Integrating MUM into Google search results also represents a continued march toward the use of language models that rely on vast amounts of text scraped from the web and a kind of neural network architecture called Transformer.

The techniques are common in malicious Play Store apps, and premium SMS fraud in particular is a notorious issue.But the researchers say it's significant that attackers were able to string these known approaches together in a way that was still extremely effective—and in staggering numbers—even as Google has continuously improved its Android security and Play Store defenses.

“I think what I had assumed is that hosting providers like Google and Microsoft and Yahoo were going to solve this issue, so we weren’t sure there was anything for us to do in the space,” Prince says.

The Russian government had pressured Apple and Google to take down the voting app for weeks, threatening fines and even accusing the companies of illegal election interference.

Many of our favorite TVs and monitors today boast displays with a high refresh rate that promise smoother on-screen action and a sharper picture.A 120 Hz refresh rate showing 24 FPS content, for example, can display each frame five times.

Under the old model, all the computers, servers, and other devices physically in an office building were on the same network and trusted each other.Once an attacker slipped by those perimeter defenses, remotely or by physically infiltrating an organization, the network would instantly grant them a lot of trust and freedom.

It’s a complex solution to a longstanding issue, and one that sets a precedent for companies that don’t want to rely quite so extensively on the security of the world’s handful of dominant cloud providers .“We’ve been working on this problem for many years and to build this, we had to develop an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage that can be used across the world’s largest operating systems,” says WhatsApp product manager Calvin Pappas.

If you think about the desktop programs you use regularly, for many people it's going to probably be limited to an image editor, a web browser, and perhaps an office application.This uses what's called progressive web apps, or PWAs, and we're going to explain everything you need to know.

Police around the country have drastically increased their use of geofence warrants , a widely criticized investigative technique that collects data from any user's device that was in a specified area within a certain time range, according to new figures shared by Google.

Today, Google announced a new 3D time-lapse feature in its Google Earth platform.Google says the time-lapse feature draws from 20 petabytes of satellite imagery, combined to create a 4.4-terapixel video (that's 4.4 million megapixels) that maps to the surface of the globe.

So you end up feeling as if you should somehow worship these giants and fear their power and size and ability to innovate—and sure, the Apple M1 rollout is for the ages—but at the same time there’s a cultural imperative to smash them, using any (digital) means necessary.

In an attempt to cut down on the threat posed by browser-related attacks, companies like the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare are developing a new generation of “browser isolation” tools that keep malicious code from running directly on your computer, while being faster and more usable than past iterations.

On March 25, the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter will once again testify before a committee of the House of Representatives, this time about the spread of disinformation on their platforms.

The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia's content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too).Conversations between the foundation’s newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia’s thousands of volunteers.

“Google has shown an astounding lack of leadership and commitment to open science, ethics, and diversity in their treatment of the Ethical AI team, specifically Drs. Gebru and Mitchell,” he wrote in his own email to the workshop’s organizers, asking them to pass his decision and comments up to Google’s leadership.

When your profile is restricted, only your followers will be able to see your reviews and ratings on Google Maps, as well as the list of who you're following.

On Tuesday morning, Politico reported that Biden plans to nominate the legal academic Lina Khan to an open seat on the Federal Trade Commission, one of the agencies with the most power to enforce antitrust laws.

Two years after publicly launching a privacy-focused browser, Brave, founded by former Mozilla executive Brendan Eich, is taking on Google’s search business too.Bing’s own index of the web also helps to provide results in other Google rivals, such as DuckDuckGo which uses it as one of 400 sources that feed into search results.

This week, Microsoft and security firm FireEye both shared new details about malware strains the Russia-linked group used to get such devastating access to so many targets.

But sources familiar with Stadia’s operations believe that after pouring tens of millions of dollars into two game studios, Google couldn’t stomach the expensive and complicated creative process necessary to build high-caliber video games—especially considering Stadia’s unremarkable subscription numbers.“I question how much the execs above Stadia leadership understand what they got into—the commitments made and overcommitments and the inability to keep those commitments,” says one current Stadia employee.

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.

Though the law doesn’t seem terribly specific about the issue, Australian lawmakers seem to have accepted the long-voiced Murdochian claim that Google and Facebook are stealing news content by linking to articles, sometimes even providing snippets.

The company continues to expand its presence in other Bay Area cities, and Zuckerberg told employees that Facebook still saw a use for all of its current and planned space.

This week it disclosed that ransomware was recently added to its list of woes, as a hacker group claimed to have stolen internal documents as well as source code for its most popular games.

“It is frightening that with one update an app can turn malicious while going under the radar of Google Play Protect,” Collier wrote.The researcher wrote:No, in the case of Barcode Scanner, malicious code had been added that was not in previous versions of the app.

This week, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok took part in a coordinated action to reclaim hundreds of accounts that had been used to facilitate trading of those ill-gotten handles within the so-called OGUsers community.Google says that it patched a so-called zero-day bug that hackers had been actively exploiting.

For most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google is planning to put Chrome in control of some of the advertising process.Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from its Privacy Sandbox, a set of proposals for improving online ads without obliterating the ad industry.

Just a half hour earlier, still steeped in the afterglow of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Sawhney had pushed live a website that lets you put a viral image of Bernie Sanders—seated, mittened, alone—atop any Google Street View image.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more.This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more.📩 Want the latest on tech, science, and more?

In a year where some in Big Tech pledged support for the activists demanding police reform, they still sold devices and furnished apps that allow government access to far more intimate data from far more people than traditional warrants and police methods would allow.