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Meta has fixed a bug that temporarily prevented some Threads users in Canada from reading and sharing news on the app, a company spokesperson told Engadget. Even though Meta pulled news content from Canadian users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds earlier this year, the block hasn’t carried over to Threads.

But a number of Threads users wondered if that had changed when they began to see alerts that suggested otherwise. “People in Canada can’t view this content,” a notice with Threads branding read. “Content from news publishers can’t be viewed in Canada in response to Canadian government legislation.”

It’s unclear how widespread the bug was or how long it was happening. Reports of the issue seemed to crop up on Monday, with some users still unable to view links as of Tuesday morning. “Well... that sucks. @meta is escalating their news blocking in Canada, previously only on Facebook and Instagram, now on Threads,” Pedro Marques wrote in a post Monday.

Screenshot via Threads

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget that the Online News Act’s framework doesn’t apply to Threads, at least for now. Still, the fact that the notice appeared at all has prompted speculation that the company could eventually block news content on Threads as well.

Over the last few years, the world’s largest tech companies have tussled with countries about paying for news. In 2021, for instance, Facebook stopped people in Australia from sharing news links, while Google threatened to stop showcasing content from Australian news publishers on Google News. Both companies, however, eventually reached agreements and agreed to start paying Australian news organizations.

In August, Meta started blocking news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada in response to the country’s Online News Act that requires platforms to pay news organizations to make up for lost advertising revenue. Google, which had earlier pledged to block news links in the country, eventually reached a deal with the country’s government and agreed to pay Canadian publishers around $100 million a year, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Though Meta has downplayed the significance of news on Threads — Instagram head Adam Mosseri said earlier this year the company didn’t want to “amplify news” on the platform — blocking news on Threads could have a more dramatic impact on Threads than it has in Instagram and Facebook. The app has grown to about 100 million users as more people look for Twitter alternatives.

Blocking news, though, could make the app a lot less useful for users and publishers, who have started to see more engagement from the service. “How will Threads replace Twitter when I can't even click on a news story in Canada without getting blocked by Meta,” a Threads user named dexter wrote after encountering the bug.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found that eBay has violated the rights of unionized workers at TCGPlayer, a trading card marketplace owned by the company. This comes in response to charges filed by the Communications Workers of America back in March of this year. eBay has allegedly refused to recognize TCGPlayer’s worker union and it delayed participating in any bargaining practices and it has also refused to divulge any information with the group that the union is legally entitled to.

As part of its examination of the issue, the NLRB said that because eBay and TCGPlayer broke the law, the company must face legal consequences for its union-busting practices. The union, which officially formed in March following numerous anti-union actions from eBay and TCGPlayer, was denied representation during disciplinary investigations. The NLRB also found that eBay was changing working conditions and benefits without engaging in bargaining with the group. On top of that, eBay is said to have even enforced rules that would punish any workers’ elections to unionize.

While the NLRB lays out evidence of eBay’s union-busting practices, it did not officially issue a decision on the matter. The agency is still waiting on the company’s response to the issue. “Now that the board has come to a decision on eBay’s illegal practices, we hope the company will see the light, obey labor law and engage in good faith bargaining practices so that workers can secure a strong union contract,” Dennis Trainor, Communications Workers of America District 1 Vice-President, said in a statement. eBay could not be reached for comment.

Apple is scrambling to make software updates to Apple Watch algorithms that measure blood oxygen levels to avoid an impending ban on the smartwatch in the US over a patent dispute, Bloomberg reported. Changing how the Watch measures oxygen saturation, Apple believes, could help keep the Watch on shelves during the busy holiday shopping season.

The blood oxygen sensor, which was first introduced with the Apple Watch 6 in 2020, is at the heart of a patent dispute between Apple and Masimo, another California-based company that sued Apple in 2021. Masimo claimed that Apple’s sensor violated two patents related to light-based blood-oxygen monitoring that it owned. In October, the International Trade Commission (ITC) upheld a ruling, stating that Apple did, in fact, violate Masimo’s patents.

