The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears. From a report: The BBC seems to be the first UK media organisation to issue the guidance - and only the second in the world after Denmark's public service broadcaster. The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. [...] The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing.

In an email to staff on Sunday, it said: "The decision is based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security. If the device is a BBC corporate device, and you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted from the BBC corporate mobile device." Staff with the app on a personal phone that they also use for work have been asked to contact the corporation's Information Security team for further discussions, while it reviews concerns around TikTok. Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of journalism industry trade publication the Press Gazette, said it would be interesting to see what other media organizations decide to do. He told the BBC: "I suspect everyone's chief technical officer will be looking at this very closely. Until now, news organizations have been very keen to use TikTok, because it's been one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for news publishers over the last year, and it's been a good source of audience and traffic. So most of the talk in the news media has been around encouraging TikTok rather than banning it."

"Crypto firms should do their work within the bounds of the law, or they shouldn't do it at all," says the head of America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates US. investment markets.

In an editorial published in The Hill, SEC chair Gary Gensler warns that instead cryptocurrency has many "trusted" intermediaries that are in fact non-compliant with U.S. securities law. Today, crypto is dominated by a handful of trading, lending, staking, and other financial intermediaries. The investing public is trusting these entities to be responsible with investors' assets. According to some data, the three largest crypto trading platforms purportedly account for almost three quarters of all trading volume. Crypto entrepreneurs might claim, in their own marketing materials, that they're transparent and regulated. But make no mistake: Very few, if any, are actually registered with the SEC and fully compliant with the federal securities laws.

The lack of compliance puts investors' hard-earned assets at risk. Investors lack fundamental disclosures about the crypto assets themselves and the firms who execute their trades and custody their assets: What are firms doing with customer assets? How are they funding their promised returns? Are they putting their hands in investors' pockets? When you buy or sell a token, are you trading against the house? What are the rules to protect against manipulation and fraud? Without disclosure and other investor protections, we simply don't know.

In essence, these firms are saying, "trust us." What's more, when firms go bankrupt (as many have of late), they turn to bankruptcy courts to sort out their mess.
"[B]ased upon how crypto platforms generally operate, investment advisers cannot rely on them today as qualified custodians," the editorial concludes. Rather than comply with the relevant laws, "it has felt like some have sought a stamp of approval for noncompliant activity, rather than changing a fundamentally non-compliant business model rife with conflicts." Of course, another tool in our toolbox is rooting out noncompliance through investigations and enforcement actions. The SEC has successfully brought or settled more than 100 cases against crypto intermediaries and token issuers, including some who operated Ponzi or pyramid schemes, engaged in unlawful touting, or committed other forms of fraud....

Some have said that we should let the innovation flourish or risk it going overseas. But forsaking investor protection puts real people's life savings at risk.
"It's a basic bargain in finance: If you want to raise money from the public, disclose certain facts and figures," Gensler told Politico this week. Their article notes "crypto giants are threatening to move their businesses across the Atlantic" from America to Europe, but with Gensler responding "We lose more if investors get harmed here." Crypto lobbyists have framed Gensler's push to force their industry to comply with 90-year-old securities laws as a war against financial innovation. Whatever changes brought by crypto markets will pale compared to what could come as brokerages and financial data aggregators move to incorporate artificial intelligence into their offerings, Gensler said.

"The much more transformative technology right now of our times is predictive data analytics and everything underlying artificial intelligence," he said, adding that he looked forward to working with lawmakers on how those tools could be regulated.

A SPAC merger brought a global "Uber for bus" startup to the Nasdaq just as tech investment was about to dry up. From a report: In July 2021 the world's tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, was briefly lit up in brilliant red, with animated electronic text scrolling up its height announcing "the Middle East's first $1.5 billion unicorn to list on Nasdaq." The splashy marketing was for Swvl, a company with lofty ambitions to become a hybrid of a ride-hailing app and bus service in cities across the globe. Twenty months later, the Dubai-based company's shares have dropped more than 99%. Its roughly $9 million market value is a shadow of the billion-dollar-plus valuation that once gave it so-called unicorn status.

