An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable. On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable.

The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse. On Saturday, the r/IAmA moderators announced that they will no longer perform these duties:

- Active solicitation of celebrities or high-profile figures to do AMAs.
- Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high-profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).
- Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
- Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
- Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
- Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
- Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

The subreddit, which has 22.5 million subscribers as of this writing, will still exist, but its moderators contend that most of what makes it special will be undermined. "Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention," the moderators said. The mods will also continue to do bare minimum tasks like keeping spam out and rule enforcement, they said. Like many other Reddit moderators Ars has spoken to, some will step away from their duties, and they'll reportedly be replaced "as needed."

Kentucky is requiring that electric vehicle charging companies include Tesla's plug if they want to be part of a state program to electrify highways using federal dollars, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. From the report: Kentucky's plan went into effect on Friday, making it the first state to mandate Tesla's charging technology, although Texas and Washington states previously shared such plans with Reuters. In addition to federal requirements for the rival Combined Charging System (CCS), Kentucky mandates Tesla's plug, called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), at charging stations, according to Kentucky's request for proposal (RFP) for the state's EV charging program on Friday.

"Each port must be equipped with an SAE CCS 1 connector. Each port shall also be capable of connecting to and charging vehicles equipped with charging ports compliant with the North American Charging Standard (NACS)," the documents say. The U.S. Department of Transportation earlier this year said that charging companies must provide CCS plugs to be eligible for federal funding to deploy 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. It added that the rule allows charging stations to have other connectors, as long as they support CCS, a national standard.

Sweden's data protection watchdog has issued a couple of fines in relation to exports of European users' data via Google Analytics which it found breach the bloc's privacy rulebook owing to risks posed by U.S. government surveillance. It has also warned other companies against use of Google's tool. From a report: The fines -- just over $1.1 million for Swedish telco Tele2 and less than $30,000 for local online retailer CDON -- are notable as they are the first such fines following a raft of strategic privacy complaints targeting Google Analytics (and Facebook Connect) back in August 2020.

The regulator found that so-called supplementary measures applied by Google to European users' data sent to the U.S. for processing were insufficient to raise the level of protection to the required legal standard. Including Google's use of IP address truncation (an anonymization measure) as, in the Tele2 case, it said the company did not clarify whether the truncation was performed before or after the transfer of the data to the U.S. so had failed to demonstrate there is "no potential access to the entire IP address before the last octet is truncated." The watchdog also found breaches of the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules on transfers to third countries in the case of two other companies' use of Google Analytics, Coop and Dagens Industries, but did not issue fines in those cases.

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. From a report: If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they're nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot. "Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public," the new Google policy says. "For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities."

Fortunately for history fans, Google maintains a history of changes to its terms of service. The new language amends an existing policy, spelling out new ways your online musings might be used for the tech giant's AI tools work. Previously, Google said the data would be used "for language models," rather than "AI models," and where the older policy just mentioned Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI now make an appearance. This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company's own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company's own AI playground.

Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of Sept. 1, according to a message on its homepage. From a report: Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to "Please save or delete your Gfycat content." "After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com." Gfycat rose as a service during a period where, like Imgur, it was easier to use than any native tools provided by content sites like Facebook or Reddit.

As CEO and co-founcer Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10 million from investors, GIFs were "hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn't very good." Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files, and offered an API for other sites to tap in. "I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions," VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk's Twitter ownership came to pass.

Pornhub is now blocking people in Mississippi and Virginia from visiting its website over laws that would require the service to verify their age. From a report The company says it's blocking users to protest unfair enforcement of these new laws, claiming that sites enforcing the new rules will lose traffic to "irresponsible platforms" that "don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content." Traffic dropped by 80 percent for Pornhub after it began enforcing age verification in Louisiana earlier this year, the company writes. After that experience, it decided to start taking its sites offline instead of enforcing an age gate. In May, it blocked access to users in Utah over a similar law. Techdirt reports that the blackout also applies to other websites operated by Pornhub's owner, such as RedTube.

Mark Zuckerberg in late 2021 had a question for those working on Meta Platforms' strategy for its virtual-reality headset: If Apple can sell iPhones in China, and Tesla can sell cars, why can't we sell our devices there? From a report: The question, posed on a video call, led to a push by Meta to restart its China business by selling its Quest headsets in the country, according to a person familiar with the matter, more than a decade after Facebook was blocked there. The company held discussions with several Chinese tech companies and has made progress with videogame powerhouse Tencent, people familiar with the matter said. But the effort faces challenges, in part because Chinese executives worry that Zuckerberg isn't seen as friendly to China, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent years the Meta founder has accused China of stealing technology and taken aim at ByteDance, the Chinese owner of video-sharing platform TikTok. That has undermined a charm offensive Zuckerberg undertook in Beijing in 2016 and bolstered negative views of the entrepreneur in Beijing, the people said. Officials' perceptions of Zuckerberg could add uncertainty should Meta and its partner seek licenses and approvals for their products and services in China, some of the people said. Meta's refusal to comply with Beijing's censorship rules led to its being blocked in 2009, officials have said. Both Facebook and Twitter were cut off that year after unrest in China's Xinjiang region, with state media saying social media was used to stir riots.

A new article in the Washington Post reports that even internally, "Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both?"

In April, the Washington Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and one possible Space Force counter-measure would "ensure that