Google rebrands its security features and calls it Play Protect

Some of you might notice something new in your Play Store app. Google announced back at I/O 2017 a new rebrand of its security features, which they’ve called Play Protect. Now, we’re seeing an instance of this show up on Google Play Store. Play Protect will be scanning apps before you download them to make sure you download apps that adhere to Google’s rules. At the same time, it watches the apps that run on your devices to see if they’re doing anything dodgy. If they are, you’ll get a notification and the app will be booted from the Play Store. You can see this in action or at least know you have it working on your phone under the “Updates” section of “My apps & games.” There you can manually scan apps and see if any of them have any issues. Some Play Store listings have also started to get “Verified by Play Protect.”

If you select the Play Protect button that has started to show up in the Play Store’s hamburger menu, it’ll then take you to the Play Protect settings page. From there you can opt to disable device scanning as well as the sending of unknown apps to Google. Now, if you disable this feature, the card under Updates will vanish but the menu items stay.

Source: 9to5Google

Coldplay will livestream its August 17th concert in virtual reality

Can’t be in Soldier Field in Chicago on August 17^th for Coldplay’s “A Head Full of Dreams Tour” concert there? It can seem like you’re there, if you have a Samsung Gear VR. Coldplay will be streaming its show there in virtual reality using Samsung’s VR headset. The live broadcast will be available on Samsung Gear VR service for 51 countries (including Canada). The show will stream on the 17^th starting at 8:30 p.m. CT. A replay of the concert will be available for a limited time on Samsung VR. 

Google engineer who penned ‘anti-diversity memo’ gets fired, files labor complaint

If you’re paying close attention to the recent tech news, one of the biggest things to come out of Silicon Valley, or Google to be more specific, is this “anti-diversity memo,” as it’s being called, written by a now ex-Google engineer. James Damore, who’s written the manifesto, was just fired by the company on Monday for “perpetuating gender stereotypes” and violating Google’s code of conduct. Damore was arguing in the memo that the biological differences between men and women are the cause of the gender gap at Google and in the tech industry in general. And he puts to question Google’s diversity efforts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke up, or rather wrote down his thoughts in a note to employees saying, "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."

On the day Damore was fired, he also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in the US saying that Google’s upper management has been “misrepresenting and shaming” him. “I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Damore told The New York Times. And he seems to have a case on his hands, at least enough to “get through the courtroom door,” as one lawyer points out to Wired that “Damore's lawyer might argue that his memo was protected under California law, because it related to allegedly unequal treatment of employees.”

Source: The Verge

HBO hackers demand ransom after leaking some internal data online, including personal numbers & addresses of ‘Game of Thrones’ stars

Sky Atlantic

HBO’s headache over its recent security breach is far from over. The hackers who got into HBO’s system have supposedly released 3.4GB of the reported 1.5TB of data it obtained from the company. While it was discovered that upcoming Game of Thrones episodes don’t look like they’ve been taken, things like scripts for upcoming GoT episodes, technical documents with HBO’s internal network and administrator passwords, and unreleased episodes of Room 104 and Ballers have landed into the hands of the hackers.

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