Tech Roundup: China Deepfake Laws, Microsoft VALL-E & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• The Cyberspace Administration of China to start regulating "deep synthesis" tech like AI-powered image, audio and text-generation software on January 10 in an attempt to restrict the production of deepfakes, which refers to media generated or edited by artificial-intelligence software; to prohibit, among other things, the use of AI-generated content for spreading fake news as well as require companies to prominently label synthetically generated images, videos and text.
• Apple is reportedly working on a combined cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip to replace Broadcom components by 2025.
• Meta's Instagram to replace the Shop tab, which it introduced in 2020, with a Reels button in the app's bottom navigation bar and return the Compose button to the center.
• Microsoft unveils text-to-speech AI model VALL-E, which is trained on English speech data and can simulate a person's voice with three seconds of sample audio.
• Roku reports ending 2022 with more than 70 million accounts globally, up 16.5% from the end of 2021, and says streaming hours grew 19% YoY to 87.4 billion in 2022.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side using AES-256 algorithm by default as a means to counter data leaks.
• Snap announces plans to shut down its Camera app for macOS and Windows, which let users apply face filters while on video calls, on January 25, 2023 more than four years after its launch in October 2018.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok tests a new sleep reminders option that mutes notifications based on the sleep time set by users.
• The number of active users on Mastodon drops from a peak of over 2.5 million in early December 2022 to about 1.8 million in the first week of January 2023.
• E-commerce spending on ByteDance's Douyin in China reaches US$ 208 billion in 2022, up 76% YoY, as shoppers in Southeast Asia spend US$ 4.4 billion buying items on TikTok in 2022.
• YouTube plans to begin sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on February 1, 2023; starts rolling out new terms for all creators in the YouTube Partner Program.
• Microsoft acquires data centre hardware maker Fungible for an undisclosed sum to deliver "multiple [data processing unit] solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements."
• Google launches a new Extension SDK framework for Android to "make new functionality backward compatible on already-released Android versions."