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RTH10260
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Google

#1

Post by RTH10260 »

Revealed: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers across dozens of countries
The documents show Google executives and attorneys at one point pursued a plan to come into compliance slowly and at the least possible cost to itself.


Julia Carrie Wong
Fri 10 Sep 2021 18.13 BST

Google has been illegally underpaying thousands of temporary workers in dozens of countries and delayed correcting the pay rates for more than two years as it attempted to cover up the problem, the Guardian can reveal.

Google executives have been aware since at least May 2019 that the company was failing to comply with local laws in the UK, Europe and Asia that mandate temporary workers be paid equal rates to full-time employees performing similar work, internal Google documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian show.

But rather than immediately correct the errors, the company dragged its feet for more than two years, the documents show, citing concern about the increased cost to departments that rely heavily on temporary workers, potential exposure to legal claims, and fear of negative press attention.

Google executives and attorneys at one point pursued a plan to come into compliance slowly and at the least possible cost to itself, despite acknowledging that such a move was not “the correct outcome from a compliance perspective” and could place the staffing companies it contracts with “in a difficult position, legally and ethically”.

Google admitted the failures and said it would conduct an investigation after being contacted by the Guardian.


https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -documents
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Re: Google

#2

Post by bill_g »

This is where Gomer Pyle says "Sooprize Sooprize Soooprize".
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Re: Google

#3

Post by RTH10260 »

Google refuses to reinstate man’s account after he took medical images of son’s groin
Experts say case highlights well-known dangers of automated detection of child sexual abuse images

Johana Bhuiyan
Tue 23 Aug 2022 00.32 BST

Google has refused to reinstate a man’s account after it wrongly flagged medical images he took of his son’s groin as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the New York Times first reported. Experts say it’s an inevitable pitfall of trying to apply a technological solution to a societal problem.

Experts have long warned about the limitations of automated child sexual abuse image detection systems, particularly as companies face regulatory and public pressure to help address the existence of sexual abuse material.

“These companies have access to a tremendously invasive amount of data about people’s lives. And still they don’t have the context of what people’s lives actually are,” said Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a senior staff technologist at the ACLU. “There’s all kinds of things where just the fact of your life is not as legible to these information giants.” He added that the use of these systems by tech companies that “act as proxies” for law enforcement puts people at risk of being “swept up” by “the power of the state.”

The man, only identified as Mark by the New York Times, took pictures of his son’s groin to send to a doctor after realizing it was inflamed. The doctor used that image to diagnose Mark’s son and prescribe antibiotics. When the photos were automatically uploaded to the cloud, Google’s system identified them as CSAM. Two days later, Mark’s Gmail and other Google accounts, including Google Fi, which provides his phone service, were disabled over “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of the company’s policies and might be illegal”, the Times reported, citing a message on his phone. He later found out that Google had flagged another video he had on his phone and that the San Francisco police department opened an investigation into him.

Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision.

“We follow US law in defining what constitutes CSAM and use a combination of hash matching technology and artificial intelligence to identify it and remove it from our platforms,” said Christa Muldoon, a Google spokesperson.

Muldoon added that Google staffers who review CSAM were trained by medical experts to look for rashes or other issues. They themselves, however, were not medical experts and medical experts were not consulted when reviewing each case, she said.

That’s just one way these systems can cause harm, according to Gillmor. To address, for instance, any limitations algorithms might have in distinguishing between harmful sexual abuse images and medical images, companies often have a human in the loop. But those humans are themselves inherently limited in their expertise, and getting the proper context for each case requires further access to user data. Gillmor said it was a much more intrusive process that could still be an ineffective method of detecting CSAM.

