“This change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends, and people can control if they want more,” said Dani Lever, a Meta spokesperson.
In Germany, Great Britain and France, the function was removed already last year. The news section, added in 2019, included the presentation of events by national and international media.
Meta says users will be able to open links to news articles. The media will again be able to publish their links to articles and to their websites.
Leading drivers for the new change to the platform are criticisms leveled at Meta that the company is not doing a good enough job of eliminating misinformation, and that it is contributing to political polarization.
Therefore, Meta has come out with the decision that they have to reduce the political content on their platforms.
“This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted”, added Dani Lever.
Meta said that restricting access to the News tab will not disrupt the review and verification of content on the disinformation platform.
]]>These enhancements, introduced at the CES technology event, allow GeForce RTX GPU owners to generate images in real time, thereby saving significant time in video production. The improvements to these models also aid in more efficient and streamlined workflows.
Each year, the CES event gathers the world’s most influential tech giants to showcase their most innovative and advanced technologies.
The improvements Ayesha Asif writes about allow GeForce RTX GPU owners to generate images in real time and save the time it takes them to generate videos. Improvements to the models also help improve and facilitate workflows.
The new distillation technology built into the SDXL Turbo that allows image generation in just one step helps to achieve the most advanced results possible.
Up to four images per second
NVIDIA hardware accelerated by Tensor Cores and TensorRT can create up to four images per second while enabling access to SDXL’s real-time image generation for the first time ever.
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a learning technology for fine-tuning stable diffusion models. Combined with the Latent Coherence Model (LCM), the LoRA checkpoint provides the ability to shorten the process past the sampling required to create a stable diffusion image.
LCM-LoRA runs up to 9 times faster as it uses only four steps (compared to the traditional 50 steps). In addition to this, it is important to note that the LCM-LoRA model is accelerated by TensorRT optimizations.
Stable Video Diffusion by Stability AI is their first foundation model for generative video based on the image model Stable Diffusion. Stable Video Diffusion runs up to 40% faster with TensorRT, potentially saving up to minutes per generation.
]]>The biggest new addition appears to be a “survival mode” called No Return, which “is designed to allow players to prove their mettle in randomly selected encounters and relive the battles from The Last of Us Part II,” said Naughty Dog’s Jonathan Dornbush in a blog dedicated to the game’s announcement.
You’ll be able to play as some new characters and go through “a variety of stealth and combat encounters that will pit you against a range of enemies, with unique twists that can add new, unexpected factors to each encounter.”
Concerning technical advancements, Dornbush states that the game provides a native 4K output in fidelity mode, upscales to 4K at 1440p during performance mode. Additionally, for users with TVs supporting VRR, there’s an option to unlock the framerate. Improved loading times and the inclusion of DualSense features, such as haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, are also noteworthy aspects.
Information about Remastered surfaced from the PlayStation Network earlier this Friday. Originally launched for PS4 in 2020, The Last of Us Part II received a PS5 optimization patch in 2021. Sony also released a PS5 remake of The Last of Us Part I last year.
While the second season of HBO’s outstanding The Last of Us adaptation may be a considerable time off, you can revisit Remastered in the interim to refresh yourself on certain story elements that might unfold in the upcoming season.
]]>Late last year, Microsoft announced it was “committed” to providing Call of Duty (CoD) to Nintendo for 10 years if its acquisition by Activision Blizzard was approved. Now president Brad Smith has announced on Twitter that the “binding” 10-year contract has been signed, and confirmed that Nintendo will get the same access to CoD as Xbox, Engadget wrote on the subject.
“Microsoft and Nintendo have now negotiated and signed a binding 10-year legal agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo players – in the same days as Xbox, with full feature and content parity. We are committed to providing long-term parity of access to Call of Duty for other gaming platforms.”
, Microsoft said in a statement.
Microsoft previously said it had offered Sony a similar deal for PlayStation consoles and committed to offering the game on Steam at the same time as Xbox – provided the merger goes through, of course.
In addition, the European Union will reportedly join the United Kingdom in declaring that the proposed acquisition could reduce competition. To that end, Microsoft has reportedly requested a hearing with EU regulators to defend the deal – and that meeting is scheduled for today, according to Reuters.
The acquisition has from the outset faced regulators’ concerns that it would deprive the PS5 and other Sony consoles of key games, particularly CoD. Sony has strongly opposed the deal, calling it a “game changer that poses a threat to our industry”. Microsoft said Sony’s comments were “self-serving”, and promised to support Call of Duty for PlayStation “forever”.
]]>The FTC is cracking down on GoodRx, Microsoft is dropping “verified” phishing scams, researchers are uncovering vulnerabilities in electric vehicle chargers, and more, Wired wrote on the topic.
Spam and malware tracking NGO Spamhaus reports that it has seen a “huge spike” in the spread of malware via Google ads over the past two months. This includes “malware” that looks like authentic downloads of tools such as Slack, Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client and the Tor browser.
Security firm SentinelOne further identified a handful of malicious bootloaders distributed through Google ads, which the researchers collectively dubbed MalVirt. They say the MalVirt loaders are used to spread malware such as XLoader, which an attacker can use to steal data from an infected machine.
This week, Microsoft announced that it has disabled the accounts of threat actors who were able to verify themselves under the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program. Posing as legitimate companies, threat actors used their verified account status to create malicious OAuth applications.
The 37 million customers put at risk by the latest T-Mobile hack may not be the only people affected by the breach. This week, Google informed customers of its Google Fi mobile service that hackers had obtained “limited” account information, including phone numbers, SIM card serial numbers and information about their accounts.
