The Ray-Ban smart glasses launched by Meta almost two years ago have struggled to catch on with owners, many of whom appear to be using the devices infrequently, according to internal company data. WSJ: Less than 10% of the Ray-Ban Stories purchased since the product's launch in September 2021 are used actively by purchasers, according to a company document from February reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta sold a total of 300,000 of the wearable devices through February, but the company only had about 27,000 monthly active users.

The device, an important part of Meta's hardware strategy, allows users to take photos and listen to music with the frames of their glasses, among other features. It has experienced a 13% return rate, according to the document. Among the top drivers of poor user experience were issues with connectivity, problems with some of the hardware features including battery life, inability for users to import media from the devices, issues with the audio on the product and problems with voice commands for the smart glasses, according to the document.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A group of Internet service providers that won government grants are asking the Federal Communication Commission for more money or an "amnesty window" in which they could give up grants without penalty. The ISPs were awarded grants to build broadband networks from the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which selected funding recipients in December 2020. A group calling itself the "Coalition of RDOF Winners" has been meeting with FCC officials about their requests for more money or an amnesty window, according to several filings submitted to the commission.

The group says broadband construction costs have soared since the grants were announced. They asked for extra money, quicker payments, relief from letter of credit requirements, or an amnesty window "that allows RDOF winners to relinquish all or part of their RDOF winning areas without forfeitures or other penalties if the Commission chooses not to make supplemental funds available or if the amount of supplemental funds the Commission does make available does not cover an RDOF Winner's costs that exceed reasonable inflation," a July 31 filing said.

A different group of ISPs urged the FCC to reject the request, saying that telcos that win grants by pledging to build networks at a low cost are "gaming" the system by seeking more money afterward. So far, the FCC leadership seems reluctant to provide extra funding. The commission could issue fines to ISPs that default on grants -- the FCC recently proposed $8.8 million in fines against 22 RDOF applicants for defaults. The Coalition of RDOF Winners doesn't include every ISP that was granted money from the program. But exactly which and how many ISPs are in the coalition is a mystery.

Google's long-running project to split up ChromeOS and its Chrome browser is currently in beta and should be live in the stable channel later this month. The flags that turn on the feature by default were spotted by Kevin Tofel from About Chromebooks. Ars Technica reports: The project is called "Lacros" which Google says stands for "Linux And ChRome OS." This will split ChromeOS's Linux OS from the Chrome browser, allowing Google to update each one independently. Google documentation on the project says, "On Chrome OS, the system UI (ash window manager, login screen, etc.) and the web browser are the same binary. Lacros separates this functionality into two binaries, henceforth known as ash-chrome (system UI) and lacros-chrome (web browser)." Part of the project involves sprucing up the ChromeOS OS, and Google's docs say, "Lacros can be imagined as 'Linux chrome with more Wayland support.'"

On the browser side, ChromeOS would stop using the bespoke Chrome browser for ChromeOS and switch to the Chrome browser for Linux. The same browser you get on Ubuntu would now ship on ChromeOS. In the past, turning on Lacros in ChromeOS would show both Chrome browsers, the outgoing ChromeOS one and the new Linux one. Lacros has been in development for around two years and can be enabled via a Chrome flag. Tofel says his 116 build no longer has that flag since it's the default now. Google hasn't officially confirmed this is happening, but so far, the code is headed that way.

Cory Doctorow, author, digital rights advocate, and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for his next book, called The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation. "The book presents an array of policy solutions aimed at dismantling the monopolistic power of Big Tech, making the internet a more open and user-focused space," writes Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder. "Key among these solutions is the concept of interoperability, which would allow users to take their apps, data, and content with them when they decide to leave a service, thus reducing the power of tech platforms." From Cory's Medium article announcing the Kickstarter: I won't sell my work with DRM, because DRM is key to the enshittification of the internet. Enshittification is why the old, good internet died and became "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" (h/t Tom Eastman). When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

The Internet Con isn't just an analysis of where enshittification comes from: it's a detailed, shovel-ready policy prescription for halting enshittification, throwing it into reverse and bringing back the old, good internet.

Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience is getting a big new feature: images and video. From a report: If you've enabled the AI-based SGE feature in Search Labs, you'll now start to see more multimedia in the colorful summary box at the top of your search results. Google's also working on making that summary box appear faster and adding more context to the links it puts in the box. SGE may still be in the "experiment" phase, but it's very clearly the future of Google Search.

