Google has taken upon itself to warn people who utilise its Gmail service whenever they suspect that the service has become the target of apparent 'state-sponsored' hacking attacks.

The search engine giant is putting a message that reads "We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer" at the top of the Gmail pages of any users that it believes to be at risk. The message will appear in any browser, so users don't have to worry about using IE, Firefox or Chrome.

Google aren't revealing what information leads them to such conclusions, with Google's vice president of security engineering Eric Grosse commenting "We can't go into the details without giving away information that would be helpful to these bad actors."

He adds "Our detailed analysis -- as well as victim reports -- strongly suggest the involvement of states or groups that are state-sponsored."

Google's ability to recognise such attacks may stem from their experiences with Chinese hackers around two years ago and it is refreshing that the company apparently intends to utilise this experience to help others.

Google have unveiled the cultural map that has come about as a result of working alongside the indiginous Surui people of Brazil. The map is a digital tool that will enable the Amazon-based tribe share their knowledge of the rainforest and combat illegal logging.

The map is the result of a five-year collaboration between the two groups and was released online for the first time at a business conference held on the sidelines of the UN Rio+20 that was recently held in Brazil.

Google have announced that they will be developing a new change to the Google Play store that houses Android Apps, stating that they will be providing mobile apps developers with the ability to reply to reviews of their mobile apps.

The ability will only be offered to those mobile apps developers with the 'Top Developer Badge' and is intended to become quite widely available at some point in the future.

The change will allow those developers who believe their mobile app is coming in for undue criticism to respond to the negativity, allowing them to call out commenters and reviewers who are being unduly harsh.

It will also help when it comes to troubleshooting, as it allows a direct line of communication between customer and developer.

Google has recently unveiled statistics that demonstrate that the company has removed about 640 videos from YouTube that were believed to be promoting terrorism during the second half of 2011. Most of the videos were removed following complaints from the UK's Association of Police Officers.

The figures, amongst others, were contained in the company's latest transparency report, in which they provide information about the requests made by international authorities to remove or hand over certain materials.

Google have also terminated five accounts that were linked to the videos and has also refused many other similar requests to take down content on the grounds of right to free speech. Amongst those refused was apparently Canada's Passport Office. They had requested that a video of a person urinating on his passport and then flushing it down the toilet be removed.

Google's senior policy analyst, Dorothy Chou, commented about the myriad of requests, stating "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 the Agency for Enterprise Development to remove links to a site that criticised it.

"We didn't comply with either of these requests."

Anybody who has yet to download the Apple Messages beta will now have to wait until the product sees its actual launch date as Apple have pulled the beta in preparation for the full product release in July. The company will also be releasing Mountain Lion, their new OSX, with the Messages system implemented into it so the company must be happy with the beta phase of the program.

The Messages beta for lion was first released back in February and gave Mac users a small taste of what was to come with the release of the new OSX. Messages with replace the iChat mobile app and will integrate with all Apple devices.

There were issues with the beta that Apple will look to address, with one complaint being that users found themselves overwhelmed with notifcations. Others complained that the service appeared stripped down when compared to the previous messaging system.

Recent reports are stating that Google have hired a top law firm based in Washington DC to help it fend off the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust probe.

Bloomberg has been reporting that the search engine giant have hired Williams & Connolly LLP, which has also represented clients like former US President Bill Clinton.

Google has been facing calls from all directions to alter its privacy and business practices in certain areas, with the FTC carrying out a review in addition to Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy. However Google doesn't seem willing to change anything, meaning that a battle seems almost inevitable.

The company hasn't provided an official comment on hiring the law firm but, at the D10 conference last week, FTC chairman John Leibowitz confirmed Wilkinson's hiring, but denied the move was any sort of indication as to how the case would be handled. "When you have the opportunity to get someone of Beth's stature and abilities ... you always take her up on it," Leibowitz said.

"It doesn't mean we've decided to bring a case at all," he continued. "It just means that we have very competent counsel that can go toe-to-toe with [Google's] very competent counsel."

Scientists are apparently working on a new search engine that will utilise information from a variety of real world sensors in an effort to deliver even more accurate search results.

Computer scientists at the University of Glasgow are working on the project, which is called "search engine for multimedia environment generated content" (SMART)

The search engine will work differently to traditional search engines as it will match queries with information from cameras and microphones before cross-referencing data with social networks.

As a result users will receive detailed responses to questions such as "what part of the city hosts live music events which my friends have been to recently?" or "how busy is the city centre?".

Dr Iadh Ounis, of the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, commented "The SMART project will be built upon an open-source search engine technology known as Terrier we have been developing at the university since 2004, and we're pleased to be involved in this innovative research initiative.

"The SMART engine will be able to answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors that can contribute to the query, then synthesising results stemming from distributed sources in an intelligent way.

"SMART builds upon the existing concept of 'smart cities', physical spaces which are covered in an array of intelligent sensors which communicate with each other and can be searched for information. The search results sourced from these smart cities can be reused across multiple applications, making the system more effective.

"We expect that SMART will be tested in a real city by 2014."

Google Analytics, which is well-known amongst SEO companies for providing an array of important data that can be used to adjust SEO campaigns, has implemented a new report tool that provides users with information about the broswer-size of a person who has visited a website.

This data is becoming increasingly important as more people start to utilise mobile devices to access websites, with many people already considering optimising their websites for mobile users.

Google has implemented the feature in an effort to provide information to SEO companies and Analytics users relating to the devices used to access their sites, allowing them to make changes wherever relevant.

The change was announced in a Google Analytics blog post in early June.

Andy Rubin, who is commonly recognised as the father of the Android operating system that is used on many different mobile devices, has recently taken to Twitter to reveal hust how quickly the operating system is growing.

He recently tweeted "No plans to leave Google. Oh, and just for meme completeness - there are over 900,000 android devices activated each day :-)"

That works out to about 324 million activations per year, thus proving just how widespread the Android technology is in smartphones and other mobile devices.

Android remains top of the smartphone pile according to most studies, however its fracticious nature and spread across multiple devices leads to it making less money for Google than iOS does for Apple.

However it does offer much more flexibility when it comes to mobile apps development, making it extremely appealing.

A Swiss court has removed some of the restrictions that were levied against Google Street View, granting the company a partial victory in the region. Google had been told that they needed to black out every single face and licence plate that made an appearance in their Street View images for Switzerland.

However this decision has now been overturned, with Google now only required to black out a face or licence plate if a user complains about its visibility. The court also made it clear to Google that they must make it easier to lodge a complaint with them to ensure this process runs as smoothly as possible.

"We're pleased the Swiss court has upheld a key part of our appeal, acknowledging that we have strong privacy controls in Street View, like automatic blurring of faces and license plates," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement. "We're reviewing the court's decision in full and are speaking to the DPA [Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection] as we consider our options."

The original ruling was made in April 2011, with Google being told to go so far as hiding features like skin colour and clothing of people photographed near 'sensitive' areas like courts and hospitals.

Google argued that the rulings were too restrictive and had threatened to pull out of Switzerland altogether.