The hackers did not gain access to payment information, passwords or the content of messages, such as text messages. However, the information may have been used for SIM replacement attacks.
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Elastic Clusters enables a user to scale a document database to handle virtually any number of writes and reads, with petabytes of storage capacity.
Elastic Clusters simplifies the way customers interact with Amazon DocumentDB by automatically managing the underlying infrastructure and eliminating the need to create, remove, upgrade or scale instances.
Several parameters for Elastic Clusters
Sharding – A popular database concept also known as partitioning, partitioning splits large datasets into smaller datasets across multiple nodes, allowing customers to scale their database beyond the limits of vertical scaling. Elastic Clusters uses sharding to partition data in Amazon DocumentDB’s distributed storage system.
Scaling workloads with little or no impact – With Elastic Clusters, your database can scale to millions of operations with little or no interruption or performance impact.
Integration with other AWS services – Elastic Clusters integrates with other AWS services the same way Amazon DocumentDB integrates today. First, you can monitor the health and performance of your Elastic Clusters using Amazon CloudWatch. Second, you can set up authentication and authorization for resources such as clusters through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles, and use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for secure connections to VPC only. Finally, you can use AWS Glue to import and export data to and from other AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Create a Cluster
When you create a cluster, you will specify the vCPUs you want for your Elastic Clusters when provisioning. With the amount of vCPUs you provision, you will also get a proportional amount of memory expressed in vCPUs. Elastic Clusters automatically provision the required infrastructure (parts and instances) on your behalf.
Customers pay for the amount of compute measured in vCPUs, for the database storage, and for the backup storage. DocumentDB Elastic Clusters is available in a subset of AWS regions, including Ohio, Northern Virginia, Frankfurt, and Ireland.
]]>Allowing developers to run large-scale search and analysis workloads without managing clusters, OpenSearch Serverless supports the latest versions of OpenSearch and previous versions of Elasticsearch, as well as OpenSearch Dashboards and Kibana.
“Prior to the release of OpenSearch Serverless, you created a managed cluster by defining the instance types, counts, and storage options, and then managed the lifecycle and index strategy within that cluster. With OpenSearch Serverless, you create a collection that manages a group of indexes that work together to support a specific workload. You no longer need to specify the hardware or manage the indexes directly.”,
Chani Yoon, chief developer advocate at AWS, explains
OpenSearch Serverless decouples compute and storage, and separates the indexing (ingest) components from the search (query) components, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) being the primary storage service for the indexes. With this decoupled architecture, OpenSearch Serverless can scale the search and indexing functions independently of each other and independently of the indexed data in Amazon S3.
For example, when an application monitoring workload receives a sudden burst of logging activity during an availability event, OpenSearch Serverless immediately scales ingest and storage resources without impacting query response times.
OpenSearch Serverless is now available in the following AWS regions: US East (Ohio), US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland).
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In order to follow some of Russia’s government sections, however, the company put on hold other forms of its business. Microsoft also announced that it will assist Ukraine and provide the country with cyber-security support. The purpose behind this action is to protect it against cyber-attacks possibly set up by Russia.
In a blog post, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said:
“Since the war began, we have acted against Russian positioning, destructive or disruptive measures against more than 20 Ukrainian government, IT and financial sector organizations.”
He also shared that the company is constantly keeping in touch with its employees in Ukraine, giving its best to support them however it can.
Other tech companies have also made similar decisions. Some of them have already restrained Russia’s state-controlled media such as Sputnik or RT. For example, Microsoft has already removed RT’s mobile applications from the app store for Windows.
Microsoft is not the only one which restricts Russia.
Facebook, Google and Youtube impeded Russia’s state media in order to stop it from making money from ads on their platforms.
Also, companies such as Cisco, Oracle, Netflix and Spotify also took actions and withhold operations in Russia.
ll bookings in Russia and Belarus have been stopped by Airbnb. It is said that the company even offered free housing to 100,000 refugees.
In a tweet, Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said that even more tech restrictions for Russia are being expected.
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A while ago, we presented you Apple’s Personal User Safety Guide and showed you what it does offer.
The AirTag devices are meant to work with Apple’s “Find My” network in order to help you find your lost items. However, they got misused as people got tracked with the AirTags, finding them in their cars or personal bags.
Apple did not remain indifferent to the situation. The company said that from now on every user who is setting up their AirTags for the first time will receive a message warning that tracking people using the devices is against the law. In a blog post, Apple stated:
“AirTag was designed to help people locate their personal belongings, not to track people or another person’s property, and we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products.”
At that point users only receive alerts for “unwanted tracks” if there is an AirTag moving with them. The company stated that this will change and people will be alerted earlier if they got unwanted devices traveling with them.
Users of iPhone 11, iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 will be capable of seeing the distance between them and the unknown AirTag.
]]>The reason for all of this is European regulations which are meant to place restrictions on the way EU citizen data gets transferred to the U.S.
However, European politicians don’t seem to be worried about that.
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck and French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire made their statements soon after Meta’s announcement.
AppleInsider reports that at an event in Paris Habeck admitted that after having been hacked he stopped using Facebook and Twitter and life has been fantastic to him for the last fours years. Le Maire on the other hand said:
“I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook.”
He also thinks digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty.
CNBC however, reports that Meta’s spokesperson announced that the company has no such plans at that moment and it has no intention of withdrawing from the European market.
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