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Google has won an appeal against a €1.5 billion competition fine from the European Commission in a victory for the Big Tech group as it comes under growing scrutiny from Brussels regulators.

The EU’s General Court said on Wednesday that while it accepted “most of the commission’s assessments” that the company had used its dominant position to block rival online advertisers, it annulled the hefty fine levied against Google in the case.

When launching the action against Google in 2019, Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief, said that the search giant had imposed anti-competitive restrictions on third-party websites for a decade between 2006 and 2016. She justified the €1.5 billion fine by arguing that it reflected the “serious and sustained nature” of the infringement.

Enlarge / Under C2PA, this stock image would be labeled as a real photograph if the camera used to take it, and the toolchain for retouching it, supported the C2PA. But even as a real photo, does it actually represent reality, and is there a technological solution to that problem? (credit: Smile via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Google announced plans to implement content authentication technology across its products to help users distinguish between human-created and AI-generated images. Over several upcoming months, the tech giant will integrate the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, a system designed to track the origin and editing history of digital content, into its search, ads, and potentially YouTube services. However, it's an open question of whether a technological solution can address the ancient social issue of trust in recorded media produced by strangers.

A group of tech companies created the C2PA system beginning in 2019 in an attempt to combat misleading, realistic synthetic media online. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent and realistic, experts have worried that it may be difficult for users to determine the authenticity of images they encounter. The C2PA standard creates a digital trail for content, backed by an online signing authority, that includes metadata information about where images originate and how they've been modified.

Google will incorporate this C2PA standard into its search results, allowing users to see if an image was created or edited using AI tools. The tech giant's "About this image" feature in Google Search, Lens, and Circle to Search will display this information when available.

Enlarge / The Windy Fire blazes through the Long Meadow Grove of giant sequoia trees near The Trail of 100 Giants overnight in Sequoia National Forest on September 21, 2021, near California Hot Springs, California. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Space is more accessible than ever thanks to the proliferation of small satellites and more affordable launch prices, which opened the door to bespoke applications like global pollution monitoring, crop observations, and new ways of collecting weather and climate data.

Now you can add wildfire detection to the list. Satellites have observed wildfires from space for decades, but a new initiative partially funded by Google's philanthropic arm aims to deploy more than 50 small satellites in low-Earth orbit to pinpoint flare-ups as small as a classroom anywhere in the world.

The FireSat constellation, managed by a nonprofit called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA), will be the first satellite fleet dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires. Google announced a fresh investment of $13 million in the FireSat constellation Monday, building on the tech giant's previous contributions to support the development of custom infrared sensors for the FireSat satellites.

Enlarge / Illustration of a person who refuses to check their iPhone's messages until RCS is enabled on their MVNO carrier, out of respect for their Android-toting friends and family. (credit: Getty Images)

The future of inter-OS mobile messaging is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

With iOS 18, Apple has made it possible for non-Apple phones to message with iPhones through Rich Communication Services (RCS). This grants upgrades from standard SMS text messages, like read receipts, easier and higher-quality media sending, typing indicators, and emoji/response compatibility. More than that, it allows for messaging while on Wi-Fi without cellular services and makes group messages far less painful to navigate and leave. Notably, RCS messages between iPhones and non-iPhones will not be encrypted, like Apple's private iMessage service available exclusively between Apple devices.

iOS 18 makes these RCS upgrades possible, but certainly not guaranteed, at least as of today. Lots of people have already been enjoying cross-platform RCS messaging when texting with iOS 18 beta users. And iPhones on the big carriers' plans can now trade RCS with Android users. But some iPhone users, particularly on mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs)—typically pre-paid services that do not own network hardware but resell major carrier access—do not have an RCS option available to them yet.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries.

Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the Android-based boxes by putting malicious components in their system storage area, where they can be updated with additional malware at any time by command-and-control servers. Google representatives said the infected devices are running operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project, a version overseen by Google but distinct from Android TV, a proprietary version restricted to licensed device makers.

Dozens of variants

Although Doctor Web has a thorough understanding of Vo1d and the exceptional reach it has achieved, company researchers say they have yet to determine the attack vector that has led to the infections.

