Category: Technology

Meta has shared an updated content monitoring action plan as the devastating Israel-Hamas war continues. It follows a stern letter from Thierry Breton, the European Union’s (EU) regulatory commissioner, to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about misinformation concerns (such as deep fakes) and compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The company had 24 hours to respond. 

In its statement, Meta said that it created an ever-evolving operations center with experts fluent in Hebrew and Arabic: “Since the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel on Saturday, and Israel’s response in Gaza, expert teams from across our company have been working around the clock to monitor our platforms while protecting people’s ability to use our apps to shed light on important developments happening on the ground.” Meta claims this new setup lets them remove content and fight misinformation faster.

Meta reportedly took over 795,000 distinct pieces of content in Hebrew or Arabic and removed or marked them with a disturbing label in the three days following the terrorist attack by Hamas. Seven times more content across these two languages was removed daily for violating its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy compared to the two months leading up to the conflict.

Hamas is listed under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy and banned from all of the company’s platforms — as is any content praising the terrorist group. However, “social and political discourse,” such as news articles and general discussion, are allowed.

Further actions by Meta include restricting certain hashtags that are regularly associated with content that violates its policies and removing any content that clearly identifies a hostage (though blurred images are allowed). The company has also lowered the threshold for its monitoring technology, ideally reducing the chances of it recommending harmful content to users. “We want to reiterate that our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping people safe on our apps,” Meta’s statement continued. “We apply these policies regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs, and it is never our intention to suppress a particular community or point of view.”

Whether these steps will satisfy Breton is unclear. Breton sent a similar letter to X’s owner, Elon Musk. X then released an outline of updated policies, but the EU has decided to move forward with an investigation into its compliance with the DSA.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-responds-to-eu-misinformation-concerns-regarding-israel-hamas-conflict-102640126.html?src=rss 

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has reached a settlement with Apple and Broadcom over Wi-Fi chips, ending a billion-dollar patent dispute that started in 2016, Reuters has reported. In a filing, Caltech said that it’s dismissing the case with prejudice, meaning it can’t be filed again.

The saga has taken several turns. Caltech initially alleged that millions of iPhones, iPads, Watches and other Apple devices with Broadcom chips infringed its Wi-Fi based patents. The institute initially won a $1.1 billion jury award, with Apple ordered to pay Caltech $837.8 million and Broadcom to pay an additional $270.2 million. 

However, Apple appealed, and a federal appeals court overturned the decision, calling the award “legally unsupportable.” Specifically, the judge rejected Caltech’s argument that it could have negotiated licenses with both Broadcom and Apple for the same chips.

The jury then ordered a new trial — though it also upheld the original jury’s findings that Apple and Broadcom infringed two Caltech patents. That trial was supposed to take place this June, but was postponed indefinitely. The parties told the court last August that they had reached a “potential settlement,” but didn’t disclose any other information. 

The technology is vital to the 802.11n and 802.11ac WiFi standards, though its inventor said that the patents (related to data transmission tech), weren’t originally designed for WiFi. Broadcom remains a major Apple supplier, having recently signed a $15 billion agreement to furnish chips for upcoming iPhones and other products. Caltech recently settled a similar lawsuit against Samsung, and still has Wi-Fi patent cases pending with Microsoft, Dell and HP. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/caltechs-seven-year-wi-fi-patent-battle-with-apple-and-broadcom-is-over-082546571.html?src=rss 

Qualcomm has just notified the California Employment Development Department that it’s eliminating 1,258 positions within the state, according to Bloomberg. That’s around 2.5 percent of the company’s entire workforce, which is approximately 50,000 strong, but the job cuts will only affect workers from Qualcomm’s San Diego and Santa Clara, California offices. Based on Bloomberg’s report, no position is safe: More than 750 of the affected employees will reportedly come from the chipmaker’s engineering team, including director-level personnel. The remaining affected roles will come from across different departments and will include internal technical and accounting staff. 

The chipmaker is required by law to notify the California agency of impending job cuts. But since many other places don’t have the same rule, it’s unclear if Qualcomm is planning to eliminate positions in other offices within and outside the US. It’s worth noting that these job cuts, while unfortunate, don’t come as a surprise: The company announced in its quarterly earnings report (PDF) released in August that it was going to take “additional restructuring actions.”

