Rivian has raised the original $67,500 base price of its quad-motor R1T electric pickup with large battery packs to $79,500 (sans destination charges). That's a whopping $12,000 increase that will apply to most reservation holders except for those in the very final stages of purchase. The price of the R1S SUV (below) is also being hiked by $12,000 from $72,500 to $84,500.
"Like most manufacturers, Rivian is being confronted with inflationary pressure, increasing component costs, and unprecedented supply chain shortages and delays for parts (including semiconductor chips)," said Rivian's chief growth officer Jiten Behl.
Rivian
If you were still hoping to pay the lower prices, there is another option. Rivian has introduced dual-motor versions of the R1T and R1S EVs, with both starting at the original $67,500 and $72,500 prices. You also have the option of equipping the dual-motor vehicles with the large battery packs, priced at $73,500 for the R1T and $78,500 for the R1S.
However, neither of those vehicles will be available until 2024, and both will have smaller "standard" battery packs that deliver less range than the large packs (260 miles instead of 310 miles). So you'll be getting quite a lot less vehicle for the same money.
The dual-motor variants (one at each axle) will have motors designed, engineered and manufactured by Rivian. They'll deliver 600 HP and 600 pound-feet of torque, according to Rivian, delivering a 4.0-second 0-60 mph time. That's about a second slower than the fastest quad-motor R1T (835 HP and 908 pound-feet of torque), but still pretty darn fast.
Twitter has temporarily walked back a controversial change that made it difficult for people to preserve deleted tweets. On Wednesday, writer Kevin Marks pointed out that the company had recently tweaked its embedded javascript so that the text of deleted tweets was no longer visible in embeds on third-party websites.
By late Friday evening, however, one Twitter user noticed the company had reverted the change, with Twitter confirming the move one day later. “After considering the feedback we heard, we’re rolling back this change for now while we explore different options,” a spokesperson for the company told The Verge. “We appreciate those who shared their points of view — your feedback helps us make Twitter better.”
When the initial change was first spotted, Twitter product manager Eleanor Harding said the company made the tweak to “better respect” people who decide to delete their tweets. Part of what made the move problematic for many was that it simply left a blank space where the embed of a deleted tweet had been previously. Harding said Twitter was planning to roll out additional messaging that would explain why a tweet was no longer visible.
Twitter didn’t elaborate on the “different options” it was exploring following its reversal. For many, the decision to change how embeds work was a strange one. When Twitter first introduced embedding in 2011, it said it intentionally wanted to maintain the text of deleted tweets. And for many years afterward, company executives, including former CEO Jack Dorsey, stressed the role of the platform as a kind of “public record.”
Meta has agreed to change some of its rules around doxxing in response to recommendations from the Oversight Board. The company had first asked the Oversight Board to help shape its rules last June, saying the policy was “significant and difficult.” The board followed up with 17 recommendations for the company in February, which Meta has now weighed in on.
Unlike decisions around whether specific posts should be taken down or left up, Meta is free to completely disregard policy proposals from the Oversight Board, but it is required to respond to each recommendation individually.
One of the most notable changes is that Meta agreed to end an exception to its existing rules that allowed users to post private residential information if it was “publicly available” elsewhere. The Oversight Board had pointed out that there was a significant difference between obtaining data from a public records request and a viral social media post.
In its response Friday, Meta agreed to remove the exception from its policy. “As the board notes in this recommendation, removing the exception for ‘publicly available’ private residential information may limit the availability of this information on Facebook and Instagram when it is still publicly available elsewhere,” the company wrote. “However, we recognize that implementing this recommendation can strengthen privacy protections on our platforms.” Meta added that the policy change would be implemented “by the end of the year.”
While the company ended one exception, it agreed to relax its policy on another issue. Meta said users would be able to share photos of the exterior of private homes “when the property depicted is the focus of the news story, except when shared in the context of organizing protests against the resident.” Likewise, the company also agreed that it would allow users to share addresses of “high ranking” government officials if the property is a publicly-owned official residence, like those used by heads of state and ambassadors.
The policy changes could have a significant impact for people facing harassment, while also allowing some information to be shared in the context of news stories or protests against elected officials.
The board had also recommended Meta revamp the way that privacy violations are reported by users and how reports are handled internally. On the reporting front, Meta said it has already started experimenting with a simpler method for reporting privacy intrusions. Previously, users had to “click through two menus” and manually search for “privacy violation,” but now the option will appear without the extra search. Meta said it will have results from the experiment “later this month" when it will decide whether to make the change permanent.
Notably, Meta declined to make another change that could make it easier for doxxing victims to get help more quickly. The company said that it would not act on a recommendation that it “create a specific channel of communications for victims of doxing” regardless of whether they are Facebook users. Meta noted that it’s already piloting some live chat help features, but said it “cannot commit to building a doxing-specific channel.”
Meta was also non-committal on a board recommendation that doxxing should be categorized as “severe” violation resulting in a temporary suspension. The company said it was “assessing the feasibility” of the suggestion and “exploring ways to incorporate elements of this recommendation.”
