Meta is releasing a web version of Threads, as it attempts to revive the social media platform. The rival to X, formerly known as Twitter, enjoyed meteoric growth when it launched in July. However, users then abandoned it just as rapidly, partly due to its limited functionality. Meta says the web version is part of a drive to deliver new features but experts warn more needs to be done to rebuild customer interest.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66574762
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United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created. Nobody really knows how things will shake out around US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but the court cases have been piling up. Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed suit against OpenAI and Meta earlier this year over their models’ data scraping practices, for instance, while another lawsuit by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick alleges that data scraping by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI amounted to software piracy.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court
Regular users of Lyft need to prepare themselves for a barrage of ads hitting the ride-hailing service's app this week. It's hard to believe someone would look at the Lyft app enough to make ads a viable money-making exercise. However, according to the company's chief business officer, Zach Greenberger, Lyft users check the app an average of nine times per ride. Combine that with detailed (anonymized) user data, and the potential for targeted advertising to generate additional revenue is there.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/your-next-lyft-journey-will-be-full-of-ads
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The overarching goal of the new design, Weiss says, was to give users more context and more focus. “We think of these as modes of work that you have,” he says. “I catch up on everything that’s going on, I respond to inbound, I triage and respond to all the activity, and then I go through my to-do list of what I need to follow up on — that’s what this is organizing, is modes of working rather than types of objects.” For more chaotic, everything-all-at-once Slack users, Slack has also been reworking its multi-windowing system so you can have multiple views open at a time. It all adds up to not quite a total reorganization of Slack but at least a slightly different way of thinking about the app. Before, it was two things: the list of all your stuff on the side and whatever you’re currently engaged with in the middle. Now, there’s a third organizational layer in between, aiming to sort and filter all the stuff you care about in a few different ways. “It was about actually putting all the things that we’ve built over time into a sensible, comprehensible place,” Weiss says. It’s going to look and feel really different to a lot of users at first, but Weiss is confident users will like the new tools. And if the pitch doesn’t resonate, well, that’s why Slack rolls out new products slowly — and has been testing it for a while.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23824562/slack-redesign-app-dms-activity-later
Zoom has updated its terms of service after a backlash over fears that it trained its artificial intelligence (AI) models on customer calls. Talking to the BBC, before the terms of service were updated, data protection specialist Robert Bateman said: "The terms appeared to give the service provider a lot of freedom to use data generated by its users for many different purposes." He said that while there was a question mark over the risks that could arise, "alarm bells should ring when you encounter broad contractual provisions like these".
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66430429
After last fall signaling its intentions to expand into cloud gaming, Netflix today launched a new app that will soon allow subscribers to play games on their TV. The app, dubbed “Netflix Game Controller,” lets you use your phone as a controller after pairing it with your TV in order to play the games available through Netflix’s service.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/netflix-launches-a-game-controller-app-for-playing-games-on-your-tv/
In an effort to make Horizon Worlds more compelling, Meta now has an in-house studio dubbed Ouro Interactive that’s focused on making first-party virtual reality games, Meta’s Vice President of Metaverse Vishal Shah said in an interview published Friday with the Lowpass technology newsletter. The studio’s first VR game, a shooter called Super Rumble, debuted Friday and reportedly contains better graphics and fidelity than other VR games built on top of Horizon Worlds. The video game will also be one of the first VR video games Meta plans to test when it eventually debuts a mobile version of Horizon Worlds, Shah said. “This is definitely more than just a new world,” Shah said, referring to it as “the next generation of Horizon Worlds.”
https://cnb.cx/3KhByam