An anonymous reader shares a report: If you want official updates from the Minecraft dev team, you better not look on Reddit. A post from a Reddit user bearing the name sliced_lime and a flair indicating they are the Minecraft Java Tech Lead (almost certainly Mojang's Mikael Hedberg) announced yesterday that Mojang would no longer be posting official content to Reddit, in the wake of that platform's response to protests over changes to its API. "As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits," read the post, before announcing that those changes have led Mojang to "no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer [its] players to".

The events are only obliquely referred to in the post, but it seems the move has been sparked by Reddit's crackdown on protests against recent changes to its API that would, in essence, kill off third-party apps that let users access the site. Subreddit mods have spent the last few weeks mounting various campaigns against Reddit's corporate leadership, either "going dark" by turning the subreddits they oversee into private, invite-only communities or else marking them as NSFW, meaning Reddit can't sell ads on those pages. Reddit responded by pressuring disgruntled mods, and in some cases ousting and trying to replace them.

Damus, a decentralized social networking app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will be removed from the App Store due to Apple's strict payment rules. From a report: Apple had threatened to remove Damus earlier this month over the app's tips feature, claiming that it could be used by content creators to sell digital content on the platform. The tech giant has a long history of prohibiting developers from selling additional in-app content unless the transactions go through Apple, which takes a 30% cut. To avoid a ban, the team behind Damus had to tweak the app's tipping feature, which is made possible by way of Bitcoin's Lightning Network. The company previously explained in a tweet that it had to remove the tips button from posts and was only allowed to permit tips on profiles.

Google users who add "Reddit" to searches for specific topics found this ineffective when numerous Reddit forums went dark this month. This happened as many popular forum moderators turned pages private to protest Reddit's decision to charge developers for data access, resulting in inaccessible or unhelpful search results. The incident, CNBC reports, has prompted Google to search for a better fix. An anonymous reader shares a report: It's an issue that Google executives say is at least partially resolved by a new feature called Perspectives that was unveiled on Monday. The Perspectives tab, available now on mobile web and the Google app in the U.S., promises to surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.

At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add "Reddit" to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience. "Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that's iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy," Raghavan said. "We need to make users happy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the cybercriminals behind 2020's major Twitter hack was sentenced to five years in U.S. federal prison on Friday. Joseph O'Connor (AKA "PlugwalkJoe"), a 24-year-old British citizen, previously pleaded guilty to seven charges associated with the digital attack. He was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the U.S. in April of this year. In addition to the five years of jail time, O'Connor was also sentenced to three additional years under supervised release and ordered to pay back more than $790,000 in illicitly obtained funds, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York. Previously, Graham Ivan Clark, another one of the hackers involved who was 17 at the time of the attack, pleaded guilty to related charges and was sentenced to three years in prison.

With all charges combined, O'Connor faced a maximum of 77 years in prison, per a Reuters report, while prosecutors called for a seven-year sentence. Ultimately, he will likely only serve about half of his five years, after having already spent nearly 2.5 years in pre-trial custody, Judge Jed S. Rakoff said during the Friday hearing, according to TechCrunch. Along with his fellow hackers, O'Connor "used his sophisticated technological abilities for malicious purposes -- conducting a complex SIM swap attack to steal large amounts of cryptocurrency, hacking Twitter, conducting computer intrusions to take over social media accounts, and even cyberstalking two victims, including a minor victim," according to a previous statement given by prosecuting U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. [...]

An investigation by the New York State Department of Financial Services determined that the breach was made possible because Twitter "lacked adequate cybersecurity protections," according to an October 2020 report. O'Connor and co were able to gain access to the social platform's internal systems through a simple scheme of calling Twitter employees posing as the company IT department. They were able to trick four Twitter workers into providing their login credentials. The FBI launched its own investigation, which found that O'Connor and his co-conspirators had managed to transfer account ownership to unauthorized users -- sometimes themselves, and sometimes to others willing to pay for the accounts. O'Connor himself paid $10,000 to take over one specific, unnamed account, according to a Department of Justice press statement from May. In addition to the Twitter hack, O'Connor also pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $800,000 from a crypto company by SIM swapping at least three executives' phone numbers. He further admitted to blackmailing an unnamed public figure via Snapchat and swatting a 16-year-old girl.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Working from home appears to be here to stay, especially for women and college-educated workers, according to economic data released Thursday that revealed how Americans spent their time in 2022. The data, from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), suggests that the pandemic changes that upended the workplace, family life and social interactions continue to have a lasting effect on life in the United States.

