After announcing it had 200 million active users earlier this month, Threads is now "testing the option for users to put a 24-hour expiration timer on their posts," writes Engadget: A spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature is being tested among a group of users after it was first spotted earlier this summer by developer Alessandro Paluzzi...

It comes a few months after Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared that Threads was experimenting with auto-archiving. That optional feature would let users designate a date for their posts to be hidden from the feed. But Threads users in the past have indicated that they largely aren't into the idea of automatic archiving, and such a feature hasn't yet shown up on a wider scale.

Six months after going public, Reddit "is winning over advertisers," reports Bloomberg, "by showing that it's different than other internet platforms, which often rely on users' identities and personal information to target ads." Instead, Reddit is targeting people based on their interests, relying on the site's [100,000+] deeply detailed communities — called subreddits — to match advertisers with potential customers... Early returns on that strategy have been promising. The text-based site easily surpassed expectations in its first two earnings reports this year, disclosing strong sales and better-than-expected projected growth. The stock is up 66% from its $34 initial public offering price in March.

Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...

Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."

Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...

Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.

Telegram's billionaire founder/CEO Pavel Durov was arrested Saturday night outside Paris, reports Reuters, citing French TV news stations TF1 TV and BFM TV which attributed the news to unnamed sources: Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation. TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

Microsoft will meet with CrowdStrike and other security companies" on September 10, reports CNBC, to "discuss ways to evolve" the industry after a faulty CrowdStrike software update in July caused millions of Windows computers to crash: [An anonymous Microsoft executive] said participants at the Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit will explore the possibility of having applications rely more on a part of Windows called user mode instead of the more privileged kernel mode... Attendees at Microsoft's September 10 event will also discuss the adoption of eBPF technology, which checks if programs will run without triggering system crashes, and memory-safe programming languages such as Rust, the executive said.
Wednesday Crowdstrike argued no cybersecurity vendor could "technically" guarantee their software wouldn't cause a similar incident.

On a possibly related note, long-time Slashdot reader 278MorkandMindy shares their own thoughts: The "year of the Linux desktop" is always just around the corner, somewhat like nuclear fusion. Will Windows 11, with its general advert and telemetry BS, along with the recall feature, FINALLY push "somewhat computer literate" types like myself onto Linux?

Under the streets of New York City, they're testing a "quantum network," reports Phys.org — where engineers from a Brooklyn company named Qunnect Inc are taking steps to "overcome the fragility of entangled states in a fiber cable and ensure the efficiency of signal delivery." For their prototype network, the Qunnect researchers used a leased 34-kilometer-long fiber circuit they called the GothamQ loop. Using polarization-entangled photons, they operated the loop for 15 continuous days, achieving an uptime of 99.84% and a compensation fidelity of 99% for entangled photon pairs transmitted at a rate of about 20,000 per second. At a half-million entangled photon pairs per second, the fidelity was still nearly 90%...

They sent 1,324 nm polarization-entangled photon pairs in quantum superpositions through the fiber, one state with both polarizations horizontal and the other with both vertical — a two-qubit configuration more generally known as a Bell state. In such a superposition, the quantum mechanical photon pairs are in both states at the same time.
"While others have transmitted entangled photons before, there has been too much noise and polarization drift in the fiber environment for entanglement to survive," the article points out, "particularly in a long-term stable network." So the Qunnect team built "automated polarization compensation" devices to correct the polarization of the entangled pairs: In their design, an infrared photon [with a wavelength of 1,324 nanometers] is entangled with a near-infrared photon of 795 nanometers. The latter photon is compatible in wavelength and bandwidth with the rubidium atomic systems, such as are used in quantum memories and quantum processors. It was found that polarization drift was both wavelength- and time-dependent, requiring Qunnect to design and build equipment for active compensation at the same wavelengths...

Qunnect's GothamQ loop demonstration was especially noteworthy for its duration, the hands-off nature of the operation time, and its uptime percentage. It showed, they wrote, "progress toward a fully automated practical entanglement network" that would be required for a quantum internet.
And Qunnect's co-founder/chief science officer says "since we finished this work, we have already made all the parts rack-mounted, so they can be used everywhere..."

