Despite Bing And Microsoft Dancing To The Chinese Tunes, Bing Gets Flicked Off And On.

On Wednesday people in China were disturbed when they could not access the Bing Search engine. After investigations involving both the sides, it was revealed that Microsoft Corp.’s search engine Bing was blocked in China was due to an accidental technical error rather than due to censorship. The search engine is once again accessible in China.

“Some reports are saying it is due to technical problems, You should ask other parties.” said Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry. The government typically does not explain its actions or justifications.

The blocking of Bing was a surprise because Microsoft has sought to build a local operation under China’s rules. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, very unlike Microsoft, under some pressure from different quarters, pulled its search engine out years ago in part to avoid government censorship, Microsoft has toed the line and stops content deemed illegal from showing up in results. This may have allowed Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service remained online and available. The Great Firewall of China, blocks thousands of websites including big boys like, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Yahoo, and Google.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company wasn’t yet certain whether the Bing incident reflected a broader issue.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve encountered issues like this for being in China. These do arise periodically, We do adhere to the global network initiative set of principles when it comes to search services in China. And that does mean that there are days when there are either difficult negotiations or even disagreements, but we’re not aware of any ongoing negotiation or disagreement.”
Microsoft President Brad Smith told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Bloomberg

'Magellan' A SQLite Vulnerability Affects Millions Of Deployments and Billions of Devices and Browsers.

Patched Brave Browser

Tencent's Blade security team has discovered a critical vulnerability in one of the most widely used databases, SQLite. It's usage is so large that any vulnerability could exposes millions of database deployments to hackers, like this one does.

Tencent's Blade security researchers have named the vulnerability as 'Magellan'. According to the team this SQLite flaw could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary or malicious code on affected devices, leak program memory or crash applications.

Due to the nature of SQLite, being a lightweight relational database management system that requires minimal support from operating systems or external libraries, it has lead to it's wide adoption. Therefore SQLite is deployed and compatible with almost every device, platform, and programming language. This lead to a lot of usage running into billions of deployments, including IoT devices, Windows and MAC OS apps, and some of the major browsers.

All Chromium-based web browsers,  Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave support SQLite through the Web SQL database API, are susceptible to remote attacks targeting users of affected browsers via a maliciously crafted URL.

The researchers have not revealed the exact code of the fault and awaiting vendors to fix the issue. So far SQLite and Google has released patches. SQLite version 3.26.0 is released to address the issue and Google released Chromiumn 71.0.3578.80 to patch the issue. The fix has been pushed the to the latest version of Google Chrome and Brave web-browsers. If you have auto update disabled, update your web browsers. The developers should update their SQLite and notify users of the software.

"Magellan is a remote code execution vulnerability discovered by Tencent Blade Team that exists in SQLite. As a well-known database, SQLite is widely used in all modern mainstream operating systems and software, so this vulnerability has a wide range of influence. After testing Chromium was also affected by this vulnerability, Google has confirmed and fixed this vulnerability. We will not disclose any details of the vulnerability at this time, and we are pushing other vendors to fix this vulnerability as soon as possible." Tencent mentioned.
"We have reported all the details of the vulnerability to Google and they have fixed the vulnerability ( commit ). If your product uses Chromium, please update to the official stable version 71.0.3578.80( Release updates). If your product uses SQLite, please update to 3.26.0 ( Release updates)."

Cloud Computing The Google Way!

When We speak or think of enterprise computing we always think of enterprise hardware. multi core processors, terabytes of high end storage and globs of memory.
Then we get our software on these heavy handed structures and run happily for about a year and in most cases six months as new better hardware comes around and our software begin to lag. So we rinse and repeat.
It seems Google is doing this in a bit of different way. The difference is that Google build its system from ground up, on low cost hardware. It is their software infrastructure that scales and manage to run on every possible hardware solution thrown at them.
Google work with the premise that even the best and most expensive hardware have a limit of not being 100% reliable. So they make their software the resilient one.
There is one good story that I read at Google Enterprise blog which explains very well the Google Enterprise architecture. I learned about it of course at Google official blog. You will find the links to both below.
Official Google Enterprise Blog: What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing
Business in the cloud

Tags: Cloud Computing, Google, enterprise computing

'Google of Image Searching' with a little help from Grid!

Imense Using Grid to Become 'Google of Image Searching'

Looking for images on the Internet can be a frustrating business. Whether you want the perfect sunset over the sea or the London skyline by night, you’re dependent on people to describe the images on their Web pages. Now, Imense Ltd, a high-tech Cambridge start-up, has announced new investment to help them become the "Google of image searching," using Imense's revolutionary technology. To test its software, they’ve made an unexpected partnership with a group of particle physicists using a massive computer grid.

Cambridge Ontology's technology makes content-based retrieval of images as easy and powerful as the search for text documents on the Internet. Our technology combines state-of-the-art computer vision with machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval methods to give an incomparable search experience.

The system automatically labels semantic visual content in images. Our cutting edge computer vision and visual classifiers allow the system to recognise a wide range of visual categories (e.g. grass, sky, sunset, beach etc.), as well as to spot and interpret faces.

Our technology allows a user to type a plain text query to search large image collections for images with matching visual content.

Tags: grid, Google, imense

Google Desktop now runs on Linux!

After getting used to the Google Desktop on my MAC, I sometime wished that I had it for my Linux machines. I use Linux, mainly at my work and home and it seems now I can try Google Desktop out.
According to Official Google Blog post;
Official Google Blog: Google Desktop now available for Linux posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Not only can you rediscover important documents that have been idling on your hard drive for years, but you can also search through emails saved in Gmail or other applications. All office files, including documents and slides created with OpenOffice.org can be easily found. Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean --and it works with many versions of Linux too.
So if it is what you like, you can get Google Desktop for Linux at GDL site.

Tags: Google, Google Desktop, Linux, Google Desktop for Linux