Homes where murders occurred

A number of Google Home Mini devices that were distributed to members of the press had a defect that caused them to record everything being said around them. This discovery renewed privacy concerns surrounding smart speakers as surreptitious listening devices in our homes. The problem was first discovered by Android Police. Once being notified, Google investigated and fixed the issue: The Google Home team is aware of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Mini devices that could cause the touch control mechanism to behave incorrectly. We immediately rolled out a software update on October 7 to mitigate the issue. Who is affected: People who received an early release Google Home Mini device at recent Made by Google events. Pre-ordered Google Home Mini purchases aren’t affected. As a general matter, Google Home and Amazon Alexa devices must “listen” to surrounding conversations to capture “wake words” (e.g.,”Alexa,” “OK … [Read more...] about Echo and Home will probably have to tell you they’re always listening — in Europe

Earlier today Google announced that you will now be able shop with Google Assistant on Google Home. This duplicates functionality already available on Amazon’s Alexa devices. Inventory is available from “participating Google Express retailers, including Costco, Whole Foods Market, Walgreens, PetSmart, Bed Bath & Beyond and more than 50 other national and locally available retailers.” To start shopping you need to set up a delivery address and a payment method in the Google Home app. Unfortunately this was not an intuitive process (for me at least), despite suggestions that it would be. I was trying to do this on my daughter’s Home; my account was not already linked. It might be easier from set up with a Google account that already has payment credentials on file. To motivate adoption and participation, through the end of April, Google is waiving its Google Express delivery and membership charges, which can either be $4.99 per store or $95 for an annual … [Read more...] about Now you can shop with Google Home — just like on Amazon Echo

We’ve all seen them; those annoying messages that crop up on screen when we try and bring up a website. But do you know what they mean? We researched the many HTTP error messages in use, and the following is an explanation of each one in simple terms, together with advice on what to do when you are party to that message. 300 Series – Redirection Messages 300 HTTP Error (Multiple Choices) This error message indicates that the particular site or other resource you are trying to access is no longer in that location. You will see the code plus a choice of new locations. The message could be caused by an incomplete URL or one that includes other locations within it; perhaps a list of ‘inner’ pages that may need to be individually selected. What to do: in the first instance, enter the URL you are using in the browser. You may see a web page asking you for another action; if this is case, you are using a URL that the browser considers to be short on specific detail. … [Read more...] about Most Common HTTP Errors Explained & How to Fix Them

In our article on link prospect qualification, we downplayed the difficulty of finding link prospects. Here’s why: the time you spend finding a link prospect pales in comparison to the time it takes to analyze that prospect for its relevance to your keywords, its overall value to your link building goals and the potential it will convert into a link. However, because it takes so long to qualify link prospects, we decided to create a tool and a worksheet for “pre-qualifying” link prospects based on the sites that occur most frequently in the search engine results pages for a given set of keywords – SERPs Dominators. This article walks you through the tools, processes and strategies for identifying the most powerful players in your keyword space, and then analyzing their link sources and link building tactics. Who are SERPs dominators? SERPs Dominators are the sites and individual URLs that appear most frequently in the SERPs for your target, most-profitable … [Read more...] about The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities

A lot of web pages and documents reuse the same text in sidebars and in footers at the bottoms of pages, like copyright notices and navigation sidebars. Computer programmers will sometimes use the term “boilerplate” code to refer to standard stock code that they often insert into programs. Lawyers use legal boilerplate in contracts – often the small print on the back of a contract that doesn’t change regardless of what a contract is about. It might be a good step for a search engine to ignore boilerplate text when it indexes pages, or uses the content of pages to create query suggestions for someone using a desktop personalized search. Ignoring boilerplate in the same documents could be helpful when using those documents to rerank search results in personalized search. Is Google ignoring boilerplate on pages when it indexes those pages and tries to understand what the pages are about? Does it disregard the words in your copyright notice, or the use of … [Read more...] about Google Omits Needless Words (On Your Pages?)