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Google upgrading to Ext4, hires former Linux Foundation CTO

Well-known Linux kernel developer Ted Ts’o announced this week that he has joined Google, leaving behind his previous role as CTO of the Linux Foundation. Ts’o, an expert on filesystem development, played a central role in creating Ext4, the latest generation of the dominant Linux filesystem.

In a statement on his blog, Ts’o expressed enthusiasm for his new job and pointed to a recent mailing list post by a Google engineer which reveals that the search giant is in the process of upgrading its storage infrastructure from Ext2 to Ext4. Ts’o says that he will continue working on Ext4 and other parts of the Linux kernel while he is at Google.

His departure from the Linux Foundation is not sudden or unexpected—the organization has an informal policy of rotating people through the CTO position at regular intervals. When Ts’o took the job in 2008, he came from IBM and it was understood that he would serve a two-year term with the foundation. With his term completed, he has decided to join Google instead of going back to Big Blue.

Ext4 faced some criticism during its development following the discovery of possible data loss issues relating to the filesystem’s implementation of delayed allocation. Ts’o created patches that have addressed those issues, minimizing the potential risk. Google’s decision to deploy Ext4 is a strong endorsement of the filesystem’s reliability and affirms its suitability for enterprise adoption.

In a mailing list post, Google engineer Michael Rubin provided more insight into the decision-making process that led the company to adopt Ext4. The filesystem offered significant performance advantages over Ext2 and nearly rivaled the high-performance XFS filesystem during the company’s tests. Ext4 was ultimately chosen over XFS because it would allow Google to do a live in-place upgrade of its existing Ext2 filesystems.

“The driving performance reason to upgrade is that while ext2 had been ‘good enough’ for a very long time the metadata arrangement on a stale file system was leading to what we call ‘read inflation’. This is where we end up doing many seeks to read one block of data. In general latency from poor block allocation was causing performance hiccups,” he wrote. “For our workloads we saw ext4 and xfs as ‘close enough’ in performance in the areas we cared about. The fact that we had a much smoother upgrade path with ext4 clinched the deal.”

The Linux Foundation has not yet announced who will be the organization’s next CTO. It would be fitting for the foundation to use its newly-announced Linux Jobs board to find a worthy candidate, but it’s more likely that the organization will pick someone from their growing roster of member companies.

Next version of Nexus will be enterprise phone

Google Inc executive Andy Rubin said on Friday that the next version of the Nexus One phone, which was made by HTC Corp, will be for enterprise users and might have a physical keyboard.

Such a device could potentially pose a competitive threat to BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which has a strong position in the enterprise cellphone market.

Rubin, the brains behind Google’s Android operating system, made the comment during an interview with Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg at an event hosted by the newspaper.

The comment followed Google’s announcement earlier this week that it would sell phones direct to consumers via its website.

Google’s Growth and Censorship Woes in China

Google this week said it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn, its search engine for users in China, and that the company may exit China altogether. Google has had a bumpy ride in China, where it trails leading search engine Baidu.com by a large margin and has faced tough government censors. The below timeline tracks Google’s history in China:

Sep. 2000: Google starts offering a Chinese-language version of its search engine for worldwide users.

Sep. 2002: Chinese visitors to Google.com are rerouted to other Web sites as the domain name is temporarily hijacked in the country.

July 2005: Google appoints former Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee as head of Google’s China operations. Microsoft sues Google to block Lee from being hired, but the companies later reach a settlement and Lee keeps the post.

Jan. 2006: Google launches Google.cn, a version of its site for Chinese users that censors pornographic and certain politically sensitive search results. Human rights groups slam Google for bowing to Chinese government demands for censorship.

April 2007: Google apologizes for using part of an application developed by China’s Sohu.com in Google software that lets users type Chinese characters by inputting standard English characters.

March 2008: China blocks YouTube and Google News after riots in the country’s western region of Tibet, a move apparently meant to stop the spread of information about the politically charged events. YouTube and other Google services such as Blogger have previously been blocked in China.

Aug. 2008: Google begins offering free, ad-supported downloads of music to users in China in competition with a similar service from Chinese search leader Baidu.

March 2009: China again blocks YouTube. It remains blocked through the present.

June 2009: China publicly criticizes Google for allowing Google.cn to serve up pornographic search results. Google.com and other Google services are briefly blocked in the country before Google removes the sensitive results from its search engine.

