Klarna has claimed that AI-related savings have allowed the buy now, pay later company to increase staff salaries by nearly 60%, but hinted it could slash more jobs after nearly halving its workforce over the past three years. From a report: Chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski said headcount had dropped from 5,527 to 2,907 since 2022, mostly as a result of natural attrition, with departing staff replaced by technology rather than by new staff members.

The figures add to the impact of an internal artificial intelligence programme, which had steadily reduced its use of outsourced workers including those in customer service, with technology now carrying out the work of 853 full-time staff, up from 700 earlier this year. It meant the company, which was founded in Sweden in 2005, had managed to increase revenues by 108% while keeping operating costs flat. Siemiatkowski told analysts on an earnings call on Tuesday that it was “pretty remarkable, and unheard of as a number, among businesses.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, with both companies investing in Anthropic’s next funding round.

The deal brings together two companies that have backed OpenAI and connects them more closely to one of the ChatGPT maker’s main competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video that OpenAI “remains a critical partner,” while adding that the companies will increasingly be customers of each other.

“We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together,” Nadella said.

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It can be tricky to find reliable Bluetooth earbuds that hit the right balance of affordability and quality (especially ones with ANC), but the JBL Tune Buds deliver. They’re currently the lowest price they’ve ever been, according to price-trackers, at $39.95 (originally $99.95), bringing the original price down 60%.

JBL Tune Buds

$39.95
at Amazon

$99.95
Save $60.00

$39.95
at Amazon

$99.95
Save $60.00

They’ve earned an “Excellent” rating from PCMag, which commends their decent noise cancellation, customizable EQ, and built-in Alexa, which are all the more impressive at a sub-$50 price point. The earbuds feature JBL’s classic bass-heavy sound, and with the customizable EQ in the companion app, you can further tweak the audio to your liking. The three pairs of silicone eartips the buds ship with also allow users to adjust fit and comfort.

While they can’t compare to top-tier noise cancellation from brands like Bose and Beats, they block outside noise fairly well and last up to 10 hours per charge (12 hours with ANC off). This gets boosted to up to 36 hours with the charging case, which makes up for its somewhat bulky silhouette. They support Bluetooth 5.3 and have 10mm dynamic drivers that deliver a powerful sound with plenty of bass. They’re slightly more durable than similar noise-cancelling buds thanks to an IP54 rating, which can withstand light rain and sweat.

If you’re looking for a pair of earbuds with modest noise cancellation, customizable and punchy sound, and long-lasting battery life for the price, the JBL Tune Buds are solid everyday earbuds that perform well and won’t break the bank—especially at the current 60% discount. 

An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s too soon to be talking about the Curse of OpenAI, but we’re going to anyway. Since September 10, when Oracle announced a $300 billion deal with the chatbot maker, its stock has shed $315 billion in market value.

OK, yes, it’s a gross simplification to just look at market cap. But equivalents to Oracle shares are little changed over the same period (Nasdaq Composite, Microsoft, Dow Jones US Software Index), so the $15 billion loss figure [figure updated with stock price] is not entirely wrong. Oracle’s “astonishing quarter” really has cost it nearly as much as one General Motors, or two Kraft Heinz.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No one likes to dwell on it, but bullying is a huge part of growing up, and this week the zeitgeist is saturated with it. Kids are using their cameras to pick on people in innovative ways, Tiktokers are parodying bullying in viral videos, and Instagram seems to be taking aim at cultural/political bullying (or bullying memers, depending on who you ask). Even God herself is bullying the poor Tripod fish.

What is the “flip the camera” trend, and why is is making everyone mad?

The “flip the camera” trend is a new and innovative form of bullying that works like this: A group of kids ask another kid to film them doing a dance or something. Then, while the video is being taken, one of them hits the “flip camera” button on the phone, so the videographer becomes the subject of the video. The resulting footage is posted on TikTok.