In addition to the substance of the policy changes, Meta’s response to the Oversight Board in this case is notable because it represents the first time the company had asked for a policy advisory opinion, received recommendations and issued a response. Typically, the board weighs in on specific moderation decisions, which can then impact the underlying policies. But Meta can also ask for help shaping broader rules, like it did with doxxing. The company has also asked for help in creating rules around its controversial“cross check” system.
Amazon will reportedly object to a recent union election victory at its warehouse in Staten Island, alleging that organizers pressured workers into voting to organize. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company revealed its intention to appeal JFK8’s election in a legal filing released to the public on Thursday. Roughly 55 percent of workers at the JFK8 warehouse voted to join the Amazon Labor Union, the first victory of its kind for Amazon workers in the US. The company has until April 22nd to gather evidence and formally file its objections to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
In the document, Amazon gave a preview of what objections it plans on raising. The company wrote that it believes that the union threatened employees unless they voted to unionize. Some may think this is a fairly ironic move on Amazon’s part, considering NLRB accused the company of threatening employees unless they did the opposite. Amazon also accused the union of “electioneering” or interfering while employees waited in line to vote. It argued that unusually long waits at polling booths led to insufficient voter turnout. The company also believes organizers loitered by the polling area and intimidated voters, even going as far as to threaten immigrant employees with the loss of their rights if they didn’t vote to unionize.
Eric Milner, an attorney who represents the ALU, believes that Amazon’s objections will be dismissed. "To say that the Amazon Labor Union was threatening employees is really absurd," Milner said toReuters. "The Amazon Labor Union is Amazon employees."
Meanwhile, a separate labor union attempting to organize an Amazon facility in Alabama filed its own objections on Thursday regarding the pending results of its recent rerun election. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is accusing Amazon of “countless attempts to intimidate workers” in the Bessemer plant, including firing or suspending workers who supported the union. The results of that election are currently too close to call and will be determined in the coming weeks by an NLRB hearing over several hundred challenged ballots.
“Amazon’s behavior must not go unchallenged, and workers in Bessemer, Alabama must have their rights protected under the law. We urge the NLRB to carefully review our objections and ensure no company, not even with the bottomless pockets of Amazon, is allowed to act above the law,” said RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum in a statement.
Engadget has reached out to Amazon for comment on both matters, and will update if we hear back.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — a real, human man who works — understands the plight of those who work remotely. The 37-year old founder of one of the world’s largest companies is actually working remotely as you read this. But unlike you or me, Zuckerberg’s home office is in the metaverse. Zuckerberg on Facebook today teased an upcoming software update to the Quest 2’s Horizon Home that includes a home office space. It looks kind of like a Blue Bottle Coffee, or maybe a dentist’s office. But it’s in VR, you see.
It’s becoming glaringly clear that Zuckerberg wants the future of work to look like the world’s most boring VR video game. It's less boot stamping on a human face forever, and more expensive, inconvenient solution in search of a problem. According to Zuckerberg, workers can use the metaverse office to take “Messenger calls, read emails or work on your next big project.” It’s also true that most of us can do those tasks just fine on our computers. But imagine the productivity boost you’ll get doing all these mundane tasks while strapped to a Quest 2 headset!
Meta’s Horizon, for those who don’t know, is a group of three social VR apps that rolled out last December. It includes Horizon Worlds (user-created experiences), Horizon Venues (sports and concerts) and Horizon Workrooms (work). They resemble 3D social playplaces, where users create their own avatars and interact with each other (all the while keeping a four-foot personal boundary from each other.) As of February, Worlds and Venues had around 300,000 users, against an estimated 10 million Quest 2 headsets sold. Dismal numbers, some might say. A company spokesperson would not disclose many people — including Meta employees — currently use Workrooms in any capacity.
Working in VR is still a relatively novel concept, mostly because it’s been terrible so far. If you’re curious about what kind of work applications are available in VR for Quest 2, there are still only a handful—two of which are Facebook and Instagram (both in beta). There are also apps for spreadsheets (Smartsheet), visual collaboration (MURAL), email (Spike) and VR versions of Dropbox and Slack.
If you want to know what it feels like to read your emails in VR, Lifewire took one for the team. While reading emails can become grating in the real world, the Quest 2 speedruns the experience and gets "uncomfortable after half an hour." Spike's VR app also lacks the ability to attach files to an email, a feature that has been available outside the metaverse since 1998.
While Workplaces might seem to an outsider like a complicated, physically nauseating way to perform tasks most people already hate doing, what matters most is how the product is being received by Meta's audience.
“I really don't see the point of it? Why would you need to do office work in a virtual world? It looks great for sure, but that's about it,” wrote one user in the comments to Zuckerberg's post.
From another enthused user: "How primal and old-fashioned. It looks like the futuristic spaces of the 80's lol. Who in their right mind will waste their time on this."
