Tag Archives: Internet & Networking Technology

X is working on a way to block links in replies

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X is developing a new feature that could help address spam posts on its website. According to Nima Owji, an independent app researcher who's unearthed several unreleased X features in the past, the platform formerly known as Twitter is working on the ability to disable links in replies. Based on the image Owji posted, users will be able to tick a box for the option if they don't want people to be able to respond with a link to their posts.

Christopher Stanley, the Senior Director for Security Engineering at X, confirmed the feature's existence in a response to a post about it. "My team built this," Stanley wrote in his reply. In addition to keeping spam bots away, the feature could also prevent real human users from promoting their websites in other people's posts. However, it can also prevent users from posting links to legitimate sources in case they're trying to debunk false information and prevent fake news from spreading further. 

Owji previously found that X was experimenting with an in-app currency that's meant to help creators earn money from the platform. Several months after rampant impersonation on the website, he found that it was working on new ID verification features, as well. He also discovered that the company was looking to compete with LinkedIn by offering job listings to verified organizations. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-is-working-on-a-way-to-block-links-in-replies-110033673.html?src=rss

Bangladesh is experiencing a ‘near-total’ internet shutdown amid student protests

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Bangladesh is experiencing a complete internet shutdown as its government attempts to clamp down on widespread student protests that have resulted in the deaths of at least 32 people, according to AFP. The unrest is centered around the country’s quota system that requires a third of government jobs to be reserved for relatives of veterans who had fought for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971.

On Thursday, several thousand protestors in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, had reportedly stormed state broadcaster BTV, smashed windows and furniture and set offices on fire, trapping “many” people inside, according to a post on BTV’s official Facebook page. 17 people died on Thursday amid clashes with police, reported Al Jazeera. To control the situation, Bangladeshi authorities shut down internet and phone access throughout the country, a common practice in South Asia to prevent the spread of rumors and misinformation and exercise state control. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor that works on digital rights analyzed live network data that showed that Bangladesh was in the middle of a “near-total national internet shutdown.”

Internet shutdowns are a popular way to crack down on conflict in countries around the world. According to internet watchdog Access Now, the number of shutdowns around the world continues to rise each year. In 2023, 39 countries collectively shutdown internet access more than 160 times for a variety of reasons including protests, exams and elections.

Bangladesh has frequently blacked out the internet to crack down on political opposition and activists. At the end of 2023, research tool CIVICUS Monitor, which provides data on the state of civil society and freedoms in nearly 200 countries, downgraded Bangladesh’s civic space to “closed,” its lowest possible rating, after the country imposed six internet shutdowns the previous year. That made Bangladesh the fifth-largest perpetrator of internet shutdowns in 2022, Access Now said.

The country’s telecom regulator had pledged to keep internet access on through Bangladesh’s general elections at the beginning of 2024, but that electoral period is now over. Despite the pledge, Bangladesh blocked access to news websites during its elections.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-total-internet-shutdown-amid-student-protests-235907085.html?src=rss

Proton Mail now has a privacy-focused AI writing assistant

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Proton Mail has a new AI-powered feature that could help it keep pace with the artificial intelligence tools Google and Microsoft offer for their email services. Proton Scribe is an AI writing assistant that can help you compose and clean up your drafts. Scribe was designed with privacy in mind — the assistant can't train on your inbox data, as Proton Mail has a zero-access approach to encryption. Proton doesn't save or log anything from your email drafts either.

According to Proton, a writing assistant was one of the most-requested features in a recent user survey. The company designed it as a secure alternative to other generative AI options. Scribe can be run locally if your system is compatible. Otherwise, you can run it on Proton's no-log servers. The assistant is powered by open-source models and code. As such, Proton says the tool itself is open-source and that independent researchers are free to carry out privacy and security audits.

Scribe can be accessed by clicking the pencil icon in the Proton Mail composer. After telling the tool what you want to say in an email, it will create a draft for you. You'll be able to use the Shorten and Proofread options to condense and clean up your draft. There's also the option to make the tone of your email more formal with the click of a button. You can review and tweak your drafts before sending them.