Sep. 2009: Kai-Fu Lee leaves Google China to start his own company, in a move seen as a blow to Google.

Oct. 2009: A Chinese group says it is considering legal action over alleged copyright infringement by Google in the company’s book scanning project. Chinese authors and media start adding their voices to the criticism of Google.

Jan. 2010: Google says it will stop censoring Google.cn and that the move may lead it to close its China offices. Google also says it has been targeted by sophisticated cyberattacks that originated in China and appeared meant to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google removes banking apps from Android Marketplace

A programmer who goes by the nickname “09Droid” has just illuminated security concerns sure to come into sharper focus as tech and financial services corporations move to popularize mobile device banking.

Antivirus supplier F-Secure says 09Droid offered more than 50 mobile banking applications for sale through Google’s Android Marketplace, the app store for smartphones based on the Android operating system. Google pulled the apps on Monday. Several banking firms included in 09Droid’s apps issued warnings for their patrons not to use them.

F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen says no one in the security community had a chance to reverse engineer 09Droid’s first-of-its-kind banking app, so it could simply be a program that redirected users to the bank’s online website.

On the other hand, 09Droid could have rather easily programmed in stealthy code to silently steal account log-ins. The programmer did sell some number of apps prior to Google yanking them. Hypponen notes that Android apps do not go through an approval process akin to the certification process required of apps made available through the iPhone App Store or through Signed by Symbian programs.

As a rule of thumb, he recommends avoiding any third-party banking apps on any platform unless you know for certain it is expressly approved by your bank. To date, F-Secure has not seen any malicious apps sold through iPhone App Store, Palm App Catalog, BlackBerry App World or Windows Mobile Marketplace. However, the security company has seen the “Signed by Symbian” certification process subverted a couple of times.

New Google Phone?

A Google company blog post over the weekend raised questions as to whether a new phone being tested by Google employees is just a way for employees to improve upon the Android operating system or is an actual prototype that will be released in 2010.

Numerous sources online have reported the device’s existence, including photos of a handset that resembles a cross between the HTC Hero and Passion, running Android 2.1. Few specs for the Nexus One are known; however, most reports suggest that the phone is an unlocked GSM device that will sell directly to consumers. Additionally, HTC has filed a report for the Nexus One with the FCC.

Ken Hyers, senior analyst for Technology Business Research, questions the logic of a solely Google-branded device. “What I find fascinating is the idea that they are just on the cusp of some really good success and now they’re going to go and compete with their own partners. I don’t think it’s wise,” Hyers said.

Hyers said that Google may see an opportunity to develop a device that connects to all of Google’s applications and services. However, he still finds the idea full of holes. “The great thing about an unlocked GSM phone is that you can take it anywhere. However, Nokia’s tried that in the United States and failed miserably,” he said.

“Nokia has had great success with the unlocked model in Europe. So maybe we shouldn’t look at this strictly from a U.S. viewpoint,” he said, noting that if the device is being developed for an international market, it would not be in direct U.S. competition with Google partners such as Motorola and HTC.

Sprint to offer HTC Hero

Sprint will be getting the highly anticipated Android-based HTC Hero, sans the quirky form factor with which the device debuted in Europe with T-Mobile and Orange.

According to a press release, the Sprint Hero will be available at all Sprint retail locations and online beginning Oct. 11 for $179.99 after a $50 instant savings and a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. Pre-registration begins today online.

From pictures provided by Sprint, the U.S. version of the Hero does not appear to take the device’s European form factor, which included a unique beveled mouth piece.

European & US HTC HeroRoger Entner, senior vice president of the communications sector for Nielsen IAG, said the U.S. version is a great improvement. “I have no idea why it was left out, but they got rid of a great big wart,” Entner said. “Ideally, you want to keep it flat. That bevel on the European version was just an admission that they couldn’t get the mic and voice quality right.”

Enter said the quality of the recent wave of Android phones has produced some possible competitors to the iPhone. “We’ll see if they’re competitive with the iPhone. They should come pretty close,” Enter said, adding: “Hopefully it means less iPhone envy on Captiol Hill.”

The HTC Hero features an integrated 5 MP camera and camcorder, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, Wi-Fi, exapandable microSD slot up to 32 GB and integrated Facebook, Twitter and Flikr.

