In 2014, Google and Facebook vied to acquire Titan Aerospace, a maker of high-altitude, solar-powered drones. Google won the bidding, so Facebook purchased its own company, which was building a huge glider called Aquila.
The idea was to beam internet access from the sky to get more people logging on from remote places to access information and probably use both companies’ web services. That soaring vision has come down to Earth with a bump. On Wednesday, a spokeswoman from Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s X research lab said it had shut down Titan.
Read moreGoogle could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself. The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.
The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people. But it also comes with an easy way of listening to and deleting all of the information that it collects. That’s done through a special page that brings together the information that Google has on you.
Read moreIt has emerged that Google has been tracking Smartphone users everywhere they go, indicating it with a red dot on a map to mark and make their location much clearer for identification.
If you do not believe this, you remember what appeared in the scene of the Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is on the run from the law, but is unable to avoid detection because everywhere he goes, there are constant retina scans feeding his location back to a central database? That is exactly what we are talking about here. You can even track yourself to see whether what we are talking about is true or not. Just log in with the same account you use on your Smartphone.
Read moreGoogle will be launching two new flagship smartwatches in the first quarter of next year, according to Jeff Chang, product manager of Android Wear at Google. In an exclusive interview, Chang said that the new watches will be the flagship Android Wear 2.0 devices and will be the first ones to launch with the new platform.
The new smartwatches had been rumored before, but Google confirmed the upcoming launch today as part of a larger effort to convince consumers that wearables — smartwatches specifically — are still in demand. The new models will not have Google or Pixel branding, but will be branded by the company that is manufacturing them.
Read moreWaymo, better known as Google X’s self-driving project, is in talks to partner with Honda on developing fully self-driving cars, the companies announced on Wednesday. If discussions progress, Honda will be the second automaker Waymo will have partnered with.
In May, Waymo — which spun out into its own Alphabet subsidiary last week — struck up a deal with Fiat Chrysler to produce 100 self-driving minivans. Previously, the self-driving project has had difficulty partnering with automakers as many of the car makers wanted to avoid relinquishing their brand to Google. It’s not clear exactly how many vehicles Honda will commit to this partnership.
Read moreA Google product manager has filed a lawsuit against the company for its confidentiality policies on the grounds they violate California labor laws.
The suit, filed today in California Superior Court in San Francisco, alleges that Google operates what amounts to an internal “spying program” on its own employees. These policies are put in place to allegedly prevent the leaking of potentially damaging information to regulators or law enforcement. They in turn prohibit employees from speaking out about illegal activity within the company, even to its own lawyers, and encourage them to report other employees suspected of leaking information.
Read moreGoogle is setting up its self-driving car unit as its own separate entity called Waymo under the Alphabet umbrella. The name is derived from its mission of finding “a new way forward in mobility.”
“We’re now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik told. He also noted that the Waymo team conducted the first fully driverless ride on public roads in Austin last year, using a car with no steering wheels and no pedals in “everyday traffic” on city streets. This historic first, fully driverless ride on public roads put Steve Mahan, a legally blind friend of Waymo principal engineer Nathaniel Fairfield, in the self-driving car solo.
Read moreYour Google accounts could have been compromised if you own a Android phone, thanks to a new malware variant known as "Gooligan." The malware has infected more than 1 million accounts, according to research, and that figure is growing by a massive 13,000 devices per day.
In August, Gooligan emerged as a complex malware that infects devices after users download apps from third party stores. It was originally related to a malicious app from 2015 named SnapPea. The malware steals authentication tokens that can be used to access data from Google Play, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive and more.
Read moreArtificial intelligence is getting its teeth into lip reading. A project by Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford applied deep learning to a huge data set of BBC programmes to create a lip-reading system that leaves professionals in the dust. The AI system was trained using some 5000 hours from six different TV programmes.
First the University of Oxford and DeepMind researchers trained the AI on shows that aired between January 2010 and December 2015. Then they tested its performance on programmes broadcast between March and September 2016. By only looking at each speaker’s lips, the system accurately deciphered entire phrases.
Read moreUninspiring design aside, Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL are fantastic smartphones that really give the iPhone a run for its money, especially when it comes to taking photos and videos.
Earlier this month, Adrian Ludwig, the director of Android security at Google, told at a security conference that the Pixels are as secure as iPhones. "For almost all threat models are nearly identical in terms of their platform-level capabilities," Ludwig said. Well, so much for that. A group of Chinese white hat hackers managed to hack a Pixel in 60 seconds at the PwnFest hacking competition that took place in Seoul on Friday.
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