YouTube will limit fitness and weight video recommendations to European teens

Posted on 05/09/2024 by Mariella Moon

YouTube has introduced additional safeguards for teens on its website, which includes limiting the content they see that could lead them to form negative beliefs about themselves. As the Google-owned video sharing platform explains, teenagers are more likely to be critical of themselves if they see repeated messages about ideal social standards. In response, YouTube is now limiting repeated recommendations of videos featuring specific fitness levels or body weights, as well as those that display "social aggression in the form of non-contact fights and intimidation" for European users. As The Guardian notes, this rule is already being enforced in the US.

The website said it decided on those video categories after reviewing which ones "may be innocuous as a single video, but could be problematic for some teens if viewed repetitively." In addition, it has deployed crisis center panels across Europe that will give teens a quick way to connect with live support from recognized crisis service partners. A panel could show up on younger users' interface if they watch videos related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, among other sensitive topics. It could also pop up in their search results if they look for topics linked to specific health crises or emotional distress.

Aside from limiting potentially harmful recommendations, YouTube is adding a new parental control feature that would let parents link their accounts to their teens' for users in the US and other regions. Parents or guardians will see their child's channel activity, such as the number of comments, uploads and subscriptions, in the Family Center hub. YouTube will also send them an email if their teen uploads a video or a Short, and if they start a livestream, even if they're set to private.

The website told TechCrunch, though, that the alerts the parents receive will not include information on the content of comments and uploads. Parents will also not be able to change their kids' age on their accounts. This feature is a further expansion of the parental controls YouTube introduced in 2021. Back then, the website opened a public beta for supervised accounts that allowed guardians to control the kinds of videos their kids can see.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/youtube-will-limit-fitness-and-weight-video-recommendations-to-european-teens-123003587.html?src=rss

DraftKings gets slapped with fine for online slots that paid zilch

Posted on 03/09/2024 by Danny Gallagher

DraftKings and White Hat Gaming must pay the state of Connecticut a total of $22,500 in fines after its online slot machine failed to issue players a win for a whole week. NBC News reported that the state’s Department of Consumer Protection uncovered the non-paying slot machine and issued the fines.

The sports betting and gambling website received a $19,000 fine and White Hat Gaming received a $3,500 fine. The website promised its players that its Deal or No Deal Banker’s Bonanza online slot machine would pay out 95 cents for every dollar it took from players. However, a Department of Consumer Protections report found that the slot machine didn’t pay out one red cent from August 15-21 last year. A total of 522 players put almost $24,000 into the machine for more than 20,569 spins during the period the machine refused to pay out any winnings.

An improperly loaded file caused the machine to glitch and refuse to let players win the advertised amount. Once the faulty file was located and identified as the cause of the glitch, DraftKings and White Hat Gaming relaunched the game on August 22, 2023.

The report also found that DraftKings and White Hat Gaming did not disclose the faulty machine to state officials until the Consumer Protections department requested the information last year. One player told the gaming website that they played “a couple hundred spins” at 20 cents per spin and the machine never paid out a “single winning spin or partial win,” according to the report. DraftKings officials responded to several complaints with messages like “I understand it can be frustrating to have a bit of a cold streak, but I can assure you there is nothing wrong with the game itself.”

The slot machine continued to withhold its winnings for another week until White Hat Gaming identified the glitch and repaired the software a second time. White Hat also says in the state’s report that all customers received refunds “without any notification from DraftKings,” according to the report.

A spokesperson for the Department of Consumer Protection also told NBC News that White Hat Gaming “responded swiftly” to investigators’ inquiries. However, DraftKings’ response “was not satisfactory” hence the higher fine.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/draftkings-gets-slapped-with-fine-for-online-slots-that-paid-zilch-222651632.html?src=rss

Bluesky added over 2 million Brazilian users after Brazil banned Elon Musk’s X

Posted on 03/09/2024 by Mariella Moon

In a post on its own social network, Bluesky has revealed that it has added 2.6 million users over the past few days. That's a lot of growth in such a short time for a platform that only has around 8.8 million users overall. In a blog post, the company said over 85 percent of the new users are Brazilian, which works out well in excess of 2 million.

If you'll recall, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes recently ordered the country's internet service providers to block X after the website formerly known as Twitter refused to ban specific accounts accused of spreading disinformation.

Moraes also ordered Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores and for people caught using VPN to access the website to be fined R$50,000 ($8,900). Brazil's Supreme Court has just upheld the ban on X after its judges voted unanimously in favor of the measure, according to the BBC. X owner Elon Musk accused Moraes of destroying democracy "for political purposes." The website also created a new profile called "Alexandre Files," which it said would shine a light "on the abuses of Brazilian law committed by Alexandre de Moraes."

