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Let’s be clear: smart TVs are a privacy nightmare. Almost all of them keep track of everything you watch, even when you’re using an HDMI cable, and send it off to analytics firms, advertisers, and who knows who else. In capitalist America, TV watches you.

A common piece of privacy advice, given this, is to disconnect your smart TV from the internet and use an Apple TV to do your streaming instead. And there is merit to this advice: Apple’s streaming box collects far less private information than a standard smart TV while still providing a straightforward, remote-based user interface with support for all the major streaming services.

Having said that, it’s not as though Apple collects no data. And using an Apple TV means buying a $130+ streaming box, on top of the price of your TV, which adds up quickly if there are multiple TVs in your home. With this in mind, let’s break down the privacy pros of an Apple TV over using the operating system in your smart TV.

No automatic content recognition

You know that common myth about smartphones listening to your conversations and showing you ads? It’s not true, at least not of your phone. But it’s not far off from how TVs work.

Almost every smart TV on the market uses technology called automatic content recognition (ACR) to create a record of everything you do on TV. You can think of this technology as similar to the music recognition service Shazam, but for TV shows, movies, and video games instead of music. Software like this is constantly running in the background of your TV, creating an ongoing list of everything you watch. That data is then sold to and shared with various third parties. Notably, this data collection happens even while you’re using an HDMI port, meaning marketers out there know exactly how much time you put into Elden Ring over the past few years.

Companies like Inscape and Samba actively brag about the data they collect using this technology on their websites. Their software, or software like it, is installed on basically every TV on the market right now. The Apple TV, notably, does not employ this technology, and doesn’t keep a record of what you watch inside applications. This is the clearest privacy benefit of using an Apple TV over your smart TV’s interface.

Apple does gather some data (and might grab more)

Having said that, Apple TV devices do record some data—just a lot less than similar devices. Over at Ars Technica, Scharon Harding wrote a breakdown of the privacy pros and cons of an Apple TV, which you can read if you really want to get into the finer points of this issue (along with speculation about how things might change). She concluded that the Apple TV is the most private streaming gadget, which I agree with.

For the most part, Apple devices offer you a lot of control over your data. When you set up a new Apple TV, the device asks you whether you want to share analytics data with Apple—you can easily opt out before using the device. You are also asked whether you want to enable location services and Siri. If you enable Siri your voice recordings are sent to Apple servers for processing. Following a class action lawsuit, Apple doesn’t store this information anymore, unless you explicitly agree to it.

Apple TVs also give you a lot of control over what information the apps you install have. Apps can access information including your location, your photos, other Apple-stored media, and your HomeKit data, but only if you allow them to (there will be a pop-up asking you whether you want to grant permission). You can also decide which, if any, applications you want to grant access to tracking features. It’s a level of control that’s not common in smart TVs, to say the least.

The Apple TV app is the centerpiece of an Apple TV and even offers a hub to watch content from other streaming services. This app records what you watch in order to make recommendations and to serve ads inside the app. You can turn this tracking off in the settings. The TV app also shares “non-personal” data, including viewing activity and demographic information, with “strategic partners.” All of this is standard practice for a streaming service, but worth keeping in mind.

Overall, though, the Apple TV itself—as opposed to applications running on the device—don’t collect much information about you or your viewing habits.

Is there anything better?

Maybe you’re uncomfortable with Apple having any information about you. What’s the best app to get then? There’s not really a great answer. You could set up a computer, or a Raspberry Pi, and install a privacy-centric Linux operating system on it. Then you could set up a privacy-focused browser to watch your shows. This will give you a slight privacy edge over the Apple TV with a few obvious downsides.

The first being that you’ll likely need to control everything with a mouse and keyboard. (Once upon a time you could work around this using Kodi, but plugins for most streaming services stopped working ages ago.) Put simply: if you want a single device you can buy, plug into your TV, and watch common streaming apps using a remote control, Apple TV is the most privacy-centric device you can buy and use that way.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a $10 museum-like experience dedicated to playfully explaining features of the Nintendo Switch 2, and technically, it costs a lot more than $10 to truly finish. As Eurogamer writes and multiple Nintendo webpages note, you can’t actually finish the game without using all of the Switch 2’s many accessories.

All 12 of the different areas in Welcome Tour are accessible whether you’re plugging in a camera or not, but to play and beat every minigame, “additional accessories [are] required,” according to Nintendo. Those accessories include a USB camera, a controller with GL and GR buttons (the kind in the Switch 2 Pro Controller’s grips) and a 4K-compatible TV. If you wanted to go the official route and use Nintendo accessories, that means paying $55 for the Nintendo Switch 2 Camera and $85 for the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, assuming you already own a 4K TV.

