YouTube’s subscription service keeps your kids’ videos ad-free
It’s nice that a YouTube Red subscription gives you ad-free and offline viewing, but wouldn’t those features be more useful for keeping your kids entertained on your next vacation? YouTube agrees. You can now sign in to Red through the YouTube Kids app, giving junior viewers all the benefits without making them visit grown-up apps or sites. They won’t see promos while watching their favorite show, and they can keep playing when they’re stuck in the back of the car for a few hours. If they’re music fans, they can switch apps while their tunes play in the background. You probably won’t subscribe just for the Kids support, but it’s a strong incentive for families.
Source: YouTube Official Blog
ICYMI: Google’s so much closer to delivery by drone
Today on In Case You Missed It: Google’s Project Wing is about to take off now that the US Government signed off on the company testing drone delivery within the country; perfect timing for Google’s commercial launch of the service sometime in 2017. Physicists from the University of New Mexico created a laser that can cool a crystal down to negative 296 degrees Fahrenheit, which could be useful for infrared detectors on satellites or to detect skin cancer.
In case you didn’t see Instagram’s video launching its new story function, you should see it just to sound informed when your friends talk about whether the company blatantly stole from Snapchat. Then wash that all down with YouTuber Eric Mouellic’s video showing how close he came to a huge fin whale. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Chrome for Android makes video smoother, less power-hungry
Google set the stage for the latest Chrome for Android update by revealing that a billion hours of video are now viewed per week on the browser, much of it on mobile. The Android team consequently focused on video for release 52, saying it’s now “smoother, loads faster and consumes less battery.” A video (below) shows load times that are five times faster, a trick that will save a bit of power and time. If you use the browser’s Data Saver mode, you’ll also get lightweight, more compressed video (much like T-Mobile’s “Binge On” mode), in case your plan is close to the limit.
Google says the changes work with HTML5, so they presumably don’t fix slow-loading Flash-based video. The improvements will be mainly beneficial for short clips, though the Data Saver video mode will obviously help if you’re watching a half-hour tutorial. You might have to wait a bit for the new version, as it appears to be on a staged rollout and our editors in Europe or the US have received it yet. Now, if it could just do something about the resource-hungry desktop browser …
Source: Google
Google’s speeding up mobile web search results for all sites
The time you spend waiting for mobile search results to load is about to drop drastically. Google announced on Tuesday that it is expanding the scope of its Accelerated Mobile Pages program to include non-publishing websites.
Google initially debuted AMP back in February. The program grew out of a collaboration between the company and various online publishing partners (Engadget’s parent company, AOL, included) intended to hasten their site’s load times. Sites that made their content AMP-compatible saw load times drop by 400 percent and use a tenth of the data as conventional websites — even if the page contained bandwidth-hungry video and images. What’s more, AMP-enabled pages are highlighted in the Top Stories carousel, putting them above the standard list of results.
To date, Google’s cached more than 150 million URLs from 650,000 domains for the AMP project. The original AMP rollout was so well-received, in fact, that a number of non-publishing sites like Fandango, Disney, Food Network and eBay began integrating the technology. And soon, though Google remains mum on the exact date, those sites (and any other that use AMP) will begin seeing faster load times. They will not, however, show up any higher in the result rankings — there will reportedly be no change in Google’s search algorithm.
Source: ReCorde
Feds give Google OK to test Project Wing drone deliveries
The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has been very cautious about drone testing in the US so far, but that’s about to change. The White House has announced that Google has been given permission to test its Project Wing delivery services at six FAA-sanctioned test sites. The flights will be part of a new push by the US National Science Foundation, which is spending over $35 million on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research and testing over the next five years
Google’s Project Wing drones, first revealed in 2014, actually take off vertically then fly like a fixed-wing plane, making them a lot different from Amazon’s drones. Although it’s technically against the rules, the search giant has been testing deliveries over private land in the US already by exploiting a NASA waiver. According to a White House fact sheet, Google will not only test drones with cargo that work beyond line-of-site, but also “develop and deploy an open-interface, airspace management solution for safe low-altitude operations.”
The initiatives were unveiled during a big shindig today, with a keynote from US Chief Technology Office Megan Smith, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta and Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich. The White House emphasized that government must be more flexible about allowing companies to test tech like drones in America. Amazon, for one, recently announced that the FAA’s restrictive rules would force it to test its services in the UK.
FAA chief Huerta cited rescue operations and crop dusting as two big areas where drones could assist or replace manned aircraft. “Just last week, two people were killed in two different accidents involving crop dusters – exactly the type of job a small unmanned aircraft could do with much less risk to people and property on the ground,” he said.
