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2024-03-24 16:25:35| Engadget

Sonos is readying the release of its followup to 2021s Roam speaker, and it should be here in time for all your outdoor summer excursions. In the Power On newsletter this week, Bloombergs Mark Gurman says Sonos is planning a June release for the Roam 2 speaker. The first-generation Roam was Sonos second attempt at a portable speaker, with a slim, triangular build that weighs less than a pound but produces impressive sound. According to Gurman, this version of the Roam will feature the same touch-sensitive control panel seen in some of the companys other speakers, like the Era 100. Sonos is also reportedly working on a new app to pair with its devices, starting with the Roam 2 and an upcoming set of premium headphones that are positioned as an AirPods Max rival. Those headphones will cost $450, Gurman reports, and are also expected to be released in June a bit behind their original schedule. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sonos-roam-2-portable-speaker-may-arrive-just-in-time-for-summer-152535125.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-23 20:09:11| Engadget

SAG-AFTRA has ratified new contracts for voice actors working in TV animation after members votes came in at over 95 percent in favor of the terms. The three-year agreements put into place new protections around the use of AI, including a requirement that producers obtain an actors consent before using their name as a prompt to create an AI-generated voice. SAG-AFTRA announced the contracts approval on Friday night. Theyll be effective through June 30, 2026. Per the new contracts, the term voice actor only includes humans. The contracts also outline voice actors rights around studios use of their digital replicas, and require producers to notify and bargain with the union any time they use AI-generated voices instead of voice actors. This is the first SAG-AFTRA animation voiceover contract with protections against the misuse of artificial intelligence, TV Animation Negotiating Committee Co-Chairs Bob Bergen and David Jolliffe said in a statement. SAG-AFTRAs Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the agreement represents a meaningful step forward in expanding our A.I. protections, along with providing important new terms in the areas of foreign residuals, high-budget SVOD [subscription video-on-demand] productions, late payments and much more. The contracts establish a series of wage increases, starting with a 7 percent increase dated back to July 1, 2023, which actors will receive retroactive payments for. That will be followed by a 4 percent increase July 1 of this year, and a 3.5 percent increase the following year. The union earlier this year announced that it had reached a deal with the AI voice generation company Replica Studios to give voice actors a way to safely license their digital voice replicas for video games. AI protection were also a crucial component of the strike-ending deal SAG-AFTRA reached with Hollywood studios late last year.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sag-aftra-ratifies-tv-animation-contracts-that-establish-ai-protections-for-voice-actors-190911363.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-23 17:28:06| Engadget

The bright orange Rabbit R1 is easily one of the most memorable devices to have debuted this year, and if youre among the lucky few who were able to put in an order before the first batch sold out, yours will soon be on its way to you. According to Rabbit, the first batch of US pre-orders will ship out on March 31 (Easter Sunday). Itll take a few weeks for the devices to get to their destinations, though. The company estimates the first R1 orders will be in customers hands around April 24. Rabbit is also hosting a pickup party in New York City on April 23 that it says is open to all buyers, not just batch one. It plans to release more information on the party and the first deliveries next week. The companys Rabbit R1 demo, which came in parallel to CES, sparked a lot of hype and a lot more questions about the purpose of dedicated AI hardware in the era of smartphones. Its positioned as a more useful AI assistant that can go with you anywhere, powered in large part by San Francisco startup Perplexitys LLM. Co-designed by Teenage Engineering, the Rabbit R1 features a physical scroll wheel and a rotating camera, plus an adorable animated bunny that serves as its mascot. r1 pickup party in NYC April 23rd. RSVP will only be available to confirmed r1 order customers of all batches. Confirmed customers will be able to pick up r1 on site. More event details coming soon. pic.twitter.com/MKry7LdhfZ rabbit inc. (@rabbit_hmi) March 23, 2024 The company started taking pre-orders for the $199 Rabbit R1 back in January, and the first several batches of 10,000 devices each sold out fast. While batch one starts shipping soon, buyers who got in later will still have to wait several months for theirs to arrive. Pre-orders are currently open for batch seven.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rabbit-r1-starts-shipping-to-the-first-batch-of-us-buyers-next-week-162804743.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-23 16:00:31| Engadget