No one needs to 100-percent complete Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, of course, but it is funny that price was one of the biggest complaints about the Switch 2’s answer to Wii Sports, and now to totally complete it you might have to pay even more.

The patient among us (who didn’t pre-order) can wait and see if the hidden secrets of Welcome Tour are truly worth spending the extra cash on accessories. For the rest, you might be better off spending your time unlocking characters in Mario Kart World.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/truly-completing-nintendo-switch-2-welcome-tour-will-cost-you-192255868.html?src=rss

If you use Bowflex adjustable dumbbells, be careful: Your workout gear may be impacted by a safety recall.

BowFlex parent company Johnson Health Tech Trading has issued a recall for BowFlex adjustable dumbbells due to a serious impact hazard that could result in injury to users—the company says there have been over 300 reports of plates dislodging during use, including 111 resulting in injuries such as concussions, abrasions, broken toes, or contusions.

This voluntary recall recall affects some 3.7 million previously sold BowFlex products (some sold under the company’s former name, Nautilus, Inc.) Here’s what to do if your BowFlex dumbbells are affected by this recall.

Which BowFlex products are affected?

The recall is for two popular BowFlex adjustable dumbbell models: the Model 552 (52.5-pound adjustable dumbbells) and Model 1090 (90-pound adjustable dumbbells).

The dumbbells were sold in pairs and single units in the black and include handles, weight plates, and a molded plastic tray. Both products were designed where users adjust the weight by turning manual knobs while the dumbbells remain in their base tray.

How to check if your BowFlex dumbbells are recalled

To determine if your BowFlex dumbbells are part of this recall, check the model and serial number printed on a sticker located on the bottom of the molded plastic tray.

For the 552, check for the following serial number ranges:

• 00182M243902233 – 00182M243902592

• 00182MAG220200463C – 00182MAG221204535C

• 00182SFE213414844C – 00182SFE234002231C

• 100182M242800001 – 100182M250201440

• 100182MAG20431227C – 100182MAG233500372

• 100182P244100067 – 100182P244602976

• 100182SFE213709609 – 100182SFE235206276

• 100748M243200001 – 100748M244300252

• 100748MAG222400734 – 100748MAG23500660

• 100748P242900001 – 100748P245205632

• 100748SFE220908785 – 100748SFE233513811

• X00748MAG233003670 – X00748MAG233003672

• X00748SFE233202493 – X00748SFE233203161

• Z00748MAG233003670

For the 1090, check for the following serial number ranges:

• 4551MAG21452813 – 4551MAG23350381

• 4551SFE23320001 – 4551SFE23501949

If you own either the Model 552 or Model 1090 adjustable dumbbells, it’s safe to say your equipment is included in this recall.

What to do if you own these BowFlex dumbbells

Needless to say, stop using the recalled dumbbells immediately. Even though Johnson Health Tech Trading is proactively reaching out to all known purchasers directly to inform them of the recall, you should not wait to hear from the company. The impact hazard poses a serious safety risk that could result in injury during use. Simply do not attempt to continue exercising with these dumbbells, even if they appear to be functioning normally.

Johnson Health Tech Trading is offering different remedy options, depending on where consumers originally purchased their dumbbells.

For units sold by Johnson Health Tech Trading:

• Full refund of purchase price in the form of a voucher

• Replacement dumbbells (where available)

For units originally sold by BowFlex Inc. (formerly Nautilus Inc.):

• Prorated voucher refund based on purchase date

• Complimentary one-year JRNY digital fitness membership

If you have a set of either dumbbell model and would like them to send a replacement set (of safe versions of the same models), prepare the following information:

• Name, mailing address (mailing address will be used to send out a pre-paid box/label to return the handle(s) and base(s) of your dumbbells)

• Model name (do you have 552s or 1090s)

• Serial number for each dumbbell (either provide the number or take a picture and send via email)

For the most current information about this recall, including contact details and specific instructions for your situation, visit the manufacturer’s official recall webpage or contact customer service directly. You can call Johnson Health Tech Trading toll-free at 800-209-3539 from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT Monday through Friday, email at recall@bowflex.com, or at www.bowflex.com/recalls or online at www.bowflex.com and click “Recalls” at the bottom of the page.

BrianFagioli writes: Google is flexing its engineering muscles today by announcing a record-breaking score on the Speedometer 3 benchmark with its Chrome browser. If you’ve felt like the web got snappier lately, this could be why.

According to the search giant, Chrome’s latest performance improvements translate to real-world time savings. Believe it or not, that could potentially add up to 58 million hours saved annually for users. That’s the equivalent of about 83 human lifetimes not wasted waiting for web pages to load!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In space, no one can hear you, uh, stream. We finally have a real trailer for the upcoming Alien: Earth TV series and it looks extremely cool. FX dropped a teaser a few months back, but that was just vibes. This is an actual two-minute trailer that’s absolutely packed with footage.

