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Google (GOOG, GOOGL) recently revealed a pilot program that will allow Spotify (SPOT) users to circumvent Google Play’s billing system. Spotify is among the companies that have publicly fought against Google and Apple’s hold on their respective app stores. Apple takes a 30% commission on app and in-app purchases for larger developers, while Google Play takes either a 30% or 15% commission, depending on a variety of factors. This seems like a small but substantial turning point for critics, but it’s unlikely the move indicates that Google is ready to move on, Anurag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Software and IT...

BRUSSELS - The European Union set the stage for a stepped-up crackdown on big tech companies with an agreement on landmark digital rules to rein in online “gatekeepers” such as Google and Facebook parent Meta. EU officials agreed late Thursday on wording for the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, part of a long-awaited overhaul of its digital rulebook. The act, which still needs other approvals, seeks to prevent tech giants from dominating digital markets, with the threat of whopping fines or even the possibility of a company breakup. For instance, they face tighter restrictions on using people’s data for targeted online...

Joe Rogan took aim at woke “activist” employees of large Silicon Valley tech firms, calling them “mentally ill” and “lunatics who are running the asylum to a certain extent.” Rogan made the comments on his Spotify podcast during an interview Wednesday with Antonio García Martínez, an ex-engineer at Apple and Facebook who parted ways with the iPhone maker after employees complained of “misogynistic” writings in his book. During the segment, Rogan asked Martínez what it was like to work for a large tech firm. “For someone from the outside, we look at it and say: ‘How are those #### places...

Go deeper: The decision follows some controversy over the last couple of years, during Google battled Epic Games over Fortnite, while the Play Store approach drew an antitrust lawsuit from state attorneys general. It also puts pressure on fellow tech giant Apple (AAPL), which has similarly fought against Epic and is firmly against third-party billing in its App Store. (8 comments

Despite its status as one of the wokest companies in the world, including maintaining an official program to inject critical race theory into the field of programming, tech giant Google is facing a major lawsuit alleging it discriminates against black employees. Even among the far-left tech giants of Silicon Valley, Google has a reputation for wokeness. The company invited Robin DiAngelo to give a talk on “white fragility” years before her presence became commonplace in corporate boardrooms. Its managers gave employees instruction manuals on recognizing “white dominant culture.” It maintains an entire program dedicated to “machine learning fairness,” the new...

More than 500 Google workers have rallied behind a colleague who alleges she is being pushed out of her job because of her activism within the company .... workers have signed a petition accusing Google leadership of “unjustly retaliating” against Ariel Koren, a product marketing manager at Google for Education, for voicing criticism of Project Nimbus, a 1.2-billion contract Google and Amazon Web Services entered into with the Israeli military and government. *** Koren feels she has faced added scrutiny since last spring. In May she called on Google to express solidarity with Palestinians in the wake of an assault...

As Google prepares to bring most employees back to the office, the company is facing a workforce that’s increasingly unhappy when it comes to key issues such as compensation and an ability to meet career goals.Google’s annual employee surveys, internally called “Googlegeist,” show that a growing number of staffers don’t view their pay packages as fair or competitive with what they could make in a similar role elsewhere. They are also questioning their employer’s ability to execute.The surveys were taken in January and released to employees last week. CNBC viewed results from the company overall as well as individual groups...

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Wednesday, during a contentious exchange at a hearing, asked fellow committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) why his wife, a former Treasury Department official, unmasked Michael Flynn. Jordan had just finished questioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the search engine’s bias against conservatives and whether he would commit to not interfering in the upcoming election to help Joe Biden. After Jordan finished his questioning, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) called his concerns “fringe conspiracy theories.”

We should have known better. I should have known better. What was billed as the “secure” alternative to Google’s data-siphoning search engine has turned out to be no better at belaying the leftist barrage of downvoting unacceptable speech. What good is valuing my privacy if you don’t value my free speech or my access to all viewpoints? Joining countless other companies at destroying lives and freedom, DuckDuckGo announced via their CEO’s Twitter feed that the company would begin engaging in, effective immediately, the censorship of articles or sites that promote – gasp! – skepticism at the corporate media’s approved narrative....

