After shutting down its awards system last July, Reddit announced that it is bringing it back, with much of the same and some new features. There'll be "a new design for awards, a new award button under eligible posts and a leaderboard showing top awards earned for a comment or a post," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company sunset its awards program last year along with the ability for users to purchase coins. At the same time, Reddit introduced "Golden Upvotes," which were purchased directly through cash. In a new post, the company said the system wasn't as expressive as awards. "While the golden upvote was certainly simpler in theory, in practice, it missed the mark. It wasn't as fun or expressive as legacy awards, and it was unclear how it benefited the recipient," the social network said.

Users who want to give awards to posts and comments will need to buy "gold," which kind of replaces coins. On a support page, the company mentioned that, on average, awards cost anywhere between 15 to 50 gold. Gold packages in Reddit's mobile apps currently start at $1.99 for 100 gold. Users can buy as much as 2,750 gold for $49.99. The company is also adding some safeguards to the awards system, such as disabling awards in NSFW subreddits, trauma and addiction support subreddits, and subreddits with mature content. Additionally, users will be able to report awards to avoid them being used for moderator removals.

Take-Two Interactive is doubling down Grand Theft Auto VI's release date, saying the long-awaited sequel will be out fall 2025 despite rumors of a possible delay into 2026. From a report: Take-Two announced GTA 6's updated release window in its latest earnings report, saying that its current outlook is based on the new date. "We do feel highly confident that we'll deliver [Grand Theft Auto VI] in fall of 2025," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN in an interview when asked if he was concerned that GTA 6 may get delayed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt, written by Mike Masnick: If you're a fan of chaos, well, the TikTok ban situation is providing plenty of chaos to follow. Ever since the US government made it clear it was seriously going to move forward with the obviously unconstitutional and counterproductive plan to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok or have the app effectively banned from the U.S., various rich people have been stepping up with promises to buy the app. There was former Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with plans to buy it. Then there was "mean TV investor, who wants you to forget his sketchy history" Kevin O'Leary with his own TikTok buyout plans. I'm sure there have been other rich dudes as well, though strikingly few stories of actual companies interested in purchasing TikTok.

But now there's another billionaire to add to the pile: billionaire real estate/property mogul Frank McCourt (who has had some scandals in his own history) has had an interesting second act over the last few years as a big believer in decentralized social media. He created and funded Project Liberty, which has become deeply involved in a number of efforts to create infrastructure for decentralized social media, including its own Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSTP).

Over the past few years, I've had a few conversations with people involved in Project Liberty and related projects. Their hearts are in the right place in wanting to rethink the internet in a manner that empowers users over big companies, even if I don't always agree with their approach (he also frequently seems to surround himself with all sorts of tech haters, who have somewhat unrealistic visions of the world). Either way, McCourt and Project Liberty have now announced a plan to bid on TikTok. They plan to merge it into his decentralization plans. "Frank McCourt, Founder of Project Liberty and Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, today announced that Project Liberty is organizing a bid to acquire the popular social media platform TikTok in the U.S., with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform's design and purpose," reads a press release from Project Liberty.

"Working in consultation with Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, and Kirkland & Ellis, one of the world's largest law firms, as well as world-renowned technologists, academics, community leaders, parents and engaged citizens, this bid for TikTok offers an innovative, alternative vision for the platform's infrastructure -- one that allows people to reclaim agency over their digital identities and data by proposing to migrate the platform to a new digital open-source protocol. In launching the bid, McCourt and his partners are seizing this opportunity to return control and value back into the hands of individuals and provide Americans with a meaningful voice, choice, and stake in the future of the web."

Kylie Robison reports via The Verge: Hugging Face, one of the biggest names in machine learning, is committing $10 million in free shared GPUs to help developers create new AI technologies. The goal is to help small developers, academics, and startups counter the centralization of AI advancements. [...] Delangue is concerned about AI startups' ability to compete with the tech giants. Most significant advancements in artificial intelligence -- like GPT-4, the algorithms behind Google Search, and Tesla's Full Self-Driving system -- remain hidden within the confines of major tech companies. Not only are these corporations financially incentivized to keep their models proprietary, but with billions of dollars at their disposal for computational resources, they can compound those gains and race ahead of competitors, making it impossible for startups to keep up. Hugging Face aims to make state-of-the-art AI technologies accessible to everyone, not just the tech giants. [...]

