Meta has set its sights on copying a new messaging app: Telegram. Mark Zuckerberg just showed off “broadcast channels,” a new Instagram feature that brings one-way messaging to the app. The company is testing the feature with a handful of creators, and plans to bring the Telegram-like functionality to Facebook and Messenger as well.

Broadcast channels allow creators to stream updates to their followers’ inboxes, much like channels on Telegram. Those who join the channels are able to react to messages and vote in polls, but can’t participate in the conversation directly. For example, Mark Zuckerberg shared in his “Meta Channel” that he would use the space to “share news and updates on all the products and tech we’re building at Meta.” In addition to text updates, creators can also share audio clips, photos and other content. 

For now, it seems only Zuckerberg and about a dozen other creators have access to the feature. The initial group includes snowboarder Chloe Kim, Jiu-Jitsu fighter Mackenzie Dern, and meme account Tank Sinatra. The company says that others interested in using the feature can sign up to be considered for early access.

Though Meta describes channels as a “test,” the company seems to be fairly invested in the feature. Additional features, including the ability to add another creator to the chat and to conduct AMAs, are already in the works. Meta also plans to start testing the channels on Facebook and Messenger “in the coming months.”

Now that the Safe Connections Act (SCA) has become law, the Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to help domestic violence survivors leave their partners' phone plans. The agency has proposed rules that would require carriers separate the line for a survivor within two business days of a request. Another proposal would also have carriers hide contact with abuse hotlines from consumer-facing call and text logs.

The FCC also hopes to use the Lifeline or Affordable Connectivity Program to support survivors enduring financial hardships for up to six months. Separately, providers are teaming with the National Domestic Violence Hotline to ensure survivors leaving a family plan will get in touch with someone who can offer support from experts on abuse.

The proposals are entering a public comment phase and may be modified when they take effect as required by the SCA. As they are, though, the measures theoretically provide survivors additional safety when leaving abusive relationships. They can quickly exit a plan managed by an abuser, and will be less vulnerable if they call a support line or need financial aid to stay connected. That, in turn, may help them reclaim independence while staying in touch with supportive friends and family members.

If you are experiencing domestic violence and similar abuse, you can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by phone at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or by texting "START" to 88788.

Tile is giving its customers a new option to make its trackers harder for thieves to detect. But since doing so also makes it easier for stalkers to track others without their consent, the company requires verification with a government ID and biometric info to activate the feature. And if someone gets caught using them to stalk, Tile’s terms and conditions will slap them with a $1 million penalty.

The rise in popularity of Bluetooth trackers after Apple’s AirTag launch has highlighted the seemingly zero-sum balance between theft and stalking prevention. Stalking prevention measures, like emitting a sound when the tracker is following someone who isn’t its owner, can make it easier for thieves to recognize they’re being tracked (and quickly dispose of the accessory). But if you remove those protections to make theft deterrence more effective, creeps will have an easier time stalking their exes or anyone else unlucky enough to be their target.

“The bottom line is that a good locating device is also a good stalking device,” said Life360 (Tile’s parent company) CEO Chris Hulls in a Medium blog post on Wednesday. “It is almost impossible to fine-tune alerts in a way that balances the need for accuracy with timeliness. Likewise, it is nearly impossible to make notifications or alert sounds noticeable enough in any practical environment — it is often hard to hear an AirTag beep in a silent room let alone a bar or club where a stalker might be present.”

Tile’s solution tries to find the sweet spot. The Anti-Theft Mode feature will make the devices invisible to Scan and Secure, the company’s in-app feature that lets you know if any nearby Tiles are following you. But to activate the new Anti-Theft Mode, the Tile owner will have to verify their real identity with a government-issued ID, submit a biometric scan that helps root out fake IDs, agree to let Tile share their information with law enforcement and agree to be subject to a $1 million penalty if convicted in a court of law of using Tile for criminal activity. So although it technically makes the device easier for stalkers to use Tiles silently, it makes the penalty of doing so high enough to (at least in theory) deter them from trying.

