Déployée aux États-Unis depuis le 14 mai 2024, la fonction « AI Overviews » résume les pages web grâce à l'intelligence artificielle Gemini. Elle est vivement critiquée par ses premiers utilisateurs, puisque certaines de ses réponses sont complètement fausses.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As denizens of the Internet, we have all often seen a news item so ridiculous it caused us to think, "This seems like an Onion headline." But as real human beings, most of us have the ability to discern between reality and satire. Unfortunately, Google's newly launched "AI Overview" lacks that crucial ability. The feature, which launched less than two weeks ago (with no way for users to opt-out), provides answers to certain queries at the top of the page above any other online resources. The artificial intelligence creates its answers from knowledge it has synthesized from around the web, which would be great, except not everything on the Internet is true or accurate. Obviously. Ben Collins, one of the new owners of our former sister site, pointed out some of AI Overview's most egregious errors on his social media. Asked "how many rocks should I eat each day," Overview said that geologists recommend eating "at least one small rock a day." That language was of course pulled almost word-for-word from a 2021 Onion headline. Another search, "what color highlighters do the CIA use," prompted Overview to answer "black," which was an Onion joke from 2005.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has warned nonprofit newsrooms that a new California bill taxing Big Tech for digital ad transactions would jeopardize future investments in the U.S. news industry. "This is the second time this year Google has threatened to pull investment in news in response to a regulatory threat in California -- but this time, hundreds of publishers outside of California would also feel the impact," reports Axios. From the report: Google's new outreach to smaller news outlets is happening in response to a different bill, introduced this year by State Sen. Steve Glazer, that would tax Big Tech companies like Google and Meta for "data extraction transactions," or digital ad transactions. Tax revenue would fund tax credits meant to support the hiring of more journalists in California by eligible nonprofit local news organizations. With the link tax bill, Google only threatened to pull news investments in California. But the company is telling partners that the ad tax proposal will threaten consideration of new grants nationwide by the Google News Initiative, which funds hundreds of smaller news outlets, sources told Axios. Previous commitments, however, should be secure. A spokesperson for the Institute for Nonprofit News said the organization believes that grants previously committed through GNI as described here "are secure, so INN members should continue to benefit through this particular Fundamentals Labs program." Google's concern, sources familiar with the company's thinking told Axios, is that the new California ad tax bill could set a troubling wider precedent for other states. California's Senate tax committee approved the "ad tax" bill May 8. Days after that, Google started making calls to nonprofits about potentially pausing future Google News Initiative funding, sources told Axios. Opponents argue (PDF) the ad tax burden would get passed down to consumers and businesses. They also say the measure would face legal challenges, similar to a digital ad tax introduced in Maryland last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you're tired of Google's AI Overview extracting all value from the web while also telling people to eat glue or run with scissors, you can turn it off -- sort of. Google has been telling people its AI box at the top of search results is the future, and you can't turn it off, but that ignores how Google search works: A lot of options are powered by URL parameters. That means you can turn off AI search with this one simple trick! (Sorry.) Our method for killing AI search is defaulting to the new "web" search filter, which Google recently launched as a way to search the web without Google's alpha-quality AI junk. It's actually pretty nice, showing only the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, other than the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it's from 2011. Sadly, Google's UI doesn't have a way to make "web" search the default, and switching to it means digging through the "more" options drop-down after you do a search, so it's a few clicks deep. Check out the URL after you do a search, and you'll see a mile-long URL full of esoteric tracking information and mode information. We'll put each search result URL parameter on a new line so the URL is somewhat readable [...]. Most of these only mean something to Google's internal tracking system, but that "&udm=14" line is the one that will put you in a web search. Tack it on to the end of a normal search, and you'll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults. One way to edit the search URL is a proxy site like udm14.com, which is probably the biggest site out there popularizing this technique. A proxy site could, if it wanted to, read all your search result queries, though (your query is also in the URL), so whether you trust this site is up to you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Did your company recently send you a phishing email? Employers will sometimes simulate phishing messages to train workers on how to spot the hacking threat. But one Google security manager argues the IT industry needs to drop the practice, calling it counterproductive. "PSA for Cybersecurity folk: Our co-workers are tired of being 'tricked' by phishing exercises y'all, and it is making them hate us for no benefit," tweeted Matt Linton, a security incident manager at Google. Linton also published a post on the Google Security blog about the pitfalls of today's simulated phishing tests. The company is required to send fake phishing emails to its employees to meet the US government's security compliance requirements. In these tests, Google sends an employee a phishing email. If the worker clicks a link in the email, they'll be told they failed the test and will usually be required to take some sort of training course. However, Linton argues that simulated phishing tests can lead to harmful side effects, which can undermine a company's security. "There is no evidence that the tests result in fewer incidences of successful phishing campaigns," Linton said, noting that phishing attacks continue to help hackers gain a foothold inside networks, despite such training. He also pointed to a 2021 study that ran for 15 months and concluded that these phishing tests don't "make employees more resilient to phishing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google pays Reddit $60 million a year to train its AI on posts on Reddit, and it looks like Google's AI is now pulling directly from the dregs of the internet. Google's AI overview for "cheese not sticking to pizza" is brilliant information it got from an 11-year-old Reddit post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

En panne pendant plusieurs heures le jeudi 23 mai, le moteur de recherche Bing a entraîné dans sa chute plusieurs services concurrents, comme Qwant, DuckDuckGo et Ecosia. Un bon rappel de leur véritable nature : aucun de ces services ne dispose de son propre moteur.

Visiblement c'est la panique chez Google pour réussir à sortir un produit à base d'IA avant les concurrents.
(Permalink)

[Deal du jour] Les Pixel 8 et 8 Pro de Google sont des smartphones premium performants, mais proposés à des prix élevés. Le modèle Pro devient d'ailleurs bien plus intéressant lorsqu'il baisse de prix.

