"In 2023, the state of our digital privacy is: Very Creepy." That's the verdict from Mozilla's first-ever "Annual Consumer Creep-o-Meter," which attempts to set benchmarks for digital privacy and identify trends: Since 2017, Mozilla has published 15 editions of *Privacy Not Included, our consumer tech buyers guide. We've reviewed over 500 gadgets, apps, cars, and more, assessing their security features, what data they collect, and who they share that data with. In 2023, we compared our most recent findings with those of the past five years. It quickly became clear that products and companies are collecting more personal data than ever before — and then using that information in shady ways...

Products are getting more secure, but also a lot less private. More companies are meeting Mozilla's Minimum Security Standards like using encryption and providing automatic software updates. That's good news. But at the same time, companies are collecting and sharing users' personal data like never before. And that's bad news. Many companies now view their hardware or software as a means to an end: collecting that coveted personal data for targeted advertising and training AI. For example: The mental health app BetterHelp shares your data with advertisers, social media platforms, and sister companies. The Japanese car manufacturer Nissan collects a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information — but doesn't specify how.

An increasing number of products can't be used offline. In the past, the privacy conscious could always buy a connected device but turn off connectivity, making it "dumb." That's no longer an option in many cases. The number of connected devices that require apps and can't be used offline are increasing. This trend, coupled with the first, means it's harder and harder to keep your data private.
Privacy policies also need improvement. "Legalese, ambiguity, and policies that sprawl across multiple documents and URLs are the status quo. And it's getting worse, not better. Companies use these policies as a shield, not an actual resource for consumers." They note that Toyota has more than 10 privacy policy documents, and that it would actually take five hours to read all the privacy documents the Meta Quest Pro VR headset.

In the end they advise opting out of data collection when possible, enabling security features, and "If you're not comfortable with a product's privacy, don't buy it. And, speak up. Over the years, we've seen companies respond to consumer demand for privacy, like when Apple reformed app tracking and Zoom made end-to-end encryption a free feature."

You can also take a quiz that calculates your own privacy footprint (based on whether you're using consumer tech products like the Apple Watch, Nintendo Switch, Nook, or Telegram). Mozilla's privacy advocates award the highest marks to privacy-protecting products like Signal, Sonos' SL Speakers, and the Pocketbook eReader (an alternative to Amazon's Kindle. (Although 100% of the cars reviewed by Mozilla "failed to meet our privacy and security standards.")

The graphics on the site help make its point. As you move your mouse across the page, the cartoon eyes follow its movement...

"Mark Zuckerberg is making good on his promise to accelerate the use of Threads," reports Business Insider: The Meta CEO insisted in July that the app was not in its final form. "I'm highly confident that we're gonna be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow," Zuckerberg said. Since then, Threads has rolled out a host of major new features, including a web version, keyword search, voice posts, and the ability to edit posts, even as it avoids promoting news. Smaller things, too, like being able to follow updates in individual threads at the tap of a bell icon, a way to mass follow people mentioned in a post, and even tag people's Instagram accounts, are now available... More Threads features are said to be on the way, like polls.
But Insider also reports that "As the app has matured quickly in recent weeks, users have started to return and downloads have continued to rise." So far in October, Threads has hovered around 33 million daily active users and 120 million monthly active users, according to data from Apptopia, up from about 25 million daily users and 100 million monthly users in July... Since the app launched on July 6, it's been downloaded 260 million times, Apptopia data shows, with downloads in September almost double the downloads in August...

