Kalakshar US

Twitter is working on a new, more expensive Blue subscription tier that will allow users to browse the platform without seeing ads. “Ads are too frequent on Twitter and too big. Taking steps to address both in coming weeks,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday afternoon. “Also, there will be a higher priced subscription that allows zero ads.”

In the US, Twitter Blue currently costs $11 per month when users subscribe directly through the Twitter iOS or Android app. On the web, where Apple and Google’s up to 30 percent commission on in-app purchases doesn’t apply, the service costs $8 per month. Since Twitter began revamping the subscription in November, the ability to see fewer ads on your timeline has been one of the primary selling points the company has pushed, but that perk is still listed as “coming soon” when you go to sign up for the service.

By some estimates, Twitter’s ad revenue has declined precipitously since Musk’s takeover of the company in October. According to a recent report published by The Information, a senior Twitter manager told employees this past Tuesday that daily revenue was down 40 percent from the same day a year ago. One internal slide seen by the outlet saw Twitter attribute the decline to the initial relaunch of Twitter Blue, which saw the platform overrun by verified trolls who used the paid verification feature to impersonate brands, celebrities and other notable accounts.

Martin Shkreli, whom you may know as “Pharma Bro,” launched a new company last year called “Druglike, Inc.” Now, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal judge to hold him in contempt for failing to cooperate with the agency in its investigation to determine whether launching the company violates his lifetime industry ban. US District Court Judge Denise Cote imposed a lifetime ban on Shkreli that prohibits him from participating in the pharmaceutical industry early last year. Cote ruled that the former pharma exec orchestrated an illegal anticompetitive scheme to gain a monopoly over Daraprim, a life-saving anti-malarial and anti-parasitic drug. 

After Shkreli’s former company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, obtained the manufacturing license for Daraprim, it raised the drug’s prices from $17.50 to $750 per tablet. Cote sided with the FTC in the antitrust lawsuit the agency filed against Shkreli in 2020 and ordered him to pay $64.6 million in damages, in addition to imposing a lifetime industry ban against him. Prior to Druglike’s launch, Shkreli tried (and failed) to convince a judge to put the ban on hold, arguing that the public could benefit from his future contributions to the industry. Shkreli challenged the ban while he was serving time in federal prison after receiving a seven-year sentence in 2017 for defrauding investors. He was released from prison in May.

The FTC said it started asking Shkreli for a compliance report and access to relevant records, as well as asking him to sit for an interview regarding Druglike, in October 2022. However, the company co-founder kept on disregarding its “repeated requests.” The agency also said that Shkreli has yet to pay any amount of his $64.6 million fine. It’s now asking the court to order Shkreli to comply with its information requests within 21 days of its decision. 

In a press release (PDF) for its launch, Druglike described itself as “a Web3 drug discovery software platform.” The company said it’s building a “decentralized computing network” that “provides resources for anyone looking to start or contribute to early-stage drug discovery projects.” In a statement, Shkreli said “Druglike will remove barriers to early-stage drug discovery, increase innovation and allow a broader group of contributors to share the rewards.”

Following a two-year run that saw the game struggle for much of it, Crystal Dynamics is winding down the development of Marvel’s Avengers. Following a report of the project’s imminent demise, the studio published a blog post on Friday announcing it plans to stop supporting the live-service title after September 30th.

Crystal Dynamics will release one final balance patch and shut down Marvel’s Avengers in-game cosmetics store on March 31st. On that same day, players will see their remaining Credit balance converted to in-game resources, as shown in the chart below. Additionally, “as a show of our appreciation for our community,” Crystal Dynamics says cosmetics that were previously only obtainable through the marketplace will be free for all players who own a copy of the game.

After official support ends on September 30th, players can continue playing Marvel’s Avengers on their own and with friends over Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus. “The changes we are making to how the game functions will ensure as long a life as possible,” the developer said. “However, after September 30th, 2023 we can’t guarantee that we will be able to address issues that occur due to unforeseen circumstances.” Crystal Dynamics said it decided to end support for the title “in conjunction with our partners.”

