Kalakshar US

Meta will soon remove a feature that lets you chat with Facebook friends on Instagram. Starting mid-December, the company will disconnect the cross-platform integration, which it added in 2020. It didn’t provide a reason for doing so, but, as 9to5Google speculates, avoiding regulatory consequences in the EU sounds like a logical motive.

Announced in 2019, the optional cross-platform integration went live a year later, blurring the lines between two of the company’s most popular services. “Just like today you could talk to a Gmail account if you have a Yahoo account, these accounts will be able to talk to each other through the shared protocol that is Messenger,” Messenger VP Loredena Crisan said at the time.

Meta says once “mid-December 2023” rolls around, you’ll no longer be able to start new chats or calls with Facebook friends from Instagram. If you have any existing conversations with Facebook accounts on Instagram, they’ll become read-only. In addition, Facebook accounts will no longer be able to see your activity status or view read receipts. Finally, any existing chats with Facebook accounts won’t move to your inbox on either platform.

The EU designed its landmark Digital Markets Act, passed in 2022, as a deterrent against platform holders from gaining monopoly power (or something close to it). If a company passes a revenue threshold and the European Commission deems the platform overly dominant, it can dole out a maximum penalty of 10 percent of its total global turnover from the previous year. Given the enforcement “stick” this provides the governing body, perhaps Meta saw the writing on the wall and deemed the Instagram / Facebook cross-messaging feature not worth the risk.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-is-disconnecting-messenger-and-instagram-chat-later-this-month-205956880.html?src=rss 

Verizon confirmed Monday it’s offering a previously rumored bundle of Netflix and Max streaming subscriptions. The pairing of the rival services is the first of its kind, giving the wireless carrier’s myPlan subscribers a 41 percent discount over buying the two ad-supported plans individually. The offer will be available starting on December 7.

The bundle will include the ad-supported Netflix and Max plans for $10 monthly. Those tiers typically cost $6.99 and $9.99 per month, respectively, so customers who grab the deal could save $80 annually compared to what they’d pay directly from the service’s websites. For Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, it’s a chance to boost their subscribers and get more people hooked on exclusive series. Meanwhile, Verizon gets another incentive to lure customers from rival carriers.

Only Verizon’s myPlan customers are eligible for the $10 streaming bundle. The carrier offers myPlan in three tiers, starting at $75 monthly (single user) for Unlimited Welcome. The Unlimited Plus level pushes the one-line price to $90 monthly, while Unlimited Ultimate costs $100 monthly. All three tiers offer lower per-line prices the more users you have on your plan. You can check out Verizon’s myPlan website for the full breakdown.

Verizon has several other $10 streaming deals as myPlan add-ons. These include a Disney Bundle, which combines Disney+, Hulu with ads and ESPN+. It also offers an Apple One bundle, including Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and iCloud+. Variety notes that wireless carriers like Verizon typically pay a per-subscriber wholesale rate to the service providers, treating the costs as customer-acquisition overhead.

In addition to myPlan enrollment, the offer requires you to be 18 or older to enroll. After choosing the add-on, you’ll need to complete your account setup separately for each service.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/verizon-subscribers-can-get-netflix-and-max-for-10-a-month-200120804.html?src=rss 

Last week, a team of researchers published a paper showing that it was able to get ChatGPT to inadvertently reveal bits of data including people’s phone numbers, email addresses and dates of birth that it had been trained on by asking it to repeat words “forever”. Doing this now is a violation of ChatGPT’s terms of service, according to a report in 404 Media and Engadget’s own testing.

“This content may violate our content policy or terms of use”, ChatGPT responded to Engadget’s prompt to repeat the word “hello” forever. “If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area.”

There’s no language in OpenAI’s content policy, however, that prohibits users from asking the service to repeat words forever, something that 404 Media notes. Under “Terms of Use”, OpenAI states that users may not “use any automated or programmatic method to extract data or output from the Services” — but simply prompting the ChatGPT to repeat word forever is not automation or programmatic. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Engadget.

The chatbot’s behavior has pulled back the curtain on the training data that modern AI services are powered by. Critics have accused companies like OpenAI of using enormous amounts of data available on the internet to build proprietary products like ChatGPT without consent from people who own this data and without compensating them.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/chatgpt-says-that-asking-it-to-repeat-words-forever-is-a-violation-of-its-terms-202622018.html?src=rss