Google

An example of a webpage made completely unusable by injected ads

A Google-sponsored study carried out by the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara found “tens of millions of instances” of ad malware in the course of just a few months. In all, they found that a staggering 5.5% of unique IP addresses – representing millions of users – were affected.

Ad injection malware drops its own ads into whatever web page an infected machine displays. Revenue from these ads is filtered through ad networks, where genuine companies end up paying the bills, effectively stealing revenue that should have gone to the websites themselves.

Some of this malware goes further than simply injecting ads … 
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As you probably could have expected would happen eventually, Google this evening has revealed that more searches are now performed on mobile devices than on desktops. In a post on the Inside AdWords blog, Google wrote, “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”

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Google appears to have started sending out the first invites to its Project Fi initiative, at least according to one user on Reddit. The user has shared screenshots of the entire setup process from start to finish. The process appears to be relatively simple and self-explanatory, with a step-by-step set-up process…

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Google is looking to continue its push to make its workforce and the tech industry as a whole more diverse, the company wrote in a blog post today.  Google is looking to spend $150 million on a campaign to increase diversity. In 2014, the company spent $115 million on diversity initiatives.

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According to a report this morning from The Information, Google is planning to introduce an interesting new feature for Play Store listings at this year’s Google I/O developers’ conference. A common practice within apps themselves, new “A/B testing” would allow developers to test multiple versions of their app listings to see which ones bring the most conversions…

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Motorola Mobility, the mobile phone company sold by Google to the Chinese company Lenovo last year, has been ordered to pay $10M damages for infringing a Fujifilm patent. The patent concerned a method of converting color smartphone photos to monochrome, reports Reuters.

There’s a certain irony to the case, as Google was widely believed to have acquired Motorola in the first place for its patent portfolio, retaining most of the patents when it sold the company … 
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Google+ Collections, a feature that has been widely rumored and speculated to be rolling out today, has started appearing on the Google+ web interface for some. Google has yet to officially announce the feature, but a new “Share” button has supposedly started appearing for some users that suggests that they “Use collections to group [their] posts.” 
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The NY Times reports that Google is embedding engineers into Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) in a bid to increase diversity in its technical staff. Currently only around 1% of Google’s engineers are African American, and the company said last year that its workforce diversity was “miles” from where it wanted to be.

HBCUs are higher education institutions established before 1964 primarily to serve the black community, while accepting students of all ethnic backgrounds. There are more than 106 HSBUs in the USA, and Google is so far sending engineers to five of the biggest … 
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The head of a British exam board has said that students should be allowed Internet access – including the ability to carry out Google searches – during exams. The head of the OCR school examinations board Mark Dawe told the BBC’s Today program that this would accurately reflect the way they would work after leaving school.

“It is more about understanding what results you’re seeing rather than keeping all of that knowledge in your head, because that’s not how the modern world works,” said Dawe.

He compared the idea to the debate about whether to have books available during a test, saying: “In reality you didn’t have too much time [to consult the book] and you had to learn it anyway.”

The Oxford, Cambridge & RSA board’s chief said that while permitting Internet access during exams would not happen in the next weeks or months, it was “inevitable” at some stage … 
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Ford was one of the first car manufacturers to announce its intentions to add support for Google’s Android Auto to its in-dash systems. Questions concerning how Ford plans to integrate Google’s solution, however, have remained since the initial announcement. In an interview with Re/code today, Ford CEO Mark Fields clarified some of the details regarding the company’s plans to offer Android Auto (and CarPlay) in its vehicles.

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Google today announced that it’s rolling out the first set of apps that support tie-ins to custom Google voice actions. This means that, yes, you’ll soon be able to say “Ok Google” followed by special commands that will let you interact with your apps in a variety of new ways…
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The Knowledge Graph is a controversial—but now fundamental—part of using Google, and for most casual browsers of the web, it’s nothing but an added convenience. It already does a great job of figuring out which pieces of information are most important and accurate, and gives them to you directly within the Google search page—there’s no need to go digging through countless results to find what you want. I myself even find it useful very often, usually when I’m searching for specific facts. Something like “When was George Washington born?” is a great example.

But I’m also wary of how intelligent it has gotten in recent years, and how much more integral to the Google experience it is becoming. Not only is Google pulling content from crowd-sourced Wikipedia articles, it is now getting smart enough to pull some of the content I’ve written on this website. Knowledge Graph has been known to bring death to many pages hosting all kinds of content, with lyrics websites being the perfect example. But what happens when Knowledge Graph and its Quick Answer box are so smart that you don’t need to browse the web at all?

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Google today is launching a new tool called Password Alert that will allow users to keep track of sign-ins on their account with notifications and change their password if necessary. The new tool comes in the form of a Chrome extension and allows users to easily change their password if a fraudulent sign-in attempt is detected.
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We’ve managed to get our hands on some images of Android Wear 5.1.1 running on the yet-to-be released LG Watch Urbane, and you can find them in gallery below…
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Samsung made a very bold attempt at entering the now-somewhat-established smartwatch space—long before the current market leaders—with the launch of their Galaxy Gear devices, but none of these wearables ever made very much of an impact. And since these devices came several months before Android Wear even existed, they ran Samsung’s proprietary Tizen operating system, which many users have agreed is notoriously clunky and unintuitive.

Now, a developer on the XDA-Developers forum has started work on porting Android Wear to the Galaxy Gear 2, and it looks like the OS is already partially functional…
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During the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of 2015, Google CFO Patrick Pichette made a comment concerning its “other revenues” stream. The “other revenues” category consists of revenues from the Play Store and now Google Store, and it’s one of the company’s smallest sources of money. But Pichette noted that while revenue from “other revenues” was up 23 percent year-over-year to $1.8 billion, revenue was down 3 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2014.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceQKErGALV8

Google today has posted its earnings for Q1 2015. The company reports revenue of $17.3 billion, which is up 12 percent compared to the first quarter of 2014. Net income for Q1 2015 was $3.68 billion For the first quarter of 2015, the company also reports earnings per share of $6.57. Google CFO Patrick Pichette cites momentum of its mobile advertising business as a reason for its strong performance.

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