When I heard about this, my reaction was, “ok, so what?” But when you dig a little deeper, you learn that it’s not necessarily a harmless prank. The idea is not to have a laugh with your social equals, but to give the camera to a dork/dweeb/lamer/whatever, so you can make fun of them. This is the first video using this format, so you can see what I mean:

While it can be done harmlessly, like these cheerleaders pranking their teacher:

the videos where it’s clearly being done to mock someone not in the “in group” are genuinely sad:

We’ve made a lot of progress in society over the last few decades in convincing people that bullying is actually really bad, but young people will go to great lengths to do it anyway. The number of videos on the flipthecamera hashtag that are calling it out as bullying is encouraging, though.

Viral video of the week: Disney bullies

There is a yin to every yang, even online bullying. TikToker @MannytheMann1 is going viral for videos of his gang accosting strangers on a college campus, but he’s employing the tactics of the bullies in Disney Channel TV shows—think backwards baseball caps, exaggerated swagger, and super cheesy dialogue—for comedic effect. The pranks are all in good fun, and maybe something of a commentary on the stupidity of both bullying and Disney Channel shows.

It started with this scene:

Manny’s street improv has gotten more elaborate since, including dance battle challenges and a gang of toadies lining up to give the bully backup:

This one has been viewed nearly 60 million times:

What is a “potato bed”?

There is no shortage of online opinions about the best ways to sleep. This week’s trend is the potato bed. The idea is to make as cozy a sleep space as possible by stuffing as many pillows and blankets as you can into a fitted sheet, so you’re surrounded (and kind of crushed by) them. Here’s a video that illustrates how it works:

It would be easy to write this off as the flash-in-the-pan trend it probably is, but this, and the popularity of weighted blankets, could also indicate that Gen-Z is the first generation of young people to ever take “you should get more sleep” advice seriously. It also feels like a rebuke to the “24/7 grindset” mentality that was in vogue a few years ago. Or it could just be that winter is starting, and everyone wants to be cozy.

TikTok’s Tripod fish obsession

The internet loves tragic animals, and a lot of people on social media have become obsessed with the Tripod fish, an animal that may have the most tragic existence of any creature on earth. Fans and well-wishers are posting odes like this:

and videos like this:

Sometimes they are moved to tears by the fishes’ plight.

So what’s so bad about the Tripod fish’s life? Basically everything. Tripod fish (Bathypterois grallator) hatch from eggs and spend their early lives swimming about and trying to avoid predators in the only way they can—by going totally limp and hoping they’re mistaken for a piece of a jellyfish and left alone. If they live long enough, their eyes begin to melt, and long bony protrusions grow from their fins. No longer able to see or swim normally, the Tripod fish sinks. When it reaches the bottom (sometimes as deep as 4,000 meters), its bony spikes stick into the mud.

Nearly immobile and nearly blind at the very bottom of the sea, the tripod fish waits. If some food happens to swim by or drift down, it can direct currents of water towards its mouth, and maybe get something to eat. If not, it starves. Its only companions are parasites that feed on its blood, essentially stealing most of the food it’s lucky enough to catch.

Tripod fish don’t even get to mate with other tripod fish. Instead, the hermaphroditic sea animal releases a mixture of eggs and sperm into the cold water. If it’s lucky, another tripod fish’s genetic stew mingles with it and eggs are fertilized. If its unlucky, it fertilizes its own eggs. So maybe your life isn’t that bad, eh?

Instagram is targeting meme aggregators

I’m old enough to remember a pre-meme internet where people were expected to post things they made themselves, or at least credited the people they took from. Instagram seems to want to take us back to those days: The social media platform has started flagging meme pages for being duplicated content, essentially declaring war on shit-posting.

On Nov. 7, many Instagram users who posted non-original content—essentially meme farms that exist just to repost vast amounts of anything remotely interesting—received a notification that read, “Content you recently shared may not be original” with a list of posts that violated the duplicated content rule and a suggestion to delete them, lest penalties like post-limiting or shadow-banning result.

