Google is currently making a concerted effort to make its Chrome browser faster and leaner. The company announced a project to bring down memory usage earlier this month, for example. But it also quietly started work on some other optimizations recently, too, that add up to making Chrome on Windows run about 15 percent faster than before. […]
If you’re the maker of a popular, zero access encrypted webmail product and suddenly discover your product is no longer featuring in Google search results for queries such as “secure email” and “encrypted email,” what do you conclude? That something is amiss, for sure. But the rather more pertinent question is whether your product’s disappearance is accidental […]
Halloween is just around the corner and if there was one horror-themed phenomenon this year, it was Netflix’s nostalgia-driven Stranger Things. Google has now teamed up with Netflix to bring a Stranger Things sticker pack to the latest version of its Allo messaging app. It’s also hosting a Stranger Things scavenger hunt in New York […]
What happens when you tell two smart computers to talk to each other in secret and task another AI with breaking that conversation? You get one of the coolest experiments in cryptography I’ve seen in a while. In short, Google Brain researchers have discovered that the AI, when properly tasked, create oddly inhuman cryptographic schemes […]
Alphabet’s strategy of trying to stuff the difference between declining mobile advertising value with additional clicks appears to still be paying off as the company once again showed Wall Street that it can make a ton of money and continue to grow. Alphabet (we’re just gonna call it what it is because we’re talking about the […]
For years we’ve been skeptical, and rightly so, of the “art filters” you can put on your photos, webcam videos, and so on. But Google may have made them relevant again — or at the very least interesting — by letting you mix and match them in real time using a single specialized neural network. […]
Google, it seems, is still capable of surprising. A few weeks after launching a pair of handsets, a smart home hub and a virtual reality headset, the company is back with one of its most left-field hardware launches in recent memory. After all a big push into consumer mobile, the software giant is pursuing, of […]
The European Competition Commission has given Google another three weeks to file a response to formal charges that its Shopping price comparison service unfairly demotes rival services in search results. The EU’s investigation of the Google Shopping service has been ongoing for some six years at this point, although the Commission only formally laid out charges in […]
Samsung is hoping to keep its customers with incentives, including a $100 credit for Note 7 owners who stick with a Samsung device as their replacement hardware. But carriers are leaving the door open for buyers to pick whatever kind of smartphone they want instead. A new survey conducted by e-commerce agency Branding Brand suggests […]
How do you make things funny in virtual reality? That’s the question CollegeHumor is exploring with 1600 in 360°, a new video series depicting some of the, um, highlights of U.S. presidential history. Apparently, Google approached IAC-owned CollegeHumor about creating 360-degree content for YouTube and for its DayDream VR platform. Sam Reich, president at CollegeHumor’s production studio Big Breakfast, told […]