Protect your Google Account with Password Alert

Posted by Drew Hintz, Security Engineer and Justin Kosslyn, Google Ideas

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Would you enter your email address and password on this page?

This looks like a fairly standard login page, but it’s not. It’s what we call a “phishing” page, a site run by people looking to receive and steal your password. If you type your password here, attackers could steal it and gain access to your Google Account—and you may not even know it. This is a common and dangerous trap: the most effective phishing attacks can succeed 45 percent of the time, nearly 2% of messages to Gmail are designed to trick people into giving up their passwords, and various services across the web send millions upon millions of phishing emails, every day.

To help keep your account safe, today we’re launching Password Alert, a free, open-source Chrome extension that protects your Google and Google Apps for Work Accounts. Once you’ve installed it, Password Alert will show you a warning if you type your Google password into a site that isn’t a Google sign-in page. This protects you from phishing attacks and also encourages you to use different passwords for different sites, a security best practice.

Heres how it works for consumer accounts. Once you’ve installed and initialized Password Alert, Chrome will remember a “scrambled” version of your Google Account password. It only remembers this information for security purposes and doesn’t share it with anyone. Next, if you type your password into a site that isnt a Google sign-in page, Password Alert will show you a notice like the one below. This alert will tell you that you’re at risk of being phished so you can update your password and protect yourself.

Password Alert is also available to Google for Work customers, including Google Apps and Drive for Work. Your administrator can install Password Alert for everyone in the domains they manage, and receive alerts when Password Alert detects a possible problem. This can help spot malicious attackers trying to break into employee accounts and also reduce password reuse. Administrators can find more information in the Help Center.

We work to protect users from phishing attacks in a variety of ways. We’re constantly improving our Safe Browsing technology, which protects more than 1 billion people on Chrome, Safari and Firefox from phishing and other dangerous sites via bright, red warnings. We also offer tools like 2-Step Verification and Security Key that people can use to protect their Google Accounts and stay safe online. And of course, you can also take a Security Checkup at any time to make sure the safety and security information associated with your account is current.

To get started with Password Alert, visit the Chrome Web Store or the FAQ.

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Add Google to your iOS Apps with CocoaPods

Posted by Jonathan Beri, Product Manager

Today, we’re announcing that CocoaPods will be the primary channel to acquire Google SDKs for iOS. CocoaPods is a popular, free dependency manager for iOS that significantly simplifies the process of importing libraries and frameworks into Xcode. And it will help you manage your dependencies between our various libraries.

While there was a small but growing number of official Google Pods, as well as a few Pods written by other iOS developers, it was often difficult for developer to find the right SDK. With today’s announcement, some of our key libraries, like Google Cloud Messaging and the Google Maps SDK for iOS can now be found on the public CocoaPods service. Going forward, new iOS SDKs will be packaged and documented as Pods and published on cocoapods.org. You can find the full list of Google Pods and all supporting documentation at developer.google.com/ios/cocoapods.

If you havent used CocoaPods yet, now is a great time to give it a try. Add GoogleAnalytics to a Podfile to start counting new users. Or pod install your way to adding AdMob ads in your app. And check out pod try, a CocoaPods plugin that allows you to quickly launch our demo projects.

For more iOS developer protips and to learn more about Google’s iOS SDKs, please check out the Route 85 video series from Todd Kerpelman. We look forward to all the great Google-powered iOS apps you will create!

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Mobile Doc Scanner MDScan Apk v3 1 1 Patched

