Document Reveals First Known Canadian UFO Study in Nearly 30 Years Now Underway – CTV News
— Delivered by Feed43 service
Computers Tech Games Crypto Music and More
— Delivered by Feed43 service
The launch of Lightfall has been huge for Destiny 2, setting a new concurrent player record on Steam, but it hasn’t been without issues. Bungie support has released a thread of all known issues to do with Lightfall’s launch, with some features temporarily deactivated while bugs are investigated.
The issues currently identified by Bungie thankfully don’t seem to be major bugs. The support team has warned that some players report crashing when they go to the Commendations page in the Journeys tab, and recommend players avoid this page until the issue can be fixed.
In temporarily disabled content, the Jötunn Exotic fusion rifle has been removed from all Crucible modes, while the Arc Hunter’s Disorienting Blow melee has also been temporarily removed.
What do Cardi B, Tesla, former Trump White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, and MSNBC host Ali Velshi all have in common?
They’re all former subscribers to Twitter Blue, Twitter’s paid subscription plan, recently revamped by owner and CEO Elon Musk, which offers blue checkmarks to anyone who pays $8 per month (or $11 per month if subscribing through an iOS device). Yes, even Tesla, a company where Musk is also CEO, appears to have unsubscribed.
New Twitter Blue subscriber data released by online researcher Travis Brown highlights that just two months after Twitter relaunched the paid Twitter Blue tier on its platform, it appears subscription numbers may already be starting to stagnate.
Furthermore, a new report from journalist Steven Monacelli in Gizmodo highlights that a number of Twitter Blue verified users who have stopped subscribing to the platform yet their blue checkmark still remains active on their account. Some of these users who spoke to Monacelli canceled their subscriptions months ago, yet their account is still marked as subscribing to Twitter Blue even though they have not paid.
As Brown confirmed to me, those non-paying Twitter Blue users would be tracked as subscribers via the Twitter API, which is what the researcher uses to monitor subscription data. Brown noticed that some of the users reported on in the Gizmodo piece were among those who were finally unsubscribed in the latest data. Monacelli has also confirmed that there are users he spoke to that still have the Twitter Blue badge even after his report and Brown’s latest data release.
Over the past week, 26,319 Twitter users either unsubscribed or were removed from paid Twitter Blue plans according to Brown’s Feb. 12 data release. Some of these unsubscribed users include notable Twitter users, like rapper Cardi B, mentioned above. This would also mark the first time Twitter Blue experienced a decrease in subscribers as far as public tracking of this data goes.
There are some caveats to this tracked data, Brown tells me. Twitter sometimes removes active Twitter Blue users in order to verify them if they change their display name. Those users would usually appear as Twitter Blue subscribers once again. In addition, the only way for third-parties to track Twitter Blue subscriptions is through Twitter’s public API, and there’s a possibility that it sometimes misses new subscribers.
In addition, we now know via the Gizmodo report that some Twitter Blue users actually unsubscribe anywhere from weeks to months before actually being removed, so their cancellations may not be counted until some time later. With that being said, the most recent internal Twitter Blue subscriber data published in a report in The Information, found that Brown’s estimates were extremely close.
So, how many paying Twitter Blue subscribers does Twitter actually have? That previously mentioned report from The Information discovered that Twitter had 180,000 Twitter Blue subscribers in the U.S. as of mid-January, with an estimated total of 290,000 subscribers worldwide.
In 2021, the year before Musk acquired the company, Twitter generated over $5 billion in revenue. Ad revenue made up more than 90% of that amount. Since Musk’s takeover, half of Twitter’s top advertisers stopped running ads on the platform. Musk launched his version of Twitter Blue envisioning a subscription-based model that could help make up for those losses.
Based on the latest internal data, Twitter is pulling in just less than $28 million a year…if all of those 290,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were actually paying, which we now know they are not.
— Delivered by Feed43 service
Malka Older, the author of the Centanal Cycle, has a new book coming out. The Mimicking of Known Successes is both a cozy science-fiction mystery and an introspective slow-burn romance that comes together in startlingly tense moments of action. As Mossa and Pleiti work on a missing-person case together, the book…
Apple’s full statement:
After extensive consultation with experts to gather feedback on child protection initiatives we proposed last year, we are deepening our investment in the Communication Safety feature that we first made available in December 2021. We have further decided to not move forward with our previously proposed CSAM detection tool for iCloud Photos. Children can be protected without companies combing through personal data, and we will continue working with governments, child advocates, and other companies to help protect young people, preserve their right to privacy, and make the internet a safer place for children and for us all.
In August 2021, Apple announced plans for three new child safety features, including a system to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos, a Communication Safety option that blurs sexually explicit photos in the Messages app, and child exploitation resources for Siri. Communication Safety launched in the U.S. with iOS 15.2 in December 2021 and has since expanded to the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the Siri resources are also available, but CSAM detection never ended up launching.
Apple initially said CSAM detection would be implemented in an update to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 by the end of 2021, but the company ultimately postponed the feature based on “feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others.” Now, after a year of silence, Apple has abandoned the CSAM detection plans altogether.
Apple promised its CSAM detection system was “designed with user privacy in mind.” The system would have performed “on-device matching using a database of known CSAM image hashes” from child safety organizations, which Apple would transform into an “unreadable set of hashes that is securely stored on users’ devices.”
Apple planned to report iCloud accounts with known CSAM image hashes to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a non-profit organization that works in collaboration with U.S. law enforcement agencies. Apple said there would be a “threshold” that would ensure “less than a one in one trillion chance per year” of an account being incorrectly flagged by the system, plus a manual review of flagged accounts by a human.
Apple’s plans were criticized by a wide range of individuals and organizations, including security researchers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), politicians, policy groups, university researchers, and even some Apple employees.
Some critics argued that the feature would have created a “backdoor” into devices, which governments or law enforcement agencies could use to surveil users. Another concern was false positives, including the possibility of someone intentionally adding CSAM imagery to another person’s iCloud account to get their account flagged.
This article, “Apple Abandons Controversial Plans to Detect Known CSAM in iCloud Photos” first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums