Google

Original source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.16321.pdf

• Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that Chrome browser extensions can still steal passwords, despite compliance with Chrome's latest security standard, Manifest V3.
• A proof of concept extension successfully passed the Chrome Web Store review process, demonstrating the vulnerability.
• The core issue lies in the extensions' full access to the Document Object Model (DOM) of web pages, allowing them to interact with text input fields like passwords.
• Analysis of existing extensions showed that 12.5% had the permissions to exploit this vulnerability, identifying 190 extensions that directly access password fields.
• Researchers propose two fixes: a JavaScript library for websites to block unwanted access to password fields, and a browser-level alert system for password field interactions.

Google has released new wallpapers for Pixel phones, featuring warm and sunny images in categories like Cityscapes, Textures, and Life. These wallpapers are exclusive to Pixel devices for now, but it's possible they will be available for all Android phones in the future. Google often releases new wallpapers to commemorate occasions, and Android users have a variety of options to choose from in the Wallpapers app.

A Waymo autonomous taxi in San Francisco on Aug. 10. , Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- California regulators voted in favor of robotaxi operators expanding their paid driverless services in the city of San Francisco, a major milestone toward commercializing the technology.

The state's Public Utilities Commission voted 3 to 1 to allow General Motors Co.'s Cruise LLC and Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo to increase the areas of the city where they can operate a car without a safety driver, and charge riders a fare for it.

The commission, meeting in San Francisco on Thursday, heard hours of public testimony arguing for and against the expansion of Waymo and Cruise's turf. Robotaxis have increasingly become a normal sight on the Northern California city's roads, with Waymo running a fleet of about 200 cars. Such services are currently limited in where they can drive, and the companies typically can't charge passengers. Cruise has 300 cars across three cities

San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix

averaging 1,000 trips a day. Both services have thousands of individuals on waiting lists to try them out.

"This is a huge milestone that enables us to expand Waymo One in SF and continue to serve you," the company said in an emailed statement. Cruise said it will help revamp an "unsafe" transport system. It "will continue to work closely with our regulators, first responders, and other key stakeholders as we expand our service to more people," a Cruise representative said in a statement.

Read More: Waymo, Cruise Robotaxis Are All Over San Francisco: Tech Daily 

Multiple people at the hearing expressed the view that expanding the services of driverless taxis would better serve those with disabilities. Human-driven ride-share vehicles often neglect the needs of picking up individuals with physical challenges, such as stopping abruptly at a curb, some said. Others said autonomous taxis would eliminate discrimination from the process of hailing a ride. 

"I experienced rideshare drivers who have left me on the street and refused to open their vehicles. Drivers can discriminate against vulnerable populations, including queer, black, and trans folks, far more than any computer," city resident Sean Durkin told commissioners at the meeting.

Others who testified argued that expanding autonomous vehicles would make the city's streets safer. 

"I never have to guess if Cruise is going to decide to follow traffic rules today," said San Francisco resident Jason Stafford. "I'm tired of seeing my family put in danger when we have a solution to the danger that human drivers cause."

Read more: Cathie Wood Keeps Up Tesla Robotaxi Hopes After Six-Year Letdown

On the opposing end, many of the individuals who testified against the expansion of autonomous vehicles said it would put jobs at risk, including drivers for traditional ride-share apps like Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.

both based in San Francisco

as well as workers for delivery services. Others focused on concerns about the safety and accountability of vehicles that companies like Waymo and Cruise allow to navigate the city. 

"I encourage you to think about the 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States, and to think that Cruise is currently rolling out delivery vehicles that they call driverless delivery with the express intent of replacing delivery drivers, long-haul truckers, and affecting the livelihood of millions of American families and working people, " city resident Graham Isom said during the testimony. 

The verdict expands how Waymo and Cruise vehicles can operate. Prior to Thursdays decision, Cruise could only charge a fare in a limited section of the city, while offering a free service covering almost all of the peninsula. Waymo did not charge a fare in San Francisco and its public service excluded the city's northeast.

The resolutions permit the autonomous vehicles to operate without a human safety driver during the day or at night, throughout the entire city of San Francisco. Previously, autonomous vehicles were limited to operating during certain hours, in specific weather conditions or with a safety driver present. Both companies are permitted to collect payment for rides. 

cross-posted from !aistuff@lemdro.id

Aug 8 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Universal Music (UMG.AS) are in talks to license artists' voices and melodies for artificial intelligence-generated songs, Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The music industry is grappling with "deepfake" songs, made using generative AI, that mimic artists' voices, often without their consent.

The goal behind the talks is to develop a tool for fans to create tracks legitimately and pay the owners of the copyrights for them, the report said, adding the artists would have a choice to opt in the process.

Discussions between Google and Universal Music are at an early stage and no product launch is imminent, while Warner Music (WMG.O) is also in talks with Google about a product, the report added.

The companies did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7009755

The difference between the two security features is that Safe Browsing will compare a visited site to a locally stored list of domains, compared to Enhanced Safe Browser, which will check if a site is malicious in real-time against Google's cloud services.

While it may seem like Enhanced Safe Browsing is the better way to go, there is a slight trade-off in privacy, as Chrome and Gmail will share URLs with Google to check if they are malicious and temporarily associate this information with your signed-in Google account.

It happens every once in a while when a story on your Google Discover news feed will mysteriously take you to Google's 404 (Not Found) page—despite the story being very much live at the time.

BleepingComputer has been observing this behavior over the past few weeks at random on Android devices, and we are able to identify the cause of the problem.

Here's how you can still read your favorite stories, and even workaround the bug that has occasionally bothered some users in the past.

YouTube today announced a number of new Shorts features, but the most promising one for Creators is a recomposition tool to convert regular videos into vertical content.

The Search Generative Experience (SGE) that Google is testing out with some users shows an interesting future for the world’s most popular search engine, but one that also wasn’t really showing its source links very clearly at first. Now, though, Google seems to be testing more prominent links in SGE.

Since its launch in May, the Search Generative Experience (SGE) in Google Search has been able to use generative AI to enhance search results with summaries related to your search. In a hands-on overview, our Abner Li called the experience “scarily sufficient,” commenting on how SGE makes it easy to ignore source links and just take Google’s answers at face value, even if they aren’t fully accurate.

YouTube is experimenting with a new feature that generates summaries for videos written by AI, but you probably won’t see it just yet.

It’s not uncommon to see strange new features come and go on YouTube’s mobile app or website. That’s the nature of a constantly changing service. However, it was only a matter of time before YouTube started introducing some form of AI. Google has made big breakthroughs in the field with Bard and Google Workspace’s new Duet AI feature set that brings the tech into your daily workflow, for the better.

Google has committed to adding new data transfer capabilities to Takeout, including for YouTube, next year in response to an investigation by Italian competition regulators.

According to Reuters, this was the result of an Italian startup that works on data exports filing a complaint about the portability of Google data. In response, Google made three commitments that the regulator has accepted to end the investigation.

Earnings release: https://abc.xyz/assets/20/ef/844a05b84b6f9dbf2c3592e7d9c7/2023q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf

WSJ News Exclusive | Sergey Brin Is Back in the Trenches at Google Miles Kruppa and Deepa Seetharaman 8–10 minutes

Co-founder is working alongside AI researchers at tech giant’s headquarters, aiding efforts to build powerful Gemini system

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back at work.

The multibillionaire has been visiting the tech giant’s Mountain View, Calif., offices in recent months generally three to four days a week, working alongside researchers as they push to develop the company’s next large artificial-intelligence system.

