SAN FRANCISCO — Google this week made good on its plan to reposition Hangouts for the enterprise by splitting the almost four-year-old service into two separate apps. A video conferencing app, Hangouts Meet and team messaging app Hangouts Chat will serve as the enterprise equivalent to Google’s Allo and Duo apps for consumers. Meet, which…
The Moto Z Play is the latest in the Lenovo family of smartphones to get Android Nougat. But that’s not the only big update this week—Google’s Pixel and Nexus devices are getting several critical security patches. Each week, we round up all the major software updates to hit the Android ecosystem, including phones and tablets…
Because the fossil fuel industry is quickly losing public support amid reports of global warming, the industry must embrace clean energy in a more substantial way, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell said this week. Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said his company plans to increase spending on renewable energy to $1 billion a year…
Google is letting its customers get a taste of its cloud for free, without a time-limited trial. The company quietly launched a new “Always Free” tier on Thursday that lets people use small amounts of its public cloud services without charge, beyond the company’s limited-time trial. The tier includes — among other things — 1…
Earlier this week, Danish-speaking users were hit by malware spread through Dropbox, but the company responded quickly to shut down the attack. According to a research report by AppRiver, the attack hit Denmark, Germany, and several surrounding Scandinavian countries on Wednesday morning. The attack was unusual in that it narrowly targeted a specific audience, said…
The revelation through Wikileaks that the CIA has explored hacking vehicle computer control systems should concern consumers, particularly as more and more cars and trucks roll off assembly lines with autonomous features. “I think it’s a legitimate concern considering all of the computers being added to cars,” said Kit Walsh, a staff attorney with the…
The Swift language was introduced to much fanfare by Apple in June 2014, positioned as a modern successor to the Objective-C language that has driven iOS and MacOS application development. Now, Swift has cracked the top 10 in Tiobe’s language popularity index, demonstrating momentum for the fledgling language as it approaches its third birthday. But…
Google knows that if enterprises are going to move their critical services to its cloud, then it has to offer something that AWS doesn’t. At Google Cloud Next, the company’s leadership made the case that Google Cloud was the most secure cloud. At the conference this week, Google unveiled tools that would let IT teams…
WikiLeaks plans to share details about what it says are CIA hacking tools with the tech companies so that software fixes can be developed. But will software companies want it? The information WikiLeaks plans to share comes from 8,700-plus documents it says were stolen from an internal CIA server. If the data is classified — and it almost…
The international body crafting the 5G standard has approved an accelerated roadmap that could see large-scale trials and deployments in 2019 instead of 2020. At a meeting this week in Dubrovnik, Croatia, the 3GPP signed off on a 5G work plan that several top mobile operators and network vendors came out in favor of last…