DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard)

DuckDuckGo, a one-man-band search engine based out of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is aiming at Google’s privacy practices with an unusual tactic: a billboard in San Francisco that proclaims “Google Tracks You. We Don’t.”

The ad, which cost DuckDuckGo founder and coder Gabriel Weinberg $7000 for four weeks, went up Thursday in San Francisco’s tech-heavy SOMA district, along the highway dumping cars off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. While the billboard is far from Google’s Mountain View HQ, San Francisco is a Google-town, where many residents who work at the search giant board Wi-Fi enable, black executive shuttles for the daily commute to the Valley proper.

At issue is Google’s habit of sending along a searcher’s query to the site they are visiting, according to DuckDuckGo’s founder and sole employee Gabriel Weinberg. So if you search on “athlete’s foot” on Google, then click on a link, that site gets told that you searched on “athlete’s foot.” That’s something that not many people know, Weinberg says, and something his search engine doesn’t do.

Moreover, third-party ad tracking networks can also grab that info and add it to the store of information the companies store on users, Weinberg adds. It’s not clear if any ad tracking networks actually do grab this information, since those companies are notoriously unforthcoming about what data they collect.

When talking about the idea, Weinberg built a quick website, donttrack.us, at the suggestion of friends, which took off earlier this month, and it’s privacy message seemed to resonate with users. In fact,DuckDuckGo’s traffic doubled after the site got attention on Hacker News and Stumbleupon and is now up to about 160,000 queries a day, which equates to about 5 million queries a month.

Weinberg chalks that success up to people not knowing that their search terms were available to marketers on search result pages.

“People know that Google is storing searches and they know about the employee snooping,” Wienberg said. “The part many don’t realize is that the serach term is being sent when the search is in the Google link.”

While that’s a pittance compared to the billions served daily by Google, but many of DuckDuckGo’s users are alpha geeks, much as Google was adopted by the tech set back in the late 1990s. Weinberg powers his search engine using his own web crawler, results from Bing, and APIs from a number of companies, including the mathematical answer engine WolframAlpha.

DuckDuckGo, along with the new, well-funded start-up Blekko, have also been challenging Google on relevance, focusing on removing many spam and low-quality content farms from their results. That approach is resonating, as tech observers have begun to turn on Google for the number of low-quality sites that show up in search results. That’s thanks to search optimization methods used by sites to lure searchers, even if a webpage lacks any quality content.

Weinberg’s search engine avoids the problem of referrers — the habit of web browsers telling a new webpage what page you just came from — by doing a quick redirect any time you click on a link in DuckDuckGo. Like Google, DuckDuckGo also offers an HTTPS version of its search engine, which naturally only passes the top-level domain you are coming from (e.g. https://google.com), instead of passing the entire url along (e.g. http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=what+I’m+searching+for).

Weinberg’s not the first to raise the question. Christopher Soghoian, an independent privacy activist who has worked at the FTC and been a Google Fellow, filed an FTC complaint in October last year, alleging Google is violating its privacy promises to users by passing along the queries.

Google itself briefly turned off referrers when it moved to AJAX search, and its HTTPS site, but faced a backlash from online marketers who live and breathe by where they rank in Google searches.

Matt Cutts, Google’s public face for webmasters, defended Google’s policy in a thread on Hacker News, saying the company cares about privacy and users can always try their HTTPS search. As for why the search giant won’t stop sending referrers, Cutts explained, “When Google switched to AJAX-based search, that temporarily stopped sending referrers, and lots of people screamed bloody murder.”

But Weinberg counters that there are other ways for websites to get the data they want without being able to tie it to a particular user using Google’s Webmaster tools, rather than relying on analytics tracking scripts installed on their own website.

“It will tell which terms you are getting traffic from, and how you rank for that term,” Weinberg says. “You can get that info if you need it, so you almost don’t need them to send it.”

-wired.com

US private equity to take stake in Russia's Kaspersky Lab

After the deal, US-based GA will become the second largest single shareholder, the Moscow-based company said in a statement, adding that the financial details were not being published.

Vedomosti business daily on Thursday quoted Natalya Kasperskaya, the co-founder and chairman of the board of directors, as saying that GA was acquiring up to 20 percent the company.

Kaspersky Lab is Europe's largest producer of anti-virus software, according to its website, which says that it employs more than 2,000 people.

Last year, it was ranked 79 in the top 100 world software companies by revenue, which reached $480 million.

