Neowin notes growing support for the "very efficient, potent, royalty-free video codec" AV1, including Microsoft's adding of support for hardware acceleration of AV1 on Windows.

But AV1 even turned up in Intel's announcement this week of the Arc A-series, a new line of discrete GPUs, Neowin reports: Intel has been quick to respond and the company has become the first such GPU hardware vendor to have full AV1 support on its newly launched Arc GPUs. While AMD and Nvidia both offer AV1 decoding with their newest GPUs, neither have support for AV1 encoding.

Intel says that hardware encoding of AV1 on its new Arc GPUs is 50 times faster than those based on software-only solutions. It also adds that the efficiency of AV1 encode with Arc is 20% better compared to HEVC. With this feature, Intel hopes to potentially capture at least some of the streaming and video editing market that's based on users who are looking for a more robust AV1 encoding solution compared to CPU-based software approaches.
From Intel's announcement: Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We've worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science. Princeton University Press has just published his new book — titled The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. (Definite internet as "the part that we are glued to for most hours of our waking lives" which in its current usage "hinders the exercise of attention, which, indeed, in the book I try to argue is crucial to a thriving human life.")

Smith recently answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some radically condensed excerpts: [T]he "crisis moment" comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That's when the crisis starts....

You identify as another contributing factor to our crisis moment the internet's addictive nature. How do algorithms play a role in addiction...?

[T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make. So that's not a philosophical problem. It's just a massively concerted effort to streamline and maximize our screen time..... [E]verything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers' parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user's part....

You could also ask, however, of social media... are you really conversing? Are you really debating? And I think the answer is, almost always, no. What's happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game.... [S]ocial media [is] more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.... [T]his is a real problem because there's no other game in town. At this point, if you have any lingering hope for the prospects of deliberative democracy, the idea that you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, it's just so obvious that the only possible setting is online. I mean, you can go print pamphlets in your basement if you want but that's not going to get your movement very far.

So we only have one choice as a public space, and it's a spurious one. It's one that can't be a public space because its raison d'être is something quite different....

In different government/enterprise meshes in different systems throughout the world, including the United States, but also significantly, China, we're seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems in very different cultures with different historical legacies. And that is, namely, a system in which algorithms constrain and define and limit our identities rather than enabling us to cultivate our freedoms.
The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning.

"[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: A major Wyze Cam security flaw easily allowed hackers to access stored video, and it went unfixed for almost three years after the company was alerted to it, says a new report today. Additionally, it appears that Wyze Cam v1 -- which went on sale back in 2017 -- will never be patched, so it will remain vulnerable for as long as it is used.

Bleeping Computer reports: "A Wyze Cam internet camera vulnerability allows unauthenticated, remote access to videos and images stored on local memory cards and has remained unfixed for almost three years. The bug, which has not been assigned a CVE ID, allowed remote users to access the contents of the SD card in the camera via a webserver listening on port 80 without requiring authentication. Upon inserting an SD card on the Wyze Cam IoT, a symlink to it is automatically created in the www directory, which is served by the webserver but without any access restrictions."

And as if that weren't bad enough, it gets worse. Many people re-use existing SD cards they have laying around, some of which still have private data on them, especially photos. The flaw gave access to all data on the card, not just files created by the camera. Finally, the AES encryption key is also stored on the card, potentially giving an attacker live access to the camera feed. Altogether, Bitdefender security researchers advised the company of three vulnerabilities. It took Wyze six months to fix one, 21 months to fix another, and just under two years to patch the SD card flaw. The v1 camera still hasn't been patched, and as the company announced last year that it has reached end-of-life status, so it appears it never will.

Sony is set to launch a new video game subscription service this summer, seeking to drive sales of its PlayStation consoles and compete with a similar offering from Microsoft. CNBC: The company said Tuesday it will bundle its existing PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services into one single subscription service called PlayStation Plus. The new PlayStation Plus will be available in June and comes in three tiers:

1. The basic package, PS Plus Essential, replaces the original PS Plus, which offers players two free games each month and access to online multiplayer. It costs $10 a month or $60 for an annual subscription.
2. A step above Essential is PS Plus Extra, which comes with all the same perks as Essential but includes a selection of 400 downloadable PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 titles. It's priced at $15 monthly or $100 a year.
3. The most expensive package is PS Plus Premium. This one includes 340 more games than Extra, and lets players stream a selection of PS, PS2, PSP, PS3, PS4 and PS5 games over the internet. PS Plus Premium costs $18 a month or $120 each year.