Although the entire team working on Threads remains small by Meta standards, around 50 people, the company was surprised by the interest in the app and "really wants it to work," an employee said. To that end, Threads is now being integrated to an extent with Facebook and Instagram, two of the most popular apps in the world. There is a direct link to Threads on each user's Instagram page, a post on Threads can be sent in Instagram DMs, and as of this week, Threads is being promoted within the Instagram app feed via a small carousel of select posts under the header "Threads for you...."
It's not just Instagram, according to BGR. "If you've been posting some especially strange messages Threads, thinking that only the few people who follow you will see them, I have some bad news for you..." As spotted by TechCrunch, users on Facebook have noticed something new on their News Feed: content from Threads. It appears that Meta is now showing Facebook users a new "For You from Threads" section on the News Feed that contains recommended content from the sibling social media platform.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: For years, tech companies like Open AI have freely used news stories to build data sets that teach their machines how to recognize and respond fluently to human queries about the world. But as the quest to develop cutting-edge AI models has grown increasingly frenzied, newspaper publishers and other data owners are demanding a share of the potentially massive market for generative AI, which is projected to reach to $1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Since August, at least 535 news organizations — including the New York Times, Reuters and The Washington Post — have installed a blocker that prevents their content from being collected and used to train ChatGPT. Now, discussions are focused on paying publishers so the chatbot can surface links to individual news stories in its responses, a development that would benefit the newspapers in two ways: by providing direct payment and by potentially increasing traffic to their websites. In July, Open AI cut a deal to license content from the Associated Press as training data for its AI models. The current talks also have addressed that idea, according to two people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, but have concentrated more on showing stories in ChatGPT responses.

Other sources of useful data are also looking for leverage. Reddit, the popular social message board, has met with top generative AI companies about being paid for its data, according to a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. If a deal can't be reached, Reddit is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing, which would prevent the forum from being discovered in searches and reduce the number of visitors to the site. But the company believes the trade-off would be worth it, the person said, adding: "Reddit can survive without search."
"The moves mark a growing sense of urgency and uncertainty about who profits from online information," the article argues. "With generative AI poised to transform how users interact with the internet, many publishers and other companies see fair payment for their data as an existential issue."

They also cite James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, who suggests Open AI's decision to negotiate "may reflect a desire to strike deals before courts have a chance weigh in on whether tech companies have a clear legal obligation to license — and pay for — content."

The Washington Post tells the story of a veteran political operative and a former army intelligence officer hired to help keep in power the president of the west African nation Burkina Faso: Their company, Percepto International, was a pioneer in what's known as the disinformation-for-hire business. They were skilled in deceptive tricks of social media, reeling people into an online world comprised of fake journalists, news outlets and everyday citizens whose posts were intended to bolster support for [president Roch Marc] Kaboré's government and undercut its critics. But as Percepto began to survey the online landscape across Burkina Faso and the surrounding French-speaking Sahel region of Africa in 2021, they quickly saw that the local political adversaries and Islamic extremists they had been hired to combat were not Kaboré's biggest adversary. The real threat, they concluded, came from Russia, which was running what appeared to be a wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing Burkina Faso and other democratically-elected governments on its borders.

Pro-Russian fake news sites populated YouTube and pro-Russian groups abounded on Facebook. Local influencers used WhatsApp and Telegram groups to organize pro-Russian demonstrations and praise Russian President Vladimir Putin. Facebook fan pages even hailed the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary network run by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the late one-time Putin ally whose Internet Research Agency launched a disinformation campaign in the United States to influence the 2016 presidential election... Percepto didn't know the full scope of the operation it had uncovered but it warned Kaboré's government that it needed to move fast: Launch a counteroffensive online — or risk getting pushed out in a coup.

Three years later, the governments of five former French colonies, including Burkina Faso, have been toppled. The new leaders of two of those countries, Mali and Burkina Faso, are overtly pro-Russian; in a third, Niger, the prime minister installed after a July coup has met recently with the Russian ambassador. In Mali and the Central African Republic, French troops have been replaced with Wagner mercenaries...

Percepto's experience in French-speaking Africa offers a rare window into the round-the-clock information warfare that is shaping international politics — and the booming business of disinformation-for-hire. Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says that since 2017 it has detected more than 200 clandestine influence operations, many of them mercenary campaigns, in 68 countries.
The article also makes an interesting point. "The burden of battling disinformation has fallen entirely on Silicon Valley companies."

"The Worker as Futurist project assists rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction," explains its web site. "In a world where massive corporations not only exploit people but monopolize the power of future-making, how can workers and other people fight and write back?"

I couldn't find any short stories displayed on their site, but there are plans to publish a book next year collecting the workers' writing about "the world after Amazon" in print, online and in audiobook format. And there's also a podcast about "the world Amazon is building and the workers and writers struggling for different futures."