This policy essentially outlaws sharing memes, a puzzling decision for a social media platform—people like sharing memes. Many feel the target of the warning is a specific kind of meme: The notices were sent just as the popularity of Charlie Kirk face-swap memes (i.e. people sharing images of just about anything with Kirk’s face on it) were becoming popular While Kirkification seems to be an absurdist thing more than something actually meant to be political, it’s likely upsetting to some, and that could be driving Instagram’s decision. Or maybe the company just wants people to make their own content.

Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11 fails to replicate the capabilities shown in the company’s TV advertisements. The Verge tested Copilot Vision over a week using the same prompts featured in ads airing during NFL games. When asked to identify a HyperX QuadCast 2S microphone visible in a YouTube video — a task successfully completed in Microsoft’s ad — Copilot gave multiple incorrect answers. The assistant identified the microphone as a first-generation HyperX QuadCast, then as a Shure SM7b on two other occasions. Copilot couldn’t identify the Saturn V rocket from a PowerPoint presentation despite the words “Saturn V” appearing on screen. When asked about a cave image from Microsoft’s ad, Copilot gave inconsistent responses.

About a third of the time it provided directions to find the photo in File Explorer. On two occasions it explained how to launch Google Chrome. Four times it offered advice about booking flights to Belize. The cave is Rio Secreto in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Microsoft spokesperson Blake Manfre said “Copilot Actions on Windows, which can take actions on local files, is not yet available.” He described it as “an opt-in experimental feature that will be coming soon to Windows Insiders in Copilot Labs, starting with a narrow set of use cases while we optimize model performance and learn.” Copilot cannot toggle basic Windows settings like dark mode. When asked to analyze a benchmark table in Google Sheets, it “constantly misread clear-as-day scores both in the spreadsheet and in the on-page review.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has been adding AI features to Windows 11 for years, but things have recently entered a new phase, with both generative and so-called “agentic” AI features working their way deeper into the bedrock of the operating system. A new build of Windows 11 released to Windows Insider Program testers yesterday includes a new “experimental agentic features” toggle in the Settings to support a feature called Copilot Actions, and Microsoft has published a detailed support article detailing more about just how those “experimental agentic features” will work.

If you’re not familiar, “agentic” is a buzzword that Microsoft has used repeatedly to describe its future ambitions for Windows 11—in plainer language, these agents are meant to accomplish assigned tasks in the background, allowing the user’s attention to be turned elsewhere. Microsoft says it wants agents to be capable of “everyday tasks like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails,” and that Copilot Actions should give you “an active digital collaborator that can carry out complex tasks for you to enhance efficiency and productivity.”

But like other kinds of AI, these agents can be prone to error and confabulations and will often proceed as if they know what they’re doing even when they don’t. They also present, in Microsoft’s own words, “novel security risks,” mostly related to what can happen if an attacker is able to give instructions to one of these agents. As a result, Microsoft’s implementation walks a tightrope between giving these agents access to your files and cordoning them off from the rest of the system.

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Who needs a revamped Mac Pro when you can just turn several Mac Studios into a unified computing system? With the upcoming macOS Tahoe 26.2 release, Apple is introducing a new low-latency feature that lets you connect several Macs together using Thunderbolt 5. For developers and researchers, it’s a potentially useful way to create powerful AI supercomputers that can run massive local models. That allows four Mac Studios, which can each run up to 512GB of unified memory, to run the 1 trillion parameter Kimi-K2-Thinking model far more efficiently than PCs with power-hungry GPUs.

While we’ve seen Thunderbolt Mac clusters before, they were limited by slower Thunderbolt speeds, especially if they required a hub (which could reduce speeds to 10 Gb/s). Apple’s new feature allows for the full Thunderbolt 5 connectivity of up to 80Gb/s. The clustering capability also isn’t just limited to the pricey Mac Studio, it will also work with the M4 Pro Mac mini and M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pro. Developers won’t need any special hardware to build clusters, just standard Thunderbolt 5 cables and compatible Macs.

