Author: Olsi

Meta is updating its Broadcast Channels feature on Instagram in an effort to make it easier for creators to collaborate with their followers, the company announced on Wednesday. Up until now, viewers could not respond to a creator’s post in a Broadcast Channel, and were limited to emoji reactions. Now, the company is giving creators the option to allow users to reply to their posts and respond to other users’ responses. Plus, creators now have the ability to share prompts to start a conversation in their Channel. When Meta launched Broadcast Channels on Instagram last year, the company presented it…

Instagram Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is testing a way to make your replies to others’ posts less visible on the platform. The company is adding a new privacy feature that allows you to customize your profile to remove the tab that displays your replies. This leaves only the two tabs that show posts and reposts. The addition offers an option to make your profile and use of Threads more private, without having to switch to a fully private profile, which would limit the visibility of your posts to only your followers and those you choose to reply…

Earlier this year, Meta tried to get its own nuclear-powered data center the easy way, by building one next to an existing reactor. But after regulators threw cold water on the plan—the site was reportedly home to a rare bee species—the company is back with a new idea: find a developer who will build one or more nuclear power plants somewhere, anywhere.  Meta announced yesterday a request for proposals from nuclear power developers who would help the company add 1 to 4 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity in the U.S. It’s willing to share costs early in the cycle, according to…

The European Union is drowning under cheap packages coming from Asian online retailers, starting with ultra low-cost e-tailers AliExpress, Shein and Temu. The issue is there are currently no custom duties on goods that are worth less than €150. But the EU isn’t scrapping this threshold, as it’s physically impossible to check all packages. Every second, 40 packages arrive in the Netherlands via air or sea freight. Instead, the European Commission is considering a per-package administrative handling fee. Or maybe a tax on e-commerce platforms’ revenue. Both options would likely lead to lengthy negotiations between the Commission, the World Trade…

U.S. government officials said Tuesday that the China-backed hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon is still inside some of the networks of America’s largest phone and internet providers, weeks after the long-running hacking campaign first came to light. Cybersecurity agency CISA said in a call with reporters the affected telecom giants are still trying to evict the hackers, in part because it’s unclear what the hackers are aiming to accomplish. News first broke in October that Salt Typhoon was reportedly deep inside the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), among others. T-Mobile said it was targeted but largely rebuffed…

Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan early Wednesday morning while walking toward the New York Hilton Midtown for his company’s annual investor conference. According to emerging media reports, Thompson was fired on from roughly 20 feet away by a masked gunman, who appeared to be waiting for Thompson, and escaped by bicycle. Law enforcement continued to canvas the area in the shooting’s aftermath; according to The New York Times, police are offering $10,000 to anyone with information about the shooting. Thompson, 50, was named CEO of UnitedHealthcare—the biggest health insurer in the U.S.—in April…

TikTok is rolling out new ways for creators to raise money for charities and causes they’re passionate about. The company is partnering with Goodstack, a fintech company that manages charitable donations, to enable creators to support organizations from its validated database of nonprofit partners, including the American Red Cross and Save the Children. TikTok is also introducing the ability for creators to personalize their fundraisers. Creators can now add custom titles, descriptions, background images, and goal amounts to their fundraising pages. They also have a dedicated space to share why they are passionate about the cause through a personal message…

Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds.Called Genie 2, the model—the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year—can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g., ,A cute humanoid robot in the woods”). In this way, it’s similar to models under development by Fei-Fei Li’s company, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart. DeepMind claims that Genie 2 can generate a vast diversity of rich 3D worlds,” including worlds in which users can take actions like jumping and swimming by using a…