From their web site: A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 workers gather online to discuss how SF shed light on their working conditions and futures. In 2023, 13 workers started to meet regularly to build their writing skills and learn about the future Amazon is compelling its workers to create... The Worker as Futurist project aims, in a small way, to place the power of the imagination back in the hands of workers. This effort is in solidarity with trade union mobilizations and workers self-organization at Amazon. It is also in solidarity with efforts by civil society to reign in Amazon's power.
Four people involved with the project shared more details in the socialist magazine Jacobin : At stake is a kind of corporate storytelling, which goes beyond crass propaganda but works to harness the imagination. Like so many corporations, Amazon presents itself as surfing the wave of the future, responding to the relentless and positive force of the capitalist market with innovation and optimism. Such stories neatly exonerate the company and its beneficiaries from the consequences of their choices for workers and their world...

WWS doesn't focus on science fiction. But it does show the radical power of the imagination that comes when workers don't just read inspiring words, but come together to write and thereby take the power of world-building and future-making back into their hands. This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different. We have tasked these workers with writing their own futures, in the face of imaginaries cultivated by Amazon that see the techno-overlords bestride the world and the stars.

Thanks to funding from Canada's arms-length, government-funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions. In each of these online forums, we were joined by experts on speculative fiction, on Amazon, and on workers' struggles. At the end of this series of sessions, the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about "The World After Amazon...."

We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox. It is in the process of writing and sharing writing we can come to an awareness of something our working bodies know but that we cannot otherwise articulate or express. The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Friday blocked in full a lower court ruling that would have curbed the Biden administration's ability to communicate with social media companies about contentious content on such issues as Covid-19. The decision in a short unsigned order (PDF) puts on hold a Louisiana-based judge's ruling in July that specific agencies and officials should be barred from meeting with companies to discuss whether certain content should be stifled. The Supreme Court also agreed to immediately take up the government's appeal, meaning it will hear arguments and issue a ruling on the merits in its current term, which runs until the end of June. Three conservative justices noted that they would have denied the application: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

"At this time in the history of our country, what the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate," Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion. GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, along with five social media users, filed the underlying lawsuit, alleging that U.S. government officials went too far in what they characterize as coercion of social media companies to address posts, especially those related to Covid-19. The individual plaintiffs include Covid-19 lockdown opponents and Jim Hoft, the owner of the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. They claim that the government's actions violated free speech protections under the Constitution's First Amendment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say. While Nvidia has historically been the leading provider of AI chips in China with a market share exceeding 90%, Chinese firms including Huawei have been developing their own versions of Nvidia's best-selling chips, including the A100 and the H100 graphics processing units (GPU).

Huawei's Ascend AI chips are comparable to Nvidia's in terms of raw computing power, analysts and some AI firms such as China's iFlyTek say, but they still lag behind in performance. Jiang Yifan, chief market analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities, said another key limiting factor for Chinese firms was the reliance of most projects on Nvidia's chips and software ecosystem, but that could change with the U.S. restrictions. "This U.S. move, in my opinion, is actually giving Huawei's Ascend chips a huge gift," Jiang said in a post on his social media Weibo account. This opportunity, however, comes with several challenges.

Many cutting edge AI projects are built with CUDA, a popular programming architecture Nvidia has pioneered, which has in turn given rise to a massive global ecosystem that has become capable of training highly sophisticated AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4. Huawei own version is called CANN, and analysts say it is much more limited in terms of the AI models it is capable of training, meaning that Huawei's chips are far from a plug-and-play substitute for Nvidia. Woz Ahmed, a former chip design executive turned consultant, said that for Huawei to win Chinese clients from Nvidia, it must replicate the ecosystem Nvidia created, including supporting clients to move their data and models to Huawei's own platform. Intellectual property rights are also a problem, as many U.S. firms already hold key patents for GPUs, Ahmed said. "To get something that's in the ballpark, it is 5 or 10 years," he added.

The popular messaging app Telegram can leak your IP address if you simply add a hacker to your contacts and accept a phone call from them. From a report: Denis Simonov, a security researcher, who is also known as n0a, recently highlighted the issue and wrote a simple tool to exploit it. TechCrunch verified the researcher's findings by adding Simonov to the contacts of a newly created Telegram account. Simonov then called the account, and shortly after provided TechCrunch with the IP address of the computer where the experiment was being carried out.

