Sorted by date Results 1 - 20 of 20
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday ordered a temporary halt of Microsoft's work on a $10 billion military cloud contract, a win for Amazon, which sued the U.S. government last year for awarding the contract to its rival. Amazon's lawsuit, filed in November, alleged that President Donald Trump's bias against the company hurt its chances to win the project. Amazon and Microsoft were finalists for the lucrative contract, for which Amazon was considered an early front-runner. The project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense I...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Netflix is holding its ground in the streaming wars, passing its first big test since Apple and Disney launched rival services. The company added 8.8 million worldwide subscribers during its fourth quarter, surpassing expectations at a time when it faces heated competition. Netflix had said it expected to add 7.6 million subscribers, and analysts thought the service would fare even better. The increase pales slightly next to the 8.9 million subscribers the service added in the fourth quarter of 2018. The stock dropped a...
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Once a hidden and under-the-radar topic, privacy is getting more attention at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas this week. Startups now volunteer information about how they're securing your data and protecting your privacy when you use their heart rate monitor or cuddly robot. Roybi, an alien-looking robot that teaches kids languages and other skills, has a camera with facial recognition that can remember children and guess whether the kid was excited or sad after a lesson. Roybi says it uses that information to make changes t...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Matt Halprin, the global head of trust and safety for YouTube, has a tough job: He oversees the teams that decide what is allowed and what should be prohibited on YouTube. The Google-owned site has come under fire recently for allowing videos that feature what many find offensive or violent, and for not doing enough to protect kids online. Halprin has to make difficult decisions to craft policies that keep the site as safe as YouTube wants it to be, while balancing what the company considers one of its core tenets: p...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Forty million Californians will soon have sweeping digital-privacy rights stronger than any seen before in the U.S., posing a significant challenge to Big Tech and the data economy it helped create. So long as state residents don't mind shouldering much of the burden of exercising those rights, that is. Come Wednesday , roughly one in 10 Americans will gain the power to review their personal information collected by large companies around the world, from purchase histories and location tracking to compiled "profiles" that s...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Uber, as part of a long anticipated safety report, revealed that more than 3,000 sexual assaults were reported during its U.S. rides in 2018. That figure includes 235 rapes across the company's 1.3 billion rides last year. The ride-hailing company noted that drivers and riders were both attacked and that some assaults occurred between riders. The Thursday report, which the company hailed as the first of its kind, provides a rare look into the traffic deaths, murders and reported sexual assaults that took place during b...
HEALDSBURG, Calif. (AP) — If you're worried that wildfires might have created shortages of Northern California's 2019 cabernet sauvignon, or even just imparted it with an undesirable smoky flavor, you can relax. The wine is just fine. For now. Despite a late October blaze that raged through one of the world's best-known wine-growing regions. forcing evacuations in two mid-sized towns, wine production in Sonoma County escaped largely unscathed. Limerick Lane Wines, for instance, avoided serious damage despite flames that licked at two sides o...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google parent company Alphabet reported mixed third-quarter results Monday, beating analyst expectations for revenue but falling short on profits. The stock fell more than 2% in after-hours trading. Still, the company met growth expectations for its key moneymaking businesses — notably its advertising business, which reported revenues that increased 17% to $33.9 billion during the quarter. But Alphabet's capital expenditures grew at the same time, rising to $6.7 billion in the period as Google continued to expand its hea...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract , snubbing early front-runner Amazon, whose competitive bid drew criticism from President Donald Trump and its business rivals. Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another. The giant contract has attracted more attention than most, sparked by speculation early in the process that Amazon would be the sole winner of the deal. Tech g...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Google will pay $170 million to settle allegations its YouTube video service collected personal data on children without their parents' consent. The company agreed to work with video creators to label material aimed at kids and said it will limit data collection when users view such videos, regardless of their age. Some lawmakers and children's advocacy groups, however, complained that the settlement terms aren't strong enough to rein in a company whose parent, Alphabet, made a profit of $30.7 billion last year on revenue o...
NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook has paid contractors to transcribe audio clips from users of its Messenger service, raising privacy concerns for a company with a history of privacy lapses. The practice was, until recently, common in the tech industry. Companies say the use of humans helps improve their services. But users aren't typically aware that humans and not just computers are reviewing audio. Transcriptions done by humans raise bigger concerns because of the potential of rogue employees or contractors leaking details. The practice at Google eme...
Tristan Harris wants to reverse the harmful effects he believes technology has had on all of us. Harris, a former Google design ethicist, first rose to national awareness after a presentation he gave within Google in 2013 spread throughout the industry. In it, he argued that many tech products were designed to be addictive, causing people to spend too much time on them and distracting them from living their lives. He urged designers to alter their approach. Harris spent more than two years pushing change within Google, but says he couldn't get...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Is a peek into the future worth your privacy in the present? That concern was pushed to the spotlight this week with the resurgence of a smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence to transform your current face into your younger and older selves. People raised fears on Twitter and other social media sites that on iPhones, FaceApp would be able to see and upload all your photos, including screenshots with sensitive financial or health information or photos of kids with the names of their schools in the background. T...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook is getting a taste of the regulatory pushback it will face as it creates a new digital currency with corporate partners. Just hours after the social media giant unveiled early plans for the Libra cryptocurrency, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire insisted that only governments can issue sovereign currencies. He said Facebook must ensure that Libra won't hurt consumers or be used for illegal activities. "We will demand guarantees that such transactions cannot be diverted, for example for financing terrorism," h...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — YouTube updated its hate speech policies Wednesday to prohibit videos with white supremacy and neo-Nazi viewpoints. The video streaming company says it has already made it more difficult to find and promote such videos, but it's now removing them outright. YouTube will also prohibit videos that deny certain proven events have taken place, such as the Holocaust. The changes come as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online services face mounting concern that the services allow, and in some cases foster , extremism. Y...
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google announced new privacy tools Tuesday intended to give people more control over how they're being tracked on the go or in their own home, part of a broader effort by big tech companies to counter increasing scrutiny of their data collection practices. The company also announced updates for its artificially intelligent voice assistant as well as a cheaper Pixel phone and a rebranding of his smart-home products. CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the company's annual developer conference by noting that the company w...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — To President Donald Trump, it was an awkward slip of the lip. To Apple CEO Tim Cook, it was an opportunity to poke some sly fun at a president who has often clashed with the tech industry. A day after Trump mistakenly referred to Cook at a White House meeting as "Tim Apple" — an understandable slip, perhaps, coming from the owner of the Trump Organization — Cook quietly altered his Twitter profile , replacing his last name with the Apple logo. Cook didn't publicly acknowledge the change, but it didn't take long for Apple...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — YouTube said Thursday it will turn off comments on nearly all videos featuring kids — potentially affecting millions of posts on the site — after reports last week that pedophiles were leaving inappropriate comments on innocuous videos of children. The change comes as YouTube grapples with moderating content across its platform as concerns about hate speech, violence and conspiracy theories continue to plague it. It will take YouTube several months to disable comments on all videos featuring minors, the company said. It al...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Several companies, including AT&T and Nestle, are pulling advertisements from YouTube over concerns about inappropriate comments on videos of children. A video from a popular YouTuber and a report from Wired showed that pedophiles have made unseemly comments on innocuous videos of kids. The comments reportedly included timestamps that showed where kids innocently bared body parts. YouTube says it disabled comments on tens of millions of videos and deleted offending accounts and channels. Nestle and Fortnite maker Epic G...
Google said Wednesday it forgot to mention that it included a microphone in its Nest Secure home alarm system, the latest privacy flub by one of the tech industry's leading collectors of personal information. The company said earlier this month that its voice assistant feature would be available on the system's Nest Guard, which controls home alarm sensors. But Google hadn't told consumers about the device's built-in microphone when it began selling the hubs in the fall of 2017. As recently as January , the product specs for the device made no...
