Before this week, Bluesky, the up-and-coming decentralized Twitter alternative, did not have a system in place to automatically prevent people from registering usernames that featured the n-word as part of their handle. On Wednesday, the company received multiple reports of someone who had the slur in their username. And while Bluesky eventually dealt with the issue, many are upset by the fact the startup did not seem to apologize for the oversight. Instead, on early Saturday morning, days after the incident occurred, Bluesky appeared to frame the event as a one-off that was swiftly addressed.

“On Wednesday, users reported an account that had a slur as its handle. This handle was in violation of our community guidelines, and it was our mistake that allowed it to be created,” the company said. “40 minutes after it was reported, the account was taken down, and the code that allowed this to occur was patched.”

Bluesky went on to claim it had in recent months “made significant investments” in its Trust and Safety team, and that it would continue to invest in “moderation, feedback, and support systems” that would scale with the platform’s growing user base. Bluesky did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request. Days before issuing a statement on the situation, the company, as caught by Hacker News, quietly added the n-word, and nearly four dozen other ethnic and racial slurs, to a list of “reserved” words.

Bluesky's statement, when it did come, appears to have been prompted by a viral LinkedIn post penned by Scott Hirleman, the host of the Data Mesh Radio podcast. Hirleman tagged the company’s executive team, including CEO Jay Graber, and accused Bluesky of failing to address an “incredibly bad anti-blackness problem” on its social network. “If you don’t want to run a social media platform, split the company in twain and go focus on the protocol and fund the platform with another team that cares,” Hirleman added. As of the writing of this article, the post has more than 700 reactions and about 50 comments.

No social media network is free from racists, but the fact that Bluesky didn’t already filter for something so basic as the n-word is surprising when you consider Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is one of the company’s backers. Under Dorsey’s leadership, Twitter was often ineffective with addressing white supremacy and could have frequently done more to protect Black people and other marginalized users.  

After multiple years of delays, it looks like the Cybertruck is finally on its way to consumers. On early Saturday morning, Tesla tweeted out a photo of a Cybertruck that recently rolled off the company’s Giga Texas assembly line in Austin. “First Cybertruck built at Giga Texas!” the automaker said of the image.

As Electrek points out, the vehicle in question is likely a production intent model Tesla designed to identify the most efficient way of making the new vehicle at scale. The fact the company shared a photo of a finished Cybertruck would suggest it’s on track to meet the most recent timeline Elon Musk set for the oft-delayed pickup.

At the start of the year, Musk predicted Cybertruck volume manufacturing would begin in 2024, adding limited production would likely kick off “sometime this summer.” More recently, he told investors Tesla would hold a Cybertruck delivery event in the third quarter of 2023. “[It] takes time to get the manufacturing line going, and this is really a very radical product," Musk said in April. “It's not made in the way that other cars are made." To that point, the Cybertruck’s signature stainless steel frame involves complicated manufacturing techniques that aren’t normally used in the production of other cars. Tesla has also encountered repeated bottlenecks involving its next-generation 4680 battery.

The company's original (and very optimistic) release date for the Cybertruck was 2021. At the time, Tesla said the vehicle would start at $39,900 for the single-motor variant, with the three-motor model coming in at $70,000. The automaker has since said that it has yet to decide on final pricing, and that the cost of the Cybertruck could be based on multiple factors, including supply chain shortages and the state of the economy.

On the same day a US federal judge denied the Federal Trade Commission's request for a preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the tech giant and the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said they have agreed to take a break from their legal battle to negotiate a compromise that could allow the deal to move forward. 

"After today’s court decision in the US, our focus now turns back to the UK. While we ultimately disagree with the CMA’s concerns, we are considering how the transaction might be modified in order to address those concerns in a way that is acceptable to the CMA,” Microsoft President Brad Smith posted to Twitter. "In order to prioritize work on these proposals, Microsoft and Activision have agreed with the CMA that a stay of the litigation in the UK would be in the public interest and the parties have made a joint submission to the Competition Appeal Tribunal to this effect."

The CMA said it would block Microsoft's bid to buy Activision Blizzard at the end of April. At the time, the regulator argued the deal would harm the nascent cloud-gaming market by creating a monopoly player in Microsoft. It added, if the acquisition were to move forward as planned, Microsoft would have an "incentive to withhold [Activision Blizzard] games from competitors and substantially weaken competition in this important growing market." Microsoft had planned to challenge the decision, with a preliminary hearing before the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), the body that hears appeals on CMA decisions, set for July 28th. In a statement the regulator shared with The Verge, it said it was "ready to consider any proposals from Microsoft to restructure the transaction in a way that would address the concerns set out in our Final Report.” The CAT still needs to allow the two sides to negotiate, but the tribunal is more than likely to rubber stamp the request.

