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THE RUN DOWN

A is for Alphabet, G is for Google

In our top story this week, tech giant Google announced a major corporate restructuring which included, to everyone’s surprise, a name change. A new holding company has been created called Alphabet. Alphabet is made up of a collection of companies including Google. Google itself is being slimmed down so that just the products and services traditionally associated with it, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Chrome, are part of it. Unrelated projects such as Google’s famous “moonshot” projects, Google Fiber, and its research into self-driving cars will be spun off into their own companies, all under the Alphabet umbrella.

As part of the restructuring, Google’s Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai has been made CEO of the new, slimmer Google, while Larry Page and Sergei Brin are taking control of Alphabet.

For the moment, no branding is changing, so if you want to search something you don’t suddenly have to “Alphabet” it and you won’t be checking “Alphabet Mail” anytime soon on your “Alphabet Phone.” At least, we sure hope not.

You can check out the new company’s website and a letter from its founders at abc.xyz.

Why not Alphabet.com?

You might be asking yourself, why didn’t Google just go with Alphabet.com? Well, it turns out, even the mighty Google can’t just have any domain name they want. The New York Times is reporting that car manufacturer BMW already owns Alphabet.com and they are not interested in selling it.

Alphabet is a subsidiary of BMW that provides vehicle fleet services. Micaela Sandstede, a BMW spokeswoman in Munich. She described the website as a “very active” part of Alphabet?s business. Which is ironic, because the website has been inaccessible ever since the Google Alphabet (or is it Alphabet Google?) announcement, presumably because of the increase in traffic. It makes us feel better knowing that even mega-companies like BMW have issues keeping their website running when they get hit with a ton of traffic.

The article points out that it would only be trademark infringement if it creates confusion with customers… which wouldn’t be an issue if Google and BMW were in entirely different industries, which they were, right up until Google entered the automobile industry with self-driving cars and Android for automobiles.

Android flaw that got patched actually not patched

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago we talked about a major security flaw in Android that allowed a remote attacker to execute code using a vulnerability in Hangouts. Google rushed out a patch for the vulnerability, which has now been codenamed “Stagefright,” and it was just a matter of getting it out to the phones for all the different carriers. Except, according to the BBC, it turns out that the patch doesn’t work – or at least, that it is easy to bypass. Better keep Hangouts disabled for the time being.

How to lose an internship at Facebook

If you figure out a huge flaw in the company you are going to start an internship at, perhaps it’s a good idea to keep it to yourself. According to Boston.com, Aran Khanna created a web-app demonstrating a huge privacy flaw in Facebook Messenger shortly before he was to begin his highly coveted internship at Facebook. Facebook Messenger stored your location automatically and shared it with anyone you chatted with on the app. Khanna’s web-app took that information and placed it onto a map showing where everyone you had chatted with was when they sent the message.

He tweeted about his app and posted it on Reddit and Medium, and a few days later, Facebook asked him to disable it, and then let him know that his internship was also disabled.

According to Khanna, he wasn’t fired from his internship because of the app, but because of the way he described Facebook?s user data collection. Khanna says the Medium post wasn’t in line with the high ethical standards expected of interns.

Drones make bears nervous

Drones seem like an ideal method for wildlife biologists to study the habits of wild animals such as bears, but it appears that there is a catch. NPR reports that a new study shows that the presence of drones make bears nervous, elevating their heart rates by as much as 400%. Mark Ditmer, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, flew a drone near bears that had been previously implanted with heart rate monitors to study their hibernation states. Although the bears appeared outwardly unphased, all of them showed elevated heart rates when buzzed by the drone.

Meet the world?s biggest hard drive

Samsung has unveiled a new device with the catchy name of PM1633a. According to The Verge, it’s a 2.5 inch solid state drive, and it packs a whopping 16 terabytes of storage space, making it essentially the biggest hard drive ever. Samsung has not announced a price tag, but they plan to sell servers with up to 48 of these drives installed, which they are calling JBOF. One JBOF should hold about 768 TB. JBOF stands for Just a Bunch Of Flash. Before you ask, the next step up after terabyte is petabyte.

Still No Apple TV

Apple TV, the long delayed, rumored, mystical device and service is further delayed. Bloomberg is reporting that negotiations between Apple and the big TV networks are holding up the works. According to Bloomberg, Apple was to announce a new live  streaming TV service at its Sept. 9 press event, but instead Buzzfeed News says Apple is only announcing a beefed up Apple TV set-top box.

eSports Drug Testing

Top-ranked Counter Strike: Global Offensive player Cory “Semphis” Friesen admitted in an interview last month that he and his competitive eSports team “were all on Adderall” during a recent tournament. According to NPR news, at least one eSports league has decided that it is not okay with that. The Electronic Sports League, which sponsored the $250,000 tournament Friesen and his team took part in, has announced a ban on drugs and alcohol during its tournaments and will be instituting random drug testing during its tournaments going forward. The League says the substances banned include those prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency. The first random drug testing at a League event will occur at ESL One in Cologne later this month.