The case then went to the White House for a 60-day Presidential Review period, which ends next week. If President Biden doesn’t veto the ITC’s decision, Apple will be banned from selling the Apple Watch 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, which include blood oxygen sensing. Apple is complying preemptively with the ban and will stop selling both Apple Watch models on its website on December 21 and in retail stores on December 24 in case the veto doesn’t happen.

One way Apple could keep selling the watch is to settle with Masimo, but the company’s last-minute race to make software changes to the Watch suggests that it doesn’t plan to do so. The company told Bloomberg that it plans to submit its software workaround to the ITC for approval. Masimo’s CEO Joe Kiani, told Bloomberg that he would be open to settling with Apple, but the company hasn’t called him yet. “It takes two to tango,” he said.

He also doesn’t think that a software update to the Apple Watch would resolve the situation. “I don’t think that could work — it shouldn’t — because our patents are not about the software,” Kiani said. “They are about the hardware with the software.”

Overhauling Apple Watch hardware would, of course, be a lot more challenging for Apple than tweaking its software. Even if the ITC approves any potential hardware changes, manufacturing and shipping modified versions of the two Watch models could take upwards of three months, a person familiar with how Apple operates told the publication.

Apple and Masimo have a complicated history. Apple reportedly discussed acquiring the company in 2013 and hiring Kiani to work on the medical features on its smartwatch. That deal never went through. Instead, Kiani claimed that Apple hired more than 20 Masimo engineers, doubled some of their salaries, and made them develop the same kind of medical technology they were working on at Masimo at Apple. “This is not an accidental infringement — this is a deliberate taking of our intellectual property,” Kiani told Bloomberg.

Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment on Kiani’s statements. The company has previously called the ITC’s ruling “erroneous” and plans to appeal the decision to the Federal Circuit.

It’s not clear whether Apple will get immediate relief. The silver lining for the company is that the ban only applies to Apple Watch sales through the company’s own channels — its website and its retail stores — in the US. You should still be able to buy the Apple Watch through other retailers like Best Buy, Walmart and Target.

Beeper Mini has a new “fix” coming for its broken iMessage on Android integration. However, the new method requires Mac access to send (and intermittently resend) “registration data” from an Apple-made desktop or laptop, calling into question how far users will stick with the app. The company says you’ll see the new functionality in an update to the Beeper Cloud Mac app on Wednesday, December 19.

Beeper’s current method requires identification info (“registration data”) sent from a physical Mac computer to authenticate iMessage connections on Android. The company’s latest plans now shift the Mac onus to users. “We have, up until now, been using our own fleet of Mac servers to provide this,” a Beeper spokesperson wrote in the app’s Reddit community. “Unfortunately, this has proven to be an easy target for Apple because thousands of Beeper users were using the same registration data.”

Beeper Mini launched to much fanfare, promising — and delivering — seamless iMessage chats on Android with only a phone number. However, in what seemed like an inevitable move, Apple squashed the app’s core functionality, forcing the startup to deploy new workarounds as it entered a cat-and-mouse game with the $3 trillion corporation.

Beeper says tomorrow’s update for Beeper Cloud on Mac will generate unique “1:1” registration data for individuals rather than thousands of accounts drawing on the same validation info on Beeper’s servers. The company says the new approach “makes the connection very reliable.” However, the registered Mac will still need to “periodically regenerate” the data after you’ve connected a Mac to Beeper Cloud, so it can’t just be a one-and-done connection to the computer.

If you don’t have a Mac and want to use Beeper Mini, the company says you can ask a friend to use their Apple computer for validation. “In our testing, 10-20 iMessage users can safely use the same registration data,” the company posted. The spokesperson said the update will restore chatting on iMessage with your Apple ID email if you don’t already have a phone number tied to your account.

Steve Jennings via Getty Images

It remains to be seen if Beeper Mini’s users will stick around for the more cumbersome setup. “At this point, I am willing to wait for Apple to come out with RCS support,” Redditor u/OldSalukiBandDude commented, referring to Apple’s promised support for the standard that will bring more iMessage-like features to chats between iPhones and Android handsets. “‘Fix’ is a strong word,” u/PredatorRanger added. “This is more like half-assing a workaround that requires more on the user’s end.”