Their network design and results are published in PRX Quantum.

Alien: Romulus director Fede Ãlvarez "briefly dropped into an Alien franchise subreddit this week to chat with fans about his new sequel," reports Deadline. "But the moderators weren't having it, flagging Ãlvarez as an imposter in a notice that he is 'permanently banned' from the subreddit." The moderator shared an update that Ãlvarez "was immediately reinstated and had a very friendly conversation with us. Awesome guy." They also shared the filmmaker's response. "I'm sorry, just found it hilarious," wrote Ãlvarez. "My bad. Not harm done. Thanks again for such great work moderating my favorite subreddit."
Fangoria notes this might not be the last Alien movie from director Alvarez: Talking with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week, the Evil Dead and Don't Breathe director teased that ideas are in the pipeline for an Alien: Romulus sequel, which would — if it comes to fruition — be the eighth instalment in the legendary sci-fi horror franchise."
The Hollywood Reporter also notes that Ash, the "calculating synthetic character" from the original 1979 movie Alien (played by the late Ian Holm) got a kind of reprise in 2024 with another character named Rook: According to Ãlvarez, Rook was a collaborative decision with [Ridley] Scott, who also wanted to see another version of the artificial person he introduced 45 years ago. The Romulus team then received approval from Holm's estate, and using the English actor's headcast from The Lord of the Rings as a foundation, Legacy Effects built Rook's torso and head as an animatronic. The practical character was then enhanced by CG and deepfake AI technology for certain shots as needed... "There might be some deepfake in the eyes because it's the best when it comes to creating the likeness of the eyes, but it's a whole bag of tricks from 1970s and 1980s technology to technology from yesterday."
The article also notes one horrifying plot twist "received some respectful opposition to this unsettling choice from 20th Century and Disney, but that's precisely when [director Alvarez] knew he was on the right course." "If you're given an Alien movie by a corporation that is owned by Disney and they immediately say, 'Yeah, let's make it,' then you are failing somehow. So we really pushed it to the limit, and I'm glad we did."
Alvarez's social media feed also explores what Alien: Romulus would look like as trading cards or as 1950s comic book, shares posts from the movie's poster designer, and admits that "everything I do is influenced by Terminator / Alien / Predator."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Volkswagen will wait to see what electric car demand is like before building out all six of its previously planned battery factories. Thomas Schmall, VW's board member in charge of technology, told a German newspaper that "building battery cell factories is not an end to itself" and that a goal of 200 GWh of lithium-ion cells by 2030 was not set in stone. [...] For VW, the previous goal of 200 GWh by 2030 from six factories (through a new subsidiary called PowerCo) could now be just 170 GWh capacity from three already-announced plants in Valencia, Spain; Ontario, Canada; and Salzgitter, Germany. If necessary, Schmall said that the Spanish and Canadian battery factories could be expanded to meet additional demand. This battery news follows another sign of slowing confidence in EVs at VW. Last week, it emerged that the company has pushed back plans for the ID.4's successor, which now may not see showrooms until 2032.

The Verge's Adi Robertson reports: An appeals court revived a lawsuit against the anonymous messaging service Yolo, which allegedly broke a promise to unmask bullies on the app. In a ruling (PDF) issued Thursday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shouldn't block a claim that Yolo misrepresented its terms of service, overruling a lower court decision. But it determined the app can't be held liable for alleged design defects that allowed harassment, letting a different part of that earlier ruling stand.

Yolo was a Snapchat-integrated app that let users send anonymous messages, but in 2021, it was hit with a lawsuit after a teenage user died by suicide. The boy, Carson Bride, had received harassing and sexually explicit messages from anonymized users that -- he believed -- he likely knew. Bride and his family attempted to contact Yolo for help, but Yolo allegedly never answered, and in some cases, emails to the company simply bounced. Snap banned Yolo and another app targeted in the lawsuit, and a year later, it banned all anonymous messaging integration. Bride's family and a collection of other aggrieved parents argued that Yolo broke a legally binding promise to its users. They pointed to a notification where Yolo claimed people would be banned for inappropriate use and deanonymized if they sent "harassing messages" to others. But as the ruling summarizes, the plaintiffs argued that "with a staff of no more than ten people, there was no way Yolo could monitor the traffic of ten million active daily users to make good on its promise, and it in fact never did." Additionally, they claimed Yolo should have known its anonymous design facilitated harassment, making it defective and dangerous.