“These systems can cause real problems for people,” he said. “And it’s not just that I don’t think that these systems can catch every case of child abuse, it’s that they have really terrible consequences in terms of false positives for people. People’s lives can be really upended by the machinery and the humans in the loop simply making a bad decision because they don’t have any reason to try to fix it.”






https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... nt-blocked
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Re: Google

#4

Post by raison de arizona »

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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Re: Google

#5

Post by sugar magnolia »

We still laugh about our friend getting in a screaming match with her google maps in the car when it kept trying to take us across the lake at City Park in NOLA instead of around it. If I never hear "recalculating" again I'll be fine with that.
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Re: Google

#6

Post by Volkonski »

Google Maps gives our North Fork address as being in the Hamlet of Laurel. In fact it is in Jamesport. However the directions it gives are correct.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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Re: Google

#7

Post by AndyinPA »

Google Maps has a road running next to our property for 500 feet. It's never been there. It exists on paper only. The owner once thought about putting in a small development there, but it never happened.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
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#8

Post by Suranis »

Google just announced it was laying off 12000 staff worldwide. Which coming the same day as Micro$oft announcing similar shows something could be afoot.
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#9

Post by tek »

Maybe planing on the House tanking the global economy?
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#10

Post by RTH10260 »

Mozilla Study: Data Privacy Labels for Most Top Apps in Google Play Store are False or Misleading
*Privacy Not Included researchers find discrepancies between Google Play Store’s Data Safety labels and privacy policies of nearly 80 percent of the reviewed apps

By Mozilla | Feb. 23, 2023

Google Play Store's Data Safety labels would have you believe that neither TikTok nor Twitter share your personal data with third parties. The apps' privacy policies, however, both explicitly state that they share user information with advertisers, Internet service providers, platforms, and numerous other types of companies.

These are two of the most egregious examples uncovered by Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included researchers as part of a study looking at whether Google Play Store’s new Data Safety labels provide consumers with accurate information about apps collect, use, and share personal data. In nearly 80 percent of the apps reviewed, Mozilla found that the labels were false or misleading based on discrepancies between the apps’ privacy policies and the information apps self-reported on Google’s Data Safety Form. Researchers concluded that the system fails to help consumers make more informed choices about their privacy before purchasing or downloading one of the store’s 2.7 million apps.

The study – “See No Evil: How Loopholes in the Google Play Store’s Data Safety Labels Leave Companies in the Clear and Consumers in the Dark,” – uncovers serious loopholes in the Data Safety Form, which make it easy for apps to provide false or misleading information. For example, Google exempts apps sharing data with “service providers” from its disclosure requirements, which is problematic due to both the narrow definition it uses for service providers and the large amount of consumer data involved. Google absolves itself of the responsibility to verify whether the information is true stating that apps “are responsible for making complete and accurate declarations” in their Data Safety labels.

Google Play Store's misleading Data Safety labels give users a false sense of security. Honest nutrition labels help us eat better. It's time we have honest data safety labels to help us better protect our privacy.

For the study, Mozilla compared privacy policies and labels of the 20 most popular paid apps and the 20 most popular free apps on Google Play Store. Each app was then assigned a rating of “Poor,” “Needs Improvement,” or “OK”. Apps that received a “Poor” score had major discrepancies on their Data Safety Forms in terms of types of data shared or collected, or the purposes for which the data was shared or collected. Apps that earned an “OK” score had privacy policies that were closely aligned with their disclosures on the Data Safety Form, and apps that were graded with “Needs Improvement” fell somewhere in the middle. The study found:

In nearly 80% of the apps we reviewed, Mozilla found some discrepancies between the apps’ privacy policies and the information they reported on Google’s Data Safety Form.
  • 16 out of 40 apps, or 40%, received a “Poor” grade, including Minecraft, Twitter, and Facebook.
  • 15 apps, or 37.5%, received a middle grade, “Needs Improvement,” including YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, WhatsApp Messenger, and Instagram.
  • Just 6 of the 40 apps, or 15%, received an “OK” grade. These apps were: Candy Crush Saga, Google Play Games, Subway Surfers, Stickman Legends
  • Offline Games, Power Amp Full Version Unlocker, and League of Stickman: 2020 Ninja.
  • 3 apps, UC Browser - Safe, Fast, Private; League of Stickman Acti; and Terraria did not fill out the form at all
“Consumers care about privacy and want to make smart decisions when they download apps. Google's Data Safety labels are supposed to help them do that. Unfortunately, they don't. Instead, I'm worried they do more harm than good,” said Jen Caltrider, Project Lead, Mozilla. "When I see Data Safety labels stating that apps like Twitter or TikTok don't share data with third parties it makes me angry because it is completely untrue. Of course, Twitter and TikTok share data with third parties. Consumers deserve better. Google must do better."

