Tech Roundup: E.U. Digital Services Act, OpenAI Sora & More

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

• The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) starts applying to all online intermediaries in the bloc, except for businesses with under €10 million in annual revenue or fewer than 50 staff, from February 17, 2024; obligations include a ban on targeting underage users with ads based on their personal data, and targeting anyone based on sensitive data like sexual preferences or religious beliefs.
• Amazon faces new class-action lawsuit that accuses the retail giant of rigging its platform to "routinely" push an overwhelming majority of customers to pay more for items that could've been purchased at lower costs with equal or faster delivery times.
• Meta's WhatsApp pilots a new feature called Favorites, which allows users to separate their frequently contacted chats from the main chat list and quickly access important conversations; Threads rolls out a new test in the U.S. that shows a list of popular topics on the platform, as WhatsApp trials a redesigned Updates tab.
• Google rolls out its Companion Mode to Meet for Android and iOS, letting users check in, share an emoji reaction, raise their hand and turn on captions.
• The E.U. ends its Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into iMessage and Microsoft Bing, Edge and Advertising, deciding not to designate them as gatekeepers and regulate the services due to their lack of dominance.
• OpenAI says it's experimenting with adding a form of long-term memory to ChatGPT that will allow it to remember details between conversations, and debuts temporary chats a way to converse without appearing in history, memory or used for training its models; warns of "very subtle societal misalignments" that could make AI systems wreak havoc.
• Meta said it's matching existing fact checks to "near-identical content on Threads", and that it plams to let fact-checkers rate content directly on Threads.
• Google unveils Gemini 1.5, which offers "dramatically enhanced performance" and "achieves comparable quality to 1.0 Ultra, while using less compute."
• Apple unveils a new AI tool called Keyframer, which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to animate static images through natural language prompts; to allow users to generate a virtual card number in the next version of iOS for spending Apple Cash when Apple Pay isn't an online option.
• Google pilots new feature that lets Android users open PDF files on the Chrome browser, as it adds an "Android Safe Browsing" page to protect against active threats by means of a "live threat protection" toggle which enables "more accurate threat detection."
• Chipmaker NVIDIA overtakes Alphabet and Amazon on February 14 as the third most valuable U.S. company and the world's fourth with a market cap of US$ 1.83 trillion after Microsoft (US$ 3.04 trillion), Apple (US$ 2.84 trillion) and Saudi Aramco (US$ 2.062 trillion), as demand for graphics processors such as H100 continues to soar amid the AI boom.
• Salesforce-owned Slack launches AI features that summarise threads, offer channel recaps and let users ask questions as a paid add-on to Enterprise users.
• Privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo adds an encrypted Sync & Backup tool that syncs passwords, bookmarks and favorites without requiring an account.
• X (formerly Twitter) removes paid checkmarks from some accounts after the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) found 28 verified accounts allegedly tied to Hezbollah and other U.S.-sanctioned entities.
• OpenAI unveils Sora, its first text-to-video model, which can create up to a minute of 1080p photorealistic video, as it takes on Google's Lumiere and VideoPoet; says it's also "building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora."
• Google plans to let businesses install its auto-updating ChromeOS Flex on Windows 10 devices, to help prevent hundreds of millions of PCs from hitting landfills in 2025. (Microsoft has said that its Windows 10 will reach the end of support on October 14, 2025, and will no longer provide regular security updates, bug fixes, or technical support.)
• Google's YouTube releases a new feature that lets users remix music videos and turn them into Shorts.
• Microsoft says its Xbox Game Pass service now has 34 million subscribers, up 36% from 25 million subscribers the company reported in January 2022.
• Apple confirms that iOS 17.4 removes Home Screen web apps in the E.U. to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that requires the company to allow alternative browser engines; says "addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps."
• Meta releases V-JEPA, an AI model that learns by predicting missing or masked parts of unlabeled video to develop a conceptual understanding of the world.
• Meta announces plans to charge advertisers an extra 30% fee when purchasing boosted posts through the Facebook and Instagram apps for iOS, more than a year after Apple updated its App Store Review Guidelines to clarify that sales of "boosted" posts in social media apps must use the App Store's in-app purchase system (which allows the iPhone maker to take a 30% cut of each transaction); urges users to visit Instagram.com and Facebook.com on mobile and desktop to boost their content and avoid the charge.
• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denies OpenAI's attempt to trademark "GPT," ruling that the term is "merely descriptive" and that it "describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant's goods and services."
• Google releases Android 15's first developer preview, with updates related to Dynamic Performance Framework, privacy and camera experience, among others.
• AI companyAnthropic test a new Prompt Shield feature, which will redirect users asking political topics to "authoritative" sources of voting info; comes as TikTok plans to launch an in-app local language Election Centre in March 2024 in all 27 E.U. countries, to fight misinformation ahead of the Parliament Elections.
• 28 civil rights organizations, like Ekō and noyb, urge the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to reject Meta's approach of asking users to pay for a monthly subscription (aka a "privacy fee") or consent to being tracked for ads; say the move could set a wrong precedent and "mark the end of genuine consent to the use of European's data."
• Google quietly stops notifying publishers of "right to be forgotten" removals, after the Swedish administrative supreme court ruled that informing webmasters is a breach of privacy.
• Microsoft fixes a problem that resulted in tabs and cookies from Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox being imported to Microsoft Edge without user consent.
• Major tech firms, including Adobe, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, Stability AI, TikTok and X, sign tech accord to combat the deceptive use of artificial intelligence in elections.
• The EU plans to reportedly planning to fine Apple around €500 million (US$ 539 million) for allegedly breaking antitrust law over access to music streaming services by preventing third-party services from telling users about cheaper alternatives to Apple's music service, following a 2019 complaint by Spotify.