The news comes after the theory inspired attacks against UK 5G towers. It also comes after YouTube deleted a video watched by about 65,000 people in which popular conspiracy theorist David Icke claimed there "is a link between 5G and this health crisis," inspiring some commentators to call for further attacks on 5G towers. "Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of COVID-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies," YouTube stated. "This includes conspiracy theories which claim that the symptoms are caused by 5G."

In a letter sent Tuesday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) expressed concerns over whether or not the project protects user data, and inquired as to what exactly the tech giant plans to do with the information, asking, for example, if the company plans on sharing it with certain governments or research groups. “Location data sharing carries with it myriad risks, and while we commend Google’s efforts to assist in combating the coronavirus pandemic, we caution you against steps that risk undermining your users’ privacy,” the senators wrote. Blumenthal and Markey have given Pichai until April 14 to respond.

G Suite, which offers popular productivity services such as Gmail, Google Drive and more, has gained over one million customers since February 2019, when it boasted five million. The news comes after many people have been forced to work remotely because of the coronavirus, and have been increasingly using G Suite's Google Meet video-calling service, which gained 25 times more users than it did in January. According to CNBC, this could help Alphabet grow outside of advertising, which was responsible for 83% of the company's revenue in 2019. It is unclear at present how much the increase in users will affect G Suite's competitiveness. In 2018, industry-research company Gartner reported that Microsoft dominated the market for productivity suites at 87.5%, while Google only had 10.4%.

Verily was able to get rid of almost all of the mosquitoes in three test sites in California's Central Valley as a part of an experimental program, a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology reveals. The project aims to eradicate illnesses spread by mosquitoes, such as dengue fever, Zika virus, and more – conditions that kill tens of thousands of people annually worldwide – by releasing lab-bred Aedes aegypti male mosquitoes infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia, thus affecting the ability to produce offspring. After mating with female mosquitoes, who bite humans, offspring are unable to hatch. In the Central Valley trial, the infected males managed to successfully suppress over 93% of the female mosquito population from July to October 2018, Verily reveals.

The traffic was routed through Rostelecom, owned by the Russian state. In industry parlance, it was a border gateway protocol hijack, and the hijackers can store the traffic for analysis -- even at a later date as decryption technology improves. (In a BGP hijack, attackers falsely claim ownership of IP addresses and redirect internet traffic, as though one re-arranged exit signs on a highway.) Some independent experts say the hijack could be unintentional, though Rostelcom in 2017 was cited for a BGP hijack of Visa and Mastercard routes.

This story first appeared in Inside Compliance.

The company explains it is doing so to prevent disruptions during the coronavirus, especially for websites "providing essential services including banking, online groceries, government services and healthcare." However, Google will continue rolling out the changes, which it started back in February with the release of Chrome 80, during the summer. 

The site crashed after an unprecedented number of people tried filing for unemployment when a number of nonessential businesses shut down because of the coronavirus. The tech giant will be working the state's Labor Department to create a new website with an improved interface, which should be launched sometime this week.

The upgraded Google Fit now focuses more on users' steps, tracking and displaying step count as one of the main metrics where the Move Minutes measurement once was. “Many users track steps daily in Google Fit and in other apps, and it’s an important goal for them. We listened closely to our users and now both Heart Points and step count will be paired together as goals at the center of our app," Google said.

Recently, both Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have referred to Hangouts Meet as Google Meet, while Google's support landing page calls the app Google Meet, 9to5Google and Android Central point out. However, Google has not officially confirmed any changes, and the Play Store listing still reads Hangouts Meet. The news comes after Google shut down the Hangouts app and divided it into Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet a few months ago.

Deepmind published a paper in the journal Nature Physics, as well as a blog detailing the AI system and the way it can shed further light on glassy and other physical systems. As explained in the paper, the researchers determined the long-term evolution of a glass system, based on initial particle positions, using graph neural networks. In experiments, the method can predict "the locations of rearranging particles," outperforming other current methods. Modeling glassy dynamics has other uses in science, a DeepMind spokesperson told VentureBeat. In the conclusion, for example, researchers wrote that "graph networks are a versatile tool that are being applied to many other physical systems that consist of many-body interactions, in contexts including traffic, crowd simulations, and cosmology." 

This is an abbreviated version of a story that first appeared in Inside AI. For the full story, click here.