Google unveils plans for 1m sq ft London headquarters Google has released designs for a new 11-story, 1 million-square-foot headquarters in London near King's Cross railway station, complete with a sprawling, landscaped rooftop garden. The facilities will include a cafe, gym and pool as well as a rooftop track and ground-floor retail spaces, according to the company's application for permission to build. The campus has been designed by an all-star team that includes Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer behind London's 2012 Olympic cauldron, and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels' BIG firm. CNN

After 0 successful submissions, Google quadruples top reward for hacking Android to $200,000 Google has paid security researchers millions of dollars since launching its bug bounty program in 2010. The company today expanded its Android Security Rewards program because "no researcher has claimed the top reward for an exploit chain in two years." Right. Well, the program has only been around for two years --- a Google spokesperson confirmed that nobody has ever claimed the top reward. Venture Beat

Intel CEO sees VR sports as a billion dollar business Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told Axios on Thursday that he sees virtual reality not only changing the face of sports, but also potentially being a multi-billion-dollar business for the chip giant. "I think it can be a couple billion dollar business" he said in an interview after his appearance at Code Conference. "And the reason is this is a whole new feed... things like advertising, the ability to take that data and sell it... we're the only ones who we believe can produce this stuff." Axios

Why we're suing the FBI for records about Best Buy Geek Squad informants Sending your computer to Best Buy for repairs shouldn't require you to surrender your Fourth Amendment rights. But that's apparently what's been happening when customers send their computers to a Geek Squad repair facility in Kentucky. We think the FBI's use of Best Buy Geek Squad employees to search people's computers without a warrant threatens to circumvent people's constitutional rights. EFF

Walmart is turning its employees into delivery drivers to compete with Amazon Walmart, which is aggressively investing in e-commerce to better compete with Amazon, is unveiling a new strategy: turning its army of 1.5 million US employees into delivery drivers. The tactic is being tested at three stores in New Jersey and Arkansas, and designed to shave costs out of the "last mile" of distribution, the most expensive part of getting goods to customers. Quartz

Exploring DynamIQ and ARM's New CPUs: Cortex-A75, Cortex-A55 ARM moves at an aggressive pace, pushing out new processor IP on a yearly cadence. It needs to move fast partly because it has so many partners across so many industries to keep happy and partly because it needs to keep up with the technology its IP comes into contact with, everything from new process nodes to higher quality displays to artificial intelligence. To keep pace, ARM keeps multiple design teams in several different locations all working in parallel. AnandTech

Is "I forget" a valid defense when court orders demand a smartphone password? On May 30, two suspects accused of extorting the so-called "Queen of Snapchat" as part of a sex-tape scandal are scheduled to appear in a Florida court. But as wild as the premise sounds, primarily the accused need only to answer a simple question on this visit. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Charles Johnson wants an explanation as to why Hencha Voigt and her then boyfriend, Wesley Victor, can't remember the passcodes to their mobile phones. Ars Technica

51 GPUs tested, from the Radeon HD 2900XT to RX 580 & R9 Fury: Testing the 2017 Linux driver stack It's that time of the year where we see how the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack is working on past and present hardware in a large GPU comparison with various OpenGL games and workloads. This year we go from the new Radeon RX 580 all the way back to the Radeon HD 2900XT, looking at how the mature Radeon DRM kernel driver and R600 Gallium3D driver is working for aging ATI/AMD graphics hardware. Phoronix

Chrome bug allows sites to record audio and video without a visual indicator Ran Bar-Zik, a web developer at AOL, has discovered and reported a bug in Google Chrome that allows websites to record audio and video without showing a visual indicator. The bug is not as bad as it sounds, as the malicious website still needs to get the user's permission to access audio and video components, but there are various ways in which this issue could be weaponized to record audio or video without the user's knowledge. Bleeping Computer

Does your video game have too many words? (Yeah, probably.) My whole career has been based on writing very story-heavy games, with lots of words. Our company, Spiderweb Software, is small. We can't afford fancy graphics, so we have to rely on words. Interesting, quality words. We're currently remastering the series with our most loved story and our bestest words. We also finished a new series, which had a lot of words which I suspect weren't as good because it didn't sell as well. Gamasutra

Hollywood sees illegal streaming devices as 'piracy 3.0' Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. After McCoy praised the collaboration between the MPA(A) and Russian authorities in their fight against online piracy, the ‎President and Managing Director of the MPA's EMEA region noted that pirates are not standing still. TorrentFreak

The sci-fi timeline Which came first, the sci-fi chicken or the (alien) egg? We're all used to seeing movies and games set in the future, but often the date can seem a bit abstract. We've brought together some of our favourites to show yo the timeline and where they all fit. There were some surprises! See for yourself, and decide if the writers got it right! Glow

BOE technology shows first working emissive QLED screens at DisplayWeek 2017 Per a report from OLED.net, Chinese tech company BOE Technology Group has shown the first examples of a fully functional electroluminescent emissive QLED displays in the form of a flat panel TV and phone. The company demoed both screens at DisplayWeek 2017. Electroluminescent QLED is an emissive technology, like OLED and plasma before it. AVS Forum

What really happened with Vista I generally have posted about things that I have been directly involved with --- either code I wrote or projects I managed. In this post I am taking a different tack to write about my perspective on the underlying causes of the Windows Vista (codename Longhorn) debacle. While this happened over a decade ago, this was a crucial period in the shift to mobile and had long-running consequences internally to Microsoft. Hacker Noon

Hack brief: Dangerous 'Fireball' adware infects a quarter billion PCs Adware that infects your computer to display pop-ups is an annoyance. But when it infects as many as one in five networks in the world, and hides the capability to do far more serious damage to its victims, it's an epidemic waiting to happen. Wired