Brin participated in meetings about AI at Google’s offices late last year, but the frequency and intensity of his involvement has picked up, said people familiar with the matter. His new stance is a notable change from the relatively hands-off approach he adopted after stepping down from an executive role at parent company Alphabet GOOG 0.65%increase; green up pointing triangle in 2019.

He has worked closely with a group of researchers building Google’s long-awaited AI model Gemini. They have discussed technical matters such as “loss curves,” a way of measuring an AI program’s performance over time, and Brin has convened weekly discussions of new AI research with Google employees. He also has intervened in personnel matters, such as the hiring of sought-after researchers, the people said.

Brin’s increased presence at Google reflects the pivotal moment in AI and his longstanding interest in the technology, which Google pioneered but was slower than rivals to turn into new products, said current and former employees.

Competition is intensifying in AI research, with recent new offerings from companies including Meta Platforms. Google sped up product development in response to last year’s release of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can respond fluently to a range of written queries, by the Microsoft-backed research company OpenAI.

Gemini is Google’s attempt to build a general-purpose AI program that can rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which powers a paid version of ChatGPT. Demis Hassabis, the Google executive overseeing the project, told employees during a recent companywide meeting that the program would become available later this year, according to people who heard the remarks.

Brin, 49 years old, started Google with Larry Page in 1998 based on web search research they worked on together as Stanford University doctoral students.

While Brin has been an occasional presence at Google headquarters in recent years, his attention had been largely directed toward outside interests such as airships and new forms of disaster aid, along with efforts to give away portions of his considerable wealth. He is Alphabet’s second-largest individual shareholder behind Page, with a stake valued at close to $90 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ data.

Shares in Alphabet have risen more than 10% since Google announced an array of AI-infused products at its annual developer conference in May, including a new version of the core search engine that provides lengthy summaries and invites follow-up questions. That increase is roughly in line with rival Microsoft’s share price and the broader Nasdaq Composite Index.

Brin has spent much of his time sitting alongside Mountain View-based AI researchers at the newly constructed Charleston East building, a short walk from the original heart of Google’s corporate campus, said people familiar with the matter. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of both Google and Alphabet, also has an office in the building.

When the founders stepped back from their daily roles four years ago and elevated Pichai to Alphabet CEO, they said they would speak with him regularly and offer “advice and love, but not daily nagging.” They still control a majority of Alphabet voting power and sit on an executive board committee with Pichai.

Pichai is excited about Brin’s involvement and has encouraged his contributions, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

Google had a head start on artificial intelligence, forming a research unit in 2011 called Brain to investigate how a computing technique called deep learning could be used to build widely useful AI programs.

Pichai merged the Brain team this year with DeepMind, an AI research company that previously operated independently under the Alphabet umbrella. The shake-up elevated Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind, to CEO of the combined group Google DeepMind.

Some researchers have embraced Brin’s involvement, viewing it as an endorsement of their work and a helpful intervention during a transitional period for the AI teams, said current and former employees. Hassabis and many Google DeepMind executives work from London, making that office a de facto power center in the new setup.

Brin’s involvement has ramped up since the release of ChatGPT in November. Google’s co-founders sat in on meetings to review AI products Google was preparing for its developer conference in May, said people familiar with the matter, a development earlier reported by the New York Times.

Brin has since maintained a strong presence at Google’s headquarters, making appearances at research gatherings and company celebrations. Google said Brin doesn’t have a formal new role at the company beyond being a co-founder and board member. A spokeswoman for Brin didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Whereas Page was sometimes a reclusive figure during his time running Google, Brin cultivated a more accessible persona, traversing the headquarters on roller skates and moving between the company’s far-flung projects.

Since the AI boom last year, Brin has attended a launch party for the company that popularized the image-generation program Stable Diffusion and occasionally attends events at a $68 million mansion in Hillsborough, Calif., known as the AGI House, said people who have interacted with him there. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, the idea that computer programs could one day match human reasoning.

