Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.
If you own a Nest product, we’ve got bad news: Last night, as you performed your evening ablutions and got ready for bed, Nest devices went offline, disabling some integral features in certain devices. But hey, if you’re a Nest user, this probably isn’t the first time you’ve had to deal with something like this.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is opening up its free denial-of-service protection program to political groups in the United States, a move that will help political campaigns defend themselves against online attacks during the upcoming election season.
On April 3rd, a woman named Nasim Aghdam entered YouTube’s main campus in San Bruno, California through a parking garage and opened fire, wounding three employees of the video-sharing platform before fatally shooting herself in the chest. Just hours before, Aghdam had been stopped by police in Mountain View.
Loretta Lee, an ex-Google engineer who filed a lawsuit against her former employer last month, posted a blog to her website Unicorn Techie today decrying the state of gender inclusion in software engineering and the tech industry in general. “The reason there are so few women in tech,” she writes, “is because it sucks…
Following the mass school shooting which killed 17 people and wounded over a dozen others in Parkland, Florida this month, YouTube launched a campaign to use some of its 10,000 new moderators to somewhat thin out the ranks of the conspiracy peddlers and far-right nuts which have become rampant across the site. Though …
On Wednesday, the Center for Responsive Politics released updated data on who is spending the most money lobbying the federal government. The list wasn’t unlike year’s past—industry groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Realtors prevailed. But what we are seeing is an uptick in…
X, the moonshot wing of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced today that a new cybersecurity project called Chronicle is “graduating” to become a fully-fledged company. X functions as an incubator for Alphabet’s more experimental endeavors, like self-driving cars or giant balloons that deliver internet…
YouTube is asking musicians who have signed up for a new partnership program in which it provides big-ticket funding for videos and promotional support to sign sweeping non-disparagement agreements, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
At 26 letters long, the English alphabet isn’t the most complicated string of symbols and characters to master, even for a five-year-old. But that’s because it has been put on a strict diet over the years that helped it slim down and shed 10 additional letters that were either deemed superfluous, redundant, or just…
After six years as executive chairman—first at Google, then Alphabet—Eric Schmidt announced in a press release today that he will step down, taking on the role of technical advisor at the company and remaining on its board.
Whether you like it or not, self-driving cars are coming, and depending on where you live, they might already be here. Google’s parent company Alphabet has had fully autonomous cars on the road for over a month, while Uber has its own self-driving fleet cruising the streets of Pittsburgh, with a deal to buy as many as…
One of Alphabet’s crazier attempts to bring the internet to more rural and isolated areas was Project Loon. Using what is called Free Space Optical Communication (FSOC), Alphabet proved it’s possible to reliably send data wirelessly between balloons floating thousands of feet in the sky. Emboldened by the results, …
YouTube—perhaps the largest repository of free music on the planet—plans to introduce a paid music subscription service in March. What could go wrong?
As you may have heard, YouTube is growing its content moderation team to 10,000 staffers. Sounds like progress! Of course, the move comes as a response to the ever-expanding gallery of horrors the site has unwittingly played host to over the years—most recently, various forms of child exploitation and predation—but…
Project Loon has provided mobile data to more than 100,000 people in Puerto Rico, according to Google parent company Alphabet, which operates the enterprise.
Waymo, the self-driving car group born out of Google’s secretive moonshot unit and recently spun out as its own company, has made a bunch of self-driving cars—around 100 of its current Chrysler iteration, with another 500 in the works, not to mention probably lots more than that in the future. Yesterday, Waymo let a…
Lyft announced today that Alphabet’s investment arm CapitalG—formerly known as Google Capital—led a $1 billion investment round in the ride-sharing company.
Project Loon, the former Google X Lab enterprise to provide mobile data to rural areas and disaster zones via high-altitude weather balloons now run by Google’s parent company Alphabet, may soon get another major test drive.
