All news with #google tag

🍪 Google has announced it is discontinuing 11 Privacy Sandbox technologies — effectively ending most of the company’s cookie‑replacement efforts after evaluating low adoption and ecosystem feedback. The decision follows regulatory scrutiny from the UK’s Competition and Market Authority and several U.S. antitrust actions, and came after prior concessions from Google. The company says it will continue to work on privacy improvements for Chrome, Android and the web but will move away from the Privacy Sandbox branding.

🛡️ Mandiant Academy and Google Cloud introduce Protecting the Perimeter: Practical Network Enrichment, a short-form training track to sharpen network traffic analysis and CTI operationalization. The curriculum covers five core methodologies—PCAP, netflow, protocol analysis, behavioral baselining, and historical review—and demonstrates how to enrich each with CTI and analytical tradecraft. It is aimed at practitioners who need focused, time-efficient skills to improve detection and investigation.

🔒 Google is expanding protections during Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025 with new features and guidance to counter scams and AI-driven threats. The company outlines a cohesive strategy for securing the AI ecosystem and introduces six new anti-scam measures to help users stay safe. It also launches Recovery Contacts to simplify account recovery and debuts CodeMender, an AI agent that automates code security. Additional updates support safer learning through responsible tools and partnerships.

🛠️ Google Cloud announced General Availability of Prompt Management in the Vertex AI SDK, enabling teams to programmatically create, version, and manage prompts as first-class assets. The capability bridges Vertex AI Studio’s visual prompt design with SDK-driven automation to improve collaboration, reproducibility, and lifecycle control. Enterprise security and compliance are supported via CMEK and VPCSC, and the SDK exposes simple Python methods to create, list, update, and delete prompt resources tied to models such as gemini-2.5-flash. Get started using the documented code examples to centralize prompt governance and scale generative AI workflows.

🔍 Cyber criminals continue to favor familiar brands, with Microsoft used in 40% of all brand impersonation attempts in Q3 2025, according to Check Point Research’s Brand Phishing Report. Google represented 9% and Apple 6%, and together these tech giants comprised more than half of brand-related phishing activity. The findings highlight persistent targeting of the technology sector and underscore the need for stronger defenses and user awareness.

📘 The Future Report (published Oct 16, 2025) summarizes findings from a Google study created with youth consultancy Livity, based on a survey of more than 7,000 teens across Europe. A five-piece guest series invites experts from child safety, digital rights, and policy to interpret what young people say about AI, digital wellbeing, and online safety. Contributors argue for building supportive, youth-centered digital environments and targeted interventions instead of default bans.

📱 Stephen Balkam of FOSI argues that instead of blanket bans, families benefit from thoughtful restrictions, ongoing dialogue and tools that preserve teen agency. He highlights solutions such as Family Link and YouTube’s supervised experience and proposes that AI assistants (for example, Gemini or ChatGPT) could configure age-, app- and device-specific controls. He urges coordinated action from policymakers, teachers and parents and calls for impartial digital literacy and AI education frameworks.

🌐 Janice Richardson presents Google's Future Report, based on responses from over 7,000 teenagers across seven EU countries, highlighting how young people use the internet for learning, cultural exploration and creativity. The study finds widespread focus on trustworthiness and practical critical thinking, alongside an openness to algorithmic recommendations. About 40% of participants report near-daily use of AI for problem solving and creative work, yet teens want better-equipped teachers and improved digital literacy across income groups. The report urges shared societal responsibility for safe, balanced online experiences and recommends supporting parents, educators, policy makers and industry to ensure equitable benefits.

⚠️ Users worldwide are reporting a widespread YouTube outage causing playback errors and site load failures across web and mobile. Reports began within the last 30 minutes and affected regions include the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and Australia, according to outage aggregator DownDetector. Some users see messages such as "Playback error" or "Something went wrong," while others experience slow or incomplete page loads. Google has not yet confirmed a cause; it remains unclear whether the issue stems from server problems, maintenance, or network disruptions.

🔒 Google for Education highlights built-in security, responsible AI, and partnerships to create safer digital learning environments for schools, classrooms, and families. Admins benefit from automated 24/7 monitoring, encryption, spam filtering, and security alerts; Google reports zero successful ransomware attacks on Chromebooks to date. Gemini for Education and NotebookLM provide enterprise-grade data protections with admin controls and age-specific safeguards, while family resources and a $25M Google.org clinics fund extend protection and workforce development.

