Tagged: google

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Apple iCloud uses Google Cloud service

Apple has confirmed that it uses Google’s public cloud to store data for its iCloud services in its latest version of the iOS Security Guide last month, as spotted by CNBC. Reports that Apple relied on Google’s cloud services surfaced in 2016 but were previously never confirmed. Apple had previously used remote data storage systems provided by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Apple’s...

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Google tries hard to keep Amazon’s Alexa from winning CES

Amazon’s Alexa assistant was crowned “winner” of CES, the Computer Electronics Show, last year. While Amazon didn’t have a splashy presence at the show — though there was a bizarrely large Echo speaker in one hallway — the fact that so many gadget makers were pledging to bake Alexa into their products became the dominant story of CES. This year, Google, which has a...

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Google Android tracks you even with location services off

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card? Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed. Since...

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Firefox makes Google default search again

With the launch of Firefox Quantum, Mozilla released what’s probably the most important update to its browser in recent years. It’s faster, lighter and you should give it a try. And as you do so, you’ll notice another change: Google is now the default search engine again — at least if you live in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2014, Mozilla...

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YouTube flags ChromeBook ad as spam

It’s no secret that YouTube’s algorithm for automatically flagging videos can be troublesome — recent issues have seen content creators getting their videos demonetized for seemingly no reason — but Google’s latest faux pas might hit the company a little closer to home. Google posted an ad for its new Chromebook Pixel that is getting flagged as spam, according to The Next Web. For...

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Google Drive offers whole PC backup

Google is turning Drive into a much more robust backup tool. Soon, instead of files having to live inside of the Drive folder, Google will be able to monitor and backup files inside of any folder you point it to. That can include your desktop, your entire documents folder, or other more specific locations. The backup feature will come out later this month, on...

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Google Chrome will automatically block annoying ads in 2018

Google’s Chrome browser will soon come with preinstalled technology that will block the most annoying ads currently marring the web experience, the company confirmed on Thursday. Publishers will be able to understand how they will be affected through a tool Google is dubbing “The Ad Experience Report.” It will basically score a publisher’s site and inform them which of their ads are “annoying experiences.”...

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Google Docs has a sophisticated phishing attack

If someone invites you to edit a file in Google Docs today, don’t open it — it may be spam from a phishing scheme that’s been spreading quickly this afternoon. As detailed on Reddit, the attack sends targets an emailed invitation from someone they may know, takes them to a real Google sign-in screen, then asks them to “continue to Google Docs.” But this...

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Google’s new invisible Captcha can only be seen by bots

Google just killed the Captcha, perhaps the most obstructive thing on the entire internet. For years, Captcha served as the primary way of telling humans and robots apart on the internet. It made sure that the person looking to access a website was actually a human being – ensuring that robots couldn’t be used to send spam or flood a website with requests, for...

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Google remains quiet about mass logout

The baffling mass logout of Google accounts last week was the result of accidental OAuth token invalidation, a cause Google acknowledged, but only to a subset of those affected. On February 24, an unknown number of people who had been logged into their Google accounts found they had been logged out and had to re-authenticate themselves to log back in. The credential removal occurred...