The ad-blocking Brave web browser startup has landed two blows on Google: It dumped the search engine for rival Qwant in France and Germany, and it lodged a formal complaint in Europe against Google’s ad privacy practices. Brave picked Qwant, which bills itself as “the search engine that respects your privacy,” as part of its …
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Starting at 9 a.m. PT today, CNET News Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo and CNET senior editor Vanessa Hand Orellana are leading a Reddit AMA on r/IAMA about everything Apple revealed Wednesday at its fall event. They’ll discuss what they thought after their first look at the new hardware, what the announcements mean for the future of Apple and the tech industry, and anything …
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Writing got a lot easier when spellcheckers and grammar checkers arrived on the scene. Now Facebook is using artificial intelligence to give programmers a similar boost with a tool called SapFix that’ll debug their software. “SapFix can automatically generate fixes for specific bugs, and then propose them to engineers for approval and deployment to production,” Facebook engineers Yue Jia, Ke …
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Google’s parent company, Alphabet, says it’s reached a new milestone in its ambitious plan to beam the internet to remote populations. The project, called Loon, would send giant, high-flying balloons into the stratosphere to deliver LTE signals to the ground. On Tuesday, Loon said it sent a signal farther than it has before: 1,000 kilometers, or more than 621 miles, …
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Facebook is expanding its Community Help feature to the Lite version of its app. This will enable people to mark themselves “safe” in crisis situations, share updates, and find or offer help. The feature was previously only available in the full versions of Facebook’s apps or on browsers. The Lite version of the social network’s app takes up less space …
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You know that feeling when something is important to you but other people just don’t care? That’s how some congressional lawmakers felt this week after Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and, notably, no one from Google testified for a combined eight hours before two committees. The hearings were kind of important, given that they focused on hot-button …
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Now playing: Watch this: CNET UK Podcast 544: We debate 8K and Twitter faces the… 35:10 Twitter, Facebook and Google are in a showdown with politicians. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg were the latest tech titans to face questioning. Katie Collins and Richard Trenholm weigh up Dorsey’s performance this week as he tackled questions about alleged …
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A Senate hearing on Wednesday was supposed to put Facebook and Twitter under the microscope, but Chinese device makers Huawei and ZTE ended up catching some of the flak, too. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg came to Capitol Hill to offer insight about how foreign governments are using their sites to spread misinformation on social media …
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Twitter returned to its role of punching bag Wednesday over suggestions of partisan bias, at a US House hearing grilling CEO Jack Dorsey. A Senate hearing earlier in the day, which also questioned Facebook‘s Sheryl Sandberg, barely mentioned political censorship, but the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee opened its session with words about bias and “shadow banning.” “We hope you can …
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Facebook hit BlackBerry with a lawsuit Tuesday, claiming the company stole its voice-messaging technology and other patented processes. The social media giant accused BlackBerry of infringing on six patents in a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, Bloomberg reports. Beyond the voice-messaging patent, Facebook says the Canadian business software provider and one-time phone giant infringed on tech used to …
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