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YouTube launches new features video sharing and massaging to users in app worldwide.

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YouTube today is launching a new sharing feature in its mobile app, previously in testing with users in select markets.  The feature allows YouTube users to send their friends videos and chat from within a new tab in the mobile app – effectively turning YouTube into a mobile messenger of sorts. The feature has been in testing since the middle of last year, and, at the beginning of 2017, rolled out to users in Canada as something of a “soft launch.” It later expanded to parts of Latin America, the company tells us. Following the feedback gained from these long-term initial tests, YouTube felt it was ready to debut the sharing feature to a global audience. That roll out begins today, but won’t reach all YouTube users worldwide for a few days. In other words, if you don’t see the sharing option yet – just wait, you will soon. Since its debut in tests, YouTube says it has made some slight changes to the user interface for sharing, including the way the chat interface
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Why stop using Google Search?

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Why stop using Search? It’s a well-known but unnerving fact that Google monitors and stores your searches so it can target you with advertising – a shameless invasion of your privacy that allows the company to build a profile of who it thinks you are.  There’s also the highly controversial issue of your search results being adjusted to benefit the web giant. Google was recently fined a record £2.1bn by the European Commission after a seven-year investigation found the company had unfairly promoted Google Shopping above other, similar shopping-comparison services in its search results. Alarmingly, that’s not the only area where Google adjusts the results. There are similar ongoing EU investigations into both Maps and local business listings.  Google also customises what you see based on your past preferences (known as the ‘filter bubble’) and makes changes to the results rankings in subtle ways, such as downgrading sites that offer pirated content or push hate
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ZUCKERBERG AND MUSK WANT TO READ YOUR MIND.

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Two giants of the tech world, Facebook and Elon Musk’s latest venture Neuralink, have both announced that they are working on brain-to-computer interfaces. At Facebook’s recent F8 developers’ conference, Regina Dugan from Facebook’s R&D division Building 8 showed a video of a woman using such an interface to type eight words per minute, and spoke of the company’s ambitions to develop a similar system capable of typing hundreds of words per minute within a few years. Dugan has experience in this area: the technology in the Stanford University video was similar to systems developed at DARPA, the US military research agency, while Dugan was director there. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later enthused about the technology in a Facebook post, saying: “ We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about five times faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at sc
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Google finally stops scanning your emails.

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What happened? Google will stop reading your messages in Gmail to personalise its advertising, the company has confirmed.  Previously, Google analysed the content of emails sent and received for behavioural advertising purposes – which is why a message about a holiday or wedding can suddenly spark a slew of very specific ads.  This change in policy is believed to be an attempt to appease corporate customers. Gmail is free for individuals, but companies pay for the webmail service as part of Google’s cloud-based collection of productivity tools, G Suite.  Messages sent in corporate Gmail aren’t scanned for advertising, but some companies believed differently and weren’t happy about it. To avoid such confusion, Google has dropped email scanning for everyone. How will it affect you? If you’re a Gmail user, Google will not look at the content of your emails – you may be alarmed to learn that it had that power previously. However, that doesn’t mean behavioura
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5 best things you must do on the web.

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1. Explore the marvels of Malta bit.ly/malta427 The tiny Mediterranean island of Malta is steeped in thousands of years of history and attracts two million visitors every year. If you’ve never been, you can now see what all the fuss is about by taking a virtual tour of its narrow, winding streets using Google Street View. Soak up the delights of the capital Valletta, admire the hilltop town of Mellieha and roam the beautiful, fortified city of Medina. As well as taking your own tour, you can wander across neighbouring Gozo’s Ggantija Temples, learn about the Great Siege and take in 360-degree views of catacombs, ancient houses, museums and tourist resorts via a new Google Arts & Culture project. There are lots of online exhibits to enjoy along with artworks, historic collections and details of prehistoric gems. 2. Send GIFs in WhatsApp WhatsApp now lets you send and receive GIFs, and search the world’s biggest library, Giphy ( giphy.com ). If you’r
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Share Google photos more easily.

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Google has added two useful features to Photos that make it much easier for you to share your snaps. Rolled out for Android, iOS and the web, the new additions rely on automation, using machine learning to identify the people in your photos, the location of the shot and your sharing habits. This information helps Google recommend images for you to share and people to share them with. You’ll see these in a new Suggestions section when you tap the Sharing tab. You’ll also be able to see photos that others share with you, even if they don’t use Google Photos.  The second feature is Share Your Library, which you’ll find in the top left-hand menu. Select this and enter the email address of someone you want to share your images with. From this point on, every time you take a photo, they’ll be sent a notification prompting them to have a look. You can also specify a date in the past to let them view historical images, and they’ll be able to choose which of y
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Google brings reCAPTCHA API to Android

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Ten years after beginning to offer protection to Web users, Google has now taken a step towards protecting mobile devices and brought its renowned reCAPTCHA API to Android. The move is to protect Android users from spam and abuse, as well as countermoves by its competitors in the smartphone space, which include Apple and Microsoft. “With this API, reCAPTCHA can better tell human and bots apart to provide a streamlined user experience on the mobile,” said Wei Liu, product manager for reCAPTCHA, Google, in a blog post. Available as a part of Google Play Services, the reCAPTCHA Android API comes along with Google SafetyNet that provides services such as device attestation and safe browsing to protect mobile apps. The combination enables developers to perform both the device and user attestations using the same API. Carnegie Mellon alumni Luis von Ahn, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham and Manuel Blum built reCAPTCH as a CAPTCHA-like system back in
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