Google has once again pulled YouTube from Amazon services such as FireTV and plans to appoint a staff of 10,000 to weed out extremist content on YouTube. Plus, Android 8.1 is out today.
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From Reddit – Google is going to war with Amazon over YouTube on services like Amazon FireTV and Amazon’s Echo Show devices. Google fired the first shots a few months ago when it took YouTube off the Echo Show, followed by Amazon refusing to sell Google Assistant embedded Nest devices. Google relented and put YouTube back up on the Echo Show, but yesterday it announced that it has immediately removed YouTube from the Echo Show, and on January 1st it will remove the video service from FireTV. In a statement made yesterday, Google said that since Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and stopped selling Nest devices, it will no longer support YouTube on those devices until an agreement can be reached.
From Reddit – Google is increasing the number of its employees tasked with tracking down and preventing extremist content on YouTube to 10,000 in 2018. According to YouTube, ‘bad actors’ have used the video platform to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm others. So far the company has developed a ‘computer-learning’ technology that helps with quickly identifying and removing radical content. Supposedly hundreds of minutes of this type of video are uploaded each minute.
And from Reddit once more – Android Oreo 8.1 has been officially released today to all Pixel and recent Nexus devices. It isn’t a huge update, with the biggest feature added being Pixel Visual Core on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL that will improve the speed and save battery when taking HDR photos. It also includes Android Oreo Go edition for devices with under 1 gig of RAM that will include performance and storage improvements and a new set of lightweight Google Apps for lower-end devices. Unfortunately, still no word on when the majority of other Android devices will receive this update.
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