Today, January 28, is Data Privacy Day, when the world recognizes the importance of preserving your online privacy and security.

If it’s like most other days, Google—like many companies that provide online services to users—will receive dozens of letters, faxes and emails from government agencies and courts around the world requesting access to our users’ private account information. Typically this happens in connection with government investigations.

It’s important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe. We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information.

To strike this balance, we’re focused on three initiatives that I’d like to share, so you know what Google is doing to protect your privacy and security.

First, for several years we have advocated for updating laws like the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents. We’ll continue this effort strongly in 2013 through our membership in the Digital Due Process coalition and other initiatives.

Second, we’ll continue our long-standing strict process for handling these kinds of requests. When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things:

• We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.
• We evaluate the scope of the request. If it’s overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request. We do this frequently.
• We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.
• We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user’s search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.

And third, we work hard to provide you with information about government requests. Today, for example, we’ve added a new section to our Transparency Report that answers many questions you might have. And last week we released data showing that government requests continue to rise, along with additional details on the U.S. legal processes—such as subpoenas, court orders and warrants—that government use to compel us to provide this information.

We’re proud of our approach, and we believe it’s the right way to make sure governments can pursue legitimate investigations while we do our best to protect your privacy and security.

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer
The Official Google Blog

Question by naidu: Do you belive in data entry, survey and affiliate promises on money making?
me NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…………….. Bulls***.

Best answer:

Answer by Susan
r.sionnach@yahoo.com

I have been working from home for 5 years.

It is great to be able to set my own hours and work days, but is still work. If you are serious, send me an email to the address above or see my profile for more information.

I can help you get started and give you any advice I can through email (obviously for free).

Add your own answer in the comments!

Very few people have stepped inside Google’s data centers, and for good reason: our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard. While we’ve shared many of our designs and best practices, and we’ve been publishing our efficiency data since 2008, only a small set of employees have access to the server floor itself.

Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit. On Where the Internet lives, our new site featuring beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.

 In addition, you can now explore our Lenoir, NC data center at your own pace in Street View. Walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor. Or take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure. You can also watch a video tour to learn more about what you’re viewing in Street View and see some of our equipment in action.

Finally, we invited author and WIRED reporter Steven Levy to talk to the architects of our infrastructure and get an unprecedented look at its inner workings. His new story is an exploration of the history and evolution of our infrastructure, with a first-time-ever report from the floor of a Google data center.

Fourteen years ago, back when Google was a student research project, Larry and Sergey powered their new search engine using a few cheap, off-the-shelf servers stacked in creative ways. We’ve grown a bit since then, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse at what we’ve built. In the coming days we’ll share a series of posts on the Google Green Blog that explore some of the photographs in more detail, so stay tuned for more!

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure

The Official Google Blog

We announced our commitment to carbon neutrality back in 2007, and since then we’ve been finding ways to power our operations with as much renewable energy as possible. In our latest step toward this end, we just signed an agreement with the Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) to green the energy supply to our Oklahoma data center with 48 MW of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project in Oklahoma, which is expected to come online later this year.

We’ve been working with GRDA, our local utility, to procure additional renewable energy since we “plugged in” our data center in 2011, and in February of 2012, GRDA approached us about purchasing power from Canadian Hills. In conjunction with the electricity GRDA already supplies Google to operate its data center, Google will pay GRDA a premium to purchase renewable energy generated by Canadian Hills. This brings the total amount of renewable energy for which Google has contracted to over 260 MW.

This agreement is a milestone for GRDA because it’s their first-ever wind energy project. It’s also a milestone for Google because it’s a little different from the previous Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) we’ve signed, where we agreed to buy the energy directly from the developer who built the wind farm. This agreement, by contrast, marks the first time we’ve partnered with a utility provider to increase the amount of renewable energy powering one of our data centers.

Although both options can make sense depending on the circumstances, we’re excited about this collaboration because it makes the most of our respective strengths: utilities like GRDA are best positioned to integrate renewable energy into their generation mix and to deliver power; we’re a growing company with a corporate mandate to use clean energy for our operations in a scalable way. We’ve been working closely with all of our utility partners to find ways to source renewables directly, and we look forward to working with other suppliers to deliver clean energy to our data centers.

