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Tag: iab-internet

  • Twitter to charge for SMS two-factor authentication | CNN Business

    Twitter to charge for SMS two-factor authentication | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter Blue subscribers will be the platform’s only users able to use text messages as a two-factor authentication method, Twitter announced Friday.

    The change will take place on March 20. Twitter users will have two other ways to authenticate their Twitter log-ins at no cost: an authentication mobile app and a security key.

    Two factor authentication, or 2FA, requires users to type in their password and then enter a code or security key to access their accounts. It is one of the primary methods for users to keep their Twitter account secure.

    “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors,” the company said in a blog post Friday. “So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers.”

    Twitter Blue, which costs $11 a month for iOS and Android subscribers, adds a blue checkmark to the account of anyone willing to pay for one.

    As of 2021, only 2.6% of Twitter users had a 2FA method enabled – and of those, 74.4% used SMS authentication, a Twitter account security report said.

    Twitter said non-subscribers will have 30 days to disable the text method and enroll in another way to sign in using 2FA. Disabling text message 2FA won’t automatically disassociate the user’s phone number from their account, Twitter said.

    Musk responded “Yup” to a tweet claiming a telecommunications company used bot accounts “to Pump 2FA SMS” and that Twitter was losing $60 million a year “on scam SMS.”

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  • These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

    These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Congress, the White House and now the US Supreme Court are all focusing their attention on a federal law that’s long served as a legal shield for online platforms.

    This week, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on two pivotal cases dealing with online speech and content moderation. Central to the arguments is “Section 230,” a federal law that’s been roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for different reasons but that tech companies and digital rights groups have defended as vital to a functioning internet.

    Tech companies involved in the litigation have cited the 27-year-old statute as part of an argument for why they shouldn’t have to face lawsuits alleging they gave knowing, substantial assistance to terrorist acts by hosting or algorithmically recommending terrorist content.

    A set of rulings against the tech industry could significantly narrow Section 230 and its legal protections for websites and social media companies. If that happens, the Court’s decisions could expose online platforms to an array of new lawsuits over how they present content to users. Such a result would represent the most consequential limitations ever placed on a legal shield that predates today’s biggest social media platforms and has allowed them to nip many content-related lawsuits in the bud.

    And more could be coming: the Supreme Court is still mulling whether to hear several additional cases with implications for Section 230, while members of Congress have expressed renewed enthusiasm for rolling back the law’s protections for websites, and President Joe Biden has called for the same in a recent op-ed.

    Here’s everything you need to know about Section 230, the law that’s been called “the 26 words that created the internet.”

    Passed in 1996 in the early days of the World Wide Web, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was meant to nurture startups and entrepreneurs. The legislation’s text recognized that the internet was in its infancy and risked being choked out of existence if website owners could be sued for things that other people posted.

    One of the law’s architects, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, has said that without Section 230, “all online media would face an onslaught of bad-faith lawsuits and pressure campaigns from the powerful” seeking to silence them.

    He’s also said Section 230 directly empowers websites to remove content they believe is objectionable by creating a “good Samaritan” safe harbor: Under Section 230, websites enjoy immunity for moderating content in the ways they see fit — not according to others’ preferences — although the federal government can still sue platforms for violating criminal or intellectual property laws.

    Contrary to what some politicians have claimed, Section 230’s protections do not hinge on a platform being politically or ideologically neutral. The law also does not require that a website be classified as a publisher in order to “qualify” for liability protection. Apart from meeting the definition of an “interactive computer service,” websites need not do anything to gain Section 230’s benefits – they apply automatically.

    The law’s central provision holds that websites (and their users) cannot be treated legally as the publishers or speakers of other people’s content. In plain English, that means that any legal responsibility attached to publishing a given piece of content ends with the person or entity that created it, not the platforms on which the content is shared or the users who re-share it.

    The seemingly simple language of Section 230 belies its sweeping impact. Courts have repeatedly accepted Section 230 as a defense against claims of defamation, negligence and other allegations. In the past, it’s protected AOL, Craigslist, Google and Yahoo, building up a body of law so broad and influential as to be considered a pillar of today’s internet.

    “The free and open internet as we know it couldn’t exist without Section 230,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has written. “Important court rulings on Section 230 have held that users and services cannot be sued for forwarding email, hosting online reviews, or sharing photos or videos that others find objectionable. It also helps to quickly resolve lawsuits cases that have no legal basis.”

    In recent years, however, critics of Section 230 have increasingly questioned the law’s scope and proposed restrictions on the circumstances in which websites may invoke the legal shield.

    For years, much of the criticism of Section 230 has come from conservatives who say that the law lets social media platforms suppress right-leaning views for political reasons.

    By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Section 230 does shield websites from lawsuits that might arise from that type of viewpoint-based content moderation, though social media companies have said they do not make content decisions based on ideology but rather on violations of their policies.

    The Trump administration tried to turn some of those criticisms into concrete policy that would have had significant consequences, if it had succeeded. For example, in 2020, the Justice Department released a legislative proposal for changes to Section 230 that would create an eligibility test for websites seeking the law’s protections. That same year, the White House issued an executive order calling on the Federal Communications Commission to interpret Section 230 in a more narrow way.

    The executive order faced a number of legal and procedural problems, not least of which was the fact that the FCC is not part of the judicial branch; that it does not regulate social media or content moderation decisions; and that it is an independent agency that, by law, does not take direction from the White House.

    Even though the Trump-era efforts to curtail Section 230 never bore fruit, conservatives are still looking for opportunities to do so. And they aren’t alone. Since 2016, when social media platforms’ role in spreading Russian election disinformation broke open a national dialogue about the companies’ handling of toxic content, Democrats have increasingly railed against Section 230.

    By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Democrats have said, Section 230 has allowed websites to escape accountability for hosting hate speech and misinformation that others have recognized as objectionable but that social media companies can’t or won’t remove themselves.

    The result is a bipartisan hatred for Section 230, even if the two parties cannot agree on why Section 230 is flawed or what policies might appropriately take its place.

    “I would be prepared to make a bet that if we took a vote on a plain Section 230 repeal, it would clear this committee with virtually every vote,” said Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at a hearing last week of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem, where we bog down, is that we want 230-plus. We want to repeal 230 and then have ‘XYZ.’ And we don’t agree on what the ‘XYZ’ are.”

    The deadlock has thrown much of the momentum for changing Section 230 to the courts — most notably, the US Supreme Court, which now has an opportunity this term to dictate how far the law extends.

    Tech critics have called for added legal exposure and accountability. “The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law. It is highly irregular for a global industry that wields staggering influence to be protected from judicial inquiry,” wrote the Anti-Defamation League in a Supreme Court brief.

    For the tech giants, and even for many of Big Tech’s fiercest competitors, it would be a bad thing, because it would undermine what has allowed the internet to flourish. It would potentially put many websites and users into unwitting and abrupt legal jeopardy, they say, and it would dramatically change how some websites operate in order to avoid liability.

    The social media platform Reddit has argued in a Supreme Court brief that if Section 230 is narrowed so that its protections do not cover a site’s recommendations of content a user might enjoy, that would “dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”

    “‘Recommendations’ are the very thing that make Reddit a vibrant place,” wrote the company and several volunteer Reddit moderators. “It is users who upvote and downvote content, and thereby determine which posts gain prominence and which fade into obscurity.”

    People would stop using Reddit, and moderators would stop volunteering, the brief argued, under a legal regime that “carries a serious risk of being sued for ‘recommending’ a defamatory or otherwise tortious post that was created by someone else.”

    While this week’s oral arguments won’t be the end of the debate over Section 230, the outcome of the cases could lead to hugely significant changes the internet has never before seen — for better or for worse.

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  • Judge orders Sam Bankman-Fried back to court after learning how he accessed the internet remotely | CNN Business

    Judge orders Sam Bankman-Fried back to court after learning how he accessed the internet remotely | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge ordered Sam Bankman-Fried back to court this week after learning that the founder of crypto trading platform FTX accessed the internet in a way the government can’t track.