Caltrider added: "Google Play Store's misleading Data Safety labels give users a false sense of security. Honest nutrition labels help us eat better. It's time we have honest data safety labels to help us better protect our privacy."

Noting a 2021 Washington Post investigation that found similar problems with the Apple App Store’s labels, Caltrider said the study also brings into question whether Google and Apple can objectively police the safety of apps in their stores. Google Play and the App Store generated gross revenues of approximately $48 billion U.S. dollars and $60 billion, respectively, through mobile apps in 2021. On the heels of the Biden administration accusing both app stores of playing “a significant gatekeeping role by controlling (and restricting) how apps are distributed,” Caltrider said it’s critical the tech industry take steps to create standardized data privacy labels much like the nutrition labels now found on packaged goods and fast food menus.

“The history of nutrition labeling shows that it’s possible to create a standardized system that becomes part of the cultural fabric and makes a positive difference in people’s daily lives,” said Caltrider.




https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/priva ... isleading/
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#11

Post by John Thomas8 »

Google shoving YouTube content creators to make shorts is getting mighty annoying.
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#12

Post by RTH10260 »

Running scared of TikTok I guess.

What I see Youtubers making of this is not new content, but rather some Trailer like stuff for a video they will post real soon now, or then it is a kind of Best Of pulled from prior content.
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#13

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The Real Risks in Google’s New .Zip and .Mov Domains
While the company’s new top-level domains could be used in phishing attacks, security researchers are divided on how big of a problem they really pose.

LILY HAY NEWMAN
MAY 21, 2023 7:00 AM

AT THE BEGINNING of May, Google released eight new top-level domains (TLDs)—the suffixes at the end of URLs, like “.com” or “.uk.” These little addendums were developed decades ago to expand and organize URLs, and over the years, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has loosened restrictions on TLDs so organizations like Google can bid to sell access to more of them. But while Google's announcement included light-hearted offerings like “.dad” and “.nexus,” it also debuted a pair of TLDs that are uniquely poised to invite phishing and other types of online scamming: “.zip” and “.mov”.

The two stand out because they are also common file extension names. The former, .zip, is ubiquitous for data compression, while .mov is a video format developed by Apple. The concern, which is already starting to play out, is that URLs that look like file names will open up even more possibilities for digital scams like phishing that trick web users into clicking on malicious links that are masquerading as something legitimate. And the two domains could also expand the problem of programs mistakenly recognizing file names as URLs and automatically adding links to the file names. With this in mind, scammers could strategically buy .zip and .mov URLs that are also common file names—think, springbreak23.mov—so online references to a file with that name could automatically link to a malicious website.

“Attackers will use whatever they can to get inside an organization,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, a longtime phishing researcher and principal threat adviser at the cybersecurity firm Cofense. “Man, this all goes back a long time now. Nothing has changed.”

Researchers have already started seeing malicious actors buying up strategic .zip URLs and begin testing them in phishing campaigns. But reactions are mixed on how much of a negative impact .zip and .mov domains will have when scams that prey on URL confusion are already an inveterate threat. Additionally, proxies and other traffic management tools already deploy anti-phishing protections to cut down on the risks if users mis-click—and .zip and .mov will simply be incorporated into those defenses.

“The risk of confusion between domain names and file names is not a new one. For example, 3M’s Command products use the domain name command.com, which is also an important program on MS DOS and early versions of Windows,” Google told WIRED in a statement. “Applications have mitigations for this (such as Google Safe Browsing), and these mitigations will hold true for TLD’s such as .zip.” The company added that Google Registry already includes mechanisms to suspend or remove malicious domains across all of the company's top-level domains. “We will continue to monitor the usage of .zip and other TLDs, and if new threats emerge we will take appropriate action to protect users,” the company said.

