Google's Android Makes Its Public Debut

BARCELONA — The Mobile World Congress became the coming-out party for Google's Android OS as four mobile processor vendors showed off pre-production devices running versions of Android.

Google's Android is a Linux-based, open operating system for mobile phones that will sport Google applications. It will be free for manufacturers to adopt, though how free and open the actual phones end up being will be up to phone manufacturers and wireless carriers.

The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices. TI showed Android on a Motorola Q-like QWERTY handheld with their 200 Mhz OMAP 850 platform, where the user interface felt smooth and fast, even with little Apple-like animated transitions between screens.
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Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo

Microsoft made a $44.6 billion bid on Friday for Yahoo, the popular search engine based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Yahoo’s rival, Google, has been working behind the scenes to stop the deal.


By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MIGUEL HELFT, The New York Times
Published: February 4, 2008

Standing between a marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo may be the technology behemoth that has continually outsmarted them: Google.
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Times Topic: Google Inc.

In an unusually aggressive effort to prevent Microsoft from moving forward with its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo, Google emerged over the weekend with plans to play the role of spoiler.

Publicly, Google came out against the deal, contending in a statement that the pairing, proposed by Microsoft on Friday in the form of a hostile offer, would pose threats to competition that need to be examined by policy makers around the world.

Privately, Google, seeing the potential deal as a direct attack, went much further. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, placed a call to Yahoo’s chief, Jerry Yang, offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies, people briefed on the call said.

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Hackers Rig Google To Deliver Malware

Erik Larkin, PC World

If last November you googled one of thousands of innocuous and common search terms, such as "Microsoft excel to access" or "how to teach your dogs to fetch," you were in line for an Internet attack that infects PCs with spam senders, password stealers, and other kinds of nasty malware.

Beginning on November 24 of last year and continuing for less than a week, bad guys loaded up more than 40,000 Web pages with malicious software and thousands of common search terms. They then employed an automated network of malware-infected computers--known as a botnet--to link to those sites in blog-comment spam and other places. The mentions elevated the position of the poisoned sites in search results, often to the first page.

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Google Translate Bug Mixes Up Heath Ledger, Tom Cruise

CNET NEWS.Com

Posted by Caroline McCarthy

Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."
This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."
It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.

Did Google Change Its Algorithm?

A story by videos.webpronews.com. In the New Year, Google seems to be changing their algorithm and making the search results more time related. The leading search engine has been ranking items from popular sites like Digg higher than factual or historical sites like Wikipedia.