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At a press conference Friday, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx walked through how the (now confirmed non-existent) project would work. Photo: GettyDuring a Friday press conference to declare the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency—“two very big words”, mind you—President Donald Trump and other White House members…

The release notes also indicate that the app will make it easier to turn lights on and off with the Lights quick action. It's still unclear what's changing, though. As 9to5Google notes, those shortcuts are already available at the top of the main tab.There's a chance that Google is making…

Photo: GettyThe tumultuous divide between full-time staff and contract workers at Facebook and Google has come to a head recently, with this distinction now purportedly determining who deserves to work from home amid an ongoing global pandemic.Throughout this week, several big names in tech have begun recommending that their workforce…

A recent Buzzfeed investigation discovered that several popular VPN and adblocking apps for Android and iOS secretly collected user data and sent it to Sensor Tower, a cross-platform data analytics service for app developers. The snooping apps include:Adblock Focus (Android and iOS)Free and Unlimited VPN (Android)Luna VPN (Android and iOS)Mobile…

Screenshot: David Murphy (Google)Whether you have multiple personalities or you don’t like dropping your personal phone number into every email you reply to, editing your signature on a per-email basis can get annoying. While plenty of third-party apps allow you to pick from multiple signatures when composing or replying to…

Google’s NYC offices, March 2018.Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)Google has asked all of its North American employees—well over 100,000, counting all those working under parent company Alphabet, and a similarly massive number of contractors—to work from home due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, Business Insider reported on Tuesday.The request applies…

Customers wearing protective facemasks visit an Apple store in Hong Kong on February 22, 2020.Photo: Vivek Prakash (GettyA Senate subcommittee on Tuesday took aim at what one witness described as a “dire threat” to the digital marketplace—the processes by which “platform monopolists” such as Google allegedly maintain a stranglehold over…

Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)While COVID-19 may have forced Google to cancel in-person attendance of Google I/O 2020, that doesn’t mean the company isn’t working on new gadgets to show off like the rumored Pixel 4a and potentially now this: a Chromecast Ultra powered by Android TV. The latest info on…

The new Doodle honors the progress made by women since the late 1800s. Image: google By Natasha Piñon2020-03-08 04:00:00 UTC It's almost International Women's Day, and your Google homepage is ready to celebrate.  To mark the occasion, Google is debuting a new Doodle with a global and cross-generational appeal.  The…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019,…