YouTube is under fire for allowing troubling videos to get past its filters on an app designed specifically for younger viewers, according to a report this weekend by The New York Times. The Google-owned website is the largest video site in the world, with more than a billion people visiting a month. The affected service, YouTube …

James Comey has ditched his Twitter pseudonym for something more straightforward: @Comey. The former head of the FBI went public on the social media platform on Monday, with, what else, a tweet. “Here’s my new handle,” Comey wrote. “Glad to be part of the Twitterverse. Grateful to Reinhold for the cover these last few years.” Here’s my new handle. Glad …

A year ago, Facebook released Workplace, its answer to the popular collaborative tool Slack. Early Thursday, Facebook said it’s expanding the software’s chat capabilities. Workplace’s chat feature has always had mobile and browser components, but Facebook is adding a desktop app. From it, employees can do screen sharing, file sharing and video chat. It’s available for Mac and PCs, as …

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is hoping its high-flying internet balloons can help the people of Puerto Rico, about a month after Hurricane Maria made landfall. On Friday, the search giant announced some balloons from its Project Loon program had been deployed over Puerto Rico, in an effort to provide people with limited internet access. That will allow for basic activities …

Google Lens is here, and it promises to do no less than change the way you find information about the world around you. Announced in May by the company behind the world’s biggest search engine, Lens lets you find details on different things in the real world by pointing your phone’s camera at them. Take a picture of a book, …

Facebook is trying again to be cool with teens. The tech giant said Monday it’s buying tbh, a social network popular with teens that lets people send compliments to each other through anonymous quizzes. Facebook didn’t disclose an acquisition price. Facebook will let tbh, which stands for “to be honest,” operate as it did before, similar to how it runs …

Facebook is bringing Stories, the photo and video feature it cribbed from Snapchat, to yet another part of its platform. This time, the feature is coming to Pages, which are official Facebook pages used by brands, including publishers, artists, athletes and businesses. Stories are strings of video clips and photos that disappear after 24 hours. The format was first developed …

It’s not just Facebook, Twitter and Google. Even Pokemon Go, the mega-popular smartphone game that became a phenomenon last year, was the target of Russian agents trying to meddle with the 2016 US election, according to a report Thursday by CNN. The effort was allegedly centered on a campaign called “Don’t Shoot Us,” an apparent reference “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” …

Ever since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone a decade ago, gadget lovers, the press and industry watchers have waited for Google to make its move. The battle became the stuff of tech lore, akin to the rivalries of the ages: Coke versus Pepsi, Magic versus Bird, Yankees versus Red Sox. So when Google finally released its first branded, flagship phone …

Last October, Rick Osterloh, the head of Google’s newly minted hardware division, stood on stage in San Francisco and made his pitch to consumers everywhere: Google is not just for Googling anymore. Instead, he said, come to Google for physical products that fit in your pocket or live in your house: a phone, a smart speaker, a Wi-Fi router. It …