Twitter locks staff out of offices until next week

REUTERS

One former Twitter employee, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC: “I think when the dust clears today, there’s probably going to be less than 2,000 people left.”

“The manager of that team, his manager was terminated. And then that manager’s manager was terminated. The person above that was one of the execs terminated on the first day. So there’s nobody left in that chain of command.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63672307

Google to pay record $391m privacy settlement

Google will pay $391.5m (£330m) to settle allegations about how it collects data from users.

“Consumers thought they had turned off their location-tracking features on Google – but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.”

The attorneys general said Google had been misleading consumers about location tracking since at least 2014, breaking state consumer-protection laws.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63635380

Payload raises $4.7M for its developer-first headless CMS

Image Credits: Payload

Instead of building another no-code CMS, the team went in the exact opposite direction and built something more akin to a framework than “just” a pure headless CMS. To get started, developers describe their configuration for Payload in TypeScript and the service creates a Mongo database, sets up REST and GraphQL APIs, handles file storage, authentication and access control, and, of course, creates the admin UI, which defaults to a clean, minimalist look.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/15/payload-raises-4-7m-for-its-developer-first-headless-cms/

First Look: Emergency SOS via Satellite on iPhone 14

To be clear, you’re not actually making a phone call—you don’t have sat-phone service with the iPhone 14. The Emergency SOS via satellite feature is run entirely by text message. The app walks you through a series of questions such as whether you are lost, what your injury is, and what landmarks are nearby that might help responders locate you more easily.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/first-look-emergency-sos-via-satellite-on-iphone-14

The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next

Illustration: Max-o-matic / The Verge

“I see people on both sides of this extremely confident in their positions, but the reality is nobody knows,” Baio, who’s been following the generative AI scene closely, told The Verge. “And anyone who says they know confidently how this will play out in court is wrong.”

https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-infringement-legal-fair-use-training-data

Binance, Crypto.com execs tell investors to ‘ask me anything’ following the fall of FTX – The Verge

Nick Barclay / The Verge

Both Binance and Crypto.com hosted live question-and-answer sessions on Monday morning in an attempt to reassure investors that the cryptocurrency exchanges won’t meet the same fate as FTX, which suffered a sudden and catastrophic collapse last week.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23457819/binance-crypto-dot-com-investors-ama-ftx-flops

DeviantArt provides a way for artists to opt out of AI art generators

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

DeviantArt’s new protection will rely on an HTML tag to prohibit the software robots that crawl pages for images from downloading those images for training sets. Artists who specify that their content can’t be used for AI system development will have “noai” and “noimageai” directives appended to the HTML page associated with their art. In order to remain in compliance with DeviantArt’s updated terms of service, third parties using DeviantArt-sourced content for AI training will have to ensure that their data sets exclude content that has the tags present, Levy says.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/11/deviantart-provides-a-way-for-artists-to-opt-out-of-ai-art-generators/