An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, is looking for ways to keep users interested after more than half of the people who signed up for the text-based platform stopped actively using the app, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees in a company town hall yesterday. Threads launched on July 5 and signed up over 100 million users in less than five days, buoyed by user frustration with Elon Musk-owned Twitter.

"Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We're not there yet," Zuckerberg told employees yesterday, according to Reuters, which listened to audio of the event. Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.

"We don't yet have daily numbers for iOS, but we suspect the boom-and-bust pattern is similar," SimilarWeb wrote. "Threads took off like a rocket, with its close linkage to Instagram as the booster. However, the developers of Threads will need to fill in missing features and add some new and unique ones if they want to make checking the app a daily habit for users." Although losing over half of the initial users in a short period might sound discouraging, the Reuters article said Zuckerberg told employees that user retention was better than Meta executives expected. "Zuckerberg said he considered the drop-off 'normal' and expected retention to grow as the company adds more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality," Reuters wrote.

Katie Malone writes via Engadget: "Tor" evokes an image of the dark web; a place to hire hitmen or buy drugs that, at this point, is overrun by feds trying to catch you in the act. The reality, however, is a lot more boring than that -- but it's also more secure. The Onion Router, now called Tor, is a privacy-focused web browser run by a nonprofit group. You can download it for free and use it to shop online or browse social media, just like you would on Chrome or Firefox or Safari, but with additional access to unlisted websites ending in .onion. This is what people think of as the "dark web," because the sites aren't indexed by search engines. But those sites aren't an inherently criminal endeavor.

"This is not a hacker tool," said Pavel Zoneff, director of strategic communications at The Tor Project. "It is a browser just as easy to use as any other browser that people are used to." That's right, despite common misconceptions, Tor can be used for any internet browsing you usually do. The key difference with Tor is that the network hides your IP address and other system information for full anonymity. This may sound familiar, because it's how a lot of people approach VPNs, but the difference is in the details. VPNs are just encrypted tunnels hiding your traffic from one hop to another. The company behind a VPN can still access your information, sell it or pass it along to law enforcement. With Tor, there's no link between you and your traffic, according to Jed Crandall, an associate professor at Arizona State University. Tor is built in the "higher layers" of the network and routes your traffic through separate tunnels, instead of a single encrypted tunnel. While the first tunnel may know some personal information and the last one may know the sites you visited, there is virtually nothing connecting those data points because your IP address and other identifying information are bounced from server to server into obscurity.

Accessing unindexed websites adds extra perks, like secure communication. While a platform like WhatsApp offers encrypted conversations, there could be traces that the conversation happened left on the device if it's ever investigated, according to Crandall. Tor's communication tunnels are secure and much harder to trace that the conversation ever happened. Other use cases may include keeping the identities of sensitive populations like undocumented immigrants anonymous, trying to unionize a workplace without the company shutting it down, victims of domestic violence looking for resources without their abuser finding out or, as Crandall said, wanting to make embarrassing Google searches without related targeted ads following you around forever.

Apple will soon start cracking down on apps that collect data on users' devices in order to track them (aka "fingerprinting"), according to an article on its developer site. Engadget writes: Starting with the release of iOS 17, tvOS 17, watchOS 10 and macOS Sonoma, developers will be required to explain why they're using so-called required reason APIs. Apps failing to provide a valid reason will be rejected started in spring of 2024. "Some APIs... have the potential of being misused to access device signals to try to identify the device or user, also known as fingerprinting. Regardless of whether a user gives your app permission to track, fingerprinting is not allowed," Apple wrote.

"To prevent the misuse of certain APIs that can be used to collect data about users' devices through fingerprinting, you'll need to declare the reasons for using these APIs in your app's privacy manifest." The new rules could increase the rate of app rejections, some developers told 9to5Mac. For instance, an API called UserDefaults falls into the "required reason" category, but since it stores user preferences, it's used by a lot of apps.

A coalition of a half-dozen open-source AI stakeholders -- Hugging Face, GitHub, EleutherAI, Creative Commons, LAION and Open Future -- are calling on EU policymakers to protect open source innovation as they finalize the EU AI Act, which will be the world's first comprehensive AI law. From a report: In a policy paper released this week, "Supporting Open Source and Open Science in the EU AI Act," the open-source AI leaders offered recommendations âoefor how to ensure the AI Act works for open source" -- with the "aim to ensure that open AI development practices are not confronted with obligations that are structurally impractical to comply with or that would be otherwise counterproductive."