"It really gives us a chance to, now, not always be constrained in the way search was working before," CEO Sundar Pichai said on Alphabet's most recent earnings call. "It allows us to think outside the box." He then said that "over time, this will just be how search works." The SGE takeover raises huge, thorny questions about the very future of the web, but it's also just a tricky product to get right. Google is no longer simply trying to find good links for you every time you search -- it's trying to synthesize and generate relevant, true, helpful information. Video in particular could go a long way here: Google has integrated YouTube more and more into search results over the years, linking to a specific chapter or moment inside a video that might help you with that "why is my dryer making that noise" query.

Worldcoin will expand its operations to sign up more users globally and aims to allow other organisations to use its iris-scanning and identity-verifying technology, a senior manager for the company behind the project told Reuters. From the report: "We are on this mission of building the biggest financial and identity community that we can," said Ricardo Macieira, general manager for Europe at Tools For Humanity, the San Francisco and Berlin-based company behind the project.

Macieira said Worldcoin would continue rolling out operations in Europe, Latin America, Africa and "all the parts of the world that will accept us." Worldcoin's website mentions various possible applications, including distinguishing humans from artificial intelligence, enabling "global democratic processes" and showing a "potential path" to universal basic income, although these outcomes are not guaranteed. Most people interviewed by Reuters at sign-up sites in Britain, India and Japan last week said they were joining in order to receive the 25 free Worldcoin tokens the company says verified users can claim.

Some of the largest tech companies, including Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia, have announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote and develop Pixar's 3D Universal Scene Description technology. From the Linux Foundation: The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the alliance will enable developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services. Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD's power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.

The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications. The Linux Foundation's JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organizations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.

Starting today, Facebook and Instagram users in Canada will no longer be able to view or share news links or see videos and photos published by publishers and broadcasters. Engadget reports: Meta made the decision in response to Canadian legislators passing the Online News Act. The law requires certain platforms to negotiate revenue-sharing agreements with news organizations. The aim is to address the collapse in advertising revenue that news outlets have struggled with over the last two decades amid the growth of online services.

"News links and content posted by news publishers and broadcasters in Canada will no longer be viewable by people in Canada," Meta said. "We are identifying news outlets based on legislative definitions and guidance from the Online News Act." Any content shared by international news organizations won't be visible on Facebook and Instagram in Canada either.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: President Joe Biden has determined that Colorado Springs will be the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command, reversing a Trump administration decision to move the facility to Alabama, the Pentagon announced Monday. The decision will only intensify a bitter parochial battle on Capitol Hill, as members of the Colorado and Alabama delegations have spent months accusing each other of playing politics on the future of the four-star command.

The command was reestablished in 2019 and given temporary headquarters in Colorado while the Air Force evaluated a list of possible permanent sites. With an eye on Russia and China, its job is to oversee the military's operations of space assets and the defense of satellites. Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Biden notified the Department of Defense on Monday that he had made the decision, after speaking with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and weighing the input of senior military leaders. "Locating Headquarters U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs ultimately ensures peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period," Ryder said in a statement. "It will also enable the command to most effectively plan, execute and integrate military spacepower into multi-domain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests." Austin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and U.S. Space Command chief Gen. James Dickinson all support Biden's decision, Ryder added.

The most significant factor Biden weighed in making the decision was the impact such a move would have on the military's ability to confront the changing threat from space, according to a senior administration official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. Keeping the headquarters at Colorado Springs "maintains operational readiness and ensures no disruption to its mission or to its personnel," according to the official. The command is set to achieve "full operational capability" this month, the official said. A move to Alabama, by contrast, would have forced the command to transition to a new headquarters in the mid-2020s, and the new site would not have been open until the early to mid-2030s, the official said. "The president found that risk unacceptable, especially given the challenges we may face in the space domain during this critical time period," according to the official.