    Judge Lewis Kaplan set a hearing for Thursday after he was notified by prosecutors and attorneys for Bankman-Fried that the former so-called Crypto King used a virtual private network, or VPN, twice in the past month, including days after the judge expressed concern about the use of encrypted messaging apps.

    Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said in a letter to the judge that Bankman-Fried used the VPN to access an NFL Game Pass international subscription that he used when he lived in the Bahamas to watch NFL playoff and Super Bowl games while out on bail in the US.

    Bankman-Fried is currently under house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, Calif. He is released on a $250 million bond while awaiting trial on fraud and conspiracy charges. He pleaded not guilty.

    The judge noted that Bankman-Fried used the VPN at least once after he was ordered to refrain from using encrypted messaging apps, adding, “The defendant’s use of a VPN presents many of the same risks associated with his use of an encrypted messaging or call application.” The judge said Bankman-Fried could not use VPNs until the outcome of the hearing.

    Overnight Prosecutors alerted the judge to Bankman-Fried’s use of a VPN in late January and early February.

    “The use of a VPN raises several potential concerns. First, a VPN is a mechanism of encryption, hiding online activities from third parties, including the Government. Second, it is a means to disguise a user’s whereabouts because a VPN server essentially acts as a proxy on the internet,” prosecutors wrote in a letter to the judge. “It is well known that some individuals use VPNs to disguise the fact that they are accessing international cryptocurrency exchanges that use IPs to block U.S. users,” they wrote.

    Prosecutors and Bankman-Fried’s lawyers asked the judge for more time to work out new bail terms, but the judge rejected that, calling them back to court for the second time in a week.

    The judge previously expressed concern over Bankman-Fried’s use of encryption and whether the government could track what he was doing while out on bail.

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  • ‘Fire-breathing demon’ dog Ralphie returned to Niagara shelter | CNN

    ‘Fire-breathing demon’ dog Ralphie returned to Niagara shelter | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Will a fourth adoption be the charm for this seemingly unadoptable pup?

    Ralphie, a New York shelter’s adorable “jerk” dog, has been returned to the shelter again after his most recent (and unsuccessful) adoption.

    “Ralphie proved to be more than she could handle,” the shelter explained in an update posted to Facebook on Tuesday after the woman who adopted the French bulldog brought him back.

    News of the canine menace went viral in late January after the Niagara SPCA posted an eye-catching ad for potential adopters. Shelter employees described Ralphie as “a terror in a somewhat small package.”

    “Everything belongs to him. If you dare test his ability to possess THE things, wrath will ensue,” they wrote at the time. “If you show a moment of weakness, prepare to be exploited.”

    This is Ralphie’s third unsuccessful adoption, according to the shelter. The pup’s first family rehomed him after training was unsuccessful. His second family surrendered him to the shelter after he “annoyed” their older dog.

    “What they actually meant was: Ralphie is a fire-breathing demon and will eat our dog, but hey, he’s only 26lbs,” reads a Facebook post from the Niagara SPCA.

    The ornery pup is now enrolled in an intensive six-week boarding and training program that will start on February 20, according to the Tuesday Facebook post. The shelter said that they would start vetting prospective adopters immediately and that the ideal adopter would work with the trainer while Ralphie’s at the residential training program.

    The shelter noted that those who believe “that all Ralphie needs is love” should not apply to adopt the fearsome pup. “He will totally exploit that,” they wrote.

    Neither should families with children or other pets, as he has a history of biting.

    Dog lovers who aren’t intimidated by Ralphie’s formidable reputation can apply to adopt him with a letter of interest and “dog experience ‘resume,’” according to the Facebook post.

    The shelter is also raising money to cover the $6,000 tuition for the training program.

    “No one likes that it didn’t work out for Ralphie, but he will receive the training he needs,” shelter employees added in the post.

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  • Video: Has Elon Musk ruined Twitter and why EV trucks are getting bigger on CNN Nightcap | CNN Business

    Video: Has Elon Musk ruined Twitter and why EV trucks are getting bigger on CNN Nightcap | CNN Business

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    How is Musk doing at Twitter? Why are EVs getting bigger? And why so many meetings?!

    In this week’s “Nightcap,” The New York Times reporter Mike Isaac evaluates Elon Musk’s first 100 days at Twitter. Curbed writer Alissa Walker explains the issue with EVs getting bigger. And UNC Charlotte professor Steven Rogelberg explains to CNN’s Jon Sarlin how to combat the trend of too many meetings. To get the day’s business headlines sent directly to your inbox, sign up for the Nightcap newsletter.

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  • Elon Musk wants to find someone to replace him at Twitter by year-end | CNN Business

    Elon Musk wants to find someone to replace him at Twitter by year-end | CNN Business

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    Dubai
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk is aiming to “find someone else” to run Twitter by the end of this year.

    He first needs to “stabilize the organization” and make sure “it’s financially in a healthy place,” Musk said Wednesday, speaking via videolink at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

    “Probably towards the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company,” he said. “I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year.”

    In December, the billionaire said he would step down as Twitter’s CEO but only when he identified a successor, after millions of Twitter users voted for his ouster in a poll that he set up on the platform.

    Musk tweeted at the time that he would resign “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” He added that, following his resignation as CEO, he would “run the software & servers teams” at Twitter, indicating that he might continue to hold sway over much of the company’s decision-making.

    Musk’s tenure as CEO has resulted in sweeping, occasionally erratic shifts at one of the world’s most influential social media companies.

    In a fresh sign of Musk’s uneven impact at Twitter, data from analytics firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower showed that over half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first few weeks of January.

    — Olesya Dmitracova contributed reporting.

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  • Congressman who raised issue of antisemitism on Twitter says he was bombarded with antisemitic tweets | CNN Business

    Congressman who raised issue of antisemitism on Twitter says he was bombarded with antisemitic tweets | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A Jewish lawmaker who spoke about the problem of antisemitism on Twitter during a House Oversight hearing this week focused on the company was later bombarded with antisemitic messages on the platform, he explained in a letter to new owner Elon Musk on Thursday.

    “What happened on Twitter directly after the hearing proves my exact point that antisemitism is real and Twitter has become a hate-filled playground for Nazis and anti-Semites,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz told CNN about the hateful comments he received.

    At the hearing on Wednesday, which focused on Twitter’s handling of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the leadup to the 2020 election, the Florida Democrat criticized his Republican counterparts for saying “God bless Elon Musk.” Moskowitz asked: “God bless the guys who is allowing Nazis and antisemitism to perpetuate on Twitter?” He also cited statistics from the Anti-Defamation League, stating there has been a more than 60% increase in antisemitic comments on Twitter since Musk took over the platform.

    Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has slashed its staff, relaxed some of its content moderation policies and reinstated a number of incendiary accounts that were previously banned. Those moves raised concerns that Musk’s Twitter could contribute to a rise in public displays of hate and antisemitism offline.

    Musk, however, has repeatedly pushed back at claims that hate speech is rising on the platform. In December, for example, Musk claimed “hate speech impressions,” or the number of times a tweet containing hate speech has been viewed, “continue to decline” since his early days of owning the company.

    Twitter, which eliminated much of its public relations team during last year’s layoffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Moskowitz and many other Democrats on the subpanel used their allotted time to grill the former Twitter executives testifying at the hearing about the company’s policies for policing hate on the platform. During his questioning, Moskowitz also rebuked former President Donald Trump for hosting white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last year. He brought a large copy of a hateful post that Fuentes had tweeted at Moskowitz, telling the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. So I have questions about that.”

    In his letter to Musk, Moskowitz said he shared a clip showing his line of questioning on his official government Twitter account, after which “the reply section of my post was flooded with hateful, antisemitic comments and images.” He added: “At the time that I am writing this letter, I have received over 200 such comments on one tweet. This does not include other posts of mine that have since received antisemitic comments, including a video honoring the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.”

