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Google on Thursday announced Nearby, a new feature for Android devices that recommends apps and websites based on your physical location. The idea is simple: You're on the go and there is an app that might be useful to you but you don't know it exists. Nearby will let you know about such apps. The company writes in a blog post: To use Nearby, just turn on Bluetooth and Location, and we'll show you a notification if a nearby app or website is available. Once you've opted-in, tapping on a notification takes you straight into the intended experience. If you're not interested, just swipe it away to give us a clear signal. Nearby has started rolling out to users as part of the upcoming Google Play Services release and will work on Android 4.4 (KitKat) and above.If you're a developer, Google has published another blog post to help you get started.

It's official: the Google Play Store is coming to Chrome OS. The company announced on Thursday that it is bringing more than 1.5 million Android apps to Chromebooks. Google adds that zero efforts are required from developers' end for their Android apps to function on Chrome OS. Users will also be able to see notifications and have in-line replies on the desktop. Users on developer channel builds of Chrome OS will get an option to use Google Play and Android apps starting early next month. Regular users on select Chromebook models will have this feature in September. Ars Technica has tons of more details about it. The Verge says Android apps are just what Chromebooks needed.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. "TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company's I/O developer conference on Wednesday. The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. "We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore's Law)," said Google's blog post. "TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly." The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has announced a plethora of new features to Firebase, its cloud services provider that mobile developers can use to power their apps. TechCrunch reports: "In its previous incarnation, Firebase was somewhat similar to Facebook's now-defunct Parse in that it offered a database service, user authentication features and hosting tools. In this new version, Firebase takes many of Google's existing developer tools, like Google Cloud Messaging, and combines them with new and existing Firebase services. With this update, Google is turning Firebase into a unified app platform for its now 470,000 developers on the service (up from 110,000 when it acquired Firebase)." The new Firebase features deeply integrated analytics services, allowing developers to track specific parts of their apps with fine-grained events. Firebase can build audience segments and allow developers to analyze their behavior in even more detail than before, and view how their advertising campaigns are performing. With these audience segments, developers can make remote configuration changes in apps and take advantage of Firebase's new notifications system. This feature is based on Google Cloud Messaging, which is now changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging. Google is offering all Firebase users free and unlimited notifications with support for iOS, Android and the Web. They're also integrating its Cloud Test Lab into Firebase for testing mobile apps on real hardware, renaming it the Firebase Test Lab. Other new features include crash reporting, the ability to create dynamic deep links into your app, Firebase Invites for allowing app users to share referral codes, Firebase App Indexing for bringing app content into Google Search, and integration with Google's AdWords and AdMob advertising platforms. Last but not least, Google is introducing new pricing plans for Firebase, including a new free plan, a fixed-rate plan, and a pay-as-you go plan.

An anonymous reader writes: Google announced users will soon see live TV listings within their search results. Fortune writes, "Pretty soon, you will be able to Google the name of a television show or movie and see live air times for that content within the search results." The announcement was made at the National Association of Broadcasters conference. "What we're seeing is that more and more, viewers are turning to their phones to find out what to watch, where to watch it and when it's available -- in fact, searches for TV shows and films on mobile have grown more than 55% in the past year alone," Google said in a blog post announcing the new feature. Google Search users will have the option of clicking an "edit provider" link that will allow them to enter their specific cable provider when they search for the name of a TV show or movie. There's no specific date for when the feature will be launching, just that it will be launching "soon."

An anonymous reader writes: A new study by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, claims over 700,000 websites were breached between June 2014 and June 2015. The research shows that "miscreants" had routinely hijacked thousands of vulnerable web servers for "cheap hosting and traffic acquisition." The exact number of recorded "hijacking incidents" within the period was 760,935 but google has been said they were able to curb the amount of breaches through direct communication with webmasters. Google's Safe Browsing Alerts sends notifications to network admins when potentially dangerous URLs are detected on their networks. These have reportedly increased the likelihood of a "cleanup" by more than 50 percent and reduced "infection lengths" by at least 62 percent. According to The Next Web, WordPress topped the chart of platforms that experienced the most breaches (almost half of all attacks). English websites experienced the most attacks, with Chinese, German, Japanese and Russian language websites following closely behind.

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: As part of the enhancements to Android security, Google scans more than 6 billion installed applications per day on users' devices. The company also scans more than 400 million devices each day, it announced on Tuesday. Google last year also began releasing monthly security updates for devices running modern versions of Android, which includes devices on version 4.4.4 (KitKat) and later. "70.8% of all active Android devices are on a version that we support with patches," the Android report says. However, that still leaves hundreds of millions of Android devices without regular updates. There were roughly 1.4 billion Android devices active in September, according to Google, so that would leave about 420 million Android devices without patches. In the Android ecosystem, carriers are also responsible for pushing security patches to users, so while Google pushes security updates each month, not all carriers and device manufacturers release them to all users regularly.In its report, Google also says that fewer than 0.15% of devices, that only get apps from Google Play, had potentially harmful apps installed on them.