For the uninitiated, Alien: Earth is the first TV series in the franchise’s long history and is being helmed by Noah Hawley. That’s the guy who made the Fargo TV series and the criminally underrated Marvel show Legion. Franchise creator Ridley Scott is also on board as an executive producer.

This is a prequel that’s set just two years before the original film. As the name suggests, it takes place on Earth. The trailer indicates the story will involve a ship crashing into a large corporate-controlled city. This vessel may or may not have a fearsome Xenomorph aboard, among other notable alien species.

A character in the clip says that the ship “collected five different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe,” going on to suggest that one is “predatory.” That’s right. We could be getting a dang Predator in our Alien TV show.

Alien: Earth premieres on August 12 on FX and will be available to stream on Hulu. The show stars Sydney Chandler as a hybrid robot/human lifeform tasked with investigating the crash. The rest of the cast includes Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther and Samuel Blenkin, among others.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-full-alien-earth-trailer-is-finally-here-and-its-a-doozy-184921361.html?src=rss

It seems like hardly a day goes by anymore without a new version of Google’s Gemini AI landing, and sure enough, Google is rolling out a major update to its most powerful 2.5 Pro model. This release is aimed at fixing some problems that cropped up in an earlier Gemini Pro update, and the word is, this version will become a stable release that comes to the Gemini app for everyone to use.

The previous Gemini 2.5 Pro release, known as the I/O Edition, or simply 05-06, was focused on coding upgrades. Google claims the new version is even better at generating code, with a new high score of 82.2 percent in the Aider Polyglot test. That beats the best from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek by a comfortable margin.

While the general-purpose Gemini 2.5 Flash has left preview, the Pro version is lagging behind. In fact, the last several updates have attracted some valid criticism of 2.5 Pro’s performance outside of coding tasks since the big 03-25 update. Google’s Logan Kilpatrick says the team has taken that feedback to heart and that the new model “closes [the] gap on 03-25 regressions.” For example, users will supposedly see more creativity with better formatting of responses.

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When it comes to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, the GPU itself is less interesting than the storm Nvidia stirred up by trying to earn it better reviews. If you don’t follow the twists and turns of graphics card launch metanarratives, allow me to recap the company’s behavior for you.

Though the RTX 5060 launched on May 19, Nvidia and its partners were uncharacteristically slow to ship graphics cards to reviewers. For outlets that received pre-launch hardware, Nvidia didn’t provide the pre-launch drivers that it usually sends out so that reviewers could run their own tests on the cards, informing reviewers on a call that drivers would be available to them and the public on the 19th.

Except! Nvidia did offer advance drivers to a handful of publications on the condition that they run a few benchmarks that had been pre-selected by Nvidia and that they only report numbers from tests performed with the 50-series new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) setting enabled.

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly opposed a proposed 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation currently under consideration by the Senate, arguing instead for federal transparency standards in a New York Times opinion piece published Thursday. Amodei said Anthropic’s latest AI model demonstrated threatening behavior during experimental testing, including scenarios where the system threatened to expose personal information to prevent being shut down. He writes: But a 10-year moratorium is far too blunt an instrument. A.I. is advancing too head-spinningly fast. I believe that these systems could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off. Without a clear plan for a federal response, a moratorium would give us the worst of both worlds — no ability for states to act, and no national policy as a backstop. The disclosure comes as similar concerning behaviors have emerged from other major AI developers — OpenAI’s o3 model reportedly wrote code to prevent its own shutdown, while Google acknowledged its Gemini model approaches capabilities that could enable cyberattacks. Rather than blocking state oversight entirely, Amodei proposed requiring frontier AI developers to publicly disclose their testing policies and risk mitigation strategies on company websites, codifying practices that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind already follow voluntarily.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you own a home, you know that homeowners insurance usually requires inspections—at least once, when you initially take out the policy, and often periodically when the renewal comes around. You usually can’t avoid this—the insurer has a right to ensure that they’re not taking on excessive risk. They don’t want to be on the hook for a huge repair bill because you didn’t bother maintaining your roof properly, after all.

Normally, you know when those inspections are coming, so you can prepare your home. But increasingly, insurance companies are using less visible tools to check out the exterior of your home, employing drones and satellite imagery to check that your roof is in good shape, that you’re doing proper maintenance to the exterior walls and landscaping, and that you’re not using your property in a manner that conflicts with your policy agreement. And you need to worry about this because it changes the core dynamic around home inspections. Here’s what you need to know—and how to react.

