Jaikumar Vijayan

Disconnect Inc., which makes privacy apps for mobile and desktop users, has accused Google of using its dominant position in the Android and mobile markets to unfairly shut Disconnect’s products out of the Google Play store. In a complaint filed with the European Commission’s Competition Directorate, Disconnect alleged that Google banned Disconnect’s applications from its […]

Developers of mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms have a new option for enabling offline support for their applications. Google, on May 29, released a Mobile Offline software development kit (SDK) for both platforms that it says will help developers build applications that work smoothly even when not connected to the Internet. The Mobile […]

Users of Google’s Chromecast will soon be able to stream more than just video and audio from their mobile devices to the TV. In addition, they will also be able to play iOS and Android games on their big screens without having to mirror content between their mobile devices and the Google Cast device. Beta-test […]

Google has released a new technical paper and an open-source reference implementation to help its cloud platform customers quickly and automatically build custom images for their Google Compute Engine and Docker applications. The goal is to give enterprises a way to reduce the time it takes to get applications installed and running on Google’s cloud […]

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli has urged the Supreme Court not to hear a closely watched case between Google and Oracle over the copyrightability of APIs. Oracle has claimed that Google owes it $1 billion in damages for illegally using a total of 37 copyrighted Java API packages in Google’s Android operating system. Google, and […]

Google wants multilingual participants at its I/O 2015 developers conference (May 26 to June 5) to contribute translations and validations for common words and phrases in their languages. The company hopes to get more than 5 million contributions between now and June 6 from on-site and off-site attendees at Google I/O. The goal is to […]

The fact that June 30, 2015, will be one second longer than normal is something that almost no one is going to even notice, but for computing systems that are not equipped to deal with it, the “leap second” could cause major problems. A leap second is what the International Earth Rotation and Systems Service […]

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and some of its peer agencies from closely allied countries targeted data links to Google’s mobile application stores as a way to plant spyware on people’s smartphones, CBC Canada reported this week. A top-secret document obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the NSA and its counterparts […]

Some customers of Google Fiber appear to be getting more than just blazing fast Internet connection speeds for their subscription. Google apparently has also been forwarding infringement notices to some subscribers from copyright holders who believe their content was misused. The automated notices have included demands for settlements ranging from $20 to $300 from copyright […]

Android and iOS smartphone and tablet owners who use Google Search on their devices will get real-time Twitter content served up with their search results. Initially, the feature is available only on Google.com in English in the Google app for Android and iOS, Google senior manager Ardan Arac wrote in a company blog post. The […]

A new experimental Chrome extension from Google lets users transmit the URL of a Web page they might be visiting to any system within earshot using audio. The extension, dubbed Tone, behaves much like a human voice in transmitting the information. Unlike radio waves, Tone’s transmissions cannot pass through walls and neither does it require […]

Google slashed prices on its Compute Engine hosted infrastructure service by up to 30 percent and introduced a new class of virtual machines for those looking for short-term capacity boosts at low cost. In a blog post Monday, the company described the price cuts as reflecting its commitment to following Moore’s Law and dropping prices […]