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From The Verge: The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.

About a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the tech giant’s involvement in Project Maven, a controversial military program that uses artificial intelligence, Gizmodo reports. Project Maven, which harnesses AI to improve drone targeting, has been a source of concern for a number of Google employees. Last month, over 3,100 Google workers signed a letter addressed to the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, asking him to pull the tech giant out of the project. Announced last year, Project Maven is designed to swiftly pull important data from vast quantities of imagery. GOOGLE EMPLOYEES PLEAD WITH CEO TO DROP OUT...

Google has rebranded its research department to Google AI in an attempt to “better reflect” its “emphasis on implementing machine learning techniques in nearly everything we do at Google.” The company announced the change in a blog post, where it explained the reasoning behind the rebrand. “For the past several years, we’ve pursued research that reflects our commitment to making AI available for everyone. From computer vision to healthcare research to AutoML, we have increasingly put emphasis on implementing machine learning techniques in nearly everything we do at Google,” the company declared. “Our research has been core to the development...

Tech giants Facebook and Google have banned advertisements related to Ireland’s upcoming abortion referendum this month. Ahead of Ireland’s upcoming referendum, which will decide whether or not the country’s eighth amendment preventing abortion in the country will be revoked, Silicon Valley’s masters of the universe have chosen to ban advertisements relating to the referendum. Facebook and Google both announced separately that they would be banning the advertisement of ads relating to the referendum. Facebook has banned ads from organizations based out of Ireland, while Google has banned all ads regardless of source.

Google’s virtual assistant can now make phone calls on your behalf to schedule appointments, make reservations in restaurants and get holiday hours. The robotic assistant uses a very natural speech pattern that includes hesitations and affirmations such as “er” and “mmm-hmm” so that it is extremely difficult to distinguish from an actual human phone call. The unsettling feature, which will be available to the public later this year, is enabled by a technology called Google Duplex, which can carry out “real world” tasks on the phone, without the other person realising they are talking to a machine. The assistant refers...

Protesters stormed Google’s I/O Conference Tuesday amid technical developers and coding lectures, demanding Google strip pro-life groups from search results on abortion. When women Google where they can get an abortion, pro-life pregnancy centers intending to give them support during times of crisis sometimes pop up as results. Protesters from progressive activist groups UltraViolet and CREDO Action regard these results as an abomination and interrupted Google’s 2018 I/O conference to demand the media platform remove “crisis pregnancy centers” from search results on abortion, according to Mercury News. In addition to disrupting the keynote speaker, the protesters said they had a...

While you and I were sleeping, the street artist Sabo was busy at work on the streets of San Francisco waging his private war against the excesses and duplicity of Silicon Valley. You might remember his last campaign in New York, exposing the incestuous relationship between Zuckerberg and Schumer: #ZuckSchumer. His new target is Google boss Sundar Pichai, a man last in the headlines for firing Google engineer James Damore for airing his views on diversity inside the business in his infamous Google memo. (Essentially, if you are straight, white or male you are at the back of the queue...

I don't usually promote Google, but I thought today's Doodle was especially worthwhile. It's a celebration of French filmmaker and magician Georges Melies, who was a pioneer in early film. Their tribute displays an extraordinary amount of detail and is very entertaining. Worth a look.

US whistleblower and transgender rights advocate Chelsea Manning on Wednesday warned that she is deeply troubled about the way in which governments and large companies collect and use people’s data. The former US Army soldier said that search engines and social media firms were helping an “accelerated progress towards totalitarianism.” “I do not think Google or Facebook are accidentally storing data,” Manning told delegates on the opening day of the “Re: publica” internet forum in Berlin. The 30-year-old added that “algorithms are not neutral,” and urged those who develop the high-tech instruments and machine learning tools to closely consider their...

I did an Ixquick search, which uses Google, for information on Oregon Republican governor candidates. I got sites for democrats. I kept changing my search words but kept getting Kate Brown or democrat sites. I even put "Republican" in twice on each end of the search. I knew Ixquick used Google but just hid your ID. Well, done with Ixquick.