There are several reasons why drone and satellite-powered inspections are problematic for you as a homeowner:

• Unreliable. The images secured via drone and satellite are usually pretty low-quality. A man living in Florida had his insurance canceled when a drone photographed his roof—he described the photo as looking “like it was taken in 1936.” These images are often plagued by shadows and artifacts that are misinterpreted as damage, and insurers are sometimes picking up satellite images that are years out of date and using them to justify rate increases or policy cancellations.

• Unpredictable. Unlike a scheduled inspection, a drone can fly over and around your house at any time. That means if you’re in the process of repairing some aspect of the home’s exterior or have the work scheduled, the photos can show an inaccurate glimpse of the state of the property. That can lead to false accusations of deferred maintenance or damage, leading to unfair rate hikes or cancelations.

• Lack of warning. These inspections often happen without your knowledge, so the first time you hear about them might be when you receive a notice that your rates are rising or your policy won’t be renewed. At that point, it might be much more difficult to fight the decision if the physical state of your house has changed. And it removes your chance to make adjustments in advance of the inspection if you’re doing something with the property you know could be misunderstood or misconstrued.

Precautions you can take

We’re living in the age of drone inspections, so it’s time to start taking some extra precautions. Your first line of defense against a shocking cancelation or rate hike due to a drone or satellite inspection is to know the basics about your homeowners insurance:

• Cancelation notices: Know the notice requirements for cancelations in your state. If your insurer is relying on an automated system, you might receive a cancelation notice without the proper notice, and you can fight that.

• Complaint process: Don’t wait to research your insurer’s process for disputing changes to your coverage until you’re fighting cancelation—you might only have a few weeks to fight back. Know how to file complaints so you don’t waste time. You should also know how to contact your state’s insurance department in case you need to file a complaint about your insurer’s handling of the situation.

• Review the exterior. You might not even be aware of aspects of your home’s exterior that could be flagged on drone footage or satellite images. If your roof is in good shape but has moss growing on it, for example, that could be flagged. Consider what your home looks like from above.

  Also consider that areas of your home you might consider private are actually exposed to drones and satellites. For example, a trampoline or treehouse in your backyard might seem harmless—and safely hidden from public view. But if a drone spots them on your property, that could be an excuse to cancel your coverage or raise your rates.

What to do before (and after) you receive a rate increase or cancelation

One way to avoid surprise events resulting from drones and satellite photos is to stop waiting for inspections to do necessary maintenance. If you normally wait until your homeowners insurance announces an inspection to get roof repairs and other work done on the house, well, stop doing that. Regular maintenance and repair of the exterior of the home will insulate you from nasty drone-related surprises.

If you receive a rate or cancelation notice from your insurer based on photos taken by drone or satellite that misrepresent the reality of the situation, demand to see the photos used to make the determination. If they’re blurry, low-res, or showing deceptive shadows or angles, take your own photos and submit them as part of the dispute process with your insurer. Chances are, your photos will be clearer and refute the claims.

You can also hire a home inspector to submit a report. If the drone inspection showed signs of disrepair or roof failure, a certified inspector’s report stating the age and condition of the roof may be persuasive.

These days, any dispute about an inspection probably starts online or via email—but it can be worth it to get a human being on the phone. Automated systems often lack flexibility, leading to nonsensical rejections of disputes or requests. If inaccurate, old, or misinterpreted drone photos are ruining your homeowners insurance, getting a person on the phone might be your best chance of flipping that script.

If you know there are aspects of your house that might be flagged by a drone or satellite review of your property—a pool you didn’t inform your insurer about, or that aforementioned trampoline—there’s one final rule: Don’t try to hide it. Covering things with tarps or other camouflage won’t work, and in fact might lead to a policy cancelation all by themselves as they might be seen as red flags.

If you’re concerned about something on your property in regards to your insurance coverage, it’s best to either get rid of it or see if you can add coverage for it to your existing policy. Trying to hide it from the eye in the sky will almost certainly backfire.

Sony’s 1000X earbuds may get most of the attention in the company’s lineup, but there are gems to be found on the roster for less money. The LinkBuds series offers some serious contenders for $100 less than the flagship WF-1000XM5. There have also been some compelling products under $150 from Sony, and the recently released WF-C710N ($120) also fits the bill. A comfortable fit, a long list of features and above-average ANC performance lead the positives here, but there are a few caveats you’ll need to consider before you commit.

What’s good about the WF-C710N?

The WF-C710N is the successor to the WF-C700N that debuted in 2023. That set was a formidable mid-range contender in its own right, thanks to a compact design and handy features. Sony didn’t change the overall look too much for the C710N, but the touch panels for the controls are easier to find since they’re now concave circles. The company also introduced a transparent blue color option that allows you to see inside the earbuds and case. It’s giving Beats Solo Buds and Studio Buds + vibes, but I’m all for it. In my opinion, the more transparent gadgets, the better.