Good morning. I hope you're having a good weekend so far. Unfortunately, our recording schedule meant I didn't get to shoehorn in the fact that the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple it'll pop up again and again for the next six months but we do have Apple striking a possible deal with Google to use its Gemini AI in future iPhones. Yes, I didn't see that coming, either.  If you're one of our money-to-spend readers, prepare for Dyson's next-gen robot vacuum, which is finally debuting in the US. It's a mere $1,200. Sorry, $1,199. This week's stories: The first human Neuralink patient controlling a computer with his thoughts Dyson enters the US robot vacuum market with the 360 Vis Nav Apple wants to bring Google's Gemini AI to iPhones And read this: Just read as Engadget Editor (and Doctor Who critic) Daniel Cooper punches Disney+ in the solar plexus with its awful global release strategy for the next series featuring the timelord. The first two hour-long episodes land on May 11 and will then air on BBC One later that day in prime time. But that initial online launch is midnight if you're in the UK. Dan lives in the UK. Daniel is not happy. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-neuralinks-first-human-patient-plays-chess-with-his-mind-150031220.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-23 15:00:18| Engadget

Federal authorities in the US asked Google for the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity of the accounts that watched certain YouTube videos between January 1 and 8, 2023, according to unsealed court documents viewed by Forbes. People who watched those videos while they weren't logged into an account weren't safe either, because the government also asked for their IP addresses. The investigators reportedly ordered Google to hand over the information as part of an investigation into someone who uses the name "elonmuskwhm" online.  Authorities suspect that elonmuskwhm is selling bitcoin for cash and is, thus, breaking money laundering laws, as well as running an unlicensed money transmitting business. Undercover agents reportedly sent the suspect links to videos of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software in their conversations back in early January. Those videos, however, weren't private and had been collectively viewed by over 30,000 times, which means the government was potentially asking Google for private information on quite a large number of users. "There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators," authorities reportedly told the company.  Based on the documents Forbes had seen, the court granted the order but had asked Google to keep it under wraps. It's also unclear if Google handed over the data the authorities were asking for. In another incident, authorities asked the company for a list of accounts that "viewed and/or interacted" with eight YouTube livestreams. Cops requested for that information after learning that they were being watched through a stream while they were searching an area following a report that an explosive was placed inside a trashcan. One of those video livestreams was posted by the Boston and Maine Live account, which has over 130,000 subscribers. A Google spokesperson told Forbes that the company follows a "rigorous process" to protect the privacy of its users. But critics and privacy advocates are still concerned that government agencies are overstepping and are using their power to obtain sensitive information on people who just happened to watch specific YouTube videos and aren't in any way doing anything illegal.  "What we watch online can reveal deeply sensitive information about usour politics, our passions, our religious beliefs, and much more," John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Forbes. "It's fair to expect that law enforcement won't have access to that information without probable cause. This order turns that assumption on its head."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/authorities-reportedly-ordered-google-to-reveal-the-identities-of-some-youtube-videos-viewers-140018019.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-23 10:30:36| Engadget

If you're in the US, you might see a new shaded section at the top of your Google Search results with a summary answering your inquiry, along with links for more information. That section, generated by Google's generative AI technology, used to appear only if you've opted into the Search Generative Experience (SGE) in the Search Labs platform. Now, according to Search Engine Land, Google has started adding the experience on a "subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the US." And that is why you could be getting Google's experimental AI-generated section even if you haven't switched it on.  The company introduced SGE at its I/O developer conference in May last year, shortly after it opened up access to its ChatGPT rival Bard, now called Gemini. By November, it had rolled out the feature to 120 countries with more languages other than English, but it still remained opt in. Search Engine Land says Google will start showing you the experience even if you haven't opted in if you look up complex queries or if it thinks you could benefit from getting information from multiple websites. "How do I get marks off painted walls," is apparently one example.  Google told the publication that for these tests, it will only show AI overviews if it has confidence that they will show information better than what Search results might surface. Apparently, the company is conducting these tests, because it wants to get feedback from more people, specifically from those who didn't choose to activate the feature. That way it can have a better idea of how generative AI can serve those who may not be tech-savvy or those who couldn't care less about generative AI. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-will-start-showing-ai-powered-search-results-to-users-who-didnt-opt-in-093036257.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-22 21:55:37| TRENDWATCHING.COM