"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines."

The AV Club explains: Earlier this year, about a month after the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves was announced as a performer at the 35th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. The concert was organized by Tibet House, a nonprofit founded by supporters of the Dalai Lama that Chinese authorities have labeled "a separatist organization advocating for Tibetan independence," according to The Hollywood Reporter....

Now, after his appearance at the show, it's being reported by the Los Angeles Times that the Matrix movies, Speed, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lake House, and more films from the actor's catalog can no longer be streamed on platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and Migu Video.... The one Reeves picture that is still up and available to stream in the country is Toy Story 4 — but that's because the film's credits feature the dubbing cast, not the original cast from the American release.
But it's more than that, notes PC Magazine: As Reuters reports, the Chinese authorities have seemingly wiped the actor's existence from servers across the country.... And with the internet being so restricted and controlled there, it's relatively simple for those in power to digitally disappear someone. So far, Tencent and iQiyi have removed at least 19 of the actor's movies from their streaming platforms, and performing a search for either his English name or its Chinese translation will return zero results from search engines, apparently.
The Los Angeles Times supplies some context: The development emerged just after his latest film "The Matrix: Resurrections" became the first blockbuster to hit Chinese theaters in over two months, ending an unusually prolonged drought of censorship approvals on U.S. titles in a year of rising geopolitical tensions and a further cooling of relations with Hollywood.... "It's a curious case that's worth following. We tend to think of the censorship machine in China as this really coordinated monster, but the fact that we're seeing these conflicting signals [between the online and theatrical markets] suggests that some of these measures come from different places," said Alex Yu, a researcher at China Digital Times, a U.S.-based news organization that translates and archives content censored in China.

It's unclear who ordered the deletions, China's regulatory agencies or platforms acting proactively to remove potentially troublesome content, Yu said.... "Why all of a sudden did they decide to take this measure at this exact moment? It's a question we as outsiders might never be able to answer," Yu said. "The system is so opaque that it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint which agency or person is responsible...."

The ban on Reeves' past works bodes poorly for the China prospects of his upcoming projects. These include animation "DC League of Super-Pets," starring Chinese fan favorite Dwayne Johnson, and the pandemic-delayed sequel "John Wick: Chapter 4," which appears to target mainland viewers with its top billing of Donnie Yen, the Hong Kong action star known for his expressions of loyalty to China's ruling Communist Party....

Despite the original trilogy's popularity, "The Matrix: Resurrections" was a flop in China even before it faced nationalist backlash, grossing only $13.6 million and notching just 5.7 out of 10 on the taste-making ratings platform Douban.

In a formalization of an earlier Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host the official kick off of a policy advocacy lobby group that's being branded the Open Internet Alliance (OIA). From a report: Alongside Twitter, video streaming platform Vimeo; Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr; the Czech and Slovak focused search engine company, Seznam; and Jodel, a Berlin-based (profile-less) social network, are named as founding members. Twitter said the establishment of this formal lobbying alliance has been some two years in the making. Notably Mozilla -- which had joined Twitter, Auttomatic and Vimeo in a earlier call for incoming EU digital regulations to support better user controls to tackle bad speech rather than hone in on content censorship -- is not being named as a founding member so appears to be sitting this one out. At the time of writing it's unclear why Mozilla is missing. But the Alliance is putting out a wider call for other "middle-layer" Internet companies to join the initiative -- so the grouping may grow in size.

Albeit -- very clearly -- big tech need not apply.

Speaking during a Twitter Spaces event today to discuss the formation of the alliance, Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's global policy VP, said the group is making a plea to lawmakers to think about the wider web ecosystem -- rather than see the Internet as "a monolith" comprised of just a handful of tech giants. "Our plea in aid of the open Internet is that [lawmakers] not view the Internet as a monolith, nor indeed view it as fixing the Internet solving all of societies problems," she said, urging policymakers to: "Take a wider focus when they're looking at solutions -- not look at the Internet just through the lens of a handful of companies. And really think about the entire ecosystem -- and get away from this sense 'oh big tech is the problem.' Because -- in actual fact, in their efforts to tackle so called 'big tech -- that is all we may end up with."

