Tech Roundup: WordPress Saga, YouTube Communities & More

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

• The European Commission says U.S. authorities have put necessary guardrails in place to "limit access to personal data by US intelligence authorities to what is necessary and proportionate to protect national security, and the establishment of an independent and impartial redress mechanism."
• The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reveals it created Ethereum-based token NexFundAI with the help of "cooperating witnesses" to investigate price manipulation in crypto markets.
• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker "for computational protein design" and DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and John Jumper "for protein structure prediction."
• OpenAI says it took steps disrupt over 20 covert influence campaigns and cyber operations that attempted to abuse its services, highlighting emerging trends in how AI is currently amplifying online security risks; emphasises that its models "did not appear to provide" any threat actors detected with "novel capabilities or directions that they could not otherwise have obtained from multiple publicly available resources."
• Brazil's Supreme Court authorises the return of X after the company complies with its demands, including taking down some accounts and appointing a legal representative.
• Amazon announces AI Shopping Guides, which show AI-generated descriptions and recommendations for more than 100 product types on its U.S. version of the mobile website and app; aims to deploy Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval, an AI tool to help drivers quickly find the right package in delivery vans, in 1,000 vans by early 2025.
• X updates its Creator Revenue Sharing program to pay creators based on engagement with their content from Premium users, not how many see ads in their replies; moves its official headquarters from California to Bastrop, Texas, a small town just outside of Austin that's also home to SpaceX and The Boring Company.
• Meta expands Meta AI to more countries, and adds it to its Ray-Ban glasses in Australia and the U.K.; begins rolling out new AI tools that let advertisers expand the aspect ratio of their videos and generate an Instagram Reel video ad from a static image.
• Russia's Roskomnadzor bans Discord, drawing ire from the Russian military, which has extensively used the app to coordinate units on the battlefield in Ukraine; comes as Turkey blocks access to Discord following a court decision over sufficient suspicion that some users had committed crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity."
• Glassdoor launches short videos, polls and images to foster engagement on its platform, and says it has 63 million monthly unique users, up from 55 million in September 2021.
• Microsoft issues Surface Duo 2's final security update ahead of its October 21 end of support.
• Samsung removes the Galaxy Z Fold2, which launched in September 2020 for US$ 2,000, from its list of devices that will receive security updates.
• Videoconferencing platform Zoom says it will let users create custom avatars to record video clips with a transcript, raising potential concerns about deepfakes; announces the next-generation Zoom AI Companion and expands Zoom Phone VoIP service to India.
• WordPress.org begins requiring users to agree that they are not affiliated with website hosting platform WP Engine before logging in, amid its ongoing tussle against the website hosting platform over allegations that WP Engine misused the WordPress brand and not contributing enough to the open-source community, prompting a legal back-and-forth and a ban on WP Engine from using WordPress.org's resources.
• Microsoft-owned LinkedIn says nearly 10 million people have created pages on its Services Marketplace for freelancers, up 48% in the last year; plans to let U.S. users buy and play Xbox games from the Xbox App on Android starting in November, after a judge ordered Google to open up Play Store.
• PayPal formally launches PayPal Ads, allowing U.S. marketers to tap into data about transactions across PayPal's platforms, including Venmo and Honey; comes as Venmo adds scheduled payments and requests to set up one-time or recurring payments monthly, weekly or bi-weekly in advance.
• Stripe reintegrates crypto payments in the U.S. as a way for users to pay merchants in USDC or USDP on Ethereum, Solana and Polygon, after disabling the feature in 2018.
• Amazon says Apple TV+ will be available as a US$ 9.99/month subscription add-on in Prime Video Channels later this month in the U.S., joining 100+ streaming services.
• ByteDance debuts its first earbuds, an open-ear wearable called Ola Friend that has audio access to its Doubao AI chatbot, for US$ 170.
• Microsoft announces a redesigned Windows Hello experience that allows users to choose how they want to save passkeys and even sync them either to their Microsoft account or third-party passkey providers like 1Password and Bitwarden.
• Web browser developer Opera releases a new AI feature that that lets users group, pin, and close tabs usingnatural language queries.
• Apple makes it possible for users to change the primary email address associated with their Apple Account (previously Apple ID) with iOS 18.1; cancels autonomous vehicle testing permit in the U.S. state of California after abandoning its plans for an electric vehicle.
• Tesla unveils the Cybercab self-driving concept car for a purported price tag of under US$ 30,000 when it becomes available by 2027; also announces plans to produce an autonomous, electric Robovan that can carry up to 20 people.
• HubSpot acquires B2B subscription billing management and configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution Cacheflow for an undisclosed sum as part of its efforts to improve Commerce Hub.
• Apple says it found no evidence of formal reasoning in large language models and their behaviour is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching, something "so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%."
• Adobe launches a Content Authenticity web app to let creators use its Content Credentials "nutrition labels" to apply attribution and opt out of AI training.
• Google's YouTube launches Communities, a Discord-like space where creators can let fans post content and chat, and Community Hub, which shows creators all their channel's activity; unveils Hype, a promotional system that lets users boost smaller creators with a hype button after liking.
• Meta says Horizon Store now supports 2D apps built as PWAs, Android native apps or via the new Meta Spatial SDK, which lets developers use Android dev tools.