How Google proteced Andy Rubin 

The Father of Android 

Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, left Google in 2014 with a $90 million exit package. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

The internet giant paid Mr. Rubin $90 million and praised him, while keeping silent about a misconduct claim.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google gave Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, a hero’s farewell when he left the company in October 2014.

“I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive then, said in a public statement. “With Android he created something truly remarkable — with a billion-plus happy users.”

What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation.

Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men

The New York Times obtained corporate and court documents and spoke to more than three dozen current and former Google executives and employees about the episodes, including some people directly involved in handling them. Most asked to remain anonymous because they were bound by confidentiality agreements or feared retribution for speaking out.

The transgressions varied in severity. Mr. Rubin’s case stood out for how much Google paid him and its silence on the circumstances of his departure. After Mr. Rubin left, the company invested millions of dollars in his next venture.

Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, disputed that the technologist had been told of any misconduct at Google and said he left the company of his own accord.

Google Workers Fume Over Executives’ Payouts After Sexual Harassment Claims

SAN FRANCISCO — At Google’s weekly staff meeting on Thursday, the top question that employees voted to ask Larry Page, a co-founder, and Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, was one about sexual harassment.

“Multiple company actions strongly indicate that protection of powerful abusers is literally and figuratively more valuable to the company than the well-being of their victims,” read the question, which was displayed at the meeting, according to people who attended. “What concrete and meaningful actions will be taken to turn this around?”

The query was part of an outpouring from Google employees after a New York Times article published on Thursday reported how the company had paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of misconduct and stayed silent about their transgressions. In the case of Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, the company gave him a $90 million exit package even after Google had concluded that a misconduct claim against him was credible.

While tech workers, executives and others slammed Google for the revelations, nowhere was condemnation of the internet giant’s actions more pointed than among its own employees.

The employee rebuke played out on Thursday and Friday in company meetings and on internal message boards and social networks, as well as on Twitter. Jaana Dogan, who works in Google Cloud, the company’s cloud computing business, tweeted, “If you are worth of millions of dollars, you should be able to show the door to authoritarian governments and serial abusers. If not now, then when?”

Another Google employee, Sanette Tanaka Sloan, also posted on Twitter that the way Google had handled Mr. Rubin’s misconduct claim was “crushing.” She added, “We can do so much better.”

On Memegen, an internal Google photo-messaging board popular among employees for its humor, one of the top posts on Thursday featured a GIF of an overjoyed game show contestant showered with confetti. Beneath the image was the text “got caught sexually harassing employee,” said one employee who saw the post and who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak publicly.

Military Mystery Solved: Two Guys Out-Googled Google for an Image of Secretive US Base

Satellite imagery of an experimental military base that was missing from Google Maps for years is now available … but you'll have to go to New York City to see it.

Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra, a resident at the technology and art nonprofit Eyebeam, and writer Brendan Byrne leased the swatch of satellite imagery from the company Apollo Mapping for $1,984.50, after noticing that Google Maps hadn't updated an area over the Tonopah Test Range in southwestern Nevada for eight years.

The leased imagery can be shown only to people within Mehrotra and Byrne's "company," so the pair hosted an event yesterday (Oct. 25) called "Internal Use Only" to showcase the bird's-eye view of the experimental military installment. Visitors had to sign paperwork declaring themselves temporary employees of Eyebeam in order to legally see the satellite shot. [15 Secretive Places You Can Now See on Google Earth (And 3 You Can't)]

Mehrotra and Byrne originally suspected government censorship when they learned that users of Google Maps were seeing 8-year-old imagery when they scrolled over Tonopah. According to a Google spokesperson who contacted Motherboard after Mehrotra and Byrne published their article, there was no censorship involved, but rather uninterest. The company licenses its imagery from third- party providers, and updates based on where users tend to browse.) The company has since updated Maps, and the aerial view of the test zone now dates to October 2017, they wrote on Motherboard. According to the Google Earth blog, most of the country's satellite imagery is updated roughly every three years, with the area in Nevada containing Tonopah Test Range an exception that "seems to have been missed."

The pair's project highlights the quilted nature of Google Maps. Some of the mapping program's imagery is aerial photography, taken from planes or helicopters, Mehrotra and Byrne wrote. Over military bases, where airspace is tightly controlled, Google tends to get imagery from private satellite companies instead.

The Tonopah Test Range is about 70 miles (110 kilometers) from Area 51, another military installment famous for UFO sightings and alien myths. According to Sandia National Laboratories, the range is used to test a variety of weapons and planes. Tonopah, according to Jalopnik, was where the slim-winged F-117, the first "stealth" aircraft in the U.S. military, was developed.

Search engine for CCTV
lets you find people from their description

Finding someone in surveillance videos can be very time consuming

Witthaya Prasongsin / Alamy Stock Photo

By Douglas Heaven

Finding someone in a surveillance video could soon be as easy as Googling them. Descriptions of people of interest, such as a suspect or a missing person, are normally given in terms of their height, gender or clothing. But using this information to find a short woman wearing a red jacket in a video, say, often requires scanning hours of footage manually, which is no easy task. But a new search tool can do it automatically.

