Security News

Google on Monday announced that it's rolling out client-side encryption to Google Workspace, thereby giving its enterprise customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service they choose to access those keys. The development coincides with the Google Workspace and Google Chat's broader availability to all users with a Google account.

Essentially, FLoC allows marketers to guess users' interests without having to uniquely identify them, thereby eliminating the privacy implications associated with tailored advertising, which currently relies on techniques such as tracking cookies and device fingerprinting that expose users' browsing history across sites to advertisers or ad platforms. FLoC sidesteps the cookie with a new "Cohort" identifier wherein users are bucketed into clusters based on similar browsing behaviors.

IonQ announced the full integration of its quantum computing platform with Cirq, an open-source quantum computing framework from Google. "From its origins, the vision for Cirq was to expand access to quantum computing to even broader audiences," said Dave Bacon, VP of Software at IonQ. "As a developer myself, I know that a smoother, simpler implementation is a better implementation, one that will be more useful in the real world. Volkswagen has shown that developing in Cirq on IonQ has real benefits for real problems faced by development teams."

Google this week released patches for 14 vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser, including a security flaw that has been exploited in the wild. "Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2021-30551 exists in the wild," the company said, without providing further technical details.

Google has released Chrome 91.0.4472.101 for Windows, Mac, and Linux to fix 14 security vulnerabilities, with one zero-day vulnerability exploited in the wild and tracked as CVE-2021-30551. Google Chrome 91.0.4472.101 has started rolling out worldwide and will become available to all users over the next few days.

They've found a means of using a voice-activated smart speaker system without it having to listen to everything you say - and no, it's not "Pressing a button." "There are a lot of situations where we want our home automation system or our smart speaker to understand what's going on in our home, but we don't necessarily want it listening to our conversations," said the aptly named Alanson Sample, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan.

Google patched more than 90 security vulnerabilities in its Android operating system impacting its Pixel devices and third-party Android handsets, including a critical remote code-execution bug that could allow an attacker to commandeer a targeted vulnerable mobile device. The Android System component of the OS also has a second critical vulnerability, an elevation-of-privilege issue tracked as CVE-2021-0516.

In an open letter this month, the Chaos Computer Club - along with Google, Facebook, and others - said they are against proposals to dramatically expand the use of so-called state trojans, aka government-made spyware, in Germany. Once you have root access on a person's computer or handheld, the the device can be an open book, encryption or not.

The French competition authority has fined Google €220 million for abusing its dominant position in online advertising and favoring its services to the disadvantage of its publishers and competitors. According to the French regulator, Google favored its Google Ad Manager tech used to operate the DFP ad server and the SSP AdX sales platform, which allow publishers to sell ad space on their sites and auction impressions to advertisers, respectively.

Google has launched a new experimental tool designed to help application developers visualize the dependencies of open source projects. In an effort to help developers gain a better perspective into the packages their open-source projects rely on, Google has introduced Open Source Insights, an exploratory visualization site that offers a view of dependencies, in an organized and accessible way.