As dubious as a VR-enabled workspace may be, there’s still more interest than ever in all that virtual reality entails. IDC reported that more than 11.2 million VR/AR headsets were sold in 2021, a 92.1 percent increase from the year prior. The newly rebranded Meta Quest 2 (formerly known as the Oculus Quest 2) hit stores this week. The Quest 2 is currently the world’s best-selling VR headset, but that could change when Sony, Apple and other tech giants enter the space.
While we can't know for sure how much Meta has spent developing digital cubicles specifically, the company plans to sink at least $10 billion in metaverse projects this year alone. For reference, WeWork —essentially a mass subletter of actual, physical offices — went public on a valuation of $9 billion — although simply buying up companies may no longer be a viable growth strategy.
Remedy is remaking Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, the Finnish studio said it was working with Rockstar Games to fully remaster the first two games in its cult classic third-person shooter series for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
We are pleased to announce that we will remake the iconic Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, in a new development agreement with Rockstar Games.
Under a new publishing agreement between the two companies, Rockstar will fund the project “in line with a typical Remedy AAA-game production.” What’s more, the studio will rebuild the games in its in-house Northlight Engine, the same engine Remedy used for its most recent title, Control. Nearly three years after its 2019 release, Control is still one of the best-looking games on both PC and consoles thanks to its implementation of ray-tracing.
"We were thrilled when our long-time friends at Remedy approached us about remaking the original Max Payne games," said Rockstar Games co-founder Sam Houser. "We are massive fans of the work the Remedy team has created over the years and we can't wait to play these new versions."
Released in 2001, Max Payne was the game that put Remedy on the map and established the studio’s signature storytelling style. It was also one of the first games to include the bullet-time effect made popular by The Matrix. Two years later, Remedy released The Fall of Max Payne. Rockstar published both games before it went on to develop the third and currently final entry in the series on its own.
The price for an Amazon Music Unlimited plan is going up from $8 to $9 for Prime members, Amazon has confirmed. It's also raising the price for a "Single Device" subscription from $4 to $5, as spotted byConsumer Reports reporter Nicholas De Leon. Non-Prime members will continue to pay $10 per month and the Family Plan will still cost $15 per month for Prime members only.
The news means that Prime subscribers are barely getting any kind of deal on Amazon Music Unlimited, whereas Prime Video is still included for free in the plan. The price is still a bit cheaper for Prime members than you'd pay for Apple Music ($10 per month) or Spotify ($10 per month). Amazon also offers Music Prime for free to Prime members, but you're limited to 2 million songs and can only play on one device at a time.
Amazon Music Unlimited is obviously best if you're a Prime subscriber and have an Echo or other Alexa device, though it works on tablets, smartphones, TVs, Amazon Fire devices, PCs and so on. However, the user interface is generally considered subpar compared to Apple Music or Spotify, lacking things like biographies in artist profiles. Some of the benefits include downloads for offline listening and HD, Dolby Atmos and Sony 360RA streaming at no extra cost.
Uber customers in San Francisco might soon find a traditional taxi waiting for them when they use the app to summon a ride. According to San Francisco Chronicle, the ride-hailing giant has inked a deal with Yellow Cab SF and Flywheel, the company that operates an Uber-like app used by taxi drivers across companies in the city. The agreement will give 1,075 taxi drivers in the area access to Uber customers in the coming months. Uber recently struck a similar deal in NYC, allowing people in the city to hail any of its 14,000 taxi drivers through the app.
The companies were able to finalize the deal, because the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board has just voted in favor of allowing taxis to accept flat upfront rates for rides hailed through a third-party app. Customers can expect to pay UberX rates, which are calculated based on trip time and distance on top of a base fare, for taxi rides. The year-long pilot for the deal will begin on August 5th.
Uber's rates are typically lower than metered fares, though they could be higher during surge times. Kate Toran, SFMTA's director of taxis, said during the board meeting that Uber and Lyft fares are about 80 to 85 percent of metered rates. While drivers could earn less than usual for Uber rides, their participation is completely optional. They can accept Uber rides whenever they want, and there are no consequences for rejecting them.
Flywheel and Yellow believe the deal would benefit drivers, who could accept Uber rides to fill in gaps for dead hours. "[H]aving some revenue come in versus no revenue is a much better situation in the end, even if it is lower than the taxi rate," Yellow Cab CEO Chris Sweis said. Still, not all SF cab drivers are thrilled about the development. Mark Gruberg, a board member of the San Francisco Taxi Alliance, expressed concerns about regular taxi customers being ignored during Uber surge times. Another driver told ABC7News that earning less money from Uber rides would mean he'll have a harder time paying off the debts he took to pay for his medallion, which cost $250,000.
If Uber gets its way, though, there'll be no taxi left that isn't part of its network. Uber exec Andrew Macdonald recently said during an investor presentation (PDF) that that the company aims to put every taxi on Uber by 2025. Doing so wouldn't only increase its driver supply, it could also unlock new markets where people don't have their own cars to use for the service.
