Google

It's hard not to view Google as an 800-pound gorilla, beating competitors at every turn thanks to its vast mountains of cash and engineering talent. But there's one field where the Mountain View-based search giant has frequently stumbled: repeated attempts to build a foothold in the biomedical realm have either failed or not borne fruit yet. Now it's trying again.

Google has been building its own software-defined data-center networks for 10 years because traditional gear can’t handle the scale of what are essentially warehouse-sized computers.

The company hasn’t said much before about that homegrown infrastructure, but one of its networking chiefs provided some details on Wednesday at Open Network Summit and in a blog post.

By now you've no doubt heard about Google Cardboard and its ability to turn your phone into a 3D projector you strap to your face. The best part about Cardboard right now is the volume of apps to check out, but as is often the case that causes a new problem. With so many options for apps on the Play Store, it's easy to get overwhelmed. There's more than a dozen roller coaster apps, some games that require full controllers to play, and others that don't quite work as advertised.

While tech pundits have long insisted that Apple and Google are growing more alike as rivals in smartphone and tablet computing, this week's WWDC should provide clear evidence that Apple is on a completely different track compared to the Android train operated by its formerly close iPhone services partner.

Google’s Project Zero vulnerability research group has drawn some flak recently for its practice of publicly disclosing security flaws in software from other vendors after a 90-day notice period, regardless of whether patches are available or not.

Friday, the company may have gotten a small taste of its own medicine when Polish firm Security Explorations Friday released details on several unpatched vulnerabilities in Google’s cloud software after the Internet giant allegedly failed to respond in a timely manner to the issue.

Less than 24 hours after Google unveiled a Chrome extension that warns when user account passwords get phished, a security researcher has devised a drop-dead simple exploit that bypasses it.

Microsoft launched today a shiny new code editor for Windows, OS X, and Linux: Visual Studio Code. It's a smart looking text editor with IntelliSense support, git integration, and a few other bits and pieces that developers will enjoy.

What Microsoft didn't say when announcing the new editor was how it built Visual Studio Code. In a move that might seem a little surprising, given the regular animosity between the two companies, the editor is built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser.

YouTube, the Web's de-facto video service, is turning 10 this year. The site has become so indispensable that it feels like a basic part of the Internet itself rather than a service that lives on top of it. YouTube is just the place to put videos, and it's used by everyone from individuals to billion-dollar companies. It's obvious to say, but YouTube revolutionized Web video. It made video uploading and playback almost as easy as uploading a picture, handled all the bandwidth costs, and it allowed anyone to embed those videos onto other sites.

The European Commission has officially accused Google of unfair and monopolistic search practices and concerns regarding the way the giant company affects competition. The authorities have also launched an investigation into Google’s mobile service through Android apps and services.