company:google

Alexa, why does the brave new world of AI have all the sexism of the old one ?
▻https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/22/alexa-why-does-the-brave-new-world-of-ai-have-all-the-sexism-of-the-old

Virtual assistants such as Google Home and Siri only encourage the attitude that women exist merely to aid men in getting on with more important things. When women are over-represented in the workforce, it tends be in industries of assistance – cleaning, nursing, secretarial work and, now, the world of virtual assistants. Research by Unesco has shown that using default female voices in AI – as Microsoft has done with Cortana, Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant and Apple with (...)

#Apple #Google #Microsoft #Amazon #robotique #Home #Assistant #Alexa #Cortana #domotique #Siri #biométrie #discrimination #voix (...)

##algorithme
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/44671b648a16095e4077973b446bf932f5c64484/1061_0_2443_1467/master/2443.jpg

Data Exploitation and Democratic Societies
▻https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/2850/data-exploitation-and-democratic-societies

Democratic society is under threat from a range of players exploiting our data in ways which are often hidden and unaccountable. These actors are manifold : traditional political parties (from the whole political spectrum), organisations or individuals pushing particular political agendas, foreign actors aiming at interfering with national democratic processes, and the industries that provide products that facilitate the actions of the others (from public facing ones, such as social media (...)

#Exxon_Mobil #Google #Mozilla #Facebook #WhatsApp #Instagram #Twitter #YouTube #algorithme #manipulation #électeurs #élections #BigData #publicité #profiling (...)

##publicité ##PrivacyInternational

Google uses Gmail to track a history of things you buy — and it’s hard to delete
▻https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase-history-how-to-delete-it.html

Google tracks a lot of what you buy, even if you purchased it elsewhere, like in a store or from Amazon. Last week, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a New York Times op-ed that said “privacy cannot be a luxury good.” But behind the scenes, Google is still collecting a lot of personal information from the services you use, such as Gmail, and some of it can’t be easily deleted. A page called “Purchases ” shows an accurate list of many — though not all — of the things I’ve bought dating back to at least (...)

#Google #Gmail #algorithme #marketing #profiling

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/105621779-1544565379218pichai.jpg

Google’s Translatotron can translate speech in the speaker’s voice
▻https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/15/google-translatotron-direct-speech-translation/?guccounter=1
▻https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims?thumbnail=1200%2C630&quality=80&image_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fo.aolcdn.com%

Speaking another language may be getting easier. Google is showing off Translatotron, a first-of-its-kind translation model that can directly convert speech from one language into another while maintaining a speaker’s voice and cadence. The tool forgoes the usual step of translating speech to text and back to speech, which can often lead to errors along the way. Instead, the end-to-end technique directly translates a speaker’s voice into another language. The company is hoping the development will open up future developments using the direct translation model.

According to Google, Translatotron uses a sequence-to-sequence network model that takes a voice input, processes it as a spectrogram — a visual representation of frequencies — and generates a new spectrogram in a target language. The result is a much faster translation with less likelihood of something getting lost along the way. The tool also works with an optional speaker encoder component, which works to maintain a speaker’s voice. The translated speech is still synthesized and sounds a bit robotic, but can effectively maintain some elements of a speaker’s voice. You can listen to samples of Translatotron’s attempts to maintain a speaker’s voice as it completes translations on Google Research’s GitHub page. Some are certainly better than others, but it’s a start.

Model architecture of Translatotron

Google has been fine-tuning its translations in recent months. Last year, the company introduced accents in Google Translate that can speak a variety of languages in region-based pronunciations and added more langauges to its real-time translation feature. Earlier this year, Google Assistant got an “interpreter mode” for smart displays and speakers that can between 26 languages.

#Intelligence_artificielle #Traduction_automatique #Google

Google’s Censored Search Would Help China “Be More Open,” Said Ex-CEO Eric Schmidt
▻https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/google-search-china-eric-schmidt-comments

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has defended the company’s plan to build a censored version of its search engine in China. In an interview with the BBC on Monday, Schmidt said that he wasn’t involved in decisions to build the censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly. But he insisted that there were “many benefits” to working with China and said he was an advocate of operating in the country because he believed that it could “help change China to be more open.” As The Intercept first (...)

#Google #GoogleSearch #algorithme #Dragonfly #censure #surveillance #web

https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2019/05/GettyImages-1143071712-schmidt-google-1557851183-e1557851260431.jpg

Google has given $150,000 in free ads to deceptive anti-abortion group
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/12/google-advertising-abortion-obria

Obria Group’s ads suggest it provides abortion services, when in fact it tries to persuade women not to terminate pregnancies Google has given tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising to an anti-abortion group that runs ads suggesting it provides abortion services at its medical clinics, but actually seeks to deter “abortion-minded women” from terminating their pregnancies. The Obria Group, which runs a network of clinics funded by Catholic organisations, received a $120,000 Google (...)