Extremely useful mobile tool gives users the power to scan any type of document, transform it into PDF format and share it right from your device.
With MDScan users are free to scan any type of document, ranging from receipts to text pages and almost everything in between, on the go anywhere and anytime.
A perfect companion for busy users, MDScan allows anyone to transform everything from invoices to whiteboards and classes notes, magazine articles and more into a PDF format in order to easily export them, share and e-mail it to others, or for any other reason they can come up with. MDScan automatically detects borders, corrects distortion, and equalizes brightness to create clear, legible documents at a very high speed for your convenience.
Going above and beyond other mobile scanning solutions MDScan offers Batch shooting mode for a super fast scanning so users can easily scan within seconds multiple pages and save scanned files for batch processing later.
The app shines in terms of uploading as well as all document conversion is performed locally right on users device. This means that you can upload documents to cloud storage services, including Dropbox, Google Docs, or Box.net, email services, or Facebook and Twitter that is guaranteed to go off quickly, without a hitch, and without risk of any potentially sensitive information becoming compromised.
Simply put theres enough for you to worry about without having to go out of your way to scan and convert files into PDFs should the need arise, and now with MDScan its one worry you wont ever have again.
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Main advantages and benefits
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? Transform any image into PDF format.
? Automatic, high quality document edge detection and perspective correction.
? Manual free Advanced image processing to enhance poor quality images and documents.
? Quickly scan and manage multi-page documents on the go
? Scan, upload or send any document quickly, including receipts, news and magazine articles, invoices, coupons, posters and much more
? Cloud storage and social network integration for accessibility and sharing
Don’t hesitate to contact us at any time and send your suggestions or questions to our support email. We try to do our best to answer to your comments as soon as possible.
This software is registered by Russian Federal Institute Of Industrial Property # 2013619506

WHATS NEW
Improved Lolipop (new API) Camera
Share multiple PDFs
Share PDF from list of scans by long click
Export scan as separated JPEG files
Minor interface improvments
Minor bugs fixes

This app has no advertisements

Download APK:
click here
Additional Server:
click here
Google Play Store:
click here

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Google Cast Remote Display Plugin for Unity

Posted by Leon Nicholls, Developer Programs Engineer

Today we launched the Google Cast Remote Display plugin for Unity to make it easy to take your Unity games to TVs. The Google Cast Remote Display APIs use the powerful GPUs, CPUs and sensors of your Android or iOS mobile device to render a local display on your mobile device and a remote display on your TV.

Unity is a very popular cross-platform game development platform that supports mobile devices. By combining the Google Cast Remote Display technology with the amazing rendering engine of Unity, you can now develop high-end gaming experiences that users can play on an inexpensive Chromecast and other Google Cast devices.

Games Using the Plugin

We have exciting gaming apps from our partners that already use the Remote Display plugin for Unity, with many more coming shortly.

Monopoly Here & Now is the latest twist on the classic Monopoly game. Travel the world visiting some of the world’s most iconic cities and landmarks and race to be the first player to fill your passport with stamps to win! Its a fun new way to play for the whole family.

Risk brings the original game of strategic conquest to the big screen. Challenge your friends, build your army, and conquer the world! The game includes the classic world map as well as two additional themed maps.

These games show that you can create games that look beautiful, using the power of a phone or tablet and send that amazing world to the TV.

Add the Remote Display Plugin to Your Game

You can download the Remote Display plugin for Unity from either GitHub or the Unity Asset Store. If you have an existing Unity game, simply import the Remote Display package and add the CastRemoteDisplayManager prefab to your scene. Next, set up cameras for the local and remote displays and configure them with the CastRemoteDisplayManager.

To display a Cast button in the UI so the user can select a Google Cast device, add the CastDefaultUI prefab to your scene.

Now you are ready to build and run the app. Once you connect to a Cast device you will see the remote camera view on the TV.

You have to consider how you will adapt your game interactions to support a multi-screen user experience. You can use the mobile device sensors to create abstract controls which interact with actions on the screen via motion or touch. Or you can create virtual controls where the player touches something on the device to control something else on the screen.

For visual design it is important not to fatigue the player by making them constantly look up and down. The Google Cast UX team has developed the Google Cast Games UX Guidelines to explain how to make the user experience of cast-enabled games consistent and predictable.

Developer Resources

Learn more about Googles official Unity plugins here. To see a more detailed description on how to use the Remote Display plugin for Unity, read our developer documentation and try our codelab. We have also published a sample Unity game on the Unity Asset Store and GitHub that is UX compliant. Join our G+ community to share your Google Cast developer experience.