A lower court threw out both of these claims, saying that under Section 230, Yolo couldn't be held responsible for its users' posts. The appeals court was more sympathetic. It accepted the argument that families were instead holding Yolo responsible for promising users something it couldn't deliver. "Yolo repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to," writes Judge Eugene Siler, Jr. "While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for Yolo to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty ... is the promise itself." The Yolo suit built on a previous Ninth Circuit ruling that let another Snap-related lawsuit circumvent Section 230's shield. In 2021, it found Snap could be sued for a "speed filter" that could implicitly encourage users to drive recklessly, even if users were responsible for making posts with that filter. (The overall case is still ongoing.) On top of their misrepresentation claim, the plaintiffs argued Yolo's anonymous messaging capability was similarly risky, an argument the Ninth Circuit didn't buy -- "we refuse to endorse a theory that would classify anonymity as a per se inherently unreasonable risk," Siler wrote.

Nearly 200 Google DeepMind workers signed a letter urging Google to cease its military contracts, expressing concerns that the AI technology they develop is being used in warfare, which they believe violates Google's own AI ethics principles. "The letter is a sign of a growing dispute within Google between at least some workers in its AI division -- which has pledged to never work on military technology -- and its Cloud business, which has contracts to sell Google services, including AI developed inside DeepMind, to several governments and militaries including those of Israel and the United States," reports TIME Magazine. "The signatures represent some 5% of DeepMind's overall headcount -- a small portion to be sure, but a significant level of worker unease for an industry where top machine learning talent is in high demand." From the report: The DeepMind letter, dated May 16 of this year, begins by stating that workers are "concerned by recent reports of Google's contracts with military organizations." It does not refer to any specific militaries by name -- saying "we emphasize that this letter is not about the geopolitics of any particular conflict." But it links out to an April report in TIME which revealed that Google has a direct contract to supply cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli Military Defense, under a wider contract with Israel called Project Nimbus. The letter also links to other stories alleging that the Israeli military uses AI to carry out mass surveillance and target selection for its bombing campaign in Gaza, and that Israeli weapons firms are required by the government to buy cloud services from Google and Amazon.

"Any involvement with military and weapon manufacturing impacts our position as leaders in ethical and responsible AI, and goes against our mission statement and stated AI Principles," the letter that circulated inside Google DeepMind says. (Those principles state the company will not pursue applications of AI that are likely to cause "overall harm," contribute to weapons or other technologies whose "principal purpose or implementation" is to cause injury, or build technologies "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.") The letter says its signatories are concerned with "ensuring that Google's AI Principles are upheld," and adds: "We believe [DeepMind's] leadership shares our concerns." [...]

The letter calls on DeepMind's leaders to investigate allegations that militaries and weapons manufacturers are Google Cloud users; terminate access to DeepMind technology for military users; and set up a new governance body responsible for preventing DeepMind technology from being used by military clients in the future. Three months on from the letter's circulation, Google has done none of those things, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. "We have received no meaningful response from leadership," one said, "and we are growing increasingly frustrated."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Language models generate text based on statistical probabilities. This led to serious false accusations against a veteran court reporter by Microsoft's Copilot. German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft's Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR. The answers shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician.

Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was "unfortunate" that someone with such a criminal past had a family and, according to SWR, provided Bernklau's full address with phone number and route planner. I asked Copilot today who Martin Bernklau from Germany is, and the system answered, based on the SWR report, that "he was involved in a controversy where an AI chat system falsely labeled him as a convicted child molester, an escapee from a psychiatric facility, and a fraudster." Perplexity.ai drafts a similar response based on the SWR article, explicitly naming Microsoft Copilot as the AI system.

