DOJ Asks Court To Keep Secret Any PARTNERSHIP Between GOOGLE And NSA:
The Justice Department refuses to divulge whatever sort of agreement there may be between Google and the National Security Agency. Not that there is one, of course.
Mike Scarcella in The Legal Times writes about The Justice Department defending the government’s refusal to discuss, or acknowledge the existence of, “any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency.”
The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.
The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.
Google plans major overhaul to search engine:
Google is giving its tried-and-true web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today's technology and maintain its dominant market share. Over the next few months, Google's search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. The changes to search are among the biggest in the company's history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google's current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements. Google isn't replacing its current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the words it contains, how often other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures. Rather, the company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called "semantic search," which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words. Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of "entities" -- people, places and things -- which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world," Singhal said, noting that for many searches today, "we cross our fingers and hope there's a web page out there with the answer." Some major changes will show up in the coming months, people familiar with the initiative said, but Singhal said Google is undergoing a years-long process to enter the "next generation of search." Under the shift, people who search for "Lake Tahoe" will see key "attributes" that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for "Lake Tahoe" today would get only links to the lake's visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map. For a more complex question such as, "What are the 10 largest lakes in California?" Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites. The coming shift has major implications for Google, which dominates the Internet search market with around 66 percent market share and more than 75 percent of all search-ad revenue. The Mountain View, Calif., companies has succeeded because of the strength and ease of its keyword-search technology, which in turn fueled Google's search ads, which appear next to search results. That business now generates the majority of Google's $37 billion in annual revenue. Now Google is taking action to maintain that lead. The Internet giant is trying to stay ahead of Microsoft's Bing in web search, catch up to Apple's Siri voice-activated mobile search, and beat back rivals in niches such as product search.
Just how far will Google go to hide its custom-built data center hardware from the rest of the world?
In one Silicon Valley data center, the company is apparently so paranoid about competitors catching a glimpse of its gear, it’s been known to keep its server cages in complete darkness, outfitting its technical staff like miners and sending them spelunking into the cages with lights on their heads. “Many [companies] try to keep things covered up. There’s a lot of valuable intellectual property in here,” says Chris Sharp, general manager of content and cloud at Equinix, as he walks through the company’s data center. “But we were always amazed by Google and the helmets.” Google is one of many big-name Web outfits that lease data center space from Equinix—a company whose massive computing facilities serve as hubs for the world’s biggest Internet providers. All the big Web names set up shop in these data centers, so that they too can plug into the hub. The irony is that they must also share space with their biggest rivals, and this may cause some unease with companies that see their hardware as a competitive advantage best hidden from others. About two years ago, Chris Sharp says, Google unscrewed all the light bulbs inside the hardware cages it occupied at that Equinix data center. “They had us turn off all overhead lights too, and their guys put on those helmets with lights you see miners wear,” he tells Wired. “Presumably, they were bringing up custom-built gear they didn’t want anyone else to see.” Google declined to comment on Sharp’s little anecdote. But the tale is not surprising. Google designs its own servers and its own networking gear, and though it still leases space in third-party data centers such as the Equinix facility, it’s now designing and building its own data centers as well. These designs are meant to improve the performance of the company’s Web services but also save power and money. More so than any other outfit, Google views its data center work as an important advantage over competitors. That said, Google has actually loosened up in recent years. In 2009, the company opened a window into the first custom-built data center it had built five years before, and it has discussed parts of its new facilities. But many of its operations remain a mystery. Some believe this should change. Facebook now designs its own data centers and servers, and as a direct response to Google’s approach, the social-networking outfit has “open sourced” its designs, hoping to encourage collaboration on designs across the industry. This, Facebook says, will allow the rest of the world to save power in much the same way Google has done and ultimately, well, save the planet. Several companies have already embraced this effort, including Netflix, the Texas-based cloud provider Rackspace and Japanese tech giant NTT Data. But others still prefer to keep their secret hardware secret. Amazon, for instance, takes a Google-like approach. The company says very little about the facilities it runs or the hardware in those facilities. Apparently, the company is working with server sellers such as ZT Technologies to customize its servers, and it has followed Google’s lead in constructing its data centers with modular shipping containers. But it’s unclear just how far the company has gone towards designing and building its own hardware. This week, the Internet is rife with speculation about just how many machines back the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud service. At Google, employees sign strict non-disclosure agreements that bar them from discussing what goes on inside the company’s data centers—and apparently, this agreement is open-ended. That alone puts a lid on Google’s deepest secrets. We’ve seen the NDA in action—many times. But for Google, and others, there’s an added problem when they set up shop in a “co-location” facility like the data centers run by Equinix. The nature of the beast is that you’re sharing space with competitors. Equinix trumpets its data centers as places where the giants of the Web can improve performance by plugging their gear straight into the world’s biggest Internet carriers—and into each other. The company began life offering a service—the Internet Core Exchange—that connected all the major Internet service providers, and now it lets other outfits plug into this carrier hub. According to Sharp, over 70 carriers used the company’s main data center in San Jose, California. “We were a place for network operators to efficiently hand off traffic, and that’s the legacy that created Equinix,” Sharp says. “Not only are networks leveraging that to talk to each other, but [websites] are too.” Security is high in the company’s facilities. Hand geometry readers—i. e. Fingerprint readers that extend beyond fingerprints—guard access to the data center floor. There’s a security camera looking at you every time you turn around. And each company can contain their gear in their own cages, protected by still more hand readers. But if you’re on the floor, you can peer into the cages. For cooling purposes, they’re not walled off. While some companies proudly display their logo on the side of their machines, the Googles of the world do their best to hide themselves. To keep competitors from eying their gear, Sharp says, many companies keep the lights off inside their cages when no one’s working on them. But others go even further.
DARPA director exits agency for Google, assumes mysterious role:
Not even the federal government's factory of sci-fi dreams can hold off the likes of Google's recruiters. According to Wired, Regina Dugan, DARPA's current director, will be moving on from the Department of Defense's fantastical research arm for an unspecified "senior executive position" with the folks from Mountain View. Dugan's served in her role for the past three years, winning over the likes of the Pentagon by shifting her agency's focus from out-there R&D experiments to more practical military applications, while also ruffling a few feathers with her brazen statements. No word was given on when exactly she'll officially join the search giant's ranks other than a vague mention of "sometime in the next few weeks.