In a demo, I watched as a cluster of four Mac Studios loaded and ran that massive Kimi-K2-Thinking model in an early version of ExoLabs’s EXO 1.0. Notably, the cluster used less than 500 watts of power, which is around 10 times lower than a typical GPU cluster (NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 is rated for 575W, but its demands can also jump higher).

macOS Tahoe 26.2 will also give Apple’s open source MLX project full access to the neural accelerators on the M5 chip, which should dramatically speed up AI inferencing. Ironically, though, the only M5 Mac available today — the 14-inch MacBook Pro — only supports Thunderbolt 4. That means it won’t be able to take advantage of the new Mac clustering capability.

The unified memory and low power design of Apple Silicon already made Macs a useful choice for demanding AI work, but the ability to cluster multiple systems together over Thunderbolt 5 is potentially even more tempting to anyone working with large models. Of course, a Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM isn’t cheap — it starts at $9,499 with the M3 Ultra chip — but that’s only the highest-end option. Labs and companies that already have Mac Studios, Mac minis and MacBook Pros could potentially cluster systems they’ve already purchased.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/you-can-turn-a-cluster-of-macs-into-an-ai-supercomputer-in-macos-tahoe-262-191500778.html?src=rss

There’s finally a way to gift games purchased on the Epic Games Store. Epic has announced that it’s now possible to gift digital games through the Epic Games Store, provided the person you’re sending them to has an Epic Games account.

On a game’s store page, you’ll now see a Gift button under the normal Buy Now button. Clicking it will prompt you to log in to your Epic account if you haven’t done so already, and then ask you to enter the Epic account of whoever you’re sending the game to, pick one message from a selection of pre-written messages and then select the date you want the gift to “arrive.” 

Ian Carlos Campbell for Engadget

Epic says that if the person you’re sending the game to already owns it, you’ll be automatically refunded. If the other person chooses to reject the gift, you’ll also receive your money back. Not every purchase on the Epic Games Store can be gifted, though. Free games, subscriptions, “pre-purchase offers” and in-game currency are excluded.

Gifting is a basic feature of online stores, so on some level it’s more surprising that the Epic Games Store didn’t have the feature than it is that gifting is being added now. One reason why, could be that most of Epic’s focus for its digital store has been on undercutting the fees of both Steam and the Apple App Store.

For example, in May, the company announced that it wouldn’t take a cut of the first $1,000,000 in revenue that an app makes, after which it would only take 12 percent. That undercuts both Apple and Valve’s financial arrangements with developers. Epic also regularly offered free games through its game store to lure new users, something it plans to continue to do with its mobile app store.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/epic-games-store-will-finally-let-you-gift-games-191000946.html?src=rss

Google is bringing back its free year of Google AI Pro for U.S. college students, after releasing its new Gemini 3 Pro AI model today. Because so many of the new model’s biggest features are hidden behind paywalls, it’s not a bad deal, even if it’s not the first time Google’s done this. The deal follows similar promotions from April and August, although the most recent one ended in October. That this offer is coming so soon after the last one means Google might plan to keep rolling out these trials on a regular basis.

How to claim your free year of Google AI Pro as a U.S. college student

To get your free year of Google AI Pro, first head over to gemini.google/students and click Get Offer. You’ll then need to log into your personal Google account, where you’ll be prompted to verify your student status using SheerID. After that, Google says it should be a pretty straightforward signup flow, although being over a decade out of college by now, I’m not able to test it personally.

Note that you will need to provide a form of payment, and that if you don’t cancel the plan by the time the trail is over, your subscription will renew using your provided payment method. You also only have until January 31, 2026 to sign up for the trail.