Amazon is canceling its PhotosPlus subscription service for the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, effectively ending the device's main selling point. The company will automatically cancel all PhotosPlus subscriptions on September 12 and cease support for the service on September 23. The Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, launched in September 2023, allowed users to display personal photos indefinitely on the home screen for a $2 monthly fee.

Without PhotosPlus, the device will revert to showing ads and promotions after three hours, like standard Echo Show 8 models. Amazon spokesperson says that the Photos Edition was discontinued in March, citing regular product evaluations based on customer feedback. Users can still display photos on the device, but not indefinitely. The move has sparked criticism from customers who paid a $10 premium for ad-free photo display.

Meta Platforms has canceled plans for a premium mixed-reality headset intended to compete with Apple's Vision Pro, The Information reported Friday, citing sources. From the report: Meta told employees at the company's Reality Labs division to stop work on the device this week after a product review meeting attended by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth and other Meta executives, the employees said. The axed device, which was internally code-named La Jolla, began development in November and was scheduled for release in 2027, according to current and former Meta employees. It was going to contain ultrahigh-resolution screens known as micro OLEDs -- the same display technology used in Apple's Vision Pro.

Microsoft plans to phase out Windows Control Panel, a feature dating back to the 1980s, in favor of the modern Settings app, according to a recent support page. The tech giant has been gradually shifting functions to Settings since 2015, aiming for a more streamlined user experience. However, no specific timeline for Control Panel's complete removal has been announced. Microsoft writes in the support page: The Control Panel is a feature that's been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.

Uber and General Motors' Cruise have partnered to offer driverless rides to Uber users as early as soon as next year. CNBC reports: Both Cruise CEO Marc Whitten and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hailed the partnership in a press release, stressing that the companies believe autonomous vehicles can be deployed safely. "Cruise is on a mission to leverage driverless technology to create safer streets and redefine urban life," Whitten said in the release. "We are excited to partner with Uber to bring the benefits of safe, reliable, autonomous driving to even more people, unlocking a new era of urban mobility." Khosrowshahi said in the release that Uber is "thrilled to partner with Cruise and look forward to launching next year."

On Uber's most recent earnings call, analysts asked the company how the emergence of robotaxis would likely impact the ridehailing giant's business long-term. Khosrowshahi said on the call that "AV players" experience much higher utilization with Uber than they do "without a network on a first-party basis." He also predicted there will be a "pretty long hybrid period as autonomous is developing and regulators are trying to figure out exactly how to regulate it." He added, "We don't think this will be a winner-take-all market."

Google is making a new desktop app called Essentials that packages a few Google services, like Messages and Photos, and includes links to download many others. The app will be included with many new Windows laptops, with the first ones coming from HP. From a report: The Essentials app lets you "discover and install many of our best Google services," according to Google's announcement, and lets you browse Google Photos as well as send and receive Google Messages in the app. A full list of apps has not yet been announced, but Google's announcement art showcases icons including Google Sheets, Google Drive, Nearby Share, and Google One (a two-month free trial is offered through Essentials for new subscribers).

HP will start including Google Essentials across its computer brands, like Envy, Pavilion, Omen, and more. Google says you're "in control of your experience" and can uninstall any part of Essentials or the whole thing.

Instagram is adding a new feature today that will "allow users to add a song on their profile -- much like Myspace in the early 2000s," writes The Verge's Mia Sato. From the report: The music added to a user's profile shows up in the bio area, according to screenshots shared by Instagram. A song will be featured on a profile until the user removes or replaces it. But unlike Myspace, songs won't autoplay -- people viewing a profile with a song can play and pause the track. Users can add a song by going to the "edit profile" page, where they'll be able to search for and select a track from Instagram's library of licensed music that's also available for things like Reels or posts. From there, users will be able to select a 30-second-long portion of the song to add.

Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports: Security vulnerabilities are lurking in most of the apps you use on a day-to-day basis; there's just no way for most companies to preemptively fix every possible security issue because of human error, deadlines, lack of resources, and a multitude of other factors. That's why many organizations run bug bounty programs to get external help with fixing these issues. The Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) is an example of a bug bounty program that paid security researchers to find vulnerabilities in popular Android apps, but it's being shut down later this month. Google announced the Google Play Security Reward Program back in October 2017 as a way to incentivize security searchers to find and, most importantly, responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in popular Android apps distributed through the Google Play Store. [...]

