Google has expanded its vulnerability rewards program (VRP) to include attack scenarios specific to generative AI. From a report: In an announcement shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication, Google said: "We believe expanding the VRP will incentivize research around AI safety and security and bring potential issues to light that will ultimately make AI safer for everyone." Google's vulnerability rewards program (or bug bounty) pays ethical hackers for finding and responsibly disclosing security flaws.

Given that generative AI brings to light new security issues, such as the potential for unfair bias or model manipulation, Google said it sought to rethink how bugs it receives should be categorized and reported. The tech giant says it's doing this by using findings from its newly formed AI Red Team, a group of hackers that simulate a variety of adversaries, ranging from nation-states and government-backed groups to hacktivists and malicious insiders to hunt down security weaknesses in technology. The team recently conducted an exercise to determine the biggest threats to the technology behind generative AI products like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan on Thursday detailed challenges the search and advertising giant faces from smaller rivals, describing efforts to avoid becoming "the next road kill." From a report: Raghavan testified at the ongoing antitrust trial in the suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging Alphabet's Google unlawfully abused its dominance in the search-engine market to maintain monopoly power. Raghavan, asked about a 1998 article about Yahoo!'s dominance of search at the time, said he was acutely aware rivals from Expedia.com to Instagram to TikTok competed for users' attention.

"I feel a keen sense not to become the next road kill," said Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google who reports to chief executive Sundar Pichai. Raghavan said Google had some 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality. Raghavan's description of Google struggling to stay relevant clashed with the Justice Department's depiction of a behemoth that broke antitrust law to retain dominance of online search and some aspects of advertising, including paying an estimated $10 billion annually to smartphone makers and wireless carriers to be the default search engine on devices. Google's share of the search engine market is near 90%.

Google has worried for years that Apple would one day expand its internet search technology, and has been working on ways to prevent that from happening. From a report: For years, Google watched with increasing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its longtime partner and sometimes competitor would eventually build its own search engine. Those fears ratcheted up in 2021, when Google paid Apple around $18 billion to keep Google's search engine the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The same year, Apple's iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users richer web results like those they could have found on Google.

Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple's search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google's Chrome web browser instead of Apple's Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple's control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Google's anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company's complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google's mobile ads business for more than a decade.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world must treat the risks from artificial intelligence as seriously as the climate crisis and cannot afford to delay its response, one of the technology's leading figures has warned. Speaking as the UK government prepares to host a summit on AI safety, Demis Hassabis said oversight of the industry could start with a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hassabis, the British chief executive of Google's AI unit, said the world must act immediately in tackling the technology's dangers, which included aiding the creation of bioweapons and the existential threat posed by super-intelligent systems.

"We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, like climate change," he said. "It took the international community too long to coordinate an effective global response to this, and we're living with the consequences of that now. We can't afford the same delay with AI." Hassabis, whose unit created the revolutionary AlphaFold program that depicts protein structures, said AI could be "one of the most important and beneficial technologies ever invented." However, he told the Guardian a regime of oversight was needed and governments should take inspiration from international structures such as the IPCC.

"I think we have to start with something like the IPCC, where it's a scientific and research agreement with reports, and then build up from there." He added: "Then what I'd like to see eventually is an equivalent of a Cern for AI safety that does research into that -- but internationally. And then maybe there's some kind of equivalent one day of the IAEA, which actually audits these things." The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is a UN body that promotes the secure and peaceful use of nuclear technology in an effort to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons, including via inspections. However, Hassabis said none of the regulatory analogies used for AI were "directly applicable" to the technology, though "valuable lessons" could be drawn from existing institutions. Hassabis said the world was a long time away from "god-like" AI being developed but "we can see the path there, so we should be discussing it now."

He said current AI systems "aren't of risk but the next few generations may be when they have extra capabilities like planning and memory and other things ... They will be phenomenal for good use cases but also they will have risks."

IFTTT in a blog post said that Amazon is removing the service from Alexa beginning October 31st. "Once the integration is severed, users won't be able to ask Alexa to trigger IFTTT applets," reports The Verge. "Certain automations will stick around in the IFTTT app, but some will be archived on November 1st unless you take action." From the report: If your IFTTT applets use a specific phrase or question as the trigger ("Alexa, trigger..." or "Alexa, what's on my to-do list?"), that will convert to using an IFTTT button widget that you can either use in the app or add to your smartphone's homescreen. But all other triggers set up through Alexa -- say, an automation that runs when you add something to your to-do list -- will be archived. You will also have to remove any Alexa ingredients from your applets or they'll stop working.