Access to compute poses a significant challenge to constructing large language models, often favoring companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which secure deals with cloud providers for substantial computing resources. Hugging Face aims to level the playing field by donating these shared GPUs to the community through a new program called ZeroGPU. The shared GPUs are accessible to multiple users or applications concurrently, eliminating the need for each user or application to have a dedicated GPU. ZeroGPU will be available via Hugging Face's Spaces, a hosting platform for publishing apps, which has over 300,000 AI demos created so far on CPU or paid GPU, according to the company.

Access to the shared GPUs is determined by usage, so if a portion of the GPU capacity is not actively utilized, that capacity becomes available for use by someone else. This makes them cost-effective, energy-efficient, and ideal for community-wide utilization. ZeroGPU uses Nvidia A100 GPU devices to power this operation -- which offer about half the computation speed of the popular and more expensive H100s. "It's very difficult to get enough GPUs from the main cloud providers, and the way to get them -- which is creating a high barrier to entry -- is to commit on very big numbers for long periods of times," Delangue said. Typically, a company would commit to a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services for one or more years to secure GPU resources. This arrangement disadvantages small companies, indie developers, and academics who build on a small scale and can't predict if their projects will gain traction. Regardless of usage, they still have to pay for the GPUs. "It's also a prediction nightmare to know how many GPUs and what kind of budget you need," Delangue said.

Palo Alto Networks is acquiring IBM's QRadar cloud software and migrating customers to its Cortex Xsiam platform as part of a broader partnership aimed at expanding its consulting capabilities and customer base. The sum of the deal was not disclosed. CNBC reports: The move normally takes one to three months, Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto's CEO, told CNBC. Also, IBM will train more than 1,000 of its consulting employees on Palo Alto's products. [...] For IBM, a more robust lineup of contemporary security tools for consulting might help the company deliver on its stated goal of revenue growth in the mid-single digits for 2024. In the first quarter, revenue increased 3%, with a 2% bump in the consulting segment.

Palo Alto is growing much faster than IBM. In the January quarter, revenue jumped 19%. The company will report results for the latest quarter on Monday. Palo Alto more than doubled in value last year and its stock is up 6% year to date, lifting the company's market cap past $100 billion. The stock rose more than 1% in extended trading. IBM is up close to 5% this year and is now valued at $154 billion. The companies said the transaction should close by the end of September, subject to regulatory approval and other conditions. [...] IBM will continue to sell its QRadar software for use in on-premises data centers. At the same time, IBM will suggest that clients using it consider switching to Palo Alto's Cortex Xsiam.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook and Instagram are under formal investigation in the European Union over child protection concerns, the Commission announced Thursday. The proceedings follow a raft of requests for information to parent entity Meta since the bloc's online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), started applying last August. The development could be significant as the formal proceedings unlock additional investigatory powers for EU enforcers, such as the ability to conduct office inspections or apply interim measures. Penalties for any confirmed breaches of the DSA could reach up to 6% of Meta's global annual turnover.

Meta's two social networks are designated as very large online platforms (VLOPs) under the DSA. This means the company faces an extra set of rules -- overseen by the EU directly -- requiring it to assess and mitigate systemic risks on Facebook and Instagram, including in areas like minors' mental health. In a briefing with journalists, senior Commission officials said they suspect Meta of failing to properly assess and mitigate risks affecting children. They particularly highlighted concerns about addictive design on its social networks, and what they referred to as a "rabbit hole effect," where a minor watching one video may be pushed to view more similar content as a result of the platforms' algorithmic content recommendation engines.

Commission officials gave examples of depression content, or content that promotes an unhealthy body image, as types of content that could have negative impacts on minors' mental health. They are also concerned that the age assurance methods Meta uses may be too easy for kids to circumvent. "One of the underlying questions of all of these grievances is how can we be sure who accesses the service and how effective are the age gates -- particularly for avoiding that underage users access the service," said a senior Commission official briefing press today on background. "This is part of our investigation now to check the effectiveness of the measures that Meta has put in place in this regard as well." In all, the EU suspects Meta of infringing DSA Articles 28, 34, and 35. The Commission will now carry out an in-depth investigation of the two platforms' approach to child protection.