Tech giants Google, Apple, and Facebook have joined a group of 60 companies calling on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to drop recent legislation that defines permanent sex reassignment surgery on children as child abuse. The Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe and their friends have called on Texas leaders to “abandon efforts to write discrimination into law.” Google, Apple, and Facebook are part of the 60 companies asking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to shut down recently proposed legislation that would define sex reassignment surgery for children as child abuse. In a full-page ad published in the Friday edition of the...

Here's an interesting phenomenon. If you want to call it that. So I wanted to see what sort of news there is for Canada; I'm curious about what happened to the Trucker's Convoy, Ottawa, etc., basically all of the stuff that was the #1 story in the US MSM before Ukraine. So I go to Google and type in Canada. When the search comes back, I hit the "News" tab. After I hit the "News" tab, the word Canada is still in the Google search window. But the heading of the search is not that word. It is two words,...

Last week Instagram notified me that a viral post I had published was “fact checked” by a group called ‘The Healthy Indian Project’. My mother is from Bombay, and I did lose 40lbs last year, but I didn’t think they had created an entire unit just for me. So, I decided to find out who this group is. My findings are bemusing. The Healthy Indian Project (‘THIP’) appears to have started as a fitness and lifestyle site in 2018. Its CEO – Sudipta Sengupta – is a life-long marketing consultant from a small city (Gurgaon, Haryana) in India. The group...

On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines. “If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.” Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing...

An apparent rip-off of Donald Trump’s social media network Truth Social has racked up downloads in the six figures on Google’s Play Store, causing confusion by MAGA types who failed to realize the distinction. Insider first reported that the app, which is titled “MAGA Hub — Truth Social Trump” on the Play Store, has crossed 100,000 downloads as of Tuesday. While the app itself was launched in August 2021, well before news broke that Trump was pursuing the “Truth” branding for his social network, most of the downloads appear to have been in the last few weeks. Trump Media &...

Portions of this article were adapted from the author’s recently published paper at The Heritage Foundation, “Combating Big Tech’s Totalitarianism: A Road Map.”Last week, our Canadian neighbors mobilized their national security apparatus against working-class citizens protesting government overreach. The Biden administration is no doubt taking notes.In fact, the contours of a similar strategy are already emerging in the United States. First, the FBI reportedly tagged parents opposed to critical race theory with a “terrorism” label under the direction of Biden’s Department of Justice. Then, the DOJ revealed plans to stand up a domestic terror unit fixated on “anti-government or anti-authority”...

Locations of the Freedom Convoy donors in Ontario, Canada, have been published on Google Maps after names of those who gave money to the crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo were leaked online. The Google link contains thousands of pins pointing to locations of donors, each pin listing their names, donor ID, email address, and the amount they donated, including those as low as $10. Who published the donors and how the list was obtained from GiveSendGo still remains unknown. Last week, the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo had its data reportedly hacked to reveal the names of donors supporting the truckers protesting the...

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A dramatic – and potentially lucrative – scenario may now be unfolding in the markets for one of the most overlooked natural resources on the planet. This essential commodity – helium – is used to drive innovation for many of the world’s biggest tech companies...and it is needed to help manufacture everything from medical equipment to computer chips. Yet despite its critical importance – and growing demand – a potentially crippling lack of supply has put us on the brink of a critical shortage. This supply-demand imbalance has triggered a fast-moving growth opportunity for any exploration and development company that...

DeepMind, the AI lab backed by Google parent company Alphabet, today announced that it used AI to successfully control superheated matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor. The lab claims that the system, which is detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature, could allow scientists to investigate how such matter reacts under different conditions. While DeepMind remains engaged in prestige projects like systems that can beat champions at StarCraft II and Go, the lab has in recent years turned its attention to more practical domains, such as code generation, language processing, weather forecasting, app recommendations, and video compression. DeepMind...

Google today announced a new operating system, Chrome OS Flex, a free-to-use, cloud-based OS built to convert old PCs or Macs into Chromebooks. The new OS was developed by Google a few years after acquiring Neverware—the makers of Cloudready—and was primarily made for schools and businesses with fleets of old PCs or Macs that have been bogged down after years of use. Google argues these systems could be revitalized by stripping out Windows or macOS and installing Chrome OS Flex, a lightweight operating system that can run on weaker hardware and remain stable for years due to its reliance on...