TECH TREK

France to Follow Through on Tiny Google Fine

In France, data protection officials announced that they will impose sanctions against Google for the company's failure to stick to a three-month deadline to tweak its privacy policies. The fine stems from Google's melding of different privacy policies in Europe into a single policy that applies to ...

A Google Street View car dinged a pair of public transport buses and a truck in Bogor, Indonesia. The Google driver hit one bus and then tried to skedaddle when the driver got angry, police reported. Alas, the getaway was thwarted when the Street View vehicle hit a second bus -- and then a truck, ac...

China's Supreme Court announced new guidelines for Internet use, including years-long jail stints for people who author "online rumors" that are viewed more than 5,000 times or reposted 500 times. Such a post would qualify as defamation, which in China carries a max sentence of three years in jail.

TECH TREK

Yahoo China’s Days May Be Numbered

Yahoo China ceased providing news and community services Sunday, a move experts say signals that Yahoo is pulling the plug on its Chinese service. People attempting to access Yahoo China are now automatically redirected to now.taobao.com, a public welfare site run by China-based Alibaba Group, which...

Google on Tuesday announced that it is incorporating real-time traffic data from Waze into its popular Google Maps mobile application. "Users of Google Maps for Mobile will now benefit from real time incident reports from Waze users," explained Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps. "This m...

Google is making a major push into voice search with the rollout of several new capabilities, the company announced on Wednesday. Specifically, over the coming days and weeks, English-speaking users with voice search on desktops, tablets and smartphones will be able to ask Google such common queries...

Baidu, a Chinese Web company and operator of the country's top search engine, will reimburse users for scams carried out by websites that appear in its search results. This is an extension of a scheme Baidu launched in May, when it promised to compensate consumers who were scammed -- but only up t...

Google might be thinking about invading the hyperlocal news field with a new beta service that dishes up location-based information to mobile devices, perhaps including Google Glass. "I love the idea that when we eventually all have our Google Glasses, [our] award-winning journalism, events calendar...

After launching Graph Search into beta earlier this year, Facebook on Monday announced that it is now beginning to roll the feature out to everyone who uses the social network's U.S. English version. Graph Search lets users perform searches on the social network that combine phrases -- "my friends i...

I just watched a presentation by the National Association of Attorneys General, and these top law enforcers painted Google as a criminal organization with so much power that it has unusual influence over the federal government. "Intellectual Property Crimes Online: Dangerous Access to Prescription D...

Google announced over the weekend it is spearheading an initiative to build a picture-sharing database aimed at ridding the Web of child pornography. The company's new database will rely on "hashing" technology; once an image has been flagged as offensive, it uses an algorithm to identify that photo...

The European Commission is taking a closer look at whether Apple is engaging in unfair sales practices. The EC, which is the executive branch of the European Union, sent a questionnaire last week to several European mobile network operators probing Apple's distribution terms -- specifically, whether...

Google Maps, already the de facto standard for online and mobile maps, is breaking new ground with added capabilities announced on Wednesday at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco. Maps will get 3D views, speech recognition, enhanced voice search capabilities and will leverage artificial inte...

Google on Wednesday announced new APIs for Google Play services and gaming, new features for the Google Play Developer Console, and a new Android Integrated Developer Environment at the Google I/O 2013 Conference in San Francisco. Google Cloud Messaging, which pushes data from servers to Android app...

A federal court in Germany has told Google that it must remove offensive or defamatory suggestions from its autocomplete function when it receives a complaint. The case that prompted the ruling started with a German businessman who, upon culling through Google.de, found that he was associated with s...

Technewsworld Channels