Google I/O 2015 – Keynote | Hacker News Reader

Google I/O 2015 – Keynote

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145 pointsjsingleton119 comments

The Google Photo recognition and auto-management looks pretty cool; except that:

1. Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage. I used to trust Google with most of my information, but I've been slowly transitioning them away to either local, or a home-brew solution.

2. What I noticed for the first time is not the cool new shiny things, but the absence of Hangouts and Google+ features. Did they get completely abandoned, or are they to be covered later? It seems like a Google style to make some AI-enhanced or Google-flavored version of pre-existing service(be it RSS, social media, you name it), let it get hyped because "Google", then abandon it when it doesn't reach some internal target.

Honestly, while I definitely agree that they're all cool stuff, but I do not see myself using those features; it's more of a trust issues over convenience. Just my two cents.

> Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage.

"You're the product". I guess the data is used to enhance machine learning, that's why they also offer "unlimited" storage now (although it's compressed with yet to see what quality).

I wonder though if the image indexing etc will have the ability to opt-out from. There's also a question if there will be a good syncing tool to upload existing photos from the desktop device and keep it synced, Google Drive and Photos didn't like each other in the past.

Please don't say "you're the product". Not only is this line absurdly overused, it's also thoughtless, lazy, and wrong. You are not the product. You are a person. You are not being bought, you are not being sold. Nobody can exchange clear legal title to your very existence because slavery is illegal and has been for some time.

"Okay, fine so what IS changing hands when money is being made?"

Well, that depends. Generally it's one of two things. The first is information about you (e.g. Experian, TransUnion, etc.). The other is access to you (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.) But neither of these things are you, any more than a story about you (which may or may not be true) is you, per se.

This may seem persnickety, but failing to grasp this means failing to recognize some of the most fundamental points about the internet and information economies. And not really caring about the difference is a bit like saying that whether the Earth is flat or round doesn't really matter because from where you're standing it all looks the same. Like I said, it's just thoughtless, lazy, and wrong. And if there's one place where people really should know enough and care enough to get this right, it's HN.

</rant>

>Nobody can exchange clear legal title to your very existence because slavery is illegal and has been for some time.

You'd be surprised.

Modern slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry with estimates of up to $35 billion generated annually. The United Nations estimates that roughly 27 to 30 million individuals are currently caught in the slave trade industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery

Sure, but those are not people spending significant amounts of time on Google, FB, etc. Indeed, if you've enough online access for companies to build profiles on you, you're not a victim of the actual slave trade.

1. The 99.9% that don't care about Google tracking them will have a use for it. Every product has its abstainers.

Post Snowden this percentage has decreased.

98.82 now.

> 1. Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage. I used to trust Google with most of my information, but I've been slowly transitioning them away to either local, or a home-brew solution.

For the same reason you'd hand over your email to them? Fast, UI, search, cloud whatever, etc etc. If you don't trust them with that, though, then yes, it follows quite naturally you shouldn't give them your photos. Not really a shocker.

Google tracks what physical retail stores you visit[1][2] on Android phones and iPhones(if you use Google Maps app). People don't care about that, do you think really think they will care about photos? Actually, scratch that, most people don't even know that Google tracks your phone location for store visits if you use location services or Google Now.

>Google cited two case studies of retailers that have been testing this metric. PetSmart’s estimated store visits data showed that 10 to 18 percent of clicks on search ads lead to a store visit.

[1] http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

[2] http://searchengineland.com/google-store-visits-estimated-co...

> Actually, scratch that, most people don't even know that Google tracks your phone location for store visits if you use location services or Google Now.

If you use Google Now, Google autorecommends locations -- including retail stores -- that you might want travel time to based on its tracking, so its pretty hard not to be aware that it is doing the tracking.

>If you use Google Now, Google autorecommends locations -- including retail stores -- that you might want travel time to based on its tracking, so its pretty hard not to be aware that it is doing the tracking.

I've noticed with that, every time it surprises someone, they call it creepy, but they don't turn it off and then get used to it. Myself included.

I was creeped out at first, but then I realized that Verizon already has all the same data, and I trust Google way more than I trust Verizon.

Does Verizon also have your emails, your photos, a large sample of your browsing history, your search history, what videos you watch online -- not sure what I'm forgetting -- oh yeah, and of course the data analysis skills to interconnect all those vast amounts of data, make educated guesses about the pieces they don't have yet, and a business model that centers around it?

Since I browse, search, and watch videos on my phone, they have a decent amount of that information. But where Google will correlate all of that data in order to show me advertisements, Verizon will modify my traffic to make me more trackable and then sell my data to other advertisers.

> Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage

Many people consider all of those to be features: cloud storage means you don't lose things when your phone is stolen or your laptop dies and most people have far more photos than they have the tools or time to organize. Intelligently clustering them based on location, faces, content type, etc. benefits from lots of CPU time and a big training corpus, which is exactly what Google excels at.

That's not to say that there aren't valid concerns about privacy but look at how many people use Gmail or Facebook to estimate what percentage of the computer using public considers that a reasonable deal for a free service.

What I noticed for the first time is not the cool new shiny things, but the absence of Hangouts and Google+ features

I'm curious about Google Photos but if Google had proclaimed "you must be a Google+ user to get this" then I wouldn't even give it a try.

I could see it being a hook into Google+ at some later point in time if/when there's momentum.

Its moving in the opposite direction though so that doesn't make sense. It already was a Google+ integrated app and now its standalone.

Billions of photos are on Facebook. Maybe trillions.

"what if we could use google's unique capabilities take back control of helpless people's digital lives?"

Or, just as bad: they pull a Reader and sunset the service in 4 years once you've stuffed all of your photos into it.

My faith in Google's ability / willingness to support these types of projects long term is minimal at best.

Your periodic reminder that there are more people on Ice Cream Sandwich and earlier than are on Lollipop:

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Heck, Gingerbread is at 6% versus 10% for Lollipop cumulative. And 5.0 has 9 times the adoption of 5.1. Instead of announcing a new Android version, why not announce how you're going to get new versions of Android onto devices already in wild? And if Google wants to blame the OEMs for this, the OEM you owned when I got my Motorola X (and still owned when you shipped 5.0!) still hasn't been updated. It's absurd.

You could have bought a nexus.

Yeah, I owned a Galaxy Nexus, the idea that the Nexus line is some blanket guarantee of updates to new OS versions is mistaken.

Well, it's an 18 month guarantee. After that, Google is happy to abandon you.

I like many many things about Android. But they really need to sort this out, at least for their flagship phones.

What would be the acceptable time frame for supporting existing devices? I agree that 18 months is a bit on the short side, but the Galaxy Nexus is way beyond that. By the time M hits the street, the Galaxy Nexus will be a four year old model.

I am not complaining about the Galaxy Nexus not being supported NOW, although frankly I don't see why it shouldn't be -- the hardware is plenty capable of running new Android versions. It was terrible about getting updates back when it was still available for sale.

EDIT: I have three and four year old computers that are running Windows 10 Technical Preview just fine. And it's not like new low-end Android phones are more powerful than four-year-old mid- and high-end phones. I think that it's silly that we have reset our expectations so low that it's beyond the pale that companies should support OS updates on four-year-old phones.

Phones will get to where computers are now. If you think back 20 years, 4 year old computers could not run just released software. It took time for two things to happen:

1) Increase in available computing resources;

2) Commoditization of the platform.

It can be argued that we are just reaching condition (1), but we are still a bit far from (2). The peculiarities between hardware platforms make it necessary to actually test on each hardware platform. As the installed base of a phone dwindles, after a point it makes little sense to provide updates.

We'll get there, but it'll take a few more years. In the meantime, Nexus are great choices, because the developer community can actually fill in for the necessary testing and tweaking. I had an HTC Desire before my Nexus 5, and it was incredible how much its life was extended by a vibrant community (mine lasted over four years and was clearly outdated spec-wise when I bough the N5).

The thing is, Apple is already there -- iOS 8 is available for the 4S, which is roughly the same age as the Galaxy Nexus. I don't think condition 1 has ever been a problem.

(I know, I know... should have bought a Nexus, should have bought an iPhone. My mistake for buying Motorola. Won't happen again.)

20 years ago, in 1995, 4 year-old computers from 1991 generally could run just released productivity software, compilers and OS versions just fine, on Linux, Amiga, Windows/DOS computers at least. It was best to add another RAM stick though.

5-7 years

18 months is a joke

7 years is worse of a joke 18 months is. The flagship phone seven years ago was the Nokia n96: 128MB RAM, 267Mhz CPU, 320x240 display...

Yes a great phone but Nokia often gave up on phones soon after release, still a sweet machine potentially capable of repurposing.

If a company will not support a device and has locked it down there should be a moral obligation to allow others to support it.

Hardware should not be dead-ended.

The latest update 5.02 has been bricking Nexus Tablets, out of warranty.

I stopped upgrading because of this.

Security and OS updates should be separate

I'd also add that the new App permissions won't be seen on versions prior to M, developers will have to support both for now when targeting the app for M.

So if judging by L, this means new App permissions will be on less then 10% of devices 6 months after release.

I dunno, blaming Google for phones not being updated (Other than their branded phones or course), is a bit like blaming Linus Torvalds when routers still use a 2.6.x kernel version. When something is open and able for anyone to do with as they please, it's only natural that the devices it lives on can't be controlled the same.

> When something is open and able for anyone to do with as they please

AOSP is open. Android from Google is not -- manufacturers have to agree to only ship Google's OS, not any competing forks. (Yes, they can customize things like the launcher, but those aren't true forks.)

New app permissions in Android. Nice.

Edit: Asks when needed, not at install time. Focus on the web with Chrome custom tabs looks good too. I only got 5.1.1 today but 6? (M...) looks great from the small amount seen so far.

This could finally be the year I start using Android. The horrible all-or-nothing permission system has made me stay clear of it so far.

CyanogenMod is an Android mod that has customizable Android permissions (Privacy Guard).

Very nice.

I hope "phone" includes phone number, as Android has a bad track record of leaking your cellphone number to every single app (and ad network) that you install.

I doubt it does, as Google had made it quite clear they don't consider your cell phone number personal information (but DO consider your email address). I am just waiting until it blows up in their faces, when spammers and scammers start utilising the hole.

Huh? Retrieving a phone number always required android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE permission. Same as retrieving your email requires android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS .

READ_PHONE_STATE is given to every app for "free" now. It is no longer listed on the play store and hasn't been for almost a year.

Many Cell plans send your phone number to any websites you visit.

That was a huge controversy and many have since stopped. They are now trying to send a unique ID number, but not the actual phone number.

Does anyone also find the "App link" a step back ? I thought getting a dialog where to open the Intent in is actually an awesome feature of the Android platform, now user will get thrown into whatever app will be defined on the server. Also let me check my crystal ball and predict that this will take a long time to be adapted by "big" companies, just like the design guidelines.

App permissions and copy/paste changes are welcomed, but I got a sense they finally caved in and just copied how some other mobile OS handles it (which is not bad, since it was always better there).

I worry that the new intents may not allow third party apps, as the domain of the link is verified. I hope not only official apps are allowed. Time will tell.

I think Google, and to some extent Facebook and Twitter, are terrified of the Intent system. I think they could be leveraged for something extremely powerful outside of the platform or sharing app owners control.

Yes, as a user of a third-party Twitter client I immediately thought this isn't a great thing.

Just because somebody has Twitter installed (or their carrier pre-installed it), doesn't mean they necessarily want to use the official app.

I noticed last week that Google search in Chrome on Android already does something similar — I searched for somebody and got a Twitter profile link. Clicking it led me to the Play Store to install the official Twitter app instead of allowing the intent system to open it in Falcon Pro. Though hopefully that's just related to Google's recent Twitter partnership.

Looking at the M preview release, I see that Settings > Apps has expanded the "Open by default" section for each app.

Now there's a toggle, "Open supported links without asking", with a list of domain names that the app supports.

So you can keep the old "which app do you want to use to handle this intent" behaviour by turning off supported links for apps you don't like (e.g. Twitter).

They glossed over this awfully quick in their keynote, but spent a whole lot of time talking about "custom tabs" for Chrome on Android...

And the "granularity" of the permissions seemed on par with the permissions categories they introduced to Play a while back. Meaning that once you ok the use of, say, speakers, the same app can get access to anything inside the same category of permissions...

Yeah, I'm torn on that. On the one hand, I want to take advantage of the permissions granularity that android offers rather than being stuck with categories. On the other hand, the small number of bigger permissions works well on iOS, so maybe that is the better solution for the mass market.

It would be nice if you could switch an expert mode switch and individually toggle every single permission, not just categories.

IoT stuff looks promising. Brillo and Weave.

http://gizmodo.com/get-ready-for-google-brillo-the-new-opera...

Edit: Not sure the cross branding will work as well as with KitKat! Ball of metal wires? :)

Excited about Weave. Not sure about Brillo. It is unnecessary. Most IoT things are low power Cortex-M devices that need to do very little and are very low power consumption. You don't have SDRAM, or a fancy OS and don't need it. There are plenty free and non-free RTOS available for those chips for whoever needs them.

Interesting talks, even though the style of every single presenter so far indicates they must have watched a lot of TED talks and subscribed for at least a year to a toaster club in the south bay.