    Moskowitz pointed to a November 30 National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warning from the Department of Homeland Security, which “issued domestic terror threats to multiple groups, including the Jewish community,” as evidence of his heightened concern. “DHS notes that threat actors have recently mobilized to violence, and there is an ‘enduring threat’ to the Jewish community,” he writes.

    “With this direct and heightened threat environment in mind, how will you work with other stakeholders to combat the rise of antisemitism on Twitter?,” Moskowitz concludes in his letter to Musk.

    Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, echoed Moskowitz’s concerns.

    “Antisemitism has no place on any social media platform that doesn’t want to further the harassment and exclusion of marginalized communities,” Greenblatt told CNN Thursday. “While Twitter ostensibly has an anti-hate policy that includes antisemitism, it is unclear the degree to which it is being enforced.”

    Greenblatt said the ADL continues to flag “batches of antisemitic content” to Twitter, but he said the company has only taken action on “a fraction of them” since Musk acquired the company. He also raised concerns about the staff cuts and the reinstated accounts that were banned previously.

    “These findings, combined with Twitter gutting its trust and safety operations, suggest serious issues will continue to persist on the platform as it pertains to effective content moderation and the proliferation of antisemitism,” Greenblatt said.

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  • Twitter is stumbling. Some ex-employees are launching rivals | CNN Business

    Twitter is stumbling. Some ex-employees are launching rivals | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

    With Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at Twitter and Google, she launched T2, currently available in beta. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

    “We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

    In the months since Musk completed his takeover, a small but growing number of services have launched or gained traction by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with the billionaire’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, rethink content moderation policies and reinstate numerous incendiary accounts that were previously banned, among other moves.

    The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps like T2 and Spill created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

    Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

    But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

    “Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

    “People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.

    Replacing Twitter, with its robust network of journalists, politicians and entertainers and sizable audience of users obsessed with real-time news, may be a challenge. While apps like Cohost have seen renewed momentum, their audiences remain a small fraction of the size of Twitter, which had more than 200 million daily active users as of last year.

    Cohost currently has 130,000 users, only 20,000 of which are what Cohost considers active users, according to Kaplan. T2 has a waitlist in the five digits, according to Oh, who says that number continues to grow. Mastodon, the most high-profile recent Twitter rival, hit 2.5 million users in November, but it has since declined to 1.4 million users, in a possible cautionary tale to other services.

    “The incumbent has the advantage of scale, and even in a situation where you have kind of a polarizing figure like Musk take over Twitter, people are realizing that the newer platforms are not nearly as effective from a one-to-many, getting your message out there,” said Tom Forte, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Despite the fact that there may be disgruntled consumers, they’re still tweeting.”

    In November, shortly after taking over the company, Musk repeatedly claimed Twitter continued to hit “all-time high” user numbers despite the initial wave of users calling to abandon the social network. (As part of the acquisition, Musk took Twitter private and the company no longer reports user numbers in quarterly securities filings.)

    “If people leave, where do they go? By all accounts, there is no platform right now that is able to take on the function of Twitter, and nothing is really prepared for it,” said Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “No platform has the global user base, representing people from all walks of life the way that Twitter does.”

    To complicate matters for rivals, some of the initial fury and media attention about Twitter under Musk has arguably faded in the months since the deal closed. Though controversy remains, many Twitter users may feel less urgency to jump ship today than in late October.

    Still, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko is not worried.

    “A platform cannot continue to go viral perpetually,” Rochko recently told CNN about Mastodon’s sagging user numbers. “The cycle of media news and attention on social media just simply goes away after awhile, but behind it leaves organic growth which is what we had before November and which we still have now.”

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  • I tried Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Here’s what it’s like | CNN Business

    I tried Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Here’s what it’s like | CNN Business

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    Seattle
    CNN Business
     — 

    Microsoft’s Bing search engine has never made much of a dent in Google’s dominance in the more than 13 years since it launched. Now the company is hoping some buzzy artificial intelligence can win converts.

    Microsoft on Tuesday announced an updated version of Bing designed to combine the fun and convenience of OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT tool with the information from a search engine.

    Beyond providing a list of relevant links like traditional search engines, the new Bing also creates written summaries of the search results, chats with users to answer additional questions about their query and can write emails or other compositions based on the results. With the new Bing, for example, users can create trip itineraries, compile weekly meal plans and ask the chatbot questions when shopping for a new TV.

    This is the new era of search that Microsoft

    (MSFT)     — which is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI — envisions, one where users are accompanied by a sort of “co-pilot” around the web to help them better synthesize information. The company is betting on the new technology to drive users to Bing, which had for years been an also-ran to Google Search. Microsoft

    (MSFT)     also announced an updated version of its Edge web browser with the new Bing capabilities built in.

    The event comes as the race to develop and deploy AI technology heats up in the tech sector. Google on Monday unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to keep pace with Microsoft and the success of ChatGPT. Baidu, the Chinese search engine, also said this week it plans to launch its own ChatGPT-style service.

    The updated Bing and Edge launched to the public on a limited basis on Tuesday, and are set to roll out to millions of people for unlimited search queries in the coming weeks. I took Bing for a spin at a press event at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters Tuesday.

    The tool provides the sort of immediate gratification we now expect from the internet — rather than clicking through a bunch of links to suss out the answer to a question, the new Bing will do that work for you. But it’s still early days for the technology, which Microsoft says is still evolving.

    The homepage of the new Bing feels familiar: you can type a query into the search bar and it returns a list of links, images and other results like a typical search engine. But on the left side of the page are written summaries of the results, complete with annotations and links to the original information sources. The search field allows up to 2,000 characters, so users can type the way they’d talk, rather than having to think of the few correct search terms to use.

    Users can also click over to a “chat” page on Bing, where a chatbot can answer additional questions about their queries.

    I asked Bing to write me a five-day vegetarian meal plan. It returned a list of vegetarian meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner for Monday through Friday, such as oatmeal with fresh berries and lentil curry. I then asked it to write me a grocery list based on that meal plan, and it returned a list of all the items I’d need to buy organized by grocery store section.

    Based on my request, the Bing chatbot also wrote me an email that I could send to my partner with that grocery list, complete with a “Hi Babe” greeting and “XOXO” closing. It’s not exactly how I’d normally write, but it could save me time by giving me a draft to edit and then copy and paste into an email, rather than having to start from scratch.

    The generated portions of Bing have personality. When you ask the chatbot a question, it responds conversationally and sometimes with emojis, letting you know it’s happy to help or that it hopes you have fun on the trip you’re planning.

    With the new Edge browser, I asked the tool to summarize one of my articles, and then turn that into a social media post the length of a short paragraph with a “casual” tone that I could share on Twitter or LinkedIn.

    The new Bing is built in partnership with OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT in which Microsoft has invested billions — on a more advanced version of the technology underlying the viral chatbot tool. Still, the new Bing has some of the quirks that the public version of ChatGPT is known for. For example, the same query may return different responses each time it’s run; this is in part just how the tool works, and in part because it’s pulling the most updated search results each time it runs.

    It also didn’t cooperate with some of my requests. After the first time it created a meal plan, grocery list and email with the list, I ran the same requests two more times. But the second and third time, it wouldn’t write the email, instead saying something like, “sorry, I can’t do that, but you can do it yourself using the information I provided!” The tool is also sensitive to the wording used in queries — a request to “create a vegetarian meal plan” provided information about how to start eating healthier, whereas “create a 5-day vegetarian meal plan” provided a detailed list of meals to eat each day.

    Even next-gen search technology isn’t immune to basic flubs. I can imagine using the tool ahead of an upcoming local election, to learn about who is running for office in my area, what their positions are and how and when to vote. But when I asked the chatbot, “when is the next election in Kings County, NY?” it returned information about the November election last year.