Many white-collar workers who hunkered down at home during pandemic shutdowns have returned to the office, but extraordinarily high numbers have not. For many, remote work appears to be a new normal... Working from home "is a permanent shift," said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. "We're now seeing many companies start as remote-first companies." The new data is a "continuation of what we've been seeing" in the American workforce, she said...

The annual survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau asks thousands of Americans how they spent the past 24 hours of their lives across different categories of activities. Results from 2019 through 2021 showed that the pandemic dramatically shifted how much time people spend working at home. The new data suggests those changes persisted through 2022, even as much of life returned to normal as more people got vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus, and case counts fell...

There is a clear benefit to remote work for employees, Pollak said. Working from home saves time and money on commuting, and many employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere, to better support their parents or children. She said remote work also is "part of the reason for this huge spike in new business formation. It has lowered the barriers to starting a business."
The 2022 figures show 34% of workers over the age of 15 still said they were working at home — and 54% of workers with a workers with a bachelor's degree or higher. (Meanwhile, workers without a high school diploma "were even less likely to work from home in 2022 than they were before the pandemic.")

The Post also reports another interesting finding in the data. "Americans ages 20 to 24 are the only group that spent more time socializing than before the pandemic. Teenagers, and adults ages 55 to 64, reported an overall decline in time spent socializing since before the pandemic."

Last year, the CEO of messaging app IRL repeatedly said it had 20 million monthly active users, who chatted about shared interests and planned real-world events together. Today, a spokesperson for the startup said an investigation by the board of directors concluded 95% of those users were "automated or from bots." The Information: As a result of the probe, the spokesperson said the company would shut down and return capital to shareholders, two months after it suspended the founder and CEO, Abraham Shafi, for alleged misconduct. IRL raised $200 million from SoftBank's Vision Fund, Founders Fund and others, before coming under scrutiny in a series of articles in The Information, which questioned its user number claims.

The EPA is assembling its first-ever National Environmental Youth Advisory Council, a group of young people to weigh in on issues that affect their communities. From a report: "We can't tackle the environmental challenges of our time without input from our younger communities, who've long been at the forefront of social movements," EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a press release yesterday. The worst effects of climate change are still ahead as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels keep building up in Earth's atmosphere. The actions policymakers take today to curb that pollution will decide what kind of planet younger generations will inherit. So it makes sense for the EPA to create seats for them at the table.

A stark business reality faced Reddit before a user uprising engulfed its site this month: slowing sales growth. From a report: Reddit's revenue rose 38% in 2022 to about $670 million last year, two people familiar with the matter said, faster than many other internet ad firms but a steep slowdown from the more than doubling of revenue the company experienced in 2021 over 2020. The slowdown adds to uncertainty about Reddit's hopes of going public. It comes in the wake of a highly public battle between Reddit and third-party apps that connect to Reddit and are popular with users and moderators. The battle has highlighted the challenges for many internet firms that rely on content from users but are trying to build profit-making businesses.

And the 2022 sales figure, which hasn't been previously reported, suggests Reddit would face a significant valuation haircut from its last private round if public investors valued it similarly to peer companies. The 2022 revenue multiple at which Snap and Meta Platforms are trading suggests Reddit is worth just over $3.3 billion. That's about one-third the value private investors put on the company less than two years ago, when Reddit last raised money.

