Netflix is making it easier to boot moochers out of your account while still letting them hang onto their viewing preferences. So, when you get fed up of an ex continuing to use your account, you can send them on their way with their recommendations, viewing history, saved titles in My List, game saves, subtitle appearance and other settings intact when they start their own account. That's assuming you ended things on good terms, anyway — you might still want to kick them out without warning.

The feature is rolling out to all users starting today after Netflix initially tested it in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru. Profile transfers will be enabled automatically in all countries except South Korea and the US. You'll need to activate it from your settings in those two nations.

You'll get an email when the profile transfer tool is available on your account. After that, you'll be able to access the Transfer Profile option from the drop-down menu that appears when you hover over your profile icon on the homepage. From there, it's a case of following the directions to set up a new account. It's not clear whether you'll be able to transfer your profile to an existing account. Engadget has asked Netflix for clarification.

Netflix

Netflix says this is a long-awaited feature and the company is framing it as a helpful option for those going through some changes in their life, such as a relationship ending or someone moving away from their parents' account to start a new one with profiles for all their own family members. However, Netflix is also looking to crack down on password sharing.

In August, it started charging users in five Latin American countries more if they share their accounts on an ongoing basis with people who live outside of the primary residence. That came after a trial run in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru, which suggests that account sharing fees may be coming to more territories after the broader rollout of profile transfers. We may soon start hearing about people getting kicked out of Netflix accounts because their friends or parents don't want to pay extra.

Netflix is taking account sharing more seriously, particularly in light of the fact that its total number of subscribers dropped for the first time this year. It lost around 1.2 million in the first six months of 2022.

If you do suddenly find yourself having to pay for your own Netflix account, though, you'll soon have the option to transfer your profile to a cheaper, ad-supported plan. That tier will be available starting on November 3rd. It costs $7 per month, but it won't include access to the full Netflix library or offline viewing.

Meta will end support for Instant Articles by mid-April, the company confirmed to Engadget. It introduced the format to Facebook in 2015 to help news articles load quickly on mobile devices. However, the company is said to be restructuring and directing more resources into its core products — including video-focused features like Reels.

"Currently less than 3% of what people around the world see in Facebook’s Feed are posts with links to news articles," a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. "And as we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn’t make sense to over invest in areas that don't align with user preferences." The company pointed out that its users are spending more time watching videos, especially short-form ones, and that they want to see less news and political content on Facebook.

Axios, which first reported the news, noted that Meta has been reducing its investment in news content, such as by ending the payments it gives to US publishers for including their articles on the News tab. The company also said last week that it will shutter the Bulletin newsletter platform by early 2023.

The mid-April timeline for winding down Instant Articles support will give publishers six months to reassess their Facebook strategies. After that, when you tap a link to a news article on Facebook's mobile apps, you'll be taken to publishers' own websites.

Meta noted that since it debuted Instant Articles, the mobile web experience has broadly improved due to faster internet speeds and more powerful devices. As such, it suggested that these upgrades have rendered Instant Articles unnecessary for many people who access text-based stories. However, you may soon find that some articles take longer to appear on your screen, depending on the page load of publishers' websites.

Google effectively made a similar switch last year when it no longer made its AMP format worthwhile for news publishers. The company said it would stop prioritizing news articles that use the format in its search rankings.

At this point, we’re all pretty used to seeing Instagram copy TikTok. Now, in a new twist, TikTok is copying Instagram with a new feature called “Photo Mode.” The update allows TikTok users to share multiple still photos in a post, along with captions of up to 2,200 characters.

The new photo posts, which can also feature music, will appear in users’ For You page alongside videos. In a blog post, TikTok says it hopes Photo Mode, combined the recently-extended character count, will allow creators to “express themselves and more deeply connect with others.”

But Photo Mode is also making the For You Page more like Instagram in ways that may not be as creative. According to Mashable, the feature is already being used by creators to share recycled text memes and other content that’s often popular on... Instagram.

But TikTok now copying Instagram’s original premise is especially noteworthy given that Instagram has reportedly been struggling with engagement with its TikTok clone, Reels. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that TikTok is still vastly outpacing Instagram Reels in daily watch time.