Posted by Gary Demasi, Director, Global Infrastructure team

The Official Google Blog

Cross-posted from the Google European Public Policy Blog

The digital age generates reams of raw data. Much of that data is interesting or important, but since there’s a lot of it out there it’s often hard to find and analyze. This is where journalists can help. Journalists are experts at delving into complex issues and writing stories that make them accessible—essential skills for dealing with the data deluge of the digital age. In order to support and encourage innovative data journalism, we’re sponsoring a series of prizes all across Europe.

Let’s start in the Nordics, where we recently partnered with Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information and Southern Denmark University’s Center for Journalism to sponsor the Nordic News Hacker 2012 contest. Contestants were asked to create and submit a piece of data journalism—anything from a data mash-up to a new mobile app.

This year’s winner is Anders Pedersen. Ander’s project, Doctors for Sale, inspired by Pro Publica’s Docs for Dollars investigation in the United States, used raw data to uncover doctors who receive money from the pharmaceutical industry. He wins a $ 20,000 scholarship to work with the Guardian Data Blog in London for one month to further his investigative skills.

Several thousand kilometers south of Denmark at the International Journalism Festival, the Global Editors Network announced the 60 shortlisted projects for the Google-sponsored Data Journalism Awards. Some 320 projects were submitted from a diverse group of applicants including major media groups, regional newspapers, press associations, and entrepreneurial journalists from more than 60 countries. Six winners will be announced during the News World Summit, on May 31, 2012 in Paris.

In Vienna, the International Press Institute recently announced the winners of their News Innovation contest, sponsored by Google. Fourteen projects were selected, including digital training in the Middle East, corruption chasing in the Balkans, and citizen photojournalism in the UK. All use digital data and new technologies to tell stories or reach new audiences. The winners received a total of more than $ 1.7 million.

Congratulations to all the journalists and publications who are embracing the digital world!

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations Europe Middle East and Africa

The Official Google Blog

To paraphrase Lord Kelvin, if you don’t measure you can’t improve. Our data center operations team lives by this credo, and we take every opportunity to measure the performance of our facilities. In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center.

One of the measurements we track is PUE, or power usage effectiveness. PUE is a ratio of the total power used to run a data center to the amount used to power the servers. For instance, if a data center has a PUE of 2.0, that means that for every watt of energy that powers the servers, another watt powers the cooling, lighting and other systems. An ideal PUE would be 1.0.

In 2011, our trailing 12-month average PUE was approximately 1.14—an improvement from 1.16 in 2010. In other words, our data centers use only 14 percent additional power for all sources of overhead combined. To calculate this number we include everything that contributes to energy consumption in our data centers. That means that in addition to the electricity used to power the servers and cooling systems, we incorporate the oil and natural gas that heat our offices. We also account for system inefficiencies like transformer, cable and UPS losses and generator parasitic energy draw.

If we chose to use a simpler calculation—for instance, if we included only the data center and the cooling equipment—we could report a PUE as low as 1.06 at our most efficient location. But we want to be as comprehensive as possible in our measurements. You can see the difference in this graphic:

We’ve been publishing our PUE quarterly since 2008—in fact, we were the first company to do so, and are still the only one. Our numbers are based on actual production data taken from hundreds of meters installed throughout our data centers, not design specs or best-case scenarios. One way to think of it is comparing a car manufacturer’s mileage estimates for a new model car to the car’s real-life miles per gallon. We’re measuring real-world mileage so we can improve real-world efficiency.

Our 2011 numbers and more are available for closer examination on our data center site. We’ve learned a lot through building and operating our data centers, so we’ve also shared our best practices. These include steps like raising the temperature on the server floor and using the natural environment to cool the data center, whether it’s outside air or recycled water.

We’ve seen dramatic improvements in efficiency throughout the industry in recent years, but there’s still a lot we can do. Sharing comprehensive measurement data and ideas for improvement can help us all move forward.