The most likely error you’re likely to run into is if your college isn’t supported by the trial, which is handled by SheerID. Neither Google nor SheerID are being upfront about which institutions are and aren’t supported, but Google says that if you run into issues, you can contact customerservice@sheerid.com or go to the SheerID help center.

You also have to be older than 18, which means some freshman might have trouble signing up, and you cannot be on a supervised Google Account, or currently have a Google One subscription through either family sharing or a third party affiliate. Google says you can cancel an existing paid AI Pro plan to swap it for the trial, but you can’t try to subscribe using the trial while applying a discount from buying a Pixel phone (which would theoretically apply after the free period ends).

There’s also some conflicting communication online. The current offer terms state you must “be a resident of the United States,” although the current help page for the trial still refers to previous offers, which were offered to other regions as well. I’ve reached out to Google for clarification, but for now, I would assume the offer only applies to those in the U.S. and expires on January 31, given the information in the Gemini 3 Pro press release.

I’ve also reached out to Google about whether students who’ve already claimed the free year-long trial can extend their offer time by signing up for the new one, as while the help page mentions that “new and existing Google one members,” are eligible, it’s unclear whether those already on a free trial count as proper subscribers. I’d guess the answer is probably no, but I’ll let you know if Google tells me otherwise.

What you get with your free year of Google AI Pro

Your free year of Google AI Pro comes with a free year of Google One Premium, too, which means it’s got some benefits for you even if you’re skeptical about AI.

For AI users, Google AI Pro offers the following:

• Higher usage limits for deep research and recent models like Gemini 3 Pro

• Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Pro in AI Mode

• Video generation with Veo 3.1 Fast and higher access to Google Flow and image-to-video generation in Veo 3.

• More remix generations and Veo 3 photo-to-video generations in Google photos

• 1,000 monthly AI credits

• Increased NotebookLM access

• Higher limits in coding tools including Jules, Gemini Code Assist, Gemini CLI

• Google Home Premium with Gemini features and 30 days of event history

For everyone else, you’ll still get 2TB of free cloud storage through Google One, which should be handy for all those assignments. Normally, when signing up for a Google One Premium Plan, you also have the option to bundle a YouTube Premium individual plan for a 14% discount, although it’s unclear to me whether that’s included in the trial, so I’ve also reached out to Google for clarity on this.

And that’s it! Personally, I wouldn’t see myself using most of those AI features, but the 2TB of cloud storage is good enough that it’s probably worth signing up for the trial just for that. Just remember to either be ready to pay the $20/month price once your year is up, or cancel before then. If you’re looking for an alternate cloud storage provider once your trail is over, check out this list of the best free and paid cloud storage services for your options.

Waymo is launching in five new cities across Texas and Florida. Autonomous vehicles in Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando will begin accepting rides next year.

The Alphabet-owned company said operations (sans passengers) will begin on Tuesday in Miami. The other cities will follow “over the coming weeks.” This phase is where the vehicles drive around town without anyone inside. That gives the company a chance to spot local quirks and adjust the driving algorithm accordingly.

Waymo said this local adjustment phase requires fewer changes with each added city. “This data feeds into a flywheel of continuous improvement, bolstered by rigorous validation through real-world driving and advanced simulation, then implemented through regular software releases,” it wrote. The company claims its robotaxis are involved in 11 times fewer serious injury accidents than human drivers.

Waymo’s autonomous vehicles currently accept passengers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin. The list of “up next” cities is much longer, including a recently announced expansion into San Diego, Detroit and Las Vegas.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/waymo-is-coming-to-five-more-cities-190000992.html?src=rss

Hypixel Studios has officially purchased the license to Hytale from Riot Games, according to a report by Game Developer. This means that development will continue just months after Riot shut everything down and cancelled the project.

The developer is also rehiring 30 staffers that were laid off as part of the cancellation. We write so often about layoffs in the industry, so it’s always a distinct treat to cover the opposite.

Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme calls this a “new and exciting chapter” for the game, which has been in development for nearly ten years. He says he is “grateful to Riot Games for making this possible.”

Riot Games, which is owned by the conglomerate Tencent, purchased Hypixel Studios back in 2020 for an undisclosed sum. However, Hytale was riding high at that point. The game had attracted over 2.5 million signees for an upcoming beta and was supposed to be officially released in 2021.

Years passed, and still no Hytale. This eventually led to Riot canning the project entirely. “After years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise,” an official post on the Hypixel website once read.

The studio hasn’t disclosed how it got funding for this move, but Collins-Laflamme said that the founders are “personally committed to funding for the next 10 years.” Here’s to hoping the game is actually playable by that point. To that end, the company does plan on announcing an early access release date in the near future.

“Hytale has had a long and challenging journey. It’s taken longer than anyone hoped, and it’s changed a lot along the way,” the company wrote. “This is not going to be easy. This is not going to be fast. This is not going to be perfect. But it’s going to be ours. Built together: one feature at a time, one bug fix at a time, one mod at a time.”

For the uninitiated, Hytale is a nifty-looking adventure game that can be described as an open world riff on Minecraft. It certainly looks like Minecraft, but it has a much bigger emphasis on action and RPG mechanics.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/hypixel-studios-buys-its-ip-from-riot-so-hytale-is-back-in-development-185040959.html?src=rss

Meta has successfully avoided what was once the biggest existential threats to its company. A federal judge has sided with the social media company in a landmark antitrust case, ruling on Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had not proven that Meta is a monopoly.

The FTC filed antitrust charges against Meta, then known as Facebook, in 2020 during President Donald Trump’s first term. The government had argued that by acquiring its one-time rivals, Instagram and WhatsApp, the company had hurt US consumers by stifling competition in the social media industry. Meta had argued that those services were only able to grow to the 1 billion-user apps because of its investment and had cited the rise of TikTok as proof that it continues to face strong competition.

On Tuesday, US District judge James Boasberg ruled in favor of Meta. “Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” he wrote. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.”

Developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-has-won-the-antitrust-case-that-could-have-forced-it-to-spin-off-instagram-and-whatsapp-184320742.html?src=rss

If you’ve ever tried to hook an old Nintendo 64 up to a modern HDTV, you know the results can be less than ideal. Assuming your original hardware still works and your flatscreen even has the requisite R/F and/or composite inputs to allow for the connection, the N64’s output will probably look like a blurry mess on a flatscreen that wasn’t designed with those old video signals as a priority.

The Analogue 3D solves this very specific problem very well, with a powerful FPGA core that accurately replicates a Nintendo 64 and well-made display filters that do a good job of approximating that cathode-ray tube glow you remember from decades ago. But the lack of easy expandability limits the appeal of this $250 device to all but the most die-hard fans of original N64 hardware.

A beauty to behold

As a piece of physical design, the Analogue 3D is a work of art. The gentle curves of its sleek black shell evoke the original N64 design without copying it, coming in at a slightly smaller footprint and height. Plus, there’s no ugly power brick.

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As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining runs mining hardware out of third-party data centers across Norway, Paraguay, Ethiopia, and the United States.

As Halliburton tells it, he had flown to Amsterdam the previous day, August 5, to meet Even and Maxim, two representatives of a wealthy Monaco-based family. The family office had offered to purchase hundreds of bitcoin mining rigs from Sazmining—around $4 million worth—which the company would install at a facility currently under construction in Ethiopia. Before finalizing the deal, the family office had asked to meet Halliburton in person.

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A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Meta did not illegally stifle competition when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. The decision marks Big Tech’s first major victory against antitrust enforcement that began during President Donald Trump’s first term. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had sought to force Meta to sell or restructure the platforms to restore competition among social media networks. Meta argued it faced competitive pressure from TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s messaging app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.