Jigsaw (company)

Last updated

Jigsaw
FormerlyGoogle Ideas (2010–2015)
Company type Think tank
Founded2010;14 years ago (2010)
Founders Eric Schmidt
Headquarters,
United States
Key people
Yasmin Green (CEO)
Parent
Website jigsaw.google.com

Jigsaw LLC (formerly Google Ideas) [1] is a technology incubator created by Google. It formerly operated as an independent subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., [2] but came under Google management in February 2020. [3] Based in New York City, Jigsaw is dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions. From "countering extremism", online censorship, and cyber-attacks to protecting access to information. [4] The current CEO is Yasmin Green.

Contents

History

Google Ideas

In 2010, Eric Schmidt approached Jared Cohen to lead Google Ideas as a "think-and-do tank" to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics, and has worked on projects intended to protect activists and independent media from cyber-attacks. [2] Ideas brought together a team of Google engineers, research scientists, product managers, and policy experts to address these issues. [5] The team also hosted a number of conferences, including the 2017 Conflict in a Connected World Roundtable Series, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations' Center of Preventative Action. [6]

Ideas came under scrutiny for its links with the US State Department [7] and its regime change activities. [8] [9]

Jigsaw

In February 2016, Eric Schmidt announced in a Medium post, [1] the expansion of Google Ideas into a technology incubator named Jigsaw. According to Schmidt, the new name "reflects our belief that collaborative problem-solving yields the best solutions" and the team's mission "is to use technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges, from countering violent extremism to thwarting online censorship to mitigating the threats associated with digital attacks". [1] Jigsaw was expected to leverage more of Alphabet's engineering talent and resources to build more sophisticated products. [10] Jared Cohen, formerly with the Policy Planning Committee at the US State Department, was the CEO of Jigsaw until 2022. [11]

In January 2023, Alphabet announced about 12,000 employees being laid off. Citing conversations with anonymous former employees, Forbes reported the Jigsaw team of 50 was reduced by somewhere between a third and a half. The company did not disclose numbers or employees a reason but Jigsaw was not generating revenue. [11]

Projects

Constitute

In 2013, Jigsaw (then known as Google Ideas) teamed up with researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Chicago to launch Constitute, an indexed repository of national constitutions. [12] The objective of the project is to identify a coherent set of constitutional options and sample text for those writing constitutions. The site was one of the early uses of the Semantic Web as a data model. The project has undergone regular updates since 2013 and is used by scholars, citizens, and constitutional drafters.

Perspective

In February 2017, Jigsaw and Google launched the free Perspective API, "a new tool for web publishers to identify toxic comments that can undermine a civil exchange of ideas". [13] Using machine learning technology, Perspective offers a score from zero to 100 on how similar new comments are to others previously identified as toxic, defined as how likely a comment is to make someone leave a conversation. Publishers can use Perspective in a number of ways, from offering readers instant feedback on the toxicity of their comments to giving readers the power to filter conversations based on the level of toxicity they'd like to see. [13] Jigsaw claims "its AI can immediately spit out an assessment of the phrase’s 'toxicity' more accurately than any keyword blacklist, and faster than any human moderator". [14] Perspective's launch partners included The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist and Wikipedia. [15] The research on Wikipedia started discussion about Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects.

In June 2017, The New York Times announced that as a result of the partnership with Jigsaw, the Times will offer comments on all top stories and scale comments to 80% of its articles by the end of the year. [16]

Project Shield

Project Shield is a free anti-distributed denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) service that is offered by Jigsaw to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights-related content." [17] The main goal of the project is to serve "small, under-resourced news sites that are vulnerable to the web’s growing epidemic of DDoS attacks", according to team lead George Conard. [18] It is similar to services offered by companies like Cloudflare. Google announced Project Shield at their Ideas Conference on 21 October 2013. [17] The service was initially only offered to trusted testers, but on 25 February 2016, Google opened up the service to any qualifying website. [19] The service works by having the website use Google's IPs, and traffic is routed through a Google-owned reverse proxy that identifies and filters malicious traffic. [20]

Project Shield provides news, human rights, and election monitoring sites with protection from DDoS cyber-attacks by a system of caching (storing the data from the protected website to reduce load on the site). It also filters traffic to thwart DDoS attacks. Project Shield is built on Google Cloud Platform. [21] It is provided free of charge to the qualifying websites of independent journalists, human rights, and elections monitoring websites to protect them regardless of their location and Project Shield as of 2016 October has users in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa. [22] Project Shield rescued Brian Krebs's security blog from a then-unprecedented DDoS attack that knocked the website entirely offline. [23]