According to the Financial Times, Meta is preparing to launch AI-enabled chatbots with unique personalities, such as a surfer personality and a chatbot based on Abraham Lincoln. Engadget reports: This is an attempt to boost engagement across Meta's social media platforms, as human-like discussions tend to be more interesting than droll robotic responses. The company hasn't announced which of these platforms would host Abe Lincoln and his pals, though previous reports indicated Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp would be recipients of this new technology. Meta staffers are calling these chatbots "personas" and they could launch as soon as September. These personas will provide a new way to search and they'll even offer recommendations, similar to how current chatbots work, though ChatGPT and the rest don't have Abraham Lincoln on the payroll (just don't ask him about the best local opera houses.)

FT notes that the chatbots could also collect vast amounts of personal data, something Meta has never shied away from. After all, you'll likely share more personal details with a human-like companion than one devoid of personality. The vast majority of Meta's yearly revenue comes from advertising, so go ahead and tell your good friend Abe all about your likes and dislikes. What's the worst that could happen?

Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, comments on the latest developments around last week's remarkable claim of a well-above-room-temperature superconducting material at ambient pressure, dubbed LK-99. Here's an excerpt from his post: As of this morning, there are (as yet not really verified) reports of replication from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. At least, a video has been posted showed what could be a sample of LK-99 levitating over a magnet due to the Meissner effect, and in different orientations relative to the magnet itself. That's important, because a (merely!) paramagnetic material can levitate in a sufficiently strong field (as can diamagnetic materials like water droplets and frogs), but these can come back to a particular orientation like a compass needle. Superconductors are "perfect diamagnets," excluding all magnetic fields, and that's a big difference. The "Meissner effect" that everyone has been hearing about so much is observed when a material first becomes superconductive at the right temperature and expels whatever magnetic fields were penetrating it at the time. All this said, we're having to take the video on the statements of whoever made/released it, and there are other possible explanations for the it that do not involve room-temperature superconductivity. I will be very happy if this is a real replication, but I'm not taking the day off yet to celebrate just based on this.

And even though I'm usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team (PDF) at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other (PDF) is from Sinead Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work. This is quite important, because this could mean that we don't need to postulate completely new physics to explain something like LK-99 - if you'd given the starting data to someone as a blind test, they would have come back after the DFT runs saying "You know, this looks like it could be a really good superconductor..." [...]

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. Not that there's anything wrong with new physics (!), but it sets a much, much higher bar if you have to invoke something in that range. I await more replication data, and with more than just social media videos backing them up. This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

Google is experimenting with the use of AI to auto-generate YouTube video summaries, according to a notice on a support page dated July 31st. From a report: The page, which we spotted via Android Police, notes that these summaries will only appear next to a limited number of English-language videos, and will only be viewable by a limited number of users. They'll appear on YouTube's watch and search pages, and are intended to give a brief overview of a video's contents without replacing its existing description written by a human. "We're starting to test AI auto-generated summaries on YouTube, so that it's easier for you to read a quick summary about a video and decide whether it's the right fit for you," the support page reads. Further reading: Forget Subtitles. YouTube Now Dubs (Some) Videos with AI-Generated Voices.

Meta intends to ask users in the European Union for their consent before allowing businesses to target advertising based on what they view on its services such as Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant said on Tuesday. From a report: Meta said the change is to address a number of evolving regulatory requirements in the region and stems from an order in January by Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner, Meta's lead EU regulator, to reassess the legal basis on how it targets ads.

Facebook and Instagram users had effectively agreed to allow their data to be used in targeted advertising when they signed up to the services' terms and conditions, until the regulator ruled it could not process personal information in that way. "Today, we are announcing our intention to change the legal basis that we use to process certain data for behavioural advertising for people in the EU, EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland from 'Legitimate Interests' to 'Consent'," Meta said in a blog post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Google plans to overhaul its Assistant to focus on using generative AI technologies similar to those that power ChatGPT and its own Bard chatbot, according to an internal e-mail sent to employees Monday and seen by Axios. Google says some work on the revamped Assistant has begun, starting with the mobile version of the product. As part of the move, Google is reorganizing the teams that work on Assistant. The company said in the email it's making a small number of layoffs in conjunction with the shift. The move will involve eliminating dozens of jobs, Axios is told, out of the thousands of employees who work on the Assistant "We remain deeply committed to Assistant and we are optimistic about its bright future ahead," Google VP Peeyush Ranjan and director of product Duke Dukellis wrote in the e-mail.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated. The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.

