Earlier today, Google unveiled Gemma 3—a series of open-source AI models that run on just a single GPU or TPU, designed to make AI development faster and more accessible. That’s a sharp contrast to rivals like DeepSeek’s 6R1, which burns […]
An emergency arbitrator ruled that former Meta staffer Sarah Wynn-Williams is prohibited from promoting memoir of her tenure at the social media company.
Snapchat on Wednesday announced a new feature for its users – at least for some of them. Starting today, Snapchat Platinum (the platform’s premium subscription) members will have access to new AI-generated Lenses.
Google is pushing back on a bill that would make Utah the first state in the US to have a law requiring app stores to conduct age verification of their users. The company has formally requested the state's governor to veto the bill, passed by the state legislature last week, as it urges states to consider a different approach to app safety.
In a blog post from Google public policy director Kareem Ghanem, the company said the Utah law poses “real privacy and safety risks” and that states shouldn’t rush to pass laws “pushed by Meta” and other social media companies. Instead, Ghanethe says that Google has proposed an “alternative legislative framework” that would allow the developers of potentially “risky” apps to request “age signals” from app store owners like Google.
The statement is the first time Google has publicly opposed the bill, which would make Apple and Google responsible for age verification and parental permission features for children under 18. A spokesperson also confirmed that the company requested that Utah Governor Spencer Cox veto the bill. Cox has previously signed off on laws that imposed age verification and parental permission requirements on social media companies, though the measures were revised and later blocked by a judge. A spokesperson for Cox didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
While it’s not surprising that Google is opposing the law and others like it (there are at least eight other states considering similar measures), it’s notable that the company is proposing its own parameters for a law that would take into account what kind of content is available in a given app, which would place more of a burden on social media companies.
Ghanem argues that not all apps should be subject to age verification. “This level of data sharing isn’t necessary — a weather app doesn’t need to know if a user is a kid,” he writes. “By contrast, a social media app does need to make significant decisions about age-appropriate content and features.” He also argues that app store safety proposals should come with a ban on all personalized ads to anyone under 18, pointedly noting that "other companies" should follow Google's lead on the issue.
Google obviously has a vested interest in not being responsible for age verification of its users, which would impose significant logistical and legal risks for the company. But many other privacy and digital rights groups have also opposed age verification laws.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-asks-utahs-governor-to-veto-the-states-app-store-age-verification-bill-233733280.html?src=rss
Google logo is screened on a mobile phone for illustration photo. Krakow, Poland on October 17th, 2024. (Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Spectre Divide, a Valorant-like free-to-play shooter where you control two bodies, is shutting down just months after its September launch.
“We were optimistic about the first week,” developer Mountaintop Studios says in a post. “We’ve had ~400,000 players play, with a peak concurrent player count of ~10,000 across all platforms. But as time has gone on, we haven’t seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs of Spectre and the studio.”
The studio expects to take Spectre Divide offline “within the next 30 days,” and it will refund all money since the game’s first season, which kicked off on February 25th. Mountaintop Studios will also be “closing its doors” at the end of the week, according to the post.
“We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition,” Mountaintop says. “In the end, we weren’t able to make it work. The industry is in a tough spot right now.”
In December, Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell and Spectre Divide game director Lee Horn told The Verge that things were already dire, and that the game’s console launch and new season would be its hail mary play. Horn said that the marketing was working going into launch, but that server issues at launch axed its momentum. “Unfortunately, the game fell over on day one,” he admitted.
Mitchell told us the game needed thousands of concurrent players if it was going to survive, or else the company would run out of money this year. Unfortunately, the game’s new season peaked at just over 1,000 concurrents on Steam, and has been downhill ever since; presumably, Mountaintop saw its multiplatform peak of around 10,000 players drop similarly.
“If the players are enjoying the game… if they aren’t into season one, they way we hope they are, we’ll have to take a hard look at if we should keep going on as we are, or if players are telling us this isn’t what we want,” Mitchell told us in December. Apparently, Mountaintop did have to take that hard look, and this is its decision.
Semiconductor giant Intel hired semiconductor veteran Lip-Bu Tan to be its new CEO. This news comes three months after Pat Gelsinger retired and stepped down from the company’s board, with Intel CFO David Zinsner and executive vice president of client relations Michelle Johnston Holthaus stepping in as co-CEOs. Tan, who was most recently the CEO […]
Starting Monday, March 17, NBC 5 Chicago (WMAQ) will present a weeklong reflection on the evolution of the coronavirus, from its initial global emergence and mass uncertainties in 2020 to its life-altering impact that is still being felt today, in an upcoming NBC 5 News series entitled Covid: 5 Years Later. "We've faced a number...
An arbitrator has decided in favor of Meta in a case the company brought against Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Meta employee who wrote a memoir published this week detailing alleged claims of misconduct at the company. Macmillan Publishers and its imprint that published the memoir, Flatiron Books, were also named as respondents.
