In the wake of the firing of Timnit Gebru and other notable AI researchers at Google, Alphabet’s circled the wagons and lawyered up. Reports flow out of Mountain View depicting teams of lawyers censoring scientific research and acting as unnamed collaborators and peer-reviewers. Most recently, Business Insider managed tointerviewseveral researchers who painted a startling and bleak picture of what it’s like to try and conduct research under such an anti-scientific regime....

In celebration of the upcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29, Googlehas been chosenby St. James’s Palace to provide its computing infrastructure for the Royal Wedding website which went live today. The website, located atwww.officialroyalwedding2011.org, is hosted on Google’s App Engine, a development platform that allows developers to build and host web apps on Google’s own computing infrastructure. Apps can be deployed quickly, run more securely and can be scaled, features that make it a reliable platform for such a high-profile national occasion....

Google has todaybroughtthe itsChromebrowser officially up to version 10. This was launched in beta last month, but from today all users of the standard ‘Stable’ release will get access to some useful new features. First, the browser is faster, with a claimed 66% improvement in JavaScript performance. It’s more secure, too. Google has extended ‘sandboxing’ to Chrome’s built-in Flash player. This means that malicious code in Flash content should be unable to cause harm to your computer....

The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. TheWebM Projectwaslaunchedlast year to bring an open, world-class video codec to the web. Since the launch, we’ve seen first-hand the benefits of an open development model. With a singleblog postto the Chromium Blog, Google has opened up a pretty hefty can of worms when it comes to web video in the Chrome browser....

Google’s Chrome browser exceeded 20% of the global Internet browser market in June for the first time, according toStatCounter, the website analytics firm. The research found that Chrome took 20.7% of the global market last month, which is up from a mere 2.8% in June 2009. In the same period, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) has fallen from 59% to 44% globally, whilst Firefox dropped slightly from 30% to 28%. Chrome is already ahead of Firefox in South America, and the browsers are neck-and-neck in the UK....