Google Data

Google’s proud of the contributions women are making to technology and aspires to cultivate the next generation of technical women leaders. On July 12th, 2013, Google hosted the inaugural Google Women in Engineering (GWE) “We Are GWE” Intern Summit at its Mountain View headquarters. Over 170 female interns joined together hailing from 13 of our North American offices, and representing a variety of Google teams like Android, Search, YouTube, Google[x], and many more.

The event kicked off with a Leadership Techmakers panel consisting of some of the top female engineers from across the organization, including VP’s and engineering directors. They shared career advice through stories of trials and tribulations and spent the morning connecting with a room full of the next generation of female techmakers. Shoulder to shoulder participants realized that together they could make a difference.

Interns spent the day in talks with Googlers who, like the participants, were interns who have moved into permanent roles. They had the opportunity to discuss and share ideas on topics like graduate level education, challenges facing female engineers, and how they can have a positive impact on a number of women in tech. United by their passion, abilities, and ambition, the Googlers were emblematic of the many women changing the field of computer science today.

In true Google fashion, the day wouldn’t be over until the group got to let loose and hangout! The day of great connections, impactful topics, and a lot of fun concluded with a large garden party on the GooglePlex patio.

The interns, now armed with a network and knowledge will return to their college campuses inspired to be leaders in engineering, on campus, and in their own communities. We hope that they will continue to contribute to this annual summit as returning interns, full-time employees and role models for the next generation of Google Women in Engineering.

Of course, Google’s commitment to women in technology extends beyond far beyond our internship program. Learn more by visiting here.

Posted by Sean Sweeney, Intern Programs Team

The Edinburgh Fringe festival is one of the largest arts festivals in the world, where thousands of people descend upon Edinburgh to see hundreds of up-and-coming comedians and artists perform in bars, basements and venues around the city.

For those of you who have always wanted to go to the Fringe, now you can enjoy great new talent, laugh ‘til your belly hurts and even heckle a comedian from the comfort of your own home. This summer, you can be in the front row of a live comedy show wherever you are thanks to Google+ Hangouts and YouTube. While you’re at it, your laughs can raise money for a good cause.

We’re partnering with the U.K. charity Comic Relief to bring you the first online comedy club—the “Hangout Comedy Club.” We’ve created a clever gizmo called the “Laughometer,” which will measure how much you enjoy the show and turn your lol’s into an optional donation to Comic Relief. They use the funds they raise to tackle the root causes of poverty and social injustice.

To be part of the Hangout Comedy Club, simply join a Google+ Hangout hosted by one of our famous comedians, including Katherine Ryan, Sanderson Jones and Joey Page. Just like a real comedy club, if you’re brave enough, you can join the front row with up to eight others. If you’d rather sit out of sight, join a Hangout, add your friends, and watch from the safety of the back row.

The next Hangout is today, Thursday, August 15, 10pm BST with Sanderson Jones. Find out who else is starring and get your free seat at www.youtube.com/user/rednoseday/hangoutcomedyclub.

So even if you can’t make it to the Fringe, we’ll bring the best new talent directly to you—and your laugh could help change a life.

Posted by Steve Vranakis, Executive Creative Director, Creative Lab London

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re accepting applications for our first ever 2013 Grace Hopper Travel Grant.

This grant is designed to help cover travel expenses to the 2013 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota from October 2nd – 5th, 2013. As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to increasing the number of women in computer science and related fields, it’s open to female computer science students or industry professionals living in Europe, Middle East or Africa.

The theme for this year’s conference is “Think Big, Drive Forward,” and will offer incredible opportunities for mentoring, networking, and technical and career development. Google will pay for successful applicants’ conference registration, airfare to and from the conference as well as accommodation for the duration of their stay.

The deadline to apply is August 22, 2013. Winners will be announced the week of September 4th.

For more information on eligibility and how to apply, please visit this page.

We look forward to receiving your application!

Posted by Efrat Aghassy, EMEA Scholarships Project Manager

Today computers aren’t very good at understanding human language, and that forces people to do a lot of the heavy lifting—for example, speaking “searchese” to find information online, or slogging through lengthy forms to book a trip. Computers should understand natural language better, so people can interact with them more easily and get on with the interesting parts of life.

While state-of-the-art technology is still a ways from this goal, we’re making significant progress using the latest machine learning and natural language processing techniques. Deep learning has markedly improved speech recognition and image classification. For example, we’ve shown that computers can learn to recognize cats (and many other objects) just by observing large amount of images, without being trained explicitly on what a cat looks like. Now we apply neural networks to understanding words by having them “read” vast quantities of text on the web. We’re scaling this approach to datasets thousands of times larger than what has been possible before, and we’ve seen a dramatic improvement of performance — but we think it could be even better. To promote research on how machine learning can apply to natural language problems, we’re publishing an open source toolkit called word2vec that aims to learn the meaning behind words.