The effective end of Marvel’s Avengers won’t come as a surprise to fans. In November 2020, two months after the game went on sale, publisher Square Enix said it had failed to recoup the cost of making the title. From that point forward, the company seemed reluctant to put any more money behind the project. Then, last May, Square sold Crystal Dynamics to Embracer Group. In December, the studio announced it was working with Amazon on a new Tomb Raider release. All of that seems to have factored into the decision to shut down Marvel’s Avengers.

Google’s Area 120 division has been severely affected by the layoffs happening across Alphabet, according to Bloomberg and TechCrunch, which said the unit now has fewer than 100 employees after the most recent round of cuts. Area 120 is known as Google’s in-house incubator, which works on experimental apps and products. Those include GameSnacks, an HTML5-based platform that enables users to load and play games quickly even on poor connections and basic smartphones. Sundar Pichai established the division in 2016 to “provide a purpose-built home for bottom-up innovation at Google.” The division’s website reads: “Area 120 teams work on new products, experiences, and services every day.”

Alphabet recently admitted that it was cutting 12,000 jobs, which is around six percent of its global workforce. The layoffs “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” but it’s bound to affect certain divisions more than others, seeing as the company performed “a rigorous review… to ensure that [its] people and roles are aligned with [its] highest priorities as a company.”

A spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company has “made the difficult decision to wind down the majority of the Area 120 team.” TechCrunch says the division typically works on 20 projects at any given time, but only three will “graduate” or will be folded into Google later this year. Almost everyone who isn’t involved in those three projects has reportedly lost their jobs. 

During a round of cuts at Area 120 back in September, a Google spokesperson said that the division is “shifting its focus to projects that build on Google’s deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve important user problems.” It’s unclear if any of the three “graduating” projects are AI-related or if the remaining team members are working on anything artificial intelligence. According to a recent New York Times report, though, Google is gearing up to show off at least 20 AI-powered products and a chatbot for search this year.

Elon Musk said that just because he tweets something, it “does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly.” The Tesla chief took the witness stand in a San Francisco federal court to defend himself (and the tweets he made back in 2018) in a lawsuit filed by a group of the automaker’s shareholders. “I think you can absolutely be truthful but can you be comprehensive? Of course not,” he added, regarding Twitter’s character limits. If you’ll recall, Musk famously tweeted in August 2018 that he was “considering taking Tesla private at $420” and that he was already able to secure funding. “Investor support is confirmed,” he said in a follow-up tweet.

The CEO later revealed that he was in talks with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which reportedly expressed interest in Tesla as part of the country’s bid to lessen its reliance on oil. However, the deal didn’t materialize, and he later penned a lengthy post on the automaker’s website to say that it’s staying public. 

As CNBC notes, shareholders blamed those “funding secured” tweets for their significant financial losses, leading them to file a class action lawsuit against Musk. Tesla’s shares apparently remained highly volatile in the weeks that followed. The executive, however, downplayed his tweets’ impact and said that they don’t necessarily affect stock prices: “There have been many cases where I thought that if I were to tweet something, the stock price would go down. For example, at one point I tweeted that I thought that, in my opinion, the stock price was too high…and it went went higher, which was, which is, you know, counterintuitive.”

In addition to the shareholder lawsuit, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk over his tweets, calling them “false and misleading statements” that could be constituted as fraud. Musk and Tesla paid $20 million each to settle with the SEC, and the executive had to step down as board chairman. The SEC also required company lawyers to approve any Tesla-related tweet Musk makes — a condition the CEO tried (and failed) to get out of last year. 