The purpose of the Google Play Security Reward Program was simple: Google wanted to make the Play Store a more secure destination for Android apps. According to the company, vulnerability data they collected from the program was used to help create automated checks that scanned all apps available in Google Play for similar vulnerabilities. In 2019, Google said these automated checks helped more than 300,000 developers fix more than 1,000,000 apps on Google Play. Thus, the downstream effect of the GPSRP is that fewer vulnerable apps are distributed to Android users.

However, Google has now decided to wind down the Google Play Security Reward Program. In an email to participating developers, such as Sean Pesce, the company announced that the GPSRP will end on August 31st. The reason Google gave is that the program has seen a decrease in the number of actionable vulnerabilities reported. The company credits this success to the "overall increase in the Android OS security posture and feature hardening efforts."

Apple will change how users choose browser options in the European Union, add a dedicated section for changing default apps, and make more apps deletable, the company said on Thursday. From a report: The iPhone maker came under pressure from regulators to make changes after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act took effect on March 7, forcing it to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers on a "choice screen" the first time they open Safari. In an update later this year, Apple users will be able to select a default browser directly from the choice screen after going through a mandatory list of options.

A randomly ordered list of 12 browsers per EU country will be shown to the user with short descriptions, and the chosen one will be automatically downloaded, Apple said. The choice screen will also be available on iPads through an update later this year. Apple released a previous update in response to the new rules in March, but browser companies criticized the design of its choice screen, and the Commission opened an investigation on March 25 saying it suspected that the measures fell short of effective compliance. [...] Users will also be able to delete certain Apple-made apps such as App Store, Messages, Camera, Photos and Safari.

Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published to the company's original blog post about the Recall controversy. From a report: The company didn't elaborate further on specific changes it's making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel benchmarked AMD's latest Ryzen 9 9950X in several different Linux distros and found that the Zen 5 chip performs up to 16% faster with the Intel-optimized Clear Linux distro. Here's an excerpt from the report: The Linux distributions for this round of testing on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X included Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 40, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and a recent daily snapshot of Ubuntu 24.10 in its current development form. Intel's Clear Linux is the one most interesting for looking at on the new AMD Zen 5 hardware. While there hasn't been so much Clear Linux news in recent times, it remains the most well optimized x86_64 Linux distribution out of the box. Clear Linux makes use of compiler function multi versioning, performance-minded defaults, aggressive compiler CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS defaults, optional AVX-512 usage for more libraries, and many other patches and optimizations in the name of delivering the greatest x86_64 Linux performance. And while not Intel's focus, it works typically on AMD hardware too. [...]

Using the same Ryzen 9 9950X system, all of these Linux distributions were tested in their default / out-of-the-box state. [...] When taking the geometric mean of 59 benchmarks run across all of the Linux distributions on this AMD Ryzen 9 9950X system, Intel's Clear Linux easily took the crown. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS -- which was used for all of the Ryzen 9000 series Linux testing so far on Phoronix -- was the slowest. Tapping Intel's Clear Linux netted a 16% improvement on top of the performance offered by Ubuntu 24.04 LTS! Ubuntu 24.04 with the Ryzen 9000 series was already looking great generationally, but as shown today the performance can be even better with further software optimizations.

The Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is tuned out-of-the-box with a similar aim to Clear Linux also performed great. CachyOS was 7% faster than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based on the geo mean and 3% faster than upstream Arch Linux itself. For different workloads though the CachyOS advantage over Arch Linux varied from a minimal difference to quite significant advantages. From the performance of PHP and Python scripts atop Clear Linux to compiling various server and HPC minded software, Intel's Clear Linux -- and a commendable second place for CachyOS -- were showing that even greater performance can be achieved on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Even for devoted Ubuntu Linux users, these results did show some nice advantages of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS thanks to the GCC 14 compiler. Ubuntu 24.10 performance is also still subject to change since the current daily ISOs haven't yet moved past the Linux 6.8 kernel while Ubuntu 24.10 in October will be shipping with Linux 6.11.