Facebook is taking another step to encourage users to create original content for its TikTok clone. The company introduced a new “sharing to Reels” feature to allow users of third-party apps to post directly to Facebook Reels.
The update allows outside developers to add a “Reels button” to their app so users can post clips directly to Reels while taking advantage of Reels’ editing tools, Facebook wrote in a blog post. Initial developers to use the feature include Smule, which makes a popular karaoke app and video editing apps Vita and VivaVideo.
The move is yet another sign of the growing importance of Reels, and how Facebook has tried to borrow from the same playbook it used with Stories. Facebook has pushed Reels into nearly every part of its service in recent months just as it once did with Stories when the company viewed Snapchat as its chief rival. Now, with Facebook losing users to TikTok, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has staked a lot on the success of Reels. He said last fall that Reels would be “as important for our products as Stories” and that reorienting its service to appeal to younger users was the company’s “North Star.”
But incentivizing users to post original content, not just ripped off TikTok clips, has been somewhat of a challenge for the company. Instagram, which has had Reels the longest, said a year ago that it would stop promoting videos with other apps’ watermarks, but the service is still filled with recycled TikToks. Adding a “Reels” button to other content creation apps is unlikely to solve that overnight, but it could help bring in some fresh, non-TikTok-created clips.
Block disclosed today that a security breach involving a former employee impacts 8.2 million Cash App users. In an SEC filing, the company reported that an ex-employee on December 10th downloaded a number of reports with information on customer information. The exfiltrated data included full names, brokerage account numbers, brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings and reports of stock trading activity.
According to the filing, only customers that used Cash App’s stock function are potentially included in the breach. While Cash App got its start as a peer-to-peer payment app, its customers can also use it to buy stocks and Bitcoin. No other Cash App features outside of stocks were involved in the breach, nor did it include any customers outside of the US, according to the company.
“The reports did not include usernames or passwords, Social Security numbers, date of birth, payment card information, addresses, bank account information, or any other personally identifiable information. They also did not include any security code, access code, or password used to access Cash App accounts. Other Cash App products and features (other than stock activity) and customers outside of the United States were not impacted,” wrote Block in the filing.
Block has launched a formal investigation into the incident and has contacted law enforcement. It also plans on notifying all 8.2 million customers involved in the breach by email.
According to the filing, the ex-employee once had access to the customer information as an employee at CashApp. But by the time the breach occurred, they had already been gone from the company for several months. It’s unclear how a former employee was still able to retrieve such highly sensitive information. Engadget has reached out to Block for a response, and will update if we hear back.
More than a decade and a half into its existence, Twitter has confirmed what was once unthinkable: an edit button is on the way. The company confirmed as much Tuesday, saying that it's been "been working on an edit feature since last year."
The company was light on details, but it did share a mock-up of the feature, which it said it would test first with Twitter Blue subscribers "in the coming months."
Twitter added that “no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll,” in an apparent reference to Elon Musk, who recently became the company’s largest shareholder and immediately asked his followers if the company should create the long-requested feature.
In a separate thread, the company’s head of consumer product Jay Sullivan said that an edit button “has been the most requested Twitter feature for many years.” He said the company would be “actively seeking input and adversarial thinking” prior to launching the feature in order to prevent potential misuse.
“Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation,” Sullivan wrote. “Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work. Therefore, it will take time and we will be actively seeking input and adversarial thinking in advance of launching Edit.”
That Twitter will start experimenting with editable tweets is a major shift for the company. Executives have long acknowledged the practicality of being able to fix typos and correct errors, but have cited concerns that an edit button could chip away at Twitter's ability to act as a public record. As recently as 2020, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said it would “probably" never happen, despite previously seeming open to the idea. “We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling, in the early days," he said, referring to Twitter’s origins as an SMS-based service.
4/ Therefore, it will take time and we will be actively seeking input and adversarial thinking in advance of launching Edit. We will approach this feature with care and thoughtfulness and we will share updates as we go.
Prior to Twitter confirming it was in fact working on an edit button, Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth weighed in on the idea, claiming that Facebook had already “solved” issues around potential misuse. “You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log,” he wrote. “If you are really worried about embeds they can point to a specific revision in that history but with a link to the latest edit. Not a real issue.”
Bringing the edit button to Twitter Blue subscribers first could also be a major boost to Twitter’s recently-launched subscription service. The $2.99/month service gives subscribers additional features, like the ability to “undo” tweets and access to NFT profile photos. But that doesn’t mean edit functionality will always be limited to those who pay. Editing will be available first as a “Twitter Blue Labs” feature, but the company has said it intends to make some “labs” features available to everyone after initial testing. Whether that will be the case with tweet editing is unclear for now.
Google's Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are great phones on paper, but they've been beset by bugs and problems that have annoyed a fair number of users. Google's April update has now arrived (on time, for once) with fixes for several key issues around charging, the camera and security, 9to5Google has reported.