After X became inaccessible in Brazil, users in the country found new homes elsewhere. Bluesky experienced a huge spike in the number of unique daily likes and posters, as well as in the number of unique followers, on the last days of August. While the website isn't quite as robust as Twitter yet, it recently teased that its next major app updated will come with video features, which could help keep its new users around.

Some other stats around Bluesky's meteroric rise show the impact of this influx of people to the platform. Comparing a 96-hour period from August 30 to September 2 to a similar period a month earlier, engineer Jaz said likes on the platform had risen from 13 million to 104.6 million, follows grew from 1.4 million to 100.8 million, and reposts increased from 1.3 million to 11 million. Bluesky developer Paul Frazee warned that users may see outages and performance issues as the platform has "never seen traffic like this."

Bluesky is a decentralized social network that was previously funded and was founded in 2019 by Twitter-founder Jack Dorsey. The website launched as an invite-only social network, but it finally opened to the public earlier this year. It also introduced new features most users would look for if they're set on leaving X, including direct messaging. While DMs only worked between two users upon launch, the website promised to roll out group messaging, media support and end-to-end encryption "down the line." Dorsey, however, exited the Bluesky board in May and later claimed that the website was "literally repeating all the mistakes" he made while running Twitter.

Update, September 4, 3:10PM ET: This story was updated after publishing. A section in the original story which inferred that the influx of users was likely Brazilian in origin was replaced with a statistic from Bluesky published on September 4 which confirmed this to be true. At the same time, further details were added to the story on the rise of follows, likes and reposts on the platform.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-added-over-2-million-brazilian-users-after-brazil-banned-elon-musks-x-140032042.html?src=rss

Social media companies can’t be forced to block teens from seeing ‘harmful’ content, judge rules

Posted on 02/09/2024 by Karissa Bell

A federal judge has ruled that social media companies can’t be required to block certain types of content from teens. The ruling will prevent some aspects of a controversial social media law in Texas from going into effect.

The ruling came as the result of tech industry groups’ challenge to the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, a Texas law that imposes age verification requirements and other policies for how social media companies treat teenage users. But, as The Verge points out, the measure also requires companies to “prevent the known minor’s exposure to harmful material,” including content that “glorifies” self-harm and substance abuse.

It’s that latter requirement that was struck down, with the judge saying that “a state cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online.” The judge also criticized the language used in the law, writing in his decision that terms like “glorifying” and “promoting” are “politically charged” and “undefined.”

At the same time, the judge left other aspects of the law, including age verification requirements and bans on targeted advertising to minors, in place. NetChoice, the tech industry group that challenged the law, has argued that measures like the Scope Act require major tech companies to increase the amount of data collected from minors.

The Texas law, originally passed last year, is one of many across the country attempting to change how social media platforms deal with underage users. New York recently passed two laws restricting social media companies’ ability to collect data on teenage users, and requiring parental consent for younger users to access “addictive” features like algorithmic feeds. California lawmakers also recently passed a measure, which has yet to be signed into law by the governor, that requires social media companies to limit notifications to minors and restrict them from “addictive” algorithms.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/social-media-companies-cant-be-forced-to-block-teens-from-seeing-harmful-content-judge-rules-221321184.html?src=rss

The world’s largest TV and movie piracy streaming ring is dead

Posted on 29/08/2024 by Danny Gallagher

The highly illegal but very popular media streaming site Fmovies and an affiliated network of pirated movie and TV show websites have been shut down. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a global coalition of movie studios and entertainment companies including Disney, NBCUniversal and MGM, announced the dismantling of the illegal streaming site, several of its other websites including bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer and aniwave and its video hosting provider vidsrc.to, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Fmovies operation was based in Vietnam. Hanoi police arrested two unidentified men in connection with the pirated media empire who are awaiting charges.

Fmovies launched in 2016 and racked up 374 million monthly visits more than 6.7 billion visits from January 2023-June 2024. Data from SimilarWeb ranked Fmovies as the 280th most visited website in any category and the 11th most popular TV, movies and streaming website. ACE called the Fmovies syndicate “the largest piracy ring in the world,” according to a statement released earlier today.

The website even has its own subreddit where users could request and share links to TV shows and movies. As authorities closed in on the Fmovies operators, Reddit users started posting notices that the syndicate’s streaming sites weren’t working or starting to shut down. When news of Fmovies’ demise started to surface, users started asking for suggestions of alternate pirating sites.

ACE Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin called the shutdown and arrests “a stunning victory for casts, crews, directors, studios and the creative community across the globe.”

The walls seem to be closing around some of the web’s bigger media pirates. ACE claimed an earlier victory on August 15 following the shutdown of the aniwave illegal anime streaming website. Another pirate website, fboxz.to, shut down a few days later and posted a goodbye note on its homepage telling its visitors to “Please pay for the movies/shows, that’s what we should do to show our respect to people behind the movies/shows,” according to TorrentFreak.