Offering more TLDs broadens the number of URLs that are available to people. This means you have more choices and don't necessarily have to pay a premium to buy the site name you want from an existing owner or speculator who bought up a bunch of historic URLs. And some in the security community feel that, given the already extensive risk of phishing attacks, additions like .zip and .mov add negligible additional danger.

“I don't agree with the assertion that the new TLDs will increase the effectiveness of phishing in any meaningful way—primarily because people are already so easily fooled by URLs,” says security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the breach-tracking service HaveIBeenPwned. “Not only can we, myself included, not tell the difference between so many ambiguous characters, we also usually have no idea what the correct URL is for many services. I bet you this all blows over before you know it with no incidents of consequence.”




cont. at https://www.wired.com/story/google-zip- ... ing-risks/
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#14

Post by RTH10260 »

Google pushes .zip and .mov domains onto the Internet, and the Internet pushes back
Will new TLDs undo decades of work to stop malicious links?

DAN GOODIN -
5/18/2023, 11:47 PM

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... -scammers/
Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world
Did we forget about .pl, .sh and oh yeah, .com ?

iconThomas Claburn
Wed 17 May 2023 // 09:22 UTC

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/ ... v_domains/
Google's new .zip and .mov domains are a security incident waiting to happen

ADAM CONWAY
PUBLISHED MAY 15, 2023

https://www.xda-developers.com/google-z ... -security/
Beware the .zip and .mov domains!
Website names in the ZIP and MOV domains are indistinguishable from file names. How will this affect IT systems, and what will threat actors do?

Stan Kaminsky
May 23, 2023

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/zip-mov- ... ion/48254/
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#15

Post by RTH10260 »

and for the chrome browser ...
Zip and Mov Domain Blocker

Blocks traffic to .zip and .mov domains. That's it - nothing more, nothing less.
SImple extension that blocks traffic calls to .zip and .mov domains. Nothing to configure as that is all it does.

If you install and legitmately need to access a .zip or .mov domain, you will need to disable the extension.

A future version may include a whitelist feature. No plans for this at the moment though.

Created as a quick workaround for .zip domain phishing.
Available thru the Chrome Extension menu setting.
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#16

Post by RTH10260 »

don't forget your older stuff ...
Updating our inactive account policies

May 16, 2023
Ruth Kricheli VP, Product Management

People want the products and services they use online to be safe and secure. Which is why we have invested in technology and tools to protect our users from security threats, like spam, phishing scams and account hijacking.

Even with these protections, if an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised. This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised, haven't had two factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user. Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up. Meaning, these accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam.

To reduce this risk, we are updating our inactivity policy for Google Accounts to 2 years across our products. Starting later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents – including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar) and Google Photos.

The policy only applies to personal Google Accounts, and will not affect accounts for organizations like schools or businesses. This update aligns our policy with industry standards around retention and account deletion and also limits the amount of time Google retains your unused personal information.



more at https://blog.google/technology/safety-s ... -policies/
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#17

Post by RTH10260 »

also too, the quick way to delete site cookies will change...
Google Chrome Dropping Lock Icon from URL Box

Tyler Cross
Published on: May 4, 2023

Google Chrome, the popular browser hosted by Google, is removing the lock icon from the URL box, claiming it may actually be helping hackers phish information from their victims.

Since the 1990s, browsers have displayed the lock icon to show a secure connection when a site loads over HTTPS. In the past, websites were rarely built with HTTPS. According to a report by Google’s security team, only 14% of the Alexa top one million sites supported HTTPS, but nowadays, over 95% of websites that display on Chrome support HTTPS.

Since plenty of phishing hackers use HTTPS now, it’s no longer a genuine badge of security and can even trick users into thinking an unsafe website is secured. Google found that only about 11% of users understood what the lock actually meant.

In the past, the protection of your data from third-party sources from an HTTPS website was a lot more guaranteed, especially given its rareness, but since HTTPS is the norm and cyber attacks are on the rise, Google is modifying its approach to security. The update is set to roll out with the Chrome 117 update in early September. The update is also being applied to Android devices.