Others were more open-minded about Beeper’s persistence in the face of Apple’s moves to squash the service. “Ppl are so whiney,” u/Waders411111 wrote. “This is a great bandaid to stop the bleeding and let ppl use beeper as intended.. as a way to integrate all your message apps in one place.” U/bb147 concurred: “Not the most user friendly fix but I am happy to have stable consolidated chats again even if I have to install something on a Mac, at least for now.”

In addition to the new setup method, Beeper says it’s open-sourcing its full iMessage bridge and the Mac code that generates registration data. The company linked to a Github tool that allows users to self-host the bridge, bypassing the company’s servers for those who want extra assurance.

Blue Origin’s 24th mission is officially a success. The New Shepard rocket took off as planned this morning and the booster and crew capsule safely separated mid-flight and landed back on this great blue marble we call Earth.

This was an uncrewed mission, but it carried 33 science payloads into low orbit, more than half of them from NASA. The launch allowed for a few minutes of zero gravity in which researchers conducted remote studies on these payloads. For instance, a payload from Honeybee Robotics studied the strength of planetary soils under differing gravity conditions. The manifest also included 38,000 student postcards from the Club for the Future initiative.

To those following this mission, the original launch was scrapped on Monday due to a ground system issue that was, obviously, handled. There were no issues reported regarding today’s flight, though there was a slight holdup of a few minutes added to the countdown.

This mission was basically a do-over of a flight from last year that ended prematurely due to a malfunction of the New Shepard booster’s hydrogen-based rocket engine. This anomaly led to the suspension of Blue Origin launches until an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was completed.

The FAA’s investigation ended in September, freeing up Blue Origin for more launches once it handled a suite of corrective actions mandated by the agency. This included a redesign of the booster’s engine and nozzle as well as some procedural changes. The company hasn’t announced any official plans for future crewed flights, but recently installed an elevator at the launch tower. This is to make future launches “more accessible to people with disabilities, and more people in general,” launch commentator Erika Wagner said during today’s livestream.

To that end, Blue Origin has begun ramping up promotions to attract customers for crewed flights. You can also apply to add a payload to a future launch.

Microsoft Copilot just rolled out a new feature that creates songs via text prompt, thanks to a partnership with AI-based music creation platform Suno. Microsoft says it gives users the ability to craft personalized songs, “regardless of musical background.” Suno has long been working with various algorithms to create an AI that can whip up entire songs and it looks like the company has struck gold.

When you access this tool, all you have to do is enter a prompt and let the algorithm do the rest. The end result should be “fun, clever and personalized” songs, complete with lyrics and singing voices. You can also make an instrumental tune, if that’s your bag. AI use has been ramping up in the music-making space, but most of those tools are intended to help musicians. This is primarily for non-musicians looking to make a tune for a birthday email or something.

To that end, Microsoft gives prompt examples like “create a pop song about adventures with your family” and “make a song that captures the spirit of growing up.” It looks like the Suno add-on will have access to any personal data accrued by Copilot during use, so these songs could, in theory, get pretty specific.

The feature begins rolling out today, but it’s a tiered release. In other words, it could be a few weeks before it reaches your update box. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with the thousand other things that Copilot can do.

The US Department of Justice says it has disrupted the Blackcat ransomware group. Also called ALPHV or Noberus, the hackers have targeted over 1,000 computer networks and extorted millions of dollars from victims. Bloomberg reports its members were known for speaking Russian. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco wrote in a DOJ news release.

The FBI says it developed a decryption tool, which it has used to help over 500 Blackcat victims recover their data — saving more than $68 million in ransom payments. The agency adds that it has “gained visibility into the Blackcat ransomware group’s computer network” and seized several of its websites.

“With a decryption tool provided by the FBI to hundreds of ransomware victims worldwide, businesses and schools were able to reopen, and health care and emergency services were able to come back online,” Monaco wrote. “We will continue to prioritize disruptions and place victims at the center of our strategy to dismantle the ecosystem fueling cybercrime.”