Aside from defending his tweets, Musk criticized short sellers during his testimony, telling the court that short-selling “should be made illegal.” He added: “It is a means for, in my opinion, bad people on Wall Street to steal money from investors. Not good.” Another piece of information to take away from his time on the witness stand is that nobody can tell Musk to stop tweeting. When lawyers asked him about the advice he got to refrain from posting on Twitter after calling a British cave diver a “pedo guy,” Musk said: “I continued to tweet, yes.”

According to Reuters, Musk only testified for less than 30 minutes and that he’s not done answering lawyers’ questions. He’s expected to take the witness stand again to explain why he wrote the funding tweets and why he insisted that he had Saudi Arabia’s backing. 

Elon Musk wasn’t lying last October when he told Bloomberg that 75 percent of the employees at his newly acquired toy, Twitter.com, wouldn’t lose their jobs under his ownership, as The Washington Post had reported at the time. Turns out, it’s closer to 80 percent. Of the roughly 7,500 people working there before Musk’s takeover, CNBC reports Friday that barely 1,300 in total, and fewer than 550 full-time engineers, are left at the husk of a company, either through said layoffs or voluntary resignations.

CNBC also notes that 75 employees are currently on leave, 40 of which are engineers, while the Trust and Safety team, which oversees content moderation for the site, has been culled to fewer than 20 full-timers. This news comes at the end of a seemingly ceaseless string of blunders since Musk announced an unsolicited $44 billion bid to buy the social media site last April. 

Aside from firing everyone that wasn’t nailed down, Musk has reinstated numerous far-right and fascist accounts that had previously been permanently banned without so much as a second glance at the “moderation council” he was supposedly going to establish. He’s made critical operational decisions based on Twitter polls — and that’s after trying weasel out of the deal to purchase Twitter in the first place on trumped up complaints regarding the prevalence of bot users and how easy it is to game Twitter polls. 

He’s used the banhammer to silence critics ranging from journalists to college kids. Musk has brought in employees from his other, unrelated companies, including members of the SpaceX and Tesla teams; and fired employees for questioning his business acumen. His $8 blue check verification scheme has haltingly rolled out in fits and starts, this while ad revenue is reportedly down 40 percent as advertisers look to escape his sinking ship. His first interest payment on the $13 billion debt he leveraged to purchase Twitter, which is today valued at around $15 billion, is due at the end of the month.

But Twitter isn’t the only company shedding staff like water off a wet dog’s coat. Google laid off 12,000 employees this week, Amazon disemployeed 18,000 people globally, and Microsoft eliminated 10,000 positions. Between the three, they’ve put about 70,000 people out of work in the last year alone.   

Quordle, a Wordle-style word game, has a fitting new owner in the shape of Merriam-Webster. The game’s URL now redirects to a page on the company’s website, as TechCrunch spotted. The Merriam-Webster logo appears at the top of the page too.

“I’m delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster! I can’t think of a better home for this game,” Quordle creator Freddie Meyer wrote in a message on the game’s help tab. “Lots of new features and fun to come, so stay tuned!”

Quordle is a supercharged version of Wordle. Instead of giving folks six guesses to find a single five-letter word, Quordle challenges players to simultaneously figure out four of them in nine guesses or fewer. The color-coded approach is the same. If a letter is the correct place, it turns green, and if it’s elsewhere in a given word, it turns yellow. As with Wordle, there’s one daily batch of four words.

Merriam-Webster scooped up Quordle a year after Wordle took the world by storm and got snapped up by The New York Times. Heardle, a music-themed clone, also has an apt owner after Spotify bought it last summer.

Some players (hi) have been annoyed by Quordle reusing certain words. On a few occasions, the same word has popped up two days in a row. With a dictionary company now in charge, here’s hoping Quordle will freshen things up.

CNET is halting its use of AI-written articles for the time being. The Vergeclaims the technology publication’s leadership has paused experiments with AI stories “for now” during a question-and-answer call with staff. While there’s no word on the exact reasoning behind the freeze, which also affects Bankrate and CreditCards.com, editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo reportedly said future AI-related stories would include a disclosure that the publication uses automated technologies.