Word2vec uses distributed representations of text to capture similarities among concepts. For example, it understands that Paris and France are related the same way Berlin and Germany are (capital and country), and not the same way Madrid and Italy are. This chart shows how well it can learn the concept of capital cities, just by reading lots of news articles — with no human supervision:

The model not only places similar countries next to each other, but also arranges their capital cities in parallel. The most interesting part is that we didn’t provide any supervised information before or during training. Many more patterns like this arise automatically in training.

This has a very broad range of potential applications: knowledge representation and extraction; machine translation; question answering; conversational systems; and many others. We’re open sourcing the code for computing these text representations efficiently (on even a single machine) so the research community can take these models further.

We hope this helps connect researchers on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language so they can create amazing real-world applications.

By Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, and Quoc Le, Google Knowledge

Posted by Alex Klyubin, Android Security Engineer

The Android security team has been investigating the root cause of the compromise of a bitcoin transaction that led to the update of multiple Bitcoin applications on August 11.

We have now determined that applications which use the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) for key generation, signing, or random number generation may not receive cryptographically strong values on Android devices due to improper initialization of the underlying PRNG. Applications that directly invoke the system-provided OpenSSL PRNG without explicit initialization on Android are also affected. Applications that establish TLS/SSL connections using the HttpClient and java.net classes are not affected as those classes do seed the OpenSSL PRNG with values from /dev/urandom.

Developers who use JCA for key generation, signing or random number generation should update their applications to explicitly initialize the PRNG with entropy from /dev/urandom or /dev/random. A suggested implementation is provided at the end of this blog post. Also, developers should evaluate whether to regenerate cryptographic keys or other random values previously generated using JCA APIs such as SecureRandom, KeyGenerator, KeyPairGenerator, KeyAgreement, and Signature.

In addition to this developer recommendation, Android has developed patches that ensure that Android’s OpenSSL PRNG is initialized correctly. Those patches have been provided to OHA partners.

We would like to thank Soo Hyeon Kim, Daewan Han of ETRI and Dong Hoon Lee of Korea University who notified Google about the improper initialization of OpenSSL PRNG.

Update: the original code sample below crashed on a small fraction of Android devices due to /dev/urandom not being writable. We have now updated the code sample to handle this case gracefully.

/*
 * This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
 * warranty.  In no event will Google be held liable for any damages
 * arising from the use of this software.
 *
 * Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,
 * including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it
 * freely, as long as the origin is not misrepresented.
 */

import android.os.Build;
import android.os.Process;
import android.util.Log;

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.DataInputStream;
import java.io.DataOutputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.security.Provider;
import java.security.SecureRandom;
import java.security.SecureRandomSpi;
import java.security.Security;

/**
 * Fixes for the output of the default PRNG having low entropy.
 *
 * The fixes need to be applied via {@link #apply()} before any use of Java
 * Cryptography Architecture primitives. A good place to invoke them is in the
 * application's {@code onCreate}.
 */
public final class PRNGFixes {

    private static final int VERSION_CODE_JELLY_BEAN = 16;
    private static final int VERSION_CODE_JELLY_BEAN_MR2 = 18;
    private static final byte[] BUILD_FINGERPRINT_AND_DEVICE_SERIAL =
        getBuildFingerprintAndDeviceSerial();

    /** Hidden constructor to prevent instantiation. */
    private PRNGFixes() {}

    /**
     * Applies all fixes.
     *
     * @throws SecurityException if a fix is needed but could not be applied.
     */
    public static void apply() {
        applyOpenSSLFix();
        installLinuxPRNGSecureRandom();
    }

    /**
     * Applies the fix for OpenSSL PRNG having low entropy. Does nothing if the
     * fix is not needed.
     *
     * @throws SecurityException if the fix is needed but could not be applied.
     */
    private static void applyOpenSSLFix() throws SecurityException {
        if ((Build.VERSION.SDK_INT  VERSION_CODE_JELLY_BEAN_MR2)) {
            // No need to apply the fix
            return;
        }

        try {
            // Mix in the device- and invocation-specific seed.
            Class.forName("org.apache.harmony.xnet.provider.jsse.NativeCrypto")
                    .getMethod("RAND_seed", byte[].class)
                    .invoke(null, generateSeed());

            // Mix output of Linux PRNG into OpenSSL's PRNG
            int bytesRead = (Integer) Class.forName(
                    "org.apache.harmony.xnet.provider.jsse.NativeCrypto")
                    .getMethod("RAND_load_file", String.class, long.class)
                    .invoke(null, "/dev/urandom", 1024);
            if (bytesRead != 1024) {
                throw new IOException(
                        "Unexpected number of bytes read from Linux PRNG: "
                                + bytesRead);
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new SecurityException("Failed to seed OpenSSL PRNG", e);
        }
    }