The past month hasn’t been kinder to online pirates either. Earlier this month, the US extradited Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload who was the poster child for online piracy in the 2010s, from New Zealand to face charges for operating his video downloading empire.

Authorities arrested Dotcom in 2012 in his New Zealand home on counts including racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering and copyright distribution. His indictment claims that Megaupload caused $500 million in damages and made $175 million in advertising and subscription revenue from its illegal media library.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/the-worlds-largest-tv-and-movies-piracy-streaming-ring-is-dead-230141145.html?src=rss

Reddit is back up after a 30-minute outage

Posted on 28/08/2024 by Will Shanklin

Reddit is back up after an outage took the site out for half an hour this afternoon. The site appears to have been down across the board, apart from a blank homepage that didn’t contain or point to any content. “We encountered an error,” the website reads. Attempting to navigate to any specific subreddit brought up the error you see above: “We were unable to load the content for this page.” However, as of 4:45PM ET, we began to see seeing subreddits and comments loading again as usual.

The Reddit status update page lists the problem as “Degraded Performance for reddit.com,” and was initially flagged as “Investigating.” At 4:32PM ET, the status was updated as “Identified - The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

At 4:45PM ET, it was updated again as “Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.” However, the site's performance still labeled as “Degraded.”

Of course, the jokes on social media didn’t take long to start rolling in:

reddit is down. how am i supposed to google anything??
— Corey Atad (@CoreyAtad) August 28, 2024

Reddit and Google signed a high-profile deal for the search giant to train its AI on Reddit user data, and search results have been increasingly Reddit-leaning over the past year. Reddit had another major outage earlier this year when it went down for nearly an hour. We’ll keep an eye on the status and update this story accordingly.

Update, August 28, 5PM ET: This story was a published as a developing news artcle about Reddit being down. It was modified after publish with more details about the breadth and length of the outage, and the headline has been changed to reflect the site's current status.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/reddit-is-back-up-after-a-30-minute-outage-203615473.html?src=rss

Threads is making fediverse replies more visible in its app

Posted on 28/08/2024 by Karissa Bell

Over the last six months, Meta has slowly begun to make good on its promise to make Threads compatible with the fediverse. The app allows users to share their posts to Mastodon and other Activity Pub-enabled services and began showing replies originating on those services earlier this summer.

Now, Threads is making those replies even more visible by allowing users who have opted in to fediverse sharing to see replies on other people’s posts. With the change, a new “fediverse replies” section will appear underneath posts that have drawn replies from Mastodon servers and other federated accounts.

How replies from Mastodon will appear on threads.

Practically, this means that a lot more fediverse content will be visible within Threads. Up until now, most users probably weren’t seeing that many replies from Mastodon and other sites unless they had a particularly large following or a post that was widely shared. But now, you’ll be able to see all those replies just by browsing Threads.

As with previous updates, Threads’ support for other Activity Pub content is still limited. Users need to opt-in to fediverse sharing in order to view replies from other apps. The feature, which is still labeled as being in “beta,” notes that some replies may not be visible on the Meta-owned service. And Threads still doesn’t support replies to those replies, which drastically limits the ability to engage with other fediverse users. (In a follow-up, Meta engineer Peter Cottle said adding that functionality is “top of mind.”) But the update might help incentivize more users to open their accounts to the fediverse, which is an important step for anyone hoping to bring decentralized social media into the mainstream.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-is-making-fediverse-replies-more-visible-in-its-app-194543494.html?src=rss

Instagram copies… Myspace?

Posted on 22/08/2024 by Sarah Fielding

If there's one thing that's guaranteed in the world of social media, it's that platforms are going to copy each other's features. However, the newest iteration of this is still surprising, to say the least. Instagram has announced a new music feature that allows you to attach a song to your profile a la Myspace.

Instagram has copied MySpace, a platform that peaked long before Instagram ever existed, and arguably was thrown into decline by the rise of Instagram's parent company.

So, how does this new feature work? You can choose a song by going to edit profile and clicking "Add music to your profile." You can then choose a song or search in the For You section. From there, pick the 30 seconds of the song you want to feature and it will remain on your profile until you pick a new one or decide Myspace features are better left in the past. Don't worry if you're scrolling in public as songs won't start playing now the second you go on someone's profile — click the play button to hear it.

Instagram's new music feature on phone screen.

Instagram teamed up with singer Sabrina Carpenter to promote the feature, with fans able to hear a clip of her new song "Taste." exclusively on her profile (though the album comes out tomorrow). Earlier this year, Instagram's parent company, Meta, teamed up with another pop star, Taylor Swift. She created a Threads account alongside the release of her new album, The Tortured Poet Society, in April. The first group of people to share her post received a customized badge on their profile.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-copiesmyspace-140049134.html?src=rss