Meta plans to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada once a parliament-approved legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers comes into effect, the company said on Thursday. From a report: The legislation, known as the Online News Act, was approved by the Senate upper chamber earlier on Thursday and will become law after receiving royal assent from the governor general, a formality. The legislation was proposed after complaints from Canada's media industry, which wants tighter regulation of tech companies to prevent them from elbowing news businesses out of the online advertising market.

"Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act taking effect," Meta said in a statement. Facebook had telegraphed such a move for weeks, saying news has no economic value to the company and that its users do not use the platform for news. The act outlines rules to force platforms such as Facebook and Alphabet's Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content, a step similar to a groundbreaking law passed in Australia in 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After threatening to do so last week, Reddit has now removed the moderators of some of the subreddits that were protesting Reddit's new API pricing scheme. Some of these subreddits have new mods in the protesters' place, while other affected subreddits have been left unmoderated. Still others, oddly, saw their moderators reinstated. Reddit claims the moves are a response to mods breaking its Moderator Code of Conduct by allowing "not safe for work" (NSFW) content in previously "safe for work" subreddits. However, moderators who spoke to Ars Technica believe Reddit's actions are designed to silence their protests over the new fees.

Various Reddit moderators reached out to Ars Technica this week, informing us that mods for r/Celebrities, r/InterestInGasFuck_, r/mildlyinteresting, r/self, r/ShittyLifeProTips, and r/TIHI have been removed. Other subreddits are reportedly affected, too, including r/toyota, r/garmin, and r/IllegalLifeProTips. All of the communities recently started allowing NSFW content as a form of API pricing protest. Reddit can't sell ads on NSFW content, and Redditors have accused the company of covertly switching some subreddits back to SFW.

As of this writing, some of the subreddits whose mods were removed remain unmoderated. Other subreddits have new mods. One example, r/Celebrities, has already seen resistance from community members, claiming the new mods "don't represent" them and that these mods weren't active in the community before the protests. Meanwhile, the feeling around the general mod community is one of disgust, while some are seriously considering abandoning their volunteer posts or have already done so. "We put up with a lot as Reddit mods—death threats, doxing, sorting through lewd and even illegal material (that Reddit continually ignores)—and deserve to be treated with basic respect," a Reddit moderator, who asked to be referred to only as Jess for privacy reasons, said regarding the removal of some mods. The mod has started erasing their account and has resigned as a moderator. "I have no desire to be associated with a company that conducts itself in such a manner," Jess said. Confusingly, the moderators of some of the subreddits, including r/mildlyinteresting, were restored. Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement: "It's not OK to show people NSFW content when they don't want to see it. In line with our Moderator Code of Conduct, we'll remove moderators and restrict communities where moderators are engaging in malicious conduct, like allowing rule-violating behavior or encouraging the submission of sexually explicit content in previously safe-for-work spaces."

He added that mods "incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct."

Ars notes that replacing Reddit moderators isn't so simple. "The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually, and as detailed on the r/hentai subreddit, the work mods do is both complex and extensive," reports Ars. "Reddit itself calculated that manual mod removals represented 30.9 percent of content removed in 2022. Reddit would be a different website, one perhaps incapable of functioning, without the tens of thousands of volunteers it uses to keep content safe, enjoyable, relevant, and valuable. Relying on volunteers saves the unprofitable company plenty of money."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A handful of subreddits have classified themselves as not safe for work (NSFW) to protest Reddit's recent treatment of the platform's volunteer moderators, and as a result, some non-porn communities are starting to get a lot of porn. More than 8,000 subreddits went dark last week in protest of the company's API pricing changes that are set to shut down popular third-party apps. But as the protests went on, Reddit started to push back. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Steve Huffman said that, while the platform allows the protests, "the users are not in support of it now. It's like a protest in a city that goes on too long, and the rest of the citizens of the city would like to go about their lives."

In an interview with NBC News, Huffman characterized moderators as "landed gentry." And some mods have felt threatened by messages sent to them by the company. Thousands of subreddits have reopened; one tracker indicates only about 3,300 remain private or restricted. But switching to NSFW creates a new level of friction in reopened communities.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft's flagship office suite -- including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps -- and cloud computing platform. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks. Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were indeed to blame.

