Tag: google

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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President Trump Accuses Google of Illegally Manipulating Search Results to Favor Kamala Harris, Vows to Prosecute for Election Interference When Re-Elected!

President Donald Trump has launched a new salvo in his war against Big Tech, specifically targeting Google for its blatant election interference.

Trump says Google has manipulated its search algorithms to boost Kamala Harris in the presidential race while simultaneously burying information about him.

The former president vowed to bring Google to justice for this illegal activity if he is re-elected.

The latest accusations stem from a disturbing pattern noticed by users across platforms last month—searches related to Trump’s campaign and the July 13 assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, failed to generate relevant autocomplete suggestions.

Instead, Google’s search engine prioritized results for historical incidents like the attacks on Presidents Truman and Reagan, along with completely unrelated events like the shooting of musician Bob Marley.

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Big Tech-Government Collusion: Biden-Haris Admin, Meta, Google, and Others Launch AI Partnership to Combat “Disinformation” and “Hate Speech”

The current US White House seems to be exploring every possibility that might secure another avenue for what opponents (and quite a few lawmakers) refer to as “collusion” with (Big) Tech.

A new scheme has just been announced, that revolves around the “AI” and “disinformation” buzzwords, and includes the US State Department, Meta, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI.

Looks like quite an “ensemble cast” – or “usual suspects” – right there.

It’s called, Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI, and it was announced by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken along with a decision to bankroll programs “identifying disinformation using AI” with $3 million.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

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Court Rule Rules Google Was Illegally Maintaining Monopoly on Internet Searches

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia recently ruled that Google’s business practices illegally hampered competition, thereby violating federal anti-trust laws. 

The court determined in its ruling that Google kept an illegal monopoly over two domains of internet activity in the United States —general search services and general text advertising. Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act via exclusive distribution agreements.

Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act was signed by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890. It prohibits ventures and ploys to monopolize. 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton praised the court’s ruling by proclaiming, “A federal court ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly by exploiting its dominance to squash competition and hamper innovation.” 

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