Category: Technology

Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews. Now, the company has a new tool to help people — and maybe the feds — track businesses that have tried to manipulate their standing on the review platform.

Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews. The company has made some of this information available in the past. Yelp places temporary alerts on businesses’ pages when it discovers fake reviews, and regularly releases transparency reports detailing its moderation efforts. But the index is the first time the company has offered a single place where users can find a historical record of every business that’s ever been subject to such a warning as well as a current list of businesses with active alerts on their pages .

For Yelp, the index is both its latest move in a long-running war on fake reviews, as well as a nod to a changing regulatory environment in which fake reviews are attracting increasing scrutiny from regulators. The FTC recently proposed a formal ban on fake reviews with penalties of up to $50,000 for businesses caught buying, selling or manipulating online reviews.

Yelp has said it supports such a rule. The company’s head of user operations, Noorie Malik, points out the company has previously worked with the FTC to notify them when it discovers fake reviews and the sometimes complex operations behind them. “We’d love to get to a place where this new index develops into a regular resource for others, whether it’s FTC, consumers, regulators or other sites,” Malik tells Engadget.

But she’s also quick to point out that the index is also meant to help Yelp users make “educated decisions” about where to spend their money. While you may not think much about visiting a coffee shop with a history of paying people to leave positive Yelp reviews, your feelings may be very different if you’re looking for a contractor to remodel your home, or for a daycare or moving company (all of which appear in the index).

Of course, fake reviews isn’t just a Yelp problem. Malik notes that phony reviews are often coordinated on other websites among organized groups of review rings. “We also hope that it inspires other review platforms to take a firmer stance against reduced solicitation and incentivisation,” she says.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/yelp-has-a-wall-of-shame-for-businesses-caught-paying-for-fake-reviews-110011882.html?src=rss 

Max has revealed that it’s giving subscribers access to live sporting events for free — for a limited time anyway — confirming a previous Bloomberg report about the offering. The streaming service formerly known as HBO Max will launch the Bleacher Report (B/R) Sports Add-On tier on October 5. It will give audiences access to all the live sporting events airing on Warner Bros. Discovery’s linear networks, including NBA, MLB, NCAA, NHL and US Soccer matches. The add-on is launching just in time for MLB’s National League Division Series, the regular NHL season and NBA Opening Night.

Subscribers in the US will be able to enjoy the add-on at no additional charge, whether they’re paying for the ad-supported or the ad-free membership options, until February 29, 2024. After that, they’ll have to start paying $10 a month for access. In its report, Bloomberg said that the company discussed using the March Madness college basketball tournament as a selling point for the new product. The tournament begins shortly after the promo period ends and could be compelling enough for fans to pay for the add-on for at least a couple of months, seeing as it ends in April. 

In addition to live game coverage, the sports add-on also gives viewers access to all of WBD’s live pre- and post-game programming. They’ll be able to watch video-on-demand content, as well, including Bleacher Report’s highlights, sports documentaries and vodcasts featuring sports personalities and athletes. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/max-will-offer-free-live-sports-streaming-until-march-2024-074445038.html?src=rss 

Unity’s decision to start charging fees each time a title using its game engine is installed was understandably met with furor and talks of class action lawsuits. In response to the bomb Unity dropped, Terraria developer Re-Logic has stepped in to promote and support alternative open-source game engines that developers can use instead. In a post on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, Re-Logic called Unity’s move “predatory” and “unequivocally condemn[ed]” the fee changes proposed, as well as the “underhanded way they were rolled out.”

“The flippant manner with which years of trust cultivated by Unity were cast aside for yet another way to squeeze publishers, studios and gamers is the saddest part,” the developer continued. Re-Logic said that a simple public statement wasn’t sufficient, so it’s donating $100,000 each to the open-source game engines Godot and FNA. It will also continue supporting both projects by giving them $1,000 each every month going forward. 

Terraria is wildly successful and has become one of the best-selling video games over the years and across platforms. While Re-Logic can afford a donation like this, it’s not the company’s responsibility — and the community knows it, based on the amount of positive responses its announcement received. 