The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because "it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation." At that point, Meta suggested that the man contact the anonymous user directly to resolve the matter, triggering the lawsuit against Meta. Initially, the claimant asked the court to order Meta to delete the posts, identify the anonymous user, and flag any posts in other private Facebook groups that could defame the claimant. While arguing the case, Meta had defended the anonymous user's right to freedom of expression, but the court decided that the claimant -- whose name is redacted in court documents -- deserved an opportunity to challenge the allegedly defamatory statements. Partly for that reason, the court ordered Meta to provide "basic subscriber information" on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account. The court did not order Meta to remove the posts or flag any others that may have been shared in private groups, though.

Meta has already agreed to comply with the order, the court's ruling said. However, if Meta fails to provide the Facebook user's identifying information, the social media company risks a penalty of approximately $1,200 daily. The maximum fine that Meta could face is less than $130,000. [...] Meta's defense of the anonymous user's right to free speech failed, the court said, because freedom of speech is not unlimited. "Someone who, without evidence, repeatedly makes serious and clearly traceable accusations, must take into account, partly in the light of the conditions applied by Facebook, that he or she may be confronted with a measure whereby his or her anonymity is lifted," the court order said. Although the key concern for The Court in the Hague appeared to be that the statements posted anonymously were plausibly defamatory, the order also noted that the content would not have to necessarily be unlawful for Facebook to be ordered to identify the user posting it. "According to settled case law, under certain circumstances Meta has an obligation to provide identifying data, even if the content of the relevant messages is not unmistakably unlawful," the court order said.

tedlistens writes: All large language models are liable to produce toxic and other unwanted outputs, either by themselves or at the encouragement of users. To evaluate and "detoxify" their LLMs, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and others are using Perspective API -- a free tool from Google's Jigsaw unit designed to flag toxic human speech on social media platforms and comment sections. But, as Alex Pasternack reports at Fast Company, researchers and Jigsaw itself acknowledge problems with Perspective and other AI classifiers, and worry that AI developers using them to build LLMs could be inheriting their failures, false positives, and biases. That could, in turn, make the language models more biased or less knowledgeable about minority groups, harming some of the same people the classifiers are meant to help. "Our goal is really around humans talking to humans," says Jigsaw's Lucy Vasserman, "so [using Perspective to police AI] is something we kind of have to be a little bit careful about." "Think of all the problems social media is causing today, especially for political polarization, social fragmentation, disinformation, and mental health," Eric Schmidt wrote in a recent essay with Jonathan Haidt about the coming harms of generative AI. "Now imagine that within the next 18 months -- in time for the next presidential election -- some malevolent deity is going to crank up the dials on all of those effects, and then just keep cranking."

While Jigsaw says the unit is focused on tackling toxicity and hate, misinformation, violent extremism, and repressive censorship, a former Jigsaw employee says they're concerned that Perspective could only be a stopgap measure for AI safety. "I'm concerned that the safeguards for models are becoming just lip service -- that what's being done is only for the positive publicity that can be generated, rather than trying to make meaningful safeguards," the ex-employee says.

In closing, the article leaves us with a quote from Vasserman. She says: "I think we are slowly but surely generally coming to a consensus around, these are the different types of problems that you want to be thinking about, and here are some techniques. But I think we're still -- and we'll always be -- far from having it fully solved."

Long-time Slashdot reader nairnr shares a report from The Register: Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead. It is now four years since we officially ran out of IPv4 ranges to allocate, and since then, those wanting a new public IPv4 address have had to rely on address ranges being recovered, either from from organizations that close down or those that return addresses they no longer require as they migrate to IPv6.

If Amazon's cloud division is to be believed, the difficulty in obtaining public IPv4 addresses has seen the cost of acquiring a single address rise by more than 300 percent over the past five years, and as we all know, the business is a little short of cash at the moment, so is having to pass these costs on to users. "This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure,' writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, on the company news blog.