An anonymous reader writes: YouTube's 360-degree videos are nothing new to the site as they were first introduced in March 2015. Today, YouTube has expanded on the feature by allowing select users to live stream 360-degree videos wherever an internet connection is present. Whether it's at a music festival or sporting event, viewers will be able to view 360-degree live video through their web browser, mobile device or VR headset. Google Executive Neal Mohan says, "Now anyone, with just their phone, can have that front row experience without having to be there." In addition, YouTube has also launched spatial audio for on-demand YouTube videos. "Just as watching a concert in 360 degrees can give you an unmatched immersive experience, spatial audio allows you to listen along as you do in real life, where depth, distance and intensity all play a role," according to the YouTube blog post. If you have an Android device, you can test out spatial audio from this playlist. YouTube's announcement comes one week after Facebook announced its plans to get more serious about 360-degree videos. They are opening up their Live Video feature to developers to allow developers to integrate live streaming into third-party apps.

An anonymous reader writes: Google Calendar is now 10 years old. What better way to celebrate than by adding a new goals feature to the service? The new feature lets you set a personal goal in Google Calendar, which will then find time in your schedule so you can achieve your goal. The feature is available for mobile-only users in all countries and languages where Google Calendar works. The goal is dependent on two main questions: "how often?" and "best time?" [Once you answer those questions], it will then find the best time slot in your schedule to pencil in your new goal. Goals will automatically adjust their timing throughout the week. Google Calendar will automatically reschedule if you add another event that's a direct conflict with a given goal. You can even defer a goal at any time, in which case Google Calendar will make time for it later. Using machine learning algorithms, Google Calendar gets better at scheduling the more you use it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report on The Telegraph: Google is facing a fierce backlash after introducing a new tool for April Fools' Day that has cost some people potential jobs. The new Gmail Mic Drop button, which sits next to the normal send button, ends an email thread forever by muting all future replies to the sender, and firing off a gif of a minion 'mic dropping' at the same time. After an immediate backlash the feature was taken down early on Friday morning. Some people using it had failed to see the funny side, saying that by accidentally pressing the button instead of simply sending the email, they have appeared rude or unprofessional, in some cases costing them jobs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google's efforts to keep users safe might be forcing other email providers to make better security decisions. In February, the company started flagging unencrypted emails, allowing Gmail users to know whether they're sending emails to, or receiving emails from, providers that don't support TLS encryption. Since then, the amount of inbound mail sent over an encrypted connection to Gmail users has increased by 25 percent, Google explained in a blog post released today. The majority of the uptick likely comes from providers updating their clients so they can avoid getting flagged by Google, the company said in a comment to The Verge. Without in-transit encryption, which Google provides by default, emails could potentially be read by attackers because their body and data are sent in plain text. Google is also going to send Gmail users a full-page warning notice if they click on a potentially malicious link. In addition, they are going to increase warnings about state-sponsored attackers with a full-page alert about how to secure accounts through two-factor authentication and the use of a security key.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is planning to compete with Nuance and other voice recognition companies head on by opening up its speech recognition API to third-party developers. To attract developers, the app will be free at launch with pricing to be introduced at a later date. The company formally announced the service today during its NEXT cloud user conference, where it also unveiled a raft of other machine learning developments and updates, most significantly a new machine learning platform. The Google Cloud Speech API, which will cover over 80 languages and will work with any application in real-time streaming or batch mode, will offer full set of APIs for applications to "see, hear and translate," Google says. It is based on the same neural network tech that powers Google's voice search in the Google app and voice typing in Google's Keyboard. Google's move will have a large impact on the industry as a whole -- and particularly on Nuance, the company long thought of as offering the best voice recognition capabilities in the business, and most certainly the biggest offering such services.

alphadogg writes from an article on NetworkWorld: HTTPS is widely considered one of the keys to a safer Internet, but only if it's broadly implemented. Aiming to shed some light on how much progress has been made so far, Google on Tuesday launched a new section of its transparency report dedicated to encryption. Included in the new section is data highlighting the progress of encryption efforts both at Google and on popular third-party sites. "Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the Web even safer for everyone," wrote HTTPS evangelists Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis on the Google Security Blog.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has once again upped the ante for bug hunters concentrating on Chrome, and is now offering $100,000 to anyone capable of achieving a compromise of a Chromebook or Chromebox (the desktop variant of the Chromebook laptop) with device persistence in guest mode (i.e. guest to guest persistence with interim reboot, delivered via a web page). From Google's Monday announcement: Last year we introduced a $50,000 reward for the persistent compromise of a Chromebook in guest mode. Since we introduced the $50,000 reward, we haven't had a successful submission. That said, great research deserves great awards, so we're putting up a standing six-figure sum, available all year round with no quotas and no maximum reward pool.