#publicité #santé #manipulation #Obria

##publicité ##santé
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6122fe3c7e1d61daf410a1d831d471591786fb00/0_0_3500_2101/master/3500.jpg

BDS = Beautiful, Diverse, Sensational: Israel fights Eurovision boycott campaign using Google ads
The new PR campaign attempts to counter BDS by putting up ads that use the same acronym but lead to a website exalting Israel
Reuters - May 10, 2019 5:46 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-fights-eurovision-boycott-campaign-using-google-ads-1.7220938

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.7220960.1557500059!/image/1628628735.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/1628628735.jpg

Israel has launched a PR campaign to counter calls for a boycott of the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest final in Tel Aviv, using Google ads which refer to the boycott but lead to a glossy website extolling Israel.

The international boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement dismissed the tactic as “crude propaganda”.

BDS has called on artists, music fans and broadcasters to avoid the 2019 contest, arguing that it amounts to “whitewashing” Israel’s policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel calls international boycotts discriminatory and anti-Semitic.

Internet advertisements on Google featuring the words “boycott” and “Eurovision” encourage searchers to click on a link that, in fact, leads them to a pro-Israel website which - in a play on the BDS initials - extols Israel as “Beautiful, Diverse, Sensational”.

#BDS

Google Docs Says Chromium-Based Microsoft Edge Is Not Supported
▻https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/google-docs-says-chromium-based-microsoft-edge-is-not-supported

https://www.bleepstatic.com/content/hl-images/2018/09/13/edge.jpg

Trop fun la gueguerre....

When users of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge use Google Docs, the service is stating that the browser is not supported. As the new Microsoft Edge uses the same HTML engine as Chrome and is clearly supported, some users feel that Google is playing unfairly.

Google Docs indicates that Edge is unsupported by displaying a notification at the top of the page that states “The version of the browser you are using is no longer support. Please upgrade to a supported browser.”. The message links to this Google support article.

This message is being shown because Google whitelists browsers based on their useragent strings, and for any that are not whitelisted, will display the above unsupported message.

A browser useragent is a unique string associated with a browser and used to identify it. When the browser connects to a website, the browser’s useragent string is also sent to the web site so that the site can offer customizations based on the browser.

For example, the useragent string for the new Microsoft Edge is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3763.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/75.0.131.0

Even though the new Microsoft Edge is compatible with Google docs because it shares the same HTML engine as Google Chrome, since its useragent is not whitelisted, Google Docs will state it is unsupported.

To prove this, I installed the User-Agent Switcher for Chrome extension in Microsoft Edge and configured the browser to use the useragent of Chrome 74, which is shown below.

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.108 Safari/537.36”

Once I switched the useragent and refreshed Google Docs, the unsupported message was no longer shown.

Google can fix, but Microsoft can fix it faster

As there should not be any reason for Google to not whitelist the new Edge’s useragent string, how fast Google fixes this issue on their side will indicate whether they plan on playing fairly.

The good news is that Microsoft has a function built into the new Microsoft Edge that allows it switch its useragent as needed based on the domain being visited.

As we reported earlier this month, this is being done so that sites who whitelist or offer different features based on a browser’s useragent string will work properly in the new Microsoft Edge.

If Google decides to take their time resolving this problem, Microsoft can bypass them altogether and create a new rule for the docs.google.com URL and use Chrome’s useragent string so that this “unsupported” message goes away.

#Google #Microsoft #Chrome #Concurrence

The only way to rein in big tech is to treat them as a public service
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/big-tech-google-facebook-unions-public-ownership

The drive for profit is behind many of the ills of Google, Facebook et al. Unions and public ownership are the only way to solve this After years of praising their virtues, governments across the world are belatedly waking up to the problems posed by big tech. From India and Australia to France and America – and now the UK, with its report from the Digital Competition Expert Panel – politicians have been reckoning with how to mitigate the harms of the world’s largest technology platforms. And (...)

#Google #Microsoft #Amazon #Facebook #algorithme #domination #bénéfices #concurrence #BigData (...)

