Google adds ability to open Microsoft Office files directly in Chrome on Mac

Google-Chrome-Microsoft-Office-viewer-Mac

Previously only available to Chromebook users, Google announced today on its Chrome blog that Mac and Windows users will now have the ability to open Microsoft Office files directly within Chrome. The functionality works for users running the latest Chrome Beta and requires installation of the Chrome Office Viewer (Beta) extension.

In addition to saving you time, the Chrome Office Viewer also protects you from malware delivered via Office files. Just like with web pages and PDFs, we’ve added a specialized sandbox to impede attackers who use compromised Office files to try to steal private information or monitor your activities.

54 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: Apps, chrome, documents, GOOGLE, Google Docs, google drive, microsoft, microsoft-office, office, open, Open Platform, Productivity, technology, web

Google Web Fonts rebrands as Google Fonts, simplifies web interface

Google has rebranded its font collection Google Fonts, which debuted in February 2011, dropping the ‘web’ from Google Web Fonts while still boasting its catalog of over 600 free, open-source fonts optimized for the web.

Google has also simplified the web interface with a more modern design, which allows users to view font examples in various formats, including word, sentence, and paragraph.

Check out the new design here.

"Google Web Fonts" is rebranded to "Google Fonts": goo.gl/kF3kB Interface is cleaner, but still 600+ great fonts.—
Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 22, 2013

58 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: design, fonts, GOOGLE, Google Corporate, Google Fonts, Google Web Fonts, interface, typography, Web Design

WhatsApp says it’s not holding sales talks with Google despite earlier rumor

This past weekend, a rumor had claimed that Google is holding talks with WhatsApp to acquire the messaging service for around $1 billion. Tonight, WhatsApp has told AllThingsD that it is not holding sales talks with Google. Meanwhile, Google is rumored to soon be launching its own “Babel” messaging service.

71 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: AllThingsD, Android, app, Babel, buys, chat, GOOGLE, Google Corporate, messaging, rumor, Sales, service, smartphone, Tech, technology, WhatsApp

Google Reader

For obvious reasons, my inbox is overflowing with folk suggesting alternatives to Google Reader, or asking me to recommend alternatives to Google Reader.

Here’s the thing: there aren’t any real alternatives to Reader available today.

Of course, there are oodles of applications and services that let you read feeds, but, to quote from bonaldi’s excellent explanation of Reader’s true value on MetaFilter:

Google Reader is like an iceberg. What you see as the website is just the tip, and it’s mostly irrelevant.

So, who’s working on the stuff below sea level, so to speak?

NewsBlur is open source, provides a decent-looking API and charges $1 a month for users subscribed to more than 64 feeds. On the downside, none of the popular RSS applications offer NewsBlur synchronisation yet, and it’s struggling to stay online in the wake of Google’s announcement.

Feedly have announced Normandy, an as-yet-unreleased Google Reader API clone which they plan to open up to third-party developers. It’s probably worth pointing out that Feedly don’t charge for their services. And they’re running Normandy on Google App Engine.

The Old Reader crew deserve an honourable mention, I think. They plan to keep calm, and carry on working towards offering paid accounts and an API, but admit that they ‘have not even started coding this yet’.

TinyTinyRSS is an open-source, web-based, self-hosted feed reader with an API, a companion Android app and Liferea integration.

There’s also Fever, a $30 self-hosted solution with a clever approach to foregrounding interesting links and an API in beta. It doesn’t archive feed contents, though, and development has stalled while creator Shaun Inman concentrates on making computer games.

There’s nothing to match Reader’s core functionality available yet, then, but I tend agree with Andre Torrez’ optimistic assessment:

I don’t think this “kills RSS” as some people on Twitter have said, if anything it is good news for people who actually care about RSS and are building a business on it.

Now RSS is going to have someone spending their time delivering the best service they can, rather than spending their time trying to figure out what ads it could inject in between posts.

Providing a reasonably priced, sturdy and scalable service that replaces the stuff we’ll really miss when Google Reader disappears—the centralised aggregation, crawling and long-term storage of feeds, real-time feed updates, search, and synchronisation across apps on all platforms—is, of course, a huge challenge.

