Unilad: Argentina Loses Its Google Domain After Random Citizen Buys It For Just $5. “Argentina temporarily lost its Google domain after a random member of the public bought it for the equivalent of around $5. Taking to Twitter yesterday, April 22, Nicolas Kuroña said a google search had shown the domain ‘google.com.ar’ was available to buy, so he bought it.”
Engadget: Google’s AI photo app uses crowdsourcing to preserve endangered languages. “Google has a new way to preserve endangered languages: give cultures the AI tools they need to protect the languages themselves. The company has launched Woolaroo, an open source photo translation web app (also available through Google Arts & Culture for Android and iOS) that uses machine learning and image recognition to help preserve languages on the brink. As a user, you just have to point your phone’s camera at an object to have the AI recognize and describe it in a given language, complete with pronunciation.”
Meduza: Russia’s censorship agency seeks new fines for Twitter, Google, and Facebook. “Twitter may face another 24 million rubles ($320,880) in fines for failing to remove content prohibited in Russia, while Google and Facebook may face an additional 20 million rubles ($267,400) in fines each for the same violation, the Russian state news agency TASS reported on Wednesday, May 5.”
City of Detroit: Detroit, Google. org Team Up To Create Tool To Help Detroiters Find Affordable Housing. “Google.org Fellows will work alongside the City’s Housing & Revitalization Department with the mission of addressing housing instability in the city by helping Detroiters find affordable housing, making it easier to rent and stay in the city. The vision is to streamline the process of searching and applying for affordable housing, and having housing opportunities listed in one place and updated frequently.”
Science: New Google effort uses cellphones to detect earthquakes. “…the internet giant announced that users of its Android phones in New Zealand and Greece will receive warnings of damaging earthquakes about to strike their locations. And those earthquakes will be detected not by the usual seismometers, but by the phones themselves.”
Financial Post: Apple hires ex-Google AI scientist who resigned after colleagues’ firing. “Apple Inc said on Monday it has hired former Google distinguished scientist Samy Bengio, who left the search giant amid turmoil in its artificial intelligence research department. Bengio is expected to lead a new AI research unit at Apple under John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, two people familiar with the matter said.”
Reuters: Australia’s Seven West Media signs Google, Facebook deals after media law feud. “Australian television and newspaper firm Seven West Media Ltd signed multi-year content deals with Facebook Inc and Google as tough new media laws enabled the industry to secure new revenue sources and adapt to the internet age.”
Gizmodo: New Google Play Store Rules Aim to Weed Out Spammy Apps. “In an attempt to boost confidence in its Play Store offerings, Google has announced new rules that will look to weed out misleading, low-quality apps from its marketplace. In an update published Thursday, the company announced new metadata policies designed to moderate how developers present their apps. The rules, meant to drive more ‘meaningful downloads’ for consumers, will take effect later this year.”
Analytics India: What Happened When Google Threw All Voice Data To The Blender. Answer: SpeechStew. “Training large models is a massive challenge as it requires collecting and annotating vast amounts of data. It is particularly challenging in the case of speech recognition models. To overcome this challenge, a team from Google Research and Google Brain have introduced an AI model, SpeechStew. The model is trained on a combination of datasets to achieve state-of-the-art results on various speech recognition benchmarks.”
Digital Inspiration: Find Google Sheets Linked to your Google Forms. “When a user submits your Google Form, the response can be either saved in the Google Form itself or it can be written as a new row in a Google Spreadsheet. Multiple Google Forms can be associated with a single spreadsheet and their responses will be stored in separate sheets of the same spreadsheet. If you have multiple Google Forms in your Drive that are writing response data to the same Google Sheet, you can use Google Scripts to determine the name of the spreadsheet and the sheet where that form is storing their responses.”
Reuters: Google battles landmark UK class action over alleged iPhone tracking. “A proposed multi-billion pound British class action against Google, which alleges the internet giant secretly tracked millions of iPhone users, is not viable and should not be allowed to proceed, the Supreme Court was told on Wednesday. Antony White, a lawyer for Google, told the first day of a two-day hearing that any maiden, U.S.-style data protection lawsuit could only seek redress under English laws if a data breach led to claimants suffering damage.”
BNN Bloomberg: Microsoft’s Brad Smith Renews Attack on Google Over Web Content. “Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith said Google has hurt the concept of the open web and impaired content creators’ ability to make money, continuing an attack the software maker began earlier this year over whether internet companies need to pay news organizations for content they re-share.”
Tom’s Guide: Update Google Chrome now to fix these three urgent security flaws. “Google has updated the desktop version of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac and Linux yet again, pushing the version number to 90.0.4430.93 and fixing nine security flaws, at least three of which merit the ‘High’ severity rating.”
The Verge: Android bug exposed COVID-19 contact tracing logs to preinstalled apps. “The Android version of Google and Apple’s COVID-19 exposure notification app had a privacy flaw that let other preinstalled apps potentially see sensitive data, including if someone had been in contact with a person who tested positive for COVID-19, privacy analysis firm AppCensus revealed on Tuesday. Google says it’s currently rolling out a fix to the bug.”
