Jaikumar Vijayan

Hundreds of Android applications on the Google Play store have a security flaw that lets attackers take control of the devices on which they are installed to enable them to steal data or install malware. Vulnerable applications include some that have been downloaded between 10 and 50 million times and at least one that comes […]

Google has become the first foreign ISP to host Internet content in Cuba. The company confirmed via an April 27 email to eWEEK that its Google Global Cache (GCC) service has gone live in the Cuba, but provided no other details. Cuba’s government-owned telecommunications company ETECSA will use the GGC service to cache YouTube videos […]

Google co-founder Larry Page’s secretive Kitty Hawk project demonstrated a prototype of the company’s vision for a flying car on April 24. The initial version of the all-electric Kitty Hawk Flyer is specifically designed to fly over water. It does not require the operator to have a pilot’s license, at least in the United States, […]

Google received more requests for customer data from governments around the world in the second half of 2016 than in any other six-month period since the company began releasing Transparency Reports describing such demands back in 2010. The increased volume prompted Google’s general counsel Kent Walker this week to call for international standards for governments […]

Google has released a white paper describing its approach to securing mobile device use for 61,000 employees worldwide. Google is sharing details about its mobile security strategy to provide guidance to other IT administrators on how to deploy mobile devices securely in modern environments, according to Google. The mobility best practices document describes what Google […]

The Google Play mobile app store is generally considered one of the safest sources for finding and downloading Android applications. That doesn’t mean it is entirely risk free though. In recent months there have been several instances where security researchers have warned about malicious and potentially harmful applications lurking on Google Play waiting to be […]

Google today confirmed that it has acquired 1,210 acres of land at an industrial park in northern Nevada for $29.1 million. But a spokesman denied the company had any plans to use the place as a testing facility for its Waymo autonomous car unit as has been widely reported. The intention instead is to eventually […]

Google has a number of research projects underway aimed at making computers smarter and technically versatile. One of those projects involves teaching machines how to draw. On April 11, Google researchers released a technical paper describing “sketch-rnn”, a neural network that has been trained by using thousands of crude human-drawn images to construct basic drawings […]

If Google is still struggling somewhat to get consumers and merchants to work with its Android Pay mobile payment service, it certainly isn’t for a lack of trying. The company this week added more banks to the list of financial institutions whose bank cards work with Android Pay. Starting this week customers of Bank of […]

Researchers in the machine learning community typically use massive datasets distributed across multiple servers in the cloud when training machines to interact with users in a more intuitive and independent manner. Google is testing a new collaborative machine learning approach in which the training data is spread across millions of individual Android mobile devices instead. […]

A senior Google executive this week strongly rebutted recent claims of significant and systemic pay discrimination against women at the company. In comments on The Keyword blog, Google’s vice president of people operations, Eileen Naughton denied the company treated women employees unfairly and insisted there was no gender pay gap at Google. “Pay equity is […]

Google has committed to using machine learning technologies to make its products more intelligent and user friendly over the next few years. The latest example of this effort is a new ‘Similar items’ feature in the Google Image Search app for Android and the mobile web. The feature is aimed at giving users a way […]