REUTERS / Reuters

Blackcat’s developers create and update the ransomware software, which “affiliates” deploy in attacks on high-value targets; the developers and attackers then split the profits. Once an affiliate has infiltrated a network, they typically steal sensitive data before encrypting the victim’s system, incapacitating it. They then ask for a ransom. If the victims pay, the hackers say they’ll decrypt the system and abstain from exposing their confidential information. If the targets refuse to pony up, the hackers leave the victims locked out and publish their spicy documents on the dark web.

Blackcat took credit for infiltrating businesses and other US and European organizations. These included hacks on MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, Reddit, US critical infrastructure (government facilities, emergency services, defense industrial base companies, critical manufacturing and healthcare facilities), a large UK hospital group and various attacks across the energy sector.

Its members aren’t afraid to think outside the box, either. Last month, Blackcat affiliates reportedly ratcheted the pressure on a hacked company by snitching to the SEC for not reporting their infiltration.

Although this could only be a fleeting upper hand in a long-running game of cat and mouse, the DOJ warns it’s just getting started. “Criminal actors should be aware that the announcement today is just one part of this ongoing effort,” wrote the DOJ’s Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri. “Going forward, we will continue our investigation and pursue those behind Blackcat until they are brought to justice.”

Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 owners can now fix their phones through Samsung's self-repair service. The do-it-yourself program is expanding so that more Galaxy products, including foldables and tablets, are included in the iFixit collaboration. 

Samsung said it will add seven more products this month to its list of devices that are eligible for self-repair – from PCs, smartphones and tablets — including the Galaxy S23 series, Tab S9 series and the Galaxy Book2 Pro series. The program provides users with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) device parts and step-by-step guides that allow for things like screen or battery replacements. The price of fix kits will vary depending on the device. For example, a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Screen and Battery set costs $240.

Samsung’s self-repair program, which first launched in the US last year, will also be offered to customers in an additional 30 countries across Europe. The company says expanding the scope of what’s covered by the program is in line with Samsung’s overall strategy to alleviate e-waste.

Blue Origin is taking another stab at its first launch in 15 months as New Shepard's 24th mission is scheduled to take flight on Tuesday. The company had to scrub a planned launch on Monday due to a ground system issue. Today's launch window opens at 11:37AM ET and the webcast starts 20 minutes beforehand. You can watch the launch below.

The uncrewed science mission has 33 payloads, more than half of which were developed by NASA, Blue Origin says. The other payloads are from K-12 schools, universities and STEAM-centric organizations. The manifest also includes 38,000 student postcards from the Club for the Future initiative.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded New Shepard after an uncrewed launch attempt in September 2022 didn't go as planned. The booster failed after takeoff but it was able to separate successfully from the capsule. Although the capsule made a safe parachute landing, the booster was destroyed when it hit the ground in a designated hazard area.

The year had started so well for robotaxis. Cruise and Waymo came into 2023 riding high on fresh investments from General Motors and Google, respectively, as well as rapidly growing interest from the general public and a downright rabid rate of adoption by city governments. Things were looking up, very up, for the burgeoning self-driving vehicle industry! Then a driverless Crusie taxi accidentally dragged a hit-and-run victim down a San Francisco street for a few dozen feet and everything just sort of went to shit from there. So fragile, these Next Big Things. Let’s take a look back through the year that was to see how autonomous taxi tech might recover from this catastrophe.

Cruise (Out of) Control

Cruise came into this year looking like a nigh-on unstoppable force of transportational change as the core of GM's self-driving efforts. The company received a $1.5 billion investment from the automaker in March 2022 after GM spent $2.1 buying equity ownership for the startup from Softbank Vision Fund. In February the company announced that its test fleet of driverless taxis had traveled a million miles of San Francisco’s streets without a human behind the wheel. The program had only started the previous November.