On the camera side, Google said the update fixes "issues causing front-facing camera preview in certain apps to appear zoomed in." It's also addressed an issue that occasionally caused a green screen to appear in the camera preview. On the wireless charging side, there's a patch for performance issues with "certain accessories," an issue that popped up on Reddit and elsewhere with various Qi charging stands.
It also fixed various UI issues and bugs (with all Pixel devices from the 3XL up), including crashes that happen in Picture-in-Picture (PIP) mode, error messages with certain live wallpapers, incorrect animation displays and more. It also includes security fixes, particularly for a "high security vulnerability in the Framework component that could lead to local escalation of privilege," as detailed in a security bulletin.
After arriving two weeks late, the March security bulletin fixed a number of key bugs related to WiFi connectivity issues, battery management and fingerprint recognition. However, it also made haptic vibration weaker, generating user complaints on various forums. Google acknowledged the issue, but there's no word yet on a fix or update. Meanwhile, the April update is now rolling out "over the next week in phases depending on carrier or device," Google said, so you should see it soon.
Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter's largest shareholder, has posted a poll on the website asking users whether they want an edit button. His options are a misspelled "yse" and "on," which might make you think that the whole thing is joke until you see that the poll has been retweeted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. "The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully," Agrawal wrote, hinting that the poll could lead to an actual edit button on the social network.
Many Twitter users have asked for an edit button over the years, but the website has remained staunchly resistant to those requests. In a video Q&A with Wiredback in 2020, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey said the website will "probably never" add an edit button. He explained that the social network started as a text messaging service, and you can't take back a text once you've sent it. Twitter apparently wanted to preserve that vibe and feeling.
Musk, who's been a prolific tweeter way before he purchased 9.2 percent of the social network, might serve as the catalyst for the company to change that outlook. As of this writing, 74.7 percent out of the 1,439,779 accounts that participated in the poll voted "yse" to an edit button. Whether Twitter will immediately start working on the feature if "yse" wins remains to be seen. That is, if it hasn't started developing it yet — the official Twitter account recently posted that the company is "working on an edit button," but that was on April Fools' Day.
It's also unclear how an edit button would work on Twitter, where reposting other people's content is widely practiced. If the person who tweeted the original post edits it, will the retweeted content reflect the change, as well? And will the edit button for a tweet be available indefinitely or only for a short period of time? Dorsey said during the Wired interview that Twitter previously considered giving users a 30-to-60-second window to correct something, which would be more than enough time to edit spelling mistakes and other minor changes.
To fuel the rise of its app Flipagram, TikTok parent company Bytedance scraped profiles, videos, usernames and other content from Instagram and other social media platforms. Buzzfeedreported that the Chinese company scraped “hundreds of thousands” of accounts for content without users’ consent. Flipagram, which ByteDance acquired back in 2017, allowed users to create short slideshow videos set to music — sort of a simplified version of TikTok and other short-form video apps.The app has since been rebranded as Vigo Video.
The scraping strategy was meant to be a “growth hack” for Flipagram, allowing it to expand its user base, according to former ByteDance employees interviewed by Buzzfeed. Flipagram was scraping up to 10,000 videos per day from high-priority countries, according to one former employee. The three platforms that Flipagram allegedly scraped content from are Instagram, Snapchat and Musical.ly (which is owned by ByteDance and was later absorbed by TikTok). One former Bytedance employee disputes that Instagram was involved in the scrape due to the incompatible sizing of their videos at the time.
The employees also allege that the scraped content from major US social media platforms was then used to build Bytedance’s “For You” algorithm. TikTok has yet to comment on whether Flipagram’s stolen data was used to build TikTok’s “For You” algorithm.
Scraping publicly available data isn’t illegal by itself. Many social platforms find "creative" ways to boost their audience in their early days, like harvesting external content, creating fake profiles or mass-emailing potential users. But companies can also ban unauthorized scraping in their terms and conditions for users, which Instagram and Snapchat both do. Violating such contracts can often lead to lawsuits.
There's an irony to Bytedance in its early days allegedly scraping data from Instagram, since Reels was Instagram's attempt to capture TikTok's audience and instead became a receptacle for old TikToks. In order to keep Reels from driving more traffic to its rival app, Instagram recently announced it would no longer promote TikToks.
Twitter’s Android app has lagged behind its iOS counterpart for years, but at least in one way, the two clients could soon be on equal footing. In a tweet spotted by Android Police, Jane Manchun Wong, who’s known for reverse engineering apps to find new features before they’re released, said the company is working on allowing Android users to freely select text within tweets. That’s something Twitter’s iOS client has allowed you to do for a while.
Huh. Good! I always assumed the lack was some kind of Dark Pattern to encourage the built in link sharing
The discovery initially lead to some confusion among Android users as a handful of devices already allow you to do that. For instance, Google’s Pixel phones come with a feature called Overview Selection that lets you select text from any screen for copying and pasting, but as former XDA Developers editor and Android expert Mishaal Rahman points out, that tool isn’t available everywhere. “Apart from Google Pixels, I don’t know if any other devices have it,” he said in response to a question from one developer who thought Twitter already supported text selection on Android.