According to the paper, "overbroad obligations" that favor closed and proprietary AI development -- like models from top AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google -- "threaten to disadvantage the open AI ecosystem." The paper was released as the European Commission, Council and Parliament debate the final EU AI Act in what is known as the "trilogue," which began after the European Parliament passed its version of the bill on June 14. The goal is to finish and pass the AI Act by the end of 2023 before the next European Parliament elections.

Google is changing the Play Store ranking algorithms to increase the visibility of apps that better support large screens. Google detailed the changes in a blog post: "Apps and games that adhere to our large screen app quality guidelines will now be ranked higher in search and Apps and Games Home. This helps users find apps that resize well, aren't letterboxed, and support both portrait and landscape orientations. Editors' Choice and other curated collections and articles will also consider these criteria going forward, creating new featuring opportunities for optimized apps." Ars Technica reports: The large-screen app guidelines have various tiers, but they recommend keyboard, mouse, and stylus support, a two-pane tablet layout, drag-and-drop support, and foldable display awareness. The post also reiterates some improvements that Google has already rolled out, like showing tablet screenshots to tablet users and downranking apps that crash a lot.

The big news is that the search results will switch to a two-pane layout on big screens. The search result list will live on the left-hand side, and tapping on each result will load a details page on the right. Previously, the results page was a stretched-out phone interface, with results on the left and nothing on the right. It would be nice if the top charts got this two-pane design, too, but that hasn't changed yet. Google says these changes are "just the beginning of our journey in creating a tailored Play Store experience for large screens." So hopefully, Google's developers will follow Google's developer guidelines soon.

According to new research published Thursday, conservatives on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election were more isolated and saw more misinformation than the platform's liberal users -- though Facebook widely affected users' political content in different ways. Slashdot reader RUs1729 shared one of the four peer-reviewed studies, appearing in the journals Science and Nature. Forbes reports: The study, led by two researchers from the University of Texas and New York University, had hundreds of thousands of participants and analyzed mass amounts of Facebook user data. One of the study's papers, which used aggregated data for 208 million U.S. Facebook users, found that most misinformation on Facebook existed within conservative echo chambers, which did not have an equivalent on the liberal side of the platform. The paper found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta's third-party fact-checking program, meaning conservative audiences are more exposed to unreliable news.

In a separate paper that assigned users to Facebook and Instagram feeds chronologically instead of algorithm-based feeds, which are the platforms' default feed types, researchers found users on chronological feeds were less engaged and saw more political content compared to those viewing algorithm-based feeds, along with more content from untrustworthy sources and more content from ideologically moderate friends and sources with mixed audiences. However, the feed analysis noted replacing algorithmic feeds with chronological ones did not create any detectable changes in political attitudes, knowledge or offline behavior.

Another paper assigned nearly 9,000 U.S.-based Facebook users feeds with no reshares, later concluding that the removal of reshared content "substantially" lessened the amount of political news, and content from all untrustworthy sources decreased overall. The two lead researchers and 15 other academics, who had control rights for the study's papers, declined compensation from Meta to ensure an ethical study was completed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Congress is closer than ever to passing a pair of bills to childproof the internet after lawmakers voted to send them to the floor Thursday. The bills -- the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0 -- were approved by the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday by a unanimous voice vote. Both pieces of legislation aim to address an ongoing mental health crisis amongst young people that some lawmakers blame social media for intensifying. But critics of the bills have long argued that they have the potential to cause more harm than good, like forcing social media platforms to collect more user information to properly enforce Congress' rules.

