Your prayers have been finally answered – that is, if you asked for Google to come to New York City with free Wi-Fi for all. Because that’s totally happening this year, and it’s all part of Google’s grandiose plan to bring free Wi-Fi to the world. According to Bloomberg, Google has already set up a company that’ll handle the free Wi-Fi job in the Big Apple. Sidewalk Labs is...
Google knows that its Chrome browser is a serious consumer of RAM, but the development team is reportedly very aware of this, and are working on lowering Chrome’s RAM consumption. Thanks to a Reddit AMA session, a Chrome for Android engineer said: “We are actively working on reducing battery usage and we are looking into when Chrome is in the foreground and in the...
Google is requiring more Windows-based Chrome extensions to be installed from its Web Store and will enforce the same requirement on Mac users in a few months in an attempt to prevent users from inadvertently installing malicious titles. The move comes a year after Google first required Windows users to download extensions from the Chrome Web Store, a mandate that resulted in a 75-percent...
Android 5.0 “Lollipop” was released about half a year ago, and while its adoption rate was much slower in the beginning, it has now spiked to almost 10 percent of the Android market, according to the latest platform distribution numbers from Google. Google usually releases a major platform, to which it gives a dessert-themed name, and then iterates on it with bug fixes and...
Surprise! Did you think Google's Wireless service was going to take a while to get here? According to The Wall Street Journal, the service could launch as early as tomorrow, Wednesday, April 22. Google has publicly talked about plans to launch an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) wireless service in March and said the service would see the light of day in "the next few months."...
CAPTCHAs are an unfortunate side effect of the internet. They're those irritating collection of numbers and letters morphed into some Surrealist dreck that leaves us guessing, and guessing, and guessing. Google wants to improve all of that with updates to reCAPTCHA, a one-click solution for telling websites that you are, in fact, a human being. Wouldn't abandoning those Dali-like distortions defeat the purpose of...
Researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behavior on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google's DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were...
Previously, Google required everyone to make a Google+ profile in order to get a new Gmail account. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Now, that requirement is lifted. Sort of. While it was still technically possible to create a Google account without tying into Google+, it was very difficult. Now, if you sign...
The point of any chat system is to make it easier to communicate with others. This is something that Google Hangouts has singularly failed at, for one reason. Rather than making it obvious which of your contacts are online, it has — up until now — displayed a chronological list of the conversations you have held with people. This is about to change. Rolling...
Despite its high profile in the tech world, patent trolling — in which companies sue for damages over patents they don't intend to use — has been difficult to address. Reform efforts in Congress stalled earlier this year, when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) failed to broker an agreement that would have raised the bar for sending patent infringement warnings and increased the risks for bringing...
Recent Forum Activity