Tag Archives: google

Trillions of domestic phone records in the United States are tracked every year under a secretive surveillance operation, WIRED revealed this week. The Data Analytical Services program, which was previously known as Hemisphere, allows cops to request and analyze the phone records of people and others who they communicate with, …

Even if you didn’t watch last weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live, you still probably saw it. You may already even know what “it” I’m talking about: Timothée Chalamet, and other similarly-dressed cast members, booty-shaking in tiny little red undies. He was, the sketch goes, “an Australian YouTube twink turned …

In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons in forecasting terms—and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. …

Terrorist groups have found a home on smaller, less well-known online platforms in recent years where they store, share, and link to content such as violent beheading videos and recruitment propaganda. Those platforms have struggled to deal with the problem due to a lack of resources and expertise, but a …

Early in the pandemic, an agent—literary, not software—suggested Fei-Fei Li write a book. The approach made sense. She has made an indelible mark on the field of artificial intelligence by heading a project started in 2006 called ImageNet. It classified millions of digital images to form what became a seminal …

Privacy campaigner Alexander Hanff claims that YouTube’s new ad blocker detection is illegal under European law, and he's taking the fight to the European Commission. On November 6, German Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer addressed Hanff’s claim to the European Commission, formally requesting a legal position as to whether “protection …

In early October, the people who make ad blocking tools convened in Amsterdam for their industry’s annual conference. One session was a welcome pitch from Google product leaders about tweaks made to address fears that a security update to the company’s Chrome browser could hamper ad zapping. Google, which draws …

When Fortnite video game creator Epic Games sued Google in 2020 over the monopoly held by its official Google Play Android app store, its allegations that the company was unfairly restricting competition immediately resonated with developer Hans-Christoph Steiner. Like Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and a few other tech companies, he oversees …

Whether it's deciding when to meet a friend for coffee or setting up a meeting for work, scheduling is annoying. The inevitable back-and-forth—“I'm free Monday, does that work?” “No, I'm busy then, what about Thursday”—is just plain tedious. Google Calendar can help with this. The application now offers a free …

The spread of misinformation is a massive problem online, and generative AI is only helping boost the creation of inauthentic or real-but-repurposed media. Even in the pre-generative-AI era, an image surfaced through a quick Google search might have been used out of context or attached to a less-than-reliable website. Google …