Proton says Scribe only fully supports English for now and it's rolling the assistant out to eligible users. Visionary and Lifetime subscribers will have access at no extra cost. Those on a Proton Business plan — Mail Essentials, Mail Professional or Proton Business Suite — can try Proton Scribe for free for 14 days. After that, the tool costs $3 per month per user.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/proton-mail-now-has-a-privacy-focused-ai-writing-assistant-155816223.html?src=rss

Meta will withhold multimodal AI models from the EU amid regulatory uncertainty

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Meta has decided to not offer its upcoming multimodal AI model and future versions to customers in the European Union citing a lack of clarity from European regulators, according to a statement given by Meta to Axios. The models in question are designed to process not only text but also images and audio, and power AI capabilities in Meta platforms as well as the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.

"We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment," Meta said in a statement to Axios.

Meta’s move follows a similar decision by Apple, which recently announced it would not release its Apple Intelligence features in Europe due to regulatory concerns. Margrethe Vesteger, the EU’s competition commissioner, had slammed Apple’s move, saying that the company’s decision was a “stunning, open declaration that they know 100 percent that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.” Withholding Meta’s multimodal AI models from the EU could have far-reaching implications — it means that any companies that use them to build their products and services would be unable to offer them in Europe.

Thomas Regnier, an EU spokesperson, told Engadget that the regulator does not comment on individual decisions of companies. "It is the companies' responsibility to ensure that their services comply with our legislation," Regnier said in a statement and added that all companies are welcome to offer service in Europe as long as they comply with the bloc's laws, including the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act. 

Meta told Axios that it still plans to release Llama 3, the company’s upcoming text-only model in the EU. The company’s primary concern stems from the challenges of training AI models using data from European customers while complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU's existing data protection law. In May, Meta announced that it planned to use publicly available posts from Facebook and Instagram users to train future AI models but was forced to stop doing so in the EU after receiving pushback from data privacy regulators in the region. At the time, Meta defended its actions, saying that being able to train its models on the data of European users was necessary to reflect local culture and terminology. 

"If we don’t train our models on the public content that Europeans share on our services and others, such as public posts or comments, then models and the AI features they power won’t accurately understand important regional languages, cultures or trending topics on social media," the company said in a blog post. "We believe that Europeans will be ill-served by AI models that are not informed by Europe’s rich cultural, social and historical contributions."

Despite its reservations about releasing its multimodal models in the EU, Meta still plans to launch them in the UK, which has similar data protection laws to the EU. The company argued that European regulators are taking longer to interpret existing laws compared to their counterparts in other regions.

Update, July 18 2024, 6:40 PM ET: This story has been updated to include a statement from an EU spokesperson. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-will-reportedly-withhold-multimodal-ai-models-from-the-eu-amid-regulatory-uncertainty-215543292.html?src=rss

Streaming accounted for more than 40 percent of TV viewing in June

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Streaming has hit a new high on the American viewing charts. According to the latest Nielsen data, streaming services were responsible for 40.3 percent of daily TV viewing in June 2024. It's a banner result for streaming video, which first overtook cable in Nielsen ratings back in 2022. The June result marks not only the biggest share recorded for streaming since Nielsen added it as a tracked category on The Gauge report, but it is also the largest share Nielsen has ever recorded for a single viewership category. Cable TV secured 27.2 percent of American viewing for the month, followed by broadcast TV at 20.5 percent.

YouTube was the favorite streaming platform with 9.9 percent of the monthly usage, followed by Netflix at 8.4 percent. The summer sensation of Bridgerton helped boost Netflix's performance; the costume drama was responsible for a staggering 9.3 billion minutes of viewing during the month. There's a notable drop after those two services, with Amazon's Prime Video securing 3.1 percent, and companion platforms Hulu and Disney+ coming in with 3 percent and 2 percent shares, respectively.

In case those streaming figures seem low, it's important to note that Nielsen tracks viewing only on television screens. That means the vast number of hours Americans spend streaming shows on their phones and tablets isn't part of this accounting.

While streaming continues to draw ever-more eyeballs, executives are more focused on drawing in dollars. Another report, this one from analyst PricewaterhouseCoopers, projected that advertising would be responsible for about 28 percent of global streaming revenue. In 2023, the ad share was 20 percent.

