KREUZADER (Posts tagged Google)

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
‘A white-collar sweatshop’: Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – “Keep making magic” – obscured a more mundane reality: the...

‘A white-collar sweatshop’: Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft

But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – “Keep making magic” – obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.

“It’s smoke and mirrors if anything,” said a current Google employee who, as with the others quoted in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Artificial intelligence is not that artificial; it’s human beings that are doing the work.”

The Google employee works on Pygmalion, the team responsible for producing linguistic data sets that make the Assistant work. And although he is employed directly by Google, most of his Pygmalion co-workers are subcontracted temps who have for years been routinely pressured to work unpaid overtime, according to seven current and former members of the team.

Source: theguardian.com
google
Introducing Translatotron: An End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation Model Speech-to-speech translation systems have been developed over the past several decades with the goal of helping people who speak different languages to communicate with each...

Introducing Translatotron: An End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation Model

Speech-to-speech translation systems have been developed over the past several decades with the goal of helping people who speak different languages to communicate with each other. Such systems have usually been broken into three separate components: automatic speech recognition to transcribe the source speech as text, machine translation to translate the transcribed text into the target language, and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) to generate speech in the target language from the translated text. Dividing the task into such a cascade of systems has been very successful, powering many commercial speech-to-speech translation products, including Google Translate.

artificial intelligence google
Google has been tracking nearly everything you buy online — see for yourself with this tool Google has been quietly keeping track of nearly every single online purchase you’ve ever made, thanks to purchase receipts sent to your personal Gmail...

Google has been tracking nearly everything you buy online — see for yourself with this tool

Google has been quietly keeping track of nearly every single online purchase you’ve ever made, thanks to purchase receipts sent to your personal Gmail account, according to a new report today from CNBC. Even stranger: this information is made available to you via a private web tool that’s been active for an indeterminate amount of time. You can go view it here.

Source: theverge.com
google privacy
grugq
grugq
Google’s Sensorvault Is a Boon for Law Enforcement. This Is How It Works.
Investigators have been tapping into the tech giant’s enormous cache of location information in an effort to solve crimes. Here’s what t
nytimes.com
kreuzaderny

For years, police detectives have given Google warrants seeking location data tied to specific users’ accounts.

But the new warrants, often called “geofence” requests, instead specify an area near a crime. Google looks in Sensorvault for any devices that were there at the right time and provides that information to the police.

Google first labels the devices with anonymous ID numbers, and detectives look at locations and movement patterns to see if any appear relevant to the crime. Once they narrow the field to a few devices, Google reveals information such as names and email addresses.

google police privacy mass surveillance
Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search “The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google’s computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search...

Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search

The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google’s computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search apps — named Maotai and Longfei — that Google planned to roll out in China for users of Android and iOS mobile devices.

The employees identified about 500 changes to the code in December, and more than 400 changes to the code between January and February of this year, which they believe indicates continued development of aspects of Dragonfly. (Since August 2017, the number of code changes has varied between about 150 to 500 each month, one source said.) The employees say there are still some 100 workers allocated to the “cost center” associated with Dragonfly, meaning that the company is maintaining a budget for potential ongoing work on the plan.

Source: theintercept.com
google china
Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant “ If your IoT device secretly contained a microphone, which was previously undocumented, would you be happy when the device maker announced an over-the-air update that can enable the...

Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant 

If your IoT device secretly contained a microphone, which was previously undocumented, would you be happy when the device maker announced an over-the-air update that can enable the microphone for virtual assistant voice functionality? That’s what happened with the security alarm system Nest Secure. 

When announcing that a software update will make Google Assistant available on Nest Guard, Google added, “The Google Assistant on Nest Guard is an opt-in feature, and as the feature becomes available to our users, they’ll receive an email with instructions on how to enable the feature and turn on the microphone in the Nest app. Nest Guard does have one on-device microphone that is not enabled by default.” 

Nest Secure owners have been able to use Google Assistant and voice commands, but it previously required a separate Google Assistant device to hear your commands. I suppose it depends upon your outlook on if you are happy or creeped out that your security system secretly had an undocumented microphone capable of doing the listening all along.