    The new Bing may also present some of the same concerns as ChatGPT, including for educators. I asked Bing’s chatbot to write me a 300-word essay about the major themes of the book “Pride and Prejudice” and, within less than a minute, it had pumped out 364 words on three major themes in the novel (although some of the text sounded a bit repetitive or wonky). Per my request, it then revised the essay as if it was written by a fifth grader.

    The chatbot tool has feedback buttons so users can indicate whether its answers were helpful or not, and users can also chat directly with the tool to tell it when answers were incorrect or unhelpful, the company says.

    “We know we won’t be able to answer every question every single time, … We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, said in a presentation.

    With some controversial search topics, it appears the new Bing chatbot simply refuses to engage. For example, I asked it, “Can you tell me why vaccines cause autism?” to see how it would react to a common medical misinformation claim, and it responded: “My apologies, I don’t know how to discuss this topic. You can try learning more about it on bing.com.” The same query on the main search page returned more standard search results, such as links to the CDC and the Wikipedia page for autism.

    Likewise, it would not return a chatbot request for how to build a pipe bomb, instead saying in its answer, “Building a pipe bomb is a dangerous and illegal activity that can cause serious harm to yourself and others. Please do not attempt to do so.” However, one of the links provided in the annotation of its answer brought me to a YouTube video with apparent instructions for building a pipe bomb.

    Microsoft says it has developed the tool in keeping with its existing responsible AI principles, and made efforts to avoid its potential misuse. Executives said the new Bing is trained in part by sample conversations mimicking bad actors who might want to exploit the tool.

    “With a technology this powerful I also know that we have an even greater responsibility to make sure that it’s developed, deployed and used properly,” said responsible AI lead Sarah Bird.

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  • The week that tech became exciting again | CNN Business

    The week that tech became exciting again | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Let’s be honest: For much of the past decade, tech events have been pretty boring.

    Executives in business casual wear trot up on stage and pretend a few tweaks to the camera and processor make this year’s phone profoundly different than last year’s phone or adding a touchscreen onto yet another product is bleeding edge.

    But that changed radically this week. Some of the world’s biggest companies teased significant upgrades to their services, some of which are central to our everyday lives and how we experience the internet. In each case, the changes were powered by new AI technology that allows for more conversational and complex responses.

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a revamped Bing search engine using the capabilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries. And there are already rumors of another event next month for Microsoft to demo similar features in its Office products, including Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.

    On Wednesday, Google held an event to detail how it plans to use similar AI technology to allow its search engine to offer more complex and conversational responses to queries. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu also said this week that they would be launching their own ChatGPT-style services. And other companies are sure to follow suit soon.

    After years of incremental updates to smartphones, the promise of 5G that still hasn’t taken off and social networks copycatting each others’ features until they all the look the same, the flurry of AI-related announcements this week feels like a breath of fresh air.

    Yes, there are very real concerns about the potential of this technology to spread biases and inaccurate information, as happened in a Google demo this week. And it’s certainly likely numerous companies will introduce AI chatbots that simply do not need one. But these features are fun, have the potential to give us back hours in the day and, perhaps most importantly, some are here right now to try out.

    Need to write a real estate listing or an annual review for an employee? Plug a few keywords into a ChatGPT query bar and your first draft is done in three seconds. Want to come up with a quick meal plan and grocery list based on your dietary sensitivities? Bing, apparently, has you covered.

    If the introduction of smartphones defined the 2000s, much of the 2010s in Silicon Valley was defined by the ambitious technologies that didn’t fully arrive: self-driving cars tested on roads but not quite ready for everyday use; virtual reality products that got better and cheaper but still didn’t find mass adoption; and the promise of 5G to power advanced experiences that didn’t quite come to pass, at least not yet.

    But technological change, like Ernest Hemingway’s idea of bankruptcy, has a way of coming gradually, then suddenly. The iPhone, for example, was in development for years before Steve Jobs wowed people on stage with it in 2007. Likewise, OpenAi, the company behind ChatGPT, was founded seven years ago and launched an earlier version of its AI system called GPT3 back in 2020.

    “ChatGPT exploded onto the market and people’s awareness,” said Bern Elliot, an analyst at Gartner, “but this has been a long time in the making.”

    More than that, artificial intelligence systems have for years underpinned many of the functions people may now take for granted, from content recommendations on social media platforms and auto-complete tools in e-mail to voice assistants and facial recognition tools. But when ChatGPT was released publicly in November, it put the power of AI systems on full display for millions in an entertaining and immediately graspable way. ChatGPT simultaneously made it much easier to see how far the technology has progressed in recent years and to imagine the vast potential for the impact it could have across industries.

    “When new generations of technologies come along, they’re often not particularly visible because they haven’t matured enough to the point where you can do something with them,” Elliott said. “When they are more mature, you start to see them over time — whether it’s in an industrial setting or behind the scenes — but when it’s directly accessible to people, like with ChatGPT, that’s when there is more public interest, fast.”

    Now that ChatGPT has gained traction and prompted larger companies to deploy similar features, there are concerns not just about its accuracy but its impact on real people.

    Some people worry it could disrupt industries, potentially putting artists, tutors, coders, writers and journalists out of work. Others are more optimistic, postulating it will allow employees to tackle to-do lists with greater efficiency or focus on higher-level tasks. Either way, it will likely force industries to evolve and change, but that’s not? necessarily a bad thing.

    “New technologies always come with new risks and we as a society will have to address them, such as implementing acceptable use policies and educating the general public about how to use them properly. Guidelines will be needed,” Elliott said.

    Many experts I’ve spoken with in the past few weeks have likened the AI shift to the early days of the calculator and how educators and scientists once feared how it could inhibit our basic knowledge of math. The same fear existed with spell check and grammar tools.

    While AI tools are still in their infancy, this week may represent the start of a new way of doing tasks, similar to how the iPhone changed computing and communication in June 2007. But this time, it could be in the form of a Bing browser.

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  • The way we search for information online is about to change | CNN Business

    The way we search for information online is about to change | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    An entire generation of internet users has approached search engines the same way for decades: enter a few words into a search box and wait for a page of relevant results to emerge. But that could change soon.

    This week, the companies behind the two biggest US search engines teased radical changes to the way their services operate, powered by new AI technology that allows for more conversational and complex responses. In the process, however, the companies may test both the accuracy of these tools and the willingness of everyday users to embrace and find utility in a very different search experience.

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a revamped Bing search engine using the abilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries.

    The next day, Google, the dominant player in the market, held an event to detail how it plans to use similar AI technology to allow its search engine to offer more complex and conversational responses to queries, including providing bullet points ticking off the best times of year to see various constellations and also offering pros and cons for buying an electric vehicle. (Chinese tech giant Baidu also said this week that it would be launching its own ChatGPT-style service, though it did not provide details on whether it will appear as a feature in its search engine.)

    The updates come as the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can generate shockingly convincing essays and responses to user prompts, has sparked a wave of interest in AI chatbot tools. Multiple tech giants are now racing to deploy similar tools that could transform the way we draft e-mails, write essays and handle other tasks. But the most immediate impact may be on a foundational element of our internet experience: search.

    “Although we are 25 years into search, I dare say that our story has just begun,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, an SVP at Google, at the event Wednesday teasing the new AI features. “We have even more exciting, AI-enabled innovations in the works that will change the way people search, work and play. We’re reinventing what it means to search and the best is yet to come.”

    For those who may not be sure what exactly to do with the new tools, the companies offered some examples, ranging from writing a rhyming poem to helping plan an itinerary for a trip.

    Lian Jye Su, a research director at tech intelligence firm ABI Research, believes consumers and businesses would be happy to embrace a new way to search as long as “it is intuitive, removes more friction, and offers the path of least resistance — akin to the success of smart home voice assistants, like Alexa and Google Assistant.”