KOSA is supposed to establish a new legal standard for the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, allowing them to police companies that fail to prevent kids from seeing harmful content on their platforms. The authors of the bills, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), have said the bill keeps kids from seeing content that glamorizes eating disorders, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and gambling. It would also ban kids 13 and under from using social media and require companies to acquire parental consent before allowing children under 17 to use their platforms. At Thursday's markup, Blackburn proposed an amendment to remedy some of the concerns raised by digital rights groups, mainly language requiring platforms to verify the age of their users. Lawmakers approved those changes along with the bill, but the groups fear that platforms would still need to collect more data on all users to live up to the bill's other rules. [...] The other bill lawmakers approved, COPPA 2.0, raises the age of protection under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act from 13 to 16 years of age, along with similar age-gating restrictions. It also bans platforms from targeting ads to kids. "When it comes to determining the best way to help kids and teens use the internet, parents and guardians should be making those decisions, not the government," Carl Szabo, NetChoice vice president and general counsel, said. "Rather than violating free speech rights and handing parenting over to bureaucrats, we should empower law enforcement with the resources necessary to do its job to arrest and convict bad actors committing online crimes against children."

Apple's increasing use of "serialization," which pairs hardware components with the logic board using proprietary software locks, is making simple repairs on devices like iPads and iPhones harder and more expensive. In a recent Forbes article, a repair expert claims the Apple Pencil won't work properly on the iPad Pro if the display is replaced with a non-genuine Apple part, or even a screen from another iPad. From the report: This has now been extended to the displays of fifth and sixth generations of the iPad Pro 12.9-inch and third and fourth generation 11-inch tablets, repair expert Ricky Panesar, founder of iCorrect.co.uk, told me. While repairing a customer's device, Panesar found that the Apple Pencil wasn't delivering straight lines when the iPad display was replaced with a screen from another Apple iPad. "We found with the newer versions of the iPad that when you put a new screen on, even if it's taken from another iPad, the pencil strokes don't work perfectly." Panesar explained to me.

"They have a memory chip that sits on the screen that's programmed to only allow the Pencil functionality to work if the screen is connected to the original logic board." He continued. In practice, Panesar found that lines drawn on the replaced display (Panesar says he doesn't use aftermarket parts for repairs) with the Apple Pencil aren't completely straight. He demoed this in the video [here]. Panesar isn't the only person to discover this, a Reddit post from May complained about the same issue. The poster claimed to have bought a sixth generation iPad Mini from a reseller, which is having the same squiggly line problem. Commenters pointed out that the issue is likely related to serialization and linked to Panesar's video.

schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: Meta reported second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and said that its Reality Labs unit, which develops virtual reality and augmented reality technologies needed to power the metaverse, logged a $3.7 billion operating loss. Last year, Meta's Reality Labs unit lost a total of $13.7 billion while bringing in $2.16 billion in revenue, which is driven in part by the company's sales of Quest-branded VR headsets. Reality Labs lost $3.99 billion during the first quarter. That puts its total losses at about $21.3 billion since the beginning of last year.

Meta said in its earnings report that it expects operating losses in its Reality Labs unit "to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem." Despite Reality Labs' operating loss, Meta reported revenue of $32 billion for its quarter ending in June, an 11% increase compared to the same period last year. "The company reported profits of $7.79 billion for the quarter, a 16% increase compared to last year, also beating analysts' estimates," adds CNN.

Waymo, the self-driving unit owned by Alphabet, is slowing the development of autonomous trucking that's being done by its Via subsidiary. From a report: "With our decision to focus on ride-hailing, we'll push back the timeline on our commercial and operational efforts on trucking, as well as most of our technical development on that business unit," the company said in a statement. "We'll continue our collaboration with our strategic partner, Daimler Truck North America, to advance technical development of an autonomous truck platform."

The move comes as Alphabet is prioritizing financial discipline. The company said on Tuesday that it promoted Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat to president and chief investment officer, saying that it will stick to the more thrifty culture she has instilled. Self-driving technology has taken a step back in the past several years. Autonomous ventures like Waymo have spent billions of dollars in capital only to bring in little, if any revenue. Waymo has made more progress monetizing its robotaxi business than it has in trucking.

OpenSignal blog: While eSIM adoption in the mobile market has been arriving for some time, Apple's move to make eSIM the only option for iPhone 14 range in the U.S. is propelling the worldwide shift towards eSIM technology. Opensignal's latest analysis reveals a significant surge in the proportion of users switching their operator among those who use an eSIM across seven examined markets -- Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S.

