Google

Marissa Mayer, one of the most well-known and longest-tenured employees of Google, resigned from Google today. She will take over as CEO of Yahoo tomorrow, the New York Times and other outlets are reporting.

Security researchers have discovered malware disguised as games hosted on the Google Play marketplace.

Android.Dropdialer, a Trojan that sends costly text messages to premium-rate phone numbers in Eastern Europe, had gone undiscovered for weeks in the form of two game titles, Symantec researcher Irfan Asrar wrote in a blog post yesterday. The two games -- "Super Mario Bros." and "GTA 3 - Moscow city" -- were uploaded to Google Play on June 24 and generated 50,000 to 100,000 downloads, Asrar said.

It seems the Federal Trade Commission has finally located its cojones, at least when it comes to Google. According to the Wall Street Journal, the federales have decided to fine Google $22.5 million for ignoring the Do Not Track privacy settings of Safari browsers and leaving DoubleClick tracking cookies behind on their hard drives.

As proven by the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacks, the Flash Player plugin that ships with Google Chrome is a major weak spot that has been targeted by attackers.

Not anymore.

Google has quietly tweaked the browser to put Flash in the browser's more restrictive sandbox on all versions of Windows, making it significantly harder to exploit a Flash Player vulnerability to get full system access. The fully sandboxed Flash was included in the Chrome 21 beta release, according to Google's Justin Schuh.

After carefully working with China for the past two years, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt bluntly predicted the fall of the Great Firewall of China.

"I believe that ultimately censorship fails," Schmidt said in an interview last week with Foreign Policy magazine. "China's the only government that's engaged in active, dynamic censorship. They're not shy about it."

Security researchers have found more malware hosted in Google's official Android market, a discovery that once again demonstrates the limitations of a recently deployed scanning service designed to flag malicious apps before they can be downloaded by end users.

When Google co-founder Sergey Brin demoed Google Glass, the search giant's attempt to build a next-generation wearable computer, with skydivers live streaming their descent, it became very clear that Glass wasn't some side project -- it was Google's future.

Glass won't be available to consumers until 2014, but a select group of developers will have the chance to purchase the "Explorer" edition of Glass in early 2013.

Apple and Google removed an app from their app stores after it was revealed to be harvesting users' phone contacts as spam targets.

The Find and Call app was originally thought to be an SMS worm but later discovered to be a Trojan, according to Kaspersky Lab. The Russian software security firm said it alerted by Apple and Google to the presence of the malware in their stores, apparently leading to the app's removal.

Whenever there's a new version of Android, Steve Kondik and the CyanogenMod team tend to swing into action almost immediately with plans for a major revision of the fan-favorite platform overhaul. For Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, that swing will be faster than ever.

The crew's early looks suggest that there will only be a few minor tweaks needed to merge Google's latest with the custom Android code, making CyanogenMod 10 a relative snap to produce.

In April, Google started selling unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones from its own store, for $399 a pop. Six days ago, the price dropped to $349. Now, however, the phone is listed as "coming soon" on Google's website. We're not sure whether Google is simply updating the boxed handsets to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, obeying a preliminary injunction in federal court to stop sales, or applying a software patch to avoid said ban. Or, maybe the company just ran out of handsets due to early Android 4.1 adopters and those hoping to get a Galaxy Nexus assuming they'll be banned?