The report credited that shift to the growth rate of subscription revenue stalling out. "Usage and consumer uptake of the core offering is continuing to increase — albeit at a lower rate than in recent years – but companies are having greater difficulty getting people to pay more for digital goods and services," PwC said. "As the number and range of streaming services proliferate, a form of market saturation has begun to kick in." In response, recent years have seen many of the top video streaming services, including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video have introduced hybrid models that offer lower monthly subscription costs in exchange for viewers watching ads. If the PwC forecast is accurate, we can expect other platforms to follow suit.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/streaming-accounted-for-more-than-40-percent-of-tv-viewing-in-june-203206939.html?src=rss

Amazon’s AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all US customers

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There’s another chatbot in town. Amazon’s AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all US customers, albeit in a beta version. This follows a testing phase that began back in February. Rufus looks to currently be tied to the app and not the web version of Amazon.

So what does it do? It’s an Amazon chatbot so it helps with shopping. You can ask for lists of recommended products and ask what specific products do and stuff like that.

I’ve tooled around with it a bit this morning and it seems fine, though a bit boring. I will say that I cross-referenced some of the recommended products with the web version and Rufus does not automatically list promoted items, at least for now.

Chatbot answer
Amazon

It spit out a seemingly random list of well-reviewed products on several occasions. That’s fine by me, though I’m not about to buy something based on the word of a one-day old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about products, but the answers seem to be pulled directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others aren’t. The chatbot is tied to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like. 

Amazon says that the bot has been trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As and public information found throughout the web. However, it hasn’t disclosed what websites it pulled that public information from and to what end. It didn’t even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites.

If you want to try it out, update to the latest version of the app and look for the colorful icon on the bottom-right. Maybe, if we all work hard enough at asking ridiculous questions, we can break it just in time for Amazon Prime Day.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-ai-chatbot-rufus-is-now-live-for-all-us-customers-190938911.html?src=rss

X is in hot water in the EU over blue checkmarks and ads

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X is the latest notable tech company to land in trouble with the European Union. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has revealed the preliminary findings of an investigation. It claims that X has violated the Digital Services Act (DSA) in a number of ways.

The platform’s approach to paid verification has come into the EU’s crosshairs. Officials say that the practice “does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users.” It added that, since anyone can pay to get a blue checkmark, it’s difficult for folks to determine the authenticity of accounts (a browser extension can tell you which accounts are verified because of notability and which paid for a checkmark). The EU also said there’s evidence of bad actors using checkmarks to hoodwink people.

X's problems with verification stem back several years. But at least when it was known as Twitter, the blue check was a (reasonably) reliable form of assurance that an account was the real deal. Paid checkmarks, and the increase in visibility that Premium users get, seems to have led to an increase in scams and spam — just as many predicted.

Next up, the EU took issue with X’s alleged lack of advertising transparency. It claimed the company doesn’t have a reliable, searchable ad repository that enables researchers to look into “emerging risks brought about by the distribution of advertising online.”

In addition, the EU said X is violating the DSA by failing to give researchers sufficient access to public data. “In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service,” the bloc argued in a statement. In the EU’s view, researchers are either dissuaded from carrying out projects or forced to pay “disproportionately high fees” to do so given the way that X has set up its application programming interfaces (APIs).

"Back in the day, Blue Checks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA," Thierry Breton, the EU's internal market commissioner, said in a statement. "We also consider that X’s ads repository and conditions for data access by researchers are not in line with the DSA transparency requirements. X has now the right of defense — but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines and require significant changes."

If X is found guilty, it will face fines of up to six percent of its global annual revenue — so we may get a sense of just how much money the now privately held company is making these days. The EU may also direct X to take steps to ensure compliance with the DSA and impose further periodic fines if the company does not do so.

The EU hasn't been shy in taking tech companies to task under the DSA and its sibling legislation, the Digital Markets Act. Meta and Apple could both be on the hook for multibillion-dollar fines if preliminary findings of investigations hold up.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-is-in-hot-water-in-the-eu-over-blue-checkmarks-and-ads-145003468.html?src=rss

Report finds most subscription services manipulate customers with ‘dark patterns’

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Most subscription sites use "dark patterns" to influence customer behavior around subscriptions and personal data, according to a pair of new reports from global consumer protection groups. Dark patterns are "practices commonly found in online user interfaces [that] steer, deceive, coerce or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests." The international research efforts were conducted by the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN) and the Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN).

The ICPEN conducted the review of 642 websites and mobile apps with a subscription component. The assessment revealed one dark pattern in use at almost 76 percent of the platforms, and multiple dark patterns at play in almost 68 percent of them. One of the most common dark patterns discovered was sneaking, where a company makes potentially negative information difficult to find. ICPEN said 81 percent of the platforms with automatic subscription renewal kept the ability for a buyer to turn off auto-renewal out of the purchase flow. Other dark patterns for subscription services included interface interference, where desirable actions are easier to perform, and forced action, where customers have to provide information to access a particular function.