Spotted by: Franziska Füsting

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-22 19:56:16| Engadget

The social network Threads is going to start showing live sports scores, starting with NBA basketball. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the initiative and wrote that itll be adding more leagues in the near future.  Heres how it works. During a game, just search for the teams and youll see an up-to-date score. If the game is over, a search will bring up the final score. You can also find out when a game will start by searching for it ahead of time. This obviously resembles how X does things, as the platform began showing live sports scores back in 2017, when it was called Twitter. Each score is accompanied by the two team logos. Tapping on these logos redirects users to a conversation about that team. Threads, along with Instagram, recently decided to stop recommending political content, so emphasizing sports is a decent way to capture the real time vibe of a hip and happening social network. To that end, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has been, sigh, courting NBA diehards for months, calling the community of basketball fans on Threads a great example of the kind of thing we hoped to see on the app. A Threads spokesperson told Engadget that basketball has become one of the most popular topics and that NBA Threads has become one of the apps most active sports communities. This makes sense, as NBA discourse is also huge on X. NBA Twitter, as it's still called in sports media, regularly drives coverage and conversation about the pro basketball league. It sure seems like Meta hopes to siphon away some of that influence. Apple also recently announced its own sports-related initiative. The first-party Sports iPhone app offers real-time stats for a number of major leagues, including the NBA, and throws up live score data on the lock screen during a game. Threads is all over the place this week. The platform introduced a new algorithm-tuning feature that works by swiping left and right on posts and announced a beta test that lets users share content to Mastodon and other fediverse services. The live scores feature is also in its testing phase. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/threads-is-getting-into-live-sports-scores-starting-with-the-nba-185616086.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-22 19:11:30| Engadget

Porn bots are more or less ingrained in the social media experience, despite platforms best efforts to stamp them out. Weve grown accustomed to seeing them flooding the comments sections of memes and celebrities posts, and, if you have a public account, youve probably noticed them watching and liking your stories. But their behavior keeps changing ever so slightly to stay ahead of automated filters, and now things are starting to get weird. While porn bots at one time mostly tried to lure people in with suggestive or even overtly raunchy hook lines (like the ever-popular, DON'T LOOK at my STORY, if you don't want to MASTURBATE!), the approach these days is a little more abstract. Its become common to see bot accounts posting a single, inoffensive, completely-irrelevant-to-the-subject word, sometimes accompanied by an emoji or two. On one post I stumbled across recently, five separate spam accounts all using the same profile picture a closeup of a person in a red thong spreading their asscheeks commented, Pristine , Music , Sapphire , Serenity and Faith . Another bot its profile picture a headless frontal shot of someones lingerie-clad body commented on the same meme post, Michigan . Once youve noticed them, its hard not to start keeping a mental log of the most ridiculous instances. agriculture one bot wrote. On another post: terror and insect. The bizarre one-word comments are everywhere; the porn bots, it seems, have completely lost it. Really, what were seeing is the emergence of another avoidance maneuver scammers use to help their bots slip by Metas detection technology. That, and they might be getting a little lazy. Screenshots by Engadget They just want to get into the conversation, so having to craft a coherent sentence probably doesn't make sense for them, Satnam Narang, a research engineer for the cybersecurity company Tenable, told Engadget. Once scammers get their bots into the mix, they can have other bots pile likes onto those comments to further elevate them, explains Narang, who has been investigating social media scams since the MySpace days. Using random words helps scammers fly under the radar of moderators who may be looking for particular keywords. In the past, theyve tried methods like putting spaces or special characters between every letter of words that might be flagged by the system. You can't necessarily ban an account or take an account down if they just comment the word insect or terror, because it's very benign, Narang said. But if they're like, Check my story, or something that might flag their systems. Its an evasion technique and clearly it's working if you're seeing them on these big name accounts. It's just a part of that dance. That dance is one social media platforms and bots have been doing for years, seemingly to no end. Meta has said it stops millions of fake accounts from being created on a daily basis across its suite of apps, and catches millions more, often within minutes after creation. Yet spam accounts are still prevalent enough to show up in droves on high traffic posts and slip into the story views of even users with small followings. The companys most recent transparency report, which includes stats on fake accounts its removed, shows Facebook nixed over a billion fake accounts last year alone, but currently offers no data for Instagram. Spammers use every platform available to them to deceive and manipulate people across the internet and constantly adapt their tactics to evade enforcement, a Meta spokesperson said. That is why we invest heavily in our enforcement and review teams, and have specialized detection tools to identify spam. Screenshot by Engadget Last December, Instagram rolled out a slew of tools aimed at giving users more visibility into how its handling spam bots and giving content creators more control over their interactions with these profiles. Account holders can now, for example, bulk-delete follow requests from profiles flagged as potential spam. Instagram users may also have noticed the more frequent appearance of the hidden comments section at the bottom of some posts, where comments flagged as offensive or spam can be relegated to minimize encounters with them. It's a game of whack-a-mole, said Narang, and scammers are winning. You think you've got it, but then it just pops up somewhere else. Scammers, he says, are very adept at figuring out why they got banned and finding new ways to skirt detection accordingly. One might assume social media users today would be too savvy to fall for obviously bot-written comments like Michigan , but according to Narang, scammers success doesnt necessarily rely on tricking hapless victims into handing over their money. Theyre often participating in affiliate programs, and all they need is to get people to visit a website usually branded as an adult dating service or the like and sign up for free. The bots link in bio typically directs to an intermediary site hosting a handful of URLs that may promise XXX chats or photos and lead to the service in question. Scammers can get a small amount of money, say a dollar or so, for every real user who makes an account. In the off chance that someone signs up with a credit card, the kickback would be much higher. Even if one percent of [the target demographic] signs up, you're making some money, Narang said. And if you're running multiple, different accounts and you have different profiles pushing these links out, you're probably making a decent chunk of change. Instagram scammers are likely to have spam bots on TikTok, X and other sites too, Narang said. It all adds up. Screenshot by Engadget The harms from spam bots go beyond whatever headaches they may ultimately cause the few who have been duped into signing up for a sketchy service. Porn bots primarily use real peoples photos that theyve stolen from public profiles, which can be embarrassing once the spam account starts friend requesting everyone the depicted person knows (speaking from personal experience here). The process of getting Meta to remove these cloned accounts can be a draining effort. Their presence also adds to the challenges that real content creators in the sex and sex-related industries face on social media, which many rely on as an avenue to connect with wider audiences but must constantly fight with to keep from being deplatformed. Imposter Instagram accounts can rack up thousands of followers, funneling potential visitors away from the real accounts and casting doubt on their legitimacy. And real accounts sometimes get flagged as spam in Metas hunt for bots, putting those with racy content even more at risk of account suspension and bans. Unfortunately, the bot problem isnt one that has any easy solution. They're just continuously finding new ways around [moderation], coming up with new schemes, Narang said. Scammers will always follow the money and, to that end, the crowd. While porn bots on Instagram have evolved to the point of posting nonsense to avoid moderators, more sophisticated bots chasing a younger demographic on TikTok are posting somewhat believable commentary on Taylor Swift videos, Narang says. The next big thing in social media will inevitably emerge sooner or later, and theyll go there too. As long as there's money to be made, Narang said, there's going to be incentives for these scammers.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-porn-bots-latest-tactic-is-ridiculously-low-effort-but-its-working-181130528.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

