Tech Roundup: China Generative AI Laws, xAI & More

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

• The European Union formally adopts a new data transfer agreement with the U.S. that includes binding clauses to limit access to E.U. data by U.S. intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, three years after the Privacy Shield was struck down; privacy non-profit none of your business (noyb) says the new framework is based on political interests and that it would "need changes in U.S. surveillance law to make this work."
• China releases detailed regulations on generative artificial intelligence (AI) models by highlighting "positive, healthy content" and "core socialist values"; to come into effect on August 15, 2023.
• Instagram's text-based app Threads achieves the mark of 100 million sign-ups in just five days, as Twitter begins blocking searches for tweets that link to Threads on the platform; confirms it's blocking users in the E.U. from accessing the service via VPN.
• Snap rolls out integration with Linktree, allowing users to show links on Snapchat.
• The Indian government blocks 14 mobile apps Crypviser, Enigma, Safeswiss, Wickrme, Mediafire, Briar, BChat, Nandbox, Conion, IMO, Element, Second Line, Zangi and Threema following reports that it's being used by terrorist groups in the country.
• Apple adds bilingual support to Siri, starting with Indic languages like Hindi and Telugu, updates macOS Sonoma to bring iCloud Keychain passwords to non-Safari browsers for the first time, and launches an online store in China's WeChat app in the form of a mini program, allowing users to purchase iPhones, iPads and Macs; comes after Apple started a similar shop on Tencent-rival Alibaba Group's Tmall online marketplace.
• Tumblr announces plans to "fix the core experience" in a bid to better compete with larger rivals; states "the underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use."
• Meta rolls out new feature that allows user to make video calls using a cartoon avatar on Instagram and Messenger; comes as WhatsApp tests a feature called Phone number privacy that allows users to control the visibility of their phone numbers in communities.
• Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition gets the go ahead after a U.S. court in San Francisco rejects FTC's motion to halt the biggest gaming deal under antitrust grounds (The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which previously okayed the purchase, has raised new concerns over the Microsoft's proposals. It also comes as the E.U. greenlights Broadcom's US$ 61 billion purchase of VMware, subject to access and interoperability commitments and the CMA opens an in-depth investigation into Adobe's US$ 20 billion Figma deal. The CMA is still probing the Broadcom-VMware deal.)
• Video streaming service Netflix updates its Profile Transfer feature to allow members to switch to an already existing account.
• AI startup Anthropic debuts new text-generating AI model, Claude 2, with improved capabilities in coding, math and reasoning as well as craft longer responses; opens the service to all users in the U.K. and the U.S.
• Google Calendar launches a new feature that lets professionals or freelancers allow their customers to book paid appointments in partnership with Stripe, as it expands client-side encryption to Calendar on mobile devices; improves client-side encryption in Gmail with the ability to flag ineligible recipients and any attachments that may be blocked.
• Shutterstock announces an expanded, six-year partnership with OpenAI that grants access to its video, image, and music libraries for AI training, as the Associated Press signs a two-year deal with OpenAI under which the publication gets access to OpenAI's tech in return for licensing some of its text archive dating back to 1985 for AI training. (Is this a sign of things to come?)
• Global PC shipments fall 13.4% YoY to 61.6 million in Q2 2023, the sixth consecutive quarter of decline, with Apple selling 5.3 million units, up 10.3% YoY, according to IDC.
  
• India-based Koo launches a Premium service for content creators to "earn money by sharing exclusive content with their subscribers."
• Google Play begins allowing developers to incorporate tokenised digital assets, such as NFTs, into their Android apps and games in a major policy shift; launches its AI-assisted note-taking tool, called NotebookLM, as part of a limited beta test in the U.S.
• Tesla and Twitter chief executive Elon Musk forms a new AI company named xAI to "understand the true nature of the universe," positioning it as a rival to OpenAI, Google and Anthropic; plans to collaborate with Tesla on silicon and AI software, and use public tweets for AI training.
• Google faces a new lawsuit in U.S. for allegedly misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems; comes amid companies drawing mounting legal scrutiny over copyright issues from works swept up in vast troves of online data, as well as their apparent use of personal and possibly sensitive data from everyday users.
• Swiss privacy company Proton launches a dedicated Proton Drive app for Windows users, with plans for a macOS version.
• Adobe expands Firefly globally with support for text prompts in 100 languages; says the service has been used to generate over 1 billion assets on the web and in Photoshop.
• Reddit plans to sunset its current coins and awards systems used to show post appreciation by September 12, 2023; deletes years of chat messages from users' accounts after shifting to a new chat infrastructure on June 30, 2023; migrates messages only sent from January 1, 2023 onward.
• Microsoft names Aptos as the next default font for its Microsoft 365 productivity apps, replacing Calibri, more than two years it started an effort to find the next-generation typeface.
• Twitter starts paying Twitter Blue creators who earned over 5 million impressions each month for the last three months a revenue cut from the ads beside the replies to their tweets.
• Google expands AI-powered chatbot to more than 40 new languages, integrates Lens support to accept image inputs, and launches the service in the E.U. and Brazil (no expansion to Canada yet) after an initial delay due to privacy concerns. (It has since emerged that human contractors in charge of training Bard are overworked and underpaid, and that they are not given enough time to corroborate and check the chatbot's most accurate answer.)
• Telegram adds support for merchants to accept payments via the TON blockchain-based Wallet in tether, bitcoin, and toncoin, expanding on previous capabilities to transfer crypto between users.
• Stability AI debuts Stable Doodle, a sketch-to-image tool that uses the Stable Diffusion model to generate "visually pleasing" artistic renditions, on ClipDrop, a platform Stability acquired in March through its purchase of Init ML.
• Apple announces the launch of Tap to Pay on iPhone in the U.K., allowing independent sellers, small merchants and large retailers in the country to use ‌iPhones‌ as a payment terminal.
• Twitter sues four unnamed entities in the U.S. state of Texas for "unlawfully scraping data" and seeks over US$ 1 million in damages; adds a new messages setting to tackle spam under which "messages from users who you follow will arrive in your primary inbox, and messages from verified users who you don't follow will be sent to your message request inbox."
• Meta unveils CM3leon, an image generation transformer model requiring five times less compute and a smaller training dataset than past transformer-based methods.
• Google brings support for hyperlinked text to Google Chat, expands Podcasts within YouTube Music globally, and brings Quizzes to desktop version of YouTube.