Posted by Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations

The Official Google Blog

If you’re familiar with the work of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier, you’ll know he wrote about the beauty of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia. “The Hooch,” as it’s known around here, starts up in the northeastern part of the state, runs through Atlanta and down into Alabama before emptying out into the Gulf of Mexico. Those of us who work in Google’s Douglas County, Ga. data center have a special fondness for the Chattahoochee because it’s an integral part of our ability to run a highly efficient facility.

Google’s data centers use half the energy of a typical data center in part because we rely on free cooling rather than energy hungry mechanical chillers. In Douglas County, like at most of our facilities, we use evaporative cooling, which brings cold water into the data center to cool the servers, then releases it as water vapor through cooling towers.

A typical data center can use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. When we first built the Georgia facility in 2007, the water we used came from the local potable (drinking) water supply. But we soon realized that the water we used didn’t need to be clean enough to drink. So we talked to the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority (known locally as the WSA) about setting up a system that uses reuse water—also known as grey- or recycled water—in our cooling infrastructure. With this system in place, we’re able to use recycled water for 100 percent of our cooling needs.

This video of the system includes never-before-seen footage of our Douglas County facility:

Here’s how it works: The WSA has a water treatment facility in Douglasville, Ga. that cleans wastewater from the local communities and releases it back into the Chattahoochee. We worked with the WSA to build a side-stream plant about five miles west of our data center that diverts up to 30 percent of the water that would have gone back into the river; instead we send it through the plant for treatment and then on to the data center. Any water that doesn’t evaporate during the cooling process then goes to an Effluent Treatment Plant located on-site. There, we treat the water once again to disinfect it, remove mineral solids and send it back out to the Chattahoochee—clean, clear and safe.

The Chattahoochee provides drinking water, public greenspace and recreational activities for millions of people. In fact, just two weeks ago it was the first river to be designated a National Water Trail in a new system announced by the Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar—a system that encourages community stewardship of local waterways. We’re glad to do our part in creating an environmentally sustainable economy along the shores of the Hooch.

Posted by Jim Brown, Data Center Facilities Manager

The Official Google Blog

Last November, we announced our support for a new Data Journalism competition, organized by the Global Editors Network. The competition is now open to submissions and today we hosted an event at our offices in London to share details on how to compete and win a total of six prizes worth EUR 45,000. The European Journalism Centre is running the contest and Google is sponsoring.

Journalism is going through an exciting—if sometimes wrenching—transition from off to online. Google is keen to help. We see exciting possibilities of leveraging data to produce award-winning journalism. “Data journalism is a new, exciting part of the media industry, with at present only a small number of practitioners,” said Peter Barron, Google’s Director of External Relations. “We hope to see the number grow.”

In data journalism, reporters leverage numerical data and databases to gather, organize and produce news. Bertrand Pecquerie, the Global Editor Network’s CEO, believes the use of data will, in particular, revolutionize investigative reporting. “We are convinced that there is a bright future for journalism,” he said at the London event. “This is not just about developing new hardware like tablets. It is above all about producing exciting new content.”

The European Journalism Centre, a non-profit based in Maastricht, has been running data training workshops for several years. It is producing the Data Journalism Awards website and administering the prize. “This new initiative should help convince editors around the world that data journalism is not a crazy idea, but a viable part of the industry,” says Wilfried Ruetten, Director of the center.

Projects should be submitted to http://www.datajournalismawards.org. The deadline is April 10, 2012. Entries should have been published or aired between April 11, 2011 and April 10, 2012. Media companies, non-profit organisations, freelancers and individuals are eligible.

Submissions are welcomed in three categories: data-driven investigative journalism, data-driven applications and data visualisation and storytelling. National and international projects will be judged separately from local and regional ones. “We wanted to encourage not only the New York Times’s of the world to participate, but media outlets of all sizes,” says Pecquerie. “Journalism students are also invited to enter, provided their work has been published.”

