Get ready to see more red warning signs online as Google Inc adds ammunition to its technological artillery for targeting devious schemes lurking on Web sites.
The latest weapon is aimed at Web sites riddled with “unwanted software” — a term that Google uses to describe secretly installed programs that can change a browser’s settings without a user’s permission.
Those revisions can unleash a siege of aggravating ads or redirect a browser’s users to search engines or other sites that they did not intend to visit.
Google had already deployed the warning system to alert users of its Chrome browser that they were about to enter a site distributing unwanted software.
The company just recently began to feed the security information into a broader “safe browsing” application that also works in Apple Inc’s Safari and Mozilla Corp’s Firefox browsers.
All told, the safe browsing application protects about 1.1 billion browser users, according to a blog post yesterday that Google timed to coincide with the 26th anniversary of the date when Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited for inventing the World Wide Web.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer does not tap into Google’s free safe browsing application. Instead, Explorer depends on a similar warning system, the SmartScreen Filter.
Google yesterday said that the safe browsing application has been generating about 5 million warnings a day, a number likely to rise now that unwanted software is now part of the detection system.
As it is, Google says it discovers more than 50,000 malware-infected sites and more than 90,000 phishing sites per month.
The safe browsing application had gotten so effective at flagging malware and phishing that shysters are increasingly creating new unwanted software in an attempt to hoodwink people, Google product manager of safe browsing Stephan Somogyi said.
“The folks trying to make a buck off people are having to come up with new stuff and that puts us in a position where we have to innovate to keep pace with these guys,” Somogyi said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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