Fridaygram: free web expression, million-year disk, media tools
By +Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog
Editor
The web opens up communication possibilities that never existed before. But with more people
doing more on the web come new challenges for keeping these new channels open and free from
censorship. Hugo Landa, Cubanet Executive Director puts it this way: “Today, access to the
Internet equals freedom of expression”. Last week
Google Ideas hosted a summit on this subject
entitled “
Conflict
in a Connected World”.
One concrete outcome of the summit is a set of tools to help people who are facing online
censorship. These tools include the
Digital
Attack Map, which visualizes
DDoS attacks,
Project Shield, which actively helps
protect against DDoS, and a
new browser
extension that enables a group to build a trusted connection to the Web. We hope
these tools will help keep web speech free.
If you express yourself via digital storage, there’s a new technology to make sure that what
you say can stay around for a long time. A team at the University of Twente in the Netherlands
has built a disk designed to
store
data reliably for a million years or more. Researchers studied the processes that
corrupt data over time, and then built a disk out of silicon nitride and tungsten designed to
withstand the corruption. They developed accelerated aging tests that proved their ideas for
now, but we’ll await the final results that will be available in about a million years.
Finally, it was a big week for new toolsets. We also launched
Google Media Tools, a destination
for journalists and news organizations. Google Media Tools includes sites and apps to help
with
collecting
information,
visualizing data,
publishing, and our favorite,
developing your own
tools. Even if you’re not a pro journalist but are interested in how you can use
Google stuff to learn what’s happening and tell others about it, you might want to check out
this nicely organized site.
We make tools, you make tools, the web rules! Fridaygram is
here to inform you, but it’s mostly for a fun weekly break from your coding chores. Thanks to
friend of the blog Adam Feldman for this week’s million-year-disk info.
