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This week, Figma CEO Dylan Field said he was temporarily disabling the company’s “Make Design” AI feature after it was accused of “excessively” training the tool on existing apps. The feature, announced at the company’s annual Config conference, was meant to accelerate the design process by generating UI layouts and components from text prompts, but faced criticism for appearing to mimic the layout of Apple’s Weather app.
YouTube quietly announced a policy change this week that allows users to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic content that mimics their face or voice. The move marks a shift in thinking at YouTube, where the company now sees deepfakes as a privacy issue, not just a content moderation issue.
Fisker has asked a Delaware bankruptcy judge overseeing its Chapter 11 bankruptcy case to approve the sale of its inventory of all-electric Ocean SUVs, which would allow the company to sell the completed electric vehicles to a New York-based car-leasing company for about $14,000 each, a significant discount from the $70,000 starting price that some EVs once commanded.
news
Twitter meets Myspace for GenZ: Aiming to put the “social” back into “social media,” a new app called noplace acts as a modern-day MySpace with colorful, customizable profiles and has rocketed to the top of the App Store. Read more
How to avoid AI-powered scams: Generative AI has made online scams easier, cheaper and more convincing. We’ve put together a helpful guide on what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones. Read more
Turn off funny reactions on video calls: If you’ve ever seen the thumbs up or confetti flying on your screen during a video call, you’re not alone. Here’s how to turn that setting off on your Apple device. Read more
Amazon Discontinues Astro for Business: Just seven months after its launch, Amazon has decided to discontinue production of its Astro for Business security robot, shifting its focus to the home version of Astro. Read more
Security Natural 1: A data breach occurred at the popular online tabletop and role-playing game platform Roll20, exposing the personal information of some users. The platform is now notifying users about the breach. Read more
Cloudflare Takes on AI Bots: The publicly traded cloud service provider has launched a new free tool to stop bots from scraping data from websites hosted on its platform to train AI models. Read more
Is Gemini as good as Google claims?: Google claims its AI models can perform previously impossible tasks, like summarizing documents that are hundreds of pages long. But new research suggests that its models aren’t as good as the company claims. Read more
With over 1 billion records stolen and counting, this year has seen some of the largest and most damaging data breaches in recent history. From AT&T to Ticketmaster, here are the biggest data breaches in 2024 so far. Read more
analysis
A Year on Threads: Meta’s Twitter alternative, Threads, has turned one year old. The social network has reached 175 million monthly active users, but it’s still finding its own voice. Threads is not as newsworthy as X, and not as open as Mastodon or Bluesky, at least for now. Ivan Mehta looks back on the app’s first year and what it can learn from other social networks. Read more
Supreme Court launches offensive against regulators: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court overturned the 1984 case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council in what could be one of the Court’s most significant decisions in the technology industry. On paper, wetlands and the EPA seem to have very little to do with technology, but as Devin Caldway writes, the decision gives regulators unlimited power to interfere. Read more