But the software giant has offered few details -- and did not immediately comment on how many customers were affected and whether the impact was global. A spokeswoman confirmed that the group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan was behind the attacks. It claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel at the time. Some security researchers believe the group to be Russian. Microsoft's explanation in a blog post Friday evening followed a request by The Associated Press two days earlier. Slim on details, the post said the attacks "temporarily impacted availability" of some services. It said the attackers were focused on "disruption and publicity" and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the globe.

Hackers are threatening to release confidential data stolen from Reddit unless the company pays a ransom demand -- and reverses its controversial API price hikes. From a report: In a post on its dark web leak site, the BlackCat ransomware gang, also known as ALPHV, claims to have stolen 80 gigabytes of compressed data from Reddit during a February breach of the company's systems. Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini declined to answer TechCrunch's questions but confirmed that BlackCat's claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9.

At the time, Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, said that hackers had accessed employee information and internal documents during a "highly-targeted" phishing attack. Slowe added that the company had "no evidence" that personal user data, such as passwords and accounts, had been stolen. Reddit didn't share any further details about the attack or who was behind it. However, BlackCat over the weekend claimed responsibility for the February intrusion and threatened to leak "confidential" data stolen during the breach. It's unclear exactly what types of data the hackers have stolen, and BlackCat hasn't shared any evidence of data theft.

A new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company found that most Americans would prefer to live "in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media," reports Fast Company, adding "this sentiment is especially strong among older millennials and Gen Xers."

The Wrap summarizes the poll results: 77% of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was "plugged in," meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage...

63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy. In total, 67% of respondents said they'd prefer things as they used to be versus as they are now.
"Interestingly, baby boomers were slightly less eager to time hop, with only 60% of people over 55 saying they'd prefer to return to yesteryear," notes Fast Company: While Americans may want to unshackle themselves from the burden of constant connectivity, an overwhelming 90% also said that being open-minded about new technologies is important, a finding that mostly held up across demographics. About half of respondents even said they tend to adopt new technologies before most people they know...

Just over half said they found keeping up with new technologies overwhelming, and about that same percentage said they believe technology is more likely to divide people than unite them. Here, it was younger respondents who took the most pessimistic view, with 57% of people under 35 agreeing that technology divides, versus 43% who disagreed.

The Associated Press reports: A project using artificial intelligence to track social media abuse aimed at players at the 2022 World Cup identified more than 300 people whose details are being given to law enforcement, FIFA said Sunday.

The people made "abusive, discriminatory, or threatening posts [or] comments" on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, soccer's governing body said in a report detailing efforts to protect players and officials during the tournament played in Qatar. The biggest spike in abuse was during the France-England quarterfinals game, said the report from a project created jointly by FIFA and the players' global union FIFPRO. It used AI to help identify and hide offensive social media posts... About 20 million posts and comments were scanned and more than 19,000 were flagged as abusive...

The identities of the more than 300 people identified for posting abuse "will be shared with the relevant member associations and jurisdictional law authorities to facilitate real-world action being taken against offenders," FIFA said. "Discrimination is a criminal act. With the help of this tool, we are identifying the perpetrators and we are reporting them to the authorities so that they are punished for their actions," FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement. "We also expect the social media platforms to accept their responsibilities and to support us in the fight against all forms of discrimination."

FIFA and FIFPRO have extended the system for use at the Women's World Cup that starts next month in Australia and New Zealand.

Slashdot reader rtfa0987 spotted this on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. "Silicon Valley is poised once again to cash in on other people's products, making a data grab of unprecedented scale that has already spawned lawsuits and congressional hearings. Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts... But a thorny, contentious and highly consequential issue has arisen: A great deal of the bots' fodder is copyrighted property...