The memoir, titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, details alleged claims of sexual harassment, including by current policy chief Joel Kaplan, who was her boss, according to NBC News.
In the decision, the arbitrator said Wynn-Williams must stop making disparaging remarks against Meta and its employees and, to the extent that she can control, cease further promoting the book, further publishing the book, and further repetition of previous disparaging remarks. The decision also says she must retract disparaging remarks from where they have appeared.
However, it’s unclear if this arbitrator actually has the authority to halt the publishing of the book or if Wynn-Williams can stop the creation of future versions; as of this writing, it’s currently for sale at stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In the decision, the arbitrator noted that the lawyer representing Macmillian and Flatiron objected to its jurisdiction. Wynn-Williams appears to have signed an arbitration agreement when she left Meta in 2017.
Meta, Macmillan, and Flatiron didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
“This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone says in a statement. “This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.”
When it goes live, iOS 18.4 will allow some users to set a default navigation app other than Apple Maps. The software of choice can be set from the Settings app by going to Apps, then to Default Apps, then to Navigation. This way, users can opt for a program like Google Maps or Waze to be automatically opened when you're getting directions.
This sounds like a useful update that lots of iPhone owners would appreciate. But not all of them will be able to take advantage. Default navigation choice will only be available in the EU. The change was previously noted by Apple earlier in the month as part of its broader response to the bloc's Digital Markets Act.
There are some preferences iPhone owners in the US can set for default programs. Currently, Americans get options for setting the to-go apps for email, messaging, calling, call filtering, browser, passwords and codes, contactless and keyboards. And they've been thrown a bone in iOS 18.4, with the added choice to set a default translation app.
Across the Atlantic, however European users can make more impactful choices around their Apple use. Most notably, they can use alternative app stores. Some features that were sparked by compliance with the Digital Markets Act have been rolled out in other markets, such as third-party access to the near-field communication that powers functions like tap-to-pay. Having an international consumer base will often lead to situations where different laws and regulations create different user experiences around the world. But at the rate EU users are getting a better experience, either initially or permanently, over Apple's home market, these instances are feeling more like an accepted strategy rather than edge cases.
iOS 18.4 is still in beta; the final version is expected to release in April.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/ios-184-introduces-a-new-default-navigation-app-choice-but-only-in-europe-223408294.html?src=rss
Researchers at Harvard University led the study, and it included nearly 58,000 adults in Japan who were followed for up to a year using a database of medical records from routine checkups. Researchers found that when people switched from being nondrinkers to drinkers during the study, they saw a drop in their "bad" cholesterol—aka low-density lipoprotein cholesterol or LDL. Meanwhile, their "good" cholesterol—aka high-density lipoprotein cholesterol or HDL—went up when they began imbibing. HDL levels went up so much, that it actually beat out improvements typically seen with medications, the researchers noted.
On the other hand, drinkers who stopped drinking during the study saw the opposite effect: Upon giving up booze, their bad cholesterol went up and their good cholesterol went down.
Sonos has canceled plans to release a streaming box, The Verge reported today. The audio company never publicly confirmed that it was making a streaming set-top box, but rumors of its impending release have been floating around since November 2023. With everything that both Sonos and streaming users have going on right now, though, a Sonos-branded rival to the Apple TV 4K wasn’t a good idea anyway.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman was the first to report on Sonos’ purported streaming ambitions. He reported that Sonos’ device would be a black box that cost $150 to $200.
At first glance, it seemed like a reasonable idea. Sonos was facing increased competition for wireless speakers from big names like Apple and Bose. Meanwhile, Sonos speaker sales growth had slowed down, making portfolio diversification seem like a prudent way to protect business.
After a little over three months, Intel has a new CEO to replace ousted former CEO Pat Gelsinger. Intel's board announced that Lip-Bu Tan will begin as Intel CEO on March 18, taking over from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus.
Gelsinger was booted from the CEO position by Intel's board on December 2 after several quarters of losses, rounds of layoffs, and canceled or spun-off side projects. Gelsinger sought to turn Intel into a foundry company that also manufactured chips for fabless third-party chip design companies, putting it into competition with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(TSMC), Samsung, and others, a plan that Intel said it was still committed to when it let Gelsinger go.
Intel said that Zinsner would stay on as executive vice president and CFO, and Johnston Holthaus would remain CEO of the Intel Products Group, which is mainly responsible for Intel's consumer products. These were the positions both executives held before serving as interim co-CEOs.
The missive follows the passage of Utah’s App Store Accountability Act, the first of its kind to advance to the governor’s desk, putting the onus on app store operators to keep kids from accessing inappropriate content. There are similar bills in more than a dozen states across the country in a growing trend of kids safety legislation, in the wake of the Kids Online Safety Act’s failure to become law last year, and ongoing legal battles over many other state laws.
