Google has added a new feature to the Chrome web browser that will make it easier for users to check if their stored passwords are weak and easy to guess.www.bleepingcomputer.com
A bug in Google Search is causing a browser tab to freeze when searching between a specified range of dates.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google has released Chrome 88 today, January 19th, 2021, to the Stable desktop channel, and it includes security improvements and the long-awaited removal of Adobe Flash Player.www.bleepingcomputer.com
With the new iPhone 12 lineup, photographers around the world capture stunning images that inspire.www.apple.com
Google says that it will block third-party Chromium web browsers from using private Google APIs after discovering that they were integrating them although they're intended to be used only in Chrome.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Project Zero, Google's 0day bug-hunting team, revealed a hacking campaign coordinated by "a highly sophisticated actor" and targeting Windows and Android users with zero-day and n-day exploits.www.bleepingcomputer.com
(Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s YouTube said on Tuesday it has suspended Donald Trump’s channel as it violated policies for inciting violence after last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol by the president’s supporters.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-youtube-trump/youtube-suspends-trumps-channel-after-violating-policy-on-inciting-violence-idUSKBN29I0F9
Online platforms and social media companies are distancing themselves from, and taking action against, those that encouraged or engaged in the violence in Washington, DC.
Trump’s channel is now prevented from uploading new videos or livestreams for a minimum of seven days, which may be extended, Youtube said in a statement. ...
Alphabet Inc's YouTube said on Tuesday it has suspended Donald Trump's channel as it violated policies for inciting violence after last week's assault on the U.S. Capitol by the president's supporters.www.reuters.com
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.I'm no friend of the tech monopolists myself. The power demonstrated here does concern me, greatly. I've long railed against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, among other tech monopolists. Largely because as monopolies they are power loci acting through their occupation of a common resource, outside common control, and not serving the common weal. Hell: Facebook, Google (YouTube), Reddit, and Twitter played a massive role in creating the current fascist insurrection in the US, along with even more enthusiastic aid and comfort from traditional media, across the spectrum. Damage that will take decades to repair, if ever.
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.greenwald.substack.com
Google has banned the conservative social networking app Parler from the Google Play Store for not removing posts that incite violence in the US.www.bleepingcomputer.com
I think we need a meta post to discuss this sudden change in Twitter/Facebook/Google/Apple[?]/Reddit[??] behaviour. Together with all the resignations from the White House it does feel like the wind is coming from a new direction.I aim to please (though my aim is poor). Here's that meta post.
(And I continue to be reminded of stories from my grandma, who lived through Hitler’s regime. The amount of people who suddenly decided to burn their uniforms in Spring 1945 was amazing. They all turned up later, well embedded in the new administration, mind you.)
It is profitable to put right-wing/fascist/conspiratorial content in front of more eyeballs, since it generates more "engagement". So Facebook, YouTube and others became perfect channels for this kind of crap.-- Rysiekúr Memesson
Big Tech made money on this, for them today's insurrection is an "externality".
Google has fixed a Chromium bug to prevent antivirus programs running on Windows 10 from blocking new files and bookmarks.www.bleepingcomputer.com
By 2014, competitors had exited the market, Google’s competitive offering Orkut shut down,76 and Facebook’s monopoly was complete ...(p. 23)
Google has tried several times, without much success, to take on Facebook and master social networking. Now it is making its biggest effort yet.And Facebook appears to have taken the threat seriously. From Wired (which also cites Srinivasan extensively):
On Tuesday, Google introduced a social networking service called the Google+ project — which happens to look a lot like Facebook.
The most revealing insight comes from the summer of 2011, when the company was gearing up to fend off the threat of Google’s rival platform, Google+. The complaint quotes an email in which Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “For the first time, we have real competition and consumers have real choice … we will have to be better to win.” At the time, Facebook had been planning to remove users’ ability to untag themselves in photos. One unnamed executive suggested pumping the brakes. “If ever there was a time to AVOID controversy, it would be when the world is comparing our offerings to G+,” they wrote. Better, they suggested, to save such changes “until the direct competitive comparisons begin to die down.” This is close to a smoking gun: evidence that, as Srinivasan hypothesized, Facebook preserves user privacy when it fears competition and degrades privacy when it doesn’t."The Smoking Gun in the Facebook Antitrust Case"
Google Plus was Google finally taking note of Facebook and confronting the company head-on, rather than via cloak-and-dagger recruitment shenanigans and catty disses at tech conferences. It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets’ placing nukes in Cuba in 1962. Google Plus was the great enemy’s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared “Lockdown,” the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook’s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.Mind: despite being a very active user, I'll be the first to admit that Google+ had its limitations, including reach and uptake by the public. Google+ could claim a large number of user profiles, literally billions, as through about 2016, every new Gmail or Android user was automatically registered with the service, totaling about 3.5 billion profiles. Google were immensely cagey about just how many of these were actively using the site, offering statistics which were openly scoffed at in the press. I realised that a measurement was in fact possible, and determined that only 9% of users ever posted publicly to the service, and 0.16% (about 4--6 million) had a public post within the preceeding month. This is NOT the industry standard measure of monthly or daily "active users" (MUA, DAU), but does give a strong indication of activity.
The antitrust case against Facebook, the "Real" Facebook Oversight Board, and our lives under surveillance capitalism.www.wnycstudios.org
Google is experimenting with increased storage for the browser cache to reduce the performance hit caused by the recently added partitioned cache feature.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week."Do evil."
