Threads launched. Twitter keeps dying. English version, unlocked for all. See what you get as paying subscriber ~ #WEEKLY ~ July 9th
A flood of strange "four-letter" e-shop ads. Stop using Google Analytics. Don't trust the headlines. Well, trust ours, really unlocked for everyone. Have nice weekend.
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False reports of the French riots are circulating on the internet. In the end, nothing else was to be expected. A flood of fake news, fabrications, manipulations. It uses photos and videos unrelated to France and the riots. (BBC)
The barrage of strange "four-letter" e-commerce ads on Twitter is unmissable. Moreover, it is accompanied by "community warnings". For several weeks they had a free field on Twitter, until a few days ago some of these accounts were blocked. The e-shops themselves are a uniform fabrication with slight changes in appearance, built on Woocomerca and a fake shop address. The real operate? The clues, of course, lead to China and the story is almost a detective story. (Financial Times)
Threads Launched
Meta will not be launching its new Twitter competitor, Threads, in Ireland or the EU anytime soon. According to the Data Protection Commission, Threads will not be launched in the EU because the EU faces stricter data protection rules than the US or the UK. (Independent)
Threads, Twitter competition from Meta, launched on Thursday. Unavailable in the Czech Republic, also reportedly unavailable in the EU, and reportedly for long. (Facebook)
Hands-on with Threads: fairly basic text-based messaging app, log in via Instagram handle, no hashtags, can't search for anything other than user handles. (Platformer)
If you delete your profile on Threads, Meta will also delete your Instagram account (Techcrunch)
Threads, Instagram's answer to Twitter, attracted 10 million registrations in its first seven hours online, Mark Zuckerberg said early Thursday morning. (Washington Post)
All Red Flags in Privacy Policy Threads (Quartz)
How Threads’ privacy policy compares to Twitter’s (and its rivals’) (Ars Technica)
Threads launch fails to prioritize accessibility (Mashable)
Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss (The Verge)
Zuckerberg's "Twitter killer" Threads reached 70 million registrations in two days. But in the context of Instagram's 2.35 billion users, this is actually a failure. Not to mention that, again, these are unverified and unverifiable numbers, and Meta has always fudged them. (Guardian)
Some journalists say Threads holds promise for their work, and some say the media should be wary of Meta, which has threatened to block news links. Not to mention that it's Meta that has been destroying journalism and the media for a long time. But the media just doesn't learn (Poynter)
French media companies Le Monde, AFP, Le Figaro and Liberation publish on Threads, although Meta has not yet launched the platform in the EU. (Bloomberg)
Internet, webdesign
In recent days, Google has removed more than half of the indexed URLs from Twitter from Google index. As a consequence of Twitter turning into a walled garden making it impossible to see content without logging in. (Search Engine Land)
Sweden's privacy authority has declared that "companies must stop using Google Analytics" and fined local online retailer CDON just under $30,000 and telecoms company Tele2 more than $1.1 million. The problem is the export of Europeans' data to the US. (TechCrunch, IMY)
Where are we all supposed to go now? We are talking about the end of Twitter, Reddit and the social web in general. Let's not kid ourselves, social networking as we've known it is ending. (The Verge)
National Music Publishers Association: in February 2023, Spotify had 44.4 million US subscribers, Apple Music 32.6 million , Amazon Music 29.3 million, YouTube 8.5 million. (Music Business Worldwide)
The investigation found that the website, which was supposed to cover local news in one British town, was launched in June 2023 with 11 fake journalist profiles that used stock photos. (Hold the Front Page)
Gfycat, the GIF hosting platform owned by Snap, plans to cease operations on September 1, 2023. In May, the site was down for five days due to an expired SSL certificate. (Ars Technica)
MediaNews Group, the newspaper chain owned by Alden Global Capital, has removed comment widgets from its site since July 1, citing moderation difficulties. A logical progression, just look at the comment cesspool on social media or something Czech like Novinky for an idea (Axios)
Lessons learned from the catastrophic failure of the metaverse. Did the "creative class" learn from buying a product that was clearly destined to fail? Personally, I'd say they haven't. Yet there was enough to learn from its predecessor, Secondlife. (The Nation)
Hardware
RPN open source and open hardware scientific calculator (OpenRPNCalc)
Recenze HyperX Pulsefire Haste 2 Wireless (PC Tuning)
