Google Voice

Google Voice started as GrandCentral, a startup launched in 2006 to revolutionize phone management on the web. Google quickly snapped it up in 2007 for over $50 million. For the next two years, it went through a metamorphosis. During that time, some wondered if it was yet another service that Google bought and let die. But in 2009, it emerged as the Google Voice butterfly.

The “early preview” of Google Voice that Google unveiled last year has since undergone a number of changes. Notably, SMS now works better, a Chrome extension makes it simple to keep on top of everything, and there’s a great mobile web app. Most importantly though, Google Voice now works seamlessly with all Android-based mobile phones. The solution is brilliant — and was the central figure in Google’s falling out with Apple (after they rejected the native Google Voice app).

There are also some features we’re still waiting for — such as full number portability and a desktop app (which may be scrapped now).

Google says that there are now over one million people actively using the service. You can expect that number to balloon now that anyone can go to the site and sign up.

In fact, why are you still reading this? Go sign up (well, if you’re in the U.S. –  yes, it’s still U.S.-only). After all, according to this chart, Google Voice is the pinnacle of human communication.

If you are not familiar with Google Voice, here are some of my favorite features:

• transcribed voicemails: whenever somebody leaves a voicemail, Google Voice will transcribe the message as best it can (this only works for English right now). These transcripts are then forwarded to your email account and you can also opt to receive an SMS notification.
• listening in to voicemails: whenever you receive a call and decide to let it go to voicemail, you can also choose to listen in and even pick up the call if it turns out to be an important message. This feels just like the old days when answering machines with tapes were still a novelty.
• call screening: one neat option in Google Voice is the ability to screen calls. If you activate this feature, callers will be prompted to leave their name once they call, and once you pick up the phone, Google Voice will play the name back and you can choose whether you want the call to go to voicemail or actually speak to this person. You can opt to let all unknown callers who are not in your Google address book go through this procedure or just those calls from callers who have blocked their caller ID.
• recording calls: at any time during a call, you can press 4 and the call will be recorded. This only works for calls you receive on your phone for now, and doesn’t work for outgoing calls.
• conference calls: just ask participants to call your Google Voice number and as more callers arrive, you can just conference them in – this works for up to 4 callers.
• switching phones: if you want to switch phones during a call (say you took a call on your landline and decide you want to take a walk and continue the call on your cell), just press * and all your other phones will ring again and you can continue the conversation on any othe rphone.
• SMS: you can send and receive text messages from your Google Voice account and web interface
• integration with Google Contacts
• it just works: the call quality is good, we didn’t experience any outages during the last few months, and calls aren’t dropped. Google Voice does what it says it does, and it does it well.

Previously only bookmarks could be synced across various machines, but with this latest release, users will now be able to port their preferences – including zoom defaults, themes and homepage settings – to the various computers they browse from. By associating browser settings with a Google account, users can quickly sync the settings on their various installations of Chrome.

Additionally, this newest version of Chrome now supports some fancy new HTML5 features, including geolocation APIs, and drag-and-drop functionality. Beta release testers of Chrome may have already spotted the ability to use Google Maps’ location functions, as well as drag-and-drop of attachments from within Gmail.

Chrome Benchmark Results

According to Google, today’s release of Chrome is the fastest ever, improving “by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks” since its initial beta release. Google is also working with Adobe to fully integrate Flash into the browser with new plug-in APIs, but this will not be available until the next full release of Flash Player in the near future.

Good news for users of Google’s Chrome browser on the Apple platform. Extensions and bookmarking are now fully supported (thank goodness!).

The new version means users can take advantage of more than 2,200 extensions that add features and bolster the usability of Chrome within Mac OS. Extensions can be selected and managed through the options menu.

As for bookmarks, Google explains that bookmarks can be synced between multiple computers, even between Macs, Windows and Linux machines. It also adds bookmark and cookie managers “in a way that feels completely at home on the Mac.” A new Task Manager will help power users keep better track of tabs.

For the impatient, the new version can be downloaded right away. The version number is 5.0.307. The link is here. Haven’t tried it yet? Well it seems to be catching on fast and is super fast, so you might want to give it a shot because it could just replace your current browser… it sure did for me!

Here are a couple of videos that Google through together to explain how it all works.

The Pushdo botnet, a.k.a. “Cutwail” and “Pandex,” has been flooding those sites with bogus SSL connections that stop short of requesting anything from the Website. The infected bots begin to initiate an SSL connection with some “junk” traffic and then disconnect, according to The Shadowserver Foundation. Shadowserver and other researchers have been monitoring the activity, which increased traffic by several million hits across several hundred thousand IP addresses, according to Shadowserver.

The botnet hit the ZeusTracker Website, for example, with hundreds of thousands of different IP addresses within a 24-hour period. “This is a lot of bots generating a lot of traffic,” blogged Steven Adair, a researcher with Shadowserver. Recent code changes to Pushdo resulted in its bots generating the “junk” SSL connections to the 315 Websites, he said.