Facebook and Google agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week.www.wsj.com
Google says that the global authentication system outage which affected most consumer-facing series on Monday was caused by a bug in the automated quota management system impacting the Google User ID Service.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google has disabled a feature that displays a warning when submitting insecure forms after receiving many complaints from users and website administrators.www.bleepingcomputer.com
A document [PDF]from the Texas Attorney General as part of its antitrust investigation reveals that shortly after Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2015, it gave Google exclusive access to millions of WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files that were supposedly end-to-end encrypted at the time. If they were truly end-to-end encrypted, this sort of access would not be possible.#technology #tech #security #privacy #Google #Facebook
Malicious Chrome and Edge browser extensions with over 3 million installs, most of them still available on the Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Edge Add-ons portal, are capable of stealing users' info and redirecting them to phishing sites.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Gmail is suffering its second outage in 24 hours, with users able to access their email but unable to send to other Gmail users or experiencing unexpected behavior.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google's global outage from yesterday was due to a bug that restricted storage space to the Identity Management System and caused the system to fail.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google users are currently experiencing issues around the world, with users unable to access Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and possibly other Google services.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google Chrome has now actively started targeting ads that drain device resources like network data, processing power or RAM.www.bleepingcomputer.com
This week Samsung has started rolling out Android's December security updates to mobile devices to patch critical security vulnerabilities in the operating system. This comes after Android had published their December 2020 security updates bulletin, which includes patches for critical bugs.www.bleepingcomputer.com
The thinking goes like this. #Google and #Facebook, including their subsidiaries like Instagram and #YouTube, make about 83 percent and 99 percent of their respective revenue from one thing: selling ads. It’s the same story with #Twitter and other free sites and apps. More to the point, these companies are in the business of what’s called behavioral advertising, which allows companies to aim their #marketing based on everything from users’ sexual orientations to their moods and menstrual cycles, as revealed by everything they do on their devices and every place they take them. It follows that most of the unsavory things the platforms do—boost inflammatory content, track our whereabouts, enable election manipulation, crush the news #industry—stem from the goal of boosting ad revenues. Instead of trying to clean up all these messes one by one, the logic goes, why not just remove the underlying financial incentive? Targeting ads based on individual user data didn’t even really exist until the past decade. (Indeed, Google still makes many billions of dollars from ads tied to search terms, which aren’t user-specific.) What if companies simply weren’t allowed to do it anymore?#politics #law #privacy #business #economy #internet #finance #advertisement #money
From protecting privacy to saving the free press, it may be the single best way to fix the internet.www.wired.com
Scientists have expressed support for a leading artificial-intelligence ethics researcher who says Google fired her.Wow! That escalated at just the right speed.
An open letter demanding transparency has now been signed by more than 4,500 people, including DeepMind researchers and UK academics.
The scientific community has raised concerns about conducting research with technology companies.www.bbc.co.uk
A paper co-authored by former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru raised some potentially thorny questions for Google about whether AI language models may be too big, and whether tech companies are doing enough to reduce potential risks, according to MIT Technology Review. The paper also questioned the environmental costs and inherent biases in large language models.#technology #tech #Google #AI
Gebru says Google fired her over the paper; the company says she resignedwww.theverge.com
Google Chrome is getting a new browser heads-up display that displays performance metrics about the web pages you are visiting.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Android apps with over 250 million downloads are still susceptible to a severe vulnerability in a Google library that was patched in August 2020.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google Maps is getting a new update that lets you create Street View photos using just a phone. Android users with ARCore-compatible devices can now capture imagery and publish it to Google Street View in certain areas. Google is allowing submissions initially in Toronto, New York, Austin, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Costa Rica. More regions will support this feature soon, and Google will use this user-generated content when it doesn’t have its own Street View imagery available.#technology #tech #Google #Android #GoogleMaps
Anyone with a compatible Android phone can create a Street Viewwww.theverge.com
Android apps with over 250 million downloads are still susceptible to a severe vulnerability in a Google library that was patched in August 2020.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google is shutting down its 3D model sharing site Poly in 2021 to focus their resources on building AR experiences.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Your online accounts' security is heavily dependent on how strong your passwords are, and if they are too easy, attackers could hack into your account by brute-forcing your password.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google Chrome will soon let you search through your open web pages to find that missing page lost among a sea of tabs.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google is slowly rolling out a new feature to Google Chrome 87 that allows you to type commands in the address bar that perform specific browser actions.www.bleepingcomputer.com
The PDF reader or viewer within Google Chrome has always been relatively simple, especially when compared to Microsoft Edge. With Chrome 87, Google has introduced a new UI for the PDF reader and here's how you can enable it if you don't have it already.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google is currently working on fixing a known issue causing a Google Chrome web browser version launched earlier today for Apple processors to suddenly crash.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google is currently working on fixing a known issue causing a Google Chrome web browser version launched earlier today for Apple processors to suddenly crash.www.bleepingcomputer.com
Google has released Chrome 87 today, November 17th, 2020, to the Stable desktop channel, and it includes numerous performance improvements, security fixes, and new features.www.bleepingcomputer.com
As an old-school Linux user and advocate, I'm used to considering Microsoft the opposition, and my praise is grudging, but given where due. By my reckoning, Microsoft are at least 3 for 4 in meeting my suggestions.
- Microsoft is a member of the RIAA. It could and should resign.
- Microsoft can lobby for further exceptions to §1201 anti-circumvention.
- Microsoft can issue a statement formally protesting RIAA's action.
- Microsoft could offer an Amicus brief or other statements in favour of youtube-dl developers.
Google on Thursday was sued for allegedly stealing Android users' cellular data allowances though unapproved, undisclosed transmissions to the web giant's servers.#technology #tech #Google #privacy #security #DontBeEvil
Ad giant sued after mobile allowances eaten by hidden transferswww.theregister.com