A trip to the past. Before Xerox, there was the Addressograph: a machine that automatically printed names, addresses or other information on consecutive envelopes or forms. (Parth Parikh)
Artifical Intelligence
Google is updating its privacy policy to state that the company may use "publicly available information" to train its artificial intelligence models and build products such as Translate and Bard. (Gizmodo)
Thousands of artists who signed away their voice rights in perpetuity years ago are forced to compete with AI cloned versions of their voices. (Financial Times)
OpenAI has temporarily disabled the beta version of the Browse with Bing feature of ChatGPT Plus after users found that requesting URLs allowed them to bypass some paywalls. Needless to say, this functionality was also quite fundamentally problematic and glitchy. It often failed to fetch URLs and the failure led to interrupted generation in a number of cases, including switching to other languages and other oddities. (Windows Central)
OpenAI announced the availability of the Code Interpreter plugin for all ChatGPT Plus users. See one of the ways you can use it for SEO (Search Engine Journal)
Websites full of AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic advertising. More than 140 brands advertise on sites with poor quality content - and the problem is growing fast. (MIT Technology Review)
AI firms should go to jail for creating fake humans, says Yuval Noah Harari. The author of Sapiens said at the Geneva summit that the proliferation of fake people on social media could lead to the collapse of democracy. (The Guardian)
AI robots declared at a UN conference that they could run the world. But it says Sophia, a puppet without AI, always controlled and reproducing what the operator says. So classic well-handled PR. Just drop the usual controversial and silly subject and it's straight into the headlines. (RTE)
Don't believe the headlines: ChatGPT loses users for the first time, shattering faith in the AI revolution. The number of visitors to the ChatGPT website fell by 10 percent globally in June. To infer a "shattering of faith" and "loss of users" from this is a failure of journalism. June brings declines in web traffic, as do other summer months. In addition, ChatGPT is being used via API and in mobile apps, with only a fraction of users coming to the site. What's more, it's a Similarweb estimate, so it may not be true at all. (Wahshington Post, reddit, Similarweb)
Chatbots Einstein and Musk have gotten millions of people to download Character.AI. Character.AI is an app that uses LLM AI to read vast amounts of text and respond to prompts using that information. Anyone can create a character on the site, which can be fictional or based on real people, dead or alive. (Bloomberg. Mashable)
Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite the LLM boom, says Dr Andrea Martin. Both ChatGPT and Google's AI have passed the (Turing) test, but to use this as evidence of thinking computers is a "terrible misinterpretation of Turing", adds Martin. (The Register)
A look at assistive apps such as Be My Eyes and Ask Envision, which integrate GPT-4 to give visually impaired users more visual information about the world around them. (Wired)
Software
GPT-4 API general availability and deprecation of older models in the Completions API. GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL·E and Whisper APIs are also generally available, and we are releasing a deprecation plan for older models of the Completions API, which will retire at the beginning of 2024. (OpenAI)
Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without. The study revives a long-standing debate that has divided the computing community. Some suggest that the practice is an indicator of a developer's status or background, but others believe it is harmless language that expresses a developer's satisfaction with his or her creativity. (From Linux)
A second trip into the past: the Xerox Smalltalk-80 graphical interface was strange (Cllin Donnell)
Mobile applications
TikTok launches TikTok Music, a standalone music streaming service offering UMG, WMG and Sony Music catalogues in Indonesia and Brazil. (Music Business Worldwide)
Pixel Fold lasted four days. The problem turned out to be that when closed, the displays are almost touching and if you leave any trash in there, it will damage the display. (Ars Technica)
Remember, July 19: Google is shutting down the Album Archive (Cord Cutters News)
Games
Blizzard has revealed Season 1 of Diablo IV. Arriving this month, collecting hearts will bring huge boosts to your characters (Hrej)
Yes, how else. After days of destruction, Macron blames a familiar bogeyman: video games. No matter that we have known for many years that video games do not educate or provoke violence. (NPR)
Comparison of Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Diablo 3 and Diablo 4. A journey through time from 1997 to today. Incredible in places. (YouTube)