IFTTT suggests a few alternatives to pursue to keep using it. In addition to button widgets, users can try Apple Shortcuts or the IFTTT note widget. It's also still integrated with Google Assistant, though voice commands have to start with "activate" before an applet will trigger.

Mark Harris, reporting at IEEE: Expect traffic on the 101 highway in Mountain View, California, to be even worse in the days or weeks ahead, as motorists slow down to watch Google co-founder Sergey Brin's 124-meter long airship Pathfinder 1 launch into the air for the first time. IEEE Spectrum has learned that LTA Research, the company that Brin founded in 2015 to develop airships for humanitarian and cargo transport, received a special airworthiness certificate for the helium-filled airship in early September. That piece of paper allows the largest aircraft since the ill-fated Hindenburg to begin flight tests at Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport in Silicon Valley, with immediate effect.

The certificate permits LTA to fly Pathfinder 1 within the boundaries of Moffett Field and neighboring Palo Alto airport's airspaces, at a height of up to 460 meters (1500 feet). That will let it venture out over the south San Francisco Bay, without interfering with planes flying into or out of San Jose and San Francisco International commercial airports. In a letter supporting its application for the certificate, LTA wrote: "Pathfinder 1's experimental flight test program is to demonstrate and establish the flight envelope for the airship.... LTA's test plan is tailored to include substantial indoor and outdoor ground testing, using a build-up approach to gradually increase the flight envelope." The huge airship will initially be attached to a mobile mast for outdoor ground testing, before conducting about 25 low-level flights, for a total of 50 hours' flight time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: SiFive, one of the key companies in the RISC-V ecosystem, is undergoing a significant restructuring marked by extensive layoffs and apparently a shift in business focus, reports More Than Moore. The company is seemingly retracting from its pre-designed core offerings, which means it may focus on custom cores instead. Meanwhile, the move casts uncertainty over SiFive's future in general along with its contributions to the RISC-V.

RISC-V has become quite a popular choice for making miniature low-cost cores, but there are several companies who are working on higher-performance RISC-V-based offerings. SiFive is one of such companies offering ready-to-use designs and also making custom cores based on what customers need. But now, SiFive has laid off somewhere between 100 to over 300 employees from around 700 in mid-October. Most of these were engineers, along with some sales and product personnel. Meanwhile, the company's leaders, including CEO Patrick Little, are still there. SiFive issued the following statement to Tom's Hardware: "As we identify and focus on our greatest opportunities, SiFive is shifting to best meet our customers' fast-changing requirements by undergoing a strategic refocusing of all our global teams. Unfortunately, with this realignment, approximately 20% of employees across all different business groups and levels were impacted. The employees are receiving severance and outplacement assistance.

SiFive continues to be excited about the long-term opportunities for the company and for RISC-V. The growth of the company has never been stronger and the opportunities never better. We are well funded for years in the future and continue to work with the market leaders in every segment. We remain focused on our four product groups, essential, intelligence, performance and automotive, and as we explained in a press event earlier this month, have a robust roadmap to meet the needs of these markets. We see tremendous new opportunities in AI and with Consumer products like wearables and mobile as Google brings Android to the RISC-V ecosystem. We will continue to offer customization for specific customers, offering standard and custom products where it makes sense from a business standpoint."

Since disclosing a security breach of its support systems Friday, Okta has shed more than $2 billion from its market valuation "Okta shares slumped more than 11% Friday after the company said an unidentified hacking group was able to access client files through a support system," reports CNBC. "The company did not provide more details beyond a set of technical identifiers. The company's stock continued to fall in Monday trading, ultimately closing down 8.1%." From the report: Okta is a lesser-known name but forms a critical part of cybersecurity systems at major corporations. The identity management company boasts more than 18,000 customers who use its products to provide a single login point for many different platforms that a given company uses. Zoom, for example, uses Okta to give "seamless" access through a single login to the company's Google Workspace, ServiceNow, VMware and Workday platforms. Okta said it had communicated with all affected clients in Friday's announcement. At least one of those clients said it had alerted Okta about a potential breach weeks earlier. [...]

Okta has also been at the center of other higher-profile incidents. Earlier this year, for example, casino giants Caesars and MGM were both affected by hacks. Caesars was forced to pay millions in ransom to the hacking group, sources told CNBC. MGM had to shut down critical systems that the company acknowledged would have a material effect on its bottom line in an SEC filing. The direct and indirect losses from those incidents totaled over $100 million. Both those attacks targeted MGM and Caesars' Okta installations, using a sophisticated social engineering attack that went through IT help desks. Three other companies were also targeted by the hacking group, an Okta executive told Reuters.