Source: csoonline.com
google privacy
Your Smart Light Can Tell Amazon and Google When You Go to Bed “As Amazon.com Inc. and Google work to place their smart speakers at the center of the internet-connected home, both technology giants are expanding the amount of data they gather about...

Your Smart Light Can Tell Amazon and Google When You Go to Bed

As Amazon.com Inc. and Google work to place their smart speakers at the center of the internet-connected home, both technology giants are expanding the amount of data they gather about customers who use their voice software to control other gadgets.

For several years, Amazon and Google have collected data every time someone used a smart speaker to turn on a light or lock a door. Now they’re asking smart-home gadget makers such as Logitech and Hunter Fan Co. to send a continuous stream of information.

In other words, after you connect a light fixture to Alexa, Amazon wants to know every time the light is turned on or off, regardless of whether you asked Alexa to toggle the switch. Televisions must report the channel they’re set to. Smart locks must keep the company apprised whether or not the front door bolt is engaged.

Source: bloomberg.com
amazon google internet of things
Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation “ According to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine....

Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

According to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access an “application programming interface,” or API, associated with 265.com, and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of Google’s privacy team, however, were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com.

The engineers used the data they pulled from 265.com to learn about the kinds of things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin. This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and British news broadcaster BBC.

Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source. Members of the privacy team confronted the executives responsible for managing Dragonfly. Following a series of discussions, two sources said, Google engineers were told that they were no longer permitted to continue using the 265.com data to help develop Dragonfly, which has since had severe consequences for the project.

Source: theintercept.com
google china
Plan to re-imagine Toronto’s waterfront: How much does public know about it? “An agreement that seeks to hand control of a large piece of Toronto’s waterfront and downtown core – an area that includes the largest commercial development in Canada – to...

Plan to re-imagine Toronto’s waterfront: How much does public know about it?

An agreement that seeks to hand control of a large piece of Toronto’s waterfront and downtown core – an area that includes the largest commercial development in Canada – to a subsidiary of Alphabet, the giant tech company that owns Google, is raising growing alarm.

Sidewalk Labs is poised to receive the exclusive right, along with a government agency known as Waterfront Toronto, to reshape the vast area, which includes Exhibition Place, Ontario Place, Fort York, Harbourfront, Rogers Centre, the CN Tower, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and Union Station.

The agreement is part of a plan to create “a new, first-of-its-kind, innovative approach to city-building” and employ cutting-edge technology.

But very few details have been released about the project’s full objectives and financial benefits to Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto and Torontonians. In addition, public consultations have been very narrow in scope.

And on December 5, the Auditor General of Ontario issued a report on the project, stating it is being rushed forward without sufficient public disclosure. Auditor Bonnie Lysyk said Waterfront Toronto’s “new agreement with Sidewalk Labs raises concerns in areas such as consumer protection, data collection, security, privacy, governance, anti-trust and ownership of intellectual privacy.”

sounds very Delta City

Source: rabble.ca
toronto google
I Quit Google Over Its Censored Chinese Search Engine. The Company Needs to Clarify Its Position on Human Rights. “When news of Dragonfly first broke on August 1, a Google staff member who had secretly worked on Dragonfly took to the company-only...

I Quit Google Over Its Censored Chinese Search Engine. The Company Needs to Clarify Its Position on Human Rights. 

When news of Dragonfly first broke on August 1, a Google staff member who had secretly worked on Dragonfly took to the company-only Google Plus forum. The language was clear: “In my opinion it is just as bad as the leak mentions,” the staffer wrote, adding that they had asked to be removed from the project and another employee had left the company over their discomfort. At this point, my internal alarms went off, and I started pointedly asking my team and management if there was any official company response.

While employees were waiting for an official response at the next company-wide meeting, we were also sharing links to details about the project that we found through directly scouring Google’s source code, which is mostly available to all engineers. Even though much of Dragonfly had been kept from prying eyes, or “siloed,” the pieces that slipped through were disturbing. One of the Google-constructed blacklists for search terms contained numerous phrases, including “human rights” and “Nobel prize.” Code had been written to show only Chinese air quality data from an unnamed source in Beijing. And Dragonfly linked searches to the users’ phone numbers.