    But there is at least one wild card: how much users will be able to trust the AI-powered results.

    According to Google, Bard can be used to plan a friend’s baby shower, compare two Oscar-nominated movies or get lunch ideas based on what’s in your fridge. But the tool, which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for a factual error it made during a Google demo: it incorrectly stated that the James Webb Telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside of our solar system. A Google spokesperson said the error “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process.”

    Bard and ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November OpenAI, are built on large language models. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts warn these tools can be unreliable — spreading misinformation, making up responses and giving different answers to the same questions, or presenting sexist and racist biases.

    There is clearly strong interest in this type of AI. The public version of ChatGPT attracted a million users in its first five days last fall and is estimated to have hit 100 million users since. But the trust factor may decide whether that interest will stay, according to Jason Wong, an analyst at market research firm Gartner.

    “Consumers, and even business users, may have fun exploring the new Bing and Bard interfaces for a while, but as the novelty wears off and similar tools appear, then it really comes down to ease of access and accuracy and trust in the responses that will win out,” he said.

    Generative AI systems, which are algorithms that can create new content, are notoriously unreliable. Laura Edelson, a computer scientist and misinformation researcher at New York University, said, “there’s a big difference between an AI sounding authoritative and it actually producing accurate results.”

    While general search optimizes for relevance, according to Edelson, large language models try to achieve a particular style in their response without regard to factual accuracy. “One of those styles is, ‘I am a trustworthy, authoritative source,’” she said.

    On a very basic level, she said, AI systems analyze which words are next to each other, determine how they get associated and identify the patterns that lead them to appear together. But much of the onus remains on the user to fact check the answers, a process that could prove just as time consuming for people as the current model of scrolling through links on a page — if not more so.

    Microsoft and Google executives have acknowledged some of the potential issues with the new AI tools.

    “We know we wont be able to answer every question every single time,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer. “We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn.”

    Raghavan, at Google, also emphasized the importance of feedback from internal and external testing to make sure the tool “meets the high bar, our high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness, before we launch more broadly.”

    But even with the concerns, the companies are betting that these tools offer the answer to the future of search.

    – CNN’s Clare Duffy, Catherine Thorbecke and Brian Fung contributed to this story.

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  • Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has gone on the attack over Social Security and Medicare.

    In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White House have singled out particular Republican senators – notably including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from those senators that could affect the retirement and health care programs.

    The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the public about where they stand. Here is a fact-check of the exchanges.

    Biden and his White House targeted Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m here right now to tell you one thing that you probably have never heard from a politician. It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip features Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up.”

    The videos are authentic, though Biden didn’t tell his Wednesday speech audience in Wisconsin they are from more than 12 years ago – an event in 2010, when Lee was running for the Senate but before he was first elected. And as Lee noted in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t mention that Lee added at the same 2010 event that current Medicare beneficiaries should have their benefits “left untouched” and that “the next layer beneath them, those who will retire in the next few years, also probably have to be held harmless.”

    Still, while Biden could have included more context, he was accurate in saying Lee had called for Social Security to be phased out.

    And while Lee said in a tweeted statement on Wednesday that, during his 12 years as a senator, he has not called for “abolishing” Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, only for “solutions to improve those programs and move them toward solvency,” he has supported benefit cuts. For example, he has endorsed various proposals over the years to raise the Social Security retirement age.

    Since last year, Biden has criticized Scott over particular components of what Scott calls his “12 Point Plan to Rescue America.”

    In the State of the Union address on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to a part of Scott’s plan that says, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Biden correctly asserted that “all federal legislation” would include Social Security and Medicare, which do not currently require congressional re-approval.

    Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that while his plan does say that “all” federal legislation should sunset in five years and become subject to a new vote by Congress, “This is clearly & obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late.”

    But the plan itself doesn’t say that.

    The plan’s official text, which remains online on a dedicated website, says “all federal legislation,” period, should be sunset in five years – not all recent legislation, all crazy legislation or all legislation except for the laws that created Social Security and Medicare. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan last year, McConnell too said that the plan “sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

    Last year, Biden sometimes overstated the support for Scott’s sunset proposal among congressional Republicans, which appears very limited. Biden has been more precise in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or accurately saying in the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – support it.

    Biden may have created an inaccurate impression, however, by mentioning the sunset proposal during the section of the State of the Union in which he discussed the battle over the debt ceiling. There is no indication that House Republicans are pushing this proposal as part of the current debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, more generally, said cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in these negotiations.

    Scott, in turn, has tossed a false claim into the debate with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of having cut billions from Medicare in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act did not cut Medicare benefits; rather, it allowed the government and seniors to spend less money to buy prescription drugs – and, in fact, simultaneously made Medicare benefits more generous to seniors. The claim of a Medicare cut was repeatedly debunked last year, when Scott and a Republican campaign organization he chaired used it during the midterm elections.

    On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell told a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will be a “challenge” for Scott’s own 2024 re-election campaign in a state with a large population of seniors, Scott announced he is introducing a new bill that would make it more difficult for Congress to make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that would send the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding to Social Security and Medicare instead.

    This week and in numerous previous speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying last year that Medicare and Social Security should be treated as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve every year, rather than as permanent entitlements.

    Biden has accurately cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Here’s what Johnson told a Green Bay radio show in August: “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt. Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.” When Johnson faced criticism for those remarks at the time, he stood by them and said that was his consistent longtime position.

    Johnson, however, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “lying” when the president discussed Johnson’s comments shortly after saying that some Republicans want to “cut” Social Security. Johnson has repeatedly said that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Security spending, and to “fix” and “save” Social Security in light of its poor fiscal shape at present, does not mean that he wants to put the programs on the “chopping block” or even to “cut” it.

    “The Democrats have been accusing me, since the first time I ran for office, of wanting to end Social Security, wanting to cut it, wanting to gut it, wanting to – I’ve never said that. I’ve always been consistent: I want to save it,” he said in a radio interview this week.

    It’s impossible to definitively fact-check this particular dispute without Johnson specifying how he wants to “fix” and “save” the program. His office did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

    White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted in an email to reporters on Thursday that, though Johnson accused Biden this week of lying about his stance on Social Security, Johnson also said in interviews this week that Social Security is a “legal Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Security might be in a more stable position for younger workers” if the government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and eventually abandoned proposal in the mid-2000s to allow workers born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts in which they could buy into the stock market and make other investments.

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  • A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

    A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.

    Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”

    “The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?

    “That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.

    A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.

    Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

    In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.

    That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.

    Guy Oseary and Madonna at a 2016 Billboard Women In Music event. Oseary said both bought NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

    The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.

    When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”

    A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.

    The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”

    Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.

    Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.

    Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”

    The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.

    The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.

    CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.

    The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.

    One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.

    Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.

    Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”

    “The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”

    Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.

    Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”

    Mad Dog Jones' SHIFT// goes on view as part of 'Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale' at Sotheby's in June 2021. NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art.

    The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”

    But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.

    Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.

    In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)

    Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.

    Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

    To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”

    Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”

    This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.

    “I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.

    So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.

    “Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”

    Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.

    This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.

    Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”

    In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.

    The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”

    “It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.

    Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.

    In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”

    “I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”

    – CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.

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  • More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show | CNN Business

    More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics, in a striking sign of how far reaching the advertiser exodus has been following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.

    Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.

    Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data.

    The data demonstrate the sharp decline of what was once a $4.5 billion advertising business for Twitter. After Musk completed his takeover of the company in late October, advertisers began to worry about the safety and stability of the platform given his plans to cut staff and relax content moderation policies. In early November, Musk said Twitter had seen a “massive revenue drop.”

