Google Archive

About Chromebooks reports: This isn’t turning out to be a good week if you’re a Chromebook hardware fan. Previously planned Chromebooks with Nvidia GPUs are no longer in the works. This follows Monday’s news that Qualcomm Gen 3 Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks were canceled. Indeed, a reader comment from the Snapdragon post pointed out the Google code that explains, in no uncertain terms, that several ChromeOS baseboards have been canceled. I did a little more research and all three of those boards share one common feature. They all were designed to support Nvidia GPUs. This is such a great example of why I titled my review of Chrome OS Flex “a good start with zero follow-through”. Google puts all this effort and marketing into bringing Steam to Chrome OS officially, and even lets several OEMs manufacture and sell gaming-focused Chromebooks… Only to then let it fizzle out and not follow through with better, more gaming-suited hardware. You can almost taste the internal struggle between people wanting to turn Chrome OS into something bigger than what it is now, and the people who just want to shovel cheap plastic crap to schools. Whether you like Chrome OS or not, that just sucks. I want all platforms to get meaningfully better, but Google just doesn’t seem to care at all about Chrome OS.

For the past several years, more than 90% of Chrome users’ navigations have been to HTTPS sites, across all major platforms. Thankfully, that means that most traffic is encrypted and authenticated, and thus safe from network attackers. However, a stubborn 5-10% of traffic has remained on HTTP, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or change that data. Chrome shows a warning in the address bar when a connection to a site is not secure, but we believe this is insufficient: not only do many people not notice that warning, but by the time someone notices the warning, the damage may already have been done. We believe that the web should be secure by default. HTTPS-First Mode lets Chrome deliver on exactly that promise, by getting explicit permission from you before connecting to a site insecurely. Our goal is to eventually enable this mode for everyone by default. While the web isn’t quite ready to universally enable HTTPS-First Mode today, we’re announcing several important stepping stones towards that goal. It’s definitely going to be tough to get those last few percentages converted to HTTPS, and due to Chrome’s monopolistic influence on the web, any steps it takes will be felt by everyone.

I doubt there’s an operating system out there that we have more preconceived notions about than Chrome OS, and most of those notions will be quite negative. Since I had little to no experience with Chrome OS, I decided it was time to address that shortcoming, and install Chrome OS Flex on my Dell XPS 13 9370 (Core i7-8550U, 16GB of RAM, 4K display), and see if there’s any merit in running Google’s desktop operating system. Installing Chrome OS Flex is a breeze. While Google warns you to stick to explicitly supported hardware, my XPS 13 9370, although not listed as officially supported, had no issues installing the operating system. The only things not working are the same things that don’t work in other Linux distributions either – the Goodix fingerprint reader (screw Dell for choosing Goodix), and the Windows Hello-focused depth camera. The latter can be made to work in Linux, but clearly Google did not go through the trouble of making it work out of the box. Everything else just worked, as you would expect from any other Linux distribution. Using an operating system primarily designed around websites as applications is a bit weird at first, but I was surprised how quickly I got used to it. Now, it is important to note that I do not do many complicated or demanding tasks on my laptop – I write OSNews articles, watch YouTube, browse around the web, and perform similar light tasks – so I’m not exactly pushing the limits of what a website-focused operating system can do. In fact, to my utter surprise, I found myself enjoying using Chrome OS quite a bit. Running websites as applications – both PWAs and plain websites opened in their own chromeless windows – has come a long way, and in many cases I barely realised I wasn’t running “native” applications. I discovered that turning websites I use often, like the OSNews WordPress backend, Wikipedia, Google Maps, and so on, into standalone applications with entries in the applications menu and dock was actually quite pleasant. Chrome OS allows you to choose if an application should run in a browser tab, or in a separate window without any browser chrome, and you can choose to open links to those websites in either a new regular tab, or in the aforementioned separate window. It all works surprisingly well – much better than I expected. Chrome OS also has quite a few features you wouldn’t expect from something mostly aimed at budget computers. It has support for various trackpad gestures, and they are very smooth and nice to use. For instance, you can swipe up with three fingers to gain an Exposé-like overview of all your running applications, which also gives you access to the virtual desktops feature. Chrome OS also comes with a few true native applications, like a surprisingly capable file manager and text editor. Other modern staples like a night light feature to reduce late-night eye strain, system-wide search, system-wide spellcheck, and others are also present. You can go deeper, too. Chrome OS comes with a complete Linux environment to run standard Linux applications. Once turned on, you gain access to a standard terminal you can use to access it, and the Linux environment’s storage becomes available in the file manager. I used it to install the regular Linux version of Steam, as well as the Flatpak of the Steam Link remote play application. Both worked just fine, although the Steam application ran extremely slow, and the Steam Link application did not seem to have access to the network, so it couldn’t find my Steam PCs. I’m chalking that one up to odd interactions between Flatpak and Chrome OS’ Linux environment. You can also link your Android device to your Chrome OS machine, giving you access to your notifications, Chrome tabs, and various toggles on your phone, such as the hotspot toggle. Sadly, this feature seems quite limited – if I get a Discord or WhatsApp notification and click it, nothing happens – even though I have both Discord and WhatsApp installed and running on Chrome OS, the operating system doesn’t seem to be able to link the phone’s notifications to the relevant installed applications, rendering the feature kind of pointless. No follow-through Chrome OS being a Google product, I was not entirely surprised to see a serious lack of follow-through in the operating system. Take the user interface’s dark mode, for instance – it’s half-baked and grossly incomplete. Various applications running in dark mode will inexplicably have a bright white titlebar, including GMail, the quintessential and flagship Google web app. I have to use an unlisted extension to fix this, but said extension is Manifest version 2, which Chrome OS warns you is deprecated and will stop working “in 2023”. It gets worse, though. Many of the most prominent Google applications do not support dark mode at all. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are all only available in bright white. Google Photos, an application that would undoubtedly benefit from a dark mode, does not support it. Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Translate, and countless others are all only available in eye-searing white. Then there’s the more esoteric issues that stem from the fact you’re effectively running web sites in browser windows. If you’re familiar with Google’s various web applications, you’ll know they have this grid icon in the top-right which opens a grid menu with the various other Google web applications. While such a menu might make sense while using a web browser on other operating systems, it’s entirely confusing on Chrome OS, and breaks the operating system’s UI in interesting ways. Aside from this menu taking up valuable real estate, it also doesn’t work in the way you expect it to, since it does not respect the window-or-tab setting from Chrome OS itself. Say I have Google Docs set to to open in a chromeless window, and I launch it from the grid menu inside Google Drive, Docs will