The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. These charges will apparently apply whether the address is attached to a service or not, and like many AWS charges, appear inconsequential at first glance but can mount up over time if a customer is using many of them. These charges will apply to all AWS services including EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and will apply across all AWS regions, the company said. However, customers will not be charged for IP addresses that they own and bring to AWS using Amazon's BYOIP feature. AWS offers a free tier for EC2, and this will include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for the first 12 months, starting from the same date the charges do.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: U.S. and European officials are growing increasingly concerned about China's accelerated push into the production of older-generation semiconductors and are debating new strategies to contain the country's expansion. President Joe Biden implemented broad controls over China's ability to secure the kind of advanced chips that power artificial-intelligence models and military applications. But Beijing responded by pouring billions into factories for the so-called legacy chips that haven't been banned. Such chips are still essential throughout the global economy, critical components for everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to military hardware. That's sparked fresh fears about China's potential influence and triggered talks of further reining in the Asian nation, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The U.S. is determined to prevent chips from becoming a point of leverage for China, the people said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo alluded to the problem during a panel discussion last week at the American Enterprise Institute. "The amount of money that China is pouring into subsidizing what will be an excess capacity of mature chips and legacy chips -- that's a problem that we need to be thinking about and working with our allies to get ahead of," she said. While there's no timeline for action to be taken and information is still being gathered, all options are on the table, according to a senior Biden administration official. The most advanced semiconductors are those produced using the thinnest etching technology, with 3-nanometers state of the art today. Legacy chips are typically considered those made with 28-nm equipment or above, technology introduced more than a decade ago.

Senior E.U. and U.S. officials are concerned about Beijing's drive to dominate this market for both economic and security reasons, the people said. They worry Chinese companies could dump their legacy chips on global markets in the future, driving foreign rivals out of business like in the solar industry, they said. Western companies may then become dependent on China for these semiconductors, the people said. Buying such critical tech components from China may create national security risks, especially if the silicon is needed in defense equipment. "The United States and its partners should be on guard to mitigate nonmarket behavior by China's emerging semiconductor firms," researchers Robert Daly and Matthew Turpin wrote in a recent essay for the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University. "Over time, it could create new U.S. or partner dependencies on China-based supply chains that do not exist today, impinging on U.S. strategic autonomy."

According to Windows Central, Lenovo is working on a handheld gaming PC dubbed "Legion Go," featuring Windows 11 and Ryzen chips. From the report: While details are scant right now, we understand this will sport AMD's new Phoenix processors, which the chip firm describes as ultra-thin, focused on gaming, AI, and graphics for ultrabooks. The fact the Legion Go will sport Ryzen chips pretty much guarantees that this is a Windows PC gaming handheld, as part of Lenovo's popular gaming "Legion" brand. As of writing, there's no information on exactly when this device could become available, or if, indeed, it'll become available at all.

According to our information, the Legion Go could sport an 8-inch screen, making it larger than the ASUS ROG Ally or the Steam Deck, both of which have a 7-inch display. PC and console games ported to PC are often designed for larger monitors or even TVs, and on smaller screens, UI elements can be difficult to see, especially if the game doesn't have a UI scaling option. A larger display could give the Legion Go a decent advantage over its competitors if it remains lightweight and balanced, which of course remains to be seen. The AMD Phoenix 7040 series chips are described by the firm as "ultra-thin" for powerful, but elegant ultrabook-style devices. They should lend themselves well to a device like the Legion Go, supporting 15W low-power states for lightweight games and maximized battery life, similar to the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. The Z1 Extreme in the ASUS ROG Ally can perform with a TDP below 15W, however, which could give the ROG Ally some advantages there. There's every chance the Legion Go could have other configurations we're unaware of yet, though, we'll just have to wait and see.

Apple's Screen Time controls are failing parents. From a report: The company's cloud-based Family Sharing system is designed in part for parents to remotely schedule off-limits time and restrict apps and adult content on their children's iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch models. Trouble is, parents are finding that when they use their iPhones to set restrictions on their kids' devices, the changes don't stick. "We are aware that some users may be experiencing an issue where Screen Time settings are unexpectedly reset," an Apple spokeswoman said. "We take these reports very seriously and we have been, and will continue, making updates to improve the situation."

Downtime, found in Settings under Screen Time, is the tool parents use to define the hours each day that a kid's device is limited or completely unusable. But when they check the setting lately, they often see the times they scheduled have reverted to a previous setting, or they see no restrictions at all. This can go unnoticed for days or weeks -- and kids don't always report back when they get extra time for games and social media. Apple previously acknowledged the bug, calling it "an issue where Screen Time settings may reset or not sync across all devices." However, the company had reported the issue fixed with iOS 16.5, which came out in May. In our testing the bug persists, even with the new public beta of iOS 17.