Chris Velazco / Engadget

Hulls believes the approach is superior to Apple’s solution with AirTag, which emits a sound and notifies iPhone users that one of the trackers is following them. (Android users need to download a separate app to receive similar alerts.) “We did our own limited internal testing (view results here) to see how quickly AirTags would trigger an alert when following someone who was not their owner, and the results were disappointing,” said Hulls. The CEO says the company’s studies, using the latest AirTag software, show that tracked participants received their first “an AirTag is moving with you” alert within one to 24 hours of walking or driving — and sometimes not for several days.

Hull says Tile will “make public, to the greatest extent legally possible, all data about any instances of misuse of Tile devices that have been Anti-Theft enabled. Finally, while I am highly confident that the numbers will prove our thesis true, if we find we are wrong, we will reverse course and publicly acknowledge our mistake.”

Apparently those Super Bowl ads finally did the trick. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced on Thursday that Tesla is recalling nearly 363,000 of its vehicles because the Full Self-Driving software may cause a crash. Specifically, the NHTSA cites a risk to "exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash."

In all, the recall impacts 362,758 vehicles. They include, according to the announcement, “certain 2016-2023 Model S, Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD Beta) software or pending installation.” Tesla will release an OTA update, free of charge to its customers to rectify the issue, Reuters reports.

The NHSTA initially launched its investigation into Tesla's much-hyped Full Self-Driving Autopilot system back in August, 2021 following years of fatal highway accidents and terrifying social media posts documenting the software's seemingly self-destructive behavior.

"We're investing a lot of resources," NHTSA acting head Ann Carlson told reporters in January. "The resources require a lot of technical expertise, actually some legal novelty and so we're moving as quickly as we can, but we also want to be careful and make sure we have all the information we need."

Developing...

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has announced that she's stepping down from the helm of the streaming video service. Wojcicki, who joined Alphabet nearly 25 years ago, said she's starting "a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about."

In her farewell letter, Wojcicki said Neal Mohan is taking over as the new chief. Mohan arrived at the company when Google bought DoubleClick in 2007. He went on to become YouTube's Chief Product Officer in 2015 and helped to launch YouTube TV, YouTube Music, Premium and Shorts. Mohan has also led the service's trust and safety team. 

Intriguingly, Wojcicki wrote that Mohan will be senior vice-president and head of YouTube, rather than CEO. "With all we’re doing across Shorts, streaming and subscriptions, together with the promises of AI, YouTube’s most exciting opportunities are ahead, and Neal is the right person to lead us," Wojcicki said.

She won't be leaving YouTube immediately. "In the short term, I plan to support Neal and help with the transition, which will include continuing to work with some YouTube teams, coaching team members, and meeting with creators," she wrote. Wojcicki will still be involved with the company after that as she'll serve as an advisor to Google and Alphabet. "This will allow me to call on my different experiences over the years to offer counsel and guidance across Google and the portfolio of Alphabet companies," she noted.

Wojcicki has been involved with Google practically since the beginning. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set up office in her parents' garage soon after they incorporated Google in 1998. Wojcicki became Google's first marketing manager the following year and played a role in the earliest Google Doodles. In 2006, she encouraged Google to buy YouTube, which launched a year earlier.

Developing...

Running from 1992 through 1995, Ghostwriter, the beloved PBS children’s television show, followed a diverse group of friends as they solved mysteries around their Brooklyn neighborhood with the help of their haunted typewriter, a cursed item possessed by the trapped soul of a murdered runaway Civil War slave. The Ghostwriter typewriter developed by interaction designer, artist and Lumen.world CTO, Arvind Sanjeev, on the other hand, comes with none of the paranormal hang-ups of its coincidental namesake. Instead of a spirit bound to this hellish plane of existence, forced to help tweens solve low-stakes conundrums, the deus in Sanjeev’s machina is animated by OpenAI’s GPT-3.

He first devised this artistic endeavor in 2021 as a, “poetic intervention that allows us to take a moment to breathe and reflect on this new creative relationship we are forming with machines.” Built over the course of weekends and evenings, Ghostwriter interacts with its user through the written word, allowing the two to converse and co-create freely through the physical medium of paper.