Including the Hero, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Tour, Sprint now has three high-profile smartphone devices on its network. The carrier also offers what is considered one of the cheapest rate plans on the market. Sprint’s Simply Everything plan provides unlimited nationwide calling, texting, e-mail, data and navigation for $99.99 per month.

Youtube to be selling new movies.

YouTube had to grow up eventually, didn’t it? It could pretend, for a while at least, under the ownership of Internet titan Google that it was still all about “you,” but the future is a pesky thing and keeps bugging for answers about sustainability. Several published reports are indicating that YouTube is in talks with Hollywood studios to begin offering rentals of “newer” movies as paid content. Just what the world needs–another pay movie provider. Apple, Netflix, Amazon and a multitude of pay TV/video-on-demand providers are already in that game.

To YouTube’s advantage, it can bring a name and a rep to that market that is at least as well known as anyone else’s, and perhaps could have more pull with a certain brand on Internet user. Also, its user base is gigantic. But, if paid content from Hollywood is the new attraction, maybe that name should be changed: NotYouTube? TheirTube? Or maybe two different brands–For-Profit YouTube and Non-Profit YouTube.

Chrome OS and Android may “merge” into one in the future.

+ = ?

Speaking at a press conference this week, ostensibly to discuss the new netbook platform but which covered various points of Google’s business, Schmidt and company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page discussed the open-nature of the new platform. While in their initial blog post about Chrome OS they indicated that it and Android would remain separate, and that “choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google”, there now seems to be signs that the two will shift from parallel to integrated projects.

The trio also discussed the nature of open-source software and how they do not envisage Chrome OS as a direct competitor to Windows. In fact, Schmidt said, “Microsoft is welcome to put Internet Explorer on our operating system,” but that “it’s highly unlikely they would do it. They would have to port it and the port is not trivial … the ball is in their court.” Referring to Google’s well-known “do no evil” pledge, he highlighted the fact that because Chrome is open-source “even if we had an evil moment [to block out Microsoft], we would be unsuccessful.”

The first netbooks running Google Chrome OS are expected in the second half of 2010.

Google To Launch Chrome OS, Taking Aim At Windows

Even as Microsoft begins to make some headway against Google in Internet search, Redmond now finds the tables turned in the PC operating system business.

In short, Google has targeted a new market: Windows.

In a post to its corporate blog late Tuesday, the company announced a new project called the Google Chrome OS – the company’s “attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

The company said Google Chrome OS “is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.” The new OS consists of a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel, the company said.

Later this year, Google said, it will open-source the code. Netbooks running the software will be available in the 2010 second half, according to Google, which said it is already talking to partners about the project.

Google already has developed one operating system – Android, which is targeted at mobile phones, and which itself is expected to be used in some netbooks. The company said the two are separate projects.

“Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android,” the company said on the blog post. “Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”

Google said Chrome OS is intended to be fast, simple and secure. “The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web,” the company reports. “And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

The company said the software will work on both x86 and ARM chips.

SonyEricsson plans and Android Phone

The rise of the Android continues, as Sony Ericsson and Nokia are both preparing Android-powered mobile phones. Pictures and details have leaked of a Sony Ericsson handset named Rachel, while The Guardian reports Nokia is planning to unveil a handset at the Nokia World conference in September.

The Sony Ericsson handset is codenamed Rachel, so expect legions of copycat haircuts on other phones. Or maybe it’s named after Rachael, the robotic love interest in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner. Android, get it?

Rachel is built on Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 platform, with a processor speed of up to 1GHz. If you want to stroke Rachel you’re in luck, as it’s reported to sport a giant 102mm (4-inch) touchscreen. It also includes an 8-megapixel camera complete with autofocus. More good news: there’s a 3.5mm headphone connector as well as the mini-USB port.

HTC is currently top droid with three phones, including the forthcoming Hero, wizardly Magic and the original G1. Other manufacturers appear to have been on a break from the Google operating system, but that’s set to change with the new phones from Son Eric, and possibly Nokia. Nokia has denied the rumour — after all the company has only recently launched its own app platform, the Ovi store. Meanwhile, Dell is rumoured to be developing an Android-based iPod touch-killer.

Also, possible SonyEricsson Android interface is spotted on unofficial SonyEricsson Blog: