What? You are still using chrome? Firefox is where its at. But if you need WebKit there is always chromium which strips out all the google nonsense.

Google Chrome Gains AI Features Including a Writing Helper
Google is adding new AI features to Chrome, including tools to organize browser tabs, customize themes, and assist users with writing online content such as reviews and forum posts.

The writing helper is similar to an AI-powered feature already offered in Google’s experimental search experience, SGE, which helps users draft emails in various tones and lengths. W … ⌘ Read more

After seeing Google’s Gemini video, will everyone now need to invest in one of this pointing-downwards camera stands for the home?

Game-playing DeepMind AI can beat top humans at chess, Go and poker
An artificial intelligence capable of beating humans at a variety of games is an important step towards a more general intelligence, says Google DeepMind ⌘ Read more

DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch
By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now ⌘ Read more

Doctor’s Office
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The amount of shady Android apps in Google’s “Play Store” is so large, it makes me want to write my own software instead. 😖

How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse | Ars Technica

🤦‍♂

WHY are these big companies treated as though they are the be all and end all of infosec? These are rookie mistakes Google’s making, at scale.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option.

Like, never ever put your multi-factor tokens into a single cloud storage location! The whole point of this being “multi” factor is that there is a separate, independent physical factor involved in the authentication process. If the authenticator app on your phone puts the tokens in the cloud, then it reduces the security that comes from having a second factor. This is basic stuff.

Of course, never ever use Google Authenticator. All it does is generate TOTP and HOTP codes, which you can do with any OTP app, preferably an open source one that’s been vetted.

@adi@twtxt.net I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Can’t do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and don’t spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so you’re informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them.

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, there’s a decent chance it won’t be in F-Droid. Many “big corporate” apps aren’t, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. You’re definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that don’t have substitutes) that come from Google Play but I’m aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net It’s worth bearing in mind that

• Fairphone has taken a considerable amount of VC funding so, sooner or later, that bill will become due: (see: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/31/fairphone-growth-capital-raise and https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fairphone)
  
• Fairphone comes with Google Play apps by default, so it’s also a spyware vector (see: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110978014080809471)
  

I used to have a lot of hope for them but these two ingredients mean that enshittification is virtually inevitable.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

Google AI predicts floods four days early in South America and Africa
An artificial intelligence from Google can predict floods even in regions with little data on water flow, and its predictions four days in advance are as accurate as conventional systems manage for the same day ⌘ Read more

Perseids Pronunciation
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Found another example of Google stealing something I’ve written and putting it in a “featured snippet”.

What’s super annoying about this one is that the source is a course page at Tufts University, not the official page of the publication they’re taking this text from. I know the professor who taught that course and I’ve guest lectured for them before on this topic. They put this publication in their course readings, and I guess that’s where Google picked it up.

@prologic@twtxt.net what do you mean when you say “Docker API”? There are multiple possible meanings for that. podman conforms to some of Docker’s APIs and it’s unclear to me which one you say it’s not conforming to.

You just have to Google “podman Docker API” and you find stuff like this: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-rest-api

Podman’s REST API consists of two components:

• A Docker-compatible portion called Compat API
  
• A native portion called Libpod API that provides access to additional features not available in Docker, including pods
  

Or this: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-system-service.1.html

The REST API provided by podman system service is split into two parts: a compatibility layer offering support for the Docker v1.40 API, and a Podman-native Libpod layer.

In case you haven’t heard yet …

https://groups.google.com/g/vim_announce/c/tWahca9zkt4

Bram Moolenaar has died. 😢

@prologic@twtxt.net bummer, that’s a shame. I ask because I install the vast majority of my phone apps from f-droid these days, and only use Google Play Store when I have no other option. I know the Play Store will have more reach, but I’m guessing reach isn’t the highest priority right now.

@prologic@twtxt.net is goryon not in the google app store?

So given’s Google™’s recent policy changes where they now outright and blatantly just admit they’ll crawl, index and feed your (yes your fuckind) writings, thoughts, conversations, etc into their AI models; Should we as a small niche community (still growing) think about perhaps finally building Yarn.social v2 where we have encrypted feeds? 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s true. I think the key point is to make it 100% clear what your intentions are, so that if there ever is a legal case against Google, they cannot credibly pretend not to have known.

Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit.

@phoronix@feeds.twtxt.net Google just sucks in every way it seems.

Bug Bounties May Sound Great, But Aren’t Always Handled Well
Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn’t always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability… ⌘ Read more

@shreyan@twtxt.net I agree re: AR. Vircadia is neat. I stumbled on it years ago when I randomly started wondering “wonder what’s going on with Second Life and those VR things” and started googling around.

Unfortunately, like so many metaverse efforts, it’s almost devoid of life. Interesting worlds to explore, cool tools to build your own stuff, but almost no people in it. It feels depressing, like an abandoned shopping mall.

There’s a link to the blog post, but they extracted a summary in hopes of keeping people in Google properties (something they’ve been called out on many times).

I was never contacted to ask if I was OK with Google extracting a summary of my blog post and sticking it on the web site. There is a very clear copyright designation at the bottom of each page, including that one. So, by putting their own brand over my text, they violated my copyright. Straightforward theft right there.

Looks like Google’s using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

Sometimes being in a webinar with Google™ engineers makes you feel quite dumb and that you just realise how much you don’t know 🤣

Borré todo el historial del navegador (Edge) y activé el Modo oscuro. Se siente mucho más limpio, y prefiero que todo esté oscuro. En general funciona muy bien, aunque en Google Drive siguen problemas (Por ello lo desactivé meses atrás). Me parece que usaré Drive en Firefox, y ahí esconderé el modo oscuro.

how install gomodot? also.. @prologic@twtxt.net your domain has some pretty strong SEO mojo searching for install "gomodot" puts you on the google first page.

This is by design due to Google culture. The only way to get promoted into the higher pay scales is to ship a new product. So you have people shipping what worked before without regard to how it will exist within the product ecosystem. Also, why they seem to die off so quickly after launch. see allo and duo for example. The person that launches gets promoted to a higher level and off the original team and so it is left to wither and die.

I guess Google Hangouts is finally dead.

Why is Google such a mess at making messaging apps? This has more or less been a solved problem for decades. Google Talk worked well enough, and since it was based on XMPP and Jingle it was perfectly suited to become a large-scale text/voice/video messaging system. If they’d run with that they’d have been able to dominate that space, I think. Instead, they’ve created and shitcanned half a dozen messaging apps and platforms, flailing around copying someone else’s app (now they’re trying to copy Slack I guess).

Have you heard about the guy who worked on the Google AI chat bot? It is more than a chat bot and the conversation he published (got put on paid leave for doing that) is pretty scary : https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

I think google voice has been winding that down.

Thanks, I’d forgotten about that. I’d rather avoid Google Voice, and I’m okay paying (reasonably). Looking like Twilio might have most of what I want natively.

Cloud Computing and Virtualization Company Citrix To Be Acquired for $16.5B
Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company used by companies including Microsoft, Google, and SAP, has revealed plans to be acquired by affiliates of global investment firm Vista Equity Partners, and an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management called Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation. From a report: The all-cash deal i … ⌘ Read more

@eldersnake@yarn.andrewjvpowell.com
Google or (insert your favourite search engine here) have never let me down. Also, Youtube has repair guides, and HOWTOs for just about anything, and everything.

Dark Arts
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de To clarify, Markdown is just text. 😊 I can do bolding, link things, and if single return multilines ever comes to jenny, I would be able to do bulleted and numbered lists.

The only things—that I know of—that doesn’t work is “> “, but I can use “>”, like so:

D’oh!

So, jenny allows me to write Markdown almost just fine!

Working with Web components feels a bit like {insert fav fantasy world here} with concepts like the Shadow Dom and the Light Dom

Is there a usable API for language translation? Non-Google preferable.

there’s no difference between google, amazon, microsoft, or you know whatever other techbro CEO company you can think of