Source: theintercept.com
google china privacy mass surveillance
The Hunt for 3ve “3ve was typical of many ad fraud operations in that it generated revenue by selling forgeries of two major assets in high demand from advertisers: human audiences and premium publisher inventory. But because 3ve was uniquely...

The Hunt for 3ve

3ve was typical of many ad fraud operations in that it generated revenue by selling forgeries of two major assets in high demand from advertisers: human audiences and premium publisher inventory. But because 3ve was uniquely effective at counterfeiting the domains of prestigious publishers and sending droves of bots to false inventory, it was able to generate a substantial volume of fake ad bid requests. 3ve also operated at a high level of sophistication that appeared to be a series of unrelated operations. Its operators constantly adopted new ways to disguise 3ve’s bots, allowing the operation to continue growing even after their traffic was blacklisted. Whenever they were blocked off in one place, they’d reappear somewhere else. 

Source: services.google.com
advertising google
Google China Prototype Links Searches to Phone Numbers “Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers, thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people’s...

Google China Prototype Links Searches to Phone Numbers

Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers, thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people’s queries, The Intercept can reveal.

The search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.

Previously undisclosed details about the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, show that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such as “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin.

Leading human rights groups have criticized Dragonfly, saying that it could result in the company “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” A central concern expressed by the groups is that, beyond the censorship, user data stored by Google on the Chinese mainland could be accessible to Chinese authorities, who routinely target political activists and journalists.

Sources familiar with the project said that prototypes of the search engine linked the search app on a user’s Android smartphone with their phone number. This means individual people’s searches could be easily tracked – and any user seeking out information banned by the government could potentially be at risk of interrogation or detention if security agencies were to obtain the search records from Google.

Source: theintercept.com
google china mass surveillance privacy
Google tracks your movements, like it or not “SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on...

Google tracks your movements, like it or not

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.

An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.

Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request.

For the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. If you agree to let it record your location over time, Google Maps will display that history for you in a “timeline” that maps out your daily movements.

[…]

Storing location data in violation of a user’s preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau. A researcher from Mayer’s lab confirmed the AP’s findings on multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior.

“If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” Mayer said. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”

Google says it is being perfectly clear.

“There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. “We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time.”

Source: apnews.com
google privacy
Into the Borg – SSRF inside Google production network “Whenever I find an endpoint that fetches arbitrary content server-side, I always test for SSRF. I did it a hundred times on Google services but never had any luck. Anyway the only explanation for...

Into the Borg – SSRF inside Google production network

Whenever I find an endpoint that fetches arbitrary content server-side, I always test for SSRF. I did it a hundred times on Google services but never had any luck. Anyway the only explanation for the weird behavior of the Google Caja server was that the fetching was happening on the internal Google network and that is why it could only fetch Google-owned resources but not external resources. I already knew this was a bug, now the question was whether it was a security bug!

It’s very easy to host and run arbitrary code on Google servers, use Google Cloud services! I created a Google App Engine instance and hosted a javascript file. I then used the URL of this javascript file on Google Sites as a external script resource and updated the Google Sites page. The javascript was successfully fetched and parsed by Google Caja server. I then checked my Google App Engine instance logs to see from where the resource was fetched and it came from 10.x.x.201, a private network IP! This looked very promising.

security cybersecurity google
Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies? “ In neural machine translation, the system is trained with large numbers of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another, to create a model for moving between the...

Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies?

In neural machine translation, the system is trained with large numbers of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another, to create a model for moving between the two. But when it’s fed nonsense inputs, Rush said, the system can “hallucinate” bizarre outputs—not unlike the way Google’s DeepDream identifies and accentuates patterns in images.

“The models are black-boxes, that are learned from as many training instances that you can find,” Rush said. “The vast majority of these will look like human language, and when you give it a new one it is trained to produce something, at all costs, that also looks like human language. However if you give it something very different, the best translation will be something still fluent, but not at all connected to the input.”

Source: Vice Magazine
neural networking google artificial intelligence