Google 
 
 Google shelled out some cash last fall after losing and regaining ownership of Google.com. Now the company has revealed how much the slip-up cost. 
 
 Former Google employee Sanmay Ved purchased Google.com for $12 at 1:20 a.m. ET on September 29. He bought the domain name on the Google Domains registration service website after the company somehow lost ownership of it. 
 
 He owned Google.com for one minute. The transaction was reversed when Google sent Ved a cancellation order, which returned ownership to the company. 
 
 Conflicts over domain ownership aren't always settled amicably or cheaply. So-called domain squatters often try to get ahead of potential, hypothetical products and register domain names -- say, "Appleflyingcar.com" -- on the cheap in hopes of netting a big sale to the company that needs the site. Or they may create a website name that combines a celebrity's name and a word like "naked." 
 
 In this case, it seems Google may have missed a deadline to renew Google.com, creating an opportunity for someone to slip in and nab it. Neither Google nor Ved has publicly revealed exactly how the domain name became available. 
 
 In a security blog post Thursday, the company revealed that it wanted to give Ved $6,006.13. Look at the amount as letters instead of numbers, and it comes close to spelling "google." "Squint a little and you'll see it!" Google said. 
 
 Google doubled that offer after Ved said he would donate the money to charity, both the company and Ved said, though neither specified the exact figure. 
 
 Google's payout ended up going to the Art of Living India foundation, which runs free schools for children in poverty-stricken areas of India. 
 
 Now playing: Watch this: Masters of a new domain 
 
 Ved, whose LinkedIn account describes him as an MBA candidate at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, detailed the incident in a post there last fall. He noted that Google was able to reverse the transaction because it owned the Google Domains registration service. 
 
 Microsoft bumped into a similar issue in 2003 when it lost ownership of the Hotmail.co.uk website, The Register reported at the time. The software giant failed to cancel the transaction. However, the person who bought the domain name returned it the same day. ||||| Google's security bounty programs can be quite lucrative for those who discover problems, and the company has just published a report looking back at the security landscape in 2015. Entitled Google Security Rewards - 2015 Year in Review, the report reveals the financial rewards that have been paid out in the last 12 months. 
 
 In all, Google has paid out more than $2 million to more than 300 people, but Sanmay Ved is probably one of the more interesting reward recipients. He's the guy who -- very briefly -- managed to buy Google.com before having it taken off his hands. Google offered him a $6,006.13 reward, but there's a little more to the story. 
 
 If you're wondering about the slightly strange amount, Google explains that if you squint and use a little imagination, the figure spells out the word Google. Sanmay decided to donate his reward to charity, and when Google learned about this, the reward was doubled. While Sanmay may have been one of the more unusual reward recipients, Tomasz Bojarski got the crown for the most prolific, discovering no fewer than 70 bugs on Google. 
 
 2015 was the year that Android was added to the to the Security Reward program initiative resulting in payments of over $200,000 to researchers. Google shares a graphic that shows some of the highlights from 2015: 
 
 In 2015, Google's Vulnerability Research Grants was used to provide researchers with the funds they need to carry out their work. One example of how these funds were used includes research into a YouTube problem: 
 
 We’ve already seen positive results from this program; here’s one example. Kamil Histamullin a researcher from Kasan, Russia received a VRP grant early last year. Shortly thereafter, he found an issue in YouTube Creator Studio which would have enabled anyone to delete any video from YouTube by simply changing a parameter from the URL. After the issue was reported, our teams quickly fixed it and the researcher was rewarded $5,000 in addition to his initial research grant. Kamil detailed his findings on his personal blog in March. 
 
 Find out more about Google's reward programs over on the Google Security blog. 
 
 Photo Credit: tanuha2001 / Shutterstock.com ||||| Abuse: Police said Google had tipped them off about the internet use of 41-year-old John Skillern, pictured 
 
 A convicted child abuser has been charged with fresh offences after saying Google detected indecent images in his Gmail account. 
 
 The internet giant used sophisticated scanning techology to catch John Henry Skillern, 41, as he allegedly tried to send three explicit photos of a young girl to a friend. 
 
 Skillern has now been charged with the possession and promotion of child pornography in a victory for Google's sometimes controversial e-mail scanning policies. 
 
 Police in the city of Webster near Houston, Texas, said they were tipped off by Google on July 11 and obtained a warrant to search Skillern's electronic devices. 
 
