Given its role as a big player in online advertising, Google has long provided controls and transparency tools overs ads. Since 2009, these features have gone through several revamps and today are getting two new blocking features.
Chrome 64 is rolling out to Mac, Windows, and Linux today with mitigations to reduce the impact of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities. In addition to developer changes and other security fixes, there are a bevy of new features for users, including an improved pop-up blocker and sitewide audio muting.
Found in Allo, Gmail, and Inbox, Smart Reply is a convenient time saver that suggests responses based on the context of a conversation. Today, the feature is rolling out to Project Fi subscribers who use Android Messages.
For the second release in a row, the stable version of Chrome 64 is first rolling out to Android, instead of Mac, Windows, and Linux. Key feature in this release, besides security mitigations and bug fixes, include limiting malicious auto redirects and sitewide audio muting.
Introduced last year, Official Artist Channels bring together videos from different accounts that musicians might maintain into one place to provide a more optimized layout. YouTube is now planning to merge those channels into a more unified one.
Over the weekend, Google Play inadvertently teased the launch of an audiobook store and listening feature. Today, that functionality is officially launching as part of Play Books and includes integration with Google Assistant.
Recently, Instagram has silently begun rolling out an update that lets your follows (that you follow back) to see the last time you opened up the social media application. Thankfully, there’s an option in the app’s settings that lets you disable your activity status. Here’s how…
Update: A few minutes after publishing, YouTube’s optimized experience has returned to the Fire TV.
The Google and Amazon dispute has reached its latest salvo with YouTube’s TV-optimized web version now blocked on the Fire TV. Users of the competing Amazon product can still access the video site, but only through an unintuitive desktop experience.
In late November, we spotted Gboard for Android working on Motion Stills integration as part of an integrated GIF creation tool. On iOS, this built-in GIF creator feature is already live and widely rolling out as of this weekend.
Since its full launch in April, YouTube has been actively expanding its cord-cutting live television service with new cities, apps, and features. A new report today claims that YouTube TV has amassed just over 300,000 paying subscribers.
In addition to the major changes Facebook announced for its News Feed last week, the social media service will begin ranking news sources based on trustworthiness. Rather than determining news source trustworthiness itself, Facebook will let users decide.
Frequently marred by the presence of inappropriate content, YouTube now plans to be more proactive in policing its network. A report today revealed plans for an “Intelligence Desk” as part of an “early detection” initiative to remove videos before they spiral into controversy.
Amazon has today brought full voice control to its Alexa app for Android and will be coming shortly to iOS as well. Previously, the Alexa app was more of a hub to customize Echo speakers and other smart home settings.
Last October, Twitter announced that it was working on a “Save for Later” feature to easily and privately bookmark tweets. On the latest beta version of Twitter for Android, the new “Bookmarks” feature is beginning to rollout.
With Android Wear 2.0, Google switched to a new model that allows updates to be delivered through the companion app on the Play Store. Recent months have seen new features and tweaks, with the latest being a new dark theme and improved glanceability for notifications.
This morning’s hands-on from Ars Technica of the latest Fuchsia OS build on a Pixelbook yielded a good look at how Google’s experimental OS is progressing. Compared to eight months ago, the OS has more things to demo, while today’s glimpse also yielded the set of current Fuchsia wallpapers (via Ron Amadeo).
Our early look at Fuchsia OS last May provided a glimpse into a number of new interface paradigms. Several months later, we now have an updated hands-on with Google’s future operating system that can span various form factors.
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Recent weeks have seen Huawei’s attempts to enter the U.S. cellular market flounder, while there might be more trouble ahead related to 5G development. Regardless, the Chinese smartphone maker is pressing on with a new Google partnership to make Android Messages the default RCS client on its devices.
G Suite is rolling out a new security center that will provide administrators of large organizations with a unified dashboard, analytics to flag threats, and “health” recommendations to better protect users.
Google’s Search ranking algorithm takes into account a number of factors when ordering results. The latest signal that will soon be factored in when ordering mobile Search results is page speed, though there are some key caveats.
While Google’s MVNO service is perfect for subscribers that only use a little bit of data every month, it’s not particularly suited for heavy data users. However, today, Project Fi is trying to reach out to more customers with “Bill Protection” — its own take on an unlimited plan.
When reports came out that Home and Chromecast devices were slowing down or even causing temporarily Wi-Fi outages, Google gave us a statement that basically read that the company was looking into it. Now, the company has published an entire support page detailing the problem and what its plan is to fix it…
At I/O 2017, Sundar Pichai announced a new, better way to design machine learning models that would help democratize access beyond organizations with deep benches of AI researchers and PhDs. Today, Google Cloud announced AutoML as a consumer product aimed at businesses and developers that don’t have ML expertise.
Unless you travel frequently enough to justify an annual policy, arranging travel insurance is just one more thing to think about when planning a trip. Financial startup Revolut now offers a solution to that: pay-per-day travel insurance that kicks in automatically, based on your phone’s GPS location …