Compared to much of the competition, the C710N’s smaller size also means it is more comfortable to wear for long periods of time. The earbuds sit on the ridges of my ears nicely, and there isn’t any unbalanced, excess weight projecting out from the side of my head. It’s clear Sony fine-tuned the ergonomics for all-day use, and I had no trouble wearing them for the entirety of my battery tests. That’s not always the case with larger, bulkier earbuds.

The C710N might be a midrange set at $120, but the long list of features allows the earbuds to punch above their weight. Starting with the basics, there’s active noise cancellation (ANC), adjustable ambient sound mode, customizable EQ (presets and sliders), multipoint connectivity, reconfigurable touch controls and automatic pausing when the buds are removed from your ears. On the more advanced end of the spec sheet, you get Adaptive Sound Control: Sony’s trademark tool that automates changes to sound settings based on activity or location. There’s also a personalized EQ, 360 Reality Audio support, DSEE upscaling and a Quick Attention feature that lowers the volume and activates ambient sound for any brief chats. The only notable omission here is Speak-to-Chat that does the same thing as Quick Attention automatically when you start talking, but I’m not surprised it was left off a pair of $120 earbuds.

ANC performance is remarkably strong on the C710N, a feat that typically eludes the competition in this price range. In particular, I noticed these earbuds do an above average job of blocking human voices as I was able to greatly reduce the volume of nearby chatter in most instances. I’m not talking complete silence, but the amount of noise blocking is above average when you’re in the vicinity of someone you’d rather not listen to at full volume. Constant distractions like loud fans are also reduced but not entirely thwarted, so that too is better than what you’ll get from a lot of the similarly priced options.

What’s not so good about the WF-C710N?

Billy Steele for Engadget

Compared to other midrange earbuds, sound quality is slightly above average on the C710N, but it could be good enough to satisfy you at this price. The bass is tight and punchy, but oftentimes it overpowers the mix for hip-hop, rock and metal — basically any genre with a driving beat. And when you switch to something more mellow like bluegrass, the low-end tone still constrains the treble and mid range. Depending on the song, highs can cut through, but a boost in the middle of the EQ would do wonders for overall depth of sound here (you’ll want to keep DSEE active). Is it good enough for someone looking to pick up a set of earbuds on a budget? Yes. Does the audio performance compete with flagship options like the WF-1000XM5? Not even close.

In my tests, the C710N didn’t last as long as Sony promised. The company says you’ll get up to eight and a half hours on a charge with ANC active. But, using a mix of noise cancelling and ambient sound modes, I only managed between six and a half and seven hours. That’s a respectable amount, but if you’re looking to wear these for an entire work day, you might not make it. That’s especially true if you need them to also stick around for your commute.

Despite offering the option to “Capture Voice During a Phone Call” in the Sound Connect app, the C710N doesn’t pipe much of you back through the earbuds in that scenario. Even with ambient sound active, I still felt the need to speak up more than normal, so voice and video calls weren’t as natural as they could be. Overall, Sony’s assurance of “crystal-clear calls” falls flat as you’ll sound decent, but not pristine. The C710N will block most background noise from coming through, but in doing so the quality of your voice greatly suffers. All of that means these earbuds are usable for calls if you really need them, but if sounding comprehensible in calls is important , you’ll want to look elsewhere.

Final verdict on the WF-C710N

If comfort and handy features are your primary concern, the C710N will serve you well. Sound quality isn’t the best, but it isn’t bad either, so I have no doubt that many people will be pleased with it. If I had been able to hit (or even surpass) Sony’s stated battery life, these earbuds would be easy to recommend. Despite that, they’re still a solid option, especially at $120, since the company once again outpaces its midrange rivals with more convenient tools than you’ll find anywhere else. The C710N is definitely a better choice than the slightly cheaper Beats Solo Buds, which are now $99.95 at full price ($80 at launch).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/sony-wf-c710n-review-more-than-midrange-180018400.html?src=rss

AI companies claim their tools couldn’t exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out, they could — it’s just really hard. To prove it, AI researchers trained a new model that’s less powerful but much more ethical. That’s because the LLM’s dataset uses only public domain and openly licensed material.

The paper (via The Washington Post) was a collaboration between 14 different institutions. The authors represent universities like MIT, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Toronto. Nonprofits like Vector Institute and the Allen Institute for AI also contributed.

The group built an 8 TB ethically-sourced dataset. Among the data was a set of 130,000 books in the Library of Congress. After inputting the material, they trained a seven-billion-parameter large language model (LLM) on that data. The result? It performed about as well as Meta’s similarly sized Llama 2-7B from 2023. The team didn’t publish benchmarks comparing its results to today’s top models.

