Google Data

Cross posted from the Google Developers Blog

I wrote my first two lines of BASIC as a five year old, and I’ve loved programming ever since. These days I’m teaching my own kids to code, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how they could have that same simple experience while learning to program for the web.

A quick sprint with my design friend +Jeff Baxter led to a little experiment called Coder. It’s an open source tool that turns Raspberry Pi into a simple, tiny, personal web server and web-based development environment – just what you need for crafting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while you’re learning to code. Here’s a quick video that helps explain how it all works (and a huge shout out to our friends +Claire Stapleton and +Minji Hong who helped us with it):

We thought about all the stuff we could do to make Coder a more complete package, but we have a hunch that the sooner this gets into the open source and maker communities, the more we’ll learn about how it might be used. Hopefully, a few more folks will pitch in and help us make this even more accessible and helpful for new coders.

To learn more, visit goo.gl/coder, get a Pi, download Coder, and make something awesome.

By Jason Striegel, Creative Technologist, Google Creative Lab

If you are a developer, source code is some of the most important data you have. It needs to be backed up regularly, it must be readily accessible from all of your machines, and it may even be confidential. Most of the code is probably already stored u…

This week marks the 178th anniversary of Darwin’s first exploration of the Galapagos Islands. This volcanic archipelago is one of the most biodiverse and unique places on the planet, with species that have remarkably adapted to their environment. Through observing the animals, Darwin made key insights that informed his theory of evolution. Here’s a short documentary that captures the 10-day expedition:

Today, in partnership with the Directorate of the Galapagos National Park and Charles Darwin Foundation, we’re launching the 360-degree images from the Galapagos Islands that we collected in May with the Street View Trekker. Now, you can visit the islands from anywhere you may be, and see many of the animals that Darwin experienced on his historic and groundbreaking journey in 1835.

Darwin may have first sighted San Cristobal Island from the water, perhaps near where we sailed with the Trekker strapped to a boat in order to observe the craggy shoreline and the Magnificent Frigatebirds that the rocky landscape shelters. After landing on San Cristobal, we made our way to Galapaguera Cerro Colorado, a breeding center that helps to restore the population of the island tortoises, seriously threatened by invasive species. Wearing the Trekker, we walked by giant tortoises munching on leafy stalks and recently hatched baby tortoises.

Darwin visited Floreana Island, but he didn’t have the scuba gear needed to properly explore the marine life just off the island’s coast. Thanks to our partner, Catlin Seaview Survey and their SVII underwater camera, we were able to collect underwater imagery of some especially energetic and inquisitive sea lions that came out to see whether the divers wanted to play!

Today, in partnership with the Directorate of the Galapagos National Park and Charles Darwin Foundation, we’re launching the 360-degree images from the Galapagos Islands that we collected in May with the Street View Trekker. Now, you can visit the islands from anywhere you may be, and see many of the animals that Darwin experienced on his historic and groundbreaking journey in 1835.

The extensive Street View imagery of the Galapagos Islands will not only allow armchair travellers to experiences the islands from their desktop computer, but it will also play an instrumental role in the ongoing research of the environment, conservation, animal migration patterns, and the impact of tourism on the islands.

One way in which the Charles Darwin Foundation plans to use the Street View imagery for science is by allowing the public to help identify plants and animals observed when navigating through the imagery. Together, Charles Darwin Foundation and iNaturalist – a website and community for citizen scientists – have developed a new project they are excited to launch today: Darwin for a Day.

Using Darwin for a Day, you can explore Street View imagery in the Galapagos.

Navigate through Street View, and choose an animal or plant you’d like to help identify!

Darwin for a Day is a web application that invites you to step into Darwin’s shoes by exploring the Galapagos Islands through Google Street View and document its unique plants and animals. When you see an animal or plant you’d like to catalogue, you can describe it by creating an observation. You can just enter your best guess as to what it is – for example, “bird” – or enter in the scientific name, if you know it! All of your observations will be shared with the iNaturalist community & the Charles Darwin Foundation, and will contribute to research of the Galapagos Islands.

Visit our behind-the-scenes experience and tune in to an exclusive Google+ Hangout with the Google Maps team and our partners at 9:00 AM PT today to learn more about this special collection of imagery.

Post content Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Project Lead, Google Earth Outreach

Cross-posted from Google Cloud Platform Blog

Google Cloud Platform is used around the world to create and deploy solutions that are affordable, scalable and easy to maintain. These qualities empower developers worldwide to solve local and global challenges with cloud technology . 