In March 2017, Jigsaw launched a campaign called "Protect Your Election", a suite of free tools to help protect access to information during elections. These tools include Shield, Password Alert, [24] and two-step verification. [25] [26]

Redirect Method

The Redirect Method is an open source methodology developed by Jigsaw in partnership, with Moonshot CVE, [27] that leverages Google's AdWords platform and YouTube to target potential ISIS recruits and dissuade them from joining the group. [28]

Jigsaw claims that during a pilot project conducted in early 2016, its advertising was three to four times more effective than a normal campaign, and "those who clicked spent more than twice as long viewing the most effective playlists than the best estimates of how long people view YouTube as a whole." [28] Jigsaw published the detailed steps for the methodology under a Creative Commons license on a GitHub repository. Initially piloted against ISIS, the Redirect Method has since been deployed against white supremacists [29] and disinformation [30] [31] in partnership with groups such as the Anti-Defamation League [32] and Moonshot CVE.

Outline

Outline is an open-source tool that lets news organizations provide their network of journalists safer access to the internet, [33] powered by Shadowsocks. [34] Jigsaw claims the VPN software can be set up on one's own server in a matter of minutes, even if the user is not technically savvy. According to WIRED, "Outline aims to provide an alternative to, on the one hand, stronger anonymity tools like Tor that slow down web browsing by bouncing connections through multiple encrypted hops around the world and, on the other hand, commercial VPNs that can be expensive, and also put users' private information and internet history at risk." [34] WIRED adds that because administrators can add unlimited secret keys, "Outline [is] an easy way to run a VPN for an entire organization, like a group of activists or journalists." Another feature is that Outline requires minimal upkeep, as "a feature called Watchtower automatically checks for security updates and installs them." [34]

Intra

Intra, launched 3 October 2018, is a DNS over HTTPS client [35] for Android versions 4.0 and above that helps protect against DNS manipulation attacks [36] and SNI sniffing attacks typically employed by Internet Service Providers to censor websites, apps, and games. [37] [ non-primary source needed ]

Other projects

Other Jigsaw projects include Detox, Sideways Dictionary, Password Alert, Unfiltered.news, Digital Attack Map, and Montage (graduated to Storyful).

In 2016, Jigsaw worked with the Wikimedia Foundation on Detox, a project using Machine learning to help better understand online harassment on Wikipedia, with application to other web platforms. [38] The tool was removed in 2019, however, due to concerns about its accuracy.

In March 2017, Jigsaw partnered with The Washington Post to launch Sideways Dictionary, a community-driven collection of analogies to explain complex tech jargon. [39] Sideways Dictionary is available as a Chrome extension and on The Washington Post. [40]

Password Alert helps protect against phishing attacks; [41] according to WIRED, "the company developed it for Syrian activists targeted by government-friendly hackers, but when it proved effective, it was rolled out to all of Google’s users." [42]

Unfiltered.news "uses Google News data to show users what topics are being under-reported or are popular in regions around the world", [43] and the Digital Attack Map displays the top digital attacks in the world in real time. [4]

Montage is a program that "lets war correspondents and nonprofits crowdsource the analysis of YouTube videos to track conflicts and gather evidence of human rights violations." [42] In May 2016, Jigsaw announced it had partnered with Vice News on a five-part documentary series called Blackout to examine free expression around the world. [44]

Jigsaw also helped develop CopCast, an open-source project that can turn any Android phone into a body-worn camera system for law enforcement. In June 2017, USA Today reported that the Jersey City Police Department will scale this technology to more than 250 officers. [45]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Password</span> Text used for user authentication to prove identity

A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services that a typical individual accesses can make memorization of unique passwords for each service impractical. Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, the secret is held by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol, the verifier is able to infer the claimant's identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denial-of-service attack</span> Type of cyber-attack

In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.

Linux malware includes viruses, Trojans, worms and other types of malware that affect the Linux family of operating systems. Linux, Unix and other Unix-like computer operating systems are generally regarded as very well-protected against, but not immune to, computer viruses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anonymous (hacker group)</span> Decentralized hacktivist group

Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jared Cohen</span> American businessman and consultant

Jared Andrew Cohen is an American businessman and presidential historian serving as the President of Global Affairs and co-head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute at Goldman Sachs, which he joined in August 2022 as a Partner and member of the firm's Management Committee. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he was the founder and the CEO of Jigsaw. Prior to that, he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and as an advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton. Brought in by Condoleezza Rice as a member of the Policy Planning Staff, he was one of a few staffers that stayed under Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, he focused on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Internet freedom, and fostering opposition in repressive countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moxie Marlinspike</span> American entrepreneur

Matthew Rosenfeld, better known by the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike, is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher. Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Technology Foundation, and served as the first CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp, Google Messages, Facebook Messenger, and Skype.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloudflare</span> American technology company

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxies, Domain Name Service, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by more than 19% of the Internet for its web security services, as of 2024.

