Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Hacking for child safety online
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Fri June 22, 16:00, correction made in final paragraph, names of MEPs added.
The
EUhackathon
is back in Brussels - and this time, it’s about online child safety.
A year ago, we hosted an inaugural EU
Hack4Transparency
, bringing together crack coders from all over the world with the goal increasing transparency on the Internet. Today and tomorrow, programmers are at the Google Brussels office for 30 hours of continuous coding.
Entries
this year come from 11 countries: France, the UK, Romania, Poland, Finland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and even Cambodia.
The new hackathon is part of the European Commission’s
Better Internet for Kids
initiative. Five civil society organisations: eSkills, Family Online Safety Institute, European Schoolnet, eNACSO and Missing Children Europe, are lending their support. Corporate contributors include Facebook, Orange and Vodafone, all of whom have dispatched engineers are to assist.
The coder’s task is to develop the best tools, websites or applications that will enhance children’s safety and creativity online. Our goal is to raise awareness of child safety and online creativity - and generate innovative ideas and solutions. European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes is a keen supporter.
Children are central to this latest EUhackathon and are being given the opportunity to participate in the competition. Our youngest hacker is 13 years old! A total of 25 teenagers from the European schools in Brussels, aged between 12 and 15, will assist, participate and get first hand experience of computer coding.
These children and their teachers - ultimately, the people who will use the tools created during the hackathon - will get to vote for their favourite entries, and their opinions will be taken into account by the
jury
in their deliberations. On 16:15 on 21st June, MEPs Sabine Verheyen, Róża Maria Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, Sean Kelly and Petru Luhan will hand out EUR 5,000 prizes to the first prize-winning teams at an award ceremony in the European Parliament.
Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Manager, Google Brussels
Big Tent brings transparency debate to Dublin
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
(Throughout this week, we’ll be presenting posts on our Big Tent and its travels around the world. The first dispatch comes from Ireland.)
It was a historic venue for a 21st century debate. We brought our
Big Tent
to the famed “Round Room” of Ireland’s
Mansion House
to coincide with the
Organization of Security and Cooperation’s
meeting on Internet Freedom. Here the
First Dáil
assembled on 21 January 1919 to proclaim the
Irish Declaration of Independence
. This week, here we assembled the Irish high tech community with diplomats and officials from 56 member countries to launch the update of our
Transparency Report
and to debate the danger of government control over the Net.
The danger is certainly rising. More than 40 countries now censor or filter the web, up from only four a decade ago, according to the
Open Net Initiative
. Our Transparency Report details the requests we receive from governments around the world to censor content or collect information on Internet users. This report has proven a powerful tool for freedom of expression. This biannual update shows how some Western governments, not just the usual suspects are censoring legitimate Internet search results.
As the report’s creator Dorothy Chou explained, Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine, she asked the audience, if an entire country came clean. This would give a global look at freedom in their country. The more transparent a government is, the less likely it will be to censor or request information on users. At least, the authorities will think twice before cracking down on the Net.
From this starting point, the Big Tent explored the danger of international organizations, and specifically the International Telecommunications Union, to undermine the bottom-up, sometimes messy system of governing the Internet. Our own chief Internet evangelist
Vint Cerf
outlined the issue in a video address that followed up from his recent New York Times
op ed
.
Estonia’s President
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
and State Department advisor
Alec Ross
continued to debate the issue. The Estonian president warned of “computer savvy despots” who would destroy Internet freedom, harkening back to another United Nations organization, UNESCO, and its attempt to strangle media freedom with a “
new world information and communications order
” in the 1980s.“ In Ross’s view, the free Internet faces an imminent attack from “monsters under the bed.”
The evening ended with an emotional and lyrical exploration of free expression from War Horse author
Michael Morpurgo
. He weaved together a tale about illiteracy, libraries and unicorns, ending with the vow to pursue his right to to say what he wants, and even “believe in unicorns.” The Irish band
Hudson Taylor
, who came to prominence on YouTube, closed the evening.
Big Tent now moves to Israel and to Cannes, to coincide with the world’s largest advertising meeting. Keep a watch out for upcoming reports of these events bringing together diverse viewpoints to debate the impact of the Internet on our world.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Energy efficiency in the cloud
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
At Google, we’re obsessed with building
energy efficient datacentres
that enable
cloud computing
. Besides helping you be more
productive
, cloud-based services like
Google Apps
can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year,
we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to
80 times more energy-efficient
than running traditional in-house email.
We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole - documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications - stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our
results show
that a typical organisation can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps.
Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organisations. That’s what happened at the
U.S. General Services Administration
(GSA), which recently switched its approximately 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction.