The switch from physical to embedded SIM cards threatens to alter how consumers switch operators and encourages operators to adopt new tactics to retain and acquire users, for example operators can offer network trials from within an app that provisions an eSIM immediately. eSIM also means the risks to operators of dual SIM devices that have long been common in many international markets are arriving in operator-controlled markets too, such as the U.S. and South Korea. Even on smartphones sold by operators, eSIM support is usually present in addition to a physical SIM, making them dual-SIM devices.

Google added eSIM-support to the Pixel range in 2017, Samsung added eSIM support to 2019's Galaxy S20 flagship. While Apple first added eSIM to their phones in 2018 with the iPhone Xs, it switched to selling exclusively eSIM models in the U.S. with the iPhone 14 range in late 2022. South Korea is also a special case -- eSIM support for domestic customers only began in mid-2022, before this point it was only available to international travelers. Notably, Samsung responded by introducing eSIM to a selection of its flagship devices in the home market, which had not been previously available there.

Customers have asked to run OpenAI models on non-Microsoft cloud services or on their own local servers, but OpenAI has no immediate plans to offer such options, Semafor reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: That means there's one area where rivals of the ChatGPT creator have an edge: flexibility. To use OpenAI's technology, paying customers have two choices: They can go directly through OpenAI or through investment partner Microsoft, which has inked a deal to be the exclusive cloud service for OpenAI.

Microsoft will not allow OpenAI's models to be available on other cloud providers, according to a person briefed on the matter. Companies that exclusively use rivals, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Oracle, can't be OpenAI customers. But Microsoft would allow OpenAI models to be offered "on premises" in which customers build their own servers. Creating such solutions would pose some challenges, particularly around OpenAI's intellectual property. But it is technically feasible, this person said.

Some of the world's most advanced artificial intelligence companies have formed a group to research increasingly powerful AI and establish best practices for controlling it, as public anxiety and regulatory scrutiny over the impact of the technology increases. From a report: On Wednesday, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI launched the Frontier Model Forum, with the aim of "ensuring the safe and responsible development of frontier AI models." In recent months, the US companies have rolled out increasingly powerful AI tools that produce original content in image, text or video form by drawing on a bank of existing material. The developments have raised concerns about copyright infringement, privacy breaches and that AI could ultimately replace humans in a range of jobs.

"Companies creating AI technology have a responsibility to ensure that it is safe, secure, and remains under human control," said Brad Smith, vice-chair and president of Microsoft. "This initiative is a vital step to bring the tech sector together in advancing AI responsibly and tackling the challenges so that it benefits all of humanity." Membership of the forum is limited only to the handful of companies building "large-scale machine-learning models that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models," according to its founders.

Google and Apple dominate the market for online maps, charging mobile app developers for access to their mapping services. The other mega-cap tech companies are joining together to help create another option. From a report: A group formed by Meta, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, along with TomTom, is releasing data that could enable companies to build their own maps, without having to rely on Google or Apple. The Overture Maps Foundation, which was established late last year, captured 59 million "points of interest," such as restaurants, landmarks, streets and regional borders. The data has been cleaned and formatted so it can be used for free as the base layer for a new map application.

Meta and Microsoft collected and donated the data to Overture, according to Marc Prioleau, executive director of the OMF. Data on places is often difficult to collect and license, and building map data requires lots of time and staff to gather and clean it, he told CNBC in an interview. "We have some companies that, if they wanted to invest to build the map data, they could," Prioleau said. Rather than spending that kind of money, he said, companies were asking, "Can we just get collaboration around the open base map?" Overture is aiming to establish a baseline for maps data so that companies can use it to build and operate their own maps.

Amazon's Clubhouse rival, Amp, has struggled to get off the ground, documents shared with TechCrunch show. From the report: As part of the launch in March 2022, Amazon announced a slate of Amp-exclusive shows and programs, including from artists, radio hosts, sportscasters, culture writers and personalities like Nicki Minaj ("Queen Radio"), Tefi Pessoa and Guy Raz, among others. Amp launched on iOS, Amazon Alexa devices and the web in beta, only in the U.S. to start. Amazon was targeted at over 1 million monthly active users by the end of 2022, according to internal documents -- a tenth of Clubhouse's user base at its peak. But Amp never came close to achieving that milestone.