This sets the stage for the very first Google Cloud Platform Developer Challenge. We’re inviting you to build locally relevant web applications that solve real world problems. You will have the opportunity to “WOW” the world with your awesome web application built on Google App Engine using Google APIs like the Google+, YouTube and Maps APIs. 

The competition starts September 4th, 2013 with the first round of submissions starting on the October 22nd, 2013. The categories for this challenge are

• Enterprise/Small Business Solutions , Education, Not for Profit
• Social / Personal Productivity/Games / Fun

Submissions will be accepted from any one of six regions across the world:

• Latin America
• Sub Saharan Africa
• South East Asia
• Middle East & North Africa
• India
• Rest of the World

We will be working in tandem with Google Developer Groups (GDGs), Google Business Groups and Google Student Ambassadors to put up and organize events around the challenge. Ensure you connect with your local communities for more information about these meetups. 

Do you want to start hacking out a cloud based web app now and you need pointers and hints? If yes , then the Google App Engine tutorial is a good place to start.

The Form+ team, one of the winners of last year’s Google Apps Developer Challenge

If your application is judged the best in your region, within one of the two categories mentioned above, you could win a prize of $20,000! We are devoted to raising the next generation of information technology experts as well as encouraging diversity among software developers. In line with this, we have special prizes for all-female teams — $2,000 and $1,000 dollars for ‘all-student teams’ that make the second round. Any ‘all female student team’ that makes the second round will receive a prize of $3,000. There are also prizes available for those who are interested in mentoring contestants.

Please read through the terms and conditions on the Google Cloud Platform Developer Challenge page and follow the hashtag #gcdc on Google+ for any additional updates.

What are you waiting for? Register your gcdc2013-.appspot.com – apply for $2,000 worth of Google Cloud Platform credit atcloud.google.com/starterpack using the promo code: gcpdc-in, and start hacking with Google Cloud Platform!

Posted by Chukwuemeka Afigbo, Program Manager

Free and open source software is a crucial part of the security infrastructure of the internet. As a Googler working on security issues, especially those involving open source software, I want to describe some of the open source security projects Google is involved with. This list is far from comprehensive, but comprises some of the projects I have personally had a hand in.

OpenSSL

Google employs two members of the OpenSSL team, myself and Bodo Möller. As well as helping to address security issues as they arise (sometimes discovered by other Googlers) we’ve also been helping with work to improve OpenSSL’s capabilities, for example implementing application-defined TLS extensions, adding support for ALPN (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-applayerprotoneg-01) and adding a framework for Authenticated Encryption with Additional Data (AEAD) (work in progress).

Capsicum

Over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly (and painfully) apparent that ACLs and MAC, which were originally designed to protect expensive mainframes from their users, and the users from each other, are failing to secure modern cheap machines with single users who need protecting from the software they run.

Instead, we need fine-grained access control and strong sandboxing.

My Cambridge colleague, Dr. Robert Watson says:

In August 2010, the University of Cambridge and Google published the Capsicum security model at the USENIX Security Symposium. Initially funded by a Google Faculty Research Award, Capsicum combines security ideas from historic research capability systems with contemporary operating-system design to allow robust, fine-grained, flexible, and application-centred sandboxing. Since 2012, Google Open Source Programs Office and the FreeBSD Foundation have been jointly funding continuing open source development to transition Capsicum from research to practice; Google also has summer students working on Capsicum through Google Summer of Code under the FreeBSD organization. 

The project has been led by FreeBSD developer Pawel Dawidek, who has refined the Capsicum model as our experience has grown, updating existing privilege-separated applications to use Capsicum (e.g., OpenSSH and dhclient). Pawel has also adapted new applications to use Capsicum compartmentalisation “out-of-the-box”, including system tools services (e.g., tcpdump, kdump,the high-availability storage daemon [hastd], the security audit-trail distribution daemon [auditdistd]), and UNIX pipeline components (e.g., grep, uniq). The goal is to move gradually towards ubiquitous sandboxing: since it is cheap (and often easy), explore what happens when you try to do it everywhere, mitigating as-yet unknown future vulnerabilities. 