A deal to buy Turkish transit company Volt Lines largely using Swvl shares fell apart in January. Once trumpeted by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum as a symbol of the Middle East's startup spirit, Swvl Holdings has become another example of tech-sector overreach -- and how quickly investor money dried up once superlow interest rates went away. It also shows the perils of trying to build a business that straddles emerging markets vulnerable to currency shocks as the dollar rises. Swvl was co-founded in Cairo in 2017 by former Rocket Internet SE executive Mostafa Kandil along with Ahmed Sabbah and Mahmoud Nouh. The trio started the company as a solution for commuters who didn't want to rely on public transit but couldn't pay a premium for ride-share services. Their idea: buses and vans running along routes that users could book a ride on with an app.

Last month, Volkswagen garnered plenty of bad publicity when it emerged that the company's connected car service refused to help track a stolen car -- with a 2-year-old child still on board -- until someone paid to reactivate the service. Now, the automaker says it's very sorry this happened, and it's making its connected vehicle emergency service free to most model-year 2020-2023 Volkswagens. Ars Technica reports: "The family was thankfully reunited, but the crime and the process failure are heartbreaking for me," said Rachael Zaluzec, VW's SVP for customer experience and brand and marketing. "As a mom and an aunt, I can imagine how painful this incident must have been. Words can't adequately express how truly sorry I am for what the family endured."

"Volkswagen must and will do better for everyone that trusts our brand and for the law enforcement officials tasked with protecting us. In addition to a full investigation of what went wrong and actions taken to address the failure, we want to make it right for the future. Today, we are setting a new standard for customer peace of mind. As of June 1, we will make these connected vehicle emergency services free for five years as one significant step we can take as a commitment to our owners and their families," Zaluzec said in a statement sent to Ars.

Most MY2020 or newer VWs can use connected services, apart from MY2020 Passats. From June, owners can sign up for five years of free Car-Net Safe and Secure, which uses the vehicle's onboard modem to connect to the emergency services via the car's SOS button. In gasoline-powered VWs, there is also an anti-theft alert. VW says it will make Car-Net Remote Access free for five years as well. This lets owners interact with their car via a mobile app and can lock and unlock the doors, honk the horn and flash the lights, and, if fitted, remote-start the vehicle.

It has been more than a decade since Jeff Bezos excitedly sketched out his vision for Alexa on a whiteboard at Amazon's headquarters. His voice assistant would help do all manner of tasks, such as shop online, control gadgets, or even read kids a bedtime story. But the Amazon founder's grand vision of a new computing platform controlled by voice has fallen short. From a report: As hype in the tech world turns feverishly to generative AI as the "next big thing," the moment has caused many to ask hard questions of the previous "next big thing" -- the much-lauded voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. A "grow grow grow" culture described by one former Amazon Alexa marketing executive has now shifted to a more intense focus on how the device can help the ecommerce giant make money. "If you have anything you can do that you might be able to directly monetise, you should do it," was the recent diktat from Amazon leaders, according to one current employee on the Alexa team.

Under new chief executive Andy Jassy's tenure this change of focus has resulted in significant lay-offs in Amazon's Alexa team late last year as executives scrutinise the product's direct contribution to the company's bottom line. The belt-tightening came as part of broader cuts that have seen the ecommerce giant slash 18,000 jobs across the group amid pressure to improve profits during a global tech downturn. At Microsoft, whose chief executive Satya Nadella declared in 2016 that "bots are the new apps," it is now acknowledged that voice assistants, including its own Cortana, did not live up to the hype. "They were all dumb as a rock," Nadella told the Financial Times last month. "Whether it's Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri, all these just don't work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end to a lot of [information] that didn't work." Nadella can afford to be blunt: Microsoft's recent introduction of AI chatbot ChatGPT to its Bing search engine means the company is now seen as a leader in the field, having previously been mostly forgotten by the majority of internet users. ChatGPT's ability to understand complex instructions left existing voice assistants looking comparatively stupid, said Adam Cheyer, the co-creator of Siri, the voice assistant acquired by Apple in 2010 and introduced to the iPhone a year later.

Microsoft, having brought artificial intelligence to its battle with Google over search, is now turning to the latest AI technology to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market such as Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. From a report: The software giant is introducing an AI assistant -- called Dynamics 365 Copilot -- for applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. It can help marketers come up with customer categories to target, and write product listings for e-commerce. The new capabilities are being released in preview form on Monday and are being tested by hundreds of early customers. For example, Italian aperitif maker Campari is trying out the marketing tools to concoct targeted campaigns for events around the Negroni cocktail.

