Tag: google

Google imports ex-Israeli spies who automated Gaza genocide

On Mar. 18, Google bought Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion. The acquisition will mark the single largest transfer of former Israeli spies into an American company. This is because Wiz is run and staffed by dozens of ex Unit 8200 members, the specialist cyber-spying arm of the IDF.

Unit 8200 wrote the programming and designed the algorithms that automated the genocide of Gaza and was also responsible for the pager attack in Lebanon. Now the men and women who helped design the architecture of apartheid are being swallowed by the US tech-surveillance complex.

The identity of the Wiz founders, all former Unit 8200, is fairly well-documented (by Israeli media at least). One of the founders, Ami Luttwak, boasts on his LinkedIn profile that he led a “mission critical R&D team” for Unit 8200 which won them the “Israel Defence Award 2012.” Less well-documented, however, is the fact that a huge chunk of the Wiz workforce, from office managers, to software engineers to product analysts, are also former Unit 8200. Following my investigation earlier this year into the former Unit 8200 members working in key AI positions for tech companies, I have identified nearly fifty Wiz employees as being ex Unit 8200 operatives.

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Welcome to Skynet: Google Unveils AI Models to Power Physical Robots

Google DeepMind has introduced two new AI models designed to bring artificial intelligence into the physical world by powering robots. Google is not the only company pursuing this goal at top speed — OpenAI and Tesla are also designing robots controlled entirely by AI as well.

CNBC reports that Google’s DeepMind has unveiled two new AI models, Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER (extended reasoning), which are set to revolutionize the way robots interact with the physical world. These models, running on Google’s Gemini 2.0, are designed to adapt to different situations, understand and respond quickly to instructions, and manipulate objects with dexterity. The company’s goal is to have autonomous robots taking orders from AI without human control.

Google has announced a partnership with Apptronik, a Texas-based robotics developer, to build the next generation of humanoid robots powered by Gemini 2.0. Apptronik, known for its work with Nvidia and NASA, recently received funding from Google in a $350 million round.

Demonstration videos released by Google showcase Apptronik robots equipped with the new AI models performing various tasks, such as plugging items into power strips, filling lunchboxes, moving plastic vegetables, and zipping up bags, all in response to spoken commands. While no timeline has been provided for the technology’s market release, the videos offer a glimpse into the potential applications of these AI-powered robots.

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Google to be hit with EU charges of breaching Big Tech rules, sources say

Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google is set to be charged with breaching EU rules aimed at checking the power of Big Tech after proposed changes to its search results failed to address the EU antitrust regulator’s concerns and those of its rivals, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The move by the European Commission comes amid tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump who has sided with U.S. tech giants lobbying against EU regulations and criticising fines as a form of tariff. That has in turn triggered concerns that the EU watchdog may ease up on Big Tech.

The European Commission has been investigating Google for potential breaches of the Digital Markets Act since March last year.

One probe focuses on whether Google favours its vertical search engines such as Google Shopping, Google Flights and Google Hotels over rivals, and whether it discriminates against third-party services on Google search results.

The imminent charges concerned this issue, the people said.

The EU competition watchdog declined to comment. Google referred to a December blog post by its director, EMEA competition, Oliver Bethell, who said the company is working to find a balanced solution with the Commission.

Bethell said more changes in Google’s search result format to appease rivals could result in the removal of certain helpful features.

The U.S. tech giant has in recent months announced a series of changes to search result formats in a bid to address conflicting demands from price-comparison sites, hotels, airlines and small retailers. The majority of them have dismissed the proposals as not DMA-compliant.

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US Tech companies, Including X and Google, Threaten To Leave Starmer’s Leftist Britain Over the Cost of Funding Online ‘Safety’ Censorship

As the ‘Trump Tornado’ is forcefully rearranging things all over Europe, there’s a justified expectation about the Donald J. Trump administration’s reaction to the ill-disguised push for censorship in the upcoming ‘Online Safety Act.’

As of now, Tech companies, including Elon Musk’s X and Google, have warned businesses could leave the PM Keir Starmer’s leftist experiment in Britain over the cost of funding the online safety crackdown.

Google said the fees charged to internet companies will drive services out of the UK, while X says it will ‘disincentivize’ global companies from entering the British market.