How is the cloud so energy efficient? It’s all about reducing energy use for servers and server cooling. Here’s how it works:
A typical organisation has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilised. And our datacentres use equipment and software specially designed to
minimise energy use
. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.
In fact, according to a
study
by the Carbon Disclosure Project, by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020:
US companies
could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2
UK companies
would save
£1
.2 billion and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
French companies
could save nearly
€700
million and 1.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
We’ve built efficient datacentres around the world, even designing them in ways that make the
best use of the natural environment
, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure
Where roads aren't - and why it matters
Monday, June 18, 2012
(Throughout this week we'll be publishing a series of posts on our
Green Blog
about our activities at Rio+20, the
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
. Our full schedule at the conference is available
here
, and follow our activities as they happen at #googleatrio20.)
On Friday, we unveiled at the Rio+20 Conference the initial fruits of a unique collaboration with a member of the European Parliament and the Society for Conservation Biologists: a global, interactive map of the world’s “Roadless Areas.”
The project came about when we were approached by
MEP Kriton Arsenis
, the European Parliament´s Rapporteur on forests. He explained that, while most people using Google Maps want to know which roads will get them from point A to point B, the same information is useful for conservationists who want to know where roads
aren’t
. In his words:
The concept of "roadless areas" is a well-established conservation measure coming from conservation biologists from all around the globe. The idea is that roads in most parts of the world lead to the unmanageable private access to the natural resources of an area, most often leading to ecosystem degradation and without the consent of the local and indigenous communities. Keeping an area roadless means that the specific territory is shielded against such exogenous pressures, thus sustaining its ecosystem services at the maximum possible level. An important tool which will drive environmental, development as well as global climate change policy forward will be the Google development of an interactive satellite map of the world's roadless areas.
We were intrigued by Kriton’s idea, so we decided to give it a try.
Start with where the Roads ARE
We started by taking all the road data (plus rail and navigable waterways) in Google maps today, and importing that into our
Google Earth Engine
platform for analysis. For example, here is what the road network in Australia looks like when zoomed out to country-scale:
Australia road network – coastal population centers such as Sydney, Perth and Adelaide show up as dense road networks, whereas the interior “Outback” is more sparse.
Then figure out where the roads AREN’T
Based upon advice from Kriton Arsenis and his project collaborators in the Society for Conservation Biology, we decided to define a “Roadless Area” (for the purposes of this prototype map) as any area of land more than ten kilometers from the nearest road. Using the global-scale spatial-analytic capabilities of Google Earth Engine, we then generated this raster map, such that every pixel in the map is color-coded based on distance from the nearest road. Every pixel colored green is at least ten km from the nearest road, and therefore considered part of a Roadless Area. For example:
Prototype “Roadless Areas” in Australia - all green areas are at least 10 km from the nearest road
Or consider the island of Madagascar, home to some of the most unique species on Earth.
Prototype “Roadless Areas” on the island of Madagascar, home of the endangered Indri lemur.
From these maps it becomes more apparent how the simple construction of new roads can fragment and disturb habitats, potentially driving threatened species closer to extinction.
Finally we decided to try running this “Roadless Area” algorithm at global-scale:
Prototype “Roadless Area” interactive map at global scale.
Large roadless areas are readily apparent such as the Amazon and Indonesian rainforests, Canadian boreal forest and Sahara desert.
Caveats and Next Steps
The road data used to produce these maps inevitably contains inaccuracies and
omissions. The good news is that Google already has a tool,
Google Map Maker
, that can be used by anyone to submit new or corrected map data, and in fact this tool is already being used in partnership with the United Nations to support global emergency response.
We look forward to continued development of this prototype, which can help to turn the abstract concept of “Roadless Areas” into something quite concrete and, we hope, useful to policymakers, scientists and communities around the world.
To explore these Roadless Area maps yourself, visit the
Google Earth Engine Map Gallery
.
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine
More transparency into government requests
Monday, June 18, 2012
About two years ago, we launched our interactive
Transparency Report
. We
started
by disclosing data about government requests. Since then, we’ve been steadily
adding
new features, like graphs showing traffic patterns and disruptions to Google services from different countries. And just a couple weeks ago, we
launched
a new section showing the requests we get from copyright holders to remove search results.
The
traffic
and
copyright
sections of the Transparency Report are refreshed in
near-real-time
, but government request data is updated in six-month increments because it’s a people-driven, manual process. Today we’re releasing data showing government requests to
remove blog posts or videos
or hand over
user information
made from July to December 2011.
Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data in 2010, we also added annotations with some of the more interesting stories behind the numbers. We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this proved an aberration. But now we know it’s not.
