Google on Monday agreed to pay a record-breaking $391.5 million in settlement to settle a privacy lawsuit filed by a forty-state coalition of attorneys general over its location tracking practices. The settlement, which was led by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and Nebraska AG Doug Peterson, is the largest attorney general-led consumer privacy settlement ever in the U.S., states the announcement published by DoJ. The U.S. attorneys general opened the Google investigation following a 2018 Associated Press article that revealed the search giant violated state consumer protection laws by misleading users and tracking their locations since at least 2014 even when they chose privacy settings claiming to prevent the company from doing so....

Google on Tuesday announced a new version of the Android Studio software codenamed Android Studio Arctic Fox on the Canary channel. The search giant has changed the version numbering of Android Studio to more closely align with IntelliJ IDEA, the IDE upon which Android Studio is built. With this change, the latest Android Studio version is now called Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Canary 1 or just, Arctic Fox. Under the previous naming scheme, it would have been called Android Studio 4....

Using Google Dorking For Hacking websites, Databases and Internet of Things devices Last year we had discussed how Google can be used to almost anything on the Internet using a method called Google Dorking. If you have not read that article, it is available here . As you know Google is a vast repository of data, some of which are available to people while some are not. Users use Google to find answers to their queries, images, videos, news, and notes, etc....

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, on Monday, announced ChatGPT’s rival named “Bard”, a LaMDA-powered product, calling it “an important next step” in artificial intelligence (AI) for the search engine giant. Google described the AI-powered chatbot as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will respond to users’ queries and join in conversations. Shortly after the announcement, the Bard AI chatbot drew flak for not providing a correct fact about a question on the James Webb Space Telescope during the AI product preview event, which dropped Google’s stock by at least 9% this week....

A Russian court has fined Google nearly $100 million over the company’s alleged “systematic failure to remove banned content”, after finding it guilty of recurring breach of Russian law. The Tagansky District Court has ordered Google to pay an administrative fine of about 7.2 billion rubles (about $98.4 million), which is around eight percent of the search giant’s annual revenue in Russia. “In the case of an administrative offense provided for in Part 5 of Article 13....

Google on Monday announced its August 2024 security patches, which address 46 vulnerabilities, including a critical zero-day flaw affecting the Android kernel that was being actively exploited in targeted attacks. Clement Lecigne, a security researcher from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), has been credited for discovering and reporting the zero-day vulnerability in Android devices. Tracked as CVE-2024-36971, the zero-day flaw has been described as a high-severity issue impacting the kernel, which can be exploited for remote code execution (RCE) with “System execution privileges needed”....

A link to a website designed by hacker, crashes your Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox and makes calls to 911 if opened from a smartphone A harmless looking link circulating on Twitter is causing mayhem in the United States. The link is from a website, meetdesai.com (caution do not click) and has been shortened using Google’s link shortening service. Clicking on this link on Chrome desktop version makes Chrome open up multiple tabs and hang while opening it opening it on Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox make them try to open Chrome tabs while these also browsers hang....

Call recording is a great feature that’s exclusively available for Android smartphones. Generally, smartphone manufacturers bundle their call recording app with other bloatware. However, if you don’t have a built-in call recorder on your Android smartphone, you can easily download one of the thousand call recorders available on the Google PlayStore. Sadly the aforementioned solution will no longer work starting 11th May 2022. Let’s get into details. To further enhance users’ safety and privacy, Google is implementing new Play Store policies to prevent third-party apps from using the Accessibility API....

Google’s social chief Vic Gundotra , the man primarily responsible for the Google+ social network, announced on Thursday by saying he is proud of his nearly eight year tenure with Google but that it is time for a new journey. Gundotra , the creator and mastermind behind Google’s social network, made the announcement, appropriately enough, in a lengthy Google Plus post , praising his co-workers and saying that he is ‘excited about what’s next....

Today, passwords hold the key to the most sensitive and valuable parts of our lives. And yet, many of us fail to follow the best practices to ensure that our information won’t be compromised. We know that in theory we should create a unique password for each new account, but don’t want to deal with the hassle of having to remember them all. Are your passwords at least 15 characters long?...

