The IT Nerd

It seems that more than half the states in the USA are about to team up to launch an antitrust investigation. At least that’s what the Washington Post is reporting:

More than half of the nation’s state attorneys general are readying an investigation into Google for potential antitrust violations, scheduled to be announced next week, marking a major escalation in U.S. regulators’ efforts to probe Silicon Valley’s largest companies.

A smaller group of these state officials, representing the broader coalition, is expected to unveil the investigation at a Monday news conference in Washington, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss a law enforcement proceeding on the record, cautioning the plans could change.

It is unclear whether some or all of the attorneys general also plan to open or announce additional probes into other tech giants, including Amazon and Facebook, which have faced similar U.S. antitrust scrutiny. The states’ effort is expected to be bipartisan and could include more than 30 attorneys general, one of the people said.

This is big trouble for Google as if they are deemed to be doing bad things on the antitrust front, things will get ugly. Just ask Microsoft when they ran into issues on the antitrust front. You have bet that there’s a bunch of execs at Google who are sweating buckets right now as this is far from a trivial development for the company.

Last week, I posted this tweet:

The good news here is that Apple patched all the exploits found on this site. Via @appleinsider https://t.co/pFVjcSnqcb

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) August 30, 2019

This was mind blowing that there were this many exploits for the iPhone floating around out there. The good news is that Apple patched them earlier this year. But Forbes has a story that indicates not only was this more extensive than thought, but we now know who the target was. And we now know that Google wasn’t telling us all the details:

Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation said that Google’s own Android operating system and Microsoft Windows PCs were also targeted in a campaign that sought to infect the computers and smartphones of the Uighur ethnic group in China. That community has long been targeted by the Chinese government, in particular in the Xinjiang region, where surveillance is pervasive.

Google’s and Microsoft’s operating systems were targeted via the same websites that launched the iPhone hacks, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. That Android and Windows were targeted is a sign that the hacks were part of a broad, two-year effort that went beyond Apple phones and infected many more than first suspected. One source suggested that the attacks were updated over time for different operating systems as the tech usage of the Uighur community changed…

The attacks appear to form part of a mass surveillance operation taking place on Uighur civilians, who’ve faced various forms of persecution in Xinjiang. Surveillance cameras are scattered across the region and facial recognition is prevalent.

Googles reputation has taken a monster dive with this revelation. When I first read this, it seemed that this were centered around iOS. But that’s apparently not true. They kind of left out the fact that Android which is Google’s own OS was affected by this along with Microsoft Windows. That’s a #Fail on Google’s part. Someone needs to slap them over that.

As for the fact that China is apparently behind this. I’m not shocked. China are the dirtiest players in the game. You can bet that they had other attacks on every platform ready to go after these ones were discovered. Hopefully this incident forces everyone from the average user to Microsoft, Apple, and Google to up their game.

From the “this is insanely stupid” file comes this situation which I think you will agree is a facepalm moment:

An interior design tools startup called Mosss on Wednesday sued Google to get it to restore its data after someone at the startup accidentally deleted the firm’s G Suite account. In a pro se lawsuit [Warning: PDF] filed in US District Court in Oakland, California, Mosss, under its previous corporate name, Musey Inc., asked Google to help it restore its data…

Except perhaps not. According to the complaint, the company was informed – it’s not clear whether Google or a third-party advised this – that it could seek a subpoena or file a civil lawsuit to access its data. So that’s what it has done.

A lot of companies think the cloud takes away the need for them to make backups of important data. But when they do something dumb, something like this happens. But I will admit that this is the most extreme case of a customer flipping out at a cloud provider that I have heard of. Let this be a lesson to people and companies out there. Just because you are “in the cloud” does not mean that common sense does not apply. You need to make backups of all your data so you don’t become like these people. And people like me laugh at you as a result.

If you are trying to get to Google Calendar, and you can’t it’s Google and not you as per this:

Google Calendar is currently experiencing a service disruption. Please stay tuned for updates or follow here: https://t.co/2SGW3X1cQn

— Google Workspace (@GoogleWorkspace) June 18, 2019

But the good news is that it is starting to come back after a more than two-hour outage this morning. But full service isn’t expected to be restored until 10:40 a.m. Pacific time. Which is subject to change. For those on the East Coast. Early lunch perhaps? Unless you keep your lunch dates in Google Calendar that is.