The new best-selling game on Steam is called BattleBit Remastered and it's made by three people. A $15 multiplayer first-person shooter with Roblox-like graphics. Despite its simple presentation, players praise BattleBit Remastered for its smooth gameplay and rich content that contrasts with recent shooters from major publishers. (TechSpot)
Marketing, communication
The EU Supreme Court has ruled that Facebook must obtain user consent before sending personalised ads. The ruling is quite a major threat to Facebook's advertising business in Europe. (WSJ)
Noyb won: first big fine (1 million euros) for using Google Analytics (Noyb)
For Europeans, the CJEU's decision in Meta could potentially close this chapter of surveillance capitalism, which relies on denying users the freedom to choose how they are tracked. (Tech Crunch)
Mark Zuckerberg shared a family photo in which the faces of his two daughters are obscured by an emoji. Several commentators accused the Meta CEO of hypocrisy. (Insider)
Why customers don't want chatbots. A useful read, but it doesn't mean that a chatbot is a bad idea. (Creative Good)
Google updates Android logo with 3D robot head and new wordmark. (9to5Google)
Yes, there's yet another new Google logo here to confuse you (Creative Blog)
The business of positive employer reviews is rampant, as is paying to "remove" unfavorable ones. Not surprisingly, the best employer reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Google can get thousands of views per month and are a major factor in brand perception. (Care Fair)
Security, privacy, law
Red Hat's new source code policy does not violate the GPL itself, but it does make it harder to verify compliance with the GPL, which has angered the open-source community (Ars Technica)
Anonymous Sudan claimed on Telegram that it was selling user data stolen from Microsoft. Microsoft said there was no evidence that user data had been accessed or compromised. (Cybernews)
The director of the MediaWise Poynter Institute argues that Twitter's community memos mostly fail to combat misinformation because they require "inter-ideological agreement on the truth." Efforts to solve the "problem of biased fact-checkers" have left most memos invisible to the public. (Poynter)
A vulnerability in the WordPress Ultimate Member plugin allows for a complete site takeover. This is a plugin with over 200,000 active installs and is very easy to execute attack. (Search Engine Journal, WPScan)
Twitter is threatening Meta with legal action over Threads, accusing it of poaching former employees to create a "copycat" app. (Semafor)
Zoro.to: the world's largest pirate site suddenly "taken over" & rebranded. With over 205 million visits per month, Zoro.to is almost certainly the largest pirate site in the world. (Torrent Freak)
Brave is trying to curb the practice of websites that scan visitors. It will allow users to choose which sites can access local network resources. (Ars Technica)
Music labels are suing Twitter for $250 million because its reputation is in tatters. Twitter is facing another lawsuit. Seventeen music labels representing Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and others claim serious copyright infringement. (Gizmodo)
MITRE: The 25 most dangerous software vulnerabilities in 2023: Are you at risk? (Hacker News)
Niantic, the creator of Pokémon Go, is accused of "systemic sexual bias" in the lawsuit. A former female employee of the company filed a lawsuit on Friday alleging that the company disadvantaged female employees and women of color and denied them equal pay. (The Verge)
Microsoft Teams vulnerability allows attackers to bypass security controls and place malware on target systems. (Jumpsec)
Microsoft warns that Linux and Internet of Things (IoT) devices exposed to the Internet are being attacked with brute force attacks as part of a recently reported cryptojacking campaign. After gaining access to a system, attackers deploy the OpenSSH Trojan, which helps them maintain a backdoor on compromised devices. It will help steal SSH login credentials to maintain persistent access. (Bleeping Computer)
Social networks
How Twitter lost its place as the global square. A series of disastrous missteps over the past year have robbed Twitter of its relevance. (Washington Post)
A eulogy for Twitter: the place us journalists loved, for better or worse(The Guardian)
After Elon Musk locked down and broke Twitter, he started claiming it was "only temporary". A classic development, actually. (Mashable)
It's getting better. Elon announced a "temporary" restriction on non-paying accounts. They can only read 600 posts per day, paying six thousand. Again, he claims this is for "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation". The question is where is the reality. Didn't Twitter pay the bills for the cloud and Amazon or Google ran out of patience? One of the most likely possibilities.
