooks started making more sense for everyday use. The Cr-48 pilot program launched three years ago. At that time, ChromeOS was exactly what Microsoft describes in its Scroogled campaign: an underpowered laptop that offered little else but the ability to surf the web and get annoyed at its horrible touchpad. Today, it’s a pretty capable laptop, even if it’s not right for everybody yet. In three years, it could become a real challenger for Windows, especially as the modern web slowly catches up to apps.

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Dawning of the Age of Quantum Information Teleportation

Researchers at ETH Zurich, a university of science and technology, have teleported information from one end of a superconducting circuit to another -- a distance of 6mm.

macroscopic electrical circuits

The ant depicted on top of the superconducting circuit illustrates the relative proportions of the macroscopic electrical circuits for the first time used for teleportation. (Credit: Jonas Mlynek/ETH Zurich)

The experiment has two unusual features: 1) It is the first time quantum teleportation was conducted over a circuit without the use of a powerful laser beam; and 2) the information was relayed making use of the laws of quantum physics rather than classical physics.

This achievement is "extraordinarily impressive," remarked Carl Williams, chief of the quantum measurement division of the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"Anybody who understands how to do the coherence and other aspects understands how difficult it is to achieve that at that level," Williams continued.

'Spooky Action'

The researchers created two small superconducting circuits on a chip measuring 7mm square. They cooled the chip to very close to absolute zero using helium in order to access the system's quantum properties.

The researchers then created quantum entanglement between the superconducting circuits.

Quantum entanglement results when particles such as photons or electrons interact physically and then become separated but remain in the same quantum state. A quantum state is a set of mathematical variables, including position, momentum and spin, that fully describes a quantum system.

Once the circuits were in an entangled state, information programmed into the sending circuit vanished, to reappear in the receiving circuit when it was read out. The information did not travel from one circuit to the other, said Andreas Wallraff, who headed the study. Think of Star Trek's transporters beaming people up to the mother ship or out of the vessel.

If the concept of spooky entanglement sounds puzzling, rest assured it is: Albert Einstein derided it as "spooky action."

'Truly Impressive'

Other teleportation experiments have moved information over far greater distances. For example, scientists in China transmitted quantum bits, or qubits, over a distance of 97 km, or roughly 60 miles, and European scientists moved information x143 km, or 89 miles, between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife. Both experiments were conducted last year.

However, both of those experiments used beams of light from lasers to encode qubits, which are quantum bits.

Although the ETH experiment teleported data over only 6mm, it is "a truly impressive experiment using superconducting electronic circuits, a couple of Josephson junctions, and a planar array," NIST's Williams said. The Institute first demonstrated quantum teleportationback in 2004 and has a US$20 million budget for quantum research.

'The First Small Spinoffs'

Quantum information processing allows for more storage density and lets information be more efficiently processed than when classical bits are used.

However, "in classical computing, we use different technologies to access RAM or a USB drive or cache memory or do actual processing," Williams pointed out. The technology used in the ETH experiment "may win a specific piece or place in a quantum computer, although it may not end up being the technology primarily used in the processor or cache memory."

Quantum technology "is futuristic," observed Williams, "and we are beginning to see some of the first small spinoffs." 

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WordPress hit by massive botnet: Worse to come, experts warn

The performance and security firm CloudFare warned in a blog post today that the unknown attacker is using a "relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack," suggesting a calm before a heavier storm. The botnet is attempting to "brute force" attack WordPress websites using the username "admin", with thousands of different passwords. The botnet of machines — often individual machines infected with malware and subscribed to target servers and websites with vast amounts of data — is being used to hack web-based WordPress installations. This botnet channels some bandwidth from individual computers infected with malware, which in mass and collectively can cause the overloading of servers. Typically, this kind of attack is either used by willing participants to cause a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against websites to force them offline, or by "slave" computers that can be used to carry out hacking attempts. It comes only a week after WordPress enhanced user security by rolling out an optional two-factor authentication system. WordPress founder Matt Mullenwag criticized those who were offering "solutions" to the problem, such as CloudFare, and instead suggested changing default usernames as an additional step to protect their WordPress accounts. "If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you're on WordPress.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress," he said. "Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99 percent of sites out there and probably never have a problem." WordPress remains a large target for hackers, which has around 64 million individual blogs and websites, with more than 370 million readers each month. Alexa ranks the blogging network as the 21 most visited site in the world.

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Google Translate app for Android gets offline support

Google today added offline language support to the Google Translate app for Android. Available for devices running Android 2.3 Gingerbread and up, the new feature allows for translation in 50 languages, even where a data connection is not present. To enable the offline capabilities on your device, simply download and install your desired language packs. While Google is quick to admit that the offline results pale in comparison to the online version, it should still help when you find yourself hiking in the Andes mountains. Those interested in kicking the tires on the new app experience are encouraged to head to Google Play, where you can download it for free. Samsung, for its part, recently introduced a similar translation app experience for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4. Dubbed S Translator, it can be embedded into e-mail, messaging, and ChatOn, or function as a standalone tool. Remember For all your technology needs www.nicholspchelp.com