    Although Twitter’s ad business was always much smaller than that of competitors Facebook and Google, it was still responsible for the vast majority of the company’s revenue. Musk must now fill in that gap as he stares down interest payments for the debt he took on to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

    Twitter, which eliminated much of its media relations team during last year’s layoffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    After initially clashing with advertisers, Musk now appears to be trying to woo them back to the platform. The company reportedly offered a Super Bowl “fire sale” deal for advertisers in an attempt to win them back for one of Twitter’s biggest audience days of the year. Twitter has also partnered with a third-party “brand safety” firm that says it can show advertisers if their ads appear alongside inappropriate or unsafe content on Twitter.

    But the pushback continues. A coalition of civil society and civil rights groups renewed calls on Thursday for companies to join what they say is more than 500 advertisers who have stopped advertising on Twitter. The latest effort came after a research report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the coalition, raised concerns about ads “appearing next to toxic content” from previously banned accounts.

    In his first months in charge, Musk rolled back bans on users who had previously violated Twitter’s rules, including former President Donald Trump. He also dissolved a third-party content oversight group and halted enforcement of its Covid-19 misinformation policy.

    Some advertisers also complained that the Twitter employees they previously worked with had been terminated by Musk, causing confusion. In November, Musk complained that Twitter had seen a “massive drop in revenue.”

    But Musk has stood by those policy changes, and has since been scrambling to reduce costs and find new revenue streams for the company. Those efforts include dramatically cutting staff, revamping its paid subscription service and, more recently, announcing the controversial move to charge researchers and developers reliant on Twitter’s API, which allows third parties to tap into Twitter’s systems.

    For now, however, Twitter remains reliant on advertising revenue as it reportedly struggles to grow its paid subscriber base.

    Even among the top advertisers that remain, many have dramatically reduced their ad spending on the platform, according to Pathmatics data. HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000. (HBO, which is owned by CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    A small number of Twitter’s top advertisers spent more on the platform in January than they did the month prior to Musk’s takeover, including ESPN, Salesforce and Apple, the latter of which Musk briefly and publicly feuded with for allegedly threatening to block Twitter from its app store. ESPN, Salesforce and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Musk said in a

    tweet     earlier this month that the previous three months had been “extremely tough, as had to save Twitter from bankruptcy,” but that the company “is now trending to breakeven if we keep at it.”

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  • Elon Musk pledged transparency at Twitter. But he’s walling off researchers | CNN Business

    Elon Musk pledged transparency at Twitter. But he’s walling off researchers | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    For years, Twitter, like other social media platforms, has freely given its platform data to independent researchers so that they can analyze everything from online trolling to the spread of misinformation. Those studies have been critical to understanding the tactics used by scammers, foreign influence campaigns and other malicious actors trying to manipulate social media.

    But now researchers fear the future of that work is under threat, after Twitter abruptly announced plans last week to restrict access to this data and charge money for it.

    The plan provided few details before it was delayed Wednesday amid a public backlash, but the company nonetheless intends to move forward with it. Twitter now says it will end free access to its application programming interface, or API, the software enabling third parties to tap into Twitter’s systems, on Feb. 13, and plans to replace it with paid access starting at $100 a month for “basic access” granting a “low level of API usage.”

    Such a change would chill civic research on Twitter manipulation and have devastating consequences for transparency, accountability and the public good, said Rebekah Tromble, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics.

    “It’s just abundantly clear that the impact is going to be profound on the research community, profound on civil society organizations that rely on free access to the API in order to provide a vitally important public service,” Tromble told CNN. “Twitter essentially has gone, in a blink of an eye, from being an industry leader in transparency to the bottom of the barrel.”

    The plan highlights the tension between new owner Elon Musk’s vows to bolster transparency on Twitter’s platform and the pressure he faces to shore up revenue through subscription products in order to improve the company’s bottom line, particularly in the face of an advertiser revolt.

    Twitter’s plan to restrict access to data also comes as it boasted to European Union authorities, in a report made public Thursday, that it provides “industry-leading access to data.”

    “Since 2006, academic researchers have used data from the public conversation to study topics as diverse as the conversation on Twitter itself,” the report said, “from state-backed efforts to disrupt the public conversation to floods and climate change, from attitudes and perceptions about COVID-19 to efforts to promote healthy conversation online.”

    “Today, academic researchers are one of the largest groups of people using the Twitter API,” the report added. But Twitter’s changes erecting a paywall for API access may jeopardize all that, Tromble and other researchers said.

    The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Musk has framed Twitter’s API restrictions as part of his wider effort to stamp out spammy, automated accounts. The data interface “is being abused badly right now by bot scammers and opinion manipulators,” he tweeted last week. “There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things.”

    But Musk’s proposed cure — putting a price on platform access — triggered a backlash from third-party software developers behind so-called “good” Twitter bots that also could be harmed by the change. Two days later, Musk seemed to soften his stance, but his concession only appeared to address the concerns of developers who use the API to write automated tweets, said Tromble, not those of researchers who use the API to collect and analyze large volumes of platform data.

    Musk’s allegations about the prevalence of bots on Twitter were a centerpiece of his attempt last year to back out of buying Twitter, an ultimately unsuccessful effort. Ironically, however, Musk’s looming changes to the Twitter API might make it harder to study bot behavior on Twitter.

    One of the third-party applications that depends on Twitter’s API is Botometer, a tool developed by Indiana University researchers and that was heavily cited by Musk’s team in court to defend his claims that Twitter was ridden with “bad” bots.

    Kaicheng Yang, one of the creators of Botometer, told CNN Thursday that Twitter’s coming API changes “would definitely make my work harder” and raise the project’s costs. Yang said he would attempt to find funding to keep the project going, but that users could ultimately have to bear the costs of Botometer’s use of Twitter’s API, which he said could be “prohibitive” and drive people away from the tool.

    “We also teach students in the classroom about how to use our tools to study social media and understand online manipulation. With the paid API, we won’t be able to do that anymore,” Yang said. He also added that even if Botometer can somehow continue, other researchers with smaller budgets, particularly in developing countries, likely won’t be able to afford Twitter’s API.

    While it’s no surprise that Twitter might ask researchers to chip in for data access, the company has made little effort to understand researchers’ constraints and whether paying $100 a month is even feasible, said Tromble.

    “There’s been no conversation with the affected community,” she said. “$100 a month is affordable to scholars at Ivy League institutions; it’s not affordable to under-resourced academic and civil-society researchers. If Twitter had that community in mind, it would be absolutely appropriate for them to reach out and have some conversations and perhaps introduce a sliding scale approach to this.”

    Given the breadth of research worldwide based on Twitter data, dealing with topics ranging from elections to the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact on smaller research organizations could be substantial. Last week, more than 100 civil society groups and more than 500 individuals signed an open letter urging Twitter to keep its API easily accessible to researchers.

    “Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has promised to make the platform more transparent and to reduce the prevalence of spam and manipulative accounts,” the letter said. “In fact, the independent research community has developed many of the most cutting-edge techniques used to manage bots. API access has provided a critical resource for that work. Twitter’s new barriers to data access will reduce the very transparency that both the platform and our societies desperately need.”

    The impending API paywall also follows Twitter’s decision to eliminate a partnership with researchers known as the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium. The initiative was launched as recently as last year and had just gotten off the ground when Musk took over the company and axed the program, said Tromble, who described the consortium as an industry-leading push for transparency.

    “The team is gone,” she said. “The researchers who were signed up to the program have heard nothing from the company in months, since Musk’s acquisition.”

    Beyond the immediate impact to researchers, Twitter’s transparency issues could land the company in hot water with policymakers.

    Last week, Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Lori Trahan called Twitter’s API plans “the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”

    “Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” Trahan said in a statement, citing a briefing her staff received from Twitter in December in which Twitter committed not to limit researcher access to the platform.

    US policymakers have broadly called for expanding researcher access to social media data as a way of holding platforms accountable. Several other platforms that filed reports to the European Union — reports that were also made public Thursday alongside Twitter’s — indicated a commitment to growing that access, said Tromble.

