Saturday, May 6, 2023

Bluesky says it can't "accommodate heads of state" as it seeks to control growth during its beta; Bluesky currently has ~60K users and a waitlist of 1.2M people (Kylie Robison/Fortune)

Kylie Robison / Fortune:
Bluesky says it can't “accommodate heads of state” as it seeks to control growth during its beta; Bluesky currently has ~60K users and a waitlist of 1.2M people  —  Bluesky, the buzzy social media platform that's emerging as a Twitter competitor, said on Friday that it will not allow …



Discord says it will let "high-visibility users" secure usernames to minimize the risk of impersonation, as some users criticize its plans to change usernames (Umar Shakir/The Verge)

Umar Shakir / The Verge:
Discord says it will let “high-visibility users” secure usernames to minimize the risk of impersonation, as some users criticize its plans to change usernames  —  A race to reserve usernames is kicking off on Discord.  —  Starting in the next couple of weeks …



AI text generators are quietly authoring more of the internet; more AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

Will Oremus / Washington Post:
AI text generators are quietly authoring more of the internet; more AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content  —  From recipes to product reviews to how-to books, artificial intelligence text generators are quietly authoring more and more of the internet.



Binance may face US probe for violating Russian sanctions: Report

The inquiry by the Justice Department's national security division is looking at whether Binance or company officials ran afoul of sanctions related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the report said, citing five people. https://ift.tt/ygu4K1i

A journalist recounts discovering that ByteDance surveilled her in 2022 after reporting on TikTok's staff troubles in London and wonders why she was targeted (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
A journalist recounts discovering that ByteDance surveilled her in 2022 after reporting on TikTok's staff troubles in London and wonders why she was targeted  —  The FT's Cristina Criddle on discovering she'd been surveilled by the controversial social media company



Friday, May 5, 2023

Google Messages rolls out “Send photos faster” to more users

The Google Messages feature "Send photos faster" was introduced last month and is now being more widely released. The "Send photos faster" feature can be found as a new toggle in the settings menu of the Google Messages app. It is specifically labelled as "Send photos faster" and comes with the description "Resolution is reduced for faster sending." https://ift.tt/yV7za1m

Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry anti-US views are taking root worldwide (New York Times)

New York Times : Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry ...