Google

Google on Tuesday announced a new Chrome update that resolves another zero-day vulnerability demonstrated at the Pwn2Own hacking contest in March.

Tracked as CVE-2024-3159, the high-severity bug is described as an out-of-bounds memory access issue in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. The flaw was exploited at Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024 by Edouard Bochin and Tao Yan from Palo Alto Networks, who received a $42,500 bug bounty reward for their finding.

Google did it. The company finally made a phone that feels like a full-effort flagship device. It took six long, frustrating years, but with the Pixel 6 it finally feels as though Google isn't holding back out of concern for its Android licensees or some other commitment issue. The Pixel 6 has a custom Google SoC, tons of AI software features that really work, and a new and exciting version of Android. These combine into the best Android smartphone out there—the One True Flagship of the Android ecosystem. With a great price, the Pixel 6 is an easy "buy" recommendation.

Android 11 has finally arrived after a lengthy beta process that started approximately three years ago in February 2020. This is the 30th release of Android, if we're counting by API levels, and in a year when it seems nearly everything has been delayed or canceled, Google has managed to turn in one of the smaller Android releases.

Google Play, the company’s official repository for Android apps, has once again been caught hosting fraudulent and potentially malicious apps, with the discovery of more than 56 apps—many of them for children—that were installed on almost 1.7 million devices.

Google has revealed plans to initially warn Chrome users about “insecure” downloads and eventually block them outright. “Today we’re announcing that Chrome will gradually ensure that secure (HTTPS) pages only download secure files,” Joe DeBlasio of the Chrome security team wrote in a blog post. “Insecurely-downloaded files are a risk to users’ security and privacy. For instance, insecurely-downloaded programs can be swapped out for malware by attackers, and eavesdroppers can read users’ insecurely-downloaded bank statements.”

Google is working on a wireless local file sharing feature for Android along the same lines as Apple's Airdrop. While it isn't out yet, XDA's Mishaal Rahman got an early version of it up and running on a few devices, as it's currently dormant in versions of Google Play Services that are out in the wild.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has warned about the dangers of unchecked A.I. in an op-ed in the Financial Times, and has said he believes that the area should be more tightly regulated. “We need to be clear-eyed about what could go wrong,” with A.I., he wrote, citing concerns such as the rise of deepfakes and potential abuses of facial recognition technology.

Google's relationship with its own Chrome OS hardware has been a peculiar one. While other OEMs regularly push out new Chromebooks for users with various budgets, Google continues to refresh its hardware just once a year. Until now, those updates have produced luxury Chromebooks with varying degrees of popularity: 2017's Pixelbook won many hearts with its unique design, versatility as a convertible, and solid performance, while 2018's Pixel Slate tablet was a decided flop.

When the Pixel 4 ships this week, it will be releasing to consumers with a face-unlock security issue that will apparently stick around for some time. Unlike the iPhone's FaceID (and Google's earlier face-unlock system on Android 4.1), the Pixel 4's face unlock doesn't look for the user's eyes, so the phone could be pointed at a sleeping or unconscious owner and unlocked without their consent. This weekend, Google said in a statement that a fix "will be delivered in a software update in the coming months."

Google unveiled its first 2-in-1, the Pixelbook, back in 2017. The device was the company’s first Chrome OS convertible and was launched along with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones. A successor to the laptop, codenamed ‘Atlas’, sporting a 4K display and a dedicated Google Assistant button was rumored to make its debut in 2018 alongside the Pixel 3 smartphones, which never happened. However, a recent FCC filing might point towards the possibility of the next generation.