The system was created by …

Forget quantum laptops, our quantum computing future is in the cloud

Australian of the Year Michelle Simmons is hoping her work building a new type of quantum computer can solve problems we don't even know about

By Phil Dooley

She describes it as “an eye opener” – the childhood moment when Michelle Simmons’s father casually underestimated her ability at chess. She won the game in question regardless, but the moment stung. That someone so close to her didn’t appreciate what she was capable of became a motivating force.

These days, no one is underestimating Simmons. Her drive and determination led the English-born quantum physicist to win the Australian of the Year award in 2018, highlighting the impact made by the scientist sometimes dubbed the “quantum queen”.

The quantum computers that Simmons works on hold the promise of solving problems that would leave conventional computers whirring impotently until the heat death of the universe. In an industry rife with speculation and misinformation, she has built a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney that has hit goal after technological goal along the road to delivering silicon-based quantum computers.

Her team made headlines when it built a transistor made of a single atom of phosphorus, embedded in silicon. The phosphorus acts as a qubit, the unit of quantum computation. Unlike digital bits, which exist only as 0s or 1s, qubits can be both at once. After recently adding a second phosphorus qubit, Simmons’s team showed that they affected each other – a step towards quantum entanglement, the key to giving quantum computers their phenomenal power.

What did it mean to you to win Australian of the Year as an immigrant?

To be recognised by my adopted country says much more about Australia than it does about me. To celebrate someone in this way, who …

?What is the territory of Russia

== What is the territory of Russia == The Russian Federation extends north of the continents of Asia and Europe, with a capital of Moscow, with a population of 143.5 million, a semi-presidential federal republic of Russian ruble, founded in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union The Soviet Union was founded in 1922. Russian Federation has a common land border with several countries, as follows: Norway. Finland. Latvia. Estonia. Poland. Lithuania. White Russia. China. Ukraine. Azerbaijan. Georgia. Kazakhstan. Mongolia. North Korea. It also has maritime borders with both Japan and the United States. Her name was derived from the word "Russ", which was a medieval state then, as later called by modern thinkers the name "Russ Kiev". The Russian Federation is the largest country in the world, accounting for almost the price of the globe for populated areas. It also contains many rivers and lakes. The total area of ​​the Russian Federation is 17,098,242 square kilometers. This area does not include the area of ​​Crimea, which joined Russia. Federal recently. The Federal Republic of Russia is divided into 83 federal entities, divided as follows: 21 states (Republic), each with autonomy for the administration of its internal affairs. 46 territories (Oblast). 9 provinces (Krajiat). 4 autonomous regions (Okrugat). 2 Federal City (Fedralny Gorod). The size of each entity varies from one to the other (by area - in square kilometers - from largest to smallest): Sakha Republic - 3,083,523 Krasnoyarsk Krai - 2,366,797 Tyumen Oblast - 1,464,173 Khabarovsk Krai - 787,633 Irkutsk Oblast - 774,846 Okrug Yamalo-Nenets - 769,250 Okrug Chokotka - 721,481 Arkhangelsk Oblast - 589,913 Okrug Khanti-Mansi Autonomous Prefecture - 534,801 Kamchatka Krai - 464,275 Magadan Oblast - 462,464 Zapaikalski Krai - 431,892 Komi Republic - 416,774 Amor Oblast - 361,913 Buryatia Republic - 351,334 Tomsk Oblast - 314,391 Sverdlovsk Oblast - 194,307 Karelia Republic - 180,520 Novosibirsk oblast - 177,756 or Rov Nienets - 176,810 Republic of Tova - 168,604 Altay Krai - 167,996 Primorsky Krai - 164,673 Perm Kray - 160,236 Murmansk oblast - 144,902 Vologda oblast - 144,527 Republic of Bashkortostan - 142,947 Omsk oblast - 141,140 Orenburg Oblast - 123,702 Kerov Oblast - 120,374 Volgograd oblast - 112,877 Saratov The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan The Republic of Tatarstan Stavro Karaganda - 66,160 Republic of Khaxaya - 61,569 Kostroma oblast - 60,211 Pskov oblast - 55,399 Novgorod oblast - 54,501 Samara oblast - 53,565 Voronezh oblast - 52,216 Dagestan republic - 50,270 Smolensk oblast - 49,779 Astrakhan oblast - 49,024 Moscow Oblast - 45,799 Pienza Oblast - 43,352 Republic of Udmurtia - 42,061 Riazhan oblast - 39,605 Ulyanovsk oblast - 37,181 Jewish Autoblast - 36,266 Yaroslavl Oblast - 36,177 Bryansk oblast - 34,857 Tambov oblast - 34,462 Kursk oblast - 29,997 Kaluga Oblast - 29,777 Vladimir Oblast - 29,084 Belgorod Oblast - 27,134 Republic of Mordovia - 26,128 Tula Oblast - Orwell Republic of Kirya - Cherkessia - 14,277 Republic of Kabardino - Balkaria - 12,470 Republic of North Ossetia - 7,987 Republic of Adygeya - 7,792 Republic Ingushetia - 3,328 St. Petersburg - 1,399 Moscow - 1,091 area of ​​Russia