Ben Lovejoy

Google has acknowledged that one of its April Fools jokes backfired when it started causing real embarrassment to some Gmail users. It has now pulled the joke feature.

Google added a ‘send + mic drop’ button last night, that added a GIF of a Minion dropping a microphone to an email reply, before archiving the thread. It was intended as a fun way for users to express their desire to exit an email conversation, but the company made one schoolboy UI error: it put the joke button right where the usual ‘send and archive’ one sits …

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TNW reports that the European Commission is pressing ahead with proposals to make Google News pay a fee for linking to news stories on the web. The EC says that as search results include a short excerpt from the piece, and that text is protected by copyright, Google must pay.

Three European countries have tried this, and it failed in all three. In Spain, Google simply decided to close Google News in that country, and news websites lost 10-15% of their traffic overnight. Spanish publishers – who had originally demanded the law – quickly realized their mistake and tried to pass a new law that would somehow force Google to return …

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The French data protection regulator CNIL has fined Google €100,000 ($112,000) after rejecting the company’s proposed compromise over the controversial ‘right to be forgotten‘ legislation.

The legislation gives individuals the right to have ‘outdated or irrelevant’ information about them removed from Google’s search results. Google at first offered to remove the results from Google’s local domains on a country-by-country basis, in this case google.fr, before saying that it would also remove them from google.com when a search was carried out from within France …

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Very few people are allowed inside one of Google’s data centers, but you can at least take a virtual tour thanks to a 360° video. We should warn that the narration is basically just one extended plug for the company’s technology, but it’s fun to take a look around.

The 360° view is available on both mobile and desktop platforms …

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As any regular user of Google Maps will know, the service doesn’t always get house locations right. It’s not unusual for street numbers to be inaccurate, and you sometimes get a home shown on one street when it’s around the corner on a different one.

So you’d think if you were doing something fairly important like, you know, demolishing someone’s house, you might just quickly double-check the address when you got there. But WFAA reports that Nabors Demolition of Seagoville skipped that part, and demolished the wrong house …

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One of the more amazing revelations in the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails posted on Wikileaks last week was that Google was in 2012 working on a tool to support the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Washington Examiner highlights an email originally sent by Google Idea‘s Jared Cohen to Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, who forwarded it on to Clinton. Cohen was a former State Department staffer who subsequently became a senior Google exec.

Cohen described a tool that Google believed could help to destabilise the Assad regime, and Sullivan said to Clinton that it was ‘a pretty cool idea,’ no-one realizing at that point how things were going to unfold …

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Google’s expansion plans for its Mountain View HQ have been progressing rather slowly, but the company has now given the go-ahead for local planning officials to release the renders of the structures it hopes to build next to its existing Googleplex head office.

The company originally submitted plans for a combination of one dome-like structure and a second building looking like a giant tent. As BizJournals now reports, the latest version appears to have abandoned the dome in favor of a lower-profile structure designed to blend into the local environment (more images below).

Once the campus is complete, you’ll be able to take a walk through it …

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As achievements go, learning how to pick up objects doesn’t sound quite as impressive as twice beating the world Go champion – it is, after all, something the average toddler can do. But it’s the fact that the robots themselves figured out the best way to do it using neural networks that makes this notable.

A recent Google report spotted by TNW explains how the company let robot arms pick up a variety of different objects, using neural networks to learn by trial-and-error the best way to handle each. Some 800,000 goes later, the robots seemed to have it figured out pretty well …

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Google’s AI system AlphaGo, part of its DeepMind project, has again beaten world champion Lee Sedol – and looks like it may be on track to take the title in the next game. Engadget reports Sedol saying that he was left speechless by his defeat.

“I’m quite speechless,” said Lee in the post-match conference. “It was a clear loss on my part. From the beginning there was no moment I thought I was leading.”

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tweeted that AlphaGo “played some beautiful creative moves in this game” …

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HTC’s fight to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive smartphone market doesn’t appear to be doing too well. The company yesterday posted financial results, showing that its revenue has dropped 55% year-on-year – and its lowest level for almost a decade. The company reported monthly revenue of just NTS4.2B ($128M).

As our own Edoardo Maggio argued last month, HTC’s lack of innovation since the M7 has been notable, with the M9 presenting itself as a flagship handset with features and specs that put it more into mid-market territory.

HTC will be pinning its hopes on two products this year …

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None of us likes to think about our own mortality, but as the old saying has it, nobody is going to make it out of here alive.

Things were simple enough in the old days. We wrote a will, took out a life insurance policy, maybe left a letter explaining where to find important documents, and that was about it. But in an age where many of our documents and assets are in digital form, it’s worth taking a little time to ensure that our loved ones don’t encounter major hassles when it comes to accessing them.

There have been cases of loved ones locked out of devices, apps and even music – all because they lacked the necessary passwords. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps we can take to ensure that technology is one less thing for our family to have to worry about …

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If you’ve ever been bored and felt like putting together some kind of tech project, Google suggested one back in 2007 – and there’s still time to give it a go. The project? A Moon shot. A literal one.

Google’s Lunar XPRIZE offers $20M to the first team able to land a privately-funded robot on the Moon, with other prizes for hitting milestones along the way, and the company has today announced a series of short films documenting the story behind nine of the teams competing for it.

Academy Award-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE … 

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So, you’ve managed to get early delivery of a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, what’s the first thing you do with it? Try your best to destroy it is the answer from a couple of YouTubers out there.

JerryRigEverything put the device through scratch, burn and bend tests, while EverythingApplePro pitched the smartphone against Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus to see how it fared when submerged in water and dropped on the ground …

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Facebook has today announced that it is bringing its Periscope-like live video broadcast feature to Android. The service received its debut on iPhones last month.

Facebook Live enables you to share your experiences and perspectives in real time, with the people who matter to you – whether you’re someone who wants to broadcast to friends and family, or a public figure who wants to connect with fans around the world. Live videos on Facebook are authentic and exciting, and we’re seeing people tuning in and engaging directly with broadcasters in the moment. 

The company says that people spend more than three times longer watching a video when it is live …

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ArsTechnica reports that AT&T is going to court to prevent Google Fiber getting immediate access to its utility poles in Louisville, potentially delaying Google’s plans to launch its high-speed broadband service in the city.

AT&T’s lawsuit in US District Court in Louisville says the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government’s ordinance is invalid because it conflicts with and is preempted by the Federal Communications Commission’s pole attachment regulations. AT&T also argues that under Kentucky law, only the state Public Service Commission has jurisdiction to regulate pole attachments.

AT&T is planning its own fiber service in the city, but insists that the case has nothing to do with Google …

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