An all-star jury has been assembled of journalists from prestigious international media companies including the New York Times, the Guardian and Les Echos. Paul Steiger, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, will serve as president.

Winners will be announced at the Global News Network’s World Summit in Paris on May 31, 2012.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

The Official Google Blog

In the past decade, Apple has gone from being a bit player in the PC industry to the largest technology company in the world, making products in several categories that are used by millions of people around the globe. Apple’s two major operating systems—iOS and Mac OS X—power all of its most major products across the PC and consumer electronics segments.

In recent memory, Apple has shown great commitment towards making sure that the OS, along with both its bundled and third-party apps, takes on the responsibility of protecting the user’s data. In this article, we take a look at thirteen ways in which Apple provides such protection. Once you know all the options available to you, you will hopefully be better prepared to take advantage of them to safeguard your own data.

On Mac OS X

1. Time Machine

Apple introduced Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard as a way for the user to keep automatic backups of every version of all the files across the OS. The feature has a fun, space-themed interface that makes users want to use it, thus giving them more impetus to turn it on. The OS prompts the user to use it for backup when they connect an external hard drive to their Mac for the first time.

Apple also made the Time Capsule, a wi-fi router with a built-in high capacity hard drive, as a complimentary accessory for Mac users interested in wirelessly backing up their Macs. The company has been improving the speed and reliability of Time Machine over the years and it’s now much faster than it used to be when it was first released (although there is still room for improvement). It can now also continue working when the backup drive is disconnected, making incremental backups on the startup drive in the meanwhile and copying it over when the latter comes back online.

How to Use it

As mentioned before, all you need to do to enable Time Machine is to plug an external hard drive with your Mac, or into your wireless router. Mac OS X automatically offers to use it for Time Machine backups when you do that. The dock and menu bar icons for the feature allow you to activate Time Machine to restore files from backups. Its configuration options in System Preferences allow you to turn the feature on or off, exempt specific folders from being backed up by it and change the drive you are using to store backups.

2. Migration Assistant

Migration Assistant in Mac OS X allows you to use another Mac or PC on the same network, a Mac OS X installation on another disk or a Time Machine backup to restore a new Mac (or one with a freshly installed copy of the OS) to the exact same state as your previous Mac. This longstanding feature of Mac OS X makes it painless to transfer your information from one Mac to another and get up and running quickly, thus making system reinstalls and new Mac purchases much easier and safer.

How to Use it

When you boot up a newly purchased Mac, Migration Assistant shows up as part of the setup procedure and offers to let you transfer information from another Mac or Windows-based computer, hard disk or Time Machine backup. If you chose to skip migrating your data during initial setup, you can launch it again from ‘/Applications/Utilities’ or by searching for it in Spotlight. Use a wired ethernet connection to migrate data if possible, because doing it wirelessly is much slower and prone to failure. Make sure you read Apple’s tips about using the feature before attempting it.

3. FireWire Target Disk Mode

FireWire targets disk mode is a feature that allows you to use a working Mac as an external hard drive, in order to get data off it. Since FireWire (both 400 and 800) is faster than ethernet, Migration Assistant can copy data faster from a Mac in target disk mode than over a regular ethernet connection. Even beyond that though, target disk mode is a great way to troubleshoot the hard disk on a Mac that refuses to boot up.

How to Use it

To start a Mac in FireWire target disk mode, power it down and then press and hold the ‘T’ key on the keyboard while it boots up. When you get to a gray screen with a FireWire logo on it, you can let go of the key on the keyboard. Connect this Mac over FireWire 400 or 800 to another and it will show up on the latter as an external hard drive. It can then be used with Migration Assistant, for troubleshooting purposes or even just to copy some files across.

4. Autosave, Resume and Versions

Apple introduced systemwide features in Lion that allow default and third-party applications to automatically save changes to your files and restore them in case of a crash or if the user quits the program without saving the changes. The OS can now also keep track of changes in your documents, so you can go back to past versions and restore things you may have deleted.

