#PHK says we’re about to get “surveillance too cheap to meter”, specifically because of how telcos work and how #Apple and #Google work. “Either we slap a stiff tax on surveillance data, or we learn to love the panopticon.” #human-rights
on 02026-08-18#Firefox still supports #uBlock Origin, but #Microsoft Edge is dropping support for it, by following #Google in dropping support for Manifest V2.
on 02026-08-18Somewhat debatable #Google acquisition #history focused on companies whose product Google canceled. It lists #Angstro, “Gecko Design, Rangespan, Jetpac, Angstro, SocialDeck, Katango, and Meebo were also classic acqui-hires,” but Angstro didn’t really have a product at that point; we had a very impressive demo but I doubt we had a whole dozen of users.
on 02026-08-18YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who rented out her garage to the #Google founders, had US$765 million in 02022, and also lung cancer, which killed her two years later. :(
on 02026-08-10#Google’s new #Android #age-verification API in Google Play Services
on 02026-07-30#Google #reCAPTCHA #security “As we identify potentially fraudulent behavior from agents, we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop using the new QR code-based challenge. This AI-resistant mitigation challenge to prove human presence is designed to make automated fraud economically unviable. ... Existing reCAPTCHA customers are automatically Fraud Defense customers, with no migration required, no action needed, and no change to pricing.” #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-06-30#GrapheneOS #security will be impacted by #Google #reCAPTCHA update that requires a mobile app installed. #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-06-30“Enterprise customers are now paying API prices” to #Anthropic for #Claude and #Google for #Codex; #simonw thought they’d been getting discounts but no.
on 02026-05-27#Google #Chrome installs a 4GiB #Gemini Nano model without asking users now. Article appears to be AI slop.
on 02026-05-05#humor #video from inside #Google: “I just want to serve five terabytes!” With Broccoli Man.
on 02026-04-23#USA #politics #censorship #human-rights: “Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (#ICE) sent #Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data. The next month, Google gave Thomas-Johnson’s information to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.”
on 02026-04-15nostrademons reports that #Google’s biggest regret was not using #ECC RAM in their early cheap servers, because, “If you look through the source code & postmortems from that era of Google, there are all sorts of nasty hacks and system design constraints that arose from the fact that you couldn’t trust the bits that your RAM gave back to you.” #fault-tolerance
on 02026-04-09more on people getting banned from their #Google accounts for using #OpenClaw for #AI with #Gemini:
Aminreza Khoshbahar: “I’m seeking assistance regarding a sudden restriction on my Google AI Ultra account that has persisted for three days. I received no prior warnings or notifications regarding a potential violation.
“The only recent change in my workflow was connecting Gemini models via OpenClaw OAuth. If third-party integrations are the issue, I would expect the platform to block the integration rather than restrict a paid account ($249/mo) without communication.”
on 02026-03-04seems like people are getting banned from their #Google accounts for using #OpenClaw for #AI with #Gemini
on 02026-03-04#news from last year claiming #Google was intentionally degrading their search quality. #toread
on 02026-02-24Mangled copy of Cory Doctorow’s short story “Scroogled” about #human-rights and #privacy in the #Google era.
on 02025-12-13apparently it’s hard to get a #Google Gemini #AI API key if you’re not a big company and especially if you’re using an Indian credit card to pay
on 02025-12-11discussion of the #FFMpeg #Google #security issues
on 02025-11-11#FFMpeg maintainers complaining about #Google reporting #security bugs
on 02025-11-11#F-Droid’s feeble protest against #Google destroying them
on 02025-10-28lawsuit against #Google for discriminating against white people and men in recruiting
on 02025-10-28discussion of Immich getting flagged as malicious by #Google
on 02025-10-24"Abseil" is “an open source collection of #C++ libraries drawn from the most fundamental pieces of #Google’s internal codebase”
on 02025-09-07“We are extremely pleased to announce the availability of the new “Swiss Table” family of hashtables in Abseil and the absl::Hash #hashing framework that allows easy extensibility for user defined types. Last year at CppCon, We presented a talk on a new hashtable that we were rolling out across #Google’s codebase.” #C++ #Swiss-tables #performance
on 02025-09-07#Google is doing voluntary buyouts instead of layoffs
on 02025-08-27tens of billions of US$ spending on #AI in 02024 by #Amazon, #Google, and #Microsoft
on 02025-08-27Why I do not want to work at #Google, or didn’t in 02011.
