An anonymous reader writes: Google has announced a plethora of new features to Firebase, its cloud services provider that mobile developers can use to power their apps. TechCrunch reports: "In its previous incarnation, Firebase was somewhat similar to Facebook's now-defunct Parse in that it offered a database service, user authentication features and hosting tools. In this new version, Firebase takes many of Google's existing developer tools, like Google Cloud Messaging, and combines them with new and existing Firebase services. With this update, Google is turning Firebase into a unified app platform for its now 470,000 developers on the service (up from 110,000 when it acquired Firebase)." The new Firebase features deeply integrated analytics services, allowing developers to track specific parts of their apps with fine-grained events. Firebase can build audience segments and allow developers to analyze their behavior in even more detail than before, and view how their advertising campaigns are performing. With these audience segments, developers can make remote configuration changes in apps and take advantage of Firebase's new notifications system. This feature is based on Google Cloud Messaging, which is now changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging. Google is offering all Firebase users free and unlimited notifications with support for iOS, Android and the Web. They're also integrating its Cloud Test Lab into Firebase for testing mobile apps on real hardware, renaming it the Firebase Test Lab. Other new features include crash reporting, the ability to create dynamic deep links into your app, Firebase Invites for allowing app users to share referral codes, Firebase App Indexing for bringing app content into Google Search, and integration with Google's AdWords and AdMob advertising platforms. Last but not least, Google is introducing new pricing plans for Firebase, including a new free plan, a fixed-rate plan, and a pay-as-you go plan.

An anonymous reader writes: Google launched a new keyboard application called "Gboard" for iOS today that features Google Search built-in to the keyboard itself. In addition, it offers swipe-based typing and access to GIFs, as well as some basic features like emojis and word predictions. The "G" icon in the upper lefthand corner opens a window for you to search Google without leaving the keyboard and launching a browser or the Google app. From there you can search for things like flight times, news articles, restaurant and business listings, weather and more, and paste that information into your chat with a single tap. The information is presented in a card-style layout. "We wanted to bring the best of Google to Gboard, so you'll see Maps, Translate, image and video search, News and others," says Rajan Patel, head of the product team that developed Gboard. "Initially, Gboard will not surface any information specific to you," he added, hinting that a personalized keyboard is in the works for the future.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Test Pilot, a program for trying out experimental Firefox features. To try the new functionality Mozilla is offering for its browser, you have to download a Firefox add-on from testpilot.firefox.com and enable an experiment. The main caveat is that experiments are currently only available in English (though Mozilla promises to add more languages "later this year"). Test Pilot was first introduced for Firefox 3.5, but the new program has been revamped since then, featuring three main components: Activity Stream, Tab Center and Universal Search. Activity Stream is designed to help you navigate your browsing history faster, surfacing your top sites along with highlights from your browsing history and bookmarks. Tab Center displays open tabs vertically along the side of your screen. Mozilla says Universal Search "combines the Awesome Bar history with the Firefox Search drop down menu to give you the best recommendations so you can spend less time sifting through search results and more time enjoying the web."

In late April, it was reported there would be a huge new 'Panama Papers' data dump on May 9th. The report did not disappoint as today the Panama Papers affair has widened, with a huge database of documents relating to more than 200,000 offshore accounts posted online. The database can be accessed at offshoreleaks.icij.org. The papers were leaked by a source known as "Jony Doe," and the papers belonged to the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) decided to make the database public despite a "cease and desist" order issued by the law firm.

Google may have plans to do a visual tweak to its search results. The company appears to be testing black search result links since the weekend, according to multiple reports. While some users are pleased with this tweak, many users have already posted their grievances on Google help forums. Some users note that it has become hard to tell which links they have already clicked. The Telegraph reports: Google puts a lot of thought into the exact colours it uses in its services -- and for a good reason. A few years ago its A/B test of different shades of blue -- nicknamed "50 shades of blue" -- earned the company an extra $200 million (£138 million). Designers at Google couldn't decide between two different blues, so they decided to test 41 shades between each blue to see which users preferred. In the test, Google showed each shade to one per cent of its users, and found that users were more likely to click on a slightly more purple shade.

An anonymous reader writes: Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo announced it will be giving away a total of $225,000 to support nine open source projects, each project will receive $25,000. DuckDuckGo said it performed 3 billion searches in 2015. It differs from many other search engines as it offers private, anonymous internet search. It doesn't gather information about you to sell ads to marketeers, like Google. Instead, it shows generic ads as it's part of the Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo ad network. It also has revenue-sharing agreements with certain companies in the Linux Open Source worlds, and makes money from select affiliate links. The $225,000 DuckDuckGo is giving away is chump change compared to the $100 million Google gives away in grants ever year. However, for the select projects, it should still be very beneficial. Last year, DuckDuckGo gave away a total of $125,000 to open source projects, so it's nice to see them donate an extra $100,000 to a good cause.