Once again, embarrassingly, every single reference to the 'developing world' is stereotypical.

New protocol for "Internet of Things" called Weave. Looks like it's going to use JSON or type-compatible. They didn't address why existing solutions aren't good.

sigh and another system where all kinds of data is managed/owned centrally by Google.

There was also a API for checking via Android (aka Google) if a URI passed via intents was "kosher".

Let's hope it's an open protocol. I'm guessing this came out of Nest so they may want to make it interoperable.

I'm a big fan of https://www.particle.io (previously Spark). http://nodered.org and https://resin.io are also good but not used them seriously.

When watching that this XKCD immediately came to mind: https://xkcd.com/927/

If they had announced how open and free their new standard was to use, I might have taken notice, but as it stands it is a Google-owned "standard" which likely only Google would use.

the word Weave reminded of Google Wave, anyone remember that?

Hmm... networking + Weave, where have I seen that before? Ah, http://weave.works . Google did the same with Go as a language, didn't they?

Weave apparently has been the name of the Nest protocol for quite some time (before the Google acquisition, I think); there have been articles about it for quite a while. The new thing with Weave isn't something with that name being created by Google, its it becoming available to third parties, as well as the Android-derived Brillo IoT stack.

> New protocol for "Internet of Things" called Weave.

From past news articles, "Weave" -- with that name -- has been Nest's protocol for a long time. What seems to be new is availability outside of Nest/Google.

Surprised nobody's commented yet about the jarring juxtaposition of the running chat that reflects the sentiment of average Youtube viewers alongside content that's meant for a fairly specific audience (developers).

Or rather... how discouraging it is that it IS such a juxtaposition.

It's well-known by now that Youtube is not the place to go to find quality discussion. It still stings a little bit to see it applied in realtime to people you care about, even if it is just because you loosely share a profession and professional culture.

>> It's well-known by now that Youtube is not the place to go to find quality discussion.

To solve this problem, i use the AlienTube firefox extension, which brings reddit discussions over to youtube.

I've heard of that extension. Does that make it better? What happens if there are multiple discussion threads in reddit of the same video? I assume the extension does a pseudo-submit/match-check to the reddit first to fetch the thread.

It shows a tabbed interface of the few most popular discussion threads over reddit.

Yeah, I hope Youtube doesn't try to become Twitch. It might be more appropriate to have a live twitter feed of some related hashtags.

There is a button to hide the chat box. I couldn't click it too soon.

HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT HIDE CHAT ;)

Hiding that chat with chrome tools was the first thing I did upon opening the stream.

> 1.5B casts from Chromecast

Interesting, I didn't know that every cast was reported back to the mothership.

Not to say that it does. Users who have opted into provide data to Google might have a once-a-month ping containing the number of times it's been used.

There are plenty of other ways to get that information. Statistics (x number sold * y average casts per user), asking streaming companies (i'm sure netflix and hulu know when you're on a chromecast and could report rough numbers to google), and i'm pretty sure there are other ways that I'm not thinking of.

... and how would they know "average casts per user"?

You don't, but that's what the entire field of statistics was invented for to estimate :)

From the above, though, it sounds like that's not necessary since it's fundamental to the cast protocol.

Nope. As others have pointed out, every cast has to begin with a call to google.com (which is why chromecast must be connected to the internet). The call basically sends an id number to google, and then google returns a URL of where to get the code for that cast.

Actually it does - the casting isn't triggered locally directly, but the castee sends a chromecast ID + app ID to Google servers which then sends appropriate payload to the CC.

Interesting -- that seems like it'd be introducing a lot of points to grow latency if you're casting a Chrome tab. Do you happen to know if that works differently?

Chrome tabs use the same process for initiation, but then use WebRTC to actually stream the tab over the local network.

The actual media data / streams can of course cast directly by sending a local network URL to HTML5 part of your app, but the load of that HTML5 part is triggered via Google servers - essentially the Google server tells CC which URL to load for a certain app.

isn't the photos message somehow misleading?

"what if we could use google's unique capabilities to help people take back control of their digital lives?

and then the 3 central ideas:

1. a home for all your photos, and videos. A private, and safe place place to keep a life-time of memories, available from any device.

2. help you organize and bring your moments to life. an app that takes the work out of photos and lets you focus on making memories, not managing them.

3. make it easy to share and save what matters. Sharing should be simple and reliable, and when you're on the receiving end, it should be easy to hold on to the photos and videos you care about.

.. then he moves the presentation to show all the data mining that they do on the photos, how they extract information about who is on the photos, which places where those taken, which tags the google's machinery could found from them

.. and for the big final, they announce unlimited free storage!