This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.
For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.
In addition to releasing new data today, we’re also adding a feature update which makes it easier to see in
aggregate
across countries how many removals we performed in response to court orders, as opposed to other types of requests from government agencies. For the six months of data we’re
releasing today
, we complied with an average of 65 percent of court orders, as opposed to 47 percent of more informal requests. We’ve rounded up some additional interesting facts in the
annotations
section of the Transparency Report.
We realize that the numbers we share can only provide a small window into what’s happening on the web at large. But we do hope that by being transparent about these government requests, we can continue to contribute to the public debate about how government behaviors are shaping our web.
We’re assembling a Big Tent in Dublin tonight precisely to address these alarming issues.
Estonia’s President Toomas Ilves
is among the participants. Years after earning its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, his country fought off a cyber attack. The Estonian government emerged determined not to shut down the Internet, but to keep it open and free.
Burma’s Nobel Peace Prize winner
Aung San Suu Kuy
will also be in the Irish capital this evening to receive an Amnesty International award. As her experience and our Transparency Report show, freedom can never be taken for granted. We must remain vigilant in its defense.
Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst
Estonian President debates Internet Freedom at Big Tent
Friday, June 15, 2012
Around the world, Internet freedom is under threat. According to the
Open Net Initiative
, more than 620 million Internet users - 31% of the world’s total Internet users - live in countries where there is substantial or pervasive filtering of online content.
On Monday 18 June, we’ll be hosting a
Big Tent
on the Internet and free expression at the
Mansion House
in Dublin, as part of the official
programme
of Ireland’s Presidency of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (
OSCE
).
This event follows the thought-provoking Big Tent we held in The Hague last November, at which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the
keynote speech
.
Monday’s Dublin Big Tent features another special guest:
President Toomas Ilves
of Estonia, pictured at left. Years after earning its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, his country fought off a massive cyber attack. Instead of cracking down on the Internet, Estonia emerged determined to keep it open and free.
We’ll also be hearing from one of the fathers of the Internet,
Vint Cerf
; the U.S. Department of State’s Innovation Advisor
Alec Ross
; and the author of the acclaimed book War Horse,
Michael Morpurgo
, who will offer a lyrical take on free expression in the modern world.
By coincidence, Myanmar’s recently freed Nobel Peace Prize winner
Aung San Sui Kuy
will also be in the Irish capital on Monday evening to receive an Amnesty International award. As her experience demonstrates, freedom can never be taken for granted. We must remain vigilant in its defence.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa
Writing a new chapter for French books
Monday, June 11, 2012
For the past six years, we have been embroiled in a debilitating dispute over digitisation with French book publishers and authors. Today, we are announcing agreements that end all our legal battles. We are forging partnerships that we believe will put France ahead of the rest of the world in bringing out-of-print works back to life.
Much of the world’s information is found on the printed page. But almost 75 percent of the world’s books are out-of-print and unavailable except to the lucky few who can find old copies in libraries. In order to make this treasure available to everyone, anywhere in the world, we digitised millions of out-of-print works in U.S. libraries.
Until now, legal challenges, not only in France, but also in the United States, have kept us from realizing our goal. French authors and publishers sued us, separately, for copyright violations back in 2006. U.S. authors and publishers also sued. Although we reached an agreement with the American
Author’s Guild
and
Association of American Publishers
in 2008, a U.S. District court in New York last year rejected the agreement.
In France, however, we have found a way to move ahead. Both the French Publishers Association (
Syndicat national de l’édition
) and the French Author’s Association (
Société des gens de lettres
) have withdrawn their suits.
In this win-win solution, publishers and authors retain control over the commercial use of their books – while at the same time, opening the possibility for out-of-print books to reach a wide audience. We remain hopeful of reaching a solution in the US allowing us to make the world's books searchable and discoverable online.
This agreement represents a new step in our broad
support
for French culture. Over the past two years, we have signed agreements with several French collecting societies representing musicians, screenwriters and other creators. Our international culture center is based in Paris.
We are taking other measures as well to support French publishing. As part of this agreement, we will sponsor publishers’ new Young Reading Champions Program, which promotes the pleasures of reading among young people. We are also supporting the Publishing Laboratory -
le Labo de l'édition
- which helps publishing startups and traditional partners test digital technologies.
Our project with the authors is equally exciting. We will support their initiative to build a comprehensive database of published writers, a process that will help identify copyright holders and help them receive payment for their works.
Our hope is that these partnerships will boost the emerging French electronic book market. They make France a pioneer in spreading knowledge in the digital world. Watch this space for more progress on putting the written page online – and keep on reading.
Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partner Development Manager of Google Books France
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