Source: Alphabet's Q1 profit was boosted by $8B in unrealized gains from an investment in SpaceX; Alphabet has been a major SpaceX investor since at least 2015
Davey Alba / Bloomberg :
A profile of Alphabet's moonshot X lab, which is carving out a path to spin off projects as independent startups, after years of debate and experimentation
more of a focus on financial success these days, plus Google looks more like a conservative incumbent than out-of-the-box innovator. https://www.bloomberg.com/... #Google Max Chafkin / @chafkin : this...
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel
https://medium.com/... X: Dr. Ks / @katejsim : Terminated worker here. Listen when employers tell you exactly who they are McCarthyism is alive and well. Look how terrified they are of worker power 🔥 ...
Filing: to settle a 2020 class action lawsuit over Chrome's Incognito mode, Google agreed to destroy billions of data points it allegedly improperly collected
Over 100 Billion Private Browsing Records To Be Deleted Tom Pritchard / Tom's Guide : Google Incognito mode was never private — and now Google's being forced to delete all the data Grace Eliza Goodwin...
Stanford researchers: LAION-5B, a dataset of 5B+ images used by Stability AI and others, contains 1,008+ instances of CSAM, possibly helping AI to generate CSAM
most prominently, Stable Diffusion 1.5—to see to what degree CSAM itself might be present in the training data. https://purl.stanford.edu/... Alex Stamos / @alex.stamos : Lots of people have worried a...
A review of 115 warrants for Google's location and search data in five US states shows investigators are increasingly using the data to solve nonviolent cases
Investigators increasingly use warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases—and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime. X: @elizabeth_joh , @deirdre...
At trial, the US DOJ asserted Googlers are trained to have sensitive conversations over chat with history off and avoid phrases like “market share” and “bundle”
The search giant's historic antitrust trial began this week. Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica : Google hid evidence by training workers to avoid words monopolists use, DOJ says Justin Diaz / Android Hea...
At trial, the US DOJ asserted Googlers are trained to have sensitive conversations over chat with history off and avoid phrases like “market share” and “bundle”
Hi all, it's Tom Giles in San Francisco and Davey Alba in Washington.
Study: in May 2023, ~150K nonconsensual porn deepfakes, with 3.8B total views, appeared on 30 sites, up 9x since 2019, aided by services from big tech companies
To stay up and running, deepfake creators rely on products and services from Google, Apple, Amazon, CloudFlare and Microsoft X: @daveyalba , @cecianasta , and @ajmartinny X: Davey Alba / @daveyalba : ...
In four new studies with collaboration from Meta, researchers find Facebook's algorithm is “influential” but doesn't necessarily change beliefs, and more
Ekeoma E. Uzogara Authors Info & Affiliations — pp. 386-387 Washington Post : Changing Facebook's algorithm won't fix polarization, new study finds Science : How do social media feed algorithms aff...