Google employees listen to you, but the issue of "ghost workers" transcends Google.  Investigative journalist Tim Verheyden, who broke the story on how Google employees listen to people’s audio recordings, explains in an interview how he got hold of the story, why he is now using the encrypted contact form Secure Connect by Tutanota and why the growing number of "ghost workers" in and around Silicon Valley is becoming a big issue in Tech.

What happens when you're locked in to a vendor that's too big to fail, but is on the opposite end of a trade war? The story of Google no longer giving Huawei access to Android updates is still developing, so by the time you read this, the situation may have changed. At the moment, Google has granted Huawei a 90-day window whereby it will have access to Android OS updates, the Google Play store and other Google-owned Android assets. After that point, due to trade negotiations between the US and China, Huawei no longer will have that access.

How to get started with this useful new programming language.

Net giants depend on open source: so where's the gratitude?

Seven years ago, we started building Tutanota, an encrypted email service with a strong focus on security, privacy and open source. Long before the Snowden revelations, we felt there was a need for easy-to-use encryption that would allow everyone to communicate online without being snooped upon. As developers, we know how easy it is to spy on email that travels through the web. Email, with its federated setup is great, and that's why it has become the main form of online communication and still is. However, from a security perspective, the federated setup is troublesome—to say the least.

We need a free software mobile operating system. Is it eelo? Remember Windows? It was an operating system that was quite popular in the old days of computing. However, its global market share has been in decline for some time, and last year, the Age of Windows ended, and the Age of Android began.

Artificial intelligence is a threat—and an opportunity—for open source. It would be an understatement to say that artificial intelligence (AI) is much in the news these days. It's widely viewed as likely to usher in the next big step-change in computing, but a recent interesting development in the field has particular implications for open source. It concerns the rise of "ethical" AI.

Android apps meet the desktop in the Chromebook.

Google's Project Fi is a great cell-phone service, but the data-only SIMs make it incredible for network projects! I have a lot of cell phones. I have iPhones (old and new), Android phones (old, new, very old and funny-shaped), and I have a few legacy phones that aren't either Android or iPhone. Remember Maemo? Yeah, and I still have one of those old Nokia phones somewhere too. Admittedly, part of the reason I have such a collection is that I tend to hoard nostalgic technology, but part of it is practical too.

Now that Google Reader is officially gone, most folks have settled on a replacement of some sort. In fact, a few months ago I even went through the process of installing Tiny Tiny RSS as a viable and powerful replacement. At the time, there was only one feature I sorely missed, the "next unread blog" link.

And the Google taketh away. So it is with Google Reader. A while back, Google discontinued its Google Wave product, because it never gained traction as a social-media platform. This surprised approximately zero people. More recently, Google announced it would be closing Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Far more people were surprised, myself included.

JavaScript has had a long-standing monopoly on client-side Web programming. It has a tremendously large user base, and countless libraries have been written in it. Surely it is the perfect language with no flaws at all! Unfortunately, that is simply not the case.

Create applications inside the Chrome browser with standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

The ASUS/Google Nexus 7 arrived at my door on August 1, 2012 with a lot of anticipation from both me and the rest of the consumer electronics world. A quad-core Tegra 3 processor from NVIDIA, a 1200x800 HD IPS display covered with the latest scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass and a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera were among its most notable cool features.

For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively.

Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Drive cloud storage service.

The next revolution will be personal. Just like the last three were.