It’s also the latest bout of every social media platform shamelessly copying each other until they all look kind of the same. In the last six weeks alone: Instagram,TikTok and Snapchat have come up with their own take on French upstart BeReal (Instagram’s hasn’t formally launched yet). Twitter introduced a TikTok-style feed for full-screen videos. While YouTube Shorts, itself a TikTok clone, added TikTok-style voice overs.

A lot more people will soon be able to do what was once unthinkable: edit tweets. Twitter has begun to roll out its new tweet-editing feature to Twitter Blue subscribers in the United States. The expansion follows a launch in Canada, New Zealand and Australia earlier this week.

The feature gives users a 30-minute window to make changes to their tweets. A version history is also available, so others — regardless of whether they subscribe to Twitter Blue — can see a record of all the changes that have been made.

For now, the feature is part of Twitter’s $4.99/month subscription service, which also provides access to NFT profile photos and other specialized features. The company hasn’t confirmed if the edit button will ever be available outside of Twitter Blue, though the feature is categorized as part of “Twitter Blue Labs,” and Twitter has previously said some “Labs” features will eventually be available more widely.

Twitter first announced that it was working on the long-requested edit button back in April, following a poll from Elon Musk, who had recently become the company’s largest shareholder. The company said its work on an edit button predated Musk’s involvement with Twitter, which newly released text messages from Musk seemed to confirm. Interestingly, Musk’s messages also revealed that he was not a fan (to put it mildly) of Twitter Blue, at least in its original form. No word yet on if he has the edit button. 

Fast Company's website finally came back online eight days after the publication took it down due to a cyberattack. The business publication was initially hacked on September 25th, but it wasn't until the second security breach on September 27th that it had to take drastic measures to contain the situation. If you'll recall, Apple News users who are subscribed to Fast Company received a couple of obscene push notifications with racial slurs in late September. The bad actors had also defaced the website with obscene and racist messages and posted details on how they were able to infiltrate the publication. 

They said that Fast Company used an easy-to-crack password for its WordPress CMS and had re-used it for its other accounts. From there, they were able to grab the company's Apple News API keys, as well as authentication tokens that gave them access to employee names, email addresses and IPs. In a forum the hackers linked to on the defaced website, a user called "Thrax" posted a database dump with 6,737 employee records that include mails, password hashes for some of them and unpublished drafts, among other details.

No customer or advertiser information was exposed as a result of the hack, though, Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan wrote in a new post announcing that the publication is back. The main Fast Company website, its corporate site Mansueto.com and its sister site Inc.com remained offline for eight days while an investigation was being conducted. During that period, the publication posted content on other platforms, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Medium. Vaughan didn't go into details with the result of the probe, other than saying that no customer or advertiser data was compromised and that the publication has "taken steps to safeguard against further attacks."

The Internet Archive is aiming to build up a new library of old content. It's expanding beyond Flash games and animations, movies, books and (of course) snapshots of websites with the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC). This particular archive, which will be led by tech historian Kay Savetz, will include amateur radio broadcasts and digital material from the early days of the internet.

Savetz told Gizmodo that his remit includes just about any kind of digital communications from the 1970s until the early 1990s. While the preservation project focuses on amateur radio recordings, it may also feature early podcasts, digital newsletters, photos, videos and, yes, websites. There are plans to digitize print materials as well. “I want the obscure stuff, the locally-produced ham radio newsletters or the smaller magazines, that sort of thing,” Savetz said.

The DLARC team, which has funding from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications Foundation, is looking for help to build out the collection. It's seeking "partners and contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications-related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small." It added that every collection in the library will be accessible to everyone. The project will also offer a discovery portal designed for education and research use cases.

With profits shrinking of late, Facebook has been shutting down unpopular apps and focusing on its core services. To that end, it's updating the primary Facebook Feed to let users see fewer or more posts from friends, groups and pages. That will in turn let it incorporate user feedback into Feed rankings, "making our artificial intelligence systems smarter and more responsive," it said in a blog post. 

As it stands now, the Facebook app only lets you hide posts from people you follow or those it suggests. Now, for friends or recommended posts, a new setting will allow you to "show more" or "show less" of that content. Doing so will not only change your feed content, but improve its AI system used for Feed rankings.

It'll "periodically" show the setting on posts in Feed, and you'll soon be able to access a similar setting on every post by tapping on the three-dot menu at the top right. It's also testing the feature in its short video Reels feature.

