Tech Roundup: Android XR, Meta Video Seal & More

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

• Austrian privacy non-profit noyb files a complaint in France against the social media platform BeReal over its use of dark patterns to trick users into consenting to the use of their personal data for advertising purposes; the complaint reads: "If you accept the use of your personal data for advertising purposes, you won't see the banner again. If you click "accept," the app will never ask you again. If you "refuse," however, the banner will reappear every single day when you try to publish a post.
• Mozilla plans to remove the "Do Not Track" feature from Firefox in version 135, the first major browser to do so, saying few websites honor the preference.
• Meta asks the U.S. government to block OpenAI's planned transition from a non-profit to for-profit entity, stating the company "should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains."
• Google unveils Android XR, a mixed reality OS with Gemini built in for headsets and smart glasses; plans a 2025 launch with Samsung's Project Moohan headset.
• Russian telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor blocks the use of messaging app Viber in the country, citing "violation of the requirements of Russian legislation for organizers of information dissemination."
• The E.U. finds it breached its own privacy rules in a 2023 ad campaign on X that intended to sway opinions for a proposal to force messaging apps to scan for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
• Apple reportedly will stop selling the iPhone SE and iPhone 14 series by the end of 2020 in the E.U., as the USB-C universal charging connector deadline comes into effect.
• Shutterstock launches a "research license" for AI companies, starting with Lightricks, which will train its video model LTXV on Shutterstock's video library.
• OpenAI launches Projects, a ChatGPT feature to organize files and chats into folders; adds screen sharing and real-time video analysis to ChatGPT via Advanced Voice Mode with vision.
• Meta-owned Threads tests collections of profiles to follow, curated by a "handful of Threads community leaders," built around topics like fashion, food, and books, and let users see metrics for their individual posts, including views, likes and replies; also adds the ability for users to follow fediverse accounts that have interacted with a Threads post, and releases a search update globally that will let users filter searches by "After date," "Before date" and "From profile."
• Meta unveils Meta Motivo, an AI model for controlling the movements of a human-like digital agent, hoping to offer lifelike NPCs and more in the metaverse, Meta Video Seal, an AI tool that applies imperceptible watermarks to AI-generated videos and a hidden message to later uncover the video's origins, and Llama 3.3 70B, a text-only model that the company claims can deliver the performance of its largest Llama model at a lower cost.
• Retail giant Amazon plans to test a 15-minute delivery service for items ranging from grocery to household goods in India this month, starting with some areas in Bengaluru.
• Google's YouTube redesigns the YouTube Kids app to make it look and behave more like the standard YouTube app and lets users browse through videos in portrait mode; rolls out its auto-dubbing feature, which generates translated audio tracks, to hundreds of thousands of channels focused on knowledge and information, and tests a Premium Lite subscription that's limited to just ad-free YouTube and YouTube Music.
• Reddit tests Reddit Answers, which lets select U.S. users ask questions and receive curated summaries of relevant responses and threads in English.
• X brings Grok to all users, giving non-Premium subscribers the ability to send up to 10 messages every two hours; adds Aurora, an AI image generator that appears to excel at photorealistic images, to its Grok AI assistant, and releases its real-time search tool, Radar, to Premium+ subscribers.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok debuts TikTok Shop in Spain, Ireland in e-commerce expansion ahead of potential U.S. ban on January 19, 2025; also begins offering users TikTok Shop credits in exchange for inviting friends to join the app.
• Norwegian payment service Vipps launches the world's first Apple Pay alternative on iOS, following Apple's move to open NFC access to developers from iOS 18.1.
• Microsoft ends production of its US$4,500+ Surface Studio 2+, after announcing the all-in-one desktop in October 2022, with seemingly no plans to make a successor; rolls out Copilot Vision in preview to analyse text and images on webpages and answer queries, starting with some Copilot Pro users in the US
• Google unveils GenCast, an AI weather model that the company claims outperforms traditional methods on up to 15-day weather and deadly storm forecasts; also debuts PaliGemma 2 models, which can analyse images and generate captions describing "actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene."
• OpenAI ChatGPT hits 300 million weekly active users, as the company launches ChatGPT Pro, a US$ 200/month plan with unlimited access to the latest AI models, including o1, which brings image upload support, faster responses and 34% fewer major errors for hard problems.
• Telegram says it has removed 15.5 million groups and channels with harmful content in 2024; says it also blocked 707,576 CSAM-related groups and channels and 130,119 terrorist-related communities, as it agrees to work with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to detect and remove CSAM, and prevent its spread.
• Anduril and OpenAI partner to deploy advanced AI systems for national security missions, focusing on "improving the nation's counter-unmanned aircraft systems."
• Amazon launches Amazon Autos, letting U.S shoppers buy Hyundai cars, and plans to add more dealerships and manufacturers; rolls out a "Buy with AWS" button that software companies can add to their websites to help customers with AWS accounts find, try and buy services.
• Meta says AI content made up less than 1% of election-related misinformation on its apps during major elections in the US, the UK, India, Indonesia and others.
• The E.U. says Corning offered commitments in a bid to settle an antitrust probe over alleged exclusive Gorilla Glass deals, including waiving exclusive clauses.
• 20% of U.S. adults say they get news from social media influencers, according to a new research from Pew Research Center; 85% of influencers are on X and 27% identify as right-wing.
• Microsoft's GitHub says it will switch from using exclusively OpenAI's GPT models to a multi-model approach for Copilot, adding Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro; launches Phi-4, a 14B-parameter language model that it says outperforms comparable and larger models, like Gemini Pro 1.5, in mathematical reasoning.
• Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5 models to help generate high quality images, as well as create diverse outputs in versatile styles; comes as Character.AI announces more parental controls and a separate large language model for users under 18, after two U.S. lawsuits claimed its chatbots contributed to self-harm and suicide.
• Microsoft quietly axes options to buy Skype credit and phone numbers, as it switches to a monthly subscription to support international calls.
• Google says viewers streamed over 1 billion hours of YouTube content daily on TVs in 2024 globally, including more than 400 million hours of podcasts monthly; rolls out 40 new "high-quality, visually modern" templates in Google Docs that come with preset layouts and styles.
• Apple takes ownership of an iCloud Passwords add-on designed for the Firefox browser, allowing users to access passwords and logins stored in the Passwords app or iCloud Keychain when using Firefox on a Mac.
• Meta rolls out "trial reels" in Instagram, which allow creators experiment by publishing videos only to users who don't follow them, after testing the feature in May 2024; enhances broadcast channels with support for replies and allow creators publish time-sensitive prompts that encourage audience engagement.
• Photobucket gets sued in the U.S. after a recent privacy policy update revealed its plans to sell users' photos—including biometric identifiers like face and iris scans—to companies training generative AI models.
• Celeb greetings app Cameo launches CameoX, allowing creators to self-enroll and expanding beyond well-known people, after piloting the app since May 2023 and adding 31,000 creators.
• The Indonesian government bans the sale of Apple iPhone 16 and Google Pixel smartphones, saying the companies must comply with rules requiring 40% locally-made parts in the devices.
• Meta shuts down the Instagram Basic Display API as of December 4, 2024, effectively preventing third-party apps from importing users' Instagram photos and posts.
• A new research finds that it's possible to create real diamonds at normal room temperature and pressure, a breakthrough that cool drastically simplify the process of producing lab-grown diamonds, potentially making it a lot more efficient and more accessible.
• Google releases ChromeOS updates with Quick Answers, a GenAI-powered reading assistant to provide summaries for web pages and PDF files; Quick Insert, a new way to insert emojis, symbols, GIFs, Google Drive links, and quick calculations and unit conversions with a keyboard key (on select models) or a keyboard shortcut; Focus mode to avoid distractions; preview and restore apps and tabs from a previous session using Welcome Recap; Picture-in-Picture (PiP) windows; accessibility improvements; AI-powered Recorder app; and Multi-calendar support.