
And also...
"Optimized ... source."
Also good at buzzword bingo...
Google has hired a former hacker who has spent the last three years working for the US Department of Defense's secretive military research bureau. The Chocolate factory poached Peiter "Mudge" Zatko from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and will put him to work in its own research skunkworks. He will take …
In an effort to avoid settling into predictability and slowing innovation, DARPA encourages folks to spend only limited, few-year-long stints there. Seems that Mudge, like Dugan before him, hit that limit, and so "poached" doesn't seem an apt characterization.
"Optimized for speed. Small, lean, resourced. With agility, freedom from bureaucratic constraints, and a willingness to embrace risk as core attributes. ATAP is focused on harnessing best-in-class, interdisciplinary talent from inside and outside Motorola Mobility, as well as technological developments from whatever the source."
In other words, a gigantic money-soak operation that would send even the beefiest black hole into a fit of jealous rage that the taxpayers are somehow paying for, despite the fact it's Google and not DARPA.
<<--You need one of these constantly going off to counteract the gravitational effects of a black hole. Because, without that, everything collapses in on itself and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
Easy to forget just how massively important Mudge & the L0pht were...I recall many hours spent accessing their server - some of the tricks and tips I learnt there transformed my understanding of how computers, networks and phone systems' operated ... And stood me in very good stead when it came to passing CESG requirements many years later (to say nothing of using their tools to pen test 'my' own Gov Dept 'hardened' environment!)
Google has a fresh list of reasons why it opposes tech antitrust legislation making its way through Congress but, like others who've expressed discontent, the ad giant's complaints leave out mention of portions of the proposed law that address said gripes.
The law bill in question is S.2992, the Senate version of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which is closer than ever to getting votes in the House and Senate, which could see it advanced to President Biden's desk.
AICOA prohibits tech companies above a certain size from favoring their own products and services over their competitors. It applies to businesses considered "critical trading partners," meaning the company controls access to a platform through which business users reach their customers. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta in one way or another seemingly fall under the scope of this US legislation.
Special report Seven months from now, assuming all goes as planned, Google Chrome will drop support for its legacy extension platform, known as Manifest v2 (Mv2). This is significant if you use a browser extension to, for instance, filter out certain kinds of content and safeguard your privacy.
Google's Chrome Web Store is supposed to stop accepting Mv2 extension submissions sometime this month. As of January 2023, Chrome will stop running extensions created using Mv2, with limited exceptions for enterprise versions of Chrome operating under corporate policy. And by June 2023, even enterprise versions of Chrome will prevent Mv2 extensions from running.
The anticipated result will be fewer extensions and less innovation, according to several extension developers.
A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit.
The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for "religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action." It alleges Peter Lubbers, director of the Google Developer Studio (GDS) film group in which 34-year-old plaintiff Kevin Lloyd worked, is not only a member of The Fellowship of Friends, the exec was influential in growing the studio into a team that, in essence, funneled money back to the fellowship.
In his complaint [PDF], filed in a California Superior Court in Silicon Valley, Lloyd lays down a case that he was fired for expressing concerns over the fellowship's influence at Google, specifically in the GDS. When these concerns were reported to a manager, Lloyd was told to drop the issue or risk losing his job, it is claimed.
The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.
"When it comes to how people use mobile phones, Apple and Google hold all the cards," said Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, in a statement. "As good as many of their services and products are, their strong grip on mobile ecosystems allows them to shut out competitors, holding back the British tech sector and limiting choice."
The decision to open a formal investigation follows the CMA's year-long study of the mobile ecosystem. The competition watchdog's findings have been published in a report that concludes Apple and Google have a duopoly that limits competition.
Google has promised to cough up $118 million to settle a years-long gender-discrimination class-action lawsuit that alleged the internet giant unfairly pays men more than women.
The case, launched in 2017, was led by three women, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, and Kelli Wisuri, who filed a complaint alleging the search giant hires women in lower-paying positions compared to men despite them having the same qualifications. Female staff are also less likely to get promoted, it was claimed.
Gender discrimination also exists within the same job tier, too, the complaint stated. Google was accused of paying women less than their male counterparts despite them doing the same work. The lawsuit was later upgraded to a class-action status when a fourth woman, Heidi Lamar, joined as a plaintiff. The class is said to cover more than 15,000 people.
Google Cloud's Anthos on-prem platform is getting a new home under the search giant’s recently announced Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) portfolio, where it will live on as a software-based competitor to AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack.
Introduced last fall, GDC enables customers to deploy managed servers and software in private datacenters and at communication service provider or on the edge.
Its latest update sees Google reposition Anthos on-prem, introduced back in 2020, as the bring-your-own-server edition of GDC. Using the service, customers can extend Google Cloud-style management and services to applications running on-prem.
US military researchers are trying to turn in-flight refueling tankers into laser-shooting "airborne energy wells" for charging drones, and they want the public's help to figure out how.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) published a request for information (RFI) from anyone willing and able to contribute their tech, with a few caveats. It needs to fit on existing in-flight refueling tankers (the newer KC-46 and Cold War-era KC-135, specifically) and be able to deliver 100kW of power.
Militaries around the world have been using in-flight refueling for decades to extend aircraft patrols and long-range missions. With a history of development stretching back to the 1920s, the practice has since developed into a standard part of operating an air fleet powered by aviation fuel.
Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies.
Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech.
LaMDA is "built by fine-tuning a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, with up to 137 billion model parameters, and teaching the models to leverage external knowledge sources," according to Google.
Google Cloud and other internet service providers are recovering from network issues attributed to a network cable cut that began in the Middle East and Asia just before 0700 PDT (1400 UTC).
The cable, Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1), is a 25,000km submarine cable operated by a telecom consortium. It connects South East Asia to Europe by way of Egypt.
According to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring biz Kentik, problems with AAE-1 affected internet connectivity in various countries in East Africa, Middle East and South Asia, including Pakistan, Somalia, Djibouti, and Saudi Arabia.
A year after the Dutch data protector said there were too many "legal obstacles" for its civil servants to use Google Workspace, a re-worked agreement will permit the public sector to fire up the productivity suite.
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