Microsoft also said its next set of AI announcements, planned for March 16, will relate to "workplace productivity," a term the software maker usually uses to mean Office software. Business applications are the latest Microsoft programs to get an AI makeover so far this year as the company adds language-generation tools and chatbots to everything from its Bing internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software. The strategy follows a successful debut for an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot last year and Microsoft's expansion of its investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in January. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has said the company plans to overhaul its whole product lineup using AI and tools from OpenAI. In the business applications category, where Microsoft has operated for more than two decades but lagged behind rivals, Nadella ultimately wants to use AI to break down silos between formerly separate programs, each with their own workflows and acronyms, like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, he said, they should be blended and have one AI copilot that can retrieve information and help workers with tasks. Still, like the Bing bot, Nadella noted Microsoft's Dynamics tool will also make mistakes.

America's public health-protecting Food and Drug Administration wants to update its definition of "healthy" for purposes of product labeling.

But the Washington Post reports dozens of food manufacturers are now "claiming the new standards are draconian and will result in most current food products not making the cut, or in unappealing product reformulations." Under the proposal, manufacturers can label their products "healthy" only if they contain a meaningful amount of food from at least one of the main food groups such as fruit, vegetable or dairy, as recommended by federal dietary guidelines. They must also adhere to specific limits for certain nutrients, such as saturated fat, sodium and added sugars.

It's the added sugar limit that has been the sticking point for many food executives. The FDA's previous rules put limits around saturated fat and sodium but did not include limits on added sugars.

The Consumer Brands Association, which represents 1,700 major food companies from General Mills to Pepsi, wrote a 54-page comment to the FDA in which it stated the proposed rule was overly restrictive and would result in a framework that would automatically disqualify a vast majority of packaged foods.... The proposed rule, if finalized, they said, would violate the First Amendment rights of food companies and could harm both consumers and manufacturers. The Sugar Association has an issue with the added sugar limit; Campbell Soup is more focused on that sodium....

Virtually every part of the food industry appeared disgruntled (here are the 402 comments about the proposed rule). Baby food company Happy Family Organics said the proposed rule probably would lead to an unintended exclusion of some nutrient-rich products. And the American Cheese Society took a more philosophical approach, saying the word "healthy" isn't that helpful on a label and should be used in a complete diet or lifestyle context rather than in a nutrient or single food-focused context.
The FDA estimates that up to just 0.4% of people who try to follow their guidelines would be swayed by the word "healthy" in their long-term food-purchasing decisions, according to the article. It's a position supported by a research paper in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing analyzing hundreds of international studies on the effectiveness of front-of-package nutrition labeling.

"The authors found that the most effective means of conveying nutrition information is a graphic warning label, as has been adopted in Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and Israel. In Chile, black warning labels shaped like stop signs are required for packaged food and drinks that exceed, per 100 grams: 275 calories, 400 milligrams of sodium, 10 grams of sugar or four grams of saturated fats."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares his perspective on the 10th anniversary of Code.org: Remember this?" asks tech-backed Code.org on Twitter as it celebrates its achievements.... "It's the viral video that launched Code.org back in 2013!" Code.org also reminds its 1M Twitter followers that What Most Schools Don't Teach starred tech leaders Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, and Drew Houston.

But 10 years later, the promise of unlimited tech jobs and crazy-fun workplaces promoted in the video by these Poster Boys for K-12 Computer Science hasn't exactly aged well, and may serve as more of a cautionary tale about hubris for some rather than evoke fond memories.

"Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find," exclaimed Zuckerberg in the video. But ten years later, Facebook's policy is firing as many employees as it can — 11,000+ and counting. Houston, who sang the praises of working in cool tech workplaces in the video ("To get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible"), went on to make remote work the standard practice at Dropbox, cut 11% of his employees, and reported a $575M loss on unneeded office space. Under pressure, Gates left Microsoft, Dorsey left Twitter, and Hsieh tragically left (Amazon-owned) Zappos, and the companies they co-founded recently unveiled plans for massive layoffs and halted ambitious office expansion plans as tech employees push back on return-to-the-office edicts.

Still, there's no denying the success of what the National Science Foundation called the "amazing marketing prowess" of tech giant supported and directed Code.org when it comes to pushing coding into American classrooms. The nonprofit boasts of having 80M+ student accounts, reported it had spent $74.7M to train 113,000+ K-12 teachers to deliver its K-12 CS curriculum, and has set its sights on making CS a high school graduation requirement in every state by 2030.