Telegram boasts 700 million users all over the world, and has always marketed itself as a "secure" and "private" messaging app, even though experts have repeatedly warned that Telegram is not as secure as end-to-end encrypted app Signal, for example. The fact that Telegram leaks your IP address to people in your contacts during a voice call has been known for years, but it's likely that new, less technical users may not be aware.

Slash_Account_Dot shares a report from 404 Media: Hackers are targeting accounts on Kodex, a platform that connects law enforcement agencies and tech companies and which is designed to verify emergency requests for customer data, according to multiple online conversations between hackers viewed by 404 Media. Screenshots from one of the compromised accounts shows a panel where a law enforcement officer, or a hacker, can potentially 'create a new request.' The screenshots show a wide range of companies such as tech giants Meta and Microsoft's LinkedIn; cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and Coinbase; social media platforms Pinterest, Discord, and Snapchat; financial service Fidelity, and gaming platform Roblox. The compromised account appears to belong to a national police force, but the screenshots do not include the agency's full name.

There is no evidence that hackers have successfully used compromised Kodex accounts to obtain data from a tech company, and Matt Donahue, the former FBI agent and now CEO of Kodex, said that multiple compromised accounts 404 Media found did not have authorization to make such requests, and that Kodex had shut down those accounts. But the repeated examples of criminal chatter show that Kodex is a target of interest for hackers.

Ty Roush reports via Forbes: Convoy, a Seattle-based digital freight booker with investors that include billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, announced Thursday it would be shutting down, according to Bloomberg, after the company failed to find a buyer amid a "massive freight recession." Convoy's founder and chief executive Dan Lewis notified employees in an internal memo Thursday that "today is your last day at the company," noting the company is "exploring and evaluating strategic options for what might come next," Bloomberg reported.

Lewis said the company had evaluated potential suitors to acquire it, though "none of the options ultimately materialized into anything sufficient to keep the company going in its then current form." Convoy was in "the middle of a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets," according to Lewis, who added "this combination ultimately crushed our progress" and likely swayed potential suitors away from acquiring the firm. "Following an exhaustive process, spanning many, many months during which we explored all viable strategic options for the business, the result is where we are today," Lewis wrote. Convoy was founded in 2015 in an effort to prevent trucks from driving "empty miles" without loads. The idea was to use technology to make freight more efficient by connecting truck drivers with freight companies -- reducing shippers' costs, increasing carriers' earnings, and eliminating carbon emissions in the process.

Discord is overhauling the way it moderates its platform with a new warning system and teen safety assist feature. From a report: The new Discord warning system has been totally revamped to be far more transparent, educating Discord users how they've broken rules and are restricted from parts of the service rather than permanently banning them. "The new system gives users more room to learn from their mistakes and correct misjudgments," explains Savannah Badalich, Discord's senior director of policy, in a briefing with The Verge. "We're moving away from permanent bans to one-year temporary bans for many violations, except for violations that are extremely harmful."

In the coming weeks, Discord will start to limit features for rule breakers, instead of banning them outright. If a Discord user violates the rules, then they'll be met with a DM from Discord letting them know about the warning or violation and what action Discord is taking. So, if a Discord user uploads an image that breaks the rules, they might temporarily take away the ability to post images.

Apple is taking a different approach to social with its Vision Pro headset: making apps social right out of the box. This, according to Road to VR's Ben Lang, is what Meta should have done all along. Instead, it's pioneered a social experience on the Quest platform that involves "jumping through a fragmented landscape of different apps and different ways to actually get into the same space with your friends." From the report: Apple is taking a fundamentally different approach with Vision Pro by making social the expectation rather than the rule, and providing a common set of tools and guidelines for developers to build from in order to make social feel cohesive across the platform. Apple's vision isn't about creating a server full of a virtual strangers and user-generated experiences, but to make it easy to share the stuff you already like to do with the people you already know. This obviously leans into the company's rich ecosystem of existing apps -- and the social technologies the company has already battle-tested on its platforms.

SharePlay is the feature that's already present on iOS and MacOS devices that lets people watch, listen, and experience apps together through FaceTime. And on Vision Pro, Apple intends to use its SharePlay tech to make many of its own first-party apps -- like Apple TV, Apple Music, and Photos -- social right out of the box, and it expects developers to do so too. In the company's developer documentation, the company says it expects "most visionOS apps to support SharePlay." [...]