We’re reached out to Twitter to find out when the company plans to roll out the feature to Android users. It’s strange that it took Twitter so long to add something so simple, but now that it’s on its way, Android users are sure to appreciate it.
While Apple’s AirPods Pro are a few years old now, they’re still among the best wireless earbuds you can pair with an iPhone. And if you’ve been waiting to purchase a set, now is a good time to do so. Amazon has discounted the AirPods Pro to $174, down from their suggested retail price of $249. While $174 isn’t an all-time low price for the AirPods Pro, it is their lowest price of the year, and they likely won’t cost less until Black Friday.
We gave the AirPods Pro a score of 87 when they came out in 2019. The inclusion of interchangeable silicone tips, a feature you won’t find on Apple’s two other in-ear earbuds, makes them more comfortable to wear during extended listening sessions. They also feature active noise-cancellation and a design that is IPX4 certified, making them a good fit for gym use. As with Apple’s other audio products, a big part of the appeal of the AirPods Pro is seamless integration with iOS. Initial pairing is a breeze, and you can easily switch between multiple devices.
For those looking for a more budget option, Amazon has also discounted the second-generation AirPods to $99. That’s a 38 percent drop from their usual $159 price. And while we think the new third-generation AirPods are a better purchase for most people, the older model still comes with the company’s H1 wireless chipset, meaning you get access to features like hands-free Siri and seamless pairing with Apple devices.
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A company's public image is arguably even more important to its bottom line than the product they produce and very much not something to be trifled with. Would Disney be the entertainment behemoth it is today if not for its family-friendly facade, would Google have garnered so much goodwill if not for its "don't be evil" motto? Nobody's going to buy your cars if they think the company is run by some "pedo guy." With the scale of business that modern tech giants operate at and the amounts of money at stake, it's little surprise that these titans of industry will eagerly leverage their legal departments to quash even the slightest sullying of their reputations. But they can only Cease and Desist you if they can find.
In The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech, associate professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy Cyber Science Department and author Jeff Kosseff explores anonymity's role in American politics and society, from its colonial and revolutionary era beginnings, to its extensive use by the civil rights movement, to the modern online Damocles sword it is today. In the excerpt below, Kosseff recounts the time that Raytheon got so mad by posts on the Yahoo! Finance message board, that it tried to sue Yahoo! to give up the real life identities of three anonymous users so it could in turn sue them for defamation.
That was the title of a November 1, 1998, thread on the Yahoo! Finance bulletin board dedicated to tracking the financial performance of Raytheon, the mammoth defense contractor. Like many publicly traded companies at the time, Raytheon was the subject of a Yahoo! Finance message board, where spectators commented and speculated on the company’s financial status. Yahoo! allowed users to post messages under pseudonyms, so its Finance bulletin boards quickly became a virtual — and public — water cooler for rumors about companies nationwide.
The Yahoo! Finance boards largely operated on the “marketplace of ideas” approach to free speech theory, which promotes an unregulated flow of speech, allowing the consumers of that speech to determine its veracity. Although Yahoo! Finance may have aspired to represent the marketplace of ideas, the market did not always quickly sort the false from the true. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Yahoo! Finance users’ instant speculation about a company’s financial performance and stock price took on new importance to investors and companies. But some of these popular bulletin boards contained comments that were not necessarily helpful to fostering productive financial discussion. “While many message boards perform their task well, others are full of rowdy remarks, juvenile insults and shameless stock boosterism,” the St. Petersburg Times wrote in 2000. “Some boards are abused and fall prey to posters who try to manipulate a company’s stock, typically by pushing up its price with misleading information, then selling the stock near its peak.”
Corporate executives and public relations departments routinely monitored the bulletin boards, keenly aware that one negative post could affect employee morale and, more importantly, stock prices. And they did not have faith in the marketplace of ideas sorting out the truth from the falsities. While companies were accustomed to handling negative press coverage, the pseudonymous criticism on Yahoo! Finance was an entirely different world. Executives knew to whom they could complain if a newspaper’s business columnist wrote about inflated share prices or pending layoffs. Yahoo! Finance’s commenters, on the other hand, typically were not easily identifiable. They could be disgruntled employees, shareholders, or even executives.
The reputation-obsessed companies and executives could not use the legal system to force Yahoo! to remove posts that they believed were defamatory or contained confidential information. In February 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally prevents interactive computer services—such as Yahoo!—from being “treated as the publisher or speaker” of user content. In November 1997, a federal appellate court construed this immunity broadly, and other courts soon followed. Congress passed Section 230 in part to encourage online platforms to moderate objectionable content, and the statute creates a nearly absolute bar to lawsuits for defamation and other claims arising from third-party content, whether or not they moderate. Section 230 has a few exceptions, including for intellectual property law and federal criminal law enforcement. Section 230 meant that an angry subject of a Yahoo! Finance post could not successfully sue Yahoo! for defamation, but could sue the poster. That person, however, often was difficult to identify by screen name.