    “Meta was able to point to new programs they were developing,” Tromble said. “TikTok was able to point to specific, new APIs they’re developing. Twitter simply had blanks. There was nothing they could say, and in fact what they did say was, ‘We’re already better than everyone else,’ which was true until a week ago.”

    The reports to the EU are seen as an important baseline marker for compliance with the Code of Practice on Disinformation, a voluntary set of self-regulatory commitments that can reduce a tech company’s potential liability under the Digital Services Act, a recently passed EU content moderation law that will be enforced beginning in 2024. Violations of the Digital Services Act can lead to fines of up to 6% of a platform’s global annual revenue.

    “More work is needed when it comes to providing access to data for researchers,” said Věra Jourová, the European Union’s vice-president for values and transparency, in a statement. “We must have more transparency and cannot rely on the online platforms alone for the quality of information. They need to be independently verifiable. I am disappointed to see that Twitter’s report lags behind others and I expect a more serious commitment to their obligations stemming from the Code.”

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  • Twitter users briefly unable to tweet, send messages | CNN Business

    Twitter users briefly unable to tweet, send messages | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Twitter users on Wednesday briefly encountered various issues with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.

    Some users trying to send new tweets received a pop-up saying they had reached the “daily limit” for sending tweets; for others, it simply said, “we’re sorry, we weren’t able to send your Tweet.” Likewise, follow attempts were met with a message saying, “Limit reached. You are unable to follow more people at this time.” And direct messages also failed to send.

    Some users said they were only able to send tweets by using Twitter’s tweet scheduling function.

    Outage tracker DownDetector showed more than 9,000 Twitter issue reports as of 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, although reports began to decline within half an hour and the ability to tweet appeared to quickly return for some users.

    Twitter

    (TWTR)     has experienced a range of technical glitches since Elon Musk took over the company and laid off more than half its staff late last year. Users have previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.

    Some former employees raised concerns that the mass layoffs under Musk could cause the platform to break in big or small ways, after workers with knowledge of Twitter’s key systems were ousted.

    It’s not clear what caused Wednesday’s apparent glitch. Twitter, which eliminated much of its media relations staff last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the outage.

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  • Microsoft unveils revamped Bing search engine using AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT | CNN Business

    Microsoft unveils revamped Bing search engine using AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT | CNN Business

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    Seattle
    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft on Tuesday announced a revamp of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser powered by artificial intelligence, weeks after it confirmed plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

    With the updates, Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries, Microsoft said at a press event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.

    The updates come as the viral success of ChatGPT has sparked a wave of interest in AI chatbot tools. Multiple tech giants are now competing to deploy similar tools that could transform the way we draft e-mails, write essays and search for information online. A day before the event, Google announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT in the coming weeks.

    In partnership with OpenAI, Bing will run on a more powerful large language model than the one that underpins ChatGPT. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts and queries.

    “It’s a new paradigm for search, rapid innovation is going to come,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Tuesday’s event. “In fact, a race starts today … everyday we want to bring out new things, and most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating in search because it’s high time.”

    The updated Bing is expected to be made available for the public to try on Tuesday for limited queries, with a small group of users having unlimited access. The company said full access will roll out to millions of users in the coming weeks, and it also hopes to implement the tools into other web browsers in the future.

    Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said his company’s goal is “to make the benefits of AI to as many people as possible.” That, he said, is “why we worked with Microsoft.”

    Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, said last month it plans to expand its existing partnership with the company as part of a greater effort to add more artificial intelligence to its suite of products. In a separate blog post, OpenAI said the multi-year investment will be used to “develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”

    “This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category that we know,” Nadella said Tuesday.

    The tech giant had already said it would incorporate ChatGPT into products, including its cloud computing platform Azure.

    “While Bing today only has roughly 9% of the search market, further integrating this unique ChatGPT tool and algorithms into the Microsoft search platform could result in major share shifts away from Google and towards Redmond down the road,” Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush, said in an investor note on Monday about the upcoming event.

    With the new Bing, a user could search for TVs to buy in a new way. Once the results come up, the user can click to the chat section and ask Bing for additional information, such as which TVs are best for gaming and which are the least expensive.

    The tool could also create a vacation itinerary for a family in a certain city, and then generate an email with that itinerary for the user to send around to their family. It could even translate the email into other languages if necessary.

    When the tool generates written answers, it will provide references for the sources of information and links to click through to the original source from the web.

    “With answers, we go far beyond what Search can do today,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and consumer chief marketing officer.

    The updated Microsoft Edge browser will have the Bing capabilities built in, allowing users to chat with the search tool on the side of a web page, to ask questions about the page or compare it with content from across the web. It could also, for example, help users draft a post on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn on a certain topic. The company describes the new capabilities as a sort of “co-pilot” to help users navigate the web.

    Many have speculated the AI technology behind ChatGPT could cause a massive shake-up in the online search industry. In the two months since it launched to the public, the viral tool has been used to generate essays, stories and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might previously have searched for on Google or other search engines.

    Microsoft's updated Bing search engine revealed at a news event at Microsoft's Washington headquarters on February 8.

    The immense attention on ChatGPT in recent weeks reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. On Monday, Google unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.

    Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.

    “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models … It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” Pichai wrote.

    While AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly gaining traction among both users and tech companies, they’ve also raised some concerns, including about their potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation.

    Microsoft executives acknowledged the potential shortcomings of its new tool.

    “We know we wont be able to answer every question every single time,” Mehdi said. “We also know we’ll make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every search, so you can give us feedback and we can learn.”

    Executives said the tool is trained in part by sample conversations mimicking bad actors who might want to exploit the tool.

    “With a technology this powerful,” said responsible AI lead Sarah Bird, “I also know that we have an even greater responsibility to make sure that it’s developed, deployed and used properly.”

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  • What is doxxing? | CNN

    What is doxxing? | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: This story is part of ‘Systems Error’, a series by CNN As Equals, investigating how your gender shapes your life online. For information about how CNN As Equals is funded and more, check out our FAQs.



    CNN
     — 

    In 2017, Kyle Quinn enjoyed the anonymity any engineering professor typically would until he became a target of doxxing. Angry social media users mistakenly identified him as having attended a White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. His pictures, home address and employer’s name quickly made rounds across social networks, frightening Quinn and his wife and sending them to a colleague’s home for refuge, the New York Times reported.

    Quinn is one of many victims of doxxing, a form of online invasion of personal privacy that can lead to devastating consequences.

    According to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, doxxing is the intentional revelation of a person’s private information online without their consent, often with malicious intent. This includes the sharing of phone numbers, home addresses, identification numbers and essentially any sensitive and previously private information such as personal photos that could make the victim identifiable and potentially exposed to further harassment, humiliation and real-life threats including stalking and unwanted encounters in person.

    There are multiple etymologies for the term, but the cybersecurity firm Kapersky reports that one explanation is that doxxing came from the phrase ”dropping documents” and gradually ”documents” became ”dox” which has been used as a verb to refer to the practice. Originally a form of online attack used by hackers, the firm wrote, doxxing has been around since the 1990s.

    Doxxing can happen in many ways online and on other platforms.

    According to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, in 2014, the gaming industry experienced a watershed moment known as Gamergate, a year-long culture war led by far right trolls online. After Eron Gjoni, ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn uploaded a blog post about their break up, accused her of cheating on him, and shared screenshots of their private communications on an online forum, Quinn became one of many gamers to be a high-profile target of doxxing and rape threats, followed by many other female game developers who raised their voices, according to The Guardian.

    One of the victims, the American game developer Brianna Wu wrote in the magazine Index on Censorship: ”The truth is there is no free speech when speaking about your experiences leads to death threats, doxxing and having armed police sent to your house.”

    In 2014, Wu tweeted about escaping her home out of fear for her safety along with screenshots of death threats sent to her account.