With over 20 million Chromecast devices sold, the opportunity for developers is huge, and it’s simple to add Remote Display to an existing Unity game. Now you can take your game to the biggest screen in millions of user’s homes.

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The healthcare industry is moving to Google Apps for Work

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps for Work

Companies of all sizes across a number of industries have come to realize that cloud computing is transforming the way they run their business and how people work together. This is especially true for the healthcare industry, where access to information quickly, accurately and securely is vitally important.

That’s why organizations covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) rely on Google’s robust infrastructure to store personal healthcare information. We provide the healthcare industry with the tools they need to help address HIPAA compliance and allow employees to have access to their information when they need it, where they need it. HIPAA compliance coverage for Google Apps for Work services includes Gmail, Calendar, Google Drive (including Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms), Vault and Sites. New and existing Google Apps customers may obtain a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) from our Google Apps Help Center.

With millions of customers using Google Apps, HIPAA compliance is a critical feature for businesses and organizations that handle health care information, and an important consideration for hospitals, health organizations and governments. Joe Ganneman, CIO for Rockford Orthopedics, a leading bone and joint center in Illinois, believes that “from a HIPAA compliance standpoint, you are actually in a better shape by putting your data in a cloud infrastructure like Googles, than you are trying to store it locally.” And Flint Waters, CIO for the State of Wyoming, says that “using Google Apps made us confident we would meet strict HIPAA requirements and demonstrate to our citizens that their data was on one of the most secure architectures out there.”

HIPAA is just one of many regulations and standards Google supports, empowering our customers across different industries to benefit from the cloud. For organizations operating in highly regulated sectors, the use of Google’s services provides the tools and protections needed to meet compliance requirements.

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Cameras in Phones what do we really need

An awful lot is being said about mobile phone cameras just lately; and we have HTC to thank for opening the conversation with the introduction of their HTC One which has half as many pixels at twice the size of anyone elses. Before we begin Im going to get some ground rules. I wont use marketing terms; so I will talk about how many pixels a camera sensor has, and what size they are. You wont hear me talking about mega- or ultra- anything. Next is that I will show my meaning with diagrams - Im a visual person and it helps me to explain. Please bear with me on this post; theres a lot to read but its worth it at the end.

A digital camera uses a lens to focus an image onto an oblong of special material which has a number of sensors on it; each sensor is called a pixel and usually contains three sub-pixels; a red, a blue (actually two blues but dont worry about that) and a green one. Each of these sends a signal to the camera depending how much light of that colour is falling onto it. Bigger pixels produce a bigger signal for the same amount of light than smaller ones. When signals are small, the amount of noise (erroneous signal levels produced simply by electrons moving around) is a bigger percentage of the whole signal because noise is a constant backdrop. When the signals are bigger therefore, its easier to pick out the signal, from the noise. More noise means that the signal produced by a smaller pixel is less accurate which means the final photo may not have exactly the same colour from each pixel receiving the same light.

Camera sensors line up their pixels in rows and columns - and the cameras rating is often quoted by counting them. For instance a 10MP camera contains ten million pixels (roughly). These are arranged in a rectangular grid with a side length ratio of 16:9 - so thats 4213 pixels across and 2370 pixels high. If you have a sensor which is 7mm across, each pixel is 7/4213=1.662 microns across (microns = thousandths of a millimetre).

In the real world, standard sensor sizes and pixel sizes exist; a 13 million pixel camera in a phone will have pixels about 1.1 microns across; this gives a sensor width of about 4.55mm (there are 4128 pixels across the image). In the HTC One, the best photos are 2688 pixels across, and the pixels are 2 microns across giving a sensor width of about 5.4mm.