The companion report from GPEN examined dark patterns that could encourage users to compromise their privacy. In this review, nearly all of the more than 1,000 websites and apps surveyed used a deceptive design practice. More than 89 percent of them used complex and confusing language in their privacy policies. Interface interference was another key offender here, with 57 percent of the platforms making the least protective privacy option the easiest to choose and 42 percent using emotionally charged language that could influence users.

Even the most savvy of us can be influenced by these subtle cues to make suboptimal decisions. Those decisions might be innocuous ones, like forgetting that you've set a service to auto-renew, or they might put you at risk by encouraging you to reveal more personal information than needed. The reports didn't specify whether the dark patterns were used in illicit or illegal ways, only that they were present. The dual release is a stark reminder that digital literacy is an essential skill.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/report-finds-most-subscription-services-manipulate-customers-with-dark-patterns-225640057.html?src=rss

Apple blog TUAW returns as an AI content farm

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has come back online nearly a decade after shutting down. But the once venerable source of Apple news appears to have been transformed by its new owners into an AI-generated content farm.

The site, which ceased operations in 2015, began publishing “new” articles, many of which appear to be nearly identical to content published by MacRumors and other publications, over the past week. But those posts bear the bylines of writers who last worked for TUAW more than a decade ago. The site also has an author page featuring the names of former writers along with photos that appear to be AI-generated.

Christina Warren, who last wrote for TUAW in 2009, flagged the sketchy tactic in a post on Threads. “Someone bought the TUAW domain, populated it with AI-generated slop, and then reused my name from a job I had when I was 21 years old to try to pull some SEO scam that won’t even work in 2024 because Google changed its algo,” she wrote.

Originally started in 2004, TUAW was shut down by AOL in 2015. Much of the site’s original archive can still be found on Engadget. Yahoo, which owns Engadget, sold the TUAW domain in 2024 to an entity called “Web Orange Limited” in 2024, according to a statement on TUAW’s website.

The sale, notably, did not include the TUAW archive. But, it seems that Web Orange Limited found a convenient (if legally dubious) way around that. “With a commitment to revitalize its legacy, the new team at Web Orange Limited meticulously rewrote the content from archived versions available on archive.org, ensuring the preservation of TUAW’s rich history while updating it to meet modern standards and relevance,” the site’s about page states.

TUAW doesn’t say if AI was used in those “rewrites,” but a comparison between the original archive on Engadget and the “rewritten” content on TUAW suggests that Web Orange Limited put little effort into the task. “The article ‘rewrites’ aren’t even assigned to the correct names,” Warren tells Engadget, “It has stuff for me going back to 2004. I didn’t start writing for the site until 2007.”

TUAW didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions about its use of AI or why it was using the bylines of former writers with AI-generated profile photos. Yahoo didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Update July 10, 2024, 11:05 AM ET: After this story was published, the TUAW website updated its author pages to remove many of the names of former staffers. Many have been swapped with generic-sounding names. "Christina Warren" has been changed to "Mary Brown." TUAW still hasn't responded to questions. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-blog-tuaw-returns-as-an-ai-content-farm-225326136.html?src=rss

Google will give users free dark web monitoring

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Google announced in an update on Tuesday that its dark web monitoring service, also known as “dark web report,” will be made available to all Google users in 46 countries including the US and UK at the end of the month, according to Fast Company. The feature was previously only available to users with a Google One membership.

The dark web report will be located in the “Results about you” page when you visit myactivity.google.com.

Google’s “dark web report” feature will scan the seedy underbelly of algorithms that ended up on the wrong side of the digital tracks to determine if your personal information has been leaked. This includes information such as your name, address, phone numbers and email accounts.

It’s a handy feature to have especially if you’re one of the millions of people who’ve fallen victim to hacking, info leaks or identity theft. Just a few months ago, 7.6 million AT&T customers had their information leaked to the dark web forcing the telecom giant to reset all of its affected users’ passcodes.

Other services like Proton Mail and LastPass already have features that monitor the dark web for user information and leaked passwords and alert them if they find anything.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-will-give-users-free-dark-web-monitoring-222557429.html?src=rss