Josiah Zayner writes: Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge followed Dr. Josiah Zayner, a former Scientist at NASA turned BioHacker, as he attempted the first ever full-body microbiome transplant. She writes "Over the course of the next four days, Zayner would attempt to eradicate the trillions of microbes that lived on and inside his body -- organisms that helped him digest food, produce vitamins and enzymes, and protected his body from other, more dangerous bacteria. Ruthlessly and methodically, he would try to render himself into a biological blank slate. Then, he would inoculate himself with a friend's microbes -- a procedure he refers to as a 'microbiome transplant.'".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Microsoft has announced a big change for how the Cortana search box in Windows 10 will work going forward: all searches will be powered by Bing and all links will open with the Edge browser. This is a server-side change going into effect today. Once it takes effect on your Windows 10 computer, Cortana will no longer be able to serve up results from third-party search providers, like Google or Yahoo, nor take you to a third-party browser, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's general manager of search and Cortana, said in a Windows blog post announcing the change, "Unfortunately, as Windows 10 has grown in adoption and usage, we have seen some software programs circumvent the design of Windows 10 and redirect you to search providers that were not designed to work with Cortana. The result is a compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable. The continuity of these types of task completion scenarios is disrupted if Cortana can't depend on Bing as the search provider and Microsoft Edge as the browser. The only way we can confidently deliver this personalized, end-to-end search experience is through the integration of Cortana, Microsoft Edge and Bing -- all designed to do more for you."

An anonymous reader writes: Google announced users will soon see live TV listings within their search results. Fortune writes, "Pretty soon, you will be able to Google the name of a television show or movie and see live air times for that content within the search results." The announcement was made at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. "What we're seeing is that more and more, viewers are turning to their phones to find out what to watch, where to watch it and when it's available -- in fact, searches for TV shows and films on mobile have grown more than 55% in the past year alone," Google said in a blog post announcing the new feature. Google Search users will have the option of clicking an "edit provider" link that will allow them to enter their specific cable provider when they search for the name of a TV show or movie. There's no specific date for when the feature will be launching, just that it will be launching "soon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The University of California, Davis spent at least $175,000 to improve its reputation on the internet after images of campus police pepper-spraying protestors went viral in 2011, according to documents obtained by The Sacramento Bee. The money went to public relations firms that promised to clean up the university's search results. One company outlined a plan for "eradication of references to the pepper spray incident," according to the documents, and was eventually paid nearly $93,000, including expenses, for a six-month campaign in 2013. After that, the Bee reports, the university paid $82,500 to another PR firm to create and follow through on a "search engine results management strategy." The latter firm was later given thousands more in other contracts to build a university social media program, and to vet its communications department.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced updates to its portfolio of machine learning tools at its Build conference in San Francisco. Previously, they had fallen under the Project Oxford name, but now they are being rebranded to Microsoft Cognitive Services. According to Microsoft senior program manager Cornelia Carapcea, there are now 22 APIs available in Cognitive Services. There are also prices for the new services, along with APIs made available from Microsoft's Bing search division. Developers can try out these services for free.

angry tapir quotes a report from Computerworld: Oracle is seeking as much as $9.3 billion in damages in a long-running copyright lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android, court filings show. Oracle sued Google six years ago, claiming the search giant needs a license to use parts of the Java platform in Google's market-leading mobile OS. The two companies first went to trial in 2012, but the jury was split on whether or not Google's use of Java was protected by "fair use." Now they're headed back to the courtroom for a new trial scheduled to begin May 9, where Oracle's Larry Ellison and Google's Eric Schmidt will be present. Currently, the sum Oracle is asking for is about 10 times as much as when the two companies went to trial in 2012.

An anonymous reader links to a Business Insider report: Uber has found a new way to lure engineers to work for the fast-growing startup. The taxi-aggregator service tests coding skills of select riders during their ride. Uber insists that it is not using individual information to identify recruits, but are just identifying geographies where tech jobs are concentrated to find candidates. "The option to play gives interested riders the opportunity to show us their skills in a fun and different way -- whether they code on the side or are pursuing a career as a developer," a Uber spokesperson said. If they accept the test, Uber challenges the ride with three coding problems to solve, each with a 60-second countdown, and scores them based on their answers. Uber is not the only Silicon Valley giant which has found a "creative" way to hire people. Last year, we saw Google offer at least one person a job based on his search queries.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP moved on Thursday to overthrow the entire board of Yahoo Inc, including Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has struggled to turn around the company in her nearly four years at the helm. Starboard, which has been pushing for changes at Yahoo since 2014 and owns about 1.7 percent of the company, said it would nominate nine candidates for the board. The proxy fight comes as Yahoo is pressing ahead with an auction of its core Internet business, which includes search, mail and news sites. Yahoo and Starboard could still come to an agreement before the company's annual meeting, expected to be in late June. If they cannot avoid a proxy fight and the Yahoo board election is taken to a shareholder vote, attention will swing to the large mutual and index funds that own the stock and will carry heavy weight in the final tally. Yahoo and Starboard representatives met on March 10 to discuss ways the two sides could avoid a proxy fight, according to people familiar with the matter. But those talks broke down, in part because Starboard was upset by Yahoo's announcement that same day that it appointed two new board directors, these people say.