Performance comparable to a two-year-old model wasn’t the only downside. The process of putting it all together was also a grind. Much of the data couldn’t be read by machines, so humans had to sift through it. “We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people,” co-author Stella Biderman told WaPo. “And that’s just really hard.” Figuring out the legal details also made the process hard. The team had to determine which license applied to each website they scanned.

So, what do you do with a less powerful LLM that’s much harder to train? If nothing else, it can serve as a counterpoint.

In 2024, OpenAI told a British parliamentary committee that such a model essentially couldn’t exist. The company claimed it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” Last year, an Anthropic expert witness added, “LLMs would likely not exist if AI firms were required to license the works in their training datasets.”

Of course, this study won’t change the trajectory of AI companies. After all, more work to create less powerful tools doesn’t jive with their interests. But at least it punctures one of the industry’s common arguments. Don’t be surprised if you hear about this study again in legal cases and regulation arguments.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/it-turns-out-you-can-train-ai-models-without-copyrighted-material-174016619.html?src=rss

Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know he thinks a lot about enshittification. With reports of an upcoming IPO and the news of his co-founder, Jason Citron, recently stepping down to hand leadership of the company over to Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive, many Discord users are rightfully worried the platform is about to become, well, shit.

“I understand the anxiety and concern,” Vishnevskiy told Engadget in a recent call. “I think the things that people are afraid of are what separate a great, long-term focused company from just any other company.” According to Vishnevskiy, the concern that Discord could fail to do right by its users or otherwise lose its way is a topic of regular discussion at the company.

“I’m definitely the one who’s constantly bringing up enshittification,” he said of Discord’s internal meetings. “It’s not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That’s how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that.”

The way Vishnevskiy tells it, Discord already had an identity crisis and came out of that moment with a stronger sense of what its product means to people. You may recall the company briefly operated a curated game store. Discord launched the storefront in 2018 only to shut it down less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes that as a period of reckoning within Discord.

“We call it embracing the brutal facts internally,” he said of the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Citron started Discord, they envisioned a platform that would not just be for chatting with friends, but one that would also serve as a game distribution hub. “We spent a year building that component of our business and then, quite frankly, we quickly knew it wasn’t going well.”

Out of that failure, Discord decided to focus on its Nitro subscription and embrace everyone who was using the app to organize communities outside of gaming. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include a few different perks, but at its heart, Nitro has always been a way for Discord users to get more out of the app and support their favorite servers. For instance, the $3 per month Basic tier allows people to use custom emoji and stickers on any server, and upload files that are up to 50MB. The regular tier, which costs $10 per month, includes 4K streaming, 500MB uploads and more. They’re all nice-to-haves, but the core functions remain free.

Marissa Leshnov for Discord

Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a “phenomenal business,” but the decision to look beyond gaming created a different set of problems. “It wasn’t clear exactly who we were building for, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that drove a lot of distractions,” he said.

That sense of mission drift was further exacerbated by the explosive growth Disord saw during the pandemic, as even more new users turned to the platform to stay in touch with friends during lockdown. “It covered up all the things that we didn’t fully clarify about how we want to approach things,” said Vishnevskiy. “We came out stronger. A lot of people were introduced to Discord, and it’s their home now, but it’s probably part of what made it take longer to realize some of the decisions we made at the time weren’t right.”

One of those was a brief flirtation with the Web3 craze of 2021. That November, Citron tweeted a screenshot of an unreleased Discord build with integrations for two crypto wallet apps. The post sparked an intense backlash, with users threatening to cancel their Nitro subscriptions if the company went forward with the release. Two days later, Citron issued a statement saying Discord would not ship the integration.

“We weren’t trying to chase a technology. It was about allowing people to use Discord in a certain way, and that came with a lot of downsides. We were trying to do some integrations to limit some scams, and actually do right by users and make people safer,” said Vishnevskiy. “But we really underestimated the sensitivity the general user base had to the topic of NFTs, and we did not do a really good job at explaining what we were trying to do.”

According to reporting from that period, Discord’s employees were partly responsible for the reversal. An internal server made up of workers and game studio representatives reportedly erupted over the proposed implementation.

Looking back, Vishnevskiy credits the company’s employees, some of whom have been with Discord for a decade, for steering leadership in the right direction over the years. He says there have been situations where the company’s employees have come to him and Citron to ask “why are we doing this?” He adds, “sometimes, they’ve pushed us to do things [Jason and I] didn’t think we should be doing. I think that’s an amazing asset to have. This product is built by people who love it and use it.”

