Defense in depth: Our goal in designing Chrome’s security architecture was to layer defenses, and avoid single points of failure. Chrome’s sandbox architecture represents one of the most effective parts of this strategy, but it’s far from the only piece. We also employ the best available anti-exploit technologies—including ASLR, DEP, JIT hardening, and SafeSEH—along with custom technologies like Safe Browsing, out-of-date plugin blocking, silent auto-update, and verified boot on Chrome OS. And we continue to work towards advancing the state of the art with research into areas like per-origin sandboxing and control flow integrity.

Transparency: We do not downplay security impact or bury vulnerabilities with silent fixes, because doing so serves users poorly. Instead, we provide users and administrators with the information they need to accurately assess risk. We publicly document our security handling process, and we disclose all vulnerabilities fixed in Chrome and its dependencies—whether discovered internally or externally. Whenever possible, we list all fixed security issues in our release notes, and make the underlying details public as soon as other affected projects have an adequate amount of time to respond. When we do not control the disclosure timeline for a security issue and cannot list it at the time of release, we make the details of the issue public as soon as disclosure occurs.

Community engagement: No software is perfect, and security bugs slip through even the best development and review processes. That’s why we’re grateful for the work of the independent security research community in helping us find and fix vulnerabilities. In response, we do our best to acknowledge and reward their contributions by ensuring proper attribution, paying out bounties, and sponsoring security conferences. We leverage the community to even greater extent where we can, by hiring members directly onto our team and contracting with industry leading, independent security consultancies.

Schmidt’s argument—a highly cogent and persuasive piece of propaganda—is dead-on: In the narrative arc of Google’s story, Siri is indeed a significant development. In fact, Siri is arguably the most significant development in Google’s story since, well, the advent of Google.

Sure, this story includes Facebook, the social web juggernaut that Google failed to see charging towards it on the distant horizon, and the Bing/Yahoo nexus that Microsoft assembled at magnificent cost. But in the retrospective view of of 3-5 years from now, these developments—while major—will likely pale in comparison to that fateful April day when Apple acquired Siri.

This is because Siri transforms computers from “passive” participants in the search process to “active” ones and in so doing urinates all over Google’s model. Instead of taking queries and then passively spitting out 10 blue links—which you then have to mine for the correct information—Siri actively goes and gets the correct information, herself.

Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it does seem logical. Very interesting.

No one other than Nathan Myhrvold and his cronies sees the U.S. patent system as functioning properly, but Google’s hypocrisy here is absurd. Google isn’t arguing against a handful of never-should-have-been-issued software patents. They’re not arguing against patent trolls like Myhrvold and his shell companies like Lodsys — companies that have no products of their own, no actual inventions, just patents for ideas for products. They’re effectively arguing against the idea of the patent system itself, simply because Android violates a bunch of patents held by Google’s competitors. It’s not “patents” that are attacking Android. It’s competing companies whose patents Google has violated — and whose business Android undermines — who are attacking Android.

Google supporters claim that Google only wants to use patents defensively. But what exactly does Google need to defend against, if not actual patents Android actually violates?

How is Google’s argument here different than simply demanding that Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, et al should simply sit back and let Google do whatever it wants with Android, regardless of the patents they hold? And, let’s not forget, give Android away for free.

Google’s business strength was simply taken for granted; so much so that even deep-pocketed competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft stopped trying to outdo Google’s massive scale and core algorithmic know-how.

And that’s why I used to think that Google was unstoppable.

Until I realized one very important thing: despite the fact that Google goes to great lengths to keep its index fresh by indexing pages that often change every hour, or even every few minutes, and despite its efforts at realtime search (including searching the Twitter firehose), its dominant dataset is dead, while the Web is—each day more so than the last—vibrantly and energetically alive.

Indeed, Google’s revered and unparalleled dataset is increasingly dating itself as an ossified relic akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls—outshined by the freshness of the living, breathing organism that is the social Web.

Like dusty and determined archaeologists, Google’s massive bots crawl the Web looking for the artifacts of digital civilization. And what they find is fossils—in the form of pages and links: the leave-behinds of writers, contributors, and casual end-users who have deposited traces of themselves in the skinny crevices and dark recesses of the Internet. Google analyzes these remains, and yet it has almost no first-hand knowledge of any of the users who created this content—or those who are searching for it.

Enter Facebook.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online. The company’s relentless and organic expansion—from an application to an emergent social operating system—has enabled it to know its users, not only on the Facebook.com domain, but also on other sites, as they travel throughout the Internet.

While Google has amassed an incredible database consisting of the fossilized linkages between most Web pages on the planet, Facebook possesses an asset that’s far more valuable—the realtime linkages between real people and the Web.

What does this mean, and what are the implications here?

Well, in a nutshell, Facebook has stored a treasure trove of distinctive data that, if fully utilized, could put Google out of business.

I don’t think this will happen, but I think it is possible.

Android’s share of the smartphone market dipped in the quarter, NPD said, to 50 percent in the first quarter from 53 percent in last year’s fourth quarter. Apple’s iOS rose nine percentage points, accounting for 28 percent of smartphone units sold, while BlackBerry lost five points of market share, falling to 14 percent.

A report by research firm Nielsen earlier this week found thirty-one percent of consumers surveyed plan to buy an Android-based smartphone in the next year, while 30 percent were going with Apple’s iPhone instead.

The real threat are web apps. The kind that will download to your device the moment you open then, allowing you offline access, whether they’re news, games, email or some other utility. If you don’t believe they’ll work — and eliminate dependencies on plugins outside of open web standards, like flash — go download a free copy of Angry Birds for Google Chrome and try disconnecting from your local network. Magic!

Steve Jobs thought web apps were the future too, in 2008 when he announced that the iPhone would have plenty of apps — all of them available through the browser. As is often the case with Jobs, he was just a little too far ahead of the curve (think of the Newton, his first attempt to create an iPhone-like device) which led him to later reverse himself and create a native app store anyway.

Here’s how Brian Kennish, formerly an engineer at Google and now something of a punk-rock privacy-protecting developer, put it in a recent email:

“One word: distribution. There are 2 billion web users versus 50 million iOS users.”

Interesting, but I’m not sure I’m purchasing it. It will come down to UI/UX. If that can be replicated by a web experience then sure…but if the local app continues to offer the superior feel the web alternative will not take hold.