Skip to main content

Google is helping protect the Internet with Project Shield

Before you can take over the world, you have to save it — and that’s precisely what Google is now aiming to do with Project Shield. The commendable initiative, which was first launched in 2013, is a free service that employs Google’s technology to guard sites, particularly those concerned with news and free expression, from denial of service attacks (DDoS). In a blog post published on Thursday, Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw and adviser to Alphabet Inc.’s executive chairman, announced the expansion of the program, which he noted would give “tens of thousands of news sites … access to Project Shield,” including “even the smallest independent news organizations.”

For the last few years, Project Shield has existed in a testing capacity, focusing especially on news sites that are frequently the targets of DDoS attacks as a sort of censorship tool. As Cohen writes in his blog post, “The Web is an increasingly critical tool for news organizations … Often it’s the primary distribution channel for critical, investigative work that shines a light into the darkest corners of society and the economy — the kind of reporting that exposes wrongdoing, causes upset and brings about change.” And as the number of these smaller, independent news organizations grow, so too have the frequency of attacks that have attempted to silence them.

Recommended Videos

So as of February 25, any and all independent news sites will be able to apply to Project Shield — preference will be given to smaller outlets, as they often lack the resources to sufficiently guard against such malicious attempts themselves. “Just about anyone who’s published anything interesting has come under an attack at some point,” Project Shield team leader George Conard told Wired. “The smaller and more independent voices often don’t have the resources, whether technical or financial, to really put good protections in place … That’s where we come into the picture.”

Once an outlet joins Project Shield, it’s able to change its domain name configuration so that visitors are redirected to a Google server, which in turn acts as a sort of “reverse proxy” that can “filter out malicious traffic and cache some elements of the site to lighten the load on the website’s own computers,” Wired explains.

This, Google hopes, will help protect journalism, and ultimately improve upon “the health of the Internet by mitigating against a significant threat for publishers and people who want to publish content that some might find inconvenient.”

“A free and open Internet depends on protecting the free flow of information — starting with the news,” Cohen concludes.

Lulu Chang
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Google coming for Duolingo as it launches language learning feature
Google's Little Language Lessons

Learning a new language is one of those goals that many people share, but is hard to achieve in practice. Tools like Duolingo have gained popularity by gamifing the language learning experience, but now Google has taken its own approach, rolling out an experimental set of playful language learning tools powered by its Gemini AI.

Google describes the new feature, called Little Language Lessons, as "a collection of three bite-sized learning experiments, all powered by Google’s Gemini models." The idea is to tweak language tips to the particular context you're currently in -- such as visiting a restaurant, taking a flight, or dealing with a travel problem like a lost passport.

Read more
Google adds Spanish and French to NotebookLM in huge language update
Google video explaining Audio Overview languages.

NotebookLM is one of Google's lesser-used AI products but it introduced a feature that's becoming increasingly popular -- Audio Overviews. The company already brought it over to Gemini and plans to add the feature to Google Docs in the next few months too. Until now, Audio Overviews has been an English-only tool but as of this week, it's available in over 50 languages.

The NotebookLM platform is all about putting together notebooks of information and different sources and using LLMs to interact with them. Audio Overviews is basically a fancy summary tool -- it lets you generate audio summaries of your selected sources that are presented in the style of a podcast with two AI hosts.

Read more
Amazon launches its first internet satellites to rival SpaceX Starlink
Amazon's KA-01 mission for Project Kuiper gets underway from the Space Coast.

Amazon has successfully launched its first satellites for the company’s Project Kuiper internet-from-space service, which will take on SpaceX’s Starlink service.

The satellites launched aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from  Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7 p.m. ET on Monday.

Read more