 They searched his home in Houston on July 24 and found the offending images, according to a crime report released by Webster Police. 
 
 Detective David Nettles, from the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, said Skillern used a Gmail account to e-mail a friend three explicit photos of a young girl. 
 
 'They got a tip from Google, basically Gmail,' he told KHOU 11 News. 
 
 'He was trying to get around getting caught with just keeping it inside of his e-mail. I would never be able to find that.' 
 
 A police statement said Skillern was held in custody after being charged. 
 
 It added: 'After forensics were completed on evidence collected at the residence, the Webster Criminal Investigation Division filed one count of possession of child pornography and one count of promotion of child pornography on Skillern through the Harris County District Attorney’s office. 
 
 'Each count had a bond of $100,000 for a total of $200,000.' 
 
 Innovation: David Nettles of Webster Police told KHOU 11 News he would never have known about the images 
 
 Skillern is a convicted child abuser whose name already appears for the rest of his life on the Texas Sex Offenders' Register. 
 
 He was jailed for 20 years in 1994 for an aggravated sexual assault on an eight-year-old boy, according to the online database. 
 
 Although the crackdown on child abuse images has been welcomed, Google's wider e-mail scanning technology has proved controversial and sparked a number of lawsuits. 
 
 In April it stopped scanning e-mails on Google Apps for Education, used by 30million people in the academic world, amid claims the information could be used for targeted advertising. 
 
 HOW THE TECHNOLOGY WORKS Since 2008 Google has used technology known as 'hashing' to tag known child sexual abuse images. That allows copies of those images elsewhere to be detected by computer software without humans having to view them again. Each image is encrypted, catalogued and assigned a unique ID number which is then tested against images being sent from Gmail accounts to see if they match. More sophisticated ways of detecting abuse images are being detected all the time. Last summer Google revealed it was launching a Child Protection Technology Fund worth $2million to encourage the development of more precise software. Source: Google 
 
 And last year it was sued by a group of citizens who claimed scanning e-mails to produce advertising violated the Federal Wiretap Act. 
 
 The lawsuit was led by Keith Dunbar of Bowie County, Texas, who claimed e-mails he sent to Gmail users from a non-Google account were scanned by the firm. 
 
 His argument was that by not signing up to Gmail himself, he had never given permission for the scans to take place. 
 
 Google's terms of service clearly state that e-mails are analysed, and that any lawbreakers will be reported to the authorities. 
 
 'Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection,' the terms say. 
 
 Information the firm gathers can be passed on for a number of reasons, including to 'protect against harm to... our users or the public as required or permitted by law'. 
 
 A blog by the firm last year added: 'The Internet has been a tremendous force for good - increasing access to information, improving people’s ability to communicate and driving economic growth. But like the physical world, there are dark corners on the web where criminal behavior exists. 
 
 Tool: Google spends millions of dollars developing ever more sophisticated tools to detect child abuse photos 
 
 'In 2011, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC’s) Cybertipline Child Victim Identification Program reviewed 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse. 
 
 'Behind these images are real, vulnerable kids who are sexually victimized and victimized further through the distribution of their images. 
 
 It is critical that we take action as a community - as concerned parents, guardians, teachers and companies - to help combat this problem. 
 
 'We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain “information” that should never be created or found. ||||| Without referring directly to the letter to Mr. Pichai, Google said in a statement on Tuesday that “any military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns.” It added, “We’re actively engaged across the company in a comprehensive discussion of this important topic.” The company called such exchanges “hugely important and beneficial,” though several Google employees familiar with the letter would speak of it only on the condition of anonymity, saying they were concerned about retaliation. 
 
 The statement said the company’s part of Project Maven was “specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes,” though officials declined to make available the relevant contract language. The Defense Department said that because Google is a subcontractor on Project Maven to the prime contractor, ECS Federal, it could not provide either the amount or the language of Google’s contract. ECS Federal did not respond to inquiries. 
 
 Google said the Pentagon was using “open-source object recognition software available to any Google Cloud customer” and based on unclassified data. “The technology is used to flag images for human review and is intended to save lives and save people from having to do highly tedious work,” the company said. 
 
 Some of Google’s top executives have significant Pentagon connections. Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google and still a member of the executive board of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, serves on a Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Innovation Board, as does a Google vice president, Milo Medin. 
 
