When Google launched its Pixel 2 flagship smartphone last year, it included something of a surprise: A co-processor called Pixel Visual Core, the company’s first homegrown, consumer-facing piece of silicon. And while that feels like a momentous foray, the co-processor has lain dormant for months. Monday, Pixel Visual Core goes to work.
Whether on Android or iOS, you likely already use Google Maps for navigation. You use Gmail for email. You use YouTube to watch videos. And you’re right to do so. You’d be even more right to ditch whatever junk keyboard your smartphone shipped with for Gboard, another Google staple that works like a dream.
Google currently has two OSes on the market: Android and Chrome OS. The company is never one to leave a successful product alone in the marketplace, though, so it's also developing a third operating system called "Fuchsia." When we last checked in on the experimental OS in May 2017, calling it an "OS" was a bit of a stretch. We only got the system UI up and running on top of Android, where it then functioned like an app. The UI offered a neat multi-window system, but mostly it was just a bunch of placeholder graphics. Nothing worked.
Android 8.0 Oreo is the 26th version of the world's most popular operating system. This year, Google's mobile-and-everything-else OS hit two billion monthly active users—and that's just counting phones and tablets. What can all those users expect from the new version? In an interview with Ars earlier this year, Android's VP of engineering Dave Burke said that the 8.0 release would be about "foundation and fundamentals." His team was guided by a single question: "What are we doing to Android to make sure Android is in a great place in the next 5 to 10 years?"
Google's recently released Android Nougat-powered Pixel smartphones offer a whole new level of data protection because of their built in encryption capabilities, the company said this week.
In a blog post Google senior software engineers Paul Crowley and Paul Lawrence said the new data security capabilities made Pixel and Pixel XL better, faster and stronger than the company's previous smartphone models.
A brand new operating system with a colorful name is currently under development at Google, according to a new project page found on GitHub.
Google hasn’t officially acknowledged that it’s working on the project, but the new operating system could possibly replace Chrome OS and Android by being able to run on pretty much everything.
Google dubbed its new operating system “Fuchsia.” Unlike Android and Chrome, it doesn’t use the Linux kernel at all. The GitHub page discovered by AndroidPolice simply teases “Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System).”
Until now, anyone using the Google cloud platform, Google Compute Engine, was forced to use encryption keys generated by Google. Clearly this spooked a lot of people, and there have long been calls for users to be granted greater control of security.
Now this is happening -- users are able to provide their own encryption keys. Customer-Supplied Encryption Key (CSEK) are used to provide a second layer of security, on top of the Google-generated keys that are used by default.
We're still not sure what Alphabet, Google, or the X division will call any new wearable headset unit to follow 2013's Google Glass, but we know something is in development—and now, at least one piece of unannounced hardware could be yours for the low, low price of $3,250 and counting (as of press time).
Google Chrome 48.0.2564.82, which is the same version that was pushed earlier today to the Beta channel, is now the newest stable version for the cross-platform and popular web browser using by Windows, Mac and Linux users worldwide on both their PCs and mobile devices.
"The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 48 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux," said Krishna Govind. "Chrome 48.0.2564.82 contains a number of fixes and improvements. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 48."
When you pay for security software, you probably hope it’s protecting you — not creating a massive security breach in and of itself. But if you ran Trend Micro’s password manager, enabled by default for all Trend Micro users, any site on the web could have executed any app on your computer just by including a bit of code.
A patch issued today mostly solves the problem. But as Ars Technica reports, that only happened because Google Project Zero team member Tavis Ormandy publicly berated the company.
