For years, companies like Google and Apple have outsourced their security operations, ensuring their campus guards take home low wages while programmers earn top dollar. But following worker protests and unfavorable media coverage, the search giant has announced it's dropping its security contractor and bringing the Googleplex guards in-house.

Two lawsuits filed last month against Google claim the search giant tried to steal superior video streaming technology from VSL Communications, a company it was in talks to acquire. According to the filings, VSL discovered the scheme thanks to some Post-It notes on which phrases like "Try to destroy email" were written. We've obtained what a source claims are copies of the Post-Its.

Google has been trying to build cars that drive without humans for longer than it's been trying to hire more women and minorities. But the company really knows its audience. Workshops at the center of its diversity initiative were specifically designed for one personality type: "a skeptical, scientifically minded Google employee," says the New York Times.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt appears to have infected Silicon Valley with a sudden bout of corporate consciousness this week, after telling The Diane Rehm Show that ALEC, the powerful conservative lobbying group, was "literally lying" about climate change.

Silicon Valley tried to settle away a $9 billion wage-fixing lawsuit, which alleges that companies including Apple and Google colluded to suppress employee wages. But a federal judge nixed the paltry $324.5 million pay out, saying it was not enough. Now the companies behind the conspiracy are appealing, insisting the lowball figure is adequate.

If Google Glass gets you thrown out of a bar, how will onlookers respond when someone wearing a Google Cartographer thuds by them in the hall? This week the company revealed its plan to bring Street View's prying eyes inside buildings through a backpack called the Cartographer.

Megan Smith, formerly of Google's shadowy "X" facility, is the new Chief Technology Officer of the United States, tasked with maintaining a technological edge for the entire country.

Google is inching along in its plan to "solve" that pesky mortality equation. Calico, the corporation's "life extension center," just revealed a partnership with the pharmaceutical company AbbVie to develop and sell "new drugs targeting diseases associated with old age," reports the Verge.

Last month, it seemed that Google's mysterious barge project was heading to the great scrap heap in the sky. But hopes for the company's floating gadget shop lives on in San Francisco.

No employee perk in Silicon Valley is as cherished as the gourmet meals dished out in corporate cafeterias. But soon, Google's multimillion dollar chicken tab could come with a tax bill from the IRS.

Building 15, a gargantuan aerospace structure outside LAX airport, was once used to construct the Spruce Goose. Soon, it might be home to another focal point of hubris, the Wall Street Journal reports.

This just popped up on everyone's least favorite social network. If Facebook is a lemonade stand, then what exactly is Google+? A neglected sack of Country Time powder? An abandoned yeast factory, inhabited only by raccoons?

If the App Store presented developers with a potential river of revenue when it launched six years ago, it's little more than a trickle today. The Financial Times says profits are "squeezed" as the App Store becomes more "industrialized."

Google developed a reputation in the mid-aughties for its lavish employee perks, particularly their corporate kitchens dishing out gourmet meals for their well-fed workers. But in a recent Business Insider profile of Nate Keller, the former Google executive chef unveiled the high cost of keeping Mountain View's advertising talent nourished:

Some complaints are a morass of technical jargon and legalese. Others read like the makings of a zany crime-comedy by Steven Soderbergh. One new lawsuit filed against Google for copying the technology to compress video and audio files falls into the latter category, due primarily to allegedly incriminating Post-It notes accidentally handed over to the victim.

For years, tech giants like Apple, Google, and Adobe made secret agreements to avoid hiring rival talent, keeping salaries artificially suppressed. These companies almost got away with paying a tiny settlement—but that monetary mea culpa just got shot down.

Justin.tv shutting down before Google reportedly buys Twitch for $1 billion is a prime example of the unspoken brutality of acquisitions: "Purchases are often followed by consolidation, as well as cutting off any excess limbs."

If you had your heart set on buying a $1,500 face computer inside a giant barge, your life is fucked: Google looks like it's phasing out the plan for grand, floating Android showrooms, a dystopian-commerce future we couldn't handle and didn't deserve.

Jack Halprin may be the head of Google's armada of eDiscovery lawyers, but he's becoming an serial evictor back in San Francisco. After purchasing a seven-unit building in the Mission District in 2012, he quickly began illegally evicting his tenants. But now four of his tenants are suing him for violating a litany of laws, and Halprin is trying to elude the lawsuit.

In 2011, Justine Tunney was an anti-establishment organizer within Occupy Wall Street, exhorting class warfare on the sidewalk. Today, it appears that Tunney spends her time ranting against the poor, advocating for the overthrow of American democracy, and not least notably, working at Google's New York branch.