🔒 Google for Education outlines built-in security, responsible AI, and community investments for Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025. The post highlights admin controls and automated protections—24/7 monitoring, encryption, and security alerts—and notes zero reported successful ransomware attacks on Chromebooks to date. It emphasizes Gemini for Education and NotebookLM with enterprise-grade data protections and stricter policies for students under 18. The company also supports workforce development through a $25 million Google.org fund and 25 cybersecurity clinics.

⚡ Vertex AI context caching saves and reuses precomputed input tokens so developers avoid repeatedly sending and recomputing long contextual content, reducing latency and cost for large-context AI applications. It provides implicit caching — automatic, default, short-lived KV caches (deleted within 24 hours) integrated with Provisioned Throughput — and explicit CachedContent objects that are paid once and then reused at a deep discount with optional CMEK protection. Caches support multimodal inputs and very large context windows.

🔐 Gemini Code Assist on GitHub for enterprises delivers AI-powered code reviews across GitHub Enterprise Cloud and privately hosted GitHub Enterprise Server. Organization-level controls let platform teams define a central style guide, set comment severity, and enforce baseline checks while preserving repo-level customization. Built on Google Cloud security and privacy commitments, the public preview includes higher pull-request quotas and stateless prompt handling to protect customer code.

🔐 Google has launched Recovery Contacts, a new option that lets users designate trusted friends or family to help regain access to a Google Account when other recovery methods aren’t available. When you request help you share a one-time code with your chosen contact; they receive an email or notification and confirm the code to verify it’s really you. Your recovery contact cannot access your account or personal data, and the feature is currently rolling out.

🛡️ Google announced six new product protections designed to help users detect and avoid online scams and fraud. Features include Safer links and Key Verifier in Google Messages, Recovery Contacts, and Sign in with Mobile Number to simplify device transfers and account recovery. The company also launched the Be Scam Ready interactive game and expanded education and partnerships focused on older adults and youth. These measures are rolling out globally as part of an ongoing effort to counter evolving threats like deepfakes and voice cloning.

🔒 Google is introducing Recovery Contacts, a new account-recovery option that lets you designate trusted friends or family to help regain access if you lose a password or device. When you request help, you share a one-time verification code with your chosen contact; they receive an email or notification and confirm the code to verify it’s really you. Your recovery contact will not have access to your account or personal data. The feature complements passkeys and existing recovery tools and is rolling out now.

🔒 Google is rolling out multiple new features to reduce scams across its services, including link warnings and navigation blocking in Google Messages when messages are flagged as spam. A Key Verifier QR option helps confirm end-to-end encrypted contacts on Android, while expanded recovery options — including Recovery Contacts and Sign in with Mobile Number — aim to simplify secure account recovery. Google also launched educational tools and partnerships to raise scam awareness.

🛡️ Google is adding an AI-powered defense in Google Workspace that monitors files synced by the Drive for desktop app on Windows and macOS, detecting mass file corruption characteristic of ransomware. Trained on millions of ransomware samples and using intelligence from VirusTotal, the model halts cloud sync to stop spread and enables simple file restoration. The feature rolls out now at no extra cost for most commercial plans and complements built-in Gmail and Chrome protections.

🔍 A new side‑channel attack called Pixnapping allows a permissionless Android app to infer and reconstruct on‑screen pixels and steal sensitive content such as one‑time authentication codes, chat messages, and emails. The technique abuses Android intents and SurfaceFlinger compositing to isolate and enlarge individual pixels, then uses a GPU compression side channel to leak visual data. The proof‑of‑concept from a team of seven U.S. university researchers works on modern Pixel and Samsung devices and can extract 2FA codes in under 30 seconds; Google issued an initial mitigation (CVE‑2025‑48561) in September that was bypassed, and a broader fix is planned for December 2025, with Samsung committing to patches as well.

🏆 Google Cloud's Apigee has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for API Management and was positioned highest for Ability to Execute. The announcement highlights Apigee's expansion to support generative and agentic AI workloads by acting as an intelligent, secure API proxy that improves governance, security, scalability, and cost control. Key capabilities called out include AI productization, agent-ready API specification boosting (Private Preview), native quota-based token controls and Looker Studio reporting, a centralized API hub with Gemini-driven semantic search, and enhanced security policies including Model Armor and Advanced API Security.