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google made Gemini Live, its voice-based AI chatbot feature, available for free to all Android users. The feature allows users to interact with Gemini through voice commands on their Android devices. That's notable because competitor OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode feature of ChatGPT, which is similar to Gemini Live, has not yet fully shipped.

Google unveiled Gemini Live during its Pixel 9 launch event last month. Initially, the feature was exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers, but now it's accessible to anyone using the Gemini app or its overlay on Android.

Gemini Live enables users to ask questions aloud and even interrupt the AI's responses mid-sentence. Users can choose from several voice options for Gemini's responses, adding a level of customization to the interaction.

Enlarge / Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji. (credit: Emojipedia)

The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.

Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as "root vegetable"), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the '90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is "face with bags under eyes," whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they're implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.

Unicode 16.0 also adds support for seven new modern and historical scripts: the West African Garay alphabet; the Gurung Khema, Kirat Rai, Ol Onal, and Sunuwar scripts from Northeast India and Nepal; and historical Todhri and Tulu-Tigalari scripts from Albania and Southwest India, respectively.

Enlarge / Google's booth at the Integrated Systems Europe conference on January 31, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | Cesc Maymo )

Google is under investigation by Europe’s privacy watchdog over its processing of personal data in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models, as regulators ramp up their scrutiny of Big Tech’s AI ambitions.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, said it had launched a statutory inquiry into the tech giant’s Pathways Language Model 2, or PaLM 2.

PaLM 2 was launched in May 2023 and predates Google’s latest Gemini models, which power its AI products. Gemini, which was launched in December of the same year, is now the core model behind its text and image-generation offering.

Enlarge / It's never explained what this collection of app icons quite represents. A disorganized app you tossed together by sideloading? A face that's frowning because it's rolling down a bar held up by app icons? It's weird, but not quite evocative. (credit: linuxct/hydra)

You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you're using a custom version of Android that doesn't include Google's Play Store. Alternately, the app might be experimental, under development, or perhaps no longer maintained and offered by its developer. Until now, the existence of sideload-ready APKs on the web was something that seemed to be tolerated, if warned against, by Google.

This quiet standstill is being shaken up by a new feature in Google's Play Integrity API. As reported by Android Authority, developer tools to push "remediation" dialogs during sideloading debuted at Google's I/O conference in May, have begun showing up on users' phones. Sideloaders of apps from the British shop Tesco, fandom app BeyBlade X, and ChatGPT have reported "Get this app from Play" prompts, which cannot be worked around. An Android gaming handheld user encountered a similarly worded prompt from Diablo Immortal on their device three months ago.

Google's Play Integrity API is how apps have previously blocked access when loaded onto phones that are in some way modified from a stock OS with all Google Play integrations intact. Recently, a popular two-factor authentication app blocked access on phones with modified firmware, including GrapheneOS, which aims to surpass the security of Android's stock system. Apps can call the Play Integrity API and get back an "integrity verdict," relaying if the phone has a "trustworthy" software environment, has Google Play Protect enabled, and passes other software checks.

Enlarge / A staffer with the Paul, Weiss legal firm wheels boxes of legal documents into the Albert V. Bryan US Courthouse at the start of a Department of Justice antitrust trial against Google over its advertiing business in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 9, 2024. Google faces its second major antitrust trial in less than a year, with the US government accusing the tech giant of dominating online advertising and stifling competition. (credit: SAMUEL CORUM / Contributor | AFP)

Just a couple of days into the Google ad tech antitrust trial, it seems clear that the heart of the US Department of Justice's case is proving that Google Ad Manager is the key to the tech giant's alleged monopoly.

Google Ad Manager is the buy-and-sell side ad tech platform launched following Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and AdX in 2008 for $3 billion. It is currently used to connect Google's publisher ad servers with its ad exchanges, tying the two together in a way that allegedly locks the majority of publishers into paying higher fees on the publisher side because they can't afford to drop Google's ad exchange.

The DOJ has argued that Google Ad Manager "serves 90 percent of publishers that use the ad tech tools to sell their online ad inventory," AdAge reported, and through it, Google clearly wields monopoly powers.

Foto: Google

Foto: Google