Tech Roundup: Google Bard's Gemini Rebrand, Meta WhatsApp Interoperability & More

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

• The European Commission proposes revised rules that criminalise AI-generated imagery and other forms of deepfakes depicting child sexual abuse (CSA).
• Meta unveils new resources to help teens, parents and teachers prevent and handle sextortion scams; begins testing the ability to save posts, a "heavily requested feature" that allows users to bookmark posts and revisit them later.
• Google rebrands its Bard AI chatbot as Gemini (and Duet AI as Gemini for Workspace), as it rolls out a US$ 20/month AI premium plan for Google One subscribers (which, coincidentally, crossed 100 million) to access the latest AI features; releases a standalone Gemini app for Android to take on OpenAI ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.
• Roblox rolls out real-time AI chat translations, with support for 16 languages, built on an LLM trained on open-source and internal Roblox data.
• Dutch-registered Yandex plans to divest its entire Russian business, including its popular search engine, to a group led by Yandex management in a deal valued at about US$ 5.2 billion.
• Snapchat reaches 414 million daily active users, up 10% year-over-year; Pinterest reports reports 498 million monthly active users, up 11% year-over-year; and Uber reports 150 million monthly active users.
• Meta plans to build interoperability into WhatsApp and Messenger by making third-party chats (that support the Signal protocol) opt-in and in a separate inbox.
• Google's YouTube averages over 70 billion daily views for Shorts uploaded across the platform, as YouTube TV crosses 8 million subscribers, up from 5 million in mid-2022; allows podcast creators to submit their RSS feeds to YouTube and YouTube Music.
  
• Mozilla announces Monitor Plus, a US$ 14/month U.S. service that scans more than 190 data broker sites and automatically submits requests for removal of the user's data.
• Twitter/X rival Bluesky, which is based on the AT Protocol, officially opens to all users without requiring an invite, adding over a million users to reach 4.1 million.
• Meta says it will start labeling AI-generated images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads; says it's "working with industry partners on common technical standards for identifying AI content, including video and audio." (OpenAI, for its part, has announced that DALL-E 3 will embed watermarks to images with C2PA metadata, but acknowledges the metadata can "easily be removed either accidentally or intentionally.")
• Apple expands support for physical security keys to allow users to sign in to their accounts and access iCloud on Windows systems.
• Music streamer Spotify reports 602 million monthly active users, with paying subscribers up 15% year-over-year to 236 million.

• Microsoft's LinkedIn releases new AI-powered messaging feature that helps premium users draft a first message to someone on LinkedIn even if they are not connected; debuts a new "Catch Up" section to display highlights from a user's professional network.
• Apple tests new visionOS 1.1 beta update for the Vision Pro headset to address a shortcoming that required users who were locked out of their devices after forgetting the passwords (it's not the Apple ID password, but the password used to unlock the device and open apps) to take them to an Apple Store or repair centre. (It's also worth noting that Vision Pro lacks built-in Find My capabilities, meaning users will have to attach an AirTag to enable location tracking on another Apple device, or on icloud.com.)
• Microsoft updates Copilot with a redesigned look, a new AI model for Copilot's Balanced mode called Deucalion, and new AI image creation and editing features; partners with Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, which is building LLMs that support Indian languages, for developing voice-based generative AI tools.
• Media platform Plex launches a dedicated movie rental store, allowing U.S. Plex users to purchase content directly from Plex rather than from a third-party store.
• Dutch data protection authority (DPA) fines Uber 10 million for infringement of privacy regulations regarding its drivers' personal data; says the ride-hailing app did not specify in its terms and conditions for how long it retained its drivers' personal data, or how it secured the data when sending it to entities in countries, which it had not named, outside the European Economic Area (EEA), and for obstructing drivers' efforts to exercise their right to privacy by making personal data access requests extremely complicated.
• Google agrees to pay US$ 350 million to resolve a long-running class action lawsuit from 2018 concerning a vulnerability in its discontinued Google Plus platform, which resulted in third-party exposure of data belonging to millions of users. (In October 2018, The Wall Street Journal had reported that the company opted to not publicly disclose for months due to fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage.)
• Apple redesigned iCloud app for Windows and sunsets iTunes for Windows by splitting it into dedicated Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Devices apps; updates Apple Maps to offer cycling navigation in Switzerland and Sweden, allowing users across the country to receive turn-by-turn directions while riding a bike.
• The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) outlaws scam robocalls featuring fake, AI-created voices to protect people from fraud and misinformation.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok quietly removes view counts for hashtags.
• Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir and over 200 others join the new U.S. government-backed AI Safety Institute Consortium to "help advance the development and deployment of safe, trustworthy AI."
• Apple releases an AI model called MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE) that can edit images based on text-based commands.
• Google rolls out a new setting called 1080p Enhanced for YouTube TV and Primetime Channels subscribers to deliver "highest video quality"; updates Google Maps for Android to overlay the weather and air quality index when browsing the map layer, a feature the iOS app has had for some time.
• Meta plans to not "proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow" on Instagram and Threads, matching the company's policy on Facebook.
• Popular note-taking service Notion acquires Skiff, which offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events and email; to shut down Skiff's product suite after six months.