Tech Roundup: More Meta Changes, WordPress Dispute & More

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

• Meta-owned Threads prototypes the ability to set a display name and add a cover image to profiles, bring its visually closer to its rival X.
• A new report from AI Forensics finds that over 3,000 pornographic advertisements featuring explicit adult content have been approved and distributed through Meta's advertising platform; says the ads "promoted dubious sexual enhancement products and hook up websites" and were "illustrated with AI-generated media such as audio, image, video and celebrity deepfakes."
• Microsoft temporarily rolls back its Bing Image Creator upgrade from OpenAI's DALL-E 3 PR16 to the previous PR13 version after users report degraded image quality, including cartoonish and "lifeless" results; to enforce storage limits on unlicensed OneDrive accounts starting January 27, 2025, ending a loophole that allowed organisations to retain departed employees' data without cost.
• Google rolls out Daily Listen, which uses AI to generate a 5-minute personalised audio overview of stories and topics that a user follows, on its mobile app; expands remote access and local control of Matter-enabled devices, including Nest hubs, Chromecasts, and Google TV devices on Android 14, and opens its Home APIs to all developers.
• Meta adds recommendations of political content on Instagram and Threads, almost a year after blocking it by default (recommendations on Threads can adjusted using three options: Less, standard, and more); comes amid broader content moderation changes across its platforms (or shall we say, the X-ification of Meta?), as Mastodon says it take action on Threads accounts violating Mastodon's policies.
• The European Commission, for its part, has rejected Meta's claim that the European Union has an "increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship" and said they only required large platforms to remove illegal content.
• Furthermore, Meta's decision to specifically allow users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill" has sparked widespread backlash at the company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since said that its own fact-checking process was "something out of 1984."
• Meta tests bringing eBay listings to Facebook Marketplace in the U.S., France and Germany to allay antitrust concerns following a €797.12 million by the European Union in November 2024 for tying its classified ads service to Facebook and imposing unfair trading conditions on rival services.
• OpenAI ChatGPT tests options for users to customise their interactions with nicknames, profession and the traits the AI assistant should have so as to better tailor responses.
• Google releases an automatic update for Pixel 4A phones that includes "new battery management features" to improve the stability of battery performance, but warns of degraded battery life for some device owners; affected users can opt for a free battery swap, a US$ 50 payment, or a US$ 100 credit toward a new Pixel phone from its online store.
• The Indonesian government says Apple still can't sell its iPhone 16 in the country, despite a deal to build a local production facility, as it hasn't met domestic content rules.
• Microsoft announces an "AI-powered edge computing solution" called SPARROW (short for Solar-Powered Acoustic and Remote Recording Observation Watch) that collects biodiversity data from camera traps, acoustic monitors and other environmental detectors and processes them using AI models on low-energy edge GPUs.
• Popular open-source VLC video player shows off automatic AI subtitling and translation that's generated locally and offline in real-time based on AI models running on the system.
• X says it is rolling out labels for parody or satire accounts to differentiate them from others and boost transparency; comes as xAI tests a standalone iOS app for its chatbot Grok in several countries, like the U.S., Australia, and India
• Automattic plans to cut its WordPress contributions to 45 hours per week "due to the lawsuits from WP Engine," focusing mostly on security and critical updates; deactivates the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, two of whom are alleged to have planned to spearhead a new fork of the open-source WordPress project.
• Apple is reportedly developing a new app called Invites that's designed to help users organise meetings and in-person events.
• AI search engine Perplexity is launching an integration with Tripadvisor to surface information about hotels; to also include information about restaurants and experiences in the future.
• The Linux Foundation launches an initiative called the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers to fund developing Chromium projects in a "neutral space," with support from Google, Meta, Microsoft and Opera; comes nearly two months after the U.S. Department of Justice demanded that Google sell Chrome as part of its proposed remedies following the ruling that Google is a monopolist.
• Amazon launches Amazon Retail Ad Service to let companies show ads in search results, product pages and other areas of their own websites.
• Meta-owned WhatsApp plans to introduce conversational AI chatbots, providing users with a wide range of first- and third-party personalities to speak with.
• Streaming service Disney+ is expected to add support for HDR10+ in the near future for improved brightness and contrast.
• OpenAI, Google and other companies are collectively paying hundreds of content creators for exclusive access to their unpublished videos to train AI models, according to a report from Bloomberg.
• The E.U. approves Synopsys' US$ 35 billion acquisition of Ansys, after the companies offered to divest parts of their businesses.
• NVIDIA updates its Autonomous Game Characters with small language models, saying the NPCs can "perceive, plan, and act like human players" in games like PUBG; gives select developers early access to Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, enabling smarter autonomous machines with generative AI via APIs supporting sensors, and unveils Mega, an Omniverse Blueprint for developing, testing and optimising physical AI and robot fleets at scale in a digital twin before deployment, the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarisation, and the Llama Nemotron and Cosmos Nemotron family of AI models to advance agentic AI.
• Meta faces accusations that its CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated e-books and articles called LibGen for training, and it deliberately attempted to its alleged infringement by stripping off copyright information.
• The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tightens up reporting requirements for voice service providers to tackle robocalling and phone number spoofing; requires companies to make updates to the database within 10 days of getting new information and face monetary fines for submission.