Figure 1 - 4 million large pixels

Figure 2 - 8 million (smaller) pixels on same size sensor

Now we can start looking at construction. Take a look at Figure 1. This shows a camera with large pixels - the lens is focussing the image onto an area exactly the same size as the sensor. In Figure 2, we gave the camera more pixels (which really does give more detail in the image but at the expense of noise and grain - and also less sensitivity at low light levels). Of course; straight away you want more, BIGGER pixels. Figure 3 shows that if you make that happen, the image doesnt cover the whole sensor; the light falls on a little bit of it. So - in Figure 4 we move the sensor further away to ensure the image covers all the pixels.

Figure 3 - 8 million large pixels with no other changes

Figure 4 - Sensor moved away, but the lens size is unchanged.

However; the same amount of light, entering the lens, is now spread over a wider area: this dims the light hitting each individual pixel, which reduces the signal output and increases the noise. The only way to change this is to make the lens bigger - the aperture wider - so that more light gets in. This is shown finally in Figure 5.

Figure 5 - all required changes incorporated.

So - how far back do we have to move the lens? Simple trig shows us the answer. Imagine the "field of view" of the lens is about 60° (not unreasonable): the light coming in from the left and right cross over in the centre of the lens and make a triangle with the sensor as the base... an equilateral triangle is formed with all angles at 60° and all sides the same length (lets call it 5.4mm to stick with the HTC Ones sensor size). So the lens must be 2.7mm away from the sensor. If we now make the sensor an 8MP one (3800x2140 pixels) that gives a width of 7.6mm - the lens still has a viewing angle of 60° so that means the sensor has to be 3.8mm away from the lens. Obviously I have used 60° as the lens viewing angle because it makes the angles, sines and side lengths easy to calculate - the numbers are probably quite different in real life but you get the idea: to get double the megapixels you have to move the sensor further from the lens, which means you need a bigger lens to gather the light needed to adequately illuminate it. Lenses very rapidly increase in price with size - a lens 4mm across instead of 2mm might cost three or four times as much. (BTW - the large circular opening on the back of the phone is NOT the lens; the lens is the tiny dark speck in the centre of it).

In practical terms for a smartphone? This means that, to get an 8 million pixel camera, with pixels 2 microns across, your phone would need to be about 16-18mm thick (at least at the cameras location); and the phone would cost upwards of US$1000 - possibly even more - JUST because of the lens.

This isnt something which can be corrected with better design, or better lenses; the only way to mitigate this increase in size and cost would be to make smaller pixels which had the properties of larger ones - and that my friends is the nirvana of a pixel scientist! The very best technology available is going into these phones - and with todays tech were stuck with these limitations. In another article Ill talk about why I believe 4MP at 2 microns across is enough.

This article is also to be found on its author personal blog.

Have any questions or comments? Feel free to share! Also, if you like this article, please use the media sharing buttons (Twitter, G+, Facebook) under this post!

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Enhanced add ons experience for Google Docs admins and developers

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager

A year ago, we partnered with loads of great developers to showcase their add-ons for Google Docs. Add-ons have opened up a world of extra features for our users, from a student needing a powerful tool for diagrams to a project manager looking for a handy way to keep their team on track.

Today we’re releasing a couple of updates to help developers share their add-ons with an even wider audience and give Google Apps IT admins more consistent control over which add-ons are used in their organizations.

Developers can now choose to make their add-ons for Docs, Sheets and Forms available for installation across entire domains, which automatically creates a Google Apps Marketplace listing thats easy for customers to find. It also means that admins can install these handy add-ons for their whole organization using just a couple of clicks.

And speaking of admins, we want to make sure they have the control they need when it comes to deciding which add-ons are best suited for their organizations and teams. For example, in particular cases — like in education — it might not be desirable to let all end-users install their own add-ons. With this update, admins will continue to have a “disable add-ons” option for their users, but they can also whitelist add-ons via the Google Apps Marketplace for their entire domain or a specific team.

With these updates, customers can now get all the add-ons they want with all the control they need. Learn more about managing Google add-ons for your organization.

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Android Developers Blog Preview of Google TV Add on for the Android SDK

Android Developers Blog: Preview of Google TV Add-on for the Android SDK

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