Samsung makes some of the best high-end Android phones money can buy, and as it just so happens, Amazon has discounted a handful of the company’s flagships during Prime Day 2023. The highlight of the sale is the 256GB variant of the Galaxy S23+, which is down to an all-time low of $800. Normally, that version of the S23+ will set you back $1,000, though it’s been possible to find the handset on sale for $850 in recent months. Either way, the additional $50 off makes an already great phone even more compelling. Engadget awarded the Galaxy S23+ a score of 86 at the start of the year. Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low praised the phone for its solid battery life, excellent performance and vibrant display, but found the main camera could have performed better in low-light situations.

If you want the best slate device Samsung offers, it’s worth noting the Galaxy S23 Ultra is also on sale. At the moment, you can buy the 256GB model for $950, or $250 off MSRP. That too is an all-time low, with the S23 Ultra going on sale for $1,000 on a few occasions in the last year.

Amazon has also discounted Samsung’s foldables during Prime Day. The Galaxy Z Fold 4 is currently $1,100. That’s a substantial discount from the $1,800 the device was at launch last year. It’s even a decent discount from the $1,350 the Z Fold 4 has sold for on occasion. Meanwhile, you can get the Galaxy Z Flip 4 for $800, a $100 discount from its previous all-time low of $900. Those are great prices for Samsung’s latest foldables, but I would advise against buying either the Z Fold 4 or Z Flip 4 right now. Samsung’s next Unpacked showcase is later this month, and the company has already said that it plans to unveil the next-generation of its foldables at the event.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for the best Amazon Prime Day tech deals. Learn about Prime Day trends on In the Know. Hear from Autoblog’s car experts on must-shop auto-related Prime Day deals and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Nearly three years after a 2020 court decision threatened to grind transatlantic e-commerce to a halt, the European Union has adopted a plan that will allow US tech giants to continue storing data about European users on American soil. In a decision announced Monday, the European Commission approved the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. Under the terms of the deal, the US will establish a court Europeans can engage with if they feel a US tech platform violated their data privacy rights. President Joe Biden announced the creation of the Data Protection Review Court in an executive order he signed last fall. The court can order the deletion of user data and impose other remedial measures. The framework also limits access to European user data by US intelligence agencies.

The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework is the latest chapter in a saga that is now more than a decade in the making. It was only earlier this year the EU fined Meta a record-breaking €1.2 billion after it found that Facebook's practice of moving EU user data to US servers violated the bloc's digital privacy laws. The EU also ordered Meta to delete the data it already had stored on its US servers if the company didn't have a legal way to keep that information there by the fall. As TheWall Street Journal notes, Monday's agreement should allow Meta to avoid the need to delete any data, but the company may end up still paying the fine.

Even with a new agreement in place, it probably won't be smooth sailing just yet for the companies that depend the most on cross-border data flows. Max Schrems, the lawyer who successfully challenged the previous Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield agreements that governed transatlantic data transfers before today, told The Journal he plans to challenge the new framework. "We would need changes in US surveillance law to make this work and we simply don't have it," he said. For what it's worth, the European Commission says it's confident it can defend its new framework in court.

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. On Friday, the comedian and author, alongside novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, filed a pair of complaints against OpenAI and Meta (via Gizmodo). The group alleges the firms trained their large language models on copyrighted materials, including works they published, without obtaining consent.

The complaints center around the datasets OpenAI and Meta allegedly used to train ChatGPT and LLaMA. In the case of OpenAI, while it's "Books1" dataset conforms approximately to the size of Project Gutenberg — a well known copyright-free book repository — lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that the “Books2” datasets is too large to have derived from anywhere other than so-called "shadow libraries" of illegally available copyrighted material, such as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. Everyday pirates can access these materials through direct downloads, but perhaps more usefully for those generating large language models, many shadow libraries also make written material available in bulk torrent packages. One exhibit from Silverman’s lawsuit involves an exchange between the comedian’s lawyers and ChatGPT. Silverman’s legal team asked the chatbot to summarize The Bedwetter, a memoir she published in 2010. The chatbot was not only able to outline entire parts of the book, but some passages it relayed appear to have been reproduced verbatim.

Silverman, Golden and Kadrey aren’t the first authors to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement. In fact, the firm faces a host of legal challenges over how it went about training ChatGPT. In June alone, the company was served with two separate complaints. One is a sweeping class action suit that alleges OpenAI violated federal and state privacy laws by scraping data to train the large language models behind ChatGPT and DALL-E.

Evernote has axed most of its workforce. In a statement shared with SFGate, Bending Spoons, the Milan-based app developer that bought the company last November, said Friday it had laid off nearly all of Evernote's employees in the US and Chile. Bending Spoons plans to move most of the company's remaining operations to Europe. The layoffs come less than six months after the firm cut 129 positions at Evernote because the app had been "unprofitable for years." Bending Spoons didn't share exactly how many employees were affected by this latest round of layoffs. A scan of LinkedIn reveals some software engineers that had been with Evernote for a few years lost their jobs on Friday.