Back then, the chipmaker had admitted that it expects these “restructuring actions” to consist “largely of workforce reductions.” It said that the move will enable it to make “continued investments in key growth and diversification opportunities” in the face of “continued uncertainty in the macroeconomic and demand environment.” As Bloomberg notes, Qualcomm still makes most of its money from smartphone sales, and market performance continues to decline. In fact, analysts said global smartphone shipments for the year are on track to be the worst in a decade. Qualcomm itself could see its revenue shrink by roughly 19 percent in the current fiscal year.

The company will start removing personnel sometime in mid-December, and it expects to be done with the restructuring changes it has to make in the first half of fiscal year 2024.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/qualcomm-is-cutting-over-1200-jobs-in-california-073034572.html?src=rss 

UK’s antitrust regulator has given Microsoft the green light to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion following a protracted back and forth. The regulator called Microsoft’s concession to sell cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft a “gamechanger that will promote competition.”

With the last major obstacle out of the way, the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) has now largely cleared the path for the companies to close the biggest merger in gaming history. That move was widely expected after the watchdog said in September that the company’s revised merger agreement “substantially addresses previous concerns and opens the door to the deal being cleared.”

In April, the CMA blocked the deal on the grounds of a belief that it would make Microsoft too dominant of a player in the cloud gaming space. However, as other dominoes that were preventing the deal from happening fell, the CMA gave Microsoft a second chance to resolve its concerns. The companies extended their merger agreement by three months to give them time to smooth things out with the CMA.

Microsoft later submitted a modified deal to the watchdog that will see it sell Activision Blizzard game streaming rights to Ubisoft if the merger goes through. Ubisoft would then handle cloud streaming rights in perpetuity for current titles and any others that Activision Blizzard releases over the following 15 years. Given that the CMA’s misgivings over the original deal, Microsoft evidently hoped that the concession would be significant enough to resolve the regulator’s concerns. Evidently, that’s exactly what happened.

The CMA said last month that it had “residual concerns” about enforcement of Microsoft’s revised proposal. However, it noted that “Microsoft gave undertakings that will ensure that the terms of the sale of Activision’s rights to Ubisoft are enforceable by the CMA.”

The regulator touted its role in forcing Microsoft to make concessions. “With the sale of Activision’s cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft, we’ve made sure Microsoft can’t have a stranglehold over this important and rapidly developing market,” CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement. “As cloud gaming grows, this intervention will ensure people get more competitive prices, better services and more choice. We are the only competition agency globally to have delivered this outcome.”

There were suggestions that European Union antitrust regulators might review the amended deal. EU officials approved the acquisition in May after Microsoft made some cloud gaming concessions. According to Bloomberg, the bloc’s competition regulators didn’t see cause for concern with the amended deal that would prompt another investigation.

After a US court rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to temporarily block the deal pending an administrative trial, the CMA and both companies in question asked a tribunal to delay Microsoft’s appeal against the UK regulator’s initial decision. The tribunal agreed and, after reviewing the updated proposal from Microsoft, the CMA has rubberstamped the merger. It now seems like just a matter of time until this is a done deal and one of the biggest tech mergers in memory is in the books.

There is one significant potential hurdle remaining, however. The FTC is moving forward with its attempt to challenge the deal. That effort won’t stop Microsoft from closing the acquisition, but there’s a chance that the FTC could force the company to divest some or all of Activision Blizzard.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/uk-regulator-approves-microsofts-687-billion-purchase-of-activision-blizzard-063625038.html?src=rss 

The EPA is withdrawing its plan to require states to assess the cybersecurity and integrity of public water system programs. While the agency says it continues to believe cybersecurity protective measures are essential for the public water industry, the decision was made after GOP-led states sued the agency for proposing the rule.

In a memo that accompanied the new rules in March, the EPA said that cybersecurity attacks on water and wastewater systems “have the potential to disable or contaminate the delivery of drinking water to consumers and other essential facilities like hospitals.” Despite the EPA’s willingness to provide training and technical support to help states and public water system organizations implement cybersecurity surveys, the move garnered opposition from both GOP state attorneys and trade groups.

Republican state attorneys that were against the new proposed policies said that the call for new inspections could overwhelm state regulators. The attorney generals of Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri all sued the EPA – claiming the agency had no authority to set these requirements. This led to the EPA’s proposal being temporarily blocked back in June.

While it’s unclear if any cybersecurity regulations will be put in motion to protect the public moving forward, the EPA said it plans to continue working with the industry to “lower cybersecurity risks to clean and safe water.“ It encourages all states to “voluntarily review” the cybersecurity of their water systems, nothing that any proactive actions might curb the potential public health impacts if a hack were to take place.