Interestingly, concomitant with Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration was the release of a new academic paper — Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship — that provocatively questions whether K-12 CS, at least in its current incarnation, is a feature or a bug. From the paper: "We are currently seeing an unprecedented push of computing into P-12 education systems across the US, with calls for compulsory computing education and changes to graduation requirements.... Although computing creep narratives are typically framed in lofty democratic terms, the 'access' narrative is ultimately a corporate play. Broadening participation in computing serves corporate interests by offering an expanded labor supply from which to choose the most productive workers. It is true that this might benefit an elite subset of BIPOC individuals, but the macroeconomics of the global labor market mean that access to computing is unlikely to ever benefit BIPOC communities at scale. [...] There are several nonprofits invested in the growth of computing, many with mission statements that do explicitly cite equity (and sometimes racial equity, in particular). Some of the larger nonprofits, though, are mainly funded by (and thus ultimately serve) corporate interests (e.g., Code. org).

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Nokia has announced one of the first budget Android smartphones designed to be repaired at home allowing users to swap out the battery in under five minutes in partnership with iFixit.

Launched before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Saturday, the Nokia G22 has a removable back and internal design that allows components to be easily unscrewed and swapped out including the battery, screen and charging port. Nokia phones manufacturer HMD Global will make "quick fix" repair guides and genuine parts available for five years via specialists iFixit, in addition to affordable professional repair options.

"People value long-lasting, quality devices and they shouldn't have to compromise on price to get them. The new Nokia G22 is purposefully built with a repairable design so you can keep it even longer," said Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing for HMD Global.

The G22 is partially made of recycled plastic and has a 6.53in screen, large-capacity battery, 50-megapixel camera and a fingerprint scanner. It runs Android 12 and will be supported for three years of monthly security updates and two major Android version upgrades.

Alphabet is shutting down its Everyday Robots project -- another casualty of job cuts at Google's parent company and the latest in a long list of failed hardware ventures. From a report: According to a report from Wired, Everyday Robots will no longer exist as a discrete team at the tech giant. "Everyday Robots will no longer be a separate project within Alphabet," Denise Gamboa, director of marketing and communications for Everyday Robots, told the publication. "Some of the technology and part of the team will be consolidated into existing robotics efforts within Google Research." Everyday Robots launched in 2019, with an aim of designing armed robots that could help out in domestic and office settings; taking on light custodial work like sorting trash and cleaning tables. The project's prototype, single-armed, wheeled robots were tested in Google's offices from 2021, and in 2022 received an upgrade courtesy of Google's AI language research, letting them process natural language commands.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Meta announced a new $11.99-a-month subscription service on Sunday (or $14.99-a-month for Android and iOS). For your money you mainly get the privilege of authenticating your own account with a government ID, so that it can then display the official "verified" badge. (Accounts must have a prior posting history, with account holders verified to be at least 18 years old.)

Meta promises they won't change already-verified Facebook and Instagram accounts — at least, not "as we test and learn." But they immediately follow that sentence by warning that in the longer-term they're "evolving the meaning" of verification, aiming to making everyone want to subscribe. Meta calls this "expanding access."

Paying subscribers will also get:

— Protection from account impersonation (at a higher level that's apparently not made available to non-paying members), including "proactive account monitoring".

— "Help when you need it with access to a real person for common account issues."

— Exclusive "stickers" for Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, plus 100 free Facebook "stars" each month "so you can show your support for other creators."


But most importantly, Meta is also promising to grant "increased visibility and reach" to paying members, promising "prominence" in parts of the service (including search, recommendations, and in comments). Although a footnote warns this may vary — depending on what you're trying to post about — and all content "will be treated according to our existing guidelines for recommendations on Instagram or Facebook and our Content Guidelines."

George Takei once calculated roughly 80% of your friends never see the things you post on Facebook. But now Facebook is deliberately evolving into a two-tiered system where some will always be relegated to less-likely-to-be-seen status, always outshined by wealthier friends with $144 a year to spend on upgrading their Facebook accounts.

The internet already has a two-tiered system for news, where the best news articles are only available to those with the funds to climb over multiple paywalls. But now even the lower tier of discourse — all that non-journalistic content floating around Facebook — will transform from a pool of burbling anger and misinformation into something worse. It's like Facebook's algorithm went from promoting just the most divisive content to promoting content from whoever most desires to foist their ideas onto other people. This may not end well.

Is it just me, or does this seem like a desperate grab for money?

— They're monetizing Meta's inability to stop account impersonators.

— Their announcement admits that "access to account support" remains a top request of their creators. Yet paying members are apparently more likely to get it than non-paying members. Maybe that can be their new marketing slogan. "Help when you need it — sold separately."

— This is happening. It becomes available for purchase this week on Instagram or Facebook in Australia and New Zealand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Australians would gain greater control of their personal information, including the ability to opt out of targeted ads, erase their data and sue for serious breaches of privacy, under a proposal to the Albanese government. On Thursday the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, will release a review conducted by his department into modernization of the Privacy Act which calls to expand its remit to small businesses and add new safeguards for use of data by political parties. Although the document is not government policy, in January Dreyfus told Guardian Australia the right to sue for privacy breaches and European-style reforms such as the right to be forgotten would be considered for the next tranche of legislation.

In 2022 the Albanese government passed a bill increasing penalties for companies that fail to protect customer data in the wake of major data breaches at telco Optus and health insurer Medibank. A summary section of the review, seen in advance by Guardian Australia, called for the exemption from the Privacy Act for small businesses to be abolished, citing community expectations that if small businesses are provided personal information "they will keep it safe." But first the government should conduct an "impact analysis" and give support to ensure small businesses can comply with their obligations, it said. Despite calls to abolish the privacy exemptions for political parties, the review proposed only increased safeguards, such as for parties to publish a privacy policy and not target voters "based on sensitive information or traits" except for political opinions, membership of a political association, or a trade union. "There was very strong support for increasing the protections for personal information under the Act," the review said.

The review called for new limits on targeted advertising, including to prohibit targeting to a child except where it is in their "best interests," and to provide others with an "an unqualified right to opt-out" of targeted ads and their information being disclosed for direct marketing purposes. The Privacy Act should include a new overarching requirement that "the collection, use and disclosure of personal information must be fair and reasonable in the circumstances," it said. The review also proposes individual rights modeled on the European Union's general data protection regulation including to: object to the collection, use or disclosure of personal information; request erasure of personal information; and to de-index online search results containing sensitive information, excessive detail or "inaccurate, out-of-date, incomplete, irrelevant, or misleading" information. The review suggested that consent should be required for collection and use of precise geolocation tracking data. The government should "consult on introducing a criminal offense for malicious re-identification of de-identified information where there is an intention to harm another or obtain an illegitimate benefit," it said. The report said that individuals wanted "more agency to seek redress for interferences with their privacy," proposing the creation of a right to sue for "serious invasions of privacy," which was also a recommendation of the Australian Law Reform Commission in 2014.

Google has begun letting Android developers kick the tyres of its claimed reboot of ad-targeting -- announcing the launch of the first Beta for its "Privacy Sandbox," an adtech stack proposal which aims to iterate how ad tracking, targeting and reporting is done so it appears less creepy for individual users while maintaining an interest-based, behavioral targeting capability on web users' eyeballs. From a report: A "small percentage" of eligible Android 13 devices will be enrolled in the trial of the beta from today as the adtech giant starts a gradual (but it says global) rollout of the beta -- which will "expand over time." (It's published developer guidance on participating in the beta here.) Ad partners for the trial include TechCrunch's parent Yahoo, mobile games maker Rovio, mobility firm Wolt, cross-platform games engine Unity and mobile marketing platforms AppsFlyer, InMobi Exchange and Adjust. "If your device is selected for the Beta, you'll receive an Android notification letting you know," Google adds in a blog post -- implying Android users will be opted in to the experimental, interest-based ad targeting (and will have to actively opt out if they don't wish their eyeballs to be guinea pigs).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Domain registrar Namecheap had their email account breached Sunday night, causing a flood of MetaMask and DHL phishing emails that attempted to steal recipients' personal information and cryptocurrency wallets. The phishing campaigns started around 4:30 PM ET and originated from SendGrid, an email platform used historically by Namecheap to send renewal notices and marketing emails. After recipients began complaining on Twitter, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall confirmed that the account was compromised and that they disabled email through SendGrid while they investigated the issue.

Namecheap published a statement Sunday night stating that their systems were not breached but rather it was an issue at an upstream system that they use for email. "We have evidence that the upstream system we use for sending emails (third-party) is involved in the mailing of unsolicited emails to our clients. As a result, some unauthorized emails might have been received by you," reads a statement issued by Namecheap. "We would like to assure you that Namecheap's own systems were not breached, and your products, accounts, and personal information remain secure." After the phishing incident, Namecheap says they stopped all emails, including two-factor authentication code delivery, trusted devices' verification, and password reset emails, and began investigating the attack with their upstream provider. Services were restored later that night at 7:08 PM EST.

While Namecheap did not state the name of this upstream system, the CEO of Namecheap previously tweeted that they were using SendGrid, which is also confirmed in the phishing emails' mail headers. However, Twilio SendGrid told BleepingComputer that Namecheap's incident was not the result of a hack or compromise of the email service provider's systems, adding more confusion as to what happened: "Twilio SendGrid takes fraud and abuse very seriously and invests heavily in technology and people focused on combating fraudulent and illegal communications. We are aware of the situation regarding the use of our platform to launch phishing email and our fraud, compliance and cyber security teams are engaged in the matter. This situation is not the result of a hack or compromise of Twilio's network. We encourage all end users and entities to take a multi-pronged approach to combat phishing attacks, deploying security precautions such as two factor authentication, IP access management, and using domain-based messaging. We are still investigating the situation and have no additional information to provide at this time."

"Opera's adding a ChatGPT-powered tool to its sidebar that generates brief summaries of webpages and articles," reports the Verge: "The feature, called 'shorten,' is part of the company's broader plans to integrate AI tools into its browser, similar to what Microsoft's doing with Edge."

The "shorten" feature isn't available to everyone just yet, though. Jan Standel, the vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, tells The Verge that it's going to "launch in browsers very soon." Opera's also working on other AI-powered features that "augment" the browsing experience and plans on adding "popular AI-generated content services to the sidebar," although it's not yet clear what this could entail.
In the blog post Opera's EVP for PC Browsers and Gaming shared their belief that "with AI solutions springing up both for text, image, and audio generation and in countless other forms, we are at the brink of a new era of creativity on the Web."

The post says the forthcoming AI integration follows their "track record of giving users direct access to the internet's most in-demand platforms, such as TikTok, Telegram, and WhatsApp." And Opera's co-CEO added that "Whether inventing browser tabs or providing our users with built-in access to generative AI tools, we always push the limits of what's possible on the web."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On January 1, 2023, a swath of books, films, and songs entered the public domain. The public domain is not a place -- it refers to all the creative works not protected by an intellectual property law like copyright. Creative works may not have intellectual property protections for a number of reasons. In most cases, the rights have expired or have been forfeited. Basically, no one holds the exclusive rights to these works, meaning that living artists today can sample and build off those works legally without asking anyone's permission to do so. That's why the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office's official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven't been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.

The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights. "That's sort of a staggering figure," Cram told Motherboard. "That's 25 to 35 percent of books that were renewed, while the rest were not. That's interesting for me as we think about copyright policy going forward." [...]

The U.S. Copyright Office and the Internet Archive collaborate to digitize these records, and while that digitization effort has been foundational for NYPL to even be able to conduct their investigation, the digital experience isn't much different from the physical one: To navigate the records, you have to click on a picture of an antique card catalog and then sift through volumes of digitized cards without the help of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which converts books into machine-readable text. Cram says that use of these tools today still requires some sort of specialized knowledge, like which drawer to open and which category to look for. Those searches can take a lot of time and produce a lot of false positives for researchers. Plus, what Cram is looking for within the records is exactly what's missing: A copyright renewal registration, or a renewal, or a registration to begin with. [trying to find absence of information] "We started the pilot with, I think it was just around 10,000 records, and then we started to realize, okay, we can start making some rules here," said Marianne Calilhanna, vice president of marketing with DCL. "So we're able to start making these conversion rules that then we can kind of put into our automation processes to start to structure this."

"Ultimately, the output we're creating is XML," she added. "XML is a series of tags that tell the computer, this is a title of a book, this is the title of a journal article. This is the author of that. And then we would also apply extra metadata on top of that record." NYPL plans to make their XML open source for other libraries across the nation and the world to use.

"For us to advance the progress and knowledge, which is the goal of copyright, I think we need access to this data so that we can understand how to answer that question of how can I use this?" Cram noted. "Having the data helps get us closer to an answer for that question, which ultimately is the goal, to use works lawfully, in a way that advances knowledge."

Microsoft, implementing the layoff of 10,000 workers announced last month, on Thursday cut jobs in units including Surface devices, HoloLens mixed reality hardware and Xbox, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Cuts to much of the HoloLens hardware team throw into question whether the company will produce a third iteration of the goggles outside of a planned version for the US Army, said the people, who declined to be named discussing confidential matters. At the Xbox gaming unit, reductions came in marketing and the Xbox Gaming Ecosystem, one of the people said.

Xbox Chief Phil Spencer emailed employees Thursday to let them know about the cuts without detailing what parts of his business were impacted. "I encourage everyone to take the time and space necessary to process these changes and support your colleagues," Spencer wrote in the email, which was seen by Bloomberg.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Stalkers and domestic abusers in the US for years have been able to access the kind of surveillance tools typically associated with foreign spies. That's all because of a pervasive industry that promises to help people who want to secretly monitor their family members. Now, because of an action brought by the New York Attorney General, one player in the so-called stalkerware industry has agreed to notify the people who were infected with its spyware. But it was required to pay just $410,000 in civil penalties, in part because rather than taking issue with the harmful nature of the technology, state prosecutors cited only the companies' use of deceptive marketing.

A detailed legal filing provides a glimpse into the pernicious capabilities that stalkerware firms provide to consumers -- enabling buyers to collect victims' texts, photos, emails, direct messages, you name it. The case is the latest evidence that such apps are more popular than previously understood. The New York investigation determined that one Florida man owned 16 companies, distributing apps with names such as PhoneSpector and AutoForward Data Services that promoted mobile surveillance software. Once installed on a device, some of the apps would be invisible on a user's home screen and allow a stalker to remotely activate an individual's camera or microphone without their knowledge, according to the legal filing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Many people in the United States would like to control the information that companies can learn about them online. Yet when presented with a series of true-or-false questions about how digital devices and services track users, most Americans struggled to answer them, according to a report published (PDF) on Tuesday by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The report analyzed the results of a data privacy survey that included more than 2,000 adults in the United States. Very few of the respondents said they trusted the way online services handled their personal data. The survey also tested people's knowledge about how apps, websites and digital devices may amass and disclose information about people's health, TV-viewing habits and doorbell camera videos. Although many understood how companies can track their emails and website visits, a majority seemed unaware that there are only limited federal protections for the kinds of personal data that online services can collect about consumers.

Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the report said. Only one person received an A grade, for correctly answering 16 of the questions. No one answered all of them correctly. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents said they had "little control over what marketers" could learn about them online, while 73 percent said they did not have "the time to keep up with ways to control the information that companies" had about them. "The big takeaway here is that consent is broken, totally broken,"Joseph Turow, a media studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was the lead author of the report, said in an interview. "The overarching idea that consent, either implicit or explicit, is the solution to this sea of data gathering is totally misguided -- and that's the bottom line."

The survey results challenge a data-for-services trade-off argument that the tech industry has long used to justify consumer tracking and to forestall government limits on it: Consumers may freely use a host of convenient digital tools -- as long as they agree to allow apps, sites, ad technology and marketing analytics firms to track their online activities and employ their personal information. But the new report suggests that many Americans aren't buying into the industry bargain. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they didn't think it was fair that a store could monitor their online activity if they logged into the retailer's Wi-Fi. And 61 percent indicated they thought it was unacceptable for a store to use their personal information to improve the services they received from the store. Only a small minority -- 18 percent -- said they did not care what companies learned about them online. "When faced with technologies that are increasingly critical for navigating modern life, users often lack a real set of alternatives and cannot reasonably forgo using these tools," Lina M. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech (PDF) last year.

In the talk, Ms. Khan proposed a "type of new paradigm" that could impose "substantive limits" on consumer tracking.

Starting pretty soon, some tickets at AMC locations are going to be getting cheaper and more expensive depending on where you sit as the movie theater chain introduces a new tiered pricing scheme called Sightline. From a report: Today, AMC announced its plans to roll out Sightline at AMC, a new pricing structure that will split auditorium seats into three differently priced tiers in theaters across the country beginning this Friday. In a statement about the new program, Eliot Hamlisch, AMC's chief marketing officer, described Sightline as an effort to get consumers thinking about buying movie tickets the same way they might events at "many other entertainment venues." Hamlisch also said that the new pricing structure is meant to give people who have particular seats they like a better shot at securing them and noted that some seats will become less expensive.