The Telegraph reported:

“Ofcom [British Office of Communications] has laid out plans to raise around £70m a year to cover the costs of enforcing the new laws, which take effect in the coming months. They will require tech companies to introduce age checks and limit exposure to harmful content. The bill would almost entirely be borne by the largest five providers – believed to be Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and TikTok – [that] would face charges equal to 0.02pc of global revenue.”

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Culture Shift: Google Calendar Removes Pride, Black History Month, Other DEI Dates

Google Calendar has erased so called ‘cultural’ dates including Pride, Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, and Hispanic Heritage, and will only display official public holidays and national observances going forward.

Over 500 million people who use Google Calendar will no longer see the DEI dates popping up with a spokesman for the company explaining that “maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable.”

In other words, there are too many made up woke ‘holiday’ dates to keep up with.

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Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website

Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week.

Asked for comment, the company pointed TechCrunch to a new blog post on “responsible AI.” It notes, in part, “we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

Google’s newly updated AI principles note the company will work to “mitigate unintended or harmful outcomes and avoid unfair bias,” as well as align the company with “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

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“Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews

If you search Google for a way to turn off the company’s AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can’t be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off “fucking Google AI results,” you’ll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

The existence of this “curse to disable Google AI” trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars’ own testing. For instance, when searching for “how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results,” a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like “dumb” or “lousy” did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

There’s long been evidence that Google’s Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

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Google says its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist

Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest, greatest quantum computing chip. The speed and reliability performance claims Google’s made about this chip were newsworthy in themselves, but what really caught the tech industry’s attention was an even wilder claim tucked into the blog post about the chip.

Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in his blog post that this chip was so mind-boggling fast that it must have borrowed computational power from other universes.

Ergo the chip’s performance indicates that parallel universes exist and “we live in a multiverse.”

Here’s the passage:

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

This drop-the-mic moment on the nature of reality was met with skepticism by some, but, surprisingly, others on the internet who profess to understand these things argued that Nevan’s conclusions were more than plausible. The multiverse, while stuff of science fiction, is also an area of serious study by the founders of quantum physics.

The skeptics, however, point out that the performance claims are based on the benchmark that Google itself created some years ago to measure quantum performance. That alone doesn’t prove that parallel versions of you aren’t running around in other universes — just where the underlying measuring stick came from.

Unlike classic digital computers that calculate based on whether a bit is a 0 or 1 (on or off), quantum computers rely on incredibly tiny qubits. These can be on/off or both (somewhere in between) and they can also tap into quantum entanglement — a mysterious connection at the tiniest levels of the universe between two or more particles where their states are linked, no matter the distance that separates them.

Quantum computers use such quantum mechanics to calculate highly complex problems that cannot currently be addressed with classic computers.

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Google claims it fixed discrepancy showing poll locations for Harris searches, but not Trump

Google claimed Tuesday that it had fixed an issue in which user search queries for “Where can I vote for Harris” generated an interactive map tool to find polling places, while queries of “Where can I vote for Trump” received no such benefit.The search giant said that the issue stemmed from its algorithm conflating Vice President Kamala Harris’ last name with Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located.

“The ‘where to vote’ panel is triggering for some specific searches [because] Harris is also the name of a county in [Texas],” the tech behemoth said in an X post. 

“Update: This is now fixed,” Google later added — and a test carried out by The Post confirmed that to be the case. 

Numerous users on social media complained about the search giant. Tech guru Elon Musk, for instance, asked his 203 million followers “are others seeing this too” and later cut a screen recording that he posted on X highlighting the problem.

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When Did Google Search Become Totally Useless?

When Google launched in the late 1990s, it quickly overtook the market for search engines. Its proprietary method of indexing led users to results they were actually looking for rather than producing the hodgepodge of results offered by other search engines of the time. Within just a few years, it was dominating the market. Today, it is a money-printing machine.

It’s also increasingly horrible at the core mission that produced such success. The company’s leadership may have realized early on that to dominate they needed to maximize the marketing angle of search, but over time that side of the business — the one that produces revenue — swallowed the informative results that drove the search engine’s success.

Now, Google’s true product, its users, are drowning in a sea of partisan slop and sponsored content rather than getting the results we’re looking for when we take to the World Wide Web. By doing so, Google is making it pointless for us to continue to allow ourselves to be the product.

Let’s say you have an artistic daughter who wants some oil paints for Christmas, but you’re unsure about which brand to buy or even what the definition of oil paint is. You head over to Google and type in “oil paint.” Is your first result a definition or even the Wikipedia page? Nope, it’s ads. You have to scroll to get to Wikipedia.

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