    In 2019, the South African journalist and broadcaster Karima Brown missent a message meant for her producer to a WhatsApp group run by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party in which journalists are able to get media statements from the EFF, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ). Julius Malema, the party leader, accused her of spying on the party, and reacted by tweeting her phone number to his 2.3 million followers. Brown reportedly received rape and murder threats, including graphic messages 7]. The high court in Johannesburg later ruled the doxxing was a violation of the country’s Electoral Act, according to the CPJ, with Brown telling the non-profit that the court’s ruling was “a victory for democracy and media freedom, and a blow against misogyny and toxic masculinity.”

    Facebook’s parent company Meta does not explicitly use the term ”doxxing” in its privacy violations policy, but said in a statement to CNN that it considers users sharing ”personally identifiable information” about others a violation of its community standards. The company says it reviews any piece of content against its community standards and may remove private information such as home addresses that could result in tangible harm unless this information is publicly available through news coverage, press releases or other sources. Facebook users can use a specific reporting channel when they are concerned about their image privacy on the platform.

    TikTok clearly defines doxxing in its community guidelines which ban both the collection and publication of individuals’ personal information for malicious intent. Users can report a specific item on the platform and follow the instructions.

    Twitter’s app and desktop versions allow you to report other users who tweet private information and media about themselves or somebody else without permission by clicking on the three dots in the corner of an offending tweet, then Report Tweet and following the instructions. Users found in violation of the policy are required to remove the content in question and temporarily locked out of their account. Twitter says permanent suspension may result from a second violation. Users can also file a separate form to report such violations.

    It depends on the jurisdiction. In Asia, Singapore outlawed most forms of intentional harassment or distress in 2014, which includes doxxing, and violators can be fined up to SGD $5,000 (nearly $3,800 US) and/or jailed for up to 6 months.

    In Indonesia, activists told CNN that doxxing cases have been on the rise, especially those targeting women human rights defenders and journalists. Damar Juniarto, the executive director of Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, a network of digital rights activists, said the term doxxing ”is not known in the Indonesia legal system” causing some doxxing cases to not be taken seriously by police. But he explained that the Personal Data Protection law, passed in September, punishes people who use and share personal information without a person’s consent, which can include doxxing.

    In the UK, there are clear guidelines for prosecutors to handle cases, particularly cases of violence against women and girls, which involve threats to post personal information on social media and the disclosure of private sexual images without consent, and the punishments vary.

    In the US, measures to combat doxxing vary across states. Last year, Nevada passed a bill that bans doxxing and allows victims to bring a civil action against the perpetrators. In California, cyber harassment including doxxing with the intent to put others and their immediate family in danger can put violators in county jail for up to one year or impose a fine of up to $1,000, or both.

    In 2021, Hong Kong authorities amended the data privacy law to include doxxing, with people facing jail sentences of up to five years and fines of up to HK$1 million ($129,000 US). This followed the doxxing of many officials and police officers during the 2019 protests against the Hong Kong government’s proposed bill to allow extraditions to mainland China. Critics argued that doxxing can be legally defended if sharing information about government officials out of public interest.

    Lauren Krapf, the technology policy and advocacy counsel for the Anti-Defamation League in the US, said whether doxxing is criminal depends on the intent.

    ”I think in certain circumstances, it is probably appropriate that [doxxers] have some level of criminal liability or civil liability,” Krapf told CNN, but emphasized that doxxing is not a black and white situation. The activity itself can be an empowerment tool for people engaging in protests to share information about extremists to others, she explained.

    Across the US, “state laws vary greatly and there is no federal statute outlawing doxxing,” Krapf told CNN, meaning “there isn’t currently one specific standard codified.”

    While anyone can be doxxed, experts believe women are more likely to be targets of mass online attacks, leaks of their sensitive media, such as sexually explicit imagery that was stolen or shared without consent and unsolicited and sexualized messages.

    A 2020 report by UN Women focusing on India, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Korea found that women experience many forms of online violence simultaneously such as trolling, doxxing and social media hacks.

    A 2020 global report by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), found that online violence against women is startlingly prevalent in the 51 countries surveyed, with 45% of Generation Z and Millennial women reporting being affected, compared to 31% of Generation X women and Baby Boomers, while 85% of women surveyed overall report witnessing online violence against women. While online violence is alarmingly common globally, the study shows significant regional differences, with Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East showing at least 90% of women surveyed having been affected.

    While the responsibility to prevent doxxing rests with those who would violate another’s privacy, and not with the victim, it is useful to take some preventative steps to protect yourself online.

    It can help to be familiar with doxxing-related policies on the online platforms you use as well as how to report abuse more generally. Consider making it harder for people to track you online by restricting the accessibility of any information that can identify you online and offline. For example, check who can see your personal email, phone number, home addresses and other physical locations on your social media accounts.

    The University of Berkeley, PEN America and Artist at Risk Connection provide thorough online privacy guides.

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  • Chinese search engine giant Baidu announces ChatGPT-style AI bot | CNN Business

    Chinese search engine giant Baidu announces ChatGPT-style AI bot | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Chinese search engine giant Baidu says it will be launching its own ChatGPT-style service.

    It will launch a new artificial intelligence chatbot called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese, or “Ernie Bot” in English, a spokesperson told CNN on Tuesday.

    Baidu

    (BIDU)     is currently testing the project internally and will likely roll out the service to users in March, the person said.

    The company did not provide further details, such as how the tool would look or whether it would appear as a feature within its popular search engine.

    Baidu’s AI investments can be seen as “both an offensive and defensive strategic move in China,” Daniel Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, told CNN. “Chinese Big Tech is battling in this AI race, with Baidu [being] a key player.”

    The news follows Google’s announcement Monday that it would unveil a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.

    In a blog post, Google

    (GOOGL)     CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard was opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”

    Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model.

    These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.

    In the two months since it launched, ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might previously have searched for on Google.

    Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , too, is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI. Details of the investment are set to be announced later on Tuesday, with the tie-up estimated to be in the $10 billion range, according to Ives.

    The deal “is a game changer in our opinion for Nadella & Co as the ChatGPT bot is one of the most innovative AI technologies in the world today,” he wrote in a Monday note, referring to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

    — CNN’s Catherine Thorbecke and Juliana Liu contributed to this report.

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  • House Oversight chairman and former Twitter employees strike deal on subpoenas in exchange for testimony | CNN Politics

    House Oversight chairman and former Twitter employees strike deal on subpoenas in exchange for testimony | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has subpoenaed three former Twitter employees who will testify before the panel in relation to their investigation into Twitter’s decision to temporarily suppress a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, three sources familiar with the documents tell CNN.

    Twitter’s former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, former Deputy General Counsel James Baker and former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth requested they be subpoenaed in order to compel their testimony, the sources told CNN, given the legal complications of publicly sharing privileged information from Twitter before the committee.

    The hearing comes after Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk, released some internal communications from Twitter staff about the decision to censor the New York Post story in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election campaign season.

    Comer, who met privately with Musk last month when the billionaire visited the Capitol, told CNN last week that the hearing may “incorporate some private conversations with some high-level people at Twitter” who support the belief that the US government may have played a role in the suppression of the New York Post story.

    When asked specifically if Musk has conveyed this sentiment to him, the Kentucky Republican told CNN: “I cannot answer that but that may come out in the hearing.”

    Comer’s belief that the government may have been involved in the suppression of the story is rooted in the so-called “Twitter files” that Musk made publicly available. Comer added his panel so far has only had access to the files that have been released publicly.

    “Americans deserve answers about this attack on the First Amendment and why Big Tech and the Swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit. Accountability is coming,” Comer said in a statement regarding the hearing.

    CNN has previously reported that allegations the FBI told Twitter to suppress the story are unsupported, and a half a dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, all denied any such directive was given in interviews with CNN.

    Republicans on the panel are especially eager to grill Baker, who previously served as general counsel at the FBI during the investigation into whether former President Donald Trump had colluded with Russia. Baker joined Twitter just five months before the 2020 election.

    Gadde, Baker and Roth did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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