on 02025-07-30Ian’s post leaving #Google
on 02025-05-16Ian Taylor has left #Google, and Russ Cox has left #Golang at Google.
on 02025-05-16#TED #video of Eric Schmidt of #Google talking about #AI and #neural-networks, saying it’s underhyped; he thinks superintelligence taking over the world is five years away.
on 02025-05-15#Aaronson commenting on the #Google Willow 105-qubit #QC #news announcing (or extending) quantum supremacy
on 02024-12-12#Google forced him to push a change to his #Android app used in-house by his customer because of an API version bump, which broke the app, and now he can’t push a fix.
on 02023-08-27Mike summarizes the #politics opposition to #Google #WEI from #Mozilla and #Brave
on 02023-08-09opposition to #Google #WEI #politics
on 02023-08-09article from 02021 on #AI course planning for #Google #balloons as part of #Project-Loon; also discussing DeepMind's #AlphaGo and #AI-risk, #GPT-2 on chess, etc.
on 02023-02-16inside baseball from #Google, teams trading “quotas”
on 02021-11-02Ferragina delivers the "PGM-index", a follow-on to the crack-smoking #Google paper from a couple of years back (?) about #databases indexing with #neural-networks
on 02020-01-25#Google #censorship of subtitle format names
on 02020-01-25looks like lowRISC’s #OpenTitan is from ETH Zürich, #Google, Western Digital, Seagate, ... and something called G+D Mobile Security and Nuvoton? But their Git repo is largely written by Michael Schaffner (Google), Eunchan Kim (Google), Cindy Chen (Google), Philipp Wagner (lowRISC), Timothy Chen (Google), Silvestrs Timofejevs (lowRISC), and Pirmin Vogel (ex-ETH, now lowRISC). The initial commit, “Start of public OpenTitan development history”, lists 19 contributors, 13 of them at Google. So basically it’s a Google project. They explain, “By creating OpenTitan with the broader hardware and academic community, we leverage the experience and #security principles used to create Google’s Titan chips to make #hardware root of trust designs more transparent, inspectable, and accessible to the rest of the industry.”
on 02021-01-24#Chromium is turning off sync because #Google wants to limit it to proprietary Chrome
on 02021-01-24Electrical #energy #pricing in the #USA in 02019 for new PPAs averaged US$27.40 per megawatt hour, down 4.7% from 02018, including non-renewables. #Solar, nearly all #photovoltaic, dropped slightly, wind rose slightly. #Google was the biggest buyer globally.
on 02021-01-21#Google #censorship of #LBRY #decentralization
on 02021-01-13GPSLogger #censorship by #Google; discussion
on 02020-11-12#Google just released "ClusterFuzz", an open-source clustered #generative testing or #fuzzing system; it's already found more than 16,000 bugs in Chromium.
on 02019-02-11#Google #censorship of #Catalonia referendum app from its app store in compliance with a Catalan High Court ruling
on 02017-11-25Alexa O’Brien was threatened with #Google automated #censorship because she published information related to the #Manning case and #al-Qaeda, as part of the “roll out of [Google’s] counter terrorist protocol.”
on 02017-11-25The Jagiellonian University in #Poland disputes #Google #patents on ANS
on 02017-08-22Debate on #feminism and #Damore on Scott Aaronson’s blog. #USA #politics #Google
on 02017-08-22The Atlantic talks about the #history of the #Google #Books settlement, the failure of which they liken to torching the Library of Alexandria. Mentions that in 2017 a Second Circuit decision held Google’s book snippet display to be fair use!
on 02017-04-26#Google puts #neural-networks online for machine translation on translate.google.com.
on 02016-11-21Really embarrassing #Google screwups in interviewing
on 02016-10-14apparently 4chan trolls are going to try to troll #Google’s Project Jigsaw AI through #racism: they’ll use the word “Google” as a new racist slur against black people and the word “Skype” as a new racist slur against Jews, echoing the kind of word-replacement games people have been using to escape #censorship in #China for years
on 02016-09-24