A lot of apps have already started incorporating these features and it’s not long before (almost) every app you use has been updated to take advantage of Lion’s new features. That will mean that, throughout the operating system, there will never be any risk of losing data due to unexpected crashes and power failures. The safety of your data will no longer be your exclusive responsibility.

How to Use it

The features are built into the OS and will automatically be a part of apps that are updated to take advantage of them, with no action required from the user. To use versions, roll your mouse over the name of a document-based app (that has at least once been manually saved to disk) to reveal a small inverted triangle next to it. Clicking on this triangle will bring options revert to its last opened version or browse all past versions and restore from any of them at will. You can even copy bits of text and media from different past versions of documents instead of restoring them as a whole.

5. Move to Solid-State Storage

With the launch of the MacBook Air in 2008, Apple began moving to solid-state storage instead of traditional disk-based hard drives. Today, Apple offers the option of installing an SSD for every Mac in its lineup, and the company continues to move in the direction of making SSDs the only option for its products across the board (with the only limiting factor currently being the high prices of SSDs).

One of the great advantages of SSDs, beyond their much faster read and write speeds, noiseless operation and reduced heat generation and power consumption, is their better shock resistance and, arguably, longer lifespan. Although SSDs have not been around long enough for us to have conclusive data on how the average SSD fares against a traditional HDD, it does seem that they will last much longer than hard drives typically do. There’s no question though that the lack of moving parts allows SSDs to deal with the rare three-feet drop much more capably than an HDD.

How to Use it

If you purchase a new Mac today, you can have Apple configure it with as SSD for you. You’ll get much less storage space for a heftier price tag if it is your only drive (although desktop Macs such as the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro can be configured with a secondary HDD as well), but all the other gains described above will be worth the trade. Alternatively, MacBook Pro owners willing to take a screwdriver to their machines can purchase an SSD from external sources (like the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 3G or OCZ Vertex 3) to get a much better and faster drive than the one Apple puts into its machines.

6. Compatibility

Mac OS X ships with support for Adobe’s PDF and PSD and Microsoft Office formats out of the box, enabling Mac users to make use of those files without installing pricey third-party software. You can also convert any document, image or webpage throughout the system into a PDF, thus making it easy to share it with Windows users. Furthermore, Mac OS X can read hard drives formatted in the Windows-friendly NTFS format, allowing you to copy data from them.

How to Use it

All of the formats described above—DOC, PDF, PSD, PPT and XLS—can be previewed using Quick Look on Mac OS X by selecting them in the Finder and hitting the spacebar. Preview can open files in the PDF, PSD, PPT and XLS formats, while TextEdit can both open and edit Microsoft Word documents. To copy data from an NTFS-formatted disk, all you need to do is plug it into the Mac—it works out of the box.

On iOS

7. iTunes Backups

iOS backs up the entire system to iTunes whenever it is connected to a Mac or PC. The backups typically only take seconds to complete, happen automatically and cannot be turned off. If you ever restore a device from a backup, it is brought to the exact state that the backup was made in, down to the contacts list and call log and the data and settings in individual applications and their placement on the device’s home screens.

How to Use it

As long as you are occasionally connecting your iOS-based device to your computer (which has iTunes installed), and assuming that you do not have automatic syncing disabled, your data is getting backed up automatically. You can manually delete past backups if you want by going into the Devices tab in iTunes’s preferences. A new or freshly restored device automatically gives you the option to restore from backup during first setup.

8. State-Saving

Similar to the autosave and resume features in Mac OS X, iOS provides APIs for third-party developers to build state-saving features into their apps with little effort. This allows them to always make sure that your data is saved even if the app is abruptly quit or experiences a crash. This autosaving and resuming makes launching and quitting apps on iOS feel like simply switching between them.

How to Use it

This is a systemwide feature for developers to take advantage of and the user is not expected to do anything to take advantage of it.

9. Find My iPhone

Apple’s free Find My iPhone feature allows iPad, iPhone 4 and fourth-generation iPod touch users to remotely locate their devices and attempt to regain them by tracking them on a map, having them emit a sound or displaying a message on them. It also allows them to lock their devices with a passcode to prevent data theft and, if all else fails, wipe their devices clean if there is no hope of recovering it. Furthermore, an upcoming Find My Mac feature will bring similar features to Macs as well.