A key contribution of this work is the Casper application framework. Casper manages the creation of sandboxes, launching them on demand with only the rights they require to operate (Saltzer and Schroeder’s 1975 Principle of Least Privilege). Existing applications can be linked against Casper to make use of a growing suite of Casper components, including sandboxed DNS resolution, delegation of file-system subsets, cryptographic random number generation, network services (such as sockets), system monitoring interfaces (via sysctl), and system databases such as the user and password files. 

Pawel’s current work is due to wrap up later in 2013. FreeBSD 10.0 will ship with Capsicum enabled by default and a suite of sandboxed applications.

Certificate Transparency

A key concern has been the repeated failures of Certificate Authorities (CAs) to properly defend their operations and correctly issue certificates, most recently exemplified by the DigiNotar incident, which not only compromised the security of hundreds of thousands of internet users, but also led to the company’s bankruptcy.

We’ve been working hard on a new idea in that area, Certificate Transparency – essentially a verifiably correct log of all issued certificates that can be used to quickly detect any missteps on the part of CAs. And, of course, we are hard at work on an open source implementation, with clients in C++, Java and Python, and a C++ server.

Tor

Tor (originally short for The Onion Router), is a free software for enabling online anonymity. Widely recognized as a key component in online privacy, Foreign Policy Magazine named its primary authors among its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers “for making the web safe for whistleblowers.” Originally released in 2002 by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor development is now supported by a broad range of governments, organizations and individuals. Google is proud to have had the Tor Foundation as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization since 2007, providing the project with both funding and potential new contributors.

Libpurple

If you’ve ever “chatted” online chances are very good that you’ve used libpurple. Libpurple is the core of various instant messaging applications, notably Pidgin and Adium. Through a donation to Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. we have sponsored a developer working on improving its security.

By Ben Laurie, Security Engineering

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Product Management Director, Chromebooks

Today we’re featuring Michelle Ferreirae, a Software Engineer on the G+ Notifications team based out of Mountain View. Michelle joined Google full-time in late June, but she made her debut at Google last summer as a Software Engineering Intern on internal tools. Michelle is from San Diego, and graduated in May from Wellesley College in Massachusetts with a B.A. in Computer Science.

Tell us a little bit about how you first got interested in computer science?
I had absolutely zero exposure to computer science before I got to college; I thought I was going to be a political science major. My first semester, I only got into one of the four classes I had originally wanted, so I had to use my backup plans, and introductory CS was my second backup. I adored the class; I hadn’t realized that I could take logical thinking, which I’ve always loved, and apply it to making cool, useful programs. Halfway through the semester, I found myself doing my CS problem set to procrastinate on readings for my political science class, and I realized I should probably reevaluate my major plans.

Tell us about your path to a full-time software engineering role at Google? What inspired you to initially apply to Google?
I’ve always loved Google products… long before I worked here, I convinced my family to switch to Chrome and use Gmail and Google Docs. I wanted to do an industry internship after my junior year, so I applied to lots of places, including Google. I was a little surprised when they emailed me back! After my internship, I got the chance to convert to full-time. I got offers from other companies too, but I was really excited to come back to Google; I’d had an awesome summer.

Were there any particular classes, clubs, and/or activities that you participated in during college that you found especially helped prepare you for an internship/job in the tech industry?
The most helpful thing I did was research. Wellesley has a Human Computer Interaction lab that I joined at the beginning of my sophomore year. Working in the lab let me work on much larger projects than I had seen in my classes, and gave me a much better sense for how to work on a team and deal with a large code base that wasn’t my own. Plus, the projects I worked on were really interesting–applications for tabletop touch screen computers that make scientific research more accessible to students in introductory science classes.

I know you attended a small liberal arts college. Do you have any suggestions for current students at similar types of colleges who may be interested in pursuing opportunities at Google?
Don’t be afraid! I was worried my classes were too theoretical; I knew people at other colleges who were learning things directly related to software engineering, while I was doing theoretical, non-useful computer science. But that hasn’t held me back; I’m able to learn new skills quickly when I need to. Another tip: liberal arts colleges often have strong alumni networks; it can be helpful for finding a job, at Google or anywhere else, to reach out to an alum who works there and talk to them.

What’s your favorite Google memory or ‘Magic Moment’?
This is my second year in the Google laser tag league. We play in between two Google buildings, where we hide behind trees and come up with strategies to draw out the other team. Sometimes other Googlers wander through, unaware that anything is happening… and other times they notice the engineers laughing and shooting at each other. It’s fun, exciting, and silly, which is exactly what I expect from working at Google.

Posted by Cari Bulman, Tech Student Engagement Team