Ça y est, les extensions pour le navigateur Chrome conçues pour rétablir les recherches classiques sur Google arrivent. Elles sont développées en réaction à une nouvelle fonctionnalité, AI Overviews, pour l'instant lancée aux USA.

Alphabet's moonshot factory, X, is scaling back its ambitious projects amid concerns over Google's core search business facing competition from AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The lab, once a symbol of Google's commitment to innovation, is now spinning off projects as startups rather than integrating them into Alphabet. The shift reflects a broader trend among tech giants, who are cutting costs and focusing on their core businesses in response to the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google has preemptively paid damages to the U.S. government, an unusual move aimed at avoiding a jury trial in the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit over its digital advertising business. Google disclosed (PDF) the payment, but not the amount, in a court filing last week that said the case should be heard and decided by a judge directly. Without a monetary damages claim, Google argued, the government has no right to a jury trial. The Justice Department, which has not said if it will accept the payment, declined to comment on the filing. Google asserted that its check, which it said covered its alleged overcharges for online ads, allows it to sidestep a jury trial whether or not the government takes it. The Justice Department filed the case last year with Virginia and other states, alleging Google was stifling competition for advertising technology. The government has said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite. Google, which has denied the allegations, said in a statement that the Justice Department "manufactured a damages claim at the last minute in an attempt to secure a jury trial." Without disclosing the size of its payment, Google said that after months of discovery, the Justice Department could only point to estimated damages of less than $1 million. The company said the government has said the case is "highly technical" and "outside the everyday knowledge of most prospective jurors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is pouncing on Microsoft's weathered enterprise security reputation by pitching its services to government institutions. Pointing to a recent report from the US Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) that found that Microsoft's security woes are the result of the company "deprioritizing" enterprise security, Google says it can help. The company's pitch isn't quite as direct as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying he made Google dance, but it's spicy all the same. Repeatedly referring to Microsoft as "the vendor" throughout its blog post on Monday, Google says the CSRB "showed that lack of a strong commitment to security creates preventable errors and serious breaches." Platforms, it added, "have a responsibility" to hold to strong security practices. And of course, who is more responsible than Google?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica looks at what happened after Google's answer to Amazon's cloud service "accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason..." "[A]ccording to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15." UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service... UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian...." Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution)... The many stakeholders in the service meant service restoration wasn't just about restoring backups but also processing all the requests and payments that still needed to happen during the two weeks of downtime. The second must-read document in this whole saga is the outage update page, which contains 12 statements as the cloud devs worked through this catastrophe. The first update is May 2 with the ominous statement, "You may be aware of a service disruption affecting UniSuper's systems...." Seven days after the outage, on May 9, we saw the first signs of life again for UniSuper. Logins started working for "online UniSuper accounts" (I think that only means the website), but the outage page noted that "account balances shown may not reflect transactions which have not yet been processed due to the outage...." May 13 is the first mention of the mobile app beginning to work again. This update noted that balances still weren't up to date and that "We are processing transactions as quickly as we can." The last update, on May 15, states, "UniSuper can confirm that all member-facing services have been fully restored, with our retirement calculators now available again." The joint statement and the outage updates are still not a technical post-mortem of what happened, and it's unclear if we'll get one. Google PR confirmed in multiple places it signed off on the statement, but a great breakdown from software developer Daniel Compton points out that the statement is not just vague, it's also full of terminology that doesn't align with Google Cloud products. The imprecise language makes it seem like the statement was written entirely by UniSuper. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader swm for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We're migrating domains in batches..." announced web-hosting company Squarespace earlier this month. "Squarespace has entered into an agreement to become the new home for Google Domains customers. When your domain transitions from Google to Squarespace, you'll become a Squarespace customer and manage your domain through an account with us." Slashdot reader shortyadamk shares an email sent today to a Google Domains customer: "Today your domain, xyz.com, migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace Domains. "Your WHOIS contact details and billing information (if applicable) were migrated to Squarespace. Your DNS configuration remains unchanged. "Your migrated domain will continue to work with Google Services such as Google Search Console. To support this, your account now has a domain verification record — one corresponding to each Google account that currently has access to the domain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Deal du jour] Si vous comptiez changer de smartphone pour un modèle performant à un prix doux, le Pixel 7a est le bon choix. Il s’accompagne de plus d'un chargeur 30 W.

Pour la première fois en 15 ans, la nouvelle version d’Android n’a pas été mise en avant pendant la keynote inaugurale de la Google I/O. Le géant du web a préféré une annonce plus sobre, le lendemain, avec une liste de nouveautés extrêmement réduite.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After launching a feature that adds more AI junk than ever to search results, Google is experimenting with a radical new feature that lets users see only the results they were looking for, in the form of normal text links. As in, what most people actually use Google for. "We've launched a new 'Web' filter that shows only text-based links, just like you might filter to show other types of results, such as images or videos," the official Google Search Liaison Twitter account, run by Danny Sullivan, posted on Tuesday. The option will appear at the top of search results, under the "More" option. "We've added this after hearing from some that there are times when they'd prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they're looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based results shown separately from search features," Sullivan wrote. "If you're in that group, enjoy!" Searching Google has become a bloated, confusing experience for users in the last few years, as it's gradually started prioritizing advertisements and sponsored results, spammy affiliate content, and AI-generated web pages over authentic, human-created websites.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dévoilé pour la première fois en 2021, le projet Starline utilise un écran 3D géant, utilisable sans lunettes, pour donner l'impression qu'une personne est en face de soi. Il s'agit de la démonstration holographique la plus impressionnante que nous avons vue.