But not an insurmountable one. And it seems reasonable to suppose that at least one of the services listed above—or something new—has the potential to become the Pinboard to Reader’s del.icio.us.

Fingers crossed, eh?

TL;DR: The demise of Google Reader is an opportunity, not a disaster.

Android Ice Cream Sandwich encryption broken with the aid of a freezer

When Google released Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) back in 2011, it introduced a new data scrambling system designed to protect sensitive user information from snoopers who successfully managed to bypass the lock screen.

It’s strong security, but a team of German researchers have managed to crack the encryption by freezing a Galaxy Nexus and using a toolset called FROST (Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones) to retrieve contact lists, browser histories, and photos (basically everything you’d want to keep private).

The process, detailed here, involved firstly unlocking the bootloader and then packing the Galaxy Nexus into a freezer bag and putting the device inside a 15 degree Celsius freezer for an hour until the phone temperature was below 10 degrees. Once cold, they turned the phone on to check it was working, dismantled it, reassembled it, and put it into fastboot mode.

From there (still acting quickly) they connected it to a Linux PC via USB and flashed the pre-compiled, frost.img recovery image file and were able to use the software to decrypt the user partition.

There’s something amusing about breaking Ice Cream Sandwich encryption using a freezer (perhaps they tried Gingerbread with a cup of tea initially) but the method works because cooling the RAM chips slows down the speed that data fades from them, giving the crackers more time to access the phone’s contents.

Having cracked the Galaxy Nexus, the researchers say they plan to try out their system on other Android devices.

If you have a Galaxy Nexus and fancy trying it for yourself -- and are prepared to accept the risks involved with sticking your phone in a freezer -- you can download the FROST recovery image and everything else you'll need from the website.

104 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: Android, Article, Galaxy Nexus, GOOGLE, Hackers, Security

Google Ports Quickoffice To Chrome Using Native Client, Will Get Full Editing Features In About 3 Months

At its Chromebook Pixel event yesterday, Google didn’t just launch its new premium Chromebook. It also announced that it is porting Quickoffice, the mobile productivity app that brings Microsoft Office to iOS and Android to the web through Native Client and Chrome. Google acquired Quickoffice.

As Google’s vice president of Chrome Sundar Pichai noted at yesterday’s event, a lot of people love Google’s productivity apps, but having a solution like Quickoffice available for Chrome and on Chromebooks “completes the story for a lot of users.”

This is a big step for Native Client, Google’s technology for allowing developers to write web apps that get full access to the power of the CPU. Currently, Native Client is mostly being used by game developers, and there are a number of Chrome Web Store apps that use it, but because it is still limited to Chrome, the number of developers who write applications for it remains small.

Google already launched a number of Quickoffice document viewers for Chrome that are only available on the new Pixel Chromebook. In about three months, however, Google told me at the Pixel launch event yesterday, Quickoffice for the browser will also feature the ability to edit documents. The new viewers are also based on Native Client, but for Microsoft Office users on Chrome and ChromeOS, the ability to edit documents and do so in what is essentially a native app is likely a far more interesting solution. Quickoffice for Chrome, of course, won’t just run on the Pixel but should work on the desktop as well, where Native Client has been a built-in feature of Chrome for a long time now.

Pricing is also still up in the air. Google continue to charge for the Quickoffice mobile app ($7.99 for Quickoffice Pro HD for the iPad, for example), but paying Google Apps users can get the iPad app for free.

When Google acquired Quickoffice, most of us assumed it was doing so to strengthen Google Drive and to ensure that Android would have a viable native Office client as well, but adding it to ChromeOS also makes a lot of sense, especially given ChromeOS’s ambitions in the enterprise.

116 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: Chrome/OS, GOOGLE, PIXEL, Quickoffice, TC

Google Introduces SyncFileSystem API For Chrome To Let HTML5 Apps Sync Your Offline Data Between Devices

One nifty feature of HTML5 is that web apps can store data locally on your computer and have it available even when you are offline. Google today introduced a new API for Chrome, the SyncFileSystem API, that offers an app-private sandboxed file storage system, similar to what’s already in the HTML5 specs. The interesting new feature here is that this data is also automatically synchronized across clients via a cloud back-up service linked to Google Drive.