Project Shield is an anti-distributed-denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) that is offered by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google, to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights related content." The main goal of the project is to serve "small, under-resourced news sites that are vulnerable to the web's growing epidemic of DDOS attacks", according to team lead George Conard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proton Mail</span> End-to-end encrypted email service

Proton Mail is a Swiss end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2013 headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland. It uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data before they are sent to Proton Mail servers, unlike other common email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com. The service can be accessed through a webmail client, the Tor network, Windows, macOS and Linux (beta) desktop apps and iOS and Android apps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Riseup</span> Tech collective

Riseup is a volunteer-run collective providing secure email, email lists, a VPN service, online chat, and other online services. This organization was launched by activists in Seattle with borrowed equipment and a few users in 1999 or 2000, and quickly grew to millions of accounts.

Sidewalk Labs LLC is an urban planning and infrastructure subsidiary of Google. Its stated goal is to improve urban infrastructure through technological solutions, and tackle issues such as cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage. The company was headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former Deputy Mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P. until 2021. Other notable employees include Craig Nevill-Manning, co-founder of Google's New York office and inventor of Froogle, and Rohit Aggarwala, who served as chief policy officer of the company and is now Commissioner of New York City Department of Environmental Protection. It was originally part of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, before being absorbed into Google in 2022 following Doctoroff's departure from the company.

Credential stuffing is a type of cyberattack in which the attacker collects stolen account credentials, typically consisting of lists of usernames or email addresses and the corresponding passwords, and then uses the credentials to gain unauthorized access to user accounts on other systems through large-scale automated login requests directed against a web application. Unlike credential cracking, credential stuffing attacks do not attempt to use brute force or guess any passwords – the attacker simply automates the logins for a large number of previously discovered credential pairs using standard web automation tools such as Selenium, cURL, PhantomJS or tools designed specifically for these types of attacks, such as Sentry MBA, SNIPR, STORM, Blackbullet and Openbullet.

Mirai is malware that turns networked devices running Linux into remotely controlled bots that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as IP cameras and home routers. The Mirai botnet was first found in August 2016 by MalwareMustDie, a white hat malware research group, and has been used in some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, including an attack on 20 September 2016 on computer security journalist Brian Krebs' website, an attack on French web host OVH, and the October 2016 DDoS attacks on Dyn. According to a chat log between Anna-senpai and Robert Coelho, Mirai was named after the 2011 TV anime series Mirai Nikki.

Cloudbleed was a Cloudflare buffer overflow disclosed by Project Zero on February 17, 2017. Cloudflare's code disclosed the contents of memory that contained the private information of other customers, such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data. As a result, data from Cloudflare customers was leaked to all other Cloudflare customers that had access to server memory. This occurred, according to numbers provided by Cloudflare at the time, more than 18,000,000 times before the problem was corrected. Some of the leaked data was cached by search engines.

Hack Forums is an Internet forum dedicated to discussions related to hacker culture and computer security. The website ranks as the number one website in the "Hacking" category in terms of web-traffic by the analysis company Alexa Internet. The website has been widely reported as facilitating online criminal activity, such as the case of Zachary Shames, who was arrested for selling keylogging software on Hack Forums in 2013 which was used to steal personal information.

Outline VPN is a free and open-source tool that deploys Shadowsocks servers on multiple cloud service providers. The software suite also includes client software for multiple platforms. Outline was developed by Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by Google.[3]

Artificial intelligence is used in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for the purpose of developing those projects. Human and bot interaction in Wikimedia projects is routine and iterative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deflect.ca</span> DDoS mitigation and website security service

Deflect is a DDoS mitigation and website security service by eQualitie, a Canadian social enterprise developing open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, resilience and self-determination, to protect and promote human rights and press freedom online.

A virtual private network (VPN) service provides a proxy server to help users bypass Internet censorship such as geo-blocking and users who want to protect their communications against data profiling or MitM attacks on hostile networks.

Area 120 is Google's in-house incubator in which employees work on 20% Project product ideas. It has helped develop Gmail, AdSense, Google News, and Google Cardboard.

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