2024-03-22 19:06:55| Engadget

As the Senate considers the bill that would force a sale or ban of TikTok, lawmakers have heard directly from intelligence officials about the alleged national security threat posed by the app. Now, two prominent senators are asking the office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify and make public what they have shared. We are deeply troubled by the information and concerns raised by the intelligence community in recent classified briefings to Congress, Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn write. It is critically important that the American people, especially TikTok users, understand the national security issues at stake. The exact nature of the intelligence community's concerns about the app has long been a source of debate. Lawmakers in the House received a similar briefing just ahead of their vote on the bill. But while the briefing seemed to bolster support for the measure, some members said they left unconvinced, with one lawmaker saying that not a single thing that we heard was unique to TikTok. According to Axios, some senators described their briefing as shocking, though the group isnt exactly known for their particularly nuanced understanding of the tech industry. (Blumenthal, for example, once pressed Facebook executives on whether they would commit to ending finsta.) In its report, Axios says that one lawmaker said they were told TikTok is able to spy on the microphone on users' devices, track keystrokes and determine what the users are doing on other apps. That may sound alarming, but its also a description of the kinds of app permissions social media services have been requesting for more than a decade. TikTok has long denied that its relationship with parent company ByteDance would enable Chinese government officials to interfere with its service or spy on Americans. And so far, there is no public evidence that TikTok has ever been used in this way. If US intelligence officials do have evidence that is more than hypothetical, it would be a major bombshell in the long-running debate surrounding the app.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/senators-ask-intelligence-officials-to-declassify-details-about-tiktok-and-bytedance-180655697.html?src=rss

Category: Marketing and Advertising
 

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