Okta has also been a target before. A hacking group purportedly accessed numerous Okta systems in a March attempt. That group, Lapsus$, has been tied to hacking attacks at Uber and Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, according to a report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Most Android users have probably never seen Google Play Protect in action. The malware-scanning service is built into every Android device and is supposed to flag malware that users have installed. Recently it flagged some popular apps that are very much not malware: Samsung Wallet and Samsung Messages.

As spotted by 9to5Google, Samsung users have been getting hit with Play Protect warnings since earlier this month. Users on the Google Support forum have posted screenshots of Play Protect flagging the Samsung system apps, and even Samsung responded to the issue, explaining (in Korean) how to fix any damage caused by the bug. Samsung says (through translation) the issue was caused by "a temporary failure of the Google server" and should now be fixed.

Downloading Chrome using Microsoft Edge is already a nightmare filled with banners and stop-gaps, and nothing seems to be stopping Microsoft from adding even more. From a report: Last weekend, we noticed that an attempt to download Google Chrome using Microsoft Edge results in the latter opening its sidebar with a poll, asking you to explain to Microsoft how you could dare try downloading Google Chrome. Of course, the exact wording is more tame, but you get the idea. Now, besides dismissing several banners and a full-size ad injected on the Chrome website, Edge wants you to answer a questionnaire with the following options:

We love having you! Can you please take a minute to tell us why you are trying another browser?

I can't search Google easily
I can't access my Google documents
I don't have my favorites or passwords here
Too many ads and pop-ups
I don't like the news feed
It's too slow
My websites don't work on Microsoft Edge
My reason is not listed

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists' work to train their models without the creator's permission. Using it to "poison" this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless -- dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists' copyright and intellectual property.

Zhao's team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to "mask" their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. The team intends to integrate Nightshade into Glaze, and artists can choose whether they want to use the data-poisoning tool or not. The team is also making Nightshade open source, which would allow others to tinker with it and make their own versions. The more people use it and make their own versions of it, the more powerful the tool becomes, Zhao says. The data sets for large AI models can consist of billions of images, so the more poisoned images can be scraped into the model, the more damage the technique will cause.

Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data -- in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Nightshade messes with those images. Artists who want to upload their work online but don't want their images to be scraped by AI companies can upload them to Glaze and choose to mask it with an art style different from theirs. They can then also opt to use Nightshade. Once AI developers scrape the internet to get more data to tweak an existing AI model or build a new one, these poisoned samples make their way into the model's data set and cause it to malfunction. Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample. Nightshade is going to make AI companies think twice, "because they have the possibility of destroying their entire model by taking our work without our consent," says Eva Toorenent, an illustrator and artist who has used Glaze.

"I'm just really grateful that we have a tool that can help return the power back to the artists for their own work," added Autumn Beverly, another artist.

Google is adding some new features to the Google Play Games Beta on PC, its service that lets you play Android games on a PC, including support for 4K screen resolution on "supported monitors" and for popular console gaming controllers. From a report: Google detailed the updates in a blog post from Arjun Dayal, Google Play Games' director of product. With the new support for 4K, you can now pick your screen resolutions while in game. "Simply press Shift + Tab in any game to select from a menu of supported resolutions," according to Dayal. The game controllers that are now supported include the Xbox Series X / S controller, the Xbox One controller, Sony's DualSense controller for PS5, and its DualShock controller for PS4. Google isn't the only company that's making it easier to use your other controllers on its platform; Apple added iOS support for the DualSense and Xbox Series X controllers with iOS 14.5, while Valve rolled out DualSense support in Steam in 2020.

Google is getting ready to test a new "IP Protection" feature for the Chrome browser that enhances users' privacy by masking their IP addresses using proxy servers. From a report: Recognizing the potential misuse of IP addresses for covert tracking, Google seeks to strike a balance between ensuring users' privacy and the essential functionalities of the web. IP addresses allow websites and online services to track activities across websites, thereby facilitating the creation of persistent user profiles. This poses significant privacy concerns as, unlike third-party cookies, users currently lack a direct way to evade such covert tracking.