“I wanted Ghostwriter to evoke warm feelings and make people comfortable playing with it,” Sanjeev told Engadget via email. “I chose the mental model of the typewriter for this reason. It is an artifact from our past, a world where technology was more physical and mindful of people's lives.”

“People trust typewriters and feel comfortable with them because they know their sole purpose is just to create stories on paper,” he added. “This is contrary to today's technology, black boxes that try to propagate unethical business models based on the attention economy.”

Ghostwriter began as a vintage electronic Brother AX-325 typewriter (chosen on account of its encodable keypad matrix). Sanjeev selected the GPT-3 model in part due to his familiarity with it through his adjunct faculty position at CIID and in part to its impressive “capability to generate creative content,” he noted. “The easily accessible API convinced me to integrate this into Ghostwriter.”

Sanjeev stripped out much of the machine’s existing mechanical guts and replaced them with an Arduino controller and Raspberry Pi. The arduino reads what the human user has typed on Ghostwriter’s keyboard, then feeds that input to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API through the onboard Raspberry. The AI does its generative magic, spits out a response and Ghostwriter dutifully prints it back onto the page the person’s perusal.

“The Ghostwriter's tactile slow-typed responses made people meditatively read each word one after the other, bringing out all the quirks and nuances of the AI through its finer details,” Sanjeev said.
“Fast digital interactions that live on a word editor tend to hide things like this unintentionally.”

Teaching the system to tap the correct keys in response proved one of the project’s greatest challenges. Sanjeev had to first decode the existing electronic keyboard’s matrix — the device that converts a key’s physical press into its corresponding digital signal. “I pressed each key, read its triggered signal-scan lines, mapped it to the corresponding key, and finally made a driver that ran on an Arduino,” he wrote. Users can even influence the AI’s answers using two physical knobs that adjust Ghostwriter’s “creativity” and “response length” parameters.

Ghostwriter will remain unique for a while longer, unfortunately, though Sanjeev is working to opensource the project so that makers around the world might build their own. “I hope to carve out some time to clean up the code and package everything together soon,” he said.

“Generative AI is definitely not a fad,” Sanjeev declared, though neither is it a silver bullet for content creation. “It is evidence that we have crossed the tipping point for AI creativity that pioneers of AI thought was impossible,” he continued.

These tools help shape our ideas and can even inspire new ones, but at the end of the day are still merely tools for our creativity, not replacements. “AI is a glorified brush that a painter can use to tell their stories,” Sanjeev said. “Humanity and life will always be the center of any successful work, regardless of whether it is realized through AI.”

Arvind Sanjeev

GPT’s ultimate applications will depend on the medium in which it is employed — as an active, hands-on instrument for digital content creation but more as a “library of ideas for inspiration” for makers in the physical space. “The key to unlocking the potential of chatGPT in maker spaces lies in creating meaningful physical interfaces for it,” he said. “The role of an artist or creative using AI becomes that of a bonafide curator who selects the best works from the AI, filters it, and passes it to the next phase of the design process.”

He expects a similar synergy from knowledge workers as well. Automated text generation systems have been the focus of intense media and industry scrutiny in recent months amidst ChatGPT’s rocketing popularity. The technology has shown itself adept at everything from writing linux code and haiku poetry to Wharton Business School entrance exams and CNet financial explainers. Knowledge workers — lawyers, business analysts and journalists, amidst myriad others — are rightly concerned that such automated systems might be used to replace them, as BuzzFeed recently did to its newsroom.

However, Sanjeev believes that AI will instead have a less conspicuous role to play, instead trickling down from its generalist creative uses specializing into specific knowledge fields as it goes. “Just like how cloud computing has become pervasive and powers most of the applications today, AI will also become ubiquitous and recede into the backgrounds of our lives once the hype cycle fades away,” Sanjeev argued.

The AI revolution should lessen the rigors of such jobs and automate much of the drudgier aspects of the work. “The ability to synthesize vast amounts of niche data catered specifically to domains like software engineering, law, and business is being used to train hyper-specialized AIs for these respective fields,” Sanjeev noted.