Perhaps most importantly, Apple is leaning on every user's existing personal friend graph (ie: the people you already text, call, or email), rather than trying to create a bespoke friends list that lives only inside Vision Pro. Rather than launching an app and then figuring out how to get your friends into it, with SharePlay Apple is focused on getting together with your friends first, then letting the group seamlessly move from one app to the next as you decide what you want to do.

Even apps that don't explicitly have multi-user experience built-in can be 'social' by default, by allowing one user to screen-share the app with others. Only the host will be able to interact with the content, but everyone else will be able to see and talk about it in real-time. It's the emphasis on 'social by default', 'things you already do', and 'people you already know' that will make social on Vision Pro feel completely different than what Meta is building on Quest with Horizon Worlds and its ecosystem of fragmented social apps.

A top Chinese AI developer punished scores of staff who took a longer lunch break than allowed, reviving memories of the relentless work culture that plagued the country's tech sector years ago. From a report: IFlytek this week fired off a companywide memo upbraiding more than a hundred employees it accused of abandoning their workstations to line up for free chicken lunches at the campus cafeteria.

As a disciplinary measure, those who took more than the allotted hour will get a "C" review rating, according to a copy of the memo that was posted online and verified by a company representative. The post drew more than 66 million views on Chinese social media platform Weibo and highlighted the immense pressures on the country's AI sector, now the hottest slice of a tech arena still struggling to regain its footing since Beijing cracked down on the industry in late 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google responded to congressional child online safety proposals with its own counteroffer for the first time Monday, urging lawmakers to drop problematic protections like age-verification tech. In a blog post, Google released its "Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens Online" (PDF). The framework comes as more lawmakers, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), are lining up behind the Kids Online Safety Act, a controversial bill intended to protect kids from dangerous content online.

In the framework, Google rejects state and federal attempts at requiring platforms to verify the age of users, like forcing users to upload copies of their government IDs to access an online service. Some states have recently gone as far as passing laws requiring platforms to obtain parental consent before anyone under 18 is allowed to use their services. Google dismisses these consent laws, arguing that they bar vulnerable teens from accessing helpful information. "Good legislative models -- like those based on age-appropriate design principles -- can help hold companies responsible for promoting safety and privacy, while enabling access to richer experiences for children and teens," Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, said in the blog post.

Aidin Vaziri reports via the San Francisco Chronicle: Epic Games has initiated layoffs at Bandcamp, the Oakland-based online music distribution platform it recently sold to Songtradr. Among those affected were members of Bandcamp Daily, the platform's editorial arm, as confirmed by former staff members on social media channels. "About half the company was laid off today," senior editor JJ Skolnik announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday morning. This move comes weeks after Songtradr's acquisition of Bandcamp was announced on Sept. 28. The company did not disclose how many employees were impacted by the cuts.

Songtradr, a Santa Monica-based licensing company, had previously stated that not all Bandcamp employees would be absorbed after the platform's sale from Epic, citing the service's financial situation as the basis for workforce adjustments. [...] The sale comes as the company cuts around 16% of its workforce, about 830 employees, in the face of lower profits that were outpaced by growing expenses.

AMD has taken down the latest version of its AMD Adrenalin Edition graphics driver after Counter-Strike 2-maker Valve warned that players using its Anti-Lag+ technology would result in a ban under Valve's anti-cheat rules. From a report: AMD first introduced regular Anti-Lag mitigation in its drivers back in 2019, limiting input lag by reducing the amount of queued CPU work when the processor was getting too far ahead of the GPU frame processing. But the newer Anti-Lag+ system -- which was first rolled out for a handful of games last month -- updates this system by "applying frame alignment within the game code itself," according to AMD. That method leads to additional lag reduction of up to 10 ms, according to AMD's data. That additional lag reduction could offer players a bit of a competitive advantage in these games (with the usual arguments about whether that advantage is "unfair" or not). But it's Anti-Lag+'s particular method of altering the "game code itself" that sets off warning bells for the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system. After AMD added Anti-Lag+ support for Counter-Strike 2 in a version 23.10.1 update last week, VAC started issuing bans to unsuspecting AMD users that activated the feature.