While IP addresses are potential vectors for tracking, they are also indispensable for critical web functionalities like routing traffic, fraud prevention, and other vital network tasks. The "IP Protection" solution addresses this dual role by routing third-party traffic from specific domains through proxies, making users' IP addresses invisible to those domains. As the ecosystem evolves, so will IP Protection, adapting to continue safeguarding users from cross-site tracking and adding additional domains to the proxied traffic. "Chrome is reintroducing a proposal to protect users against cross-site tracking via IP addresses. This proposal is a privacy proxy that anonymizes IP addresses for qualifying traffic as described above," reads a description of the IP Protection feature. Initially, IP Protection will be an opt-in feature, ensuring users have control over their privacy and letting Google monitor behavior trends.

Matter -- the IOT connectivity standard with ambitions to fix the smart home and make all of our gadgets talk to each other -- has hit version 1.2, adding support for nine new types of connected devices. From a report: Robot vacuums, refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers are coming to Matter, as are smoke and CO alarms, air quality sensors, air purifiers, room air conditioners, and fans. It's a crucial moment for the success of the industry-backed coalition that counts 675 companies among its members. This is where it moves from the relatively small categories of door locks and light bulbs to the real moneymakers: large appliances.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the organization behind Matter, released the Matter 1.2 specification this week, a year after launching Matter 1.0, following through on its promise to release two updates a year. Now, appliance manufacturers can add support for Matter to their devices, and ecosystems such as Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings can start supporting the new device types. Yes, this means you should finally be able to control a robot vacuum in the Apple Home app -- not to mention your wine fridge, dishwasher, and washing machine.

The initial feature set for the new device types includes basic function controls (start / stop, change mode) and notifications -- such as the temperature of your fridge, the status of your laundry, or whether smoke is detected. Robot vacuum support is robust -- remote start and progress notifications, cleaning modes (dry vacuum, wet mopping), and alerts for brush status, error reporting, and charging status. But there's no mapping, so you'll still need to use your vacuum app if you want to tell the robot where to go.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple was caught flat-footed when ChatGPT and other AI tools took the technology industry by storm. But the company is now preparing its response and plans to develop features for its full range of devices. One of the most intense and widespread endeavors at Apple right now is its effort to respond to the AI frenzy sweeping the technology industry. The company has some catching up to do. Apple largely sat on the sidelines when OpenAI's ChatGPT took off like a rocket last year. It watched as Google and Microsoft rolled out generative AI versions of their search engines, which spit out convincingly human-like responses to users' queries. Microsoft also updated its Windows apps with smarter assistants, and Amazon unveiled an AI-enhanced overhaul of Alexa. All the while, the only noteworthy AI release from Apple was an improved auto-correct system in iOS 17.

Apple's senior vice presidents in charge of AI and software engineering, John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, are spearheading the effort. On Cook's team, they're referred to as the "executive sponsors" of the generative AI push. Eddy Cue, the head of services, is also involved, I'm told. The trio are now on course to spend about $1 billion per year on the undertaking. Giannandrea is overseeing development of the underlying technology for a new AI system, and his team is revamping Siri in a way that will deeply implement it. This smarter version of Siri could be ready as soon as next year, but there are still concerns about the technology and it may take longer for Apple's AI features to spread across its product line. Federighi's software engineering group, meanwhile, is adding AI to the next version of iOS. There's an edict to fill it with features running on the company's large language model, or LLM, which uses a flood of data to hone AI capabilities. The new features should improve how both Siri and the Messages app can field questions and auto-complete sentences, mirroring recent changes to competing services.

Japan's antitrust watchdog has begun an investigation into whether Alphabet's Google abuses its market position to block rival services, compounding scrutiny of the internet leader's business practices across the globe. From a report: The country's Fair Trade Commission has begun a probe centered on allegations of potential antitrust violations, an official with the agency said, confirming a Nikkei report. It plans to solicit information and views on the matter from the public, the official added. The agency plans to examine whether Google inappropriately asked smartphone makers to prioritize its search services on their devices.

The Japanese investigation marked the first time the commission has consulted with third parties from the outset of an individual probe, agency officials told reporters in Tokyo. The probe could widen to include Android phone makers found to be complicit in antitrust activity, an official said, without elaborating. Japan's review comes on top of an antitrust case the US has mounted against the global search leader. Federal regulators accuse Google of abusing its dominance to block startups and larger rivals such as Microsoft, a key argument in the biggest tech anti-monopoly case since the 1990s.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: For years, tech companies like Open AI have freely used news stories to build data sets that teach their machines how to recognize and respond fluently to human queries about the world. But as the quest to develop cutting-edge AI models has grown increasingly frenzied, newspaper publishers and other data owners are demanding a share of the potentially massive market for generative AI, which is projected to reach to $1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Since August, at least 535 news organizations — including the New York Times, Reuters and The Washington Post — have installed a blocker that prevents their content from being collected and used to train ChatGPT. Now, discussions are focused on paying publishers so the chatbot can surface links to individual news stories in its responses, a development that would benefit the newspapers in two ways: by providing direct payment and by potentially increasing traffic to their websites. In July, Open AI cut a deal to license content from the Associated Press as training data for its AI models. The current talks also have addressed that idea, according to two people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, but have concentrated more on showing stories in ChatGPT responses.

