WhatsApp will let you hide your IP address from whoever you call

A new feature in WhatsApp will let you hide your IP address from whoever you call using the app. Knowing someone’s IP address can reveal a lot of personal information such as their location and internet service provider, so having the option to hide it is a major privacy win. “This new feature provides an additional layer of privacy and security geared towards our most privacy-conscious users,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post.

WhatsApp currently relays calls either through its own servers or by establishing a direct connection called peer-to-peer with whoever you are calling depending on network conditions. Peer-to-peer calls often provide better voice quality, but require both devices to know each other’s IP addresses.

Once you turn the new feature, known simply as "Protect IP address in calls" on, however, WhatsApp will always relay your calls through its own servers rather than establishing a peer-to-peer connection, even if it means a slight hit to sound quality. All calls will continue to remain end-to-end encrypted, even if they go through WhatsApp’s servers, the company said.

WhatsApp has been adding more privacy features over the last few months. In June, the company added a feature that let people automatically silence unknown callers. It also introduced a “Privacy Checkup” section to allow users to tune up a host of privacy settings from a single place in the app, and earlier this year, added a feature that lets people lock certain chats with a fingerprint or facial recognition.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whatsapp-will-let-you-hide-your-ip-address-from-whoever-you-call-140045546.html?src=rss

GPT-4 Turbo is OpenAI’s most powerful large language model yet

During its first-ever developer conference on Monday, OpenAI previewed GPT-4 Turbo, a brand new version of the large language model that powers its flagship product, ChatGPT. The newest model is capable of accepting much longer inputs than previous versions — up to 300 pages of text, compared to the current limit of 50. This means that theoretically, prompts can be a lot longer and more complex, and responses might be more meaningful.

OpenAI has also updated the data that GPT-4 Turbo is trained on. The company claims that the newest model now has knowledge about the world until April 2023. The previous version was only caught up until September 2021, although recent updates to the non-Turbo GPT-4 did include the ability to browse the internet to get the latest information.

GPT-4 Turbo will also accept images as prompts directly in the chat box, wherein it can generate captions or provide a description of what the image depicts. It will also handle text-to-speech requests. And users will now be able to upload documents directly and ask the service to analyze them — a capability that other AI chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude have included for months.

For developers, using the newest model will effectively be three times cheaper. OpenAI said that it was slashing costs for input and output tokens — a unit used by large language models to understand instructions and respond with answers.

In addition to announcing its newest large language model, OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT now has more than 100 million weekly active users around the world and is used by more than 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies. The company also said that it would defend customers, including enterprises, not only against legal claims around copyright infringement that might arise as a result of using its products, but it would also pay for costs incurred as a result.

OpenAI Dev Day also saw the reveal of single-application "mini-ChatGPTs" today, small tools that are focused on a single task that can be built without even knowing how to code. GPTs created by the community can be immediately shared, and OpenAI will open a "store" where verified builders can make their creation available to anyone. 

The company didn’t announce when GPT-4 Turbo would come out of preview and be available more generally. Accessing GPT-4 currently costs $20 a month.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gpt-4-turbo-is-openais-most-powerful-large-language-model-yet-211956553.html?src=rss

Live in Washington DC? You might be able to get free AirTags for your car

The city of Washington DC will distribute free Apple AirTags to residents in certain neighborhoods, mayor Muriel Bowser announced on Wednesday. The aim: to make stolen cars easier for police to track down.

“We are equipping residents with technology that will allow the [Metropolitan Police Department] to address these crimes, recover vehicles, and hold people accountable,” Bowser said in a statement, "we will continue to use all the tools we have, and add new tools, to keep our city safe.” Local publication DCist first reported the story.

DC residents in neighborhoods with the highest numbers of vehicle theft will be eligible to get free AirTags at three different events in the city over the next few months, starting next week. It’s not clear how many AirTags, which cost $29 a pop, will be given away.

Police officers will help residents put the AirTags in their cars and register them on their iPhones. If a car is stolen, residents will need to report the location of the car as it appears in Apple’s FindMy app to law enforcement.

DC is the second city to hand out free AirTags to make finding car thieves easier. Earlier this year, New York City mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would give away 500 AirTags to make finding car thieves easier. Since then the NYPD has held several AirTag and Tile tracker giveaways, focusing on Kia and Hyundai owners, though it's unclear if these come from the same supply announced by the mayor.

AirTags, which Apple released in 2021, have often sparked controversy. Critics have said that they let stalkers track victims silently without their knowledge — a safety issue Apple eventually addressed. But the devices have also been useful, letting people keep track of pets, checked baggage and stolen campaign signs

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/live-in-washington-dc-you-might-be-able-to-get-free-airtags-for-your-car-202616642.html?src=rss

Thousands of people are uninstalling ad blockers after YouTube’s big crackdown

YouTube’s crackdown on ad blockers is having an impact beyond YouTube. Multiple ad blocking apps claim that thousands of people have uninstalled their products since YouTube started showing warnings to people attempting to watch videos with ad blockers enabled.

One of the companies, AdGuard, told Wired that more than 11,000 people have uninstalled its Chrome extension each day since October 9, compared to 6,000 uninstallations per day before YouTube implemented the change. On October 18, 52,000 people uninstalled AdGuard, the company’s CTO Andrey Meshkov told Wired. However, installations of AdGuard’s paid version, which YouTube’s crackdown doesn’t affect, went up.

Another ad blocking company, Ghostery, said that its usage was flat in October as it experienced three to five times the daily number of installs as well as uninstalls. Notably, the company said that more than 90 percent of its users who completed a survey about why they uninstalled the product said they did so because the tool no longer worked with YouTube.

Since YouTube’s crackdown only seems to affect people who access its website through Chrome on laptops and desktops, some users also tried to use other browsers as a workaround. Ghostery told Wired that its installations of Microsoft’s Edge browser went up by 30 percent in October compared to September.

YouTube ads are increasingly contributing more to Google’s overall revenue. The company sold more than $22 billion in ads on the platform from the beginning of this year through September. But the streaming platform is also trying to push more people to pay for YouTube Premium, which gets rid of ads, lets people download videos, stream videos in higher quality and access YouTube Music. Earlier this year, the company bumped up YouTube Premium’s pricing by $2 to $14 a month.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/thousands-of-people-are-uninstalling-ad-blockers-after-youtubes-big-crackdown-174009041.html?src=rss