---

so how exactly will google help users take back control of their digital life?

call me suspicious? I'm staying out.

The lack of G+ and Hangouts is quite obvious. I don't remember the last time they've tweeted or used Whatsapp or Viber for product showcase.

Actually I think this is completely ridiculous point , because G+ and hangout as far as I can remember installed on nexus [you aware enough to know that they use nexus device for demonstration ] by default , so they cannot show the app permission dialog because all default app granted all permission by default .

They also wouldn't want to show users declining permissions to a Google app.

Doze looks cool. Using the accelerometer to work out how often to sync. Saving power when not being moved.

Also the bi directional charging with type C is super cool.

I wonder how much power running the accelerometer uses? It isn't free to keep track of that. Back on my Note (1) Samsung had a bunch of gestures related to the accelerometer, and leaving them enabled drained a significant amount of battery.

Probably will be the same thing as pedometers in newer mobile SOCs, that don't use significant power. Snapdragon S800 (Nexus 5) and up.

It depends on how many updates a second. One update a second is about 10µA, with a higher frequency costing more.

"Unlimited free storage" for photos is not exactly a new thing. It was already unlimited before with Google+ Photos, the catch was that it will automatically resize your photos to be smaller than 2048x2048 (about 4MP). Now they're just bumping the limit to 16MP.

Android M will be available in preview for Nexus 5, 6, 9 and "player".

I hope it doesn't mean that Nexus 4 is already end of life ?

It does, it'll receive security updates only as part of the new devices policy - 2 years for major updates, 3 years for security updates.[1] It is a bit sour though to deprecate a device with a quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM, while low range devices launched last year will get M.

[1]http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/05/23/rumor-android-m-will...

You should stop spreading rumor , this is rumor right now and no one give shit about what some crazy site says.Please be accurate as possible when answering someone.

Well this is the site which showed the new app permissions yesterday[1], so they're pretty sharp about what they "rumors" they spread.

[1]http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/05/27/android-m-to-introdu...

lack of logical thinking. not related , saying one truth does not imply you are saying truth all the time.

It is a shame because Android has actually become far better optimized for low spec phones anyway!

Nexus 7 too. Just under 2 years of updates :/

Guess I'll have to finally root, no way there will be any issues getting it running M.

This is just a preview not the release. It will probably be supported when it is actually released

L preview wasn't available on the N4 either.

I'm extremely excited about Expeditions - VR for schools (and other people/institutions at some point, I guess) can have great impact on how we learn. This is a long term investment, with better educational system we'll get more innovators and, I hope, better world.

JUMP (camera rig & assembly) is cool too and I hope it won't share the same fate as Glass. In general, seeing all the progress in the VR world makes me feel that we're at the edge of another technological revolution (and it's great that Google wants to bring this experience to everyone, or at least the viewers as the camera ring won't be cheap). I have a great dose of skepticism, of course, but I plan to learn as much as possible about developing for VR platforms in the coming months - can you suggest good resources for this? What languages are the best bet? What concepts are the most important ones? I'd appreciate all suggestions.

Audience shot shows just one person with Google Glass--ouch.

I hope there is going to be a new chromecast today

With what kind of new features?

I'd just take a general speed up - casting something is painfully slow for me (or was the last time I tried - much happier with my Roku)

I've had no such issues with speed. My chromecast is generally on by the time I've figured out what I want to watch and buffering is less than 15 seconds to start the video. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

5GHz WiFi support

This seems like such a minor thing to people who live in houses/rural areas, but I took home a Chromecast that is completely unusable for video because I live in a densely packed apartment building. My TV is RIGHT next to my router, but there's so many 2.4GHz networks and so much interference that Netflix buffers like crazy.

4k playback is the only thing I can think of

Power over HDMI

edit:

- HDMI passthrough so I can use multiple devices without switching TV inputs.

- Bluetooth for things like music streaming

- Camera? (not sure how psyched I'd be about this but it could be cool)

- Microphone (for voice commands without phone)

- Native apps (Android apps?)

HDMI 1.4 supports 50 mA @ 5V, I'm not sure if that's enough to power a Chromecast.

It is sadly not (my current draw is closer to 300-400 mA at 4.8v). Even if it was though, the current chromecast doesn't have the hardware to support it.

HDMI CEC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#CEC

Chromecast currently supports HDMI-CEC

work offline?

This. The current "phone home" setup makes it tough to deploy in many environments.

This was the best I/O in over 3 years. Very impressed...

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