Coming out of the pandemic, Discord announced last year it would refocus on gaming. In the immediate future, that shift of strategy will see the company emphasize “simple things” like app performance and useability over “building new features.” In March, users got a taste of that new approach, with the company releasing a redesign of its PC overlay that made it less likely to trigger anti-cheat systems like BattleEye. In turn, that made the overlay compatible with a greater number of the most-played games on Discord. In that same release, Discord added three new UI density options to give users more control over the look and feel of the app.

Moving forward, one area where the company wants to be particularly thoughtful is around AI. Discord has deployed the tech in a few areas – for example, it partnered with Krisp AI in 2019 to add noise cancellation to calls – but it also has wound down experiments that didn’t work. “What we’ve found is that a lot of these things did not work well enough to be in the product,” said Vishnevskiy, pointing to features like AutoMod.

The tool exists in Discord right now. Moderators can use it to filter for specific words and phrases. But when the company first pitched the feature, it envisioned an AI component that would help admins manage large, unruly servers, and even built a version of it that ran on a large language model. The company has yet to ship the feature because “it was making too many mistakes.” Discord also experimented briefly with a built-in chatbot called Clyde that leveraged tech from OpenAI, but canned it less than a year later. At the time, the company didn’t give a reason for the shutdown, but the occasional screenshots posted to the Discord subreddit showed Clyde could, often unprompted, say some questionable things.

“We’re constantly retrying some of those ideas with modern models. No timeline on any of this because we will not ship until we think it’s a good fit for the product,” said Vishnevskiy, adding the last thing the company wants to do is “slap [AI] in because everyone else is doing it.”

Looking to the future, Vishnevskiy says Discord is focused on helping game developers, especially as it relates to discovery. The majority of the most popular games on Discord are the same ones that were popular on the platform 10 years ago. That’s where Vishnevskiy says the app’s new Orbs currency comes in, which people can earn by watching interactive ads, playing a game, or streaming their gameplay to friends on Discord. Yes, it’s a way for Discord to grow its revenue, but Vishnevskiy believes the system aligns player interests with developer interests by giving Discord users something in return for their time and attention.

At least that’s the idea. I got to try the system after my interview with Vishnevskiy, and while it does feel friendly to users, I’d like to see how Discord plans to make it into something smaller game studios can leverage. Right now, many of the publishers the company has partnerships with are advertising releases that already have a lot of word of mouth going for them. I’m sure fans of Marvel Rivals will love the chance to earn an Ultron avatar decoration for their Discord, but a game with 147,000 concurrent players on Steam isn’t exactly struggling.

Vishnevskiy wouldn’t discuss the specifics of when and if the company plans to IPO, but did offer one last assurance for users. “Discord is something that is meant to be a durable company that has a meaningful impact on people’s lives, not just now but in 10 years as well,” he said. “That’s the journey that Hammond joined and signed up for too. We are long-term focused. Our investors are long-term focused.” 

While it may be true that the Vishnevskiy and Discord’s veteran employees have learned a lot over the company’s sometimes turbulent history, it’s not clear how a culture of experimentation and dissent might change with more shareholders to appease. The test will be whether Discord can stay true to itself and its many users.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/discords-cto-is-just-as-worried-about-enshittification-as-you-are-173049834.html?src=rss

Amazon is developing software for humanoid robots that could eventually replace hundreds of thousands of delivery workers, [non-paywalled source] The Information reports. The company is building a “humanoid park” obstacle course at its San Francisco office to test robots that would ride in the back of Amazon’s Rivian electric vans and deliver packages to customers, the report said. The indoor testing facility, roughly the size of a coffee shop, will house a Rivian van and serve as a controlled environment before Amazon takes the robots on “field trips” to deliver real packages on actual streets.

This summer, Amazon plans to test multiple humanoid models, including a $16,000 unit from China-based Unitree that has gained popularity among robotics developers, the report said. The initiative represents Amazon’s most ambitious robotics project yet, extending beyond its existing warehouse automation to tackle the significantly more complex challenge of outdoor package delivery. Amazon currently operates more than 20,000 Rivian vehicles for deliveries and plans to expand its electric fleet to 100,000 vehicles by 2030.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whatever your opinion of X, you probably don’t think of it as a platform known for fostering agreement. The company is apparently trying to change that, though, and is in the early stages of an experiment that aims to boost posts that are widely agreeable to the site’s users.

With a new test, described by X as an “experimental pilot,” the app will begin asking a small subset of users what they think of a particular post in their timeline. A screenshot shared by X shows that people can respond with a range of positive or negative opinions, like “it makes a meaningful point,” “it’s funny” or “it doesn’t interest me.” X will then use those responses to help it “develop an open source algorithm that could effectively identify posts liked by people from different perspectives.”