Despite being a decade-old game, Minecraft’s popularity hasn’t decreased a bit. Available in two different versions namely Minecraft: Java Edition and Minecraft: Bedrock Edition the game has over 500 Million Players . In this article, we have shared multiple methods that will help you Download Minecraft: Bedrock Edition . NOTE : Before proceeding, we would like to inform you that the name Minecraft Bedrock Edition has been officially dropped. Consequently, the game now goes by the name Minecraft For Windows 10 ....

There’s a reason WhatsApp is more popular than other instant messaging apps. It offers better features and privacy options. WhatsApp allows you to download a group’s profile picture but restricts you from doing the same for an individual contact’s profile picture. This thing is done to respect the privacy of the user. Can You Save Someone’s WhatsApp Profile Picture? How to Save Someone’s WhatsApp Profile Picture? Capture the Screenshot of Profile Picture Popup Save WhatsApp Profile Picture Using an Online Tool Other Tools to Save WhatsApp Profile Picture by Number Download WhatsApp Profile Picture using WhatsApp Web Frequently Asked Questions: Can You Save Someone’s WhatsApp Profile Picture?...

Many of us have old laptops that have become painfully slow, tempting us to replace them with newer models. However, Google’s Chrome OS now offers a way to breathe new life into these aging devices. You can your Windows laptop to run on Chrome OS and turn it into a Chromebook. Chromebooks, which operate on a cloud-based system, are ideal for old laptops and modest computers. All you need is a Chrome OS Flex image and a pen drive to turn your old laptop into a Chromebook....

When you install Homebrew on your Mac as a package manager, you will experiment by installing several packages that you find useful. But what happens when you don’t need a specific Homebrew package is that it is just taking up the space. So, you can uninstall packages with Homebrew with a simple command to make some space and clean up the computer. Removing packages with Homebrew is easy. In fact, uninstalling and deleting packages from Homebrew is as simple as installing a package....

Windows 10 KB4515384 is causing network adapter failure for version 1903 users Most of the times when Microsoft releases a Windows 10 cumulative update, users face some issues or the other. Such updates have become the perennial cause of problems for many users, and this time too it’s no different. This time the issue is with the latest KB4515384 cumulative update for Windows 10 version 1903 that is causing network adapter failure for some users....

Piracy, the biggest fear of the film industry is expected to end soon as the members of big piracy websites are being arrested every year. TamilRockers , an Indian piracy website was a danger to Kollywood filmmakers and producers. TR is since 26th of July. Fortunately, the members of TamilRockers including admin got arrested on Thursday in Coimbatore. According to the sources, the anti-piracy cell tracked down the culprits and arrested them....

Microsoft recently acknowledged a significant issue affecting macOS users of OneDrive that is causing apps to hang or become unresponsive when trying to open or save files in OneDrive. This known issue, which affects systems running Mac’s latest operating system, macOS Sequoia (also known as macOS 15), is currently being investigated by the Redmond giant. “Opening or saving files within Desktop or Documents folders can cause the file’s app to freeze....

Microsoft in collaboration with the University of Washington at the Molecular Information Laboratory (MISL) has developed a faster method of reading and writing data in DNA format meeting the ever-growing need of data storage. The new method is detailed in a paper in the journal Science Advances , wherein Microsoft has introduced their first nanoscale DNA storage writer – a proof-of-concept molecular controller in the form of a tiny DNA storage writing mechanism on a chip....

Microsoft has announced that they are buying Activision Blizzard for a juggernaut amount of $68.7 billion. To put things in perspective, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 Billion around a decade ago. With this deal in the pocket, Microsoft is adding “Candy Crush” and “Diablo,” the two global video-gaming powerhouse franchises, to its gaming portfolio. The acquisition will make Microsoft the third largest gaming company after Tencent and Sony , provided it is cleared by the EU and USA regulators....

Users of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Friday were unable to access application shortcuts and utility shortcuts on the Start menu, Desktop, and Taskbar in Windows 10 and 11. Apparently, the problem was related to a flawed Microsoft Defender for Endpoint ASR (attack surface reduction) rule issued with Windows Defender security intelligence update 1.381.2140.0 on Friday morning. In the known issues and notification section of the Windows Health page, Microsoft explains that affected devices which had the Atack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule “Block Win32 API calls from Office macro” enabled caused the application shortcuts in the Start menu, pinned to the taskbar, and on the Desktop to either go missing or get deleted....