Google Announces 97 Percent of YouTube Traffic is Now Encrypted
Google yesterday posted an entry on its YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog, detailing the increased encryption achieved by the company for its video streaming site. Over the past few months, Google has slowly bolstered the encryption for YouTube, and now 97 percent of the service’s traffic is encrypted using HTTPS.
The encryption-enforcing protocol provides “critical security and data integrity” for any website that uses it, and all of its visitors. YouTube said that three reasons it took the company so long to reach this high level of encryption was because of the heavy traffic the site receives daily, the breadth of devices that HTTPS needs to work on due to YouTube’s ubiquity, and “mixed content” that leads to lots of potentially non-secure requests.
We’re also proud to be using HTTP Secure Transport Security (HSTS) on youtube.com to cut down on HTTP to HTTPS redirects. This improves both security and latency for end users. Our HSTS lifetime is one year, and we hope to preload this soon in web browsers.
In the real world, we know that any non-secure HTTP traffic could be vulnerable to attackers. All websites and apps should be protected with HTTPS.
The company also pointed out that its website isn’t at a full 100 percent encryption rate yet because “some devices do not fully support modern HTTPS.” It’s doing its best to support the widest number of smartphones, tablets, and browsers with the new security protocol, but admitted that down the line, to ensure the safety of all its users, it plans to “gradually phase out insecure connections.”
Tags: Google, YouTube
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Google’s 2016 Nexus phones could feature a new launcher
While we’ve had early looks at Android Nougat for months, it appears Google may be saving other software tweaks for its next Nexus devices. Android Police has screenshots that it says show “in progress” evidence of the new software, with a replacement for the Google Search bar widget at the top, a new way to open up the app drawer and space for potentially revamped navigation buttons.
As some commenters mention, the slide-up app drawer shown in the pictures brings to mind the Android experience of we started with on the T-Mobile G1. Up top, the slide-out G button for searching and calendar widget look well-positioned for a focus on the new Google Assistant AI. As the calendar keeps turning, we’re getting closer and closer to seeing the new Nexus lineup, but even these leaks could change by then — stay tuned.
Source: Android Police
Apple drops the gun emoji for a friendlier water pistol
The news is awash in the shootings of police officers and unarmed black men, and individuals opening fire in nightclubs and public party events. In an effort to stop promoting gun violence, Apple is replacing its gun emoji with a friendlier-looking water pistol. In place of the old black and silver revolver is a bright green and orange water gun that looks very distinctly like a harmless toy.
Apple also led the decision to remove a rifle from a list of potential additions to the emoji library on all platforms, including Android. Unicode, the organization that handles the character standard, listened to the company’s request, and Microsoft agreed with this decision as well.
Apple has an additional one hundred new and redesigned emoji that will be available to iPhone and iPad users this Fall with iOS 10. These new emoji show women playing more sports and performing jobs that, before this update, only had male options. A few examples are a woman riding a mountain bike, lifting weights, and playing basketball. There will also be redesigns of popular emoji, a new rainbow flag, and more family options.
This is in an effort to bring more gender and race options to existing characters, and Google’s leading the charge. Apple, Unicode, Google, and other companies have the power to promote change, and making important tweaks to a popular way people communicate on their phones is one way to do it.
Source: Apple
Android will tell you when new devices access your Google account
If you have a Google account, few things are more disconcerting than getting a notice that an unfamiliar device just got access… especially when you only got the notice while checking your email considerably later. You might not miss that vital heads-up after today, though. Google is introducing native Android notifications that pop up whenever a new device accesses your account, giving you a chance to change your password before an intruder goes on a shopping spree using your credentials. If you’re ever suspicious, it takes one tap to review what happened.
The feature is rolling out gradually, and Google notes that it make take over two weeks for some people to see the change. Whenever it does arrive, it should provide a useful safeguard against data breaches and the surprise bills that frequently follow.
Source: Google Apps Updates
Google weaves Olympics highlight videos into your search results
Google is no stranger to providing useful info during Olympic games, but it’s kicking things up a notch for Rio. The internet behemoth has teamed up with broadcasters in 60-plus countries (including America Movil, BBC and Japan’s NHK) to integrate Olympics highlight videos into both Google search results and YouTube’s Watch Cards. It’s not the same as watching live, of course, but it could help a lot if work or time zones force you to catch up after the fact.
Logically, Google is promising plenty of raw Olympics news at the same time. Searches will turn up athlete bios, medal tallies and schedules, while the Google mobile search app can notify you when there are event and medal wins. While this kind of integration isn’t completely new, it could be more than a little helpful if you’d rather not visit sports or TV sites just to get a quick recap.
Source: Google Official Blog, YouTube Official Blog
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