Musk's clownery continues: A little later Musk's consumption limit was 800/8000 and even later 1000/10000. But it also turns out that the incompetence of programmers leads to Twitter attacking itself. (waxy.org)
Twitter claims that advance notice of the restriction would allow bad actors to avoid detection, and claims that the rate limit had a "minimal" impact on advertising. The weekend clowning continues. (Engadget)
BlueSky stopped working on Saturday. Now it says it is "temporarily" suspending registration of new users to address performance issues caused by "record high traffic". But registrations are still by invitation only, so that doesn't make much sense. (The Verge)
The r/IAmA moderators won't coordinate AMAs for celebrities, and Reddit "has all the resources it needs to hire people" for the tasks that volunteers do (The Verge)
Twitter competitor, Meta's Threads, will launch for iOS on July 6, 2023, according to the App Store's pre-order listing. (TechCrunch) In the meantime, you can start studying Kam přejít z Twitteru? Jaká je nejlepší náhrada Twitteru?
An analysis of Instagram's Threads APK, which was uploaded to Google Play prior to the app's launch, reveals the threads.net website and details on how the app will work. (9to5Google)
Twitter says that within 30 days, users must pay for Blue to use TweetDeck. The new version supports full composer functionality, Spaces, polls. Needless to say, the new version is an unusable mess. Charging was expected, TweetDeck doesn't display ads, a rather unwelcome thing for Musk. And Musk broke the old version with a weekend of tweaks to Twitter's operation. (Twitter Support)
Mastodon added 294k users over the weekend. The network has 1.4 million users, significantly less than the 2.5 million users at its peak. Posting activity roughly tripled. (Tech Crunch, Eugen Rochko)
Twitter quietly backs away from requiring users to log in to view individual tweets, ending Elon Musk's "temporary emergency measure"; profiles remain blocked (Engadget)
Out of the chaos on Twitter, Japanese illustrators are flocking to Weibo - and they're being welcomed with open arms. Weibo is Chinese microblogging platform. (Sixth Tone)
According to an analysis by data.ai, the Bluesky app has surpassed one million downloads on iOS and Android, although it remains an invite-only app. But that doesn't mean it has a million users, we're talking about a million app downloads. (Tech Crunch)
BotDefense, a project run by volunteers to remove rogue bots on r/gaming and other major subreddits, is shutting down due to Reddit "hostilities". (Ars Technica)
Startups and economics
Tiny is acquiring HappyFunCorp for $30 million. (Tech Crunch)
Canada has stopped ads on Facebook and Instagram because of a new law. The latter wants Meta to pay for Canadian media content on FB/IG. Meta refuses and Canadian media has paid the price, they are not visible on Facebook and Instagram. (Bloomberg)
Ottawa and Quebec pull advertising and escalate dispute with Facebook and Instagram (National Post)
California and Canada should call Google's and Facebook's bluff, given the success of Australia's 2021 media law, as the companies threaten to remove news links (Los Angeles Times)
Almost all of Evernote's remaining employees have been laid off. (Ycombinator)
The European Commission launches a wide-ranging investigation into Amazon's $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot and sets a deadline of 15 November 2023 to approve or block the deal. (Reuters)
From Jan. 1 to July 2, Disney earned $3.4 billion worldwide, Universal $2.89 billion, Sony $1.1 billion, Warner Bros. $898 million and Paramount $871 million. (Deadline)
E-books and podcast
BookTok can create bestsellers. ByteDance becomes a publisher. TikTok's owner, ByteDance, apparently thinks it can use this sales power for itself: They've started looking for authors to publish their books with their own publishing company, 8th Note Press, which they recently founded. (TubeFilter)
Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it. (Washington Post)
#TYDEN/#WEEKLY is e-mailing published on sunday. From august 2022 ocassional podcast in czech langauge (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts). From April 2023 english version as #WEEKLY. #TYDEN is czech language.
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