Google

Google spent $18M last year lobbying the Trump administration, the highest amount it has ever spent on its efforts to influence the White House. In all, tech giants spent a record $50M on lobbying in 2017.

The record spend isn’t too surprising when you consider the number of issues on which the tech industry found itself battling with the Trump presidency …

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A Google engineer recently spoke at a conference and stated that only roughly 10 percent of all Google account holders have enabled two-factor authentication. That is a surprisingly low percentage of users not taking every step possible to protect their Google and email accounts.

Why haven’t you enabled two-step authentication on your Google account?

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Online security is an increasingly big deal in our day-to-day lives, and there are two easy methods of keeping our data secure. First, a strong password, and secondly, two-factor authentication. If used properly, these can do wonders for keeping your online data safe, but so few actually use them as they should…

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Yesterday, shortly after Google’s hardware design lead shared images of early Pixel 2 and Pixelbook iterations, a tipster wrote in to tell us that the company had also tested different colored fingerprint sensors and even multi-colored edges. Unfortunately, none of this came to market, and all we got was the orange power button on the panda Pixel 2 XL.

Do you think Google should take what it learned and find ways for customers to customize how the next Pixel smartphone will look?

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According to a report out of Reuters this morning, US lawmakers are urging AT&T to further cut commercial ties with China-based smartphone manufacturer Huawei. The report comes on the heels of one of the biggest stories of CES 2018 — namely, that AT&T cancelled plans to sell the company’s Mate 10 flagship at the last minute amid political pressure.

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Google is building three new under-sea fiber-optic cables, adding to the eight that it already helped construct. The latest ones will connect areas as far apart as the Pacific and the North Sea, and will be used to speed up data transfers as well as provide alternative routings in case of failures elsewhere.

The company said that the new cables would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take more than a year to install, and it would really prefer not to do it …

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While companies have announced new Google-focused products at past CES events, there has never been a strong Google presence. That changed this year, and not just because the search giant built a giant booth outside the main show floor. On top of several announcements from Google, companies had a lot of Android Wear watches, Android TVs, and mobile accessories to show off.

What was your favorite announcement from CES 2018?

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The lawyer representing James Damore, the former Google engineer fired for writing a now-infamous anti-diversity memo, has filed a lawsuit alleging that the search giant maintains blacklists of conservative employees.

The lawsuit alleges that a number of Google managers not only keep such lists, but have also shared details publicly. One manager even went as far as suggesting a company-wide Google document of blacklisted employees, and wondered whether there ought to be a ‘trial’ to determine who should be included on it …

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Since launching its latest wave of products back in October, Google has been going nuts with the number of advertisements on television, online, and in print for Assistant. Walking into Las Vegas for CES 2018, it’s clear that the search giant isn’t going to hold back on making sure everyone knows the phrase “Hey Google.”

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Whether you’ve been there in person, seen it in pictures, or watched a comedy about it, you’re probably quite familiar with the multi-colored bikes that can be found all over Google’s Mountain View campus. Designed for the company’s employees, these bikes are available to grab on the campus at any time, but there’s a problem — people keep stealing them.

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Last July, OnePlus was in the news for running a survey on user phones, asking them what they thought of the device. Then, today, Google began doing something very similar but instead of making it a dismissable notification, the company added a pop-up to a Pixel 2 XL’s settings menu.

Do you think companies should be allowed to add notifications or pop-ups to its smartphones asking customers to answer surveys?

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Back in July of 2017, OnePlus owners were upset when the company began running a “survey” on the phone asking users how they liked its latest handset. Now, it seems as though Google is doing the same thing with the Pixel 2, with a survey popping up in the handset’s settings menu…

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Back in October of last year, Google announced a cleaned up and refreshed version of Google Calendar for the web. On top of receiving a fresh coat of paint, Google worked to add features to the online calendar to make it easier to add events, format calendar invites, and much more.

As the new design will automatically replace the outgoing version starting on January 8, we wanted to know if you prefer the look of the 2017 redesign more than the version from 2006 leaving the web in a couple of days…

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Google claims that the latest version of its AI-powered speech synthesis system, Tacotron 2, is almost indistinguishable from human speech – and has put some comparative examples online to demonstrate.

Tacotron 2 works directly from written text, and Google says it can use context to correctly pronounce identically-spelled words like ‘read’ (to read) and ‘read’ (has read), responds to punctuation and can learn to stress words …

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