Tech Roundup: Frontier Model Forum, Twitter's X Rebrand & More

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

• Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI launch the Frontier Model Forum, aiming to ensure "the safe and responsible development of frontier AI models." (The development comes amid new research that found it's possible to jailbreak and circumvent AI safety guardrails in order to induce unintended responses and generate harmful information by adding an adversarial suffix.)
• The U.S. National Security Agency moves to resist demands that it obtain a search warrant in court instead of paying for sensitive data sold by data brokers.
• VKontakte (VK), Russia's homegrown Facebook clone and its biggest social network, witnessed a 30-fold increase in censorship requests from government officials during the eight-month period following the Russian military's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to the Citizen Lab.
• Google begins enabling the Privacy Sandbox toolkit for Chrome developers set to replace third-party tracking cookies with privacy-preserving API alternatives ahead of fully deprecating the former by early 2024.
• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) imposes Facebook a AU$ 20 million penalty for "mislead[ing] the public in promotions for the Onavo Protect app, by failing to adequately disclose that users' data would be used for purposes other than providing Onavo Protect, including Meta's commercial purposes.
• Twitter formally rebrands to X, complete with a new domain x.com, and changes its official handle to @X, replacing the iconic bird logo, less than a year after Tesla chief executive Elon Musk purchased the company for US$ 44 billion; teases potential banking and financial features in its quest to become an all-in-one app like China's WeChat and India's Paytm, adds the ability for Blue members to download videos shared on the service by other subscribers, and launches its ads revenue sharing program for eligible users globally.
• Adobe's US$ 20 billion Figma deal faces an in-depth E.U. probe for potential competition concerns, after the U.K. began a similar probe.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok rolls out support for text posts to better compete with Instagram Stories, along with features to add sounds, locations, and stickers.
• Spotify becomes the latest music streamer to increase the cost of Premium subscription in the U.S. to US$ 10.99 per month (Duo will increase from US$ 12.99 to US$ 14.99, Family will increase from US$ 15.99 to US$ 16.99, and Student will increase from US$ 4.99 to US$ 5.99) and across a number of markets, shortly after Apple Music, Amazon, TIDAL, and YouTube Music announced similar raises; tops 220 million Premium subscribers and 551 million monthly active users as of June 30, 2023.
• Microsoft brings Bing AI support to Google Chrome and Apple Safari, loosening a restriction that previously limited the feature to its own Edge browser.
• Lax content moderation policies of Mastodon and other decentralised social media platforms have led to a proliferation of child sexual abuse material, a new report from Stanford's Internet Observatory finds; says "analysis over a two-day period found 112 matches for known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in addition to nearly 2,000 posts that used the 20 most common hashtags which indicate the exchange of abuse materials."
• Netflix rolls out My Netflix, a "one-stop shop tailored to you with easy shortcuts to help you choose what you want to watch."
• Google adds the ability to add line numbers to documents in Docs, to start downranking non-tablet apps in the Play Store, and brings Street View back to Germany after more than a decade-long hiatus following privacy outcries.
• Apple gets targeted by a new class-action lawsuit in the U.K., accusing the tech giant of abusing a dominant position by charging an "anticompetitive" 30% fee on in-app sales made by app makers on its iOS App Store; seeks a compensation payout as high as £800 million (over US$ 1 billion); also faces a separate lawsuit for allegedly colluding with Amazon in 2018 to increase the price of Apple products in the country via the e-commerce platform.
• The Browser Company makes its Arc web browser available to all macOS users after two years of testing, with a Windows version planned for release later this year.
• Open-source hacking tool Flipper Zero launches an app store that's built into its mobile apps for Android and iOS to curate applications from third-party developers.

