Google not only updated its advice on hiring an SEO document, but also created a new one named Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice. This document drills into how to evaluate the advice you get from these sources and some tips to think critically about such SEO advice.

Google has updated its help document titled Do you need an SEO? Google said the changes are to help when "evaluating your SEO's recommendations and tools, along with other minor updates to the page to simplify and modernize the content." But the document also added a section for Optimizing for generative AI and making sure your SEO follows Google's guidelines around that topic.

Google launched Search Profiles late last week, a way for creators and publishers to have a place on Google to highlight its content and platforms. And Google seems to be testing a new Insights section for Search profiles, where you can see how searchers are interacting with your Search profiles on Google.

Google is paying SpaceX for access to about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, but enterprise cloud buyers still do not know whether the deal will improve Google Cloud capacity.

The post Google-SpaceX $30B Compute Deal Raises Cloud Buyer Questions appeared first on TechRepublic.

Microsoft Bing announced a new way to disable the Copilot, Microsoft AI, responses from showing up in the Bing search results. There is a new browser extension available for Chrome and Edge that you can install to toggle off showing AI responses, or you can just add -ai to the end of your query.

Google has confirmed that the search company has no plans on making AI Mode the default search experience within Google Chrome. This comes after Chrome Canary added a new experimental flag that redirected searches from the address bar directly to AI Mode. According to Rajan Patel, a Google VP, that was an error.

For remote workers and IT professionals juggling multiple devices, this VPN deal is worth a serious look.

The post ExpressVPN Is on Sale for $40: A Great Deal for Remote Teams appeared first on TechRepublic.

Last year, WhatsApp made history by securing a landmark verdict and permanent injunction barring NSO Group — a spyware firm blacklisted for actions contrary to US national security — from targeting WhatsApp and its users ever again. The court was unequivocal: NSO violated the federal and state laws against hacking. Today, we’re asking the court to hold them in contempt of that order.

Catching and Disrupting NSO’s Targeting Attempts

We successfully disrupted NSO-linked social engineering attempts, after investigating user reports. They tried to trick people into clicking on malicious links to drive them to external websites outside of WhatsApp, similar to previously reported 1-click phishing campaigns linked to NSO. We also caught them creating test accounts and groups on WhatsApp, which we took down. 

We are sharing threat indicators so that anyone can check if they were targeted by NSO-linked social engineering attempts across any platform — be it text message, email, WhatsApp message, or something else.

Spyware Is a National Security Threat

Since 2019, our case has shown that NSO continues to build spyware tools to target people’s devices. Its CEO confirmed in court that the company  looks for “vectors, or ways to access the phone” beyond WhatsApp, targeting browsers, operating systems, and other applications. 

No technology is off-limits to surveillance-for-hire firms, whose reported targets range from journalists to government officials, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations. 

When a malicious company on the US government’s Entity List continues to defy US courts, existing restrictions must remain firmly in place. Easing them would undermine US national security and put American companies and billions of people worldwide who depend on secure communications at risk.

No Company Can Fight Spyware Alone

When we originally discovered NSO’s 2019 attack, Citizen Lab helped us investigate it and notify the people who were targeted. When the case first went to trial, our industry peers and other organizations supported it, strengthening the legal record. 

Last month, we were joined by 12 prominent civil rights organizations — a coalition of security researchers, privacy advocates, and digital rights experts — who filed their amicus briefs to fight NSO’s appeal against the permanent injunction. 

Today, we are beginning to deliver on our promise to support digital rights organizations working to defend people against spyware attacks by making a significant contribution to the Spyware Accountability Initiative (SAI). SAI supports dozens of organizations worldwide focused on forensic research, user support, and advocacy. 

For example, a Citizen Lab zero-day discovery led to an Apple security update for over a billion devices. This year, a Greek court issued the first-ever criminal conviction of spyware company executives, a case built on forensic evidence and investigative reporting by civil society.

This work is demanding, often dangerous, and consistently under-resourced compared to the spyware industry that continues to develop new exploits. We’re committed to doing our part to support this critical effort.

As always, WhatsApp users’ personal messages and calls remain protected with default end-to-end encryption. We encourage people to keep their apps and devices up to date and report suspicious activity so we can quickly investigate and take action. For those who believe they may be targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks, we strongly recommend enabling strict account settings to harden their WhatsApp accounts even more.

Threat Indicators Malicious domains:

• hxxps://ikhwancast[.]com
• hxxps://ghazacast[.]com
• hxxps://fr24cast[.]com

The post Fighting Spyware: An Update From WhatsApp appeared first on Meta Newsroom.