Russia is increasingly seeking to encourage and direct hackers to attack British and other western targets, the director of GCHQ has said in her first keynote speech as head of the British intelligence agency. From a report: Anne Keast-Butler said her agency was "increasingly concerned about growing links" between the Russian intelligence services and proxy hacker groups who have long taken advantage of a permissive environment within the country. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate but now they're nurturing and inspiring these non state cyber actors," she said in a speech to the Cyber UK conference, in what she described as a "globally pervasive" threat.

The spy chief, appointed last year to be the first woman to hold the role, referenced the threat from ransomware -- "the most acute and pervasive cyber threat" -- where cybercriminals, typically from Russia, take control of a company's data and systems and demand significant sums to regain access. GCHQ was "doing everything we can" to counter ransomware actors, Keast-Butler said, degrade their ability to attack systems across government and business and to "produce intelligence that means those involved in ransomware are held to account." There is "no hiding place" for cybercriminals she added.

Samsung has released a response to Apple's recently criticized "Crush" ad, which featured the destruction of instruments, arcade games, and sculptures to promote the new iPad Pro. Apple subsequently apologized, with an executive admitting they "missed the mark."

In a video titled "UnCrush," created by BBH USA and directed by Zen Pace, Samsung depicts a woman navigating debris reminiscent of Apple's ad, using a Galaxy Tab S9 and Galaxy AI to play guitar, in contrast to Apple's destructive message. "We would never crush creativity," the caption of Samsung's video reads.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After launching a feature that adds more AI junk than ever to search results, Google is experimenting with a radical new feature that lets users see only the results they were looking for, in the form of normal text links. As in, what most people actually use Google for. "We've launched a new 'Web' filter that shows only text-based links, just like you might filter to show other types of results, such as images or videos," the official Google Search Liaison Twitter account, run by Danny Sullivan, posted on Tuesday. The option will appear at the top of search results, under the "More" option.

"We've added this after hearing from some that there are times when they'd prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they're looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based results shown separately from search features," Sullivan wrote. "If you're in that group, enjoy!" Searching Google has become a bloated, confusing experience for users in the last few years, as it's gradually started prioritizing advertisements and sponsored results, spammy affiliate content, and AI-generated web pages over authentic, human-created websites.

Google and Samsung used to update smartphone software for only three years. That has changed. From a report: Every smartphone has an expiration date. That day arrives when the software updates stop coming and you start missing out on new apps and security protections. With most phones, this used to happen after about only three years. But things are finally starting to change. The new number is seven. I first noticed this shift when I reviewed Google's $700 Pixel 8 smartphone in October. Google told me that it had committed to provide software updates for the phone for seven years, up from three years for its previous Pixels, because it was the right thing to do.

I was skeptical that this would become a trend. But this year, Samsung, the most profitable Android phone maker, set a similar software timeline for its $800 Galaxy S24 smartphone. Then Google said it would do the same for its $500 Pixel 8A, the budget version of the Pixel 8, which arrived in stores this week. Both companies said they had expanded their software support to make their phones last longer. This is a change from how companies used to talk about phones. Not long ago, tech giants unveiled new devices that encouraged people to upgrade every two years. But in the last few years, smartphone sales have slowed down worldwide as their improvements have become more marginal. Nowadays, people want their phones to endure.

Samsung and Google, the two most influential Android device makers, are playing catch-up with Apple, which has traditionally provided software updates for iPhones for roughly seven years. These moves will make phones last much longer and give people more flexibility to decide when it's time to upgrade. Google said in a statement that it had expanded its software commitment for the Pixel 8A because it wanted customers to feel confident in Pixel phones. And Samsung said it would deliver seven years of software updates, which increase security and reliability, for all its Galaxy flagship phones from now on.

After bipartisan constituents introduced the Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing (TICKET) Act in June 2023, the United States House of Representatives passed the legislation this week in the ongoing efforts to reform the ticketing industry. From a report: The bill received a substantial amount of bipartisan support, passing 338-24. This comes after the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved the bill 45-0 in Dec. 2023. It will, of course, now need to move through the Senate before President Joe Biden signs it into law, and there is currently no floor vote in place for the measure.

