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Google has sued two app developers based in China over an alleged scheme targeting 100,000 users globally over four years with at least 87 fraudulent cryptocurrency and other investor apps distributed through the Play Store.

The tech giant alleged that scammers lured victims with "promises of high returns" from "seemingly legitimate" apps offering investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies and other products. Commonly known as "pig-butchering schemes," these scams displayed fake returns on investments, but when users went to withdraw the funds, they discovered they could not.

In some cases, Google alleged, developers would "double down on the scheme by requesting various fees and other payments from victims that were supposedly necessary for the victims to recover their principal investments and purported gains."

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)

One of Google's most lucrative businesses consists of packaging its free consumer apps with a few custom features and extra security and then selling them to companies. That's usually called "Google Workspace," and today it offers email, calendar, docs, storage, and video chat. Soon, it sounds like Google is gearing up to offer an AI chatbot for businesses. Google's latest chatbot is called "Gemini" (it used to be "Bard"), and the latest early patch notes spotted by Dylan Roussei of 9to5Google and TestingCatalog.eth show descriptions for new "Gemini Business" and "Gemini Enterprise" products.

The patch notes say that Workspace customers will get "enterprise-grade data protections" and Gemini settings in the Google Workspace Admin console and that Workspace users can "use Gemini confidently at work" while "trusting that your conversations aren't used to train Gemini models."

These "early patch notes" for Bard/Gemini have been a thing for a while now. Apparently, some people have ways of making the site spit out early patch notes, and in this case, they were independently confirmed by two different people. I'm not sure the date (scheduled for February 21) is trustworthy, though.

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On Tuesday, Google announced the launch of its Duet AI assistant across its Workspace apps, including Docs, Gmail, Drive, Slides, and more. First announced in May at Google I/O, Duet has been in testing for some time, but it is now available to paid Google Workspace business users (what Google calls its suite of cloud productivity apps) for $30 a month in addition to regular Workspace fees.

Duet is not just one thing—instead, it's a blanket brand name for a multitude of different AI capabilities and probably should have been called "Google Kitchen Sink." It likely represents several distinct AI systems behind the scenes. For example, in Gmail, Duet can summarize a conversation thread across emails, use the content of an email to write a brief or draft an email based on a topic. In Docs, it can write content such as a customer proposal or a story. In Slides, it can generate custom visuals using an image synthesis model. In Sheets, it can help format existing spreadsheets or create a custom spreadsheet structure suited to a particular task, such as a project tracker.

An example of Google Duet in action (one of many), provided by Google. (credit: Google)

Some of Duet's applications feel like confusion in branding. In Google Meet, Google says that Duet AI can "ensure you look and sound your best with studio look, studio lighting, and studio sound," including "dynamic tiles" and "face detection"—functions that feel far removed from typical generative AI capabilities—as well as automatically translated captions. It can also reportedly capture notes and video, sending a summary to attendees in the meeting. In fact, using Duet's "attend for me" feature, Google says that "Duet AI will be able to join the meeting on your behalf" and send you a recap later.

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The Internet is dangerous, so what if you just didn't use it? That's the somewhat ironic recommendation Google, one of the world's largest Internet companies, is making to its employees. CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports that Google is "starting a new pilot program where some employees will be restricted to Internet-free desktop PCs" while they work. An internal memo seen by CNBC notes that “Googlers are frequent targets of attacks” by criminals, and a great way to combat that is to not be on the Internet.

Employees that work at major tech companies are a much richer target for criminals compared to normal people. Tech company employees have all sorts of access to sensitive data, and compromising a single employee could lead to exploiting sensitive infrastructure. Just last week, Microsoft was targeted by a Chinese espionage hacking group that somehow stole a cryptographic key to bypass Microsoft's authentication systems, giving it access to 25 organizations, including multiple government agencies.

The report says Google's new pilot program "will disable Internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail." This was originally mandatory for the 2,500 employees that were selected, but after "receiving feedback"—we're going to assume that was very enthusiastic feedback—Google is letting employees opt out of the program. The company also wants some employees to work without root access, which is common sense for a lot of computer roles, but not really for developers, which are used to being able to install new programs and tools.

Enlarge / The Google Workspace icons. (credit: Google)

"Please delete 2 million files to continue using your Google Drive account." That was the message that Reddit user ra13 woke up to one day. Google apparently decided to put a hard limit on the number of files you're allowed to have on one Google Drive account. Google rolled out this file limit without warning anyone it would happen. Users over the limit found themselves suddenly locked out of new file uploads, and it was up to them to figure out what was going wrong.

Did we mention this all started in February? A post on the Google Drive API issue tracker shows some users have been seeing this error for almost two months now. The original message said: "The limit for the number of items, whether trashed or not, created by this account has been exceeded." And sometime in March, it was updated to say, "Error 403: This account has exceeded the creation limit of 5 million items. To create more items, move items to the trash and delete them forever." Since there is nothing anywhere that informs users Google Drive has a file limit, users originally thought this was a bug and asked Google to quickly fix it. It has been two months now, though, and Google has not issued a public response. Some users say they have gotten Google Support to privately confirm the limit is intended, and a pop-up message is starting to show up in the Drive UI for some users.

It might be understandable to limit a data hog abusing a free account, but that's not what's happening here. Google is selling this storage to users, via both the Google Workspace business accounts and the consumer-grade Google One storage plans. Google One tops out at 30TB of storage, which costs an incredible $150 a month to use. Google Workspace's formal plans cap out at 5TB, but an "Enterprise" plan promises "As much storage as you need." From what we can tell in the various comments on reddit and the issue tracker, both consumer and business account types are subject to this hidden 5 million file limit.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Grandfathered-in "Legacy G Suite" users got a scare recently when another new "transition" message started popping up in the Google Admin console. "The transition to Google Workspace has started," said the new message that suddenly appeared in people's accounts. This was after Legacy G Suite users went through a contentious transition last year, where Google's opening position involved shutting down their accounts if people didn't start paying, but eventually, it was talked into not doing that. A Google spokesperson tells us the Workspace transition message was "a bug that surfaced an old banner from earlier in the process last year, and our team is working on removing it. More changes are not happening at this time, and those who previously opted-in for personal use are not expected to take any further action."

We've received a few questions about this message, and this Reddit post has people wondering what the deal is, but it's just a bug. That's great because Legacy G Suite users have gone through enough already. To recap, Google currently offers businesses the option to pay a monthly fee for a Google/Gmail account that ends in a custom domain name instead of @gmail.com. Today this is called "Google Workspace," but due to Google's constant rebrands, it was first called "Google Apps for your Domain," then "Google Apps," and then "G Suite." Google's custom domain service was not always paywalled and not always exclusively aimed at businesses—it was free from 2006 to 2012. Google even pitched these accounts to families as a way to let everyone have similar email addresses. Some people did so, which means today they are getting a paid service for free.

Don't believe a word of this message. (credit: nativecode_ )

Last year, the Google accounting department turned its Eye of Sauron on these long-term users and threatened to take away their nearly 16-year-old accounts if they didn't start paying a business rate for these formerly free and not necessarily business accounts. After a public outcry, Google eventually left these "Legacy G Suite accounts" alone after making users confirm that they were using their accounts for "non-business" purposes. After that, everything was settled.