Google’s status page indicates that Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Hangouts, Meet, Chat, and Voice as all being subject to a massive outage that seems to be hitting Google users across the east coast of the US and a handful of places across the globe from the looks of it via Down Detector. At present, there is no estimate for recovery, nor has Google provided information regarding the root cause of the incident. So if you can’t get to any of these services, it’s Google and not you.

Watch this space for any updates.

Update 7:30 p.m. Eastern time: Google reports that all services have been restored, more than four hours after the first reported outage.

Google says a small number of its enterprise customers mistakenly had their passwords stored on its systems in plaintext. The exact number was not disclosed. “We recently notified a subset of our enterprise G Suite customers that some passwords were stored in our encrypted internal systems unhashed,” said Google vice president of engineering Suzanne Frey:

The search giant disclosed the exposure Tuesday but declined to say exactly how many enterprise customers were affected. “We recently notified a subset of our enterprise G Suite customers that some passwords were stored in our encrypted internal systems unhashed,” said Google vice president of engineering Suzanne Frey.

Passwords are typically scrambled using a hashing algorithm to prevent them from being read by humans. G Suite administrators are able to manually upload, set and recover new user passwords for company users, which helps in situations where new employees are on-boarded. But Google said it discovered in April that the way it implemented password setting and recovery for its enterprise offering in 2005 was faulty and improperly stored a copy of the password in plaintext.

Google has since removed the feature.

No consumer Gmail accounts were affected by the security lapse, said Frey.

I’m sorry, but Google didn’t make a mistake. What you see here ladies and gentlemen is incompetence. This is a multi-billion dollar company failing at basic security and not finding their mistake for 15 years. Sorry, Google, you don’t get to claim anything but your own incompetence and stupidity when it comes to this security screw up.

#EpicFail

European regulators have slapped Google with a $1.7 billion fine on charges that its advertising practices violated local antitrust laws:

Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s top competition commissioner, announced the punishment at a news conference, accusing Google of engaging in “illegal practices” in a bid to “cement its dominant market position” in the search and advertising markets. The new penalty adds to Google’s costly headaches in Europe, where Vestager now has fined the tech giant more than $9 billion in total for a series of antitrust violations. Her actions stand in stark contrast to the United States, where regulators — facing a flood of complaints that big tech companies have become too big and powerful — have not brought a single antitrust case against Google or any of its peers in recent years, reflecting a widening transatlantic schism over Silicon Valley and its business practices.

For those keeping score at home, that’s the third time in three years that they’ve been hit by fines by the EU for bad behavior. At this point if you’re Google you have to wonder what you have to do to stop this from happening. If I were running the company, maybe I would start with altering the company’s behavior as it has to be clear to anyone that they are clearly doing something either wrong or something that goes against their meaningless mantra of “do no evil “.

Google today launched its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

Stadia is not a dedicated console or set-top box. The platform will be accessible on a variety of platforms: browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices. In an onstage demonstration of Stadia, Google showed someone playing a game on a Chromebook, then playing it on a phone, then immediately playing it on PC — a low-end PC, no less –, picking up where the game left off in real time. Stadia will be powered by Google’s worldwide data centers, which live in more than 200 countries and territories, streamed over hundreds of millions of miles of fiber optic cable, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Phil Harrison, previously at PlayStation and Xbox, now at Google, said the company will give developers access to its data centers to bring games to Stadia. Harrison said that players will be able to access and play Stadia games, like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, within seconds. Harrison showed a YouTube video of Odyssey featuring a “Play” button that would offer near-instant access to the game. Pichai announced the new platform at the Game Developers Conference, saying that Google want to build a gaming platform for everyone, and break down barriers to access for high-end games.

Users will be able to move from YouTube directly into gameplay without any downloads. Google says this can be done in as little as 5 seconds. At launch, Stadia will stream games at 4k resolution, but Google claimed in the future it will be able to stream at a video quality of 8k.

Here’s the catch, will this service be around in the long term given that Google has a habit of abandoning stuff. But I guess we’ll find out as I can’t blame them for wanting to jump into this space.