AI toys are finding their way into Australian homes and schools, raising new concerns about how children’s data and safety are protected.

The post AI-Powered Toys Spark Privacy Concerns in Australia appeared first on TechRepublic.

The Google Tunix Hackathon on Kaggle challenged developers to transform small, non-reasoning base models into general reasoning engines using Kaggle TPUs and a limited compute budget. The winning teams achieved this by implementing multi-stage post-training pipelines that combined Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with advanced alignment techniques like GRPO and SimPO. Ultimately, the competition democratized AI development by proving that highly capable, structured reasoning models can be successfully trained by the community using accessible, open-source resources.

Google has announced the general availability of Gemini Embedding 2, a unified model that maps text, images, video, audio, and documents into a single semantic space. This model allows developers to process interleaved multimodal inputs in a single request, significantly improving performance for tasks like agentic RAG, visual search, and content moderation. By supporting over 100 languages and offering features like task-specific prefixes and Matryoshka dimensionality reduction, the model provides a highly efficient and accurate foundation for building complex AI agents.

I reviewed the best nonprofit CRM software for donor management, fundraising, volunteer tracking, event management, integrations, reporting, pricing, and ease of use.

The post Best Non Profit CRM Software for Donor Management in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Discover the best software development project management tools, tested for agile teams, DevOps pipelines, and enterprise delivery.

The post 7 Best Software Development Project Management Tools in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 12B model brings agentic, multimodal AI capabilities to everyday laptops with 16GB of RAM, enabling local data processing and visual insight generation. Users can leverage this model on macOS through the Google AI Edge Gallery for dynamic Python code execution and visualization, as well as via Google AI Edge Eloquent for completely offline voice dictation and text editing. Additionally, developer workflows are enhanced by the LiteRT-LM CLI's new serve command, which creates an industry-compatible local endpoint to power fully-local AI tools and agents.

The newly released Gemma 4 12B is a dense, multimodal model designed for high-performance local AI execution on consumer devices. By introducing a novel, encoder-free architecture, it bypasses traditional visual and audio encoders to feed multimodal data directly into the LLM backbone.

Google is unifying its AI terminal tools by transitioning the community-focused Gemini CLI into Antigravity CLI, a new agent-first platform built for complex, multi-agent workflows. This new Go-based tool offers faster execution, asynchronous processing, and a unified architecture that syncs with the Antigravity 2.0 desktop application. While enterprise customers will maintain existing access, individual and free users must transition to the new platform before Gemini CLI stops serving requests on June 18, 2026.

The Google Cloud and NVIDIA developer community is celebrating its first anniversary with 100,000 members and a renewed focus on providing builders with advanced AI infrastructure and resources. To accelerate development, the community offers curated learning pathways for mastering LLM optimization, GPU-accelerated data analytics, and monthly expert-led webinars. Moving into its second year, the initiative will expand to include hands-on labs, engineering events, and specialized content focused on the growth of agentic AI.

Google announced the transition from assistive AI to independent agents, highlighting the launch of the Gemini 3.5 series and major updates to its Antigravity agent-first development platform. For mobile developers, the post introduces new Android CLI tools, the Android Bench evaluation leaderboard, and an automated Migration agent designed to rapidly convert various frameworks into native Kotlin code. Web development is also being transformed through Chrome DevTools for agents, the HTML-in-Canvas API, and the proposal of WebMCP, an open web standard that enables browser-based AI agents to execute complex tasks.

Google AI Edge’s LiteRT-LM provides a production-proven, highly optimized infrastructure for running Gemma 4 across cross-platform mobile and edge environments. It actively unlocks the model's native multimodal and agentic features on-device by utilizing memory-efficient dynamic loading, Multi-Token Prediction for up to a 2.2x speedup, and advanced orchestration tools like Thinking Mode and Constrained Decoding. Furthermore, the engine is rapidly expanding its integration surfaces beyond Android, introducing new native Swift APIs for Apple ecosystems and WebGPU-accelerated JavaScript APIs for high-performance, serverless browser inference.

The Google AI Edge Gallery app has expanded its on-device AI capabilities by introducing experimental support for the open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Android, allowing Gemma 4 to coordinate complex tasks across external data sources like Google Workspace and Google Maps. To enable more proactive and persistent user interactions, the update adds a "Schedule Notification" skill for automating routines and a persistent chat history feature that restores long session contexts nearly instantly. Driven by an open-source toolkit, the platform encourages community developers to build and share custom utility-focused workflows, prompt configurations, and tool integrations via its GitHub repository.