    /**
     * Installs a Linux PRNG-backed {@code SecureRandom} implementation as the
     * default. Does nothing if the implementation is already the default or if
     * there is not need to install the implementation.
     *
     * @throws SecurityException if the fix is needed but could not be applied.
     */
    private static void installLinuxPRNGSecureRandom()
            throws SecurityException {
        if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT > VERSION_CODE_JELLY_BEAN_MR2) {
            // No need to apply the fix
            return;
        }

        // Install a Linux PRNG-based SecureRandom implementation as the
        // default, if not yet installed.
        Provider[] secureRandomProviders =
                Security.getProviders("SecureRandom.SHA1PRNG");
        if ((secureRandomProviders == null)
                || (secureRandomProviders.length 

Join the discussion on

+Android Developers

It’s intern season at Google! Interns are located at offices all across the globe, and represent a broad diversity of backgrounds, concentrations and interests. So inspired by Stephen Colbert’s Better Know a District, we’re bringing to you “Better Know an Intern!” The series will introduce you to our interns and get you the scoop on the impactful projects they work on, their interests and passions, and what it’s really like to intern at Google straight from the source.

In today’s post, meet Benedict Liang, a 2nd Year Computer Science Undergraduate in the National University of SIngapore. He is currently an intern in gTech.

1. Of all the companies to apply for, why did you want to work at Google?
The people and the impact it is making on the world. Enough said.

2. In what way(s) has Google impacted you, and how have you left an impact at Google?
I was able to work with brilliant software engineers. I was given guidance through code reviews, discussions, and weekly sync ups. In my opinion, this is the greatest benefit of being in Google.

Was I able to make an impact in Google? Definitely.

My intern project involves engineering an internal tool to help teams visualize and obtain geodata more effectively. This improved the workflow for getting better and more accurate business listings for Google Map users.

3. What is the most interesting/exciting thing that you have been able to do as a Google intern? Your “Magic Moment”?
I got to try out Google Glass! In Singapore! (Just some context, Glass has not been released outside of US yet.)

4. Aside from working for Google, what kinds of organizations/clubs/activities are you involved with in your community and around your school’s campus?
I was a Google Student Ambassador for my school last year. Representing Google (wow), having fun, and getting awesome SWAG, briefly summarizes my GSA experience. Certainly, this does not do any justice to the program. Definitely check out the video, and the program description.

I am also actively involved in NUS Hackers. This is a community of people who mess around with hardware or software with playful cleverness; they are more commonly known as hackers. Being in this community means being with like-minded people (hack&roll, Friday Hacks).

5. Any advice for students interested in being a Google intern?
Optimize for learning. In the context of college, this means taking the right courses, not the easy ones. Taking an algorithms course early in college equates to more interview preparation time and taking a rigorous course means getting yourself acquainted with more non-trivial problems.

6. Favorite micro-kitchen snack?
Emmi Yogurt Drink. It is yogurt without a spoon!

Posted by Minty Cai, Tech Staffing Programs team

Ever had trouble checking your flight’s status on the go because it meant digging through your email for the flight number? Or wanted to just quickly see whether your package would arrive on time, without having to look up the tracking info first? You’ve told us it would be much easier if you could skip the fuss and just ask Google.

Soon you’ll be able to find this info instantly in Google Search if it’s in your Gmail, Google Calendar or Google+. For example, just ask or type, “What’s my flight status?” or “When will my package arrive?”

Over the next several days, we’ll be rolling this out to all U.S., English-speaking users on desktop, tablet and smartphone, with voice search (so you don’t have to type). Here are just a few of the time savers that will be available this week, with more to come:

• Flights: Ask Google “Is my flight on time?” to get info on your upcoming flights and live status on your current flights.
• Reservations: Ask for “my reservations” to see your dining plans or “my hotel” to get your hotel name and address. With one tap, you can get driving or public transit directions straight there, saving you lots of steps.
• Purchases: Ask for “my purchases,” and you’ll get the status of your current orders, so you know whether your mom’s birthday present will arrive on time.
• Plans: Ask Google “What are my plans for tomorrow?” to see a summary of upcoming flights, hotels, restaurant reservations and events—very useful when you’re traveling.
• Photos: Say “Show me my photos from Thailand” to see the photos you uploaded to Google+. You can also ask for “my photos of sunsets” if you want to show off the shots you’ve taken over the year; Google will try to automatically recognize the type of photo you’re asking for.

We’ve been offering this kind of info—flights, reservations, appointments and more—for more than a year in Google Now. We’ve gotten great feedback on how convenient it is, especially when you’re on the go. Now that it’s in Google Search, you can get it anytime you need it.

This information is just for you—secure, via encrypted connection, and visible only to you when you’re signed in to Google. Likewise, you can also control whether you want the service on or off. Whenever you don’t want to see it, simply click the globe icon at the top of the search results page to turn it off for that search session. To turn it off permanently, visit the “Private results” section in search settings.

We hope this makes your day a little easier. Visit our Inside Search site to learn more about the questions you can ask.

Posted by Roy Livne, Product Manager