Tech Roundup: Meta AI Setback, Proton Docs & More

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

• The European Union says Meta's pay or consent ad model breaches the Digital Markets Act; says the "binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta's social networks."
• Australia's eSafety Commissioner issues notices to key members of the online industry giving them six months to come up with enforceable codes that will protect children from graphic pornography and other high-impact content.
• The Spanish government introduces a "porn passport" called the Digital Wallet (Cartera Digital) that would allow pornographic sites to verify if their users are above 18 years and allot them 30 generated "porn credits" with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content.
• ElevenLabs launches Voice Isolator, a freemium AI tool for removing background noise from audio files for film, podcast and interview post production.
• Apple approves the Epic Games Store on iPhones and iPads in the European Union; removes the mobile apps of 25 VPN services from its App Store in Russia following a request by state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor.
• The European Commission asks Amazon to provide more information on its compliance with the Digital Services Act provisions concerning the transparency of the company's recommender systems by July 26.
• Google's YouTube updates its Erase Song tool for creators with an AI algorithm to detect and remove any copyrighted music from their videos without impacting other audio; rolls out a policy change that will let people request the takedown of AI-generated or other synthetic content that simulates their face or voice
• Brazil's data regulator suspends the validity of Meta's new privacy policy for the use of personal data to train its generative AI systems in the country; comes as Cloudflare launches a tool that aims to block bots from scraping websites for AI training data.
• Koo, an Indian rival to X, shuts down its operations on July 3, 2024, due to lack of funding and high cost of technology services involved.
• Netflix proceeds with its plan to discontinue its cheapest ad-free subscription tier, starting with the U.K. and Canada, with more countries to follow; urges users to switch to the cheaper Standard with ads, or the more expensive Standard or Premium 4K plans.
• Meta releases pre-trained models that use a novel multi-token prediction approach; tasks models with forecasting multiple future words simultaneously, promising enhanced performance and drastically reduced training times.
• Proton launches Docs in Proton Drive, a privacy-focused alternative to Google Docs, after acquiring secure note-taking app Standard Notes in April 2024.
• Google's parent company Alphabet winds down robo-agriculture startup Mineral, which became an independent subsidiary in January 2023, and licenses some of its tech to berry producer Driscoll's to "develop AI tools to improve crop phenotyping, better forecast yields, optimize quality inspections and reduce food waste in the supply chain."
• Telegram rolls out the ability for creators to share paid content to channels using its Stars digital currency and for channels to convert Stars to Toncoin; adds a mini app bar and the option to search stories by hashtag and location.
• Meta's Threads touches 175 million monthly active users, up from 150 million in April 2024, one year after its launch; to enable ads in the service next year.
• Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems.
• Adobe updates Acrobat with Firefly-powered AI image generation and an integration with AI Assistant to support analysis of multiple documents, including non-PDF files.
• Google announces faster Sheets calculations on Chrome and Edge browsers on desktop, doubling speeds for running formulas and creating pivot tables.
• The European Commission says Apple's decision not to launch its AI features in the Eurpoean Union is a "stunning, open declaration" of the company's anticompetitive behaviour.
• The EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology and others file a brief saying the U.S. law forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban is unconstitutional.
• Apple launches the Vision Pro in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, the first time the device has been officially available outside of the U.S.; says Vision Pro will allow alternate payment methods in the European Union.
• Meta changes its "Made with AI" label to "AI info", to indicate images were not necessarily created with AI but that AI editing tools may have been used; shares its research on Meta 3D Gen, a system that creates high-quality 3D assets from text descriptions in less than a minute.
• Generative AI music service Suno launches its iOS app in the U.S., with plans for a global rollout and an Android app in the future.
• Figma disables its recently launched generative AI app design tool Make Designs after it was found that it produced copycat designs; claims that the feature is "powered by off-the-shelf models and a bespoke design system that we commissioned, which appears to be the underlying issue."
• Snapchat debuts new features that lets Snapchat+ subscribers design a personalised house on Snap Map and send Snaps that last .10, .25, and .50 seconds.
• Apple reclassifies the iPhone X, first-generation HomePod, and first-generation AirPods as "vintage" products.
• Google says it will require advertisers to disclose election ads that use digitally altered content that "contain synthetic or digitally altered content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events."
• Baidu unveils an upgraded version of its AI model, Ernie 4.0 Turbo, as its chatbot Ernie Bot reaches 300 million users since its launch.
• Google tests a new "Use without an account" option in its Contacts app for Android that allows users to locally store their contact lists on their devices without syncing it to the cloud.
• Microsoft adds spellchecking and autocorrect to Notepad in Windows 11, more than 40 years after launching the simple text editor in Windows in 1983.