##GAFAM
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/219b3c919d10378646c10ae07ed73f57decd9d9f/0_281_5616_3370/master/5616.jpg

Librem One Mobile Apps Can Help De-Google Your Life
▻https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/04/purism-privacy-android-ios-apps

https://aozoeky4dglp5sh0-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/privacy-phone-406x232.jpg

Purism announce a suite of privacy focused mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, including a encrypted VPN and chat client, and a private e-mail service. This post, Librem One Mobile Apps Can Help De-Google Your Life, was written by Joey Sneddon and first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Google CEO: Publishers “want to see our commitment” to Stadia
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-30-google-ceo-publishers-want-to-see-our-commitment-to-stadia

But Sundar Pichai says giving games execs hands on time with streaming service “completely wins people over”

#Publishing #Development

Google removes Do Global Games from Play Store
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-29-google-removes-do-global-games-from-play-store

Developer with over 100 apps and 600m installs banned following reports of concealing ownership info, ad fraud

#Mobile #Publishing

Google worker activists accuse company of retaliation at ’town hall’
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/26/google-worker-activists-accuse-company-of-retaliation-at-town-hall

The group published a new set of demands, which include an investigation and a public response from co-founder Larry Page Worker activists at Google held a “town hall” on Friday where they alleged that the company regularly retaliates against employees who speak out about workplace problems and announced plans for a “company-wide day of action” on 1 May. The meeting, livestreamed for Google employees in offices around the world, was announced after two of the organizers of the November 2018 (...)

#Google #travail #travailleurs #surveillance

▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6bb72c2f4b5bf1d7d18e0a227ce3268a3615a184/0_40_3947_2368/master/3947.jpg

Why Google Needed a Graph Serving System — very interesting article
▻https://blog.dgraph.io/post/why-google-needed-graph-serving-system #graph #database #distributed #article

6 Steps to Prepare Your Mobile Site for Voice Search in 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/6-steps-to-prepare-your-mobile-site-for-voice-search-in-2019-164fef42b72

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/900/1*bAzSqgDM70omiFJ5MhmU1A.jpeg

When Google first debuted voice search application for iPhone in 2008, the app was far from flawless. Over the years this app has become more precise and human-like. Statistics reveal that Google’s English identification precision rate is currently over ninety-five percent.People fancy an immediate answer when searching for something from the web. While typing a question in a search bar is fast, merely talking in your gadget and obtaining similar outcomes is even swifter. Typically, an individual can type around forty words per minute and talk approximately a hundred and fifty words per minute.To attempt a spoken search, you may trigger your smartphone’s assistant like Amazon Alexa, Google assistant or Siri. You’ll need to press on the mic icon on Google’s search bar right side, to the (...)

#seo #content #mobile-website #optimize #voice-search

How #blockchain could prevent companies like Facebook from manipulating users
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-blockchain-could-prevent-companies-like-facebook-from-manipulating-u

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/858/1*e46tHkGQXsfjLck7v_HRfw.png

Technology products have changed the way we live, eat, interact, and commute. We shop through Amazon instead of going to physical stores. We order Uber or Lyft ride before leaving our home instead of trying our luck to get a taxi on the street. We use GrubHub to order delivery online. We make new friends through Tinder. We use Airbnb to find a place to stay when traveling. We search on Google when we have questions to ask.What changes our lives the most is the way we interact with one another. People often open their social apps like Facebook, Twitter, or WeChat first thing in the morning before getting out of beds. We often see people on their phones during social events. It is amazing to learn that more than 2.3 billions of people are using Facebook on a daily basis in 2019. Yet, (...)

#artificial-intelligence #ai-on-blockchain #ai #decentralization

The problem with AI ethics
▻https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/3/18293410/ai-artificial-intelligence-ethics-boards-charters-problem-big-tech

Is Big Tech’s embrace of AI ethics boards actually helping anyone ? Last week, Google announced that it is creating a new external ethics board to guide its “responsible development of AI.” On the face of it, this seemed like an admirable move, but the company was hit with immediate criticism. Researchers from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and top universities objected to the board’s inclusion of Kay Coles James, the president of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation. They pointed out (...)

#Google #Microsoft #Facebook #algorithme #éthique #harcèlement #discrimination #LGBT #publicité (...)

##publicité ##profiling

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Google flips the switch on its next big money maker: Maps (https://...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/8900546

Google flips the switch on its next big money maker: Maps | #advertising #google #maps #money

Big Data and Machine Learning with Nick Caldwell
▻https://hackernoon.com/big-data-and-machine-learning-with-nick-caldwell-14ed702b1c64?source=rss

Episode 39 of the Hacker Noon Podcast: An interview with Nick Caldwell CPO at Looker and former VP of #engineering at Reddit.Listen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.In this episode Trent Lapinski interviews Nick Caldwell from Looker, you get to learn about big data, machine learning and AI.“Modern data stores are extremely powerful. You can put tons and tons of data into them. You can query them without losing speed. And in some cases, you can even do analytics in the database. We’re just seeing this trend where the data layer is becoming more and more powerful, and Looker is riding that trend.”“My favorite learning, again, was just what’s going on in the data engineering space. The BigQuery to me, at that time, was just mind blowing. You dump 4–5 petabytes of (...)