In 2009, Kaspersky Lab's share of the world information security market for private computers was around 5.8 percent, executive director Yevgeny Bukyakin told AFP.

Kommersant business daily quoted a source close to the deal as saying that around 15 percent was being sold, worth between $150 million and $225 million.

Kasperskaya told Kommersant: "The company has grown to such a level that we need to get access to capital markets and the new investor will help us to stage an IPO."

Executive director Bukyakin told AFP that the initial public offering of shares could be held within the next three years.

"In the medium term, in the next three years, perhaps a little more, we expect to remain a private company and to concentrate on developing our business. Then the next natural step for the company will be an IPO," he said.

With this in mind, "we are counting on the help of General Atlantic," he added.

The company was co-founded in is 1997 by Natalya Kasperskaya and Yevgeny Kaspersky, a couple who are now divorced but still work together.

Kaspersky studied computer science, cryptography and mathematics at a Moscow institute used by the KGB secret services to train its staff.

He later worked at a defence ministry research institute until 1991, where he first began writing anti-virus programmes.-

physorg.com

An Eyeball Camera, Now with Zoom Cameras built using flexible electronics could find many uses.

The burgeoning field of stretchable electronics promises to change the way we think about gadgets. Silicon chips, once confined to flat, rigid shapes, will break out of the planar mold. One experimental example is a camera, modeled after an eyeball, that features a curved array of light sensors.

Eye of the beholder: Inside this experimental camera, a stretchable sensor array sits below a liquid lens. Water is pumped into both components to change the magnification of the image captured by the camera. Credit: John Rogers

Now a new design gives this curved camera a boost: the shape of the lens and of its sensor can be changed in synchrony, providing a 3.5x zoom. This provides a key piece of missing functionality for the original camera concept, says John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Rogers led the development of the device. "The result is a complete camera system, with tunable lens and tunable detector, capable of taking pictures," he says. Rogers and his coauthors published details of the work on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A camera with curved sensors—analogous to the curved retina of the eye—has certain advantages over one with a flat sensor. Its field of view is wider, and overall the device can be simpler and more compact. Possible applications include cameras for surveillance, phones, endoscopic imaging, or even tiny video cameras embedded in football helmets, says Yonggang Huang, coauthor and engineering professor at Northwestern University.

The camera is about as wide as a nickel and has two main parts, a lens and a sensor array. The lens consists of a thin membrane stretched over a transparent glass window. The shape of the lens, which corresponds to the camera's focal length, changes when the space between the glass and the membrane is filled with water.

For the camera to produce quality images, its sensor array must adjust to match the lens. Therefore, the detector consists of a 16-by-16 array of ultra-thin silicon diodes, connected by thin wires. The array, originally fabricated on a flat substrate, sits on top of a stretchable sheet and is bonded to a plate with a circular opening. When water is pumped out of a chamber below the plate creating negative pressure, the stretchable sensors are pulled down, producing a concave shape. Modulating the water pressure in the lens and below the sensors, makes it possible to produce a variety of magnifications.

Data collected by the sensor array is transferred to a computer, where it is used to create an image. The camera has a relatively small number of pixels, so the system uses computational trickery to boost the resolution. By taking multiple pictures from slightly different positions and using special imaging algorithms, the researchers were able to achieve a 100-fold increase in resolution. The same basic technique was used to compensate for damaged pixels.

After years of theoretical modeling and fine-tuning the fabrication and transfer process, Rogers and his colleagues have found effective ways to make silicon stretch into a variety of shapes for various applications. The approach involves connecting ultrathin islands of silicon using precisely patterned wires on a conformable surface. When a surface is stretched, the silicon islands are spared the strain because the wires allow them to separate, and because they themselves are so thin.

Organic and printed materials can also be used to make stretchable electronics, but they can't match silicon in terms of speed. Applications for stretchable silicon circuits range from electrical sensors that sit on top of the brain to wearable solar cells. Rogers's startup MC10recently announced a collaboration with Reebok to integrate stretchable electronics into sportswear to monitor a person's performance during training or rehabilitation.

The new camera design is "a fantastic demonstration of the technology toolbox that John Rogers and Yonggang Huang have pioneered over the years," says Heiko Jacobs, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota. Rogers and Huang are able to "integrate high-performance devices on stretchable and curved substrates while maintaining electrical activity," he says. "It will dramatically change the appearance of devices and systems which can take new forms and shapes that a few years ago would have been impossible to build."

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