Executive content VP Lindsey Turrentine also promised more transparency regarding the AI, according to The Verge. Some employees would get a preview of the tech, she said. More details of the system will reportedly be available next week. CNET owner Red Ventures has also formed an AI working group. Staff were generally unaware of either the AI’s inner workings or when it was being used.

Questions about CNET‘s AI practices began last week, when The Byte noticed that dozens of financial explainer articles appeared to have been written using “automation technology.” While there was a disclosure, it was effectively hidden when you had to click the byline to see it. CNET claimed in the blurb that humans “thoroughly” edited and fact-checked the work, but that wasn’t true — the outlet started reviewing the pieces after Futurism discovered serious errors in a story.

CNET has used machine-made articles in years past. AI has advanced since then, though, and the discovery comes as text generation tools like ChatGPT draw flak and even bans over fears of plagiarism and reduced work for human writers. As with automation elsewhere in the workforce, some people don’t trust that companies will use AI in an ethical way.

Now that Twitter has confirmed it’s banning third-party clients, some of the most prominent alternatives are going away. Tapbots has shut down work on Tweetbot, one of the more popular iOS apps, as Twitter rendered it non-functional “in a blink of an eye.” The developer is instead pivoting to Ivory, an app for the open social platform Mastodon. While it’s limited to an invitation-only test for now, Tapbots hopes to make the software “better than Tweetbot ever could be.”

This isn’t the only major Twitter app developer calling it quits. The Iconfactory has pulled Twitterrific from the iOS and macOS App Stores, and blasted the Musk-era Twitter as a company it “no longer recognize[s] as trustworthy.” Android users, meanwhile, can’t count on apps like Matteo Villa’s Fenix (it’s no longer available on Google Play) or Luke Klinker’s Talon (which the creator warns “will cease to work”).

The shutdowns follow roughly a week of disruption and unclear messaging. Numerous third-party apps suddenly stopped working around the evening of January 12th, with leaks suggesting it was intentional. Twitter later acknowledged it was breaking these apps, allegedly to enforce “long-standing” developer rules. The social media giant then quietly updated its developer agreement to formally ban unofficial clients.

Third-party Twitter clients generally haven’t played a major role in recent years. In 2018, Sensor Tower determined that 6 million users had installed alternatives versus 560 million for the official Android and iOS apps. However, the ban doesn’t help Twitter’s bid to keep users and protect its bottom line. Third-party app users downloaded their software of choice precisely because they’re active and want features that the official apps don’t offer (such as more powerful media previews and searches). Twitter’s policy risks alienating those users who hate the first-party app.

Earlier this month, Amazon confirmed plans to lay off around 18,000 workers. The move has hit certain divisions hard, including Comixology and Prime Air. The latter’s drone delivery program was just starting to gain traction after commencing deliveries in test markets and unveiling a new model, but the layoffs have reportedly had a significant impact on that team.

Prime Air employees learned about the cuts on Wednesday, according to CNBC. Employees in the drone delivery department’s design, maintenance, systems engineering, flight testing and flight operations teams are said to have been laid off. Workers at multiple locations have been dismissed, it has been claimed, including at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and a drone testing facility in Oregon. Around half of the employees at the test site were reportedly let go.

Headcount reductions were seemingly expected given the many struggles that the drone delivery group has endured over the years. In 2013, Amazon founder CEO Jeff Bezos announced a plan to start delivering packages by drone within 30 minutes. After years of testing, the company finally gained approval from the Federal Aviation Administration in 2020 to start delivering orders by drone. Amazon began doing so in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas, just a few weeks ago.

A spokesperson declined to tell CNBC how many Prime Air workers Amazon has let go. The layoffs come only two months after the company unveiled a redesigned drone that could fly further than its predecessor and withstand light rain.

In recent months, Amazon executives have laid off workers from the hardware, Alexa, robotics and physical store divisions. CEO Andy Jassy said in early January that the company was “prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses.”