Google Archive

Google has hired a veteran chip architect away from Apple and is now looking to build its own chips for future versions of its flagship Pixel phone, Variety has learned from sources familiar with the hire. Manu Gulati, who had been spearheading Apple's own chip developments for close to eight years, joined Google in the last few weeks. He publicly announced the job change on his Linkedin profile Tuesday morning, stating that he now works as Google's Lead SoC Architect.

Chrome has always focused on giving users the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, Chrome, like other browsers, prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. Today, we have an even better understanding of the types of experiences that bother users when it comes to unwanted advertising. New public, consumer-driven research done by the Coalition for Better Ads in creating the Better Ads Standards outlines a number of these experiences, such as full-page ad interstitials, ads that unexpectedly play sound, and flashing ads. In dialog with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

At most companies, if you think you've witnessed sexual harassment, sexism, bigotry or racism, there s one way to get it addressed: going to human resources. At Google, there's another way to air your grievance: submitting your complaint to an employee-run message board that's curated into a weekly email.

The list, called "Yes, at Google," is a grassroots effort to collect anonymous submissions at Google and parent Alphabet Inc. and communicate them across the company, according to five current employees who receive the emails. "Yes, at Google" tracks allegations of unwelcome behavior at work in an attempt to make the company more inclusive, said the employees, who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak about internal company matters. Since starting in October, more than 15,000 employees - 20 percent of the company's workforce - have subscribed, according to two of those people.

Google management is aware of the list. "We work really hard to promote and preserve a culture of respect and inclusion," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "Our employees have numerous ways to raise issues - both negative and positive - with us, including through grassroots transparency efforts like this one. We take concerns seriously and take appropriate measures to address them."

These, in my view, don't go far enough in stating the problem and I feel this needs to be said very clearly: Google's AMP is bad - bad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news for how the web is built, it's bad news for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad news for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and possibly, purveyors of fake news.

But other than loading fast, AMP sucks. It implements its own scrolling behavior on iOS, which feels unnatural, and even worse, it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view.

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

After almost a decade of research, Google's autonomous car project is close to becoming a real service.

Now known as Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. self-driving car unit is letting residents of Phoenix sign up to use its vehicles, a major step toward commercializing a technology that could one day upend transportation.

Google isn't planning to rid fake news from its search results - but it's trying to purge it from the top.

The Alphabet Inc. company is making a rare, sweeping change to the algorithm behind its powerful search engine to demote misleading, false and offensive articles online. Google is also setting new rules encouraging its "raters" - the 10,000-plus staff that assess search results - to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories and what the company calls "low-quality" content.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is planning to introduce an ad-blocking feature in the mobile and desktop versions of its popular Chrome web browser, according to people familiar with the company's plans.

The ad-blocking feature, which could be switched on by default within Chrome, would filter out certain online ad types deemed to provide bad experiences for users as they move around the web.

Google could announce the feature within weeks, but it is still ironing out specific details and still could decide not to move ahead with the plan, the people said.

Fuchsia is a new operating system being built more or less from scratch at Google. The news of the development of Fuchsia made a splash on technology news sites in August 2016, although many details about it are still a mystery. It is an open-source project; development and documentation work is still very much ongoing. Despite the open-source nature of the project, its actual purpose has not yet been revealed by Google. From piecing together information from the online documentation and source code, we can surmise that Fuchsia is a complete operating system for PCs, tablets, and high-end phones.

The source to Fuchsia and all of its components is available to download at its source repository. If you enjoy poking around experimental operating systems, exploring the innards of this one will be fun. Fuchsia consists of a kernel plus user-space components on top that provide libraries and utilities. There are a number of subprojects under the Fuchsia umbrella in the source repository, mainly libraries and toolkits to help create applications. Fuchsia is mostly licensed under a 3-clause BSD license, but the kernel is based on another project called LK (Little Kernel) that is MIT-licensed, so the licensing for the kernel is a mix. Third-party software included in Fuchsia is licensed according to its respective open-source license.

