Moonshot cull Alphabet has made its first closure of a "moonshot" project since founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page took a back seat at the end of last year. The victim: Makani, the Google parent's power-generating-kite venture. Losses in Alphabet's "Other Bets" segment are mounting, so CEO Sundar Pichai is under pressure to get rid of the relative duds. Financial Times
https://thehill.com/policy/technolo...oracle-in-supreme-court-battle-against-google Trump administration backs Oracle in Supreme Court battle against Google The Department of Justice (DOJ) in a filing on Wednesday urged the high court to rule in favor of Oracle in the case that Google once referred to as the "copyright case of the decade." The DOJ is arguing that Google flouted copyright law when the tech giant copied 11,500 lines of Oracle's code more than 10 years ago. The Trump administration's stance could have far-reaching consequences as the high court weighs the outer limits of copyright law in the digital age. Google v. Oracle centers on a question that has eluded Silicon Valley for over a decade: whether it is possible to copyright application-programming interfaces (APIs), computer code that allows software products to communicate with one another. Just hours before the Trump administration filed a brief in favor of Oracle, Oracle co-founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his golf course in California. https://www.businessinsider.com/ora...llison-is-fundraising-for-donald-trump-2020-2 Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison is holding a fundraiser for Donald Trump, where supporters can pay $100,000 for a golf outing and photo op with the president — and some Oracle employees are livid
Google suit Google has been hit with a class action lawsuit by people who accuse it of tracking them even when they are in Chrome's incognito mode. Google says it has always been upfront about the fact that browsing in this mode doesn't stop the collection of data about people's browsing activity—it just stops such information being saved to the user's browser or device. Fortune
Australia vs Google Google started blocking some Australian news sites as an experiment, to determine the value of its search services to said sites. The extraordinary move, which has outraged the Australian government, comes in the context of a long-running dispute over whether Google should pay to show clips of Australian news articles. BBC
Google new AR function: virtual objects are seamlessly embedded and can interact with the real world.
Google Cloud Business lost $5.6B last year… but is growing fast (50% YoY) and notched a full year revenue of$13B.
Anti-tracking With Apple set to force iOS app developers to ask users for permission before tracking them across apps and websites, Google is now reportedly planning to do the same…sort of. Bearing in mind that Google is an ad business that thrives on tracking people everywhere, here's what Bloomberg reports: "Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple’s solution." Bloomberg