Today, we’re announcing some important new features in Google Search to help you stay in control of your personal information, privacy and online safety. There’s improved tools to remove results about yourself, such as those containing phone numbers and such, as well as easier ways to remove explicit content about yourself, such as photos. Of course, tools such as these merely remove the results from Google Search – they don’t actually remove them from the web.

Supporting the open web requires saying no to WEI, and having Google say no as well. It’s not a good policy. It’s not a good idea. It’s a terrible idea that takes Google that much further down the enshittification curve. Even if you can think of good reasons to try to set up such a system, there is way too much danger that comes along with it, undermining the very principles of the open web. It’s no surprise, of course, that Google would do this, but that doesn’t mean the internet-loving public should let them get away with it. Fin.

About Chromebooks reports: After covering Google’s effort to separate the Chrome browser from ChromeOS for over two years, it appears more of you will get to experience it. The project is called Lacros, and it uses the Linux browser for ChromeOS instead of the integrated browser. The idea is that browser updates can be pushed quicker to Chromebooks instead of waiting for a full ChromeOS update. Based on recent code changes I spotted, ChromeOS 116 may bring the Lacros browser to more Chromebooks with a wider release. This seems like a no-brainer move, and may help improve the version of Chrome running on Linux.

Google’s plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an “environment attestation” test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a “third-party” attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed “IntegrityToken” that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted. The web mercilessly mocked this idiotic proposal over the weekend, and rightfully so. This is an unadulterated, transparent attempt at locking down the web with DRM-like nonsense just to serve more targeted ads that you can’t block. This must not make its way into any browser or onto any server in any way, shape, or form. The less attention we give to this drivel, the better.

The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that’s hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on actual people who review the answers, provide feedback on mistakes and weed out any inklings of bias. It’s an increasingly thankless job. Six current Google contract workers said that as the company entered a AI arms race with rival OpenAI over the past year, the size of their workload and complexity of their tasks increased. Without specific expertise, they were trusted to assess answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws. Documents shared with Bloomberg show convoluted instructions that workers must apply to tasks with deadlines for auditing answers that can be as short as three minutes. That’s the reality of “artificial intelligence” – the same reality it always seems to be in Silicon Valley: thousands and thousands of exploited workers behind the scenes running around like ants keeping the illusion of futurism alive for meager pay.

Eight years after Google Domains launched, and a little more than a year after it graduated out of beta, Google is “winding down following a transition period,” as part of “efforts to sharpen our focus.” That’s corporate-ese for “We need to keep cost-cutting, so we’re selling this business we just finished shaping up to Squarespace.” I have two domains over at Google Domains. I doubt Squarespace’s UI is going to be as nice and easy to understand as Google’s is.

We’re bringing a new mid-tier compiler to Chrome. Maglev is a just-in-time compiler that can quickly generate performant machine code for all relevant functions within the first one-hundredth of a second. It reduces overall CPU time to compile code while also saving battery life. Our measurements show Maglev has provided a 7.5 percent improvement on Jetstream and a 5 percent improvement in Speedometer. Maglev will start rolling out in Chrome version 114, which begins release on June 5. Let’s hope making benchmarks run faster also makes actual websites load faster.

On a support page, Google details the full list of 180 countries in which Bard is now available. This includes countries all over the globe, but very noticeably not any countries that are a part of the European Union. It’s a big absence from what is otherwise a global expansion for Google’s AI. The reason why isn’t officially stated by Google, but it seems reasonable to believe that it’s related to GDPR. Just last month, Italy briefly banned ChatGPT over similar concerns that the AI couldn’t comply with the regulations. Google also slyly hints this might be the case saying that further Bard expansions will be made “consistent with local regulations.” In other words, Bard probably does things that run afoul of the stricter privacy regulations in the EU. Make of that what you will.

Have you ever found yourself in this position? You see an image on a website, in your feed, or in a message from a friend — and you think, “this doesn’t feel quite right.” Is the image being shown in the right context? Has it been manipulated or faked? Where did it come from? When you’re trying to figure out if a piece of information or an image is reliable, having the full story is key. That’s why we’re expanding our ongoing work in information literacy to include more visual literacy and help people quickly and easily assess the context and credibility of images. In the coming months, we’re launching a new tool called About this image. This is a great idea, and I hope it works as intended. While I doubt it’ll be perfect, it’ll make it much easier to quickly verify where an image came from, just how genuine or fake it is, if it’s been edited, and more. It’s not giving a simple “yay” or “nay”, but instead gives the user the data it can then use to make their own informed decision. This is the kind of stuff Google should be doing.

Google I/O, Google’s developer conference, started today, and there has been a deluge of news coming out of the advertising giant. I do not intend to cover every single bit of I/O news, instead choosing to focus one some of the more interesting bits and pieces. In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms. We’ll also show more details about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile photo or information about the popularity of their content. Basically, this is a “remove SEO garbage” button. Whenever I need to find some answer to a tech issue or see if other people are experiencing a bug, regular Google search is entirely useless, as the results are overflowing with useless SEO/AI garbage, so I do what a lot of us do: append “reddit” to our queries to get content from real people. With this new Perspectives filter, Google seems to finally acknowledge that their regular search results are useless, and that what users really want is genuine results written by normal humans. I really hope this works as advertised.

And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself.  The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale. AI-powered content farms focused on high-value search terms like heat-seeking missiles are already here; Google is only now catching up, and its response to them will change how it sends traffic around the web in momentous ways. That leads to the second problem, which is that chat-based search tools like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s own Bard represent something that feels like the future of search, without any of the corresponding business models or revenue that Google has built up over the past 25 years. If Google Search continues to degrade in quality, people will switch to better options — a switch that venture-backed startups and well-funded competitors like Microsoft are more than happy to subsidize in search of growth, but which directly impacts Google’s bottom line. At the same time, Google’s paying tens of billions annually to device makers like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on phones. Those deals are up for renewal, and there will be no pity for Google’s margins in these negotiations. Search on the web is in a terrible state right now. Searching for anything on Google is a horrible experience, with results riddled with ads and an endless stream of SEO’d garbage content of low to no quality. Alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo, aren’t much better, and tend to promote garbage anti-science and fascist nonsense if you’re not careful enough. At this point I just don’t know what to use to find stuff on the web, and tend to just go straight to sites that I think have the best odds of containing a relevant result (e.g. going straight to Reddit when dealing with some obscure bug or software issue). I know there are even smaller competitors, but I don’t hold high hopes they can offer the same breadth as Google once did, or even DuckDuckGo sometimes does now. It’s not looking pretty out there.