Other sources of useful data are also looking for leverage. Reddit, the popular social message board, has met with top generative AI companies about being paid for its data, according to a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. If a deal can't be reached, Reddit is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing, which would prevent the forum from being discovered in searches and reduce the number of visitors to the site. But the company believes the trade-off would be worth it, the person said, adding: "Reddit can survive without search."
"The moves mark a growing sense of urgency and uncertainty about who profits from online information," the article argues. "With generative AI poised to transform how users interact with the internet, many publishers and other companies see fair payment for their data as an existential issue."

They also cite James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, who suggests Open AI's decision to negotiate "may reflect a desire to strike deals before courts have a chance weigh in on whether tech companies have a clear legal obligation to license — and pay for — content."

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

Is Google laying the groundwork for a true challenger to language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise and Babbel? In a blog post on Thursday, the search giant announced that it's rolling out a new Google Search feature designed to help people improve their English speaking skills. TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers reports: Rolling out over the next few days for Search on Android devices in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela, with more countries and languages to come in the future, the new feature will provide interactive speaking practice for language learners translating to or from English, Google writes in a blog post. "Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners, providing translations, definitions, and other resources to improve vocabulary," reads the the post, attributed to Google Research director Christian Plagemann and product manager Katya Cox. "Now, learners translating to or from English on their Android phones will find a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback."

The new experience presents Search users with prompts and asks them to speak the answers using a provided vocabulary word. During each practice session, which last 3 to 5 minutes, Search gives personalized feedback -- and the option to sign up for daily reminders to keep practicing and advance to the next stage of difficulty. How personalized is it, exactly? Well, according to Google, the experience gives semantic feedback -- indicating whether a response was relevant to a given question and comprehensible to a theoretical conversation partner. It also recommends areas where grammar could be improved, and, to give concrete suggestions for alternative ways to respond, provides a set of example answers at varying levels of language complexity. During practice sessions, learners can tap on any word they don't understand to see a translation of that word that considers the word in context.

"Designed to be used alongside other learning services and resources, like personal tutoring, mobile apps and classes, the new speaking practice feature on Google Search is another tool to assist learners on their journey," Plagemann and Cox write. [...] "We look forward to expanding to more countries and languages in the future, and to start offering partner practice content soon," Plagemann and Cox continued. "With these latest updates, which will roll out over the next few days, Google Search has become even more helpful."

theodp writes: In July, Seattle-based and tech-backed nonprofit Code.org announced its 10th policy recommendation for all states "to require all students to take computer science (CS) to earn a high school diploma." In August, Washington State Senator Lisa Wellman phoned-in her plans to introduce a bill to make computer science a Washington high school graduation requirement to the state's Board of Education, indicating that the ChatGPT-sparked AI craze and Code.org had helped convince her of the need. Wellman, a former teacher who worked as a Programmer/System Analyst in the 80's before becoming an Apple VP (Publishing) in the '90s, also indicated that exposure to CS given to students in fifth grade could be sufficient to satisfy a HS CS requirement. In 2019, Wellman sponsored Microsoft-supported SB 5088 (Bill details), which required all Washington state public high schools to offer a CS class. Wellman also sponsored SB 5299 in 2021, which allows high school students to take a computer science elective in place of a third year math or science course (that may be required for college admission) to count towards graduation requirements.

And in October, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi appeared before the Washington State Board of Education, driving home points Senator Wellman made in August with a deck containing slides calling for Washington to "require that all students take computer science to earn a high school diploma" and to "require computer science within all teacher certifications." Like Wellman, Partovi suggested the CS high school requirement might be satisfied by middle school work (he alternatively suggested one year of foreign language could be dropped to accommodate a HS CS course). Partovi noted that Washington contained some of the biggest promoters of K-12 CS in Microsoft Philanthropies' TEALS (TEALS founder Kevin Wang is a member of the Washington State Board of Education) and Code.org, as well some of the biggest funders of K-12 CS in Amazon and Microsoft -- both which are $3,000,000+ Platinum Supporters of Code.org and have top execs on Code.org's Board of Directors.