Ever since the highly publicized Solarwinds hack in 2020 that exposed government records and the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that temporarily shut down operations for the oil pipeline system, it’s been abundantly clear that government entities and public agencies are hackable and prime targets for bad actors. The Biden administration has initiated a national strategy focused on public-private alliances to shift the burden of cybersecurity onto the organizations that are “best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-epa-wont-force-water-utilities-to-inspect-their-cyber-defenses-232301497.html?src=rss 

The launch of Starlink’s much-anticipated satellite cellular service, Direct-to-Cell, will reportedly begin rolling out for SMS in 2024, according to a newly published promotional site by the company. Eventually the system will “enable ubiquitous access to texting, calling, and browsing wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters,” and connect to IoT devices through the LTE standard.

Starlink has partnered with T-Mobile on the project, which was originally announced last August at the “Coverage and Above and Beyond” event. The collaboration sees T-Mobile setting aside a bit of its 5G spectrum for use by Starlink’s second-generation satellites; Starlink in turn will allow T-Mobile phones to access the satellite network giving the cell service provider “near complete coverage” of the United States. 

During the event last August, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that “Starlink V2” would launch this year on select mobile phones, as well as in Tesla vehicles. “The important thing about this is that it means there are no dead zones anywhere in the world for your cell phone,” Musk said in a press statement at the time. “We’re incredibly excited to do this with T-Mobile.” That estimate was revised during a March panel discussion at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition 2023, when SpaceX VP of Starlink enterprise sales Jonathan Hofeller estimated testing — not commercial operation — would begin in 2023. 

The existing constellation of 4,265 satellites are not compatible with the new cell service so Starlink is going to have to launch a whole new series of microsats with the necessary eNodeB modem installed, over the next few years. As more satellites are launched, the adde voice and data features will become available. 

As an messaging-only satellite service, Direct-to-Cell will immediately find competition from Apple, with its Emergency SOS via Satellite feature in iOS 14, as well as Qualcomm’s rival Snapdragon Satellite, which delivers texts to Android phones from orbit using the Iridium constellation. Competition is expected to be fierce in this emerging market, Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller noted during the March event, arguing that satellite cell service could potentially be the “biggest category in satellite.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/starlinks-satellite-cell-service-is-set-to-launch-in-2024-but-only-for-sms-215036124.html?src=rss 

Netflix used to make its money on physical media, mailing DVDs to customers, and it looks like the company’s trending toward the analog once again. The streaming giant has, strangely, decided to open a number of brick-and-mortar retail locations, called Netflix House, as originally reported by Bloomberg.

The stores will sell merchandise based on hit Netflix shows, so you can finally snag that Lincoln Lawyer coffee mug you’ve always dreamed of. Netflix House establishments will also offer dining and curated live experiences. To the latter point, the two initial locations are going to feature an obstacle course based on Squid Game. This seems to miss the point of the show’s brutal satire of modern capitalism, but that’s been par for the course since it took the world by storm back in 2021.

Netflix House will also boast rotating art installations based on hit shows and live performances to excite fans. Additionally, the in-house restaurant will serve cuisine and drinks originally featured on the streamer’s many unscripted food-based reality shows. The menu will range from fast casual to high-end dining.

The first two locations should open up in the US some time in 2025, though Netflix hasn’t said where, with more global outlets to come at a later date. Why the big global push? Josh Simon, the company’s vice president of consumer products, told Bloomberg that its customers “love to immerse themselves in the world of our movies and TV shows, and we’ve been thinking a lot about how we take that to the next level.” Want to really take things to the next level? Let us play real-world versions of The Circle and Is It Cake?

Of course, this isn’t Netflix’s first stab at brick-and-mortar nirvana. In the past, it’s opened a number of pop-up experiences throughout the world to celebrate shows like Stranger Things and its spate of cooking reality programming. Netflix House, on the other hand, will celebrate the streamer’s entire stable of content, though we doubt there will be any live experiences based on Real Rob, Flaked or The Ranch anytime soon. We wouldn’t mind, though, snagging some sweet Bojack Horseman merch.

The company’s still finalizing details regarding menus, locations and just about everything else. It has more than a year, after all, to set up shop.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-to-open-branded-retail-stores-for-some-reason-184331296.html?src=rss