How to Use It

Before your iOS device can be tracked, you need to enable Find My iPhone on it. Now, if it ever gets stolen, you can either use the Find My iPhone app to track it from another iOS device or use Apple’s Web-based MobileMe service to track down the device from a Web browser. Both the native and Web apps allow you to use all of the features described above.

In Both Operating Systems

9. Update in Place for OSes

Both iOS and Mac OS X can be updated to major new releases in place, without disturbing any of the existing data. This takes the pain out of OS updates and makes them much safer for the average user. It also helps keep data secure by eliminating the need to make external copies of it and then restoring it after the update is done (although regular external backups are still advised, just in case things go south). Once iCloud launches later this year, devices running iOS 5 will be automatically back themselves up to the cloud and be able to update without the help of the computer as well.

How to Use it

In Mac OS X, starting with Lion in July this year, Apple started selling Mac OS X on the Mac App Store, which made the updating process even simpler than before. All you need to do to install the update is purchase a copy of the OS from the App Store and then launch the installer from the Dock or the applications folder once it is downloaded. For iOS-based devices, iTunes automatically informs you about available OS updates when they are launched. Clicking on the Update button on those prompts downloaded and installs the update in place.

11. Safety from Malware

It has often been suggested that the only reason Mac OS X hasn’t been afflicted by malware is because of its minority status in the desktop OS market. However, the continuing absence of malware on Mac OS X despite its steadily climbing popularity as well as the complete lack of malware on iOS indicate that that may not be the only reason.

Apple’s OSes use sophisticated technologies like address space randomisation, a built-in firewall and sandboxing of applications to make them more resilient against spurious software and Apple actively fights against any that show up, such as the MacDefender virus that popped up earlier this year. Both iOS and Mac OS X continue to be two of the most secure operating systems in the business.

How to Use it

Most of the malware-defense mechanisms on Apple’s OSes are automated and require no user intervention. Mac OS X ships with its firewall disabled, however, and it should be turned on for additional safety. To do so, visit the Firewall tab under the Security & Privacy pane in System Preferences.

12. Encryption Everywhere

Apple builds encryption technologies into practically every part of its ecosystem. From its desktop and mobile operating systems to their backups, and its Web-based synchronisation offerings, everything can be encrypted. One of the great advantages of which, besides the fact that it makes the data much less vulnerable to malicious attacks, is that if the device gets stolen and the user is forced to wipe it remotely, it can be done within a matter of seconds (thus making the data less prone to theft).

How to Use it

In Mac OS X, Apple’s encryption technology is called FileVault and it can be turned on from the FileVault tab in the Security & Privacy pane in System Preferences. Make sure you keep the recovery key in a safe place, just in case you ever lose your encryption password. For iOS-based devices, system-level encryption is already in place by default, but backups can also be encrypted by enabling the preference in the Summary section of the device in iTunes.

13. MobileMe/iCloud Synchronisation

Apple is transitioning its MobileMe offering to iCloud later this year and is in the process making it free. Once it is launched, users will be able to synchronise their bookmarks, calendars, contacts and email (in addition to apps, documents, music, photos and a whole host of other content) hosted on iCloud over the air across their Macs and iOS devices. This will mean that most of their sensitive data will be backed up in the cloud and will be at considerably less likely to be lost in case of the theft or failure or one of more of their devices.

How to Use it

iCloud is yet to be launched, but we will have more information for you when it’s out.

[Image courtesy of waynehowes / Shutterstock.com.]

TNW Aggregated Feed

(Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog)

The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. We believe in the power of the web and information, and we work every day to detect potential abuse of our services and ward off attacks.

As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results:

This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.

We hope to use the knowledge we’ve gathered to assist as many people as possible. In case our notice doesn’t reach everyone directly, you can run a system scan on your computer yourself by following the steps in our Help Center article.

Posted by Damian Menscher, Security Engineer

The Official Google Blog