WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned texting app, is going dark for a few days in Brazil. A judge ordered the blackout after the company failed to comply with a court order asking WhatsApp to turn over data tied to a criminal investigation. The story was first reported by local newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. This isn’t the first …

Google wants you to buy more of its devices. To get you to do that, the search giant is shaking up the way it runs its hardware business. Google is bringing all of its disparate devices, from its Nexus smartphones to its Chromecast streaming sticks, together under one group, the company confirmed. The division will be run by Rick Osterloh, …

It’s a given that the most important thing to Google — the company/verb/website that’s synonymous with finding things using the Internet — is its search business. Now, as the company lays out its master plan for the future, Google is making sure that business is injected with a healthy dose of artificial intelligence. At least that’s the big takeaway from …

The tech world is obsessed with two things right now: virtual reality and live video. So why not combine them? That’s what YouTube is doing. The Google-owned video behemoth said Monday that it’s launching live streaming for so-called 360 videos, which let you look up, down and all round a scene. To kick things off, the site will live-stream a …

Graduation is coming. You’re worried you wasted a lot of money on a fancy piece of paper because you’ll never find a job. LinkedIn wants to calm your nerves. The professional social network on Monday will release an app dedicated to helping college kids find their first job out of school. The app, called Linkedin Students, has students enter their …

Facebook isn’t working on artificial intelligence just to let you text with robots. (Though it’s doing that, too.) It’s also using the technology to do something much simpler: help you quickly find the photos you’re searching for or the videos you want to see on the social network. The company showed off several new ways to use “machine learning,” a …

Mark Zuckerberg was once the boy king of Silicon Valley. Now he wants to be the bot king of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg, who famously started Facebook in his dorm as a cherub-faced sophomore at Harvard, has said repeatedly that it’s his mission to connect every person on the planet. Now we know that doesn’t just mean connecting people to other …

Now playing: Watch this: Bot Invasion! Prepare for chatbots on Facebook Messenger,… 2:49 Last week, I tried to see if I could live without Facebook. I didn’t purposefully avoid it. I just wanted to figure out how much I actually use the social network that’s sucked up so much of the world’s time since Mark Zuckerberg created it more than …

Police “assisted” Google security at the company’s corporate campus in Mountain View, California, after a threat Friday, according to a tweet from the Mountain View Police Department. The police said there were no injuries. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The race to pick the bones of Yahoo is picking up. Verizon will make a bid to buy up Yahoo’s Web business next week, while Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is also “weighing” an offer, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Verizon is also willing to buy the Internet portal’s stake in Yahoo Japan, worth about $8.5 billion, to sweeten the deal, …