Unity first introduced its new “Runtime fees,” which it intends to implement on January 1, 2024, a week ago. The fees will vary depending on what plan a developer uses. A Unity Personal and Unity Plus subscriber, for instance, will pay 20 cents per install after reaching $200,000 in revenue from the past 12 months and 200,000 lifetime installs. Days after its initial announcement, though, Unity backtracked and promised changes to the policy. It also explained that the owners of subscription services, such as Microsoft when it comes to Game Pass, will have to pay the fees and not the developers themselves. At the moment, the exact details of Unity’s Runtime fees remain unclear, but it promised to release an update very soon. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/terraria-developer-re-logic-is-giving-100000-to-two-open-source-game-engines-amid-unity-debacle-054307544.html?src=rss 

Elon Musk’s Neuralink company, purveyors of the experimental N1 brain-computer interface (BCI), announced on Tuesday that it has finally opened enrollment for its first in-human study, dubbed Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME, not PRIBCI). The announcement comes nearly a year after the company’s most recent “show and tell” event, four months beyond the timeframe Musk had declared the trials would start, and nearly a month after rival Synchron had already beaten them to market.

Per the company’s announcement, the PRIME study “aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.” As such, this study is looking primarily for “those who have quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS),” despite Musk’s repeated and unfounded claims that the technology will be useful as vehicle for transhumanistic applications like learning Kung Fu from an SD card, uploading your consciousness to the web and controlling various household electronics with your mind.

Actually, that last one is a real goal of both the company and the technology. BCIs operate as a bridge between the human mind and machines, converting the analog electrical signals of our brains into digital signals that machines understand. The N1 system from Nueralink leverages a high-fidelity Utah Array of hair-thin probes that, unlike Synchron’s Stentrode, must be installed via robotic keyhole surgery (performed by Nerualink’s sewing machine-like R1 robot surgeon). This array will be fitted onto the patient’s motor cortex where it will record and wirelessly transmit electrical impulses produced by the region to an associated app which will interpret them into actionable commands for the computer. “The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone,” the release reads.

Neuralink has been working on the N1 system since 2017, one of the first companies in the industry to begin publicly developing a commercial BCI. However, Neuralink’s efforts were waylaid last year after the company was credibly accused of causing the needless suffering and death of dozens of animal test subjects, which led to both a USDA investigation on animal cruelty charges and instigated the FDA to deny the company’s request to fasttrack human trials. The PRIME study is being conducted under the auspices of the investigational device exemption (IDE), which the FDA awarded Neuralink this past May.   

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/neuralink-opens-enrollment-for-its-first-human-bci-implants-215822024.html?src=rss 

After a day of leaks comprising an all-digital Xbox Series X, an advanced controller, a “cloud-hybrid” console, fruitless Nintendo acquisition plans and some very mean words about Baldur’s Gate 3, Xbox head Phil Spencer has spoken publicly — and semi-privately — about the situation for the first time.

On X, Spencer said, “It is hard to see our team’s work shared in this way because so much has changed and there’s so much to be excited about right now, and in the future.” He added that the company “will share the real plans when we are ready.”

In an internal memo sent to employees at Microsoft’s gaming division, and published in full by The Verge, Spencer went further. The full note reads:

Undoubtedly, it’s been a long day for everyone at Xbox. Spencer is doing his best in both missives to downplay the significance of the leaked documents by suggesting that Xbox’s hardware plans have changed since they were first internally shared in 2022. The original slides outline a plan to debut a disc-less, cylindrical, 2TB version of the Xbox Series X in 2024, as well as an updated controller with “precision haptic feedback” (like PlayStation’s DualSense) and direct-to-cloud capabilities (like Stadia’s controller). Looking even further ahead, the documents included plans for a 10th-gen Xbox console with a focus on “cloud-hybrid games,” penciled in for a 2028 release. 

Also, Spencer really wanted to buy Nintendo at one point, apparently (but it seems Microsoft is settling for Activision-Blizzard instead, which is how we ended up in this leaky mess to begin with). We’ve rounded up all the news from today’s document dump right here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/xbox-head-phil-spencer-responds-to-a-day-of-massive-leaks-220326175.html?src=rss 

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic organization created in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, announced a bold new generative AI initiative today. The group is funding and building a high-end GPU cluster that will use AI to create predictive models of healthy and diseased cells; it hopes they’ll help researchers better understand the human body’s cells and cellular reactions. The group believes the collection of computers will help it achieve its incredibly lofty goal of helping to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.”

“Researchers are gathering more data than ever before about the trillions of cells within our bodies, and it’s too complex for our brains to grapple with,” Jeff MacGregor, CZI vice president of communications, wrote in an emailed statement to Engadget. He lists an example of imaging one cell at nanometer resolution, which would use the same amount of data as 83,000 photos on a smartphone. Sifting through the finer details of a cache of cellular models like that is where generative AI could play a role.