"AMD's latest driver has made their 'Anti-Lag/+' feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions," Valve wrote on social media Friday. "If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban." Beyond Valve, there are also widespread reports of Anti-Lag+ triggering crashes or account bans in competitive online games like Modern Warfare 2 and Apex Legends. But Nvidia users haven't reported any similar problems with the company's Reflex system, which uses SDK-level code adjustments to further reduce input lag in games including Counter-Strike 2.

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: After a nasty battle between the developers of third-party apps and Reddit management, ultimately resulting in a site-wide protest, many app makers were put out of business due to Reddit's price increases related to the usage of its API. Though the changes meant the loss of popular apps like Apollo, RIF (Reddit is Fun), ReddPlanent, Sync and BaconReader, one app, Narwhal, is attempting to make a comeback. The company announced this week that it will implement a subscription-based version of its app at $3.99 per month, promising an ad-free and privacy-focused experience.

The new app will also include a Tip Jar to solicit donations to help keep the app afloat beyond the subscription fees and fund additional development work. Though not available at launch, the app's developer Rick Harrison (u/det0ur on Reddit and CTO at Meadow by day) says he's considering adding a small fee, perhaps $1 per month, to allow users to also check their notifications and messages... Notes Narwhal's developer, Reddit's fee will be "tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands a month depending on how many people subscribe." To work, the app will need a critical mass of subscribers to cover its costs, but Harrison says he's fairly confident the model will work.

"Also, with a simpler plan like this, I can offer a subscription on a Narwhal website for 30% less (no Apple cut)," Harrison wrote...

Narwhal isn't the only Reddit client to attempt to remain in business despite Reddit's API pricing changes. Another, Relay, announced a multi-tier subscription plan where users have to choose one of six price points, each that caps them at a certain number of API calls.

The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Equifax a smidge over $13.6 million for severe failings that put millions of consumers at risk of financial crime. From a report: The regulator branded the entire debacle "entirely preventable" -- from Equifax's failure to promptly notify regulators to the way in which it misled the public over the severity of a security breach back in 2017. The original fine should have been greater; the true sum was $19,428,836 but the company received a 30 percent discount for agreeing to the penalty early into the proceedings. It also received a 15 percent credit for good behavior during the investigation.

After first opening the investigation in 2017, the FCA's fine comes after the ICO wasted less time imposing a penalty of $609,092 in 2018. "Cybersecurity and data protection are of growing importance to the security and stability of financial services," said Jessica Rusu, FCA chief data, information, and intelligence officer. "Firms not only have a technical responsibility to ensure resiliency, but also an ethical responsibility in the processing of consumer information. The Consumer Duty makes it clear that firms must raise their standards."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: New York State officials on Wednesday unveiled a bill to protect young people from potential mental health risks by prohibiting minors from accessing algorithm-based social media feeds unless they have permission from their parents. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Letitia James, the state attorney general, announced their support of new legislation to crack down on the often inscrutable algorithms, which they argue are used to keep young users on social media platforms for extended periods of time -- sometimes to their detriment. If the bill is passed and signed into law, anyone under 18 in New York would need parental consent to access those feeds on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and other social media platforms that use algorithms to display personalized content. While other states have sought far-reaching bans and measures on social media apps, New York is among a few seeking to target the algorithms more narrowly.

The legislation, for example, would target TikTok's central feature, its ubiquitous "For You" feed, which displays boundless reams of short-form videos based on user interests or past interactions. But it would not affect a minor's access to the chronological feeds that show posts published by the accounts that a user has decided to follow. The bill would also allow parents to limit the number of hours their children can spend on a platform and block their child's access to social media apps overnight, from midnight until 6 a.m., as well as pause notifications during that time.

The bill in New York, which could be considered as soon as January when the 2024 legislative session begins, is likely to confront resistance from tech industry groups. The bill's sponsors, State Senator Andrew Gounardes and Assemblywoman Nily Rozic, said they were readying for a fight. But Ms. Hochul's enthusiastic support of the bill -- she rarely joins lawmakers to introduce bills -- is a sign that it could succeed in the State Capitol, which Democrats control. A second bill unveiled on Wednesday is meant to protect children's privacy by prohibiting websites from "collecting, using, sharing, or selling personal data" from anyone under 18 for the purpose of advertising, unless they receive consent, according to a news release. Both bills would empower the state attorney general to go after platforms found in violation.