Google

As part of a settlement announcement on Monday, Google has agreed to pay out $17 million to 37 U.S. states, as well as the District of Columbia, for ignoring anti-tracking protocols baked in to Apple's Safari Web browser.

According to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the state attorneys general took Google to task over unauthorized placement of cookies on users' machines when they visited sites on the Internet search giant's DoubleClick ad network between 2011 and 2012, reports PCWorld.

Fancy getting your hands on a Nexus 7 without having to part with any cash? If you've been on the lookout for a 7-inch Android tablet, Google has a contest that may well be of interest. Providing you live in the US, you can take part in a photo competition to bag yourself either a free Nexus 7 or a $50 Google Play gift card. Sound tempting? All you need to do is take a photo of an arrangement of things that matter to you -- that's all there is to it!

According to the Washington Post, the US National Security Agency has had the ability to track mobile phones even when they are switched off. It's not new news, with the Post's article published July 22 and its source, troops from the NSA's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), stating they've been able to do this since 2004. The problem is, almost a decade later, no one knows how it was done.

If you find yourself searching the same sites and using the same criteria over and over, you can simplify things and save yourself a lot of time by using Google’s Custom Search.

The feature, which can be found here, started as a service to give webmasters the ability to embed a Google search box that searches their webpage. But even if you don’t have a site you need to index, search, and serve ads against, Google Custom Search can be a powerful tool for any workflow that queries the internet.

Google Glass is slowly coming within reach of members of the general populace who aren't developers, celebrities, or elite early adopters.

Google's mobile operating system Android has been a whipping boy for some segments of the security community, but the latest version of the software may begin to rehabilitate its reputation.

Android 4.4, or KitKat, contains a number of new and improved features that are garnering the praise of malware fighters. They include improved implementation of SELinux, better warnings about bad website certificates, and a fortified method for blocking potential malicious changes to the operating system.

If you've ever wondered which of your 200 browser tabs is making all that racket, the latest Chrome Beta can lend an ear.

When a tab is streaming audio in Chrome 32 Beta, an indicator will appear next to the close tab X. The indicators will change depending on the source, so streaming audio will be denoted by a speaker icon, a red circle will indicate a Web cam, and Chromecast's box icon will notify you when you're broadcasting a tab to your television.

According to F-Secure’s latest report titled ‘Mobile Threats’ covering the latest developments in the mobile malware sector for Q3 2013, the vast majority of malware is targeted directly at Android.

It's fair to say that Android went through some chaotic years in the beginning. The pace of development was frantic as the operating system grew at an unprecedented rate.

An as-yet undetermined future led to decisions that were made to conform to existing hardware and architectures, the available development tools, and the basic need to ship working code on tight deadlines.

Google has started to encrypt its traffic between its data centers, effectively halting the broad surveillance of its inner workings by the joint National Security Agency-GCHQ program known as MUSCULAR. The move turns off a giant source of information to the two agencies, which at one point accounted for nearly a third of the NSA's daily data intake for its primary intelligence analysis database—at least for now.