 In an interview in November, Mr. Schmidt acknowledged “a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly, if you will.” He said he served on the board in part “to at least allow for communications to occur” and suggested that the military would “use this technology to help keep the country safe.” 
 
 An uneasiness about military contracts among a small fraction of Google’s more than 70,000 employees may not pose a major obstacle to the company’s growth. But in the rarefied area of artificial intelligence research, Google is engaged in intense competition with other tech companies for the most talented people, so recruiters could be hampered if some candidates are put off by Google’s defense connections. 
 
 As Google defends its contracts from internal dissent, its competitors have not been shy about publicizing their own work on defense projects. Amazon touts its image recognition work with the Department of Defense, and Microsoft has promoted the fact that its cloud technology won a contract to handle classified information for every branch of the military and defense agencies. ||||| Exclusive Microsoft was busy covering up an almighty cock-up last night after forgetting to renew its hotmail.co.uk domain name. 
 
 Despite being warned that the domain for its popular Web mail service was up for renewal, it seems Microsoft - or whoever had the task of managing its hotmail.co.uk domain - overlooked this vital piece of administration. 
 
 As a result, last month Microsoft lost its claim to the domain and it was duly returned to the open market to be picked up by whomever fancied it 
 
 Luckily, the domain was snapped up on the same day - October 23. The new owner - a good hearted soul - then proceeded immediately to contact Microsoft, inform the giant of its slip and arrange to hand back the domain. 
 
 However, Microsoft didn't want to know. Despite phone calls and emails - and being fobbed off by Microsoft drones - our man behind this public-spirited deed was completely blanked by the software empire. 
 
 Microsoft only took notice when The Register contacted the company yesterday afternoon to enquire why its hotmail.co.uk site was registered to a private individual. 
 
 It was then we were told that the matter was under investigation and being "escalated". Worryingly, no one in the UK could deal with the matter so it was up to the US to sort things out. 
 
 Of course, while Microsoft's spinstresses tried to stall for time, the company was busy scurrying behind the scenes to sort out this embarrassing episode. It managed to contact hotmail.co.uk's new owner, grovel at their mistake and sort out the mess. By all accounts, hotmail.co.uk will be returned in a few days. 
 
 A spokeswoman for Nominet UK - the registry for all .uk domains - confirmed that hotmail.co.uk had failed to be renewed and was placed back into pool of available domains. 
 
 For Nominet's part, she confirmed that "all the standard renewal procedures were followed regarding hotmail.co.uk". 
 
 "I would like to remind companies and their agents that it is their responsibility to renew their domains," she said. 
 
 Despite repeated attempts to seek comment from Microsoft, the software giant has failed to cobble together any form of statement that might shed light on this situation. 
 
 In December 1999, Microsoft forgot to renew the domain name Passport.com, and so rendered its Hotmail service partially crippled. A Linux programmer, Michael Chaney, paid the $35 fee and promptly handed over ownership to Microsoft. Here is his story. ® 
 
 ®
– Google handed out more than $2 million to more than 300 people in 2015 who spotted bugs and security issues, but one award in particular stands out, reports Beta News. The odd sum of $6,006.13 went to Sanmay Ved, a former Google employee and current MBA candidate at Babson College in Massachusetts. Why the weird amount? It kind of spells "Google" numerically. "Squint a little and you’ll see it!" says Google's Online Security Blog in a post on the 2015 awards. It seems Ved was messing around with the Google Domains interface late one night in September (because don't we all?) when to his surprise the domain name Google.com appeared as available for purchase. For $12. So he found himself buying—with a credit card and all—one of the world's most famous domains. His moment of glory was quite literally just that—within a minute Google canceled the transaction, which Google can do because it owns the registration service itself. Ved says he doesn't know exactly what caused the glitch on Google's end, but he details the geekily sordid affair on his LinkedIn account. CNET speculates that Google missed a renewal deadline, and Ved was able to capitalize. A nice footnote: When Ved elected to donate his award to charity—it went to this education foundation—Google doubled it. Microsoft ran into a similar problem back in 2003 but did not immediately cancel the sale of Hotmail.co.uk. Fortunately for Microsoft, the buyer returned it that same day, the Register reported at the time. (Speaking of domains, Google has bought the entire alphabet.)