While Meta, Snap, and X issued a joint statement praising the Utah bill’s passage, Google calls it “concerning.” Rather than protect kids and give parents more control, Google director of public policy Kareem Ghanem writes, the legislation “requires app stores to share if a user is a kid or teenager with all app developers (effectively millions of individual companies) without parental consent or rules on how the information is used. That raises real privacy and safety risks, like the potential for bad actors to sell the data or use it for other nefarious purposes.” Social media companies would be the real beneficiaries of the law, Ghanem writes, because they could “avoid that responsibility despite the fact that apps are just one of many ways that kids can access these platforms.” Both Meta and Google’s YouTube have come under fire in the past for allegedly not doing enough to keep its youngest users safe on their platforms by pushing videos of kids to potential predators or keeping teens in a content loop that makes them feel bad about themselves. Both companies have said they maintain robust policies and resources to create healthy experiences on their platforms.
“We welcome Google’s concession that they can share age information with app developers, and we agree this should be done in a privacy-preserving manner,” Meta spokesperson Jamie Radice says in a statement. “But with millions of apps on Google’s app store, and more added every day, it’s unclear how they’ll determine which apps are eligible to receive this data. The simplest way to protect teens online is to put parents in charge. That’s why legislation should require app stores to obtain parental consent before allowing children to download apps.” In the past, Meta has argued that the app store is the optimal place for parents to grant permission and to vet users’ ages before they ever download apps. This method would also protect users’ privacy, Meta global head of safety Antigone Davis wrote in 2023, because “by verifying a teen’s age on the app store, individual apps would not be required to collect potentially sensitive identifying information.” How exactly users’ ages get verified is a major concern for privacy advocates, but it’s one that’s not yet entirely worked out in some of the legislation. Utah’s, for example, says that app store operators can use either “commercially available methods that are reasonably designed to ensure accuracy,” or other methods to be determined and deemed acceptable by state regulators.
“Because developers know their apps best, they are best positioned to determine when and where an age-gate might be beneficial to their users”
Google believes it has “a better way.” To Google, that means that app stores should only provide age assurance securely to developers that “actually need them” — meaning only for apps that offer risky content, and probably not for something more mundane like a weather app. In that vein, Google proposes putting more discretion on app developers, rather than app stores, to determine the appropriate protections to put in place for a given age group. “Because developers know their apps best, they are best positioned to determine when and where an age-gate might be beneficial to their users, and that may evolve over time, which is another reason why a one-size-fits-all approach won’t adequately protect kids,” Ghanem writes. Google is also proposing “clear consequences for developers who violate users’ trust” by doing things like “improperly accessing or sharing the age signal.”
Apple has similarly raised concerns about potentially excessive data collection. In a white paper announcing steps it would take to help protect kids online, including letting parents share kids’ age ranges with developers, Apple emphasized the importance of collecting just the minimal amount of data to protect users’ privacy.
“Everyone wants to protect kids and teens online, and make sure they engage with age-appropriate content,” Ghanem writes, “but how it’s done matters.”
Researchers have discovered multiple Android apps, some that were available in Google Play after passing the company’s security vetting, that surreptitiously uploaded sensitive user information to spies working for the North Korean government.
Samples of the malware—named KoSpy by Lookout, the security firm that discovered it—masquerade as utility apps for managing files, app or OS updates, and device security. Behind the interfaces, the apps can collect a variety of information including SMS messages, call logs, location, files, nearby audio, and screenshots and send them to servers controlled by North Korean intelligence personnel. The apps target English language and Korean language speakers and have been available in at least two Android app marketplaces, including Google Play.
Think twice before installing
The surveillanceware masquerades as the following five different apps:
Straining the limits of wall space and most reasonable people's budgets, Samsung is now selling a March Madness bundle of eight "premium Samsung TVs" that you can get for $10,000, a savings of more than $6,000. Samsung suggests the new "Buzzer Beater" bundle will let you dedicate a TV to each channel March Madness games will air on so that you don't have to fiddle with Multi View or keep your remote handy to stay on top of your favorite college basketball teams.
If you decide to go all-in, the Buzzer Beater bundle includes a 98-inch Crystal UHD 4K TV, a 65-inch Neo QLED 8K TV, three 65-inch Neo QLED 4K TVs and three 55-inch QLED 4K TVs. The image in Samsung's press release somehow imagines all of the TVs will fit on one giant wall, but however you arrange them, you'll want to be quick. Samsung is offering the deal while supplies last, and you'll want to find a way to get them all installed by March 18, when the first March Madness matches actually start.
Samsung
Samsung's bundle gets you a sampler platter of the company's display technology, but if you're looking for a less expensive way to get a new TV, Samsung has several normal deals available, too, including on its Neo QLED TVs, which use Mini LEDs to offer and overall brighter and more contrast-y look. You can get a 43-inch Neo QLED TV for as low as $900, $600 off their usual $1,500 starting price.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/samsungs-new-march-madness-tv-bundle-pushes-the-boundaries-of-reason--and-walls-212310298.html?src=rss
