Google facing new legal challenges over handling of child data - The UpStream

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

For anyone who has used a computing device other than iPhone or iPad at any time in the past few decades, there is one commonality - the ability to determine default apps for common tasks. The behavior is such an important piece of computing that, when Microsoft began to build their web browser, Internet Explorer, into Windows 98SE and beyond, Europe was afraid they were going to eliminate the ability to change the default browser option. That wasn't the plan, but it didn't stop worry, anger, and an anti-trust case.

It was just two weeks ago that Nvidia finally took its long-awaited GeForce Now cloud gaming platform out of beta and certified it as ready for the market. When the platform launched, it was populated by games from nearly every major game publisher. In some cases, the platform had direct connections to developer platforms, such as Activision Blizzard's Battle.net and Ubisoft's Uplay.

If there is any company in the United States that understands the fallout from not completely complying with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), it's Google. In the past few months, the company was on the receiving end of a Federal Trade Commission fine, which ultimately changed the entire community policy for YouTube. However, this seems to have had little to no effect on the wider Google, as they are once again in trouble.

We have long predicted that consumer burnout would ultimately lead to consolidation among video streaming services. To subscribe to all of the services that are available would cost far above the already outrageous cost of cable television. This leads to consumers having to choose which content they are willing to skip, which is not what any of the streaming services want. No one wants to be the service that is the one being skipped, so inevitably, the smaller services would be integrated into the larger ones. This week, reports have surfaced that two of the smaller video services are under contract to join two of the larger media companies.