The new AI's intellectual-property problem goes beyond art into movies and television, photography, music, news media and computer coding. Critics worry that major players in tech, by inserting themselves between producers and consumers in commercial marketplaces, will suck out the money and remove financial incentives for producing TV scripts, artworks, books, movies, music, photography, news coverage and innovative software. "It could be catastrophic," said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents nearly 2,000 U.S. news publishers, including this news organization. "It could decimate our industry."

The new technology, as happened with other Silicon Valley innovations, including internet-search, social media and food delivery, is catching on among consumers and businesses so quickly that it may become entrenched — and beloved by users — long before regulators and lawmakers gather the knowledge and political will to impose restraints and mitigate harms. "We may need legislation," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who as a member of the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on copyright and generative AI last month. "Content creators have rights and we need to figure out a way how those rights will be respected...."

Furor over the content grabbing is surging. Photo-sales giant Getty is also suing Stability AI. Striking Hollywood screenwriters last month raised concerns that movie studios will start using chatbot-written scripts fed on writers' earlier work. The record industry has lodged a complaint with federal authorities over copyrighted music being used to train AI.
The article includes some unique perspectives:

• There's a technical solution being proposed by the software engineer-CEO of Dazzle Labs, a startup building a platform for controlling personal data. The Mercury News summarizes it as "content producers could annotate their work with conditions for use that would have to be followed by companies crawling the web for AI fodder."

• Santa Clara University law school professor Eric Goldman "believes the law favors use of copyrighted material for training generative AI. 'All works build upon precedent works. We are all free to take pieces of precedent works. What generative AI does is accelerate that process, but it's the same process. It's all part of an evolution of our society's storehouse of knowledge...."

"Compared to the website's average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop..." reports Engadget (citing data provided by internet analytics firm Similarweb). [A]s many subreddits continue to protest the company's plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That's unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.
In fact, the Financial Times now reports that Reddit "acknowledged that several advertisers had postponed certain premium ad campaigns in order to wait for the blackouts to pass." But they also got this dire prediction from a historian who helps moderate the subreddit "r/Askhistorians" (with 1.8 million subscribers).

"If they refuse to budge in any way I do not see Reddit surviving as it currently exists. That's the kind of fire I think they're playing with."

More people had the same same thought. The Reddit protests drew this response earlier this week from EFF's associate director of community organizing: This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge... Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to "spam"). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary...
Saturday the EFF official reiterated their concerns when Wired asked: does this really signal the death of Reddit? "I can't see it as anything but that... [I]t's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course. The longer they stay in their position, the more loss of users and content they're going to face."

Wired even heard a thought-provoking idea from Amy Bruckman, a regents' professor/senior associate chair at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bruckman "advocates for public funding of a nonprofit version of something akin to Reddit."

Meanwhile, hundreds of people are now placing bets on whether Reddit will backtrack on its new upcoming API pricing — or oust CEO Steve Huffman — according to Insider, citing reports from online betting company BetUS.

CEO Huffman's complaint that the moderators were ignoring the wishes of Reddit's users led to a funny counter-response, according to the Verge. After asking users to vote on whether to end the protest, two forums saw overwhelming support instead for the only offered alternative: the subreddits "now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver."

Both r/pics (more than 30 million subscribers) and r/gifs (more than 21 million subscribers) offered two options to users to vote on... The results were conclusive:

r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; "only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy," 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes...

On Twitter, John Oliver encouraged the subreddits — and even gave them some fodder. "Dear Reddit, excellent work," he wrote to kick off a thread that included several ridiculous pictures. A spokesperson for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

Reddit "appears to be laying the groundwork for ejecting forum moderators committed to continuing the protests," CNN reported Friday afternoon, "a move that could force open some communities that currently remain closed to the public.

"In response, some moderators have vowed to put pressure on Reddit's advertisers and investors." As of Friday morning, nearly 5,000 subreddits were still set to private and inaccessible to the public, reflecting a modest decrease from earlier in the week but still including groups such as r/funny, which claims more than 40 million subscribers, and r/aww and r/music, each with more than 30 million members. But Reddit has portrayed the blacked-out communities as a small slice of its wider platform. Some 100,000 forums remain open, the company said in a blog post, including 80% of its 5,000 most actively engaged subreddits...

Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman told NBC News the company will soon allow forum users to overrule moderators by voting them out of their positions, a change that may enable communities that do not wish to remain private to reopen. In addition, one company administrator said Thursday, Reddit may soon view communities that remain private as an indicator that the moderators of those communities no longer wish to moderate. That would constitute a form of inactivity for which the moderators can be removed, the company said. "If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users," the administrator said, adding that Reddit may intervene even if most moderators on a team wish to remain closed and only a single moderator wants to reopen...

Omar, a moderator of a subreddit participating in this week's blackout, told CNN Friday that many subreddits have participated in the blackouts based on member polls that indicate strong support for the protests... Content moderation on Reddit stands to worsen if the company continues with its plan, Omar said, warning that the coming changes will deter developers from creating and maintaining tools that Reddit communities rely on to detect and eliminate spam, hate speech or even child sexual abuse material. "That's both harmful for users and advertisers," Omar said, adding that supporters of the protests have been contacting advertisers to explain how the platform's coming changes may hurt brands. Already, Omar said, the blackout has made it harder for companies to target ads to interest groups; video game companies, for example, can no longer target ads to gaming-focused subreddits that have taken themselves private...

Huffman has also said that the protests have had little impact on the company financially.
NBC News adds: In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk's aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted "a handful of times" with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform. Huffman said he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

Reddit is pledging it will respect the subreddit blackout where thousands of subreddits are currently staying dark -- but it's not clear the company actually will. From a report: "We are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally reopening communities," reads a line from a "Reddit API Fact Sheet" that the company shared with The Verge alongside our full Reddit CEO interview. But that word "unilaterally" may be doing a awful lot of work -- because Reddit has apparently given itself a framework and justification to eject the moderators who support a blackout, replacing them with those who would re-open the sub. On Reddit, the ModCodeofConduct account has informed moderators that it will replace inactive moderators with active ones, even if they all agree to "stop moderating." That Reddit admin suggests that it breaks Rule 4 of Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct and is nothing new -- even though Rule 4 says nothing of the sort.

European Union officials have voted in favor of stricter regulations on artificial intelligence, including a ban on AI use in biometric surveillance and a requirement for AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT to disclose when content is generated by AI. Ars Technica reports: On Wednesday, European Union officials voted to implement stricter proposed regulations concerning AI, according to Reuters. The updated draft of the "AI Act" law includes a ban on the use of AI in biometric surveillance and requires systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT to reveal when content has been generated by AI. While the draft is still non-binding, it gives a strong indication of how EU regulators are thinking about AI. The new changes to the European Commission's proposed law -- which have not yet been finalized -- intend to shield EU citizens from potential threats linked to machine learning technology.

The new draft of the AI Act includes a provision that would ban companies from scraping biometric data (such as user photos) from social media for facial recognition training purposes. News of firms like Clearview AI using this practice to create facial recognition systems drew severe criticism from privacy advocates in 2020. However, Reuters reports that this rule might be a source of contention with some EU countries who oppose a blanket ban on AI in biometric surveillance. The new EU draft also imposes disclosure and transparency measures on generative AI. Image synthesis services like Midjourney would be required to disclose AI-generated content to help people identify synthesized images. The bill would also require that generative AI companies provide summaries of copyrighted material scraped and utilized in the training of each system. While the publishing industry backs this proposal, according to The New York Times, tech developers argue against its technical feasibility.

Additionally, creators of generative AI systems would be required to implement safeguards to prevent the generation of illegal content, and companies working on "high-risk applications" must assess their potential impact on fundamental rights and the environment. The current draft of the EU law designates AI systems that could influence voters and elections as "high-risk." It also classifies systems used by social media platforms with over 45 million users under the same category, thus encompassing platforms like Meta and Twitter. [...] Experts say that after considerable debate over the new rules among EU member nations, a final version of the AI Act isn't expected until later this year.