Tech Roundup: Anthropic System Prompts, Roblox's Paedophile Problem & More

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

• France conducts a trial that bans smartphones for children under the age of 15 in an attempt to give them a "digital pause."
• Snap-owned Snapchat launches new safety tools and resources for U.S. educators, as the popular social media platform surpasses 20 million U.S. teen users; debuts a native Snapchat app for iPad, 13 years after launching on iOS.
• X updates its AI chatbot Grok to direct users to Vote.gov for U.S. election queries following concerns that the service is spreading election misinformation; takes on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams with a native video conferencing tool.
• Meta allows users add text to photos right from its post editor on Instagram; also makes it possible to add more photos as stickers on top of a photo.
• Google tests a new Android feature that will automatically launch apps right after they are installed them from the Play Store; launches a Google Meet AI feature that automatically takes notes during meetings conducted in spoken English and makes available a new picture-in-picture mode on Chrome for desktop when switching tabs in the web browser.
• AI company Anthropic launches Claude Artifacts generally for all users across its Free, Pro and Team tiers, as well as its availability on the official Claude iOS and Android mobile apps; publishes a changelog for the system prompts of its Sonnet, Opus and Haiku models, becoming the first major AI vendor to do so.
• Meta and Spotify team up for deeper music integration in Instagram that would allow users to continuously share what music they're listening to through Instagram Notes; comes as Apple and Google partner to make it easy for their respective subscribers to port playlists to the other service.
• Google plans to roll out image generation of people to Gemini paid users, after suspending the feature in February amid criticism about racial depictions; releases Imagen 3 to all Gemini users and Gems, which allows the creation of custom Gemini chatbots, to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users, and readies to launch an opt-in AI-powered summaries feature to "show AI-generated summaries of files containing text."

• Meta-owned Threads lets users see and like fediverse replies on other posts besides their own; to syndicate posts submitted via Threads API to the fediverse; confirms it's experimenting with ephemeral posts that disappear after 24 hours for limited users.
• Yelp sues Google, alleging Google used its dominance in general search to gain an unfair advantage in local search services and local search advertising markets.
• Productivity and note-taking app Notion announces plans to suspend its service in Russia in response to U.S. government sanctions that prohibit access to certain software products and services in the country.
• Steam hits more than 37 million concurrent users on August 25, 2024, for the first time, up from the previous record of nearly 33.7 million in January 2024.
• Samsung plans to bring some Galaxy AI features to select mid-range smartphones as well, including the Galaxy A35 and Galaxy A55, as it bets big on AI across its product portfolio.
• SpaceX, Tesla and X chief executive Elon Musk revives his OpenAI lawsuit, filing a complaint in the U.S. state of California to allege that OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman breached OpenAI's founding contract.
• ByteDance's TikTok adds in-app hubs for videos about movies and TV shows as part of a new feature called TikTok Spotlight; company calls it a "new promotional solution that allows the entertainment industry to harness the power of TikTok fan communities to promote films, TV series and franchises."
• Chinese internet search giant Baidu appears to have started blocking the online search engines of Alphabet's Google and Microsoft's Bing from scraping content derived out of the mainland firm's Wikipedia-style service, Baike.
• Midjourney opens the platform to let all users to generate AI images on the platform, removing a restriction that limited it to users who generated over 10,000 images on Discord; Inflection announces plans to cap free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months and let users export their conversations, as the startup focuses on enterprise products.
• Apple announces a September 9 event at Apple Park to unveil the iPhone 16 lineup, as well as new Apple Watch and AirPods models.
• A new investigation from Bloomberg shows how paedophiles groom children using Roblox, a problem exacerbated by the virtual gaming platform not collecting any personal information beyond a user's age.
• Indian telecom company Bharti Airtel announces plans to shutter its music streaming service Wynk Music in November 2024, over a decade after launching it in September 2014; urges subscribers to switch to Apple Music.
• Single sign-on systems from several Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, Discord, X, Patreon and Line have been incorporated into deepfake generators; Google's login system appeared on 16 websites, Discord's appeared on 13, and Apple's on six, and X's on three websites, with Patreon and messaging service Line’s both appearing on the same two websites, per a report from WIRED.