"Our plans for Evernote are as ambitious as ever: Going forward, a growing, dedicated team based in Europe will continue to assume ownership of the Evernote product," Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari told SFGate. "This team will also be in an ideal position to leverage the extensive expertise and strength of the 400-plus workforce at Bending Spoons, many of whom have been working on Evernote full-time since the acquisition." Ferrari added Bending Spoons would provide affected employees with 16 weeks of salary, a prorated performance bonus and up to one year of health insurance.

How the company plans to make Evernote successful in a market crowded with competitors like Notion and Obsidian Ferrari did not say. Whatever Bending Spoons has planned for Evernote, there's no denying this marks another low point for what was once one of the more popular note-taking apps you could download and an early darling of the App Store boom. Evernote enjoyed a valuation of $1 billion at its height, but a lack of focus and buggy software left the company a shell of itself in recent years.

It's probably fair to say that when most people conjure images of the pharmaceutical industry, it's not often there's an association between the production of life-saving drugs and environmental decline. But according to one 2019 study by The Conversation, drug companies produce more tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents per million dollars than the automotive industry. "By our calculations, the pharma market is 28 percent smaller yet 13 percent more polluting than the automotive sector," the outlet said of the state of the pharmaceutical industry in 2015. Put another way: drug companies need to reduce their carbon emissions for the health of the planet and everyone living on it.

Thankfully, a group of scientists from the University of Bath in the United Kingdom may have found a way for the industry to do exactly that. In a study published in the journal ChemSusChem, the team describes a process they created for converting β-pinene, a component found in turpentine, into pharmaceutical precursors that they then used to synthesize paracetamol and ibuprofen. Right now, most companies producing those painkillers use chemical precursors derived from crude oil. Turpentine, meanwhile, is a waste by-product the paper industry makes at a scale of more than 350,000 metric tonnes per year. The researchers say they also successfully used turpentine to synthesize 4-HAP, a precursor for beta-blockers, the asthma inhaler drug salbutamol and a range of household cleaners.

In addition to being more sustainable, the team's "bio-refinery" process could lead to more consistent drug costs for consumers since turpentine isn't subject to the same geopolitical pressures that can send energy and oil prices skyrocketing. However, a significant pitfall of the process in its current form is that it costs more to produce drugs with turpentine than crude oil. The team suggests consumers may be willing to pay slightly higher prices for more sustainable drugs, but let's be honest, when someone is sick or in pain, paying more for relief is the last thing most people want to do.

After a meteoric rise in popularity late last year and into early 2023, it looks like OpenAI’s chatbot is beginning to lose some steam. According to data internet analytics firm Similarweb shared with The Washington Post, last month mobile and desktop traffic to ChatGPT’s website fell by 9.7 percent globally. If Similarweb’s data is accurate, the drop marks the first time the chatbot has seen a user decline. In June, app tracker Sensor Tower also saw downloads of ChatGPT’s iOS client fall off after peaking earlier in the month. OpenAI did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.

Waning interest in ChatGPT appears to be part of an industry trend. Similarweb’s numbers show fewer people visiting the desktop and mobile websites for Microsoft Bing, Google Bard and Character.AI in recent months. Microsoft, for instance, saw traffic to its search engine surge between February and March when Bing AI became available in public preview. Since then, monthly traffic to the website has steadily declined, returning nearly to the levels it was before Microsoft retooled Bing around GPT-4. Separately, Similarweb says it saw a drop in ChatGPT engagement, with user minutes down by 8.5 percent as of May 2023.

As for what could be causing the decline, ThePost suggests the end of the school year may have something to do with it. With most college students on summer break, it speculates not as many young adults are using ChatGPT to write their papers. Another reason could be that companies like Samsung are prohibiting employees from using AI chatbots over the very real fear of a potential data leak. Whatever the reason for the decline, you can bet no one at OpenAI is panicking. If anything, the research lab is probably happy to see fewer people use the public version of ChatGPT. CEO Sam Altman has said the service costs OpenAI an “eye-watering” amount to operate.

Earlier this week, Twitter began migrating users to the "new" version of TweetDeck after its decision to limit how many tweets people could view temporarily broke the previous iteration of its list aggregator. For many, the change was a downgrade due to the new version missing some of the features found within its predecessor. If you want to go back to using the previous release of TweetDeck, now you can, but almost certainly only for a limited time.

As noted by The Verge, overnight some Twitter users noticed that the old TweetDeck was back without so much as an official announcement from Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino or any of the company's official social accounts. Additionally, a handful of developers, including Harpy creator Roberto Doering, noticed Twitter's legacy API was working again, allowing their third-party clients to work once more. Again, how long that will remain true is hard to say.

"Please note that this doesn't mean that Harpy will be maintained again, seeing as Twitter will most likely shut down access to their legacy API (again) soon and third-party apps are still against their [terms of service]," Doering wrote on Harpy's GitHub page. When Twitter began forcing users to migrate to the new Tweetdeck, the company said users will need to be verified to continue using the tool, meaning most people will need to subscribe to Twitter Blue if they want continued access.