#artificial-intelligence #machine-learning #big-data

New Episodes of the Hacker Noon Podcast
▻https://hackernoon.com/new-episodes-of-the-hacker-noon-podcast-9391d5c67d?source=rss----3a8144e

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Paris Blockchain Week, Tokenized Equity and Solving Problems in the Tech CommunityThe Hacker Noon Podcast recently interviewed Frontend Developer Pariss Athena, Karim Sabba from Paris Blockchain Week, and Josh Stein from Harbor.Solving Problems in the Tech Community with Pariss Athena of BlackTechTwitter & BTPipeline PlatformFrance In the Blockchain Ecosystem: Learn About Paris Blockchain WeekToday’s show would not be possible without Digital Ocean.Tokenized Equity with Josh Stein from HarborDon’t Forget to Subscribe to the Hacker Noon Podcast. Available on iTunes, Google Podcast, and YouTube.And lastly, stay up to date with Hacker Noon as we launch 2.0 from scratch via this form.New Episodes of the Hacker Noon Podcast was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are (...)

#podcast-technology #blockchain-paris #tech-interview-podcast #tech-community-problems #hackernoon-podcast

“Picking the right door” with the future of Unity
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-17-picking-the-right-door-with-the-future-of-unity

CMO Clive Downie shares insight on the company’s GDC announcements, including why the engine-maker won’t develop games, and Google Stadia

#Development #GDC_2019

Google opens applications for Indie Game Accelerator
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-17-google-opens-applications-for-indie-game-accelerator

Program expands to select countries in Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America

TRON’s New Sun Network Highlights the Pivotal Role of Sidechain #technology
▻https://hackernoon.com/trons-new-sun-network-highlights-the-pivotal-role-of-sidechain-technolog

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*J824c9nSBT9uTuVxueUh-g.png

Tron (TRX) is again announcing a series of development upgrades to make the Tron network more scalable. The reason for this need for scalability lays in the increased usage of DApps.A DApp is an abbreviation for a decentralized application. For most users, the application will look and feel the same as a normal application you can find in the App Store or Google PlayStore, however, the app is built on top of #blockchain infrastructure.This means that the business logic (backend code) is running on all nodes within a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Another variant to this concept is a frontend application which makes calls to a smart contract running on the p2p network. It is even possible to take this one step further and host the frontend code on decentralized storage such as Swarm (...)

#cryptocurrency #blockchain-technology #blockchain-development

Solving problems in the Tech Community with Pariss of BlackTechTwitter & BTPipeline
▻https://hackernoon.com/solving-problems-in-the-tech-community-with-pariss-of-blacktechtwitter-b

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Episode 38 of the Hacker Noon #podcast: An interview with Pariss Athena, Creator of #BlackTechTwitter & Founder of @BTPipeline platform, a community for people of color to mentor each other and find work.▻https://medium.com/media/0d168710b53a42e7292065d6fef1ebce/hrefListen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.In this episode Trent Lapinski interviews Pariss Athena, Front end Dev/RN dev, creator of #BlackTechTwitter & founder of @BTPipeline platform, a community for people of color to mentor each other and find work.“It’s scary. I even think about that for Web Development, because of things like Squarespace and Wix, where people don’t even need to know how to code where they could just build their website from there. Are they going to automate that? Are (...)

#software-development

#google Cloud Next ’19
▻https://hackernoon.com/google-cloud-next-19-4fbedaff95e7?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*uNhlavSa9u6d9j7NQWnmVQ.png

Last week the tech world gathered at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google Cloud Next, the annual event focussing on Google’s latest cloud solutions, the future of AI and machine learning. A lot of what was announced has an impact on our work. Let’s take a look at the exciting news!Google Cloud versus the restThis was the first edition Google Cloud Next with Thomas Kurian as CEO of Google Cloud, as he took over from Diane Green end of last year. He made it clear that Google will be focusing more on enterprise — while still embracing startups — and open source to strengthen its multi-cloud infrastructure offering.We’re committed to substantially expanding the scale of our go-to-market teams in order to help more customers use our technologyThomas Kurian, CEO Google CloudAs we can see (...)

#cloud-computing #google-cloud-platform #google-next #public-cloud