If enacted, the TICKET Act will require ticket sellers to implement simple all-in pricing; ban speculative ticketing, where the seller does not have actual possession of the ticket; ban deceptive websites and website marketing; provide full refunds for any canceled event; offer comparable replacement tickets for any postponed event with buyers' approval; and require the FTC to issue a report on the BOTS Act Enforcement, which passed in 2016. Representatives Jan Schakowsky (IL-09) and Gus Bilirakis (FL-12) introduced the legislation last year "to improve transparency in the entertainment industry by requiring all event ticket sellers to display the total ticket price -- including all required fees -- in any advertisement, marketing or promotional materials." It was meant to mirror advertising guidelines for airline tickets and have full transparency throughout the purchasing process.

Japan's Toshiba said on Thursday it will cut up to 4,000 jobs domestically as the industrial conglomerate accelerates restructuring under new ownership. From a report: Toshiba delisted in December due to a $13 billion takeover by a consortium led by private equity firm Japan Industrial Partners, capping a decade of scandal and upheaval. The consortium's efforts to engineer a turnaround at Toshiba are seen as a test for private equity in Japan, which used to be seen as "hagetaka" or vultures due to its rapacious reputation. The restructuring amounts to up to 6% of Toshiba's domestic workforce. The company also said it would relocate office functions from central Tokyo to Kawasaki, west of the capital, and target an operating profit margin of 10% in three years.

Visa is rolling out new technology that will allow the payments giant to share more information about customers' preferences [non-paywalled source] based on their shopping history with retailers as it seeks to remain a top player in the competitive e-commerce space. From a report: The data will be shared via the payments giant's proprietary "tokens," which provide an added layer of security between a consumer's bank information and a merchant. Shopping inclinations and other information based on past transactions -- such as preferred categories, like movies or golf -- will be shared via token with retailers with the consent of consumers.

"It's almost entirely blind to almost all consumers," Visa Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney said in an interview of the company's token technology. "They just know their payments work better." The sharing of shopping data via token is one of a handful of innovations Visa unveiled at a conference in San Francisco, where it's based. Visa, one of the largest e-commerce technology companies in the world, is finding itself increasingly fending off competitors seeking larger slices of the fees merchants must pay to carry out consumer transactions.

In an op-ed on Windows Central, the site's co-managing editor Jez Corden laments Microsoft's "short-sighted" decision-making and "inconsistent" investment in its products and services, which he argues has led to a loss of trust among customers and missed opportunities in the tech industry. Despite Microsoft's advancements in AI and cloud computing, the company has made "baffling" decisions such as shutting down Windows Phone, under-investing in Xbox, and canceling promising Surface products.

The author argues that Microsoft's lack of commitment to security, customer support, and long-term quality has "damaged" its reputation and hindered its potential for growth. Examples include recent hacking scandals, poor customer service experiences, and the aggressive promotion of Microsoft Edge at the expense of user choice. The author also expresses concern over Microsoft's handling of the Xbox brand, particularly the decision to release exclusive games on PlayStation, which could undermine the reasons for customers to choose Xbox. The op-ed concludes that while Microsoft has the potential to be a leader in the tech industry, its pattern of short-sighted decisions and failure to learn from past mistakes has led to a growing sense of doubt among its customers and observers.

Microsoft is asking hundreds of employees in its China-based cloud-computing and AI operations to consider transferring outside the country, as tensions between Washington and Beijing mount around the critical technology. WSJ: Such staff, mostly engineers with Chinese nationality, were recently offered the opportunity to transfer to countries including the U.S., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, people familiar with the matter said. The company is asking about 700 to 800 people [non-paywalled link], who are involved in machine learning and other work related to cloud computing, one of the people said.ÂThe move by one of America's biggest cloud-computing and AI companies comes as the Biden administration seeks to put tighter curbs around China's capability to develop state-of-the-art AI. The White House is considering new rules that would require Microsoft and other U.S. cloud-computing companies to get licenses before giving Chinese customers access to AI chips.