The OP1 is built by Rockchip, which has made ARM processors for a while and isn't especially well-regarded among US consumers. And, strangely enough, even discovering that Rockchip makes the OP1 took a bit of sleuthing. The company doesn't have its brand anywhere near the Chromebook Plus. Also, the chip is called the OP1, which implies that there's going to be an OP2 and OP3 and so on. What exactly is going on here? Just what is OP?

Well! Turns out there's a website for answering that exact question, helpfully named whatisop.com. OP is a designation for SoCs that are optimized for Chrome OS. Naturally, I assumed it was a Rockchip brand - but that's not the case at all. And the website ostensibly designed to explain OP to us doesn't tell us who owns it (and it's even registered anonymously), so OP strangely mysterious.

Mystery solved: OP is a trademark owned by Google, and bestowed on SoCs that meet a Google spec for a good Chrome OS device. Basically, if a Chromebook has an OP processor, it means that Google certifies that it’s been optimized for Chrome OS.

I decided to dig through open source to examine the state of Google's upcoming Andromeda OS. For anyone unfamiliar, Andromeda seems to be the replacement for both Android and Chrome OS (cue endless debates over the semantics of that, and what it all entails). Fuchsia is the actual name of the operating system, while Magenta is the name of the kernel, or more correctly, the microkernel. Many of the architectural design decisions appear to have unsurprisingly been focused on creating a highly scalable platform.

It goes without saying that Google isn't trying to hide Fuchsia. People have clearly discovered that Google is replacing Android's Linux kernel. Still, I thought it would be interesting for people to get a better sense of what the OS actually is. This article is only intended to be an overview of the basics, as far as I can comment reasonably competently. (I certainly never took an operating systems class!)

You might have used Google's new AMP project without even knowing.

It's a technology that makes mobile page results load very quickly on Google, it displays the content in a more uniform fashion. But there's a problem.

The content loads off of Google's own server, not from the website itself.

This document gives an overview of how security is designed into Google’s technical infrastructure. This global scale infrastructure is designed to provide security through the entire information processing lifecycle at Google. This infrastructure provides secure deployment of services, secure storage of data with end user privacy safeguards, secure communications between services, secure and private communication with customers over the internet, and safe operation by administrators.

We will describe the security of this infrastructure in progressive layers starting from the physical security of our data centers, continuing on to how the hardware and software that underlie the infrastructure are secured, and finally, describing the technical constraints and processes in place to support operational security.

A Google data center consists of thousands of server machines connected to a local network. Both the server boards and the networking equipment are custom-designed by Google.

The third and most important thing to consider is this is the only device you can buy right now that supports Google Tango. Tango is Google-made software that, combined with specific hardware, offers advanced 3D sensing. If basic augmented reality creates a flat layer of digital information on your smartphone screen - think Pokémon Go, with the game content built on top of your real world - Tango goes beyond that, to the point where it interprets and measures spaces and objects around you and then lets you interact with digital things as though they're really, physically there.

The architect of this reorganization - known as "Alphabetization" at the ever-sunny Google - was Ruth Porat, the new chief financial officer. Porat, who was born in England but grew up in Palo Alto, led Morgan Stanley's technology banking division during the first dot-com boom, served as an adviser to the Treasury Department during the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and became Morgan Stanley's CFO in 2010. She joined Google in May 2015 with a mandate to bring discipline and focus to a company so awash in cash that it never needed much of either. She instituted rigorous budgeting and, according to people familiar with Alphabet's operations, forced the Other Bets to begin paying for the shared Google services they used. Projects hatched with ambiguous timelines of 10 or more years in some cases had to show a path to profit in half the time.

At most big companies, such financial controls are standard operating procedure, and Alphabet's investors are pleased. Its stock is up 35 percent since Porat joined. But within the Other Bets, Porat's tenure has been controversial, earning her an unflattering nickname: Ruthless Ruth. "She's a hatchet man," says a former senior Alphabet executive. "If Larry isn't excited about something," the executive continues, referring to CEO Page, "Ruth kills it."