OpenAI itself offers custom training packages for its systems so that customers might more easily spin up their own personalized AI doctors and robolawyers. Who ultimately bears responsibility when something goes wrong — whether it’s an AI doctor pushing quack diagnoses or an AI lawyer getting itself disbarred — remains a significant question with few easy answers.

The story behind how Tetris became a global phenomenon is the basis of an upcoming Apple TV+ movie. The film will hit the streaming service on March 31st and Apple has just dropped the first trailer.

Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a Dutch entrepreneur who (spoiler) secured deals to distribute Tetris on the Game Boy and other consoles. Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov (played by Nikita Yefremov) created the game during the Cold War, but because he was a government employee, he didn't receive any royalties at the outset. On the surface, that might not sound like the most compelling foundation for a thriller, but the rights to the classic puzzle game were embroiled in a clash between communism and capitalism. 

The fast-paced trailer (appropriately soundtracked by "The Final Countdown") highlights some of that inherent tension. Rogers encounters resistance from a British media mogul who wants the game, KGB agents and even Mikhail Gorbachev.

If you suddenly feel the urge to rotate falling shapes and create horizontal lines with them, there are dozens of ways to play Tetris. Still, it's worth noting that the original version of the game just hit Nintendo Switch Online as part of the first wave of Game Boy titles on the service.

Paramount+ will get a bit more expensive later this year as it folds in Showtime's streaming service. The Premium tier of Paramount+, which will be renamed to Paramount+ With Showtime, will soon cost $12 per month, up from the current $10, as Variety reports. The ad-supported tier, which will not include Showtime, is going up from $5 to $6 per month.

Paramount Global will increase the prices when it merges the two services, which is expected to happen early in the third quarter of this year (i.e., around July or August). The price hikes will be effective in the US and some other markets, according to The Verge. They'll be the first price increases since CBS All Access became Paramount+ two years ago.

There are now almost 56 million Paramount+ subscribers. The service added 9.9 million members in the last quarter of 2022, with the likes of NFL games, Yellowstone and Top Gun: Maverick drawing new users in. Revenue also increased by 81 percent compared with the same quarter in 2021 to around $800 million. As for the ad-supported Pluto TV service, the number of global monthly active users increased by 6.5 million to just under 79 million.

However, Paramount Global executives warned investors on an earnings call the company ran into significant "headwinds" in 2022 and that this won't be a "robust year" for profits. CEO Bob Bakish said that ,for Paramount+, "we are at peak investment in 2023."

Paramount Global expects to take a writedown of between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion as an impairment charge as it merges Paramount+ and Showtime in the US. The writedown, according to chief financial officer Naveen Chopra, is "all about content, driven by the fact that when we combine Showtime and Paramount+, we don’t need the kind of content you would need if they were operating on an independent basis." The company hopes that the move will save it as much as $700 million.

YouTube Kids is finally available on more than a handful of devices in your living room, if not quite in the way you'd expect. As 9to5Googlereports, Google is rolling out the YouTube Kids experience on game consoles, Roku devices and more smart TVs through an update to the main YouTube app. If you switch to a YouTube Kids profile, you'll get the child-friendly experience without having to jump to a different app. This also makes it easier to return to the full app once your kid has finished watching.

You'll see the new approach sometime in the "next few weeks," Google says. You can delete kids' profiles through families.youtube.com when they're ready for grown-up access, although the company warns this will scrub profiles on all platforms.

The dedicated YouTube Kids app is available for Android TV, Apple TV and Fire TV devices as well as LG and Samsung smart TVs. This move makes the walled-off experience available to considerably more people — important if you're concerned your young one might view mature content or thinly-veiled sales pitches. You'll still want to keep an eye on your child's viewing habits, but you might not have to steer them toward a computer or tablet.

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode One: “The Next Generation.”