The lock icon is being replaced with a new icon that serves similar functions. Like the original lock icon, this new tune icon will be located on the URL bar and when clicked, will display additional information about the website, like its cookies. If your connection isn’t secure, Chrome will still inform you, so there’s no loss of any security benefits.

According to Google, it believes this new tune icon will be more obviously clickable, will be closer to appearing like a settings button, and most importantly, won’t give users a false sense of security.


https://www.safetydetectives.com/news/g ... m-url-box/
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#18

Post by RTH10260 »

Youtube seems to have some dirty marketing tricks up its sleeves

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#19

Post by RTH10260 »

Youtube

(seems we do not have a separate thread for it as business)

When getting the link to a video by using the Share button, the link will newly include a "SI=" parameter. This seems to be a reference to the source. This can be deleted.
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#20

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#21

Post by AndyinPA »

I happily use Firefox's AdBlock. I don't know what it's like to see crappy ads and be followed around. Except on the iPhone. :think:
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#22

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#23

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Google agrees to pay $700m after antitrust settlement with consumers and US states
The company was accused of overcharging consumers but did not admit wrongdoing

Reuters
Tue 19 Dec 2023 07.57 CET

Google has agreed to pay US$700m and to allow for greater competition in its Play app store, according to the terms of an antitrust settlement with US states and consumers disclosed in a San Francisco federal court.

Google was accused of overcharging consumers through unlawful restrictions on the distribution of apps on Android devices and unnecessary fees for in-app transactions. It did not admit wrongdoing.

The company will pay $630m into a settlement fund for consumers and $70m into a fund that will be used by states, according to the settlement, which still requires a judge’s final approval.

The settlement said eligible consumers will receive at least $2 and may get additional payments based on their spending on Google Play between 16 August 2016 and 30 September 2023.





https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -us-states
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#24

Post by RTH10260 »

Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead
Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.

RON AMADEO -
2/2/2024, 10:09 PM

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don't see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google's page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the "Google Bot" web crawler views the web. The pages aren't necessarily rendered like how you would expect. In the past, pages were text-only, but slowly the Google Bot learned about media and other rich data like javascript (there are a ton of specialized Google Bots now). A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like. In 2020, Google switched to mobile-by-default, so for instance, if you visit that cached Ars link from earlier, you get the mobile site. If you run a website and want to learn more about what a site looks like to a Google Bot, you can still do that, though only for your own site, from the Search Console.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world's webpages.




https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02 ... -webpages/
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#25

Post by RTH10260 »

older
Google announces April 2024 shutdown date for Google Podcasts
Does this mean YouTube Podcasts is ready for prime time?

RON AMADEO -
12/8/2023, 7:58 PM

Google Podcasts has been sitting on Google's death row for a few months now since the September announcement. Now, a new support article details Google's plans to kill the product, with a shutdown coming in April 2024.

Google Podcasts (2016–2024) is Google's third attempt at a podcasting app after the Google Reader-powered Google Listen (2009–2012) and Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020). The product is being shut down in favor of podcast app No. 4, YouTube Podcasts, which launched in 2022.

View more storiesGoogle support article details how you can take your subscriptions with you. If you want to move from Google Podcasts to YouTube Podcasts, Google makes that pretty easy with a one-click button at music.youtube.com/transfer_podcasts. If you want to leave the Google ecosystem for something with less of a chance of being shut down in three to four years, you can also export your Google Podcast subscriptions as an OPML file at podcasts.google.com/settings. Google says exports will be available until August 2024.

With the shutdown of Google Podcasts coming, we might assume YouTube Podcasts is ready, but it's still a pretty hard service to use. I think all the core podcast features exist somewhere, but they are buried in several menus. For instance, you can go to youtube.com/podcasts, where you will see a landing page of "podcast episodes," but there's no clear way to add podcasts to a podcast feed, which is the core feature of a podcast app. YouTube still only prioritizes the regular YouTube subscription buttons, meaning you'll be polluting your video-first YouTube subscription feed with audio-first podcast content.



https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12 ... goes-live/
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