Amp, which had roughly 32,000 monthly active users as of the end of March 2022, was sitting just short of 200,000 monthly active users by late October. (A source tells TechCrunch that the number is hovering around 700,000 today.) From September 2022 to October 2022, monthly first-time iOS app installs declined precipitously from ~76,000 to ~43,000, internal documents show. And Amp encountered roadblocks on the engagement front, despite its lineup of high-profile content. Between September 2022 and October 2022, the number of hours users spent listening to Amp shows dipped 51% from a peak of around 183,000. Even without access to internal data, it's obvious that Amp isn't the most active of the live audio platforms cohort.

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission proposes a new broadband standard of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads, replacing the 2015's 25Mbps/3Mbps metric. From a report: "In today's world, everyone needs access to affordable, high-speed Internet, no exceptions," Rosenworcel said in the announcement today. "It's time to connect everyone, everywhere. Anything short of 100 percent is just not good enough." Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

The FCC's previous Section 706 reports analyzed availability and included data on adoption but didn't consider affordability. In her announcement today, Rosenworcel said she "recently shared with her colleagues an updated Notice of Inquiry that would kick off the agency's evaluation of the state of broadband across the country, as required by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. Chairwoman Rosenworcel proposes that the Commission consider several crucial characteristics of broadband deployment, including affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to 'all Americans.'"

Following two years of testing, The Browser Company's Arc is graduating from its waitlist phase, launching its version 1.0. Arc, the Mac and iOS browser, aims to redefine online interaction by incorporating tools for note-taking, collaboration, webpage personalisation, among others. The Verge adds: We've covered Arc a lot in recent months, both because it's a good browser and because it's a big new idea about how you use the internet. The Browser Company's ultimate plan is to build "the operating system for the internet." Arc isn't just a place to see webpages; it has tools for taking notes, making visual and collaborative easels with others, redesigning webpages to your liking, and more. (Personally, I love Arc's picture-in-picture mode above everything else, especially now that it works with Google Meet calls.) Arc 1.0 doesn't seem to come with any splashy new features. Rather, The Browser Company seems to just feel like it's ready to launch more widely. Arc has been pretty stable for me in recent months, though it does run into some of the same performance issues you'll find with any browser based on the Chromium engine -- you can always open a couple dozen tabs and watch your computer grind to a halt.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In January, artificial intelligence powerhouse OpenAI announced a tool that could save the world -- or at least preserve the sanity of professors and teachers -- by detecting whether a piece of content had been created using generative AI tools like its own ChatGPT. Half a year later, that tool is dead, killed because it couldn't do what it was designed to do.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI quietly unplugged its AI detection tool, AI Classifier, last week because of "its low rate of accuracy," the firm said. The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool. The link to OpenAI's classifier is no longer available. "We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated," OpenAI wrote.

Google Street View's cameras have returned to Germany more than a decade after a privacy backlash in the country pushed it to stop updating images. From a report: Alphabet's update will start with new photos of the streets and landmarks of the country's 20 largest cities and expand from there, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. Google voluntarily suspended Street View photography in Germany in 2011, after an outcry from privacy advocates and opposition from regulators.

"We've been back on the road with our vehicles in Germany since June and will be posting the latest images as they become available -- adding footage from other regions across the country," Sven Tresp, a program manager for Street View, wrote. Google is posting information about where its cameras are traveling, he said. The Street View rollout across Europe more than a decade ago triggered probes by data protection watchdogs across the European Union. The investigations included a probe by the Hamburg authority, where Google had its main German base. Some led to fines, including a $1.1 million penalty in Italy.

The Council of the EU has adopted new rules intended to make it much easier for EV owners to travel across Europe, while simultaneously helping to reduce the output of harmful greenhouse gases. From a report: The new regulation is set to benefit owners of electric cars and vans in three ways: It reduces range anxiety by expanding the EV charging infrastructure along Europe's main highways, it makes payments "at the pump" easier without requiring an app or subscription, and ensures pricing and availability is clearly communicated to avoid surprises. From 2025 onward, the new regulation requires fast charging stations offering at least 150kW of power to be installed every 60km (37mi) along the EU's Trans-European Transport Network, or (TEN-T) system of highways, the bloc's main transport corridor. The fast charging network along European highways is already pretty robust, I discovered on a recent 3,000km (2,000 mile) roadtrip with a VW ID Buzz. This new law could all but eliminate range anxiety for those sticking to TEN-T roads.