In March, Brin was photographed at Google headquarters with Pichai and Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker during a visit from the prime minister of Luxembourg, dressed in gray sweatpants and a black long-sleeve shirt. The other attendees wore suits.

Brin’s work with Gemini is another layer in Google’s long-running efforts to build AI systems that can exhibit humanlike capabilities and more seamlessly meet the needs of the company’s billions of users.

At first Brin ignored the work of the Brain team and expressed skepticism that they could crack artificial intelligence, even though that group began in the Google X division he led, he said during an interview at the World Economic Forum in 2017.

“I didn’t pay attention to it at all, to be perfectly honest,” Brin said. A few years later, Brain’s research was used in many of Google’s largest products, he said, upending his previous assumptions.

Brin has focused in part on personnel issues, an area of difficulty for Google and other large tech companies as the talent wars for AI researchers intensifies. Multiple authors of a landmark 2017 Google paper credited with sparking the latest wave of AI development have left the company to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for competing startups.

Though he is one of the world’s most respected computer scientists, Brin has needed to catch up with the most recent developments in AI and hasn’t contributed significantly to coding projects, said current and former employees.

Brin promoted the possibilities of AI in his last shareholder letter, issued in 2018, writing that the “power and potential and potential of computation to tackle important problems has never been greater.”

“The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime,” he wrote.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6738148

The much maligned "Trusted Computing" idea requires that the party you are supposed to trust deserves to be trusted, and Google is DEFINITELY NOT worthy of being trusted, this is a naked power grab to destroy the open web for Google's ad profits no matter the consequences, this would put heavy surveillance in Google's hands, this would eliminate ad-blocking, this would break any and all accessibility features, this would obliterate any competing platform, this is very much opposed to what the web is.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/127876

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news copy, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.

Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.

A Google spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times and The Post declined to comment.

“We have an excellent relationship with Google, and we appreciate Sundar Pichai’s long-term commitment to journalism,” a News Corp spokesman said in a statement, referring to Google’s chief executive.

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and media commentator, said Google’s new tool, as described, had potential upsides and downsides.

Our business reporters. Times journalists are not allowed to have any direct financial stake in companies they cover.

“If this technology can deliver factual information reliably, journalists should use the tool,” said Mr. Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

“If, on the other hand, it is misused by journalists and news organizations on topics that require nuance and cultural understanding,” he continued, “then it could damage the credibility not only of the tool but of the news organizations that use it.”

News organizations around the world are grappling with whether to use artificial intelligence tools in their newsrooms. Many, including The Times, NPR and Insider, have notified employees that they intend to explore potential uses of A.I. to see how it might be responsibly applied to the high-stakes realm of news, where seconds count and accuracy is paramount.

But Google’s new tool is sure to spur anxiety, too, among journalists who have been writing their own articles for centuries. Some news organizations, including The Associated Press, have long used A.I. to generate stories about matters including corporate earnings reports, but they remain a small fraction of the service’s articles compared with those generated by journalists.

Artificial intelligence could change that, enabling users to generate articles on a wider scale that, if not edited and checked carefully, could spread misinformation and affect how traditionally written stories are perceived.

While Google has moved at a breakneck pace to develop and deploy generative A.I., the technology has also presented some challenges to the advertising juggernaut. While Google has traditionally played the role of curating information and sending users to publishers’ websites to read more, tools like its chatbot, Bard, present factual assertions that are sometimes incorrect and do not send traffic to more authoritative sources, such as news publishers.

The technology has been introduced as governments around the world have called on Google to give news outlets a larger slice of its advertising revenue. After the Australian government tried to force Google to negotiate with publishers over payments in 2021, the company forged more partnerships with news organizations in various countries, under its News Showcase program.

Publishers and other content creators have already criticized Google and other major A.I. companies for using decades of their articles and posts to help train these A.I. systems, without compensating the publishers. News organizations including NBC News and The Times have taken a position against A.I.’s sucking up their data without permission.