“UPDATE: A Facebook representative told Breitbart News that “a block was incorrectly put on [Ms. Geller’s] account on April 25 after a post was mistakenly identified to violate our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy because it included ‘God Bless Hitler’ and we don’t allow praise for hate figures. We removed the block the next day as soon as we identified that Ms. Geller was raising awareness about this content, which we do allow.” Original Story starts here: Days after Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, refused to attend a congressional hearing on social media censorship, the social network banned the...

Erasing white history.

The head of a Lutheran publishing house has claimed Google will no longer accept advertisements related to the organization's website "because of the faith we express." Bruce Kintz, CEO of Concordia Publishing House — an entity of the theologically conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, took to his Facebook page on Monday to voice outrage after the organization had been told that the Google's online advertising service will not promote the CPH website because of certain religious items on the page. Kintz's Facebook post explains that he was told by an associate earlier in the day that "Google ads will no longer...

By inserting negative search suggestions under the name of a candidate, search engines like Google can shift the opinions of undecided voters by up to 43.4 percent, according to new research by a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and reported exclusively by Breitbart News. The lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Epstein, has previously conducted research into what he calls the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). This research showed that the manipulation of results pages in search engines can shift the voting preferences of undecideds by anywhere between 20 and 80 percent, depending on...

At Business Insider's IGNITION conference, Scott Galloway gave a blistering presentation on why "The Big Four" — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — should be broken up. Galloway is a professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google."

Alon Altman, a senior software engineer at Google, pressured the company to sabotage President Trump’s Android phone, according to new evidence released via James Damore’s class-action lawsuit against the company. Calling on the tech giant to use the “full economic force [of] Google for good”, Altman also suggested deleting the gmail accounts of Trump, his administration, and his aides for “abuse.” Altman – who is still employed by the tech giant – also called on Google to blacklist “alt-right’ sites on the Google ad network (she falsely included Breitbart News in this category — an assertion refuted by a Harvard...

You my children are my lightning bolts of boldness, and thunder of my presence as you declare my word for truly I watch over my word to perform it in the glory and majesty of who I AM. Therefore press forward for I have Already conquered the enemy for you by the The Cross. Dissolve the lies of the enemy with my word and declare grace to the mountains for my life is alive in you. • ACTS 17:28 For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your owr.cn poets have said, 'We are...

While congresscritters expressed outrage at Facebook’s intrusive data grabs during Capitol Hill hearings with Mark Zuckerberg this week, not a peep was heard about the Silicon Valley–Beltway theft ring purloining the personal information and browsing habits of millions of American schoolchildren. It doesn’t take undercover investigative journalists to unmask the massive privacy invasion enabled by educational technology and federal mandates. The kiddie data heist is happening out in the open — with Washington politicians and bureaucrats as brazen co-conspirators. ... Under the guise of customizable assessments, public and private preschools in Colorado experimented with toddlers whose student activities and social/emotional...

Hello! Gordon's pizza? - No sir it's Google's pizza. So it's a wrong number? Sorry - No sir, Google bought it. OK. Take my order please - Well sir, you want the usual? The usual? You know me? - According to our caller ID data sheet, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust. OK! This is it ... - May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato.? What? I hate vegetables. - Your cholesterol is not good, sir. How do you know? - We crossed the number of your fixed...

The discovery was made by New York cybersecurity expert Kelly ShortridgeShe noticed the browser tool was scanning files in a folder on her Windows PCMs Shortridge shared her worries that it was gathering data on social media Google's head of security for Chrome responded that this is not the caseGoogle users are sharing their shock at discovering Chrome's built-in anti-virus tool is scanning private files on their computers.Chrome Cleanup Tool, a browser component added in 2014 to scan and remove malicious or resource heavy software, is behind the outcry.