In the 25th Century…

There’s a wounded starship playing possum in the beautiful, merciless vastness of space, and inside, is a museum. The captain’s quarters holds a trove of props from that old TV show you watched when you were a kid, maybe you still do as an adult. There’s a hypospray, a ready room terminal playing the logs from “The Best of Both Worlds: Part One” and the captain’s dead husband’s personal effects. When an intruder alert sounds, the sleeping captain snaps into action, brandishes a phaser rifle and sets about defending her turf. In a chiaroscuro corridor, she goes full Rambo against two skull-headed villains, and wins, but takes a shot to the gut for her trouble. As she desperately tries to escape, she makes one last, desperate call for help – to Admiral Jean-Luc Picard.

Picard, of course, is in his own museum: He and new beau Laris are staring at his Ready Room painting of the Enterprise D. At his desk, there’s his Ready Room chair from the Enterprise E, and in front of him, a Ressikan Flute and a Kurlan Naiskos. Later, his combadge from the D will start to chirrup, and Picard will dig through boxes of isolinear chips and old uniforms to find it. Less than ten minutes in and you can already imagine the Reddit threads and website articles listing every single easter egg lurking in the half-focus. “Why would anyone send a coded message to a more than twenty year-old Enterprise D communicator?” asks Picard. It’s a fair question to ask given the whole thing makes absolutely no sense in the show’s internal logic.

With a message of distress from his former beau, Picard leaps into action by having a nice sit-down chat with Laris. To be fair, Picard was never a kinetic man of action, and he does need to check in with his new partner’s feelings before running off to rescue his old one. Once he has done that, he leaps into action by going to Ten Forward for a boozy sit-down drink with Riker.

The scene transition has Picard staring at the Enterprise D painting before we crossfade to an Eaglemoss model of the D on the bar shelf. If there was one thing this show needed, it was more beauty shots of memorabilia lovingly presented on shelves. Although there’s a glimmer of self-deprecation, with the server declaring that “nobody wants the fat ones.” When a sinister figure winds up following Picard and Riker out of the bar, they drop the same Enterprise D model into a glass for one last close-up.

After a detour to Raffi, undercover on M’Talas Prime (real subtle, Terry), the fanservice goes broader. First up, we’ll get some nods to the ‘80s Trek movies, paying off the Wrath of Khan-aping “In the 25th Century…” title card. Riker and Picard banter on their way to Spacedock, hatching a plan to hijack the Titan to mount a rescue mission under the nose of its new captain, Shaw. But the Titan has been so completely refitted from the Luna class that it gets an A on its registry as a “Neo Constitution Class.” I’ll admit – this managed to short-circuit my nostalgia glands, since I’m a sucker for Andrew Probert and Richard Taylor’s starship design and Jerry Goldsmith’s Motion Picture score. And when it pulls out of Spacedock before leaping to warp, a la The Search for Spock, we even get some of James Horner’s beloved french horns added to the mix.

Then, again like Wrath of Khan, Picard and Riker are piped aboard with the old-fashioned square electronic whistles by Seven. Shaw is, alas, not for turning, and as well as insisting that Seven use her human name (in a way that clearly makes her uncomfortable), he starts needling both Picard and Riker. The latter for his liking of jazz, the former for his past as a Borg, mirroring Sisko’s needling Picard on their first meeting.

650 or so words in and I haven’t really spoken about the plot, because not much has happened. After 40 minutes, Picard has received a distress call and spoken to lots of people about it, and that’s about it. There’s been plenty of callbacks and continuity porn, paraphiliac depictions of old props, but very little forward motion in the narrative. Picard and Riker make it to Beverley’s ship only to find her in a stasis pod, with her son keeping watch. They’re attacked and left stranded with no hope of escape while a big pointy ship with a Romulan-esque design menaces outside.

Now, remind me. A successful Starfleet Admiral gets a distress call from an old flame, a Doctor no less, who is being threatened by things unknown. When he comes to her aid, he first meets her adult son who instantly gets into a fistfight with the good guys before they realize who he is and what he represents. All the while, our heroes are being menaced by a much more powerful vessel which is looming long in the background. Have we ever seen that in Star Trek before?