Not surprisingly, the Yahoo! Finance bulletin boards would become the first major online battleground for the right to anonymous speech. Companies’ attempts in the late 1990s to unmask Yahoo! Finance posters would set the stage for decades of First Amendment battles over online anonymity.
A November 1, 1998, reply in the Raytheon bonuses thread came from a user named RSCDeepThroat. The four-paragraph post speculated on the size of bonuses. “Yes, there will be bonuses and possibly for only one year,” RSCDeepThroat wrote. “If they were really bonuses, the goals for each segment would have been posted and we would have seen our progress against them. They weren’t, and what we get is black magic. Even the segment execs aren’t sure what their numbers are.” RSCDeepThroat predicted bonuses would be less than 5 percent. “That’s good as many sites are having rate problems largely due to the planned holdback of 5%. When it becomes 2%, morale will take a hit, but customers on cost-plus jobs will get money back and we will get bigger profits on fixed-price jobs.”
RSCDeepThroat posted again, on January 25, 1999, in a thread with the title “98 Earnings Concern.” The poster speculated about business difficulties at Raytheon’s Sensors and Electronics Systems unit. “Word running around here is that SES took a bath on some programs that was not discovered until late in the year,” RSCDeepThroat posted. “I don’t know if the magnitude of those problems will hurt the overall Raytheon bottom line. The late news cost at least one person under Christine his job. Maybe that is the apparent change in the third level.” The poster speculated that Chief Executive Dan Burnham “is dedicated to making Raytheon into a lean, nimble, quick competitor.” Although RSCDeepThroat did not provide his or her real name, the posts’ discussion of specifics—such as the termination of someone who worked for “Christine”—suggested that RSCDeepThroat worked for Raytheon or was receiving information from a Raytheon employee.
RSCDeepThroat and the many other people who posted about their employers on Yahoo! Finance had good reason to take advantage of the pseudonymity that the site provided. Perhaps the most important driver was the Economic Motivation; if their real names were linked to their posts, they likely would lose their jobs. Likewise, the Legal Motivation drove their need to protect their identities, as many employers had policies against disclosing confidential information, and some companies require their employees to sign confidentiality agreements. And the Power Motivation also was a likely factor in the behavior of some Yahoo! Finance posters—suddenly, the words and feelings of everyday employees mattered to the company’s top executives.
Raytheon sought to use its legal might to silence anonymous posters. The prospect of inside information being blasted across the Internet apparently rankled Raytheon’s executives so much that the company sued RSCDeepThroat and twenty other Yahoo! Finance posters for breach of contract, breach of employee policy, and trade secret misappropriation in state court in Boston. In the complaint, the company wrote that all Raytheon employees are bound by an agreement that prohibits unauthorized disclosure of the company’s proprietary information. Raytheon claimed that RSCDeepThroat’s November post constituted “disclosure of projected profits,” and the January post was “disclosure of inside financial issues.”
Raytheon’s complaint stated only that the company sought damages in excess of twenty-fi ve thousand dollars. Litigating this case might cost more than any money the company would recover in settlements or jury verdicts. The lawsuit would, however, allow Raytheon to attempt to gather information to identify the authors of the critical posts.
Raytheon’s February 1, 1999, complaint was among the earliest of what would become known as a “cybersmear lawsuit,” in which a company filed a complaint against (usually pseudonymous) online critics. Because of its high visibility and large number of pseudonymous critics, Yahoo! Finance was ground zero for cybersmear lawsuits.
Because Raytheon only had the posters’ screen names, the defendants listed on the complaint included RSCDeepThroat, WinstonCar, DitchRaytheon, RayInsider, RaytheonVeteran, and other monikers that provided no information about the posters’ identities. To appreciate the barriers that the plaintiffs faced, it first is necessary to understand the taxonomy that applies to the levels of online identity protection. This was best explained in a 1995 article by A. Michael Froomkin. He summarized four levels of protection:
Traceable anonymity: “A remailer that gives the recipient no clues as to the sender’s identity but leaves this information in the hands of a single intermediary.”
Untraceable anonymity: “Communication for which the author is simply not identifiable at all.”
Untraceable pseudonymity: The message is signed with a pseudonym that cannot be traced to the original author. The author might use a digital signature “which will uniquely and unforgeably distinguish an authentic signed message from any counterfeit.”
Traceable pseudonymity: “Communication with a nom de plume attached which can be traced back to the author (by someone), although not necessarily by the recipient.” Froomkin wrote that under this category, a speaker’s identity is more easily identifiable, but it more easily allows communication between the speaker and other people.