• Snapchat reports 397 million daily active users globally as of Q2 2023, up 14% year-over-year.
• OpenAI releases ChatGPT for Android in the U.S., India, Bangladesh and Brazil, ahead of broader expansion next week; quietly shuts down its AI classifier tool -- which was designed to distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs -- citing a "low rate of accuracy."
• Meta's Instagram threads gains a Following feed that displays a reverse chronological feed of posts from accounts users follow (the algorithmic For You feed will be the default, however), as it confirms a web version of the app; rolls out Instagram creator subscriptions in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K.
• Apple opens applications for Apple Vision Pro developer kits, offering developers a "loaner" to build apps alongside specialized hardware and software support.
• Retail giant Amazon launches a new "Your Recalls and Product Safety Alerts" page for customers to view product recalls and safety information for items purchased in its store; debuts AWS HealthScribe, an AI-powered tool to summarise patient visits, as it aims for Microsoft and Google.
• Meta's Facebook surpasses 3 billion monthly active users for the first time, increasing 3% YoY as of June 30, 2023, as family monthly active people grows 6% YoY to 3.88 billion; debuts instant video messages in WhatsApp, letting users send clips up to 60 seconds in a similar way to voice notes.
• Stability AI launches Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, an open-source text-to-image model that can yield 1MP resolution images "in seconds" in multiple aspect ratios.
• Microsoft starts rolling out a new Xbox Home UI, offering more space for backgrounds and quick access to store, search, and settings, after 10 months of testing.
• Bumble launches its standalone Bumble for Friends app in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, the U.K. and the U.S.
• Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, which teamed up to form the Overture Maps Foundation in December 2022 to take on Google and Apple's map offerings, release the first open map dataset comprising over 59 million places worldwide.
• Samsung debuts its next-generation Galaxy Z Flip5, Galaxy Z Fold5, Galaxy Tab S9 and Galaxy Watch 6 at its Unpacked 2023 event; updates Samsung Wallet in India to support government IDs and other digital credentials, after launching the service in January 2023.
• Researchers from the MIT create a new tool called PhotoGuard that aims to prevent unauthorised AI-based manipulation of images.
• Google says two billion logged-in monthly users are watching YouTube Shorts, giving it an edge over competitors like TikTok and Instagram Reels.
• Gautam Buddha Nagar, a district in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, rolls out crime-fighting search engine powered by live facial recognition called the Geospatial Data Intelligence Platform (GDIP) to tackle surging crimes in the area.
• Reddit begins testing "official" labels for profiles to "provide proof of authenticity, reduce impersonation, and increase transparency across the platform"; announces accessibility improvements that make its mobile apps compatible with screen readers.
• Microsoft-owned GitHub, along with Creative Commons, EleutherAI, Hugging Face, LAION and Open Future, call upon E.U. regulators to support open source AI development as the region readies to pass a comprehensive AI regulation.
• The E.U. opens an antitrust investigation into whether Microsoft abuses its dominant position by bundling Teams with Office, marks the first time in a decade that thec company has come under formal investigation by regulators in the region; comes as the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says Amazon has offered to change the way it treats third-party sellers using its Marketplace platform in the country.
• Sony says it has sold over 40 million PlayStation 5 consoles, up from 10 million units sold as of July 2021.
• Google rolls out Android unknown tracker alerts, including manual scan, and pauses a Find My Device update to locate missing items until Apple updates iOS.
• News service Artifact adds an AI-powered text-to-speech feature to read news articles out loud as part of a collaboration with Speechify.
• India-based food delivery platform Swiggy becomes the latest to offer its customers a credit card, joining the roster of a long list of Zomato and other non-fintech startups that have launched similar services.
• Electric car maker Tesla consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles and created a secret "Diversion Team" to suppress thousands of driving range complaints, a new investigation from Reuters reveals.
• Google launches RT-2 or Robotics Transformer 2, a "vision-language-action" model trained on text and images from the web that can output robotic actions; officially brings Multiview for YouTube TV and Primetime Channels.
• U.S. smartphone shipments fall 24% YoY in Q2 2023, the third consecutive quarter of decline; Samsung shipments drop 37% YoY, Apple's slump by 6% YoY, while Google Pixel's surges 48% for a 3% market share.
• Red Hat announces plans to limit public access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code to CentOS Stream.