An anonymous reader writes from a DailyDot's Kernel Mag article: Welcome to the Internet of Things, what Schneier calls "the World Size Web," already growing around you as we speak, which creates such a complete picture of our lives that Dr. Richard Tynan of Privacy International calls them "doppelgangers" -- mirror images of ourselves built on constantly updated data. These doppelgangers live in the cloud, where they can easily be interrogated by intelligence agencies. Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at University of California, Berkeley, points out that "Under the FISA Amendments Act 702 (aka PRISM), the NSA can directly ask Google for any data collected on a valid foreign intelligence target through Google's Nest service, including a Nest Cam." And that's just one, legal way of questioning your digital doppelgangers; we've all heard enough stories about hacked cloud storage to be wary of trusting our entire lives to it. [...] But with the IoT, the potential goes beyond simple espionage, into outright sabotage. Imagine an enemy that can remotely disable the brakes in your car, or (even more subtly) give you food poisoning by hacking your fridge. That's a new kind of power. "The surveillance, the interference, the manipulation the full life cycle is the ultimate nightmare," says Tynan. [...] That makes the IoT vulnerable -- our society vulnerable -- to any criminal with a weekend to spend learning how to hack. "When we talk about vulnerabilities in computers... people are using a lot of rhetoric in the abstract," says Privacy International's Tynan. "What we really mean is, vulnerable to somebody. That somebody you're vulnerable to is the real question." The state of security around IoT, the chip or sensor-equipped devices connected to each other over the Internet, is deeply concerning. Just in the past few months, we have seen several instances of these devices getting hacked. We have also seen things such as Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things that can allow someone to browse vulnerable webcams. Many people continue to overlook the significance and potential consequences of their "smart" devices getting compromised. Someone recently asked, "So what if my coffee maker gets hacked? What are criminals going to do? Burn my coffee?" They can do a lot more than burn your coffee. You see these devices are connected to your Wi-Fi network, which gives them the ability to interact with other gadgets connected to the same network. When attackers manage to access one of these devices, it's only a matter of time before they own your entire network.

An anonymous reader writes: Alibaba has announced its plans to train a million teenagers and graduates living in rural areas of China to kick-start their own businesses. The Chinese e-commerce giant reached an agreement today with the China Communist Youth League to support the teenagers with funding, training and partnerships. The company's internet financing branch Ant Financial will set aside 1 billion yuan to invest in the training of recent college graduates who want to return to their home-towns and launch businesses.

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in China and America will soon launch a platform called Hoaxy, designed to identify and analyze what happens when misinformed news goes viral, and the processes which lead to a correction of the misinformation. The study, which compared 71 likely and prominent sources of inaccurate internet news over a period of three months to the same news stories on fact-checking sites, concludes that the average interval between viral diffusion of inaccurate news and the discovery of facts which disprove it stands at about 13 hours. Hoaxy uses a custom crawler written in Python and diffused via the Scrapy web crawling framework.

campuscodi writes: Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing PageRank scores from the Google toolbar, which was the last place where someone could check their site's PageRank status. Many SEO experts are extremely happy at this point, since it seems that PageRank is responsible for all the SEO spam we see today.

An anonymous reader writes: MIT has launched a new scheme whereby participating users can voluntarily share data on their website viewing habits, via the use of a Google Chrome extension and by signing up to an MIT website. The scheme, called Eyebrowse, began development in 2010 and has been in closed beta for the last 18 months. Cornell information science professor Mor Naaman says of the project: "Data has traditionally been used by anyone from corporations to the government...but the goal of this system is to make the data more useful for the individuals themselves, to give them more control, and to make it more useful to communities."

An anonymous reader writes: Google Inc. is testing a new feature to allow local businesses, celebrities, and organizations to post self-promoting information and ads on the company's search results. The information would be displayed on a design similar to Google's "mobile cards." This new type of self-promoting campaigns impulsed by Google appears to be an extension of "Google Podium," a beta that started last month with the collaboration of the U.S. presidential candidates. "This is an experimental search feature we are testing, but it is not tied to Google+. We are currently experimenting with presidential candidates and just started with some SMBs for a select pilot period," said a Google representative, as quoted by Modern Readers on Sunday.