Although traceable anonymity and traceable pseudonymity are not substantially diff erent from a technical standpoint—in both cases, the speakers can be identified, Margot Kaminski argues that a speaker’s choice to communicate pseudonymously rather than anonymously might have an impact on their expression because pseudonymous communication “allows for the adoption of a developing, ongoing identity that can itself develop an image and reputation.”
Yahoo! Finance largely fell into the category of traceable pseudonymity. Yahoo! did not require users to provide their real names before posting. But it did require them to use a screen name and asked for an email address (though there often was no guarantee that the email address alone would reveal their identifying information). It automatically logged their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, unique numbers associated with a particular Internet connection. Plaintiff’s could use the legal system to obtain this information, which could lead to their identities, albeit with no guarantee of success.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Friday released early findings of an investigation into Google’s app store and its payment system, Google Pay. As Bloombergreported, it found that Google’s Play Store billing system for app developers is “unfair and discriminatory”.
Back in 2020, Google decided to delay enforcing its 30% commission for app developers in India following an outcry from the country's startup community. The tech giant agreed to defer the policy until this month. But in the interim, Indian developers lobbied the nation’s government to stop Google from enacting what they felt was an unfairly high fee. Developers also believed that since Android phones are preloaded with the Play Store, it gave Google an unfair advantage over rival payment systems.
Of particular concern in India is whether Google Pay will undercut rival United Payments Interface (or UPI) apps, which allow users to directly debit payments from their bank accounts using just a virtual address. UPI payment apps like Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm are currently the most popular way for Indians to make payments online. Critics have alleged that Google’s control of the Play Store and the Android operating system gives it an unfair amount of control over India's digital payment ecosystem.
India’s antitrust regulator echoed similar concerns over Google Pay. “Google’s conduct is also resulting in a denial of market access to competing UPI apps since the market for UPI enabled digital payment apps is multi-sided, and the network effects will lead to a situation where Google Pay’s competitors will be completely excluded from the market in the long run," wrote CCI in documents viewed by Bloomberg.
India’s antitrust agency has yet to finish its investigation into Google. Upon its conclusion, the tech giant may be forced to pay fines or change its policies.
The search giant has come under fire in India, both for its developer's fees and the potential threat Google Pay poses to domestic payment platforms. Last year Google announced that all Play Store developers would have to integrate with Google’s payment system by October 2022.
A training document used by Facebook’s content moderators raises questions about whether the social network is under-reporting images of potential child sexual abuse, The New York Timesreports.The document reportedly tells moderators to “err on the side of an adult” when assessing images, a practice that moderators have taken issue with but company executives have defended.
At issue is how Facebook moderators should handle images in which the age of the subject is not immediately obvious. That decision can have significant implications, as suspected child abuse imagery is reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which refers images to law enforcement. Images that depict adults, on the other hand, may be removed from Facebook if they violate its rules, but aren’t reported to outside authorities.
But, as The NYT points out, there isn’t a reliable way to determine age based on a photograph. Moderators are reportedly trained to use a more than 50-year-old method to identify “the progressive phases of puberty,” but the methodology “was not designed to determine someone’s age.” And, since Facebook’s guidelines instruct moderators to assume photos they aren’t sure of are adults, moderators suspect many images of children may be slipping through.
This is further complicated by the fact that Facebook’s contract moderators, who work for outside firms and don’t get the same benefits as full-time employees, may only have a few seconds to make a determination, and may be penalized for making the wrong call.
Facebook, which reports more child sexual abuse material to NCMEC than any other company, says erring on the side of adults is meant to protect users’ and privacy and to avoid false reports that may hinder authorities’ ability to investigate actual cases of abuse. The company’s Head of Safety Antigone Davis told the paper that it may also be a legal liability for them to make false reports. Notably, not every company shares Facebook’s philosophy on this issue. Apple, Snap and TikTok all reportedly take “the opposite approach” and report images when they are unsure of an age.
Netflix, Spotify and other similar services will now be able to add a link in their iOS apps that take users to their own websites for payment and account management. Apple now allows developers of "reader" apps to link to a website that they maintain. The tech giant defines reader apps as applications that "provide previously purchased content or content subscriptions for digital magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music and video."
Apple first announced that it will allow certain media services to add in-app links last year as part of a settlement with the Japan Fair Trade Commission. The company agreed with the stipulation, because those apps "do not offer in-app digital goods and services for purchase" anyway. While the change was a result of JFTC's investigation, Apple will apply the new policy to all reader apps around the world. That said, developers will have to request access to the External Link Account Entitlement program first before they're allowed to add in-app links. Also, while the change gives developers a way to avoid giving Apple a 15 to 30 percent cut, the company will still collect commissions for purchases within the app itself if the service offers any.
Google also recently launched a pilot program to test third-party billing systems in Android, allowing users to pay for services either via its own payment system or the developer's. Spotify, one of the apps piloting the feature, will show subscribers Google's and its own billing system side by side starting later this year. Google will still get a cut even if the user chooses the service's own billing system, but it will be smaller than the 15 percent commission the tech giant typically collects for subscriptions.
January 08, 2026