The concept is somewhat similar to Community Notes, which already attempts to take differing perspectives into account when ranking fact checks. The new program, though, isn’t about surfacing fact-checked content but boosting posts that are likely to be, well, liked.

X’s post about the test suggests it has lofty goals. “This experimental new feature seeks to uncover ideas, insights, and opinions that bridge perspectives,” the company wrote. “It can bring awareness to what resonates broadly. It could motivate people to share those ideas in the first place.”

Whether an open source algorithm based on data about users’ likes can actually accomplish that, though, is unclear. A report published today by Pew Research shows that there is still a significant partisan divide in terms of how X is perceived and experienced by users. Overcoming that could be more difficult than boosting a few extra posts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-tests-centrism-170939276.html?src=rss

Last month, ahead of the launch of the Switch 2 and its GameChat communication features, Nintendo updated its privacy policy to note that the company “may also monitor and record your video and audio interactions with other users.” Now that the Switch 2 has officially launched, we have a clearer understanding of how the console handles audio and video recorded during GameChat sessions, as well as when that footage may be sent to Nintendo or shared with partners, including law enforcement.

Before using GameChat on Switch 2 for the first time, you must consent to a set of GameChat Terms displayed on the system itself. These terms warn that chat content is “recorded and stored temporarily” both on your system and the system of those you chat with. But those stored recordings are only shared with Nintendo if a user reports a violation of Nintendo’s Community Guidelines, the company writes.

That reporting feature lets a user “review a recording of the last three minutes of the latest three GameChat sessions” to highlight a particular section for review, suggesting that chat sessions are not being captured and stored in full. The terms also lay out that “these recordings are available only if the report is submitted within 24 hours,” suggesting that recordings are deleted from local storage after a full day.

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On the heels of an OpenAI controversy over deleted posts, Reddit sued Anthropic on Wednesday, accusing the AI company of “intentionally” training AI models on the “personal data of Reddit users”—including their deleted posts—”without ever requesting their consent.”

Calling Anthropic two-faced for depicting itself as a “white knight of the AI industry” while allegedly lying about AI scraping, Reddit painted Anthropic as the worst among major AI players. While Anthropic rivals like OpenAI and Google paid Reddit to license data—and, crucially, agreed to “Reddit’s licensing terms that protect Reddit and its users’ interests and privacy” and require AI companies to respect Redditors’ deletions—Anthropic wouldn’t participate in licensing talks, Reddit alleged.

“Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users’ basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems,” Reddit’s complaint said.

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OpenAI said it disrupted several attempts [non-paywalled source] from users in China to leverage its AI models for cyber threats and covert influence operations, underscoring the security challenges AI poses as the technology becomes more powerful. From a report: The Microsoft-backed company on Thursday published its latest report on disrupting malicious uses of AI, saying its investigative teams continued to uncover and prevent such activities in the three months since Feb. 21.

While misuse occurred in several countries, OpenAI said it believes a “significant number” of violations came from China, noting that four of 10 sample cases included in its latest report likely had a Chinese origin. In one such case, the company said it banned ChatGPT accounts it claimed were using OpenAI’s models to generate social media posts for a covert influence operation. The company said a user stated in a prompt that they worked for China’s propaganda department, though it cautioned it didn’t have independent proof to verify its claim.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There’s finally a Snapchat app for watchOS, bringing the social media platform to Apple‘s line of wearables. This has been a long time coming, given that the first Apple Watch graced our wrists over a decade ago.

The app lets users preview incoming messages and reply by using the keyboard, scribbling with a finger, voice dictation or sending out an emoji. Apple Watch wearers could already preview a Snapchat message by enabling them on an iPhone, but there wasn’t a way to respond until now.

Snapchat says the app will be useful when doing things like alerting friends when arriving at a restaurant or when sending out a quick reply during a run. A company representative told us that it’s good for people who want to “keep active conversations going while they’re on the go.”

They also indicated that previewing a message on an Apple Watch will not mark it as “read” on the mobile or web app, as it only shows the first 100 characters. The app cannot be used to view images or videos, but the company plans to “evolve the experience over time.” 

Despite coming ten years after the Apple Watch first launched, Snapchat has still outpaced many of its rivals. There isn’t a dedicated Facebook app for the wearable, or a WhatsApp release. Facebook Messenger did have an app once upon a time, but it was pulled. 

Snapchat’s watchOS app comes just ahead of this year’s WWDC event. Rumors indicate that Apple is planning on some major announcements throughout the event, including a complete redesign of its various operating systems and new Apple Intelligence features that I’m sure everyone will just love.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/snapchat-finally-has-a-watchos-app-after-a-decade-163733916.html?src=rss