So what is Pushdo up to? Joe Stewart, director of malware research for Secureworks, says the botnet is making fake SSL connection attempts: Malformed packets cause the server to return an SSL negotiation error. “By adding the initial header of an SSL conversation, they may be attempting to avoid closer scrutiny by less vigilant inspection devices,” Stewart says. “And by sending a flurry of these connections to a number of legit ‘decoy’ sites, it helps the Pushdo C&C [command and control] traffic blend in and remain undetected in some cases,” he says.

It’s unclear thus far whether this is a test-run for phony SSL connections gone amuck that ended up exposing this Pushdo traffic, or something else. Stewart says it’s possible there could be more to the latest activity, such as the botnet’s rotating its target lists. “It’s hard to say,” he says.

Blending in has traditionally been Pushdo’s trademark: Although it’s one of the top five spamming botnets, it’s also one of the more under-the-radar botnets around. But this latest activity has researchers wondering how this massive surge of traffic, which resembles a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, would ultimately help its traffic blend in and become less detectable.

Shadowserver says the traffic is technically an attack, even though it doesn’t appear to be trying to knock the sites offline like a DDoS does. “We find it hard to believe this much activity would be used to make the bots blend in with normal traffic, but at the same time it doesn’t quite look like a DDoS either,” Adair says.

Secureworks’ Stewart says he has witnessed botnets sending traffic via SSL or port 443, but this phony SSL connection attempt is a first. “The Pushdo C&C protocol now also uses similar packets to encapsulate its encrypted/compressed phone-home requests,” he says. “Port 443 is commonly being used to proxy all kinds of non-SSL traffic by legit applications and bots alike, so it stands to reason that a heuristic one might look for suspicious or firewall-policy-violating traffic connections over port 443 that aren’t using SSL.”

The surge in traffic from Pushdo could cause problems for Websites with limited bandwidth and that typically get only a few hundred to a few thousand hits daily, Shadowserver says.

The major features in this release (officially labeled 4.0.249.78—uh, we’ll just call it 4.0):

• Extensions
• Bookmark sync
• Enhanced developer tools
• HTML5: Notifications, Web Database, Local Storage, WebSockets, Ruby support
• v8 performance improvements
• Skia performance improvements
• Full ACID3 pass, due to re-enabled remote font support (with added defense against bugs in operating system font libraries)
• HTTP byte range support
• New security feature: “Strict Transport Security” support
• Experimental new anti-reflected-XSS feature called “XSS Auditor”

They’ve also pushed out a handful of security fixes, listed on the Chrome Releases blog post. Google’s spinning this release as adding “over 1,500 new features” to Chrome by virtue of the number of extensions already available to the Chrome community. This update isn’t the final blow to Firefox or anything along those lines, but we can’t help but think the folks at Mozilla would be a little worried.

Extensions are a large part of what’s set Firefox apart from Chrome, while Chrome has often out-paced Firefox in arenas like performance. As Chrome extensions hit the mainstream stable release, we could see a lot of people considering the switch.

Chrome 4.0.etc. is a free, stable release for Windows only but you can only expect the other OS’s versions to be caught up fairly quickly.

Microsoft has been preparing users for IE8 for a good year now, stressing performance improvements, better support for Internet technology standards, the addition of new features to help people keep track of most visited sites and favorite sources of information, and of course, security, as highlights of the new browser. According to the report Microsoft released Thursday, based on research conducted by NSS Labs, IE8′s Release Candidate 1 was 69 percent effective at catching malware before it did damage to a user’s system. Mozilla Firefox 3.07 came in second with a 30 percent effectiveness rate, with Apple Safari’s 3 in third place with a 24-percent rate and Google’s Chrome 1.0.154 in fourth place with 16 percent effectiveness rate

NSS Labs said in the report that the data was collected from tests conducted in just over 12 days from Feb. 26 through March 10 in its labs in Austin, Texas. During the course of the test, the company said it monitored connectivity to ensure the browsers could access the live malware sites being tested, and performed 141 discrete tests. The margin of error of the tests was 3.76 percent, according to NSS Labs. Amy Barzdukas, a senior director at Microsoft, acknowledged that it might be a conflict of interest for Microsoft to sponsor a report in which IE8 came out on top in terms of security. However, she encouraged people to “look closely at the results” before making a judgment call on the validity of the report.

IE8 will be included as part of the Windows 7 OS. However, for the first time since adding browser technology to its operating system, Microsoft will give users the ability to turn off IE8 as a feature in the system. This decision was outlined in a blog post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Microsoft is under pressure from an ongoing antitrust case in the European Union to give users more browser choice in Windows.

As for the Linux version, Google initially thought that a Windows clone would be acceptable, since Chrome itself is already such a fast application. However, the people working on the Linux version of Chrome made a case for using Gtk+ instead, and Google went with that option. Since Chrome is open source, it could still be possible that a Qt version will be developed independently of Google, of course.

When it comes to the Mac version, Goodger explains that the plan there has been to develop a native version all along. ”A Windows-clone would most definitely not be acceptable on MacOS X,” Goodger says, ”where the APIs for UI development are highly evolved and have many outstanding features. So that’s always been the plan there.” The Mac version is coming along nicely, and Google hopes to deliver both the Linux and Mac versions somewhere in June. Hopefully, they will also implement something like Firefox’s NoScript extension because according to some users, the security model is still lacking.