Tech Roundup: E.U. Digital Services Act, Somalia TikTok Ban & More

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

• India's Chandrayaan-3 mission makes space travel history by successfully achieving a soft landing near the south pole of Earth's Moon, making it the first to have successfully touched down on the lunar south pole.
• Somalia announces a ban against social media platforms TikTok and Telegram, as well as the online betting platform 1XBet, saying they're used by "terrorists" to spread "horrific images and misinformation."
• Jordan passes a new cyber crime law empowering the government to control more online content in a bid to tackle disinformation, hate speech and online defamation, tightening prison sentences and penalties for any website, social media platform or person responsible for a public account deemed to have violated privacy and a host of other provisions; also penalises users who leverage anonymity services TOR browser and VPNs to commit criminal acts.
• Meta officially launches a web app for Threads to all users and kills Messenger Lite app for Android; reaffirms its commitment to bring end-to-end encryption to Messenger by the end of the year, as governments across the world weigh in on new regulations to prevent child sexual abuse and serious crime online that would effectively undermine encryption.
• Pinterest unveils new safety features that allows users ages 16 and older to opt into either a private or a public profile; makes it the the default and only option for teens under the age of 16.
• BeReal replaces its Discovery feed with a Friends of Friends feed and adds pinning up to three profile posts and mentions; says the app is holding at roughly 20 million daily active users.
• Google's YouTube and Universal Music Group partner to explore new products, using music in AI tools and paying artists whose work is used to make AI-generated content. (The development comes as a U.S. court ruled that art generated entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted because "human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.")
• Online gaming platform Roblox faces a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. for allegedly facilitating third-party websites to profit from unregulated gambling activities targeting minors.
• Meta-owned WhatsApp to allow users create new group chats of up to six individuals without having to name them, share HD videos, and tests a full-blown text editor to add code blocks, quotes, and lists, and send avatars as reactions to Status updates; to roll out for European users to "view Stories and Reels only from people they follow, ranked in chronological order, newest to oldest" as the Digital Services Act (DSA) goes into effect on August 25, 2023, requiring larger platforms and search engines to provide users in the region with the ability to switch off AI-driven personalisation. (Snapchat has also joined the fray by including the ability for users of its messaging app to switch off tracking-based content personalisation. Google, for its part, said it plans to expand its Ads Transparency Center and offer more info on targeted ads in the bloc.)
• Microsoft to sell off Activision cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft after the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocks the original deal to "protect innovation and choice in cloud gaming"; integrates Microsoft Designer, the company's free AI-powered design tool, to Edge users in the U.S.
• Microsoft announces support for the Python programming language in Excel that "runs securely on the Microsoft Cloud"; comes as IBM unveils watsonx Code Assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code-generating AI model to translate COBOL code into Java.
• OpenAI adds fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo, letting developers, for a fee, customise and fine-tune pretrained models with their own data to make them perform better for their use cases.
• Twitch rolls out an experimental TikTok-like vertical "discovery feed" to select users.
• IBM plans to sell its weather business, including Weather.com and business-oriented offerings, to private equity firm Francisco Partners for an undisclosed sum.
• Meta debuts SeamlessM4T, a multimodal AI model for speech and text translations that can perform text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for "up to 100 languages"; also introduces Code Llama, an AI model built on top of Llama 2, that's fine-tuned for generating and discussing code.
• Google brings redesigned editing tools to the web version of Google Photos; announces new security features for Workspace, including zero-trust, data loss prevention, and digital sovereignty controls via client-side encryption, as well as options to require multi-party approval for sensitive administrator actions.
• Sony unveils the PlayStation Portal, an 8-inch handheld console that can stream games from a PS5 over Wi-Fi in 1080p at 60fps for US$ 200, a US$ 200 Pulse Explore earbuds, and a US$ 150 Pulse Elite headset that connect to the Portal via its PlayStation Link tech for low latency performance; acquires high-end headphone maker Audeze.
• Google pilots new option for Chrome browser on iOS that permits users to move the address bar to the bottom (it's worth noting that Google experimented with a similar feature for its Android counterpart as early as 2017, but later removed the feature); also tests a new feature in YouTube for Android that allows users to identify songs by humming or recording a few seconds of the tune.
• A new study from the Carnegie Mellon University finds that Meta's "state-controlled media" labels in Facebook reduces engagement with content from Chinese and Russian government-run media.
• Mozilla Firefox adds the option for user to import select extensions from other browsers like Google Chrome.
• South Korean internet giant Naver releases generative artificial intelligence tools, Cue: and Clova X, powered by its own large language model called HyperClova X, joining other companies in launching large language models to compete with OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard; coincides with Alibaba's launch of two AI models: Qwen-VL, which can answer questions about images and generate captions, and Qwen-VL-Chat, which can have "complex interactions."
• Cloud storage service Dropbox ends its Advanced unlimited option, capping its "all the space you need" storage plan to 5 TB and moving to a metered storage policy, after it was found that the subscriptions were abused in some cases to perform cryptocurrency mining, pool storage for personal use cases and resell storage.
• Reddit launches the "Mod Helper Program", a tiered system that rewards moderators with trophies and flairs for helping other moderators in r/ModSupport.
• Google to begin prompting users to complete a two-factor authentication step before making any sensitive changes to Gmail, including adding a new forwarding address; formally confirms support for rich text formatting options in Keep, adds options to view counts for messages in Google Chat spaces and speaker notes while co-presenting Google Slides in Meet, and expands Keep integration with Assistant to all Workspace users.
• A number of privacy regulators from Africa, Europe, Hong Kong, and the Americas call on social media platforms to secure users' personal data from unlawful data scraping; urge companies to impose rate limits and monitor how quickly and aggressively a new account starts looking for other users.
• AI model can be tricked into making mistakes, suggest instructions to spy on members of the civil society and exhibit bias, new findings show, as privacy concerns about generative AI remain. (The developments also come as a number of news outlets have blocked OpenAI's web crawler, GPTBot, from accessing their content, limiting the company's ability to collect a vast repository of up-to-date information.)
• Google tests a rudimentary read-aloud option to its reading mode in Chrome browser; to bring support for RSS uploads for users to add RSS feeds to their library within YouTube Music, including private feeds.
• X launches its job posting feature X Hiring in beta for verified organizations, allowing them to "organically reach millions of relevant candidates."