Facebook

In addition, Facebook is testing a global menu to customize the number of posts you see from Friends and family; Groups; and Pages and public figures. As shown in the image above, you'll be able to select "Normal," "Show more" or "Show less" of that content. That will appear along with the current Favorites, Snooze, Unfollow and Reconnect in the Feed Preferences.

With the changes, Facebook appears to be addressing one of the main user complaints: too many posts that they don't want to see. Considering the number of ads in Feed (with more coming to Instagram and Reels as well), parent Meta no doubt wants to make sure users are happy with other content. 

Meta's quarterly revenue dipped for the first time ever in the April-June quarter. It's looking to make those numbers go back up and keep smiles on investors' faces. One of the strategies it's employing to do that is by attempting to squeeze more money out of Instagram. As such, it will shove ads into more areas of the app, namely the Explore feed and the grid on people's profiles.

Brands can now place ads in the Explore feed, but profile feed ads are still in the testing phase. The company will also offer some creators the chance to earn a cut of revenue from ads that are displayed in their profile feeds.

Meta announced a slew of other updates for its advertising products. Some of those will impact Instagram. For one thing, the company will try out augmented reality ads in both the feed and Stories. Meta suggests that brands might use these to let people test virtual furniture in their home or get a closer look at a car.

Meta

In addition, the company is experimenting with new formats for ads in Facebook and Instagram Reels. These include a "post-loop" format — skippable ads lasting between four and 10 seconds that play after a reel. After the ad finishes, the reel will play again. The company is also testing image carousel ads, which you may start to see at the bottom of Facebook Reels starting today. In addition, brands will have access to a free library of music to use in Reels ads.

As for how many ads you'll actually see, that may be different for each person. You may or may not see more of them, but they'll at least pop up in places where they weren't present before. "The number of ads across the platform varies based on how people use Instagram," an Instagram spokesperson told Engadget. "We closely monitor people’s sentiment — both for ads and overall commerciality."

It doesn't seem that Meta is considering the sentiment that some people don't want to see ads at all. The company swiftly took action against an unofficial, ad-free Instagram client that popped up last week.

After years of users begging Twitter for an edit button, they're finally getting their wish. The company is rolling out the long-awaited feature in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but only for Twitter Blue subscribers. The option isn't available in the US just yet, but Twitter says users there will get access soon. It plans to offer the feature in other markets too.

Twitter Blue subscribers who send a tweet and realize they made a typo or two will have 30 minutes to make edits. They can make changes up to five times during that time frame. For the sake of transparency, edited tweets have a modified timestamp that reads "last edited" and the time of the last change. Click the timestamp and you'll see the entire edit history.

Twitter said in April that it was at long last starting to test an edit button. There were indications early on that the feature could include an edit history screen. At the beginning of September, Twitter said that it had, in fact, created an edit button. It published a test tweet at the end of the month and, a few days later, the edit button is going out into the wild.

The company is still technically testing the feature — it'll be available as part of the Labs section of the $5 per month Twitter Blue service. Moreover, you can only edit original tweets and quote tweets, according to a support page. Many types of tweets cannot be edited, such as threads, replies, retweets, pinned tweets, Super Follow tweets and ones you draft on third-party apps.

Still, it's a start. Twitter's approach to the edit button makes sense in terms of keeping things as transparent as possible. It's easy to imagine news organizations making changes to a breaking news tweet that's going viral as clarifications or more details come in. Maybe if Twitter opens up the edit button to everyone, they'll be able to fix innocuous typos like "sneak peak" without too much strife.

You might soon need YouTube Premium for more than ditching ads, background playback and trying new features. As MacRumorsnotes, users on Reddit and Twitter have noticed that YouTube is asking some viewers to upgrade to Premium to watch videos in 4K resolution. It's not clear which countries, devices or videos are affected, but this won't be thrilling if you were hoping for better than 1440p on your computer or tablet.

It's not certain if this is a test or broader rollout. We've asked YouTube for comment, and will let you know if we hear back. Premium normally costs $12 per month, or $120 per year.

A move like this wouldn't be unexpected. YouTube claimed a combined 50 million Premium and Music subscribers last September. That may sound like a lot of customers, but it's a modest amount compared to paid media services like Spotify Premium (188 million users as of the second quarter) and Netflix (220.7 million). In theory, locking 4K videos behind YouTube Premium could spur sign-ups and make it a larger revenue source for Google.