LOL is OOS (Out of Style)

You may have seen an article from the New Yorker back in April about how we express laughter online – appropriately known as e-laughter – and the increase in the use of “hehe.”

This piqued the interest of the he research team at Facebook, who decided to look into how users showed amusement. They did so by analyzing posts and comments from last week of May. Don’t worry – they only looked at ones that had “at least one string of characters that matched laughter” and they left out private messages.

So what did their study find? Well, among other things, the form of e-laughter that is used more than any other is “haha” – which they found is used over 50% of the time. In second place are emoji, followed by “hehe” in third. And it last place… our dear friend “LOL.”

The first text speak that many of us learned is now used only about 2 percent of the time.

Mic.com has a great breakdown of all of Facebook’s findings, including which phrases are most popular among different age groups and states.

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With over 750 million users worldwide, online companies are taking aim at Facebook to fight for consumers’ time and advertising dollars, but Facebook doesn’t plan on backing down anytime soon. Amidst the notable launch of Google+, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook would be launching “something awesome” this week during a press conference for media members. The news event will take place tomorrow at Facebook’s headquarters located in Palo Alto, California.

While touring the company’s 40-person engineering campus in Seattle, Zuckerberg said that the announcement would be about something that was developed there at the site – which plays a major role in the mobile arena for Facebook. Although there are numerous rumors regarding the announcement, it is speculated that the company will either be launching the long-anticipated Apple iPad app or new features such as a photo-sharing app and video-chat powered by Skype. The two well-known brands, Facebook and Skype, have already entered into a partnership that integrates the social media outlet with clients for Skype. When Skype was purchased by Microsoft in May, the connection between Facebook and Skype became even more entrenched, as Microsoft bought a $240 million piece of the Facebook pie in 2007.

Facebook has taken its own steps in trying to make any transition to Google+ more difficult by blocking Facebook Friend Exporter, a Google Chrome extension that let’s users extract contact information their friends have shared with them via Facebook and import them elsewhere. After Google+ was announced last week, one of the first to create an account was Mark Zuckerberg – who ironically has the most followers… even more than Google CEO Larry Page.

Photo by Doug Gross via CNN

Facebook has caused a worldwide revolution in social media, and Google may have finally developed a similar product that can rival their nemesis. Google’s response to Facebook, Google+, was launched on Tuesday to a select number of people as a “social field test” – meaning Google+ is not in the public beta release stage yet. Plus is the first major launch by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and new Chief Executive Officer since April.

Google has had prior hiccups entering the social media game with failed products like Google Buzz, Google Orkut, and Google Wave, so it’s no surprise that the search giant’s latest attempt at a social media avenue has generated mixed feelings from its users. Some are receptive of the features offered in the Facebook alternative, most notably the ability to create “Circles” – an easier way to maintain and group contacts. Other features are described by Reuters below:

Google+ will have some obviously-essential features for a social network ? a news component called the Stream, a search/alert component called Sparks which will serve up different results on your interests than a plain vanilla Google search. There is also the ability to share with people who aren’t signed up for the service ? which addresses the problem of opt-in-itis.

But at first blush the most intriguing aspect of Google+ seems to be the granularity with which you can pigeonhole your friends, acquaintances, family, contacts and whomever into the exact right slot in your social web. It’s a seemingly obvious problem to solve and one which Facebook hasn’t, perhaps, because it hasn’t seen the need to ? ?groups? notwithstanding.

Critics, however, are saying that Plus is not differentiated enough from its competition and is basically a replica of Facebook, and not many people are interested in maintaining multiple social media outlets.

One thing is clear though, Google+ is generating a lot of buzz. The VP of Social at Google, Vic Gundotra,  posted on Plus, “We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!” While the platform has a loooooooong way to go before it can compete with Facebook, the company claims that Plus is not a Facebook Killer but an overall improvement of the Google experience. Fast Company writes, “Google+ is one element in a much larger strategy the company launched last year to gradually shift all of Google–Search, YouTube, Places, etc—from standalone tools to a set of services that operate much more socially.”

So for now, users who weren’t granted an invite (like myself) can browse Business Insider’s top-to-bottom tour of Google+ and can play around on the Google+ demo site to take a look at the social media site while its still in its infancy.

Photo by Google