The API is currently only available in the highly experimental Canary version of Chrome, but it will likely find its way into the release channel over the next few months.

As Google notes, this shouldn’t be confused with an API that allows developers to access arbitrary documents in the cloud. It is just meant for storing and syncing offline data across multiple machines.

In its documentation, Google notes that the standard use case for this API is to “store user-generated data (or any other binary data) locally for offline or caching usage when the app also wants to save/synchronize the data on a cloud storage so that the same data can be available across different clients.”

Currently, the API only supports Google Drive as a backend storage service, but in the future, it sounds like the team may give developers the option to target other services as well.

123 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: api, chrome, GOOGLE, TC, Web Developers

Google looking to make strategic $50M investment in Vevo to keep its high-quality music content on YouTube

Two weeks ago, we heard Google planned to invest in Vevo. Today, those rumors heat up with some specifics…

Bloomberg has the story:

Google Inc.’s YouTube is negotiating a $50 million equity investment in music video service Vevo LLC, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
Google would own less than 10 percent of the company, giving Vevo a valuation of at least $500 million, said the people, who asked for anonymity because negotiations are still early and an agreement may not be reached.
The investment would be part of a broader contract to keep Vevo’s music videos on YouTube, the people said. Vevo, formed in 2009 by Vivendi SA’s Universal Music and Sony Corp.’s Sony Music Entertainment, and Google last year extended their existing contract until April.

Some of the most valuable (and clicked) content on YouTube is from Vevo-associated Artists. Vevo previously threatened to leave YouTube, so the investment would be to secure long-term access to the content advertised on and monetized by affiliate links to buy music.

It is also important to Google’s ecosystem to have easy and cheap access to all of Vevo’s content.

Google donates 15,000 Raspberry Pi microcomputers to UK schools

Although the Raspberry Pi was originally aimed at encouraging school children to learn to program as they did in 1980s and 90s, the affordable credit card-sized ARM GNU/Linux computer has actually ended up appealing to a broad range of ages.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has never lost sight of its initial purpose though, and thanks to the generosity of Google, it’s about to make some serious headway into British schools.

A grant from Google Giving will see 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs distributed to children around the UK. According to Liz Upton, marketing manager and wife of Pi creator Eben: "We’re absolutely made up over the news; this is a brilliant way for us to find kids all over the country whose aptitude for computing can now be explored properly. We believe that access to tools is a fundamental necessity in finding out who you are and what you’re good at. We want those tools to be within everybody’s grasp, right from the start".

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Google, and six UK educational partners will work together to find the children who will be likely to benefit the most from having their very own Raspberry Pi.

141 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: Article, Content Creation, Developer Tools, GOOGLE, raspberry pi

Get Phone notifications on suspicious Google login activity

The majority of Internet users use Google for a variety of things, from searching the Internet to email, backing up data, monetizing their websites or authorizing their Android devices. It is therefore essential to protect the Google account as thorough as possible. A secure password is certainly helping a lot, but there are other things you can do to improve the security of your account.

One of the best options that you can enable in this regard is the 2-step verification that Google made available some time ago for all accounts. This links the account to a mobile phone number that is used to authorize login attempts. Instead of just entering your username and password to get access to the account, you are now also asked to enter a random code that is sent to your mobile phone the minute you log in to the account.

Even with all those precautions in place, it may make sense to make use of the notification options that Google makes available as well. What these are? Previously, you could configure the account to send notifications when the account password changes or when suspicious login attempts are recorded. The notifications make sense considering that there are ways to get past the defenses to change the account password after all.

Up until now, you could only enable email notifications. While this may be sufficient for most users, it could become a problem if the email address is the Google account email. Why? If a third party changes the account password, you can’t check the emails anymore as you are trying to log in to Gmail with the old password.

Google has added phone notifications to the Google account security page which you can enable in addition to email notifications.

When you click on the phone box on the Account security page you are asked to enter your account password again. Once done, you are asked to select or enter the mobile phone number you want to receive the notifications on.

You will receive a verification code on that phone – even if it is already verified – to complete the process and enable phone notifications. Both options are checked by default in the end. (via)

The post Get Phone notifications on suspicious Google login activity appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.

147 days ago • Google Reader • Tags: GOOGLE

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