The system will use a cluster of over 1,000 GPUs to train AI large language models (LLMs) on human cells. “LLMs have done an impressive job at helping us understand protein structure, and we think they will be equally great at helping us understand more complex structures like cells,” MacGregor said. He expects the AI models to draw insights and conclusions beyond even the capabilities of a team of human experts. “But also, it’s about the speed at which they can do this. It would take that team of experts years to draw the types of insights rather than weeks that it will take for the models to do so.”

Chan lists other examples of how LLMs could tackle biomedicine’s problems. “AI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient’s body will respond to a new medication,” the co-founder and co-CEO said. “We hope that this collaborative effort will generate new insights about the fundamental characteristics of our cells.”

The group describes the GPU clusters as one of the first to power “openly available” models of human cells, suggesting the investment could yield dividends for under-funded researchers with bright ideas. Examples of data the models will train on include those integrated into the Chan Zuckerberg Cell by Gene tool (with its existing database of over 50 million cells), resources from CZ Science research institutes and publicly available datasets. CZI Head of Science Stephen Quake describes one of the project’s goals as creating a “virtual biology simulator.”

“AI is creating new opportunities in biomedicine, and building a high-performance computing cluster dedicated to life science research will accelerate progress on important scientific questions about how our cells work,” said Zuckerberg. “Developing digital models capable of predicting all cell types and cell states from the genome will help researchers better understand our cells and how they behave in health and disease.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-chan-zuckerberg-initiative-is-building-a-massive-gpu-cluster-to-cure-prevent-or-manage-all-diseases-205454041.html?src=rss 

As part of a $520 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Epic Games will be forced to provide refunds to Fortnite players who were allegedly tricked into making unintended purchases on the platform. About $245 million has been specifically earmarked for these refunds. The regulator has started notifying more than 37 million people via email if they are for compensation.

The entire process may take one month to complete and the FTC says customers who believe they were impacted will have until January 17, 2024, to submit a claim where you can simply apply for a refund directly on the FTC’s website. The FTC notes that this is one of the largest refunds in a gaming-related case to happen to date.

The FTC previously claimed that Epic Games used deceptive tactics to get Fortnite players to make unintended in-game purchases. As part of a complaint first announced by the FTC in December of last year, the agency says the video game-making company made it easy for underage players to rack up charges “without parental consent” and also “locked the accounts of consumers” that disputed unauthorized charges. Because Epic Games violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA, it was ordered to pay $275 million in addition to the consumer refunds.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ftc-starts-claims-process-for-fortnite-players-tricked-into-making-unwanted-purchases-201534338.html?src=rss 

US Representative Deborah Ross (D-NC) has introduced an updated version of the Protect Musicians Act in an attempt to change the way independent artists bargain with major streaming platforms. Created in collaboration with The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) and The Artists Rights Alliance (ARA), the updated bill aims to “level the playing field” for artists in the digital age and the world of AI-generated music.

“This legislation will help give small, independent music creators a level playing field, empowering them to stand together for fairer compensation and giving them a voice in important negotiations that will determine the future of the music industry,” Ross said.

As it stands, current laws leave many artists, whether signed to a major label or independently working, unprotected and at the mercy of major streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. And these companies don’t always provide fair compensation to artists when their music is uploaded and streamed on the platforms. Independent artists are often forced to accept whenever rates are being offered without being able to collectively negotiate for better terms. Additionally, there is no real protection for artists against having their voice or music manipulated by AI without consent.

If passed, the Protect Working Musicians Act would allow working artists and independent musicians to come together and negotiate with dominant streaming platforms and artificial intelligence developers. It would also grant working artists and independent musicians the ability to collectively refuse to license their music to online music distribution platforms that refuse to pay fair market value.

It could be argued that many artists have always gotten a raw deal for decades when it comes to the sales and distribution of their music. Back in the day of album downloads and CD purchases, this money was usually split in many ways, leaving only a small amount for the artist. Unfortunately, unfair compensation being offered by streaming platforms is just a modern spin on a longstanding problem. And it’s not just musicians that are being affected. For years, streaming giants like Netflix have been offering low wages to its writers, which has contributed to the strike of members of the Writers Guild of America.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/revised-protect-musicians-act-could-empower-artists-against-streaming-platforms-200058922.html?src=rss