"When you consider our safety record, the gravity of our team’s achievement comes into sharper focus," Mo Elshenawy, Cruise's EVP of engineering, said in February. "To date, riders have taken tens of thousands of rides in Cruise AVs. In the coming years, millions of people will experience this fully driverless future for themselves."

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt had been installed at his position in December 2021 after GM CEO Mary Barra ousted Dan Ammann from the spot. Vogt spent the following year laying out a grand vision of “zero crashes, zero traffic, and zero emissions,” though, according to a November report from the New York Times, the company “put a priority on the speed of the program over safety” during his tenure, cutting corners on safety in order to get more vehicles on the road. And expand Cruise did, into Houston and Los Angeles most notably, despite a growing number of traffic incidents and accidents left behind by its vehicles.

In April, the company was given permission to operate its driverless vehicles throughout San Francisco, 24/7 as well as pick up paying passengers during daylight hours. Previously, only Cruise employees were allowed to ride in the robotaxis and they could only operate when the sun was out. In August, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3-to-1 in favor of allowing Cruise (and Waymo as well) to to pick up paying passengers at all hours.

Not everybody was fully on board with the robotaxi takeover, mind you. In January 2023, San Francisco officials requested the CPUC slow or even halt the expansion of self-driving vehicle services in the city, arguing that the free-for-all growth OK’d by state regulators was becoming an “unreasonable” burden. In fact, barely a week after the CPUC voted in favor of expansion, the California DMV opened an investigation into an altercation between a Cruise taxi and a fire truck. In response, the DMV had Cruise cut its operating fleet in half — down to 50 vehicles during daylight hours and 150 at night — until it had completed its investigation. Then there was the whole “using robotaxis as love hotels” issue in August.

Those mishaps were bad. The events of October 3 and Cruise’s response to the resulting investigation proved unforgivable. As the company initially explained in the above thread, a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian, pushing her into the path of the Cruise taxi in the lane to her right. The taxi ran the woman over, despite aggressively braking, and ended up dragging her 20 feet until coming to a stop. EMS crews were able to extract the pedestrian from underneath the taxi using the jaws of life, and rushed her to medical treatment with critical injuries.Though she has not been identified, the pedestrian was reportedly in serious condition as late as October 25.

If that weren’t bad enough, Cruise then allegedly misled regulators about when the taxi engaged its brakes — telling them that the taxi had stopped immediately, not eventually, after slowly traveling another 20 feet down the block. The company then repeatedly delayed in releasing video of the incident to investigators until October 19.

The company’s cover-up efforts puts Cruise in financial jeopardy with the CPUC, which is currently considering fining it as much as $1.5 million for its obfuscating actions. The Commission's decision will be made in early February at an upcoming evidentiary hearing.

More immediately, the accident itself set off a whole slew of investigations, regulatory and internal alike. The Exponent consulting firm was brought in as an independent investigator and promptly dredged up some rather unflattering data regarding the robotaxis’ difficulties with spotting and reacting to the presence of small children. That revelation wasn’t so bad, at least compared to the company’s decision to keep the vehicles on the road even after being informed of the potentially deadly defect.

The California DMV was not amused and, two weeks after the accident occurred, the department suspended Cruise’s license to operate within the state, effectively shuttering its robotaxi operations. That’s a huge blow to GM, which has sunk billions into the startup and was anticipating the robotaxi service to generate as much as $5 billion annually when operations were to begin in 2025. In mid-November, the company recalled all 950 of its autonomous taxis in operation, and even paused robotaxi rides with human safety drivers behind the wheel a week later, as part of a “full safety review.”

Then things got even worse. On November 18, CEO Kyle Vogt announced his resignation from his position a week after GM installed EVP of Legal and Policy Craig Glidde (who was already a Cruise board member) as Chief Administrative Officer. The following day, company co-founder and Chief Product Officer Daniel Kan also announced his departure.

In response to Vogt's departure, GM promoted Mo Elshenawy from EVP of Engineering to the dual role of President and CTO, leaving the CEO position currently vacant. GM CEO Mary Barra told reporters recently that the company has “a lot of confidence with what the two co-presidents will do,” but will be “leaning in to make sure that it meets our strict requirements from a safety perspective.”

