Chromecast Adds Support for Android Screen Mirroring

As previously announced at Google I/O, Chromecast is about to become a lot more functional. The latest version of the Chromecast app for Android (that's version 1.7) adds support for screen mirroring. The feature is still in beta and it's limited to a few high-end Android phones and tablets: Nexus 4, 5, 7 (second generation only) and 10, Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5, Note 3 and 10, HTC One M7, LG G2, G3 and G Pro 2. Google promises to add more devices to the list.

"To start mirroring, simply select 'Cast Screen' from the navigation drawer in the Chromecast app and select your Chromecast device. On Nexus devices, this feature is also available through the quick settings menu," explains Google.

Hopefully, Android L will add native support for screen mirroring, so you'll no longer have to use the Chromecast app.

Updated Translation Card for Google Search

Google updated the translation card and made it more useful and more interactive. When you search for [translate hello to italian] or other similar queries, Google lets you change the input language and the translation language, switch between the two languages, edit the text you want to translate, listen to the translated text and find alternate translations.

If you use the mobile interface, you can also enable a full screen mode.

Here's the old Google Translate card:

{ Thanks, Herin. }

HTTPS YouTube Streams

Most Google services use HTTPS and Google wants to switch the entire Web to HTTPS. YouTube uses encrypted connections for signed-in users and even video streams use SSL. You can check this by right-clicking a video, selecting "Stats for nerds" and reading the "stream type" value for the HTML5 player or the third line for the Flash player.

More than 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. A study from 2013 concluded that YouTube video streaming accounted for more than 18 percent of all downstream traffic in North America.



5 years ago, SSL was mostly used for online banking and logging in to various sites. Few online services offered HTTPS as an option and one of them was Gmail back in 2008. HTTPS access for Gmail was enabled by default in 2010. Google released Secure Search in 2010 and made it the default option last year.



While protecting against man-in-the-middle attacks makes sense, what's the point of delivering hundreds of megabytes of publicly available videos though HTTPS? Privacy is a good reason. Traffic is encrypted, it can't easily be decoded by third parties between your computer and Google's servers.



Back in 2009, Microsoft didn't use SSL by default for logging in and now YouTube uses SSL to stream videos.