Jaikumar Vijayan

At least some Google employees appear unhappy with their company’s participation in a Pentagon initiative exploring the use of artificial intelligence techniques that could improve military drone weapons targeting.  The New York Times April 4 reported that more than 3,100 Google employees have so far signed a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai urging the […]

Google is making it harder for cyber-criminals to use Chrome browser extensions for crypto-currency mining.  Effective immediately Google will no longer allow developers to upload crypto-currency mining browser extensions to the Chrome Web Store.  Extensions with crypto-currency mining functions that are already in Chrome store will be delisted sometime in late June. The company will […]

Google has released a new tool that gives developers a way to continuously profile and understand how their code is executing in production environments so they can quickly identify and address potential performance issues.  The new Stackdriver Profile is based on much of the same Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities that Google uses internally to […]

In a decision with potentially far reaching implications for the software industry, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has once again ruled that Google’s use of certain Java code in Android infringes upon Oracle’s copyrights.  The Appeals Court opinion on March 27 reverses a 2016 jury verdict and subsequent court decision in […]

Google has launched a new technology that makes it easier for businesses to add natural sounding speech capabilities to their applications and services.  Cloud Text-to-Speech is available—currently in beta form—as an API that developers can use to enable voice interaction in a wide range of use cases.  Examples include powering interactive voice response systems in […]

Google has released more details of its newly announced Cloud Armor system for mitigating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.  The service is one of about 20 security enhancements Google announced recently as part of a broad effort to convince enterprise customers that they can move mission critical business applications to Google Cloud Platform with […]

Google is changing its ad polices in the European Union to comply with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that goes into effect May 25.  Under the new policies, publishers and advertisers that use Google’s advertising services to deliver targeted messages to Internet users in the EU will need to obtain informed […]

Google will spend $300 million over the next three years on various initiatives to help news organizations sustain business growth and drive quality journalism.  Under a new Google News Initiative (GNI) announced March 20, the company will also work on empowering news organizations through technological innovation such as machine learning and natural language processing tools.  […]

Though corporate concerns about cloud security have waned considerably in recent years, it still remains a big reason why enterprise balk at move IT workloads more quickly to cloud environments.  Google this week introduced as many as 20 new security enhancements to its cloud portfolio in one of the company’s most comprehensive efforts yet to […]

Google has launched Shopping Actions, a new program that makes it easier for consumers to shop and buy products online via Google Search and Google Assistant.  Retailers who participate in the program will have an opportunity to have their products listed within the sponsored shopping unit on Google’s Search and Google Shopping pages when a […]

Play Protect, a suite of Android security services that Google introduced in May 2017, played a big role in bolstering overall security of the Android ecosystem last year. That’s according to Google, which on March 15 released its fourth annual report reviewing the steps it has been taking to improve the security of its mobile […]

Organizations using Chrome Enterprise, Google’s business friendly version of its cloud operating system for desktops, laptops and mobile computers, now have more options for managing and implementing security policies across their devices.  The company on March 15 announced partnerships with four enterprise mobility management (EMM) vendors,—Cisco Meraki, Citrix, IBM and ManageEngine a division of Zoho […]