GM suddenly found itself holding the multibillion dollar bag, so it cut off funding near immediately, slashing budgets to the tune of “hundreds of millions” of dollars. As a result, Cruise has since suspended its equity program and begun laying off employees, starting with those in autonomous vehicle operations.

"The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust," Cruise said in a statement. "Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult."

But Cruise isn’t entirely dead yet, as Elshenawy explained in a recent email to staff. The company plans to scale back its self-driving ambitions and relaunch with a renewed focus on the current Chevy Bolt AV robotaxi platform, rather than its custom-built Origin vehicle. As such the company is pausing production on the Origin at least through 2024 but does plan to continue the program at some point in the future.

Waymo Money, Waymo Problems

Waymo entered 2023 in much the same way as Cruise did: riding high on the hype and promise of self-driving vehicle technology. However it is ending the year in a very different place from its biggest competitor.

Google-backed Waymo had received glowing praise from Swiss RE, a leading global reinsurer, regarding the safety of its vehicles versus human drivers the previous September, and had just launched its second Waymo One taxi service area that December, this time in Phoenix, Arizona, running a route between downtown and the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Los Angeles joined Waymo’s stable of cities in February. Much as it was rolled out in San Francisco, Waymo’s self-driving vehicles were initially made available only to riders who were part of the Waymo Research Trusted Tester program in a limited area (in this case, Santa Monica), always outside of rush hour and only in limited numbers.

The following month the company launched a similar effort in Austin, Texas, a town where it had conducted some of its earliest self-driving tests back in 2015. Austin is a hot town to test self-driving vehicles in, on account of a 2017 state law that prevents cities from locally regulating the technology’s use and deployment on their streets.

Things were going so well for Waymo come summer that the company announced it would shift gears, pushing back plans for its self-driving truck idea to instead focus fully on its expanding robotaxi service.

“Given the tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity we’re seeing on the ride-hailing front, we’ve made the decision to focus our efforts and investment on ride-hailing,” Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov wrote in a July blog post. "We’re iterating more quickly than ever on our technology by pushing forward state of the art AI/ML, and seeing significant business growth and rider demand in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.”

By August, Waymo announced that Austin would be joining those towns as the fourth city to host its autonomous taxi service, with the program rolling out through the Fall. That same month, Waymo received its driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), enabling the company to begin charging passengers for its robotaxi rides as well as expanding the service to additional customers. Previously, the company could only charge for rides if a human safety driver was behind the wheel. The company acknowledged at the time that demand was “incredibly high” (signups had already reportedly passed 100,000 users) but that it was working to make its fully autonomous trips "available to everyone over time."

“Things are growing… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF,” he continued, noting that the company provides more than 10,000 trips per city each week. Overall, it would have been a pretty great year for Waymo — especially after chief rival, Cruise, effectively imploded over the course of Q4 — had the company’s workforce not been subject to not one, not two, but three rounds of layoffs impacting over 300 employees.

The Road Ahead for Robotaxis

As we head into the new year, Waymo is effectively the only game in town, now that Cruise isn’t a viable commercial entity for the foreseeable future.

Midway through the year, analysts predicted the robotaxi market, valued at just over $1.1 billion in 2022, could rise to anywhere from $45.7 billion in 2030 to $118 billion in 2031 citing, “increasing demand for shared transportation, advancements in vehicle technology, growing interest in fuel-efficient public transportation, and improved infrastructure.”

Those outlooks have been tempered in recent months, at least for short term estimates, with Cruise temporarily out of the picture. Forrester Analytics, for example, now expects drone delivery services to become the dominant self-driving vehicle segment in 2024 as pushback from regulators slows development of robotaxi transit tech.

“Expect a booming year for self-driving forklifts, curbside delivery robots, and drone delivery, driven by the increasing popularity of e-commerce, the need for last-mile delivery solutions, and more sophisticated autonomous technologies,” wrote Craig Le Clair, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester.

We are, of course, still waiting on those million robotaxis Elon Musk promised us back in 2019.