"Music was one of the first industries that felt the sonic boom of the internet, starting with song-sharing websites like Napster in the late 1990s and iTunes digital downloads later," writes the New York Times.

They take a quick look at how the music industry "survived an online revolution," arguing that streaming services "saved the music industry from the jaws of the internet," making it financially healthy and giving it a wider reach.

"But all is not entirely well." Even now, the music industry in the United States generates less revenue than at the peak of the CD. There's a raging debate about how long the gravy train from streaming will last. And many musicians and others say that they're not sharing in the spoils from the digital transformation....

First, I'll lay out the case that the music industry is doing awesome. More than 500 million people around the world pay for digital music, mostly in fees for services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Tencent Music, which is based in China. Those services have given the industry something it has never had before: a steady stream of cash every month. The industry also is making money a gazillion ways. When you watch a music video on YouTube, money flows to the people responsible for that song. TikTok pays record companies when videos feature their popular songs....

Revenue for the music industry has been increasing consistently since 2015, but revenue from all sources — including streaming subscriptions, CDs and royalties from elevator music — is still less than it was in 1999. Total industry revenue back then was about $24 billion adjusted for inflation, and revenue in 2021 was $15 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Global sales data from a different music trade group show a similar trajectory.) There aren't an infinite number of people who are willing to pay the going rate in many countries of $10 a month to access a whole bunch of songs on their phones via a service like Spotify. That's what worries people who believe the music industry's digital success has peaked.
Finally, the article points out that even the most-popular songs...aren't as popular as songs got in the past. And then it links to a story headlined "Streaming Saved Music. Artists Hate It."

"The big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren't at Beyoncé's level of fame. And they're angry about not sharing in the music industry's success."

The Washington Post looks at what happened after Starlink activated its satellite-based internet service to help Ukraine: Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk's companies and European allies, which has proved "very effective," Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Friday. "The quality of the link is excellent," Fedorov said through a translator, using a Starlink connection from an undisclosed location. "We are using thousands, in the area of thousands, of terminals with new shipments arriving every other day...." A person familiar with Starlink's effort in Ukraine, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said there are more than 5,000 terminals in the country....

Internet flows deteriorated on the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and have not fully recovered, according to data-monitoring services. But since that initial dip, connectivity has remained fairly stable, with mainly temporary, isolated outages even during heavy Russian shelling. "Every day there are outages, but generally service comes back," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, which monitors global data flows.

Even before Fedorov tweeted at Musk for help, SpaceX was working on a way to get Starlink to Ukraine. President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a talk at California Institute of Technology this month that the company had been working for several weeks to get regulatory approval to allow the satellites to communicate in Ukraine.
In addition, the Washington Post reports, this week on Twitter Elon Musk also "challenged Putin to a fight and followed up by pledging he would use just one hand if Putin was scared. And he told Putin he could bring a bear." Reached for comment by the Post's reporters, Elon Musk responded by telling The Post to give his regards "to your puppet master Besos," following it with two emojis.

But the Post's article also argues Starlink's technology "could have widespread implications for the future of war. Internet has become an essential tool for communication, staying informed and even powering weapons." And The Telegraph reports that Starlink "is helping Ukrainian forces win the drone war as they use the technology in their effort to track and kill invading Russians." In the vanguard of Ukraine's astonishingly effective military effort against Vladimir Putin's forces is a unit called Aerorozvidka (Aerial Reconnaissance) which is using surveillance and attack drones to target Russian tanks and positions. Amid internet and power outages, which are expected to get worse, Ukraine is turning to the newly available Starlink system for some of its communications. Drone teams in the field, sometimes in badly connected rural areas, are able to use Starlink to connect them to targeters and intelligence on their battlefield database. They can direct the drones to drop anti-tank munitions, sometimes flying up silently to Russian forces at night as they sleep in their vehicles...

Should Ukraine's internet largely collapse, the "drone warriors" of Aerorozvidka would still be able to communicate with their bases by sending signals from mobile Starlink terminals, and using ground stations in neighbouring countries including Poland.... As Ukraine's internet is inevitably degraded, Starlink will be an alternative. General James Dickinson, commander of US Space Command, told the Senate armed services committee: "What we're seeing with Elon Musk and the Starlink capabilities is really showing us what a megaconstellation, or a proliferated architecture, can provide in terms of redundancy and capability."
It's not all Starlink. The Telegraph points out that "The Ukrainian system benefitted from equipment given by Western countries, including radio communications which superceded Soviet-era technology, and the US has also poured in millions of dollars to protect against Russian hacking, jamming of signals and attempts to 'spoof' GPS technology."

And meanwhile, weakness in Russia's own communications infrastructure may have played a role in the killing of five senior Russian generals in the last three weeks, according to a recent CNN interview with retired U.S. army general and former CIA director David Petraeus: "The bottom line is that [Russia's] command-and-control has broken down. Their communications have been jammed by the Ukranians.

Their secure comms didn't work. They had to go single-channel. That's jammable, and that's exactly what the Ukranians have been doing to that. They used cellphones. The Ukranians blocked the prefix for Russia, so that didn't work. Then they took down 3G. [The Russians] are literally stealing cellphones from Ukranian civilians to communicate among each other.

So what happens? The column gets stopped. An impatient general is sitting back there in his armored or whatever vehicle. He goes forward to find out what's going on... And the Ukranians have very, very good snipers, and they've just been picking them off left and right.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

LibrePlanet, the annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation, will be happening online this weekend. The event "provides an opportunity for community activists, domain experts, and people seeking solutions for themselves to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics," according to its web page. This year's LibrePlanet theme is "Living Liberation".

And while you're listening to the presentations, you can apparently also interact with the rest of the community: Each LibrePlanet room has its own IRC channel on the Libera.Chat network... Want to interact with other conference-goers in a virtual space? Join us on LibreAdventure, where you'll be able to video chat with fellow free software users, journey to the stars, and walk around a replica of the FSF office!

Our Minetest server is back by popular demand, and now running version 5.x of everyone's favorite free software, voxel sandbox game. You can install Minetest through your GNU/Linux distro's package manager, and point your client to minetest.libreplanet.org with the default port 30000.
Sunday's presentations include "Living in freedom with GNU Emacs" and "Hacking my brain: Free virtual reality implementations and their potential for therapeutic use."

And Sunday will also include a talk from Seth Schoen, the first staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who helped develop the Let's Encrypt certificate authority) titled "Reducing Internet address waste: The IPv4 unicast extensions project."

View the complete schedule here.

Slashdot reader quonset shares this report from Reuters: Instagram users in Russia have been notified that the service will cease as of midnight on Sunday after its owner Meta Platforms said last week it would allow social media users in Ukraine to post messages such as "Death to the Russian invaders". An email message from the state communications regulator told users to move their photos and videos from Instagram before it was shut down, and encouraged them to switch to Russia's own "competitive internet platforms".

Meta, which also owns Facebook, said Friday that the temporary change in its hate speech policy applied only to Ukraine, in the wake of Russia's Feb. 24 invasion. The company said it would be wrong to prevent Ukrainians from "expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces"....

The message to Instagram users from the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, described the decision to allow calls for violence against Russians as a breach of international law. "We need to ensure the psychological health of citizens, especially children and adolescents, to protect them from harassment and insults online," it said, explaining the decision to close down the platform.
"The tears were flowing Sunday among Russia's airbrushed Instagram influencers, who begged their followers in farewell posts to join them on alternative social media platforms..." reports the Washington Post: On the platform, emotions ran high Sunday among Russians who were about to lose thousands of dollars they received to promote various products, as well as access to millions of followers amassed over the years. "I'm writing this post now and crying," Olga Buzova, a Russian reality television star, wrote, saying she hoped "it's all not true and we will remain here...."

The ban on Instagram is the latest example of how Russia's citizens are being isolated from the rest of the world as a result of Moscow's war against Ukraine. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, his government has also pulled the plug on Russia's opposition-oriented radio and television networks, part of a broader effort to squelch domestic dissent in response to the war. Thousands of Russians have been arrested for attempting to protest the invasion.... But perhaps no move is more isolating than removing Russians from social media platforms that connect them directly to other users around the world. Instagram counted nearly 60 million users in Russia in 2021, according to the market data firm Statista, about 40 percent of the country's population. The platform is also a huge revenue source for its users, who rake in cash from sponsors by posting promotional content.
"We know that over 80 percent of people in Russia on Instagram follow an account from outside of Russia," Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video, according to the Post's article.

It adds that "It is unclear how many Russians will continue to be able to access Instagram using Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs."

DidgetMaster writes: Hard drive costs now hover around $20 per terabyte (TB). Drives bigger than 20TB are now available. Fast SSDs are more expensive, but the average user can now afford these in TB capacities as well. Yet, we are still using antiquated file systems that were designed decades ago when the biggest drives were much less than a single gigabyte (GB). Their oversized file records and slow directory traversal search algorithms make finding files on volumes that can hold more than 100 million files a nightmare. Rather than flexible tagging systems that could make searches quick and easy, they have things like "extended attributes" that are painfully slow to search on. Indexing services can be built on top of them, but these are not an integral part of the file system so they can be bypassed and become out of sync with the file system itself.

It is time to replace file systems with something better. A local object store that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files and find things in seconds based on file type and/or tags attached is possible. File systems are usually free and come with your operating system, so there seems to be little incentive for someone to build a new system from scratch, but just like we needed the internet to come along and change everything we need a better data storage manager.

See Didgets for an example of what is possible. In a Substack article, Didgets developer Andy Lawrence argues his system solves many of the problems associated with the antiquated file systems still in use today. "With Didgets, each record is only 64 bytes which means a table with 200 million records is less than 13GB total, which is much more manageable," writes Lawrence. Didgets also has "a small field in its metadata record that tells whether the file is a photo or a document or a video or some other type," helping to dramatically speed up searches.

Do you think it's time to replace file systems with an alternative system, such as Didgets? Why or why not?

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is building a digital voice assistant to help people interact hands-free with physical devices, such as the company's Portal video-calling device and, eventually, augmented-reality glasses. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company is building the assistant in preparation for the so-called metaverse, a more immersive version of the internet that will let people interact online through virtual and AR glasses. Digital assistants will need to "learn the way humans do" to help users navigate this new online world, Zuckerberg said during a presentation on Wednesday. "When we have glasses on our faces, that will be the first time an AI system will be able to really see the world from our perspective -- see what we see, hear what we hear and more," Zuckerberg added, saying he hopes to eventually build AI assistants that can "move between virtual and physical worlds." The AI assistant doesn't have a name, but Meta is calling the effort "Project CAIRaoke."

From the New York Times: As Gita Jackson reported recently in Vice News, some Amazon customers are now explicitly asking the company's drivers to deliver a performance along with the package. They are posting signs to their front doors or tapping unusual delivery instructions into the Amazon app in the hopes of capturing a spectacle on their surveillance feeds.... [T]hese customers proceed to shamelessly post the evidence to social media. Sometimes the videos are spun into an online sleuthing opportunity, as the TikToker asks viewers to hunt for the dancing driver's identity. And they represent just a slice of the "Amazon driver approaches the door" genre of internet video... But whether the video is pitched as heartwarming or sadistic, the customer is enlisting the driver into a nonconsensual pageant that doubles as a performance review. As Jackson reported, Amazon drivers who fail to fulfill customer requests risk demerits....

Amazon encourages customers to publicize their Ring videos on its safety-minded social network, Neighbors, and makes it easy to share them more widely, too. One of Ring's marketing lines is "A lot happens at your front door," and this is meant as both a warning and an invitation — though it suggests it is too dangerous to venture outside, it also implies that a whole world of entertainment is to be found through eyeing your surveillance feed.... The official Ring YouTube channel is filled with user-generated videos that help inject its growing spy network with warmth and surprise, as the cameras catch spontaneous footage of good Samaritans, grazing cows and, of course, the company's drivers caught in kooky scenarios, like in this entry from December: "Even a Giant Bear Will Not Stop This Amazon Driver From Making His Delivery."

Amazon obsessively surveils its workers through dashcams, smartphone monitors and machine-generated report cards, and these videos implicate the customer in that exercise, making the violation of driver privacy into a kind of internet-wide contest. The caption for Amazon's bear video focuses on the heroic actions of a Ring user named Josh, who supposedly aided the delivery driver's safety by "watching his exit the whole time" on the security camera.... Its routes are often serviced by precarious gig workers, its quotas are too punishing to allow for socializing, and all potential human interactions have been replaced by one-way surveillance. In many of these TikTok videos, Amazon workers literally run in and out of the frame. If delivery drivers were once lightly teased or frequently ogled, now they are simply dehumanized, plugged into machine-run networks and expected to move product with robotic efficiency. The compulsory dance trend on TikTok suggests that customers, too, have come to see drivers as programmable....

On an even more depressing corner of Amazon TikTok, customers post videos not to backwardly celebrate drivers but just to shame them for delivering the package with less than the customer's expected level of service.

America's Internal Revenue service abandoned plans to make face-scanning mandatory for access to your tax records.

Unfortunately, before this change of heart the IRS had already directed 7 million Americans to facial recognition vendor ID.me, reports the Washington Post. Now the chair of the House Oversight Committee is urging IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig to instruct ID.me to destroy the biometric data and ensure the data isn't used for "unapproved or unauthorized purposes." "Those Americans' highly personal information may continue to be held by a third party outside of the IRS's direct control — increasing the potential for exposure due to bad actors and other cybersecurity incidents," [head of the committee] . Maloney wrote.... ID.me said on Wednesday that it would drop the facial recognition requirement in its software, which is used by 30 states and 10 federal agencies. The company also told The Washington Post that effective March 1, anyone would be able to delete their selfie or photo data....

The letter follows years of controversy over the government's expanding use of facial recognition software, despite warnings from the General Services Administration that the face-scanning technology has too many problems to justify its use.... There is no federal law regulating how facial recognition can be used or how it should be secured....

Maloney also writes that 13 percent of ID.me users since June had struggled to use the software and were referred to customer service, where representatives would attempt to verify their identities over video chat. The letter says this underscores the "widespread issues related to the use of the nascent facial recognition technology."
In fact, the Verge reports that "Internal documents and former ID.me employees say the company was beset by disorganization and staffing shortages throughout 2021, as shortcomings in the automated systems created tensions among the company's workforce, particularly the human verification workers who have to step in when the algorithms fail." Current and former employees who spoke to The Verge paint a picture of a company described as being in "permanent crisis mode," changing policies rapidly to keep up with fluctuating demand for its services and fight a slew of negative press. In particular, they say a lack of human review capacity has been a chokepoint for the company, leading to stress, pressure, and a failure to meet quality standards. It's an unexpected challenge for a biometrics system that's usually seen as automatic, pointing to the often-ignored workers needed to support automated systems at scale.

When the automated systems fail — ID.me says roughly 10 percent of users will need video chat assistance — it's workers and subjects who are left to manage the consequences.... To keep up with demand, the company added 1,300 new employees between January and September 2021, including 500 to be based in a new office in Tampa, Florida, dedicated to customer support. But as adoption increased, so did complaints. A Vice report found dozens of complaints from applicants who said they had been locked out of unemployment benefits when ID.me's verification service had failed to identify them. When the automated system failed, applicants often faced long wait times to reach human reviewers, according to the report — wait times that became even more burdensome and difficult to navigate for people without access to reliable internet connections....

Many staff were unhappy about the end of work-from-home policies, which were being phased out at the company at the same time as first the delta and then omicron variants hit the US. As in-office staffing levels rose, more ID.me employees began to contract COVID at work, sources said, in some cases taking whole teams offline at once.
One Id.me employee complained to the Verge that "In terms of worker treatment, it's like the Amazon of identity protection."

The article also notes that an ID.me video chat agent was terminated after engaging in "inappropriate conduct," and while the company added new procedures to prevent this, "sources said that these quality checks have begun to fall by the wayside under the pressure of clearing through the backlog of video verification requests."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mark Zuckerberg quipped that if he started to cry, it wasn't because of the day's news. His red, teary eyes were the result of a scratched cornea, the Facebook founder said Thursday, attempting to lighten the mood as Meta Platforms' stock price lost more than a quarter of its value. At a company-wide virtual meeting, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. It is important to focus on growing Facebook's short-video product, he said. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the rival viral-video platform. Meta's Instagram app has a copycat of TikTok called Reels, which the company is now prioritizing.

Employees were glued to the stock price. Facebook lost a record $251 billion of value in a single day. Some were discussing buying shares during the dip, believing in Zuckerberg's long-term vision for the metaverse, an immersive version of the internet. Others fretted about what a continued decline might mean for their net worth, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg's own wealth dropped by $31 billion. Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of extending existing three-day holiday weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week all the time would not be productive.

America's Internal Revenue Service created an uproar with early plans to require live-video-feed selfies to verify identities for online tax services (via an outside company called ID.me).

But Wired points out that more than 20 U.S. federal agencies are already using a digital identification system (named Login.gov and built on services from LexisNexis) that "can use selfies for account verification."

It's run by America's General Services Administration, or GSA.... The GSA's director of technology transformation services Dave Zvenyach says facial recognition is being tested for fairness and accessibility and not yet used when people access government services through Login.gov. The GSA's administrator said last year that 30 million citizens have Login.gov accounts and that it expects the number to grow significantly as more agencies adopt the system.

"ID.me is supplying something many governments ask for and require companies to do," says Elizabeth Goodman, who previously worked on Login.gov and is now senior director of design at federal contractor A1M Solutions. Countries including the UK, New Zealand, and Denmark use similar processes to ID.me's to establish digital identities used to access government services. Many international security standards are broadly in line with those of the U.S., written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Goodman says that such programs need to provide offline options such as visiting a post office for people unable or unwilling to use phone apps or internet services....
In fact, Wired argues that in many cases, a selfie or biometric data is virtually required by U.S. federal security guidelines from 2017: NIST's 2017 standard says that access to systems that can leak sensitive data or harm public programs should require verifying a person's identity by comparing them to a photo — either remotely or in person — or using biometrics such as a fingerprint scanner. It says that a remote check can be done either by video with a trained agent, or using software that checks for an ID's authenticity and the "liveness" of a person's photo or video.... California's Employment Development Department said that ID.me blocked more than 350,000 fraudulent claims in the last three months of 2020. But the state auditor said an estimated 20 percent of legitimate claimants were unable to verify their identities with ID.me.

Caitlin Seeley George, director of campaigns and operations with nonprofit Fight for the Future, says ID.me uses the specter of fraud to sell technology that locks out vulnerable people and creates a stockpile of highly sensitive data that itself will be targeted by criminals. ...

Last week America's Internal Revenue Service announced a live-video-feed verification of taxpayer's faces would be required by this summer access online tax service. But now the Washington Post reports that "complaints of confusing instructions and long wait times to complete the sign-up have caused an unknown number to abandon the process in frustration."

"The $86 million ID.me contract with the IRS also has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans' facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come." There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared. While the IRS couldn't say what percentage of taxpayers use the agency's website, internal data show it is one of the federal government's most-viewed websites, with more than 1.9 billion visits last year. The partnership with ID.me has drawn anger from some members of Congress, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who tweeted that he was "very disturbed" by the plan and would push the IRS for "greater transparency." Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) called it "a very, very bad idea by the IRS" that would "further weaken Americans' privacy." The Senate Finance Committee is working to schedule briefings with the IRS and ID.me on the issue, a committee aide said.... "No one should be forced to submit to facial recognition as a condition of accessing essential government services," Wyden said in a separate statement. "I'm continuing to seek more information about ID.me and other identity verification systems being used by federal agencies."

A Treasury official said Friday that the department was "looking into" alternatives to ID.me, saying Treasury and the IRS always are interested in improving "taxpayers experience...."

About 70 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services already have been scanned by the McLean, Va.-based company, which says its client list includes 540 companies; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs.... Equifax, the credit-reporting company that previously confirmed taxpayers' data for the IRS, had its $7 million contract suspended in 2017 after hackers exposed the personal information of 148 million people...

[ID.me] says 9 of 10 applicants can verify their identity through a self-service face scan in five minutes or less. Anyone who hits a snag is funneled into the backup video-chat verification process...But some who have tried to verify their identities through ID.me for other purposes have reported agonizing delays: cryptic glitches in Colorado, website errors in Arizona, five-hour waits in North Carolina, days-long waits in California and weeks-long benefit delays in New York. The security blogger Brian Krebs wrote last week that he faced a three-hour wait trying to confirm his IRS account, three months before the tax-filing deadline.... The company said it intends to expand its workforce beyond the 966 agents who now handle video-chat verification for the entire country. It has also opened hundreds of in-person identity-verification centers — replicating, in essence, what government offices have done for decades.
The article also points out that advertising is also a key part of ID.me's operation, with people signing up through their web site asked if they want to subscribe to "offers and discounts" — though the company stresses people do have to opt in. And in addition, the article adds, "If a person is using ID.me to confirm their identity with a government agency, the company will not use that verification information for 'marketing or promotional purposes,' the company's privacy policy says."

But a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center complained to the Post that "We haven't even gone the step of putting regulations in place and deciding if facial recognition should even be used like this. We're just skipping right to the use of a technology that has clearly been shown to be dangerous and has issues with accuracy, disproportionate impact, privacy and civil liberties."

A spokesperson for the U.S. Treasury Department also told Bloomberg News "that any taxpayer who does not want to use ID.me can opt against filing his or her taxes online." "We believe in the importance of protecting the privacy of taxpayers, while also ensuring criminals are not able to gain access to taxpayer accounts," LaManna added, arguing that it's been "impossible" for the IRS to develop its own cutting-edge identification program because of "the lack of funding for IRS modernization."

YouTube is exploring adding nonfungible token features for its video creators, Chief Executive Officer Susan Wojcicki wrote to the site's broadcasters on Tuesday. From a report: Although Wojcicki didn't say exactly what her team is planning, or when, it marks the first time Alphabet's Google, YouTube's owner, is becoming involved with the cryptocurrency collectibles. Several of YouTube's rivals have already jumped on the trend. Twitter began letting users post NFTs as profile photos and Instagram is reportedly working on a similar offering, according to the Financial Times. NFTs are digital assets that represent ownership of digital assets, like art, that people can buy or sell. YouTube, home to the largest creator economy, has spent several years building ways for its video stars to earn money beyond advertising, adding tools like fan payments and e-commerce. Wojcicki told creators her company was looking to web3, an umbrella term for internet models built around crypto, as a "source for inspiration."

"GIF folders were used by ancient civilisations as a way to store and catalogue animated pictures that were once employed to convey emotion," Vice writes: Okay, you probably know what a GIF folder is — but the concept of a special folder needed to store and save GIFs is increasingly alien in an era where every messaging app has its own in-built GIF library you can access with a single tap. And to many youngsters, GIFs themselves are increasingly alien too — or at least, okay, increasingly uncool. "Who uses gifs in 2020 grandma," one Twitter user speedily responded to Taylor Swift in August that year when the singer-songwriter opted for an image of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson mouthing the words "oh my god" to convey her excitement at reaching yet another career milestone.

You don't have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people — which, yes, now means millennials. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge...?

Gen Z might think GIFs are beloved by millennials, but at the same time, many millennials are starting to see GIFs as a boomer plaything. And this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. "That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders," Phillips explains. "That's been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point...."

In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. "The more GIFs there are, maybe the less they're regarded as being special treasures or gifts that you're giving people," Phillips says. "Rather than looking far and wide to find a GIF to send you, it's clicking the search button and typing a word. The gift economy around GIFs has shifted...."

Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychology professor at Edge Hill University, hasn't done direct research in this area but theorises that the ever-growing popularity of video-sharing on TikTok means younger generations are more used to "personalised content creation", and GIFs can seem comparatively lazy.
The GIF was invented in 1987 "and it's important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before," the article points out. It cites Jason Eppink, an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014, who highlighted how GIFs were popular with GeoCities users in the 90s, "so when Facebook launched, they didn't support GIFs.... They were like, 'We don't want this ugly symbol of amateur web to clutter our neat and uniform cool new website." But then GIFs had a resurgence on Tumblr.

Vice concludes that while even Eppink no longer uses GIFs any more, "Perhaps the waxing and waning popularity of the GIF is an ironic mirror of the format itself — destined to repeat endlessly, looping over and over again."

Meta may be the loudest company building AR and VR hardware. Microsoft has HoloLens. Apple is working on something, too. But don't count out Google. The Verge: The search giant has recently begun ramping up work on an AR headset, internally codenamed Project Iris, that it hopes to ship in 2024, according to two people familiar with the project who requested anonymity to speak without the company's permission. Like forthcoming headsets from Meta and Apple, Google's device uses outward-facing cameras to blend computer graphics with a video feed of the real world, creating a more immersive, mixed reality experience than existing AR glasses from the likes of Snap and Magic Leap. Early prototypes being developed at a facility in the San Francisco Bay Area resemble a pair of ski goggles and don't require a tethered connection to an external power source.

Google's headset is still early in development without a clearly defined go-to-market strategy, which indicates that the 2024 target year may be more aspirational than set in stone. The hardware is powered by a custom Google processor, like its newest Google Pixel smartphone, and runs on Android, though recent job listings indicate that a unique OS is in the works. Given power constraints, Google's strategy is to use its data centers to remotely render some graphics and beam them into the headset via an internet connection. I'm told that the Pixel team is involved in some of the hardware pieces, but it's unclear if the headset will ultimately be Pixel-branded.