On Friday, researcher Margaret Mitchell said she had been fired from the company’s AI lab, Google Brain, where she previously co-led a group working on ethical approaches to artificial intelligence.

User traffic has nearly tripled since the start of the year, to 4 million monthly unique visitors, the most since early 2016, according to Google Analytics.The new team tapped the surge in traffic to conduct user research and test ways to moderate content, including AI tools from Amazon and Microsoft .

Last week, prominent Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru said she was fired by the company after managers asked her to retract or withdraw her name from a research paper, and she objected.

The paper discussed ethical issues raised by recent advances in AI technology that works with language , which Google has said is important to the future of its business .

To put two Nest speakers together as a stereo pair, they need to be in the same room: Tap any speaker, then the cog icon, then Room to set this.David Nield via GoogleWith that done, tap on the first speaker, then the cog icon, then Speaker pair .

The good news: This means your existing “high-quality” photos and videos won’t apply to the 15-GB limit, nor will any that you upload through next May. In a blog post announcing the change, Google Photos vice president Shimrit Ben-Yair said that 80 percent of users should stay under their quota for roughly three years before they hit that limit, although obviously your mileage will vary.

The success of email spam filters has left scammers looking for new ways to get people to click on malicious links.One of the scam notifications received by WIRED linked to a Google Slides document that had been created by a Gmail account with a Russian name.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s 20th employee who later went on to lead Yahoo!, once told me that for many years, Google would do a test: It would show a certain percentage of users a version of search with no ads, to see if people preferred a commercially pristine experience.

Rumors indicate Google will not be using the best processor available but instead is sticking with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 765G (the same one in mid-priced phones like the LG Velvet and Motorola One 5G .

After WIRED flagged them to the company, Google said Friday it had blocked those suggestions for breaking its new election-related policies for autocomplete.Typing "donate bid" on Thursday suggested searches related to the Biden campaign.

In May of this year, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich sued Google under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act, alleging "widespread and systemic use of deceptive and unfair business practices to obtain information about the location of its users.” Even a privacy-focused Google software engineer didn’t understand how location controls worked, according to recently unsealed court documents from the case first reported by the Arizona Mirror.

Google’s cloud division will soon invite customers to outsource something less tangible than CPUs and disk drives—the rights and wrongs of using artificial intelligence .The company plans to launch new AI ethics services before the end of the year.

While Gmail doesn’t scan the content of your emails to collect information for its advertising machines, data from your Google account is used to serve ads in your Gmail inbox.

Photograph: GoogleAt the moment, Nearby Share is available for select Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones, but Google says that because the feature is a part of Google Play Services, you do not need to wait for an over-the-air update from your manufacturer or carrier to get it.

For instance, Facebook and Google will send notifications and emails alerting you to attempts to access your account.These breaches can include phone numbers, passwords, credit card details, and other personal information that would let criminals steal your identity, among other threats.

They show the hackers accessing compromised Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts to download their contents, as well as exfiltrating other Google-hosted data from victims.A screenshot from a leaked video of Iranian hackers demonstrating how to exfiltrate emails from a Yahoo account using the email management tool Zimbra.

Some tech giants like Google and Facebook have already paused accepting requests for data from Hong Kong authorities.After the implementation rules were released, companies including Google, Zoom, Microsoft, and Telegram all said they would temporarily stop accepting requests for user data from the Hong Kong government.

Newly formed Google accounts will auto-delete activity and location every 18 months by default.Auto-delete features also don't apply to services explicitly meant for long-term data storage, like Gmail, Google Drive, and Photos.

Google's Chrome, too, is adding privacy and security features , like enhanced "safe browsing" designed to warn users about phishing sites, and a password manager that automatically checks your passwords against collections of leaked user credentials.

"Chrome checks the URL of each site you visit or file you download against a local list, which is updated approximately every 30 minutes," Google explains in a blog post about the new setting.

Screenshot: David Nield via GoogleIf someone's clogging your inbox but Gmail's Report spam feature isn't catching it, Gmail lets you block individual senders easily.Instead of choosing Block or Report spam from the menu, pick Filter messages like this .

Unlike most of the shady apps found in Play Store malware, Kaspersky's researchers say, PhantomLance's hackers apparently smuggled in data-stealing apps with the aim of infecting only some hundreds of users; the spy campaign likely sent links to the malicious apps to those targets via phishing emails.

In a blog post, Pichai said the milestone affirmed his belief that quantum computers might one day tackle problems like climate change , and name-checked John Martinis, who had established Google’s quantum hardware group in 2014.Here’s what Pichai didn’t mention: Soon after the team had first got its quantum supremacy experiment working a few months earlier, Martinis says, he had been reassigned from a leadership position to an advisory one.

Similar to how Google made photographic magic happen with limited physical hardware on its older Pixel phones, Apple is wielding its software tools to add Portrait mode, Smart HDR, stage lighting effects, and auto white-balancing to the iPhone SE’s rear camera.

Google and Apple said yeah, sure, we can help with that .Meanwhile, gig workers for companies like Uber and Lyft aren’t having an easy time getting their hands on federal pandemic relief funds .

France's competition authority says that Google must go back to the bargaining table to negotiate a rate that the search giant will pay to link to articles on French news sites.

More than 4,000 Google Play apps silently collect a list of all other installed apps in a data grab that allows developers and advertisers to build detailed profiles of users, a recently published research paper found.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to whip around the world, killing thousands of people and overloading hospitals, you’ve probably turned to Google to answer your questions.“Compare that to somebody who has measles and sneezes, the virus then clings to particles that hang in the air,” says Yasmin.

When President Trump announced Friday that Google was developing a website for Americans to find out where they could get tested for the novel coronavirus , the details of the project remained unclear.

Google researchers made headlines early this month for a study that claimed their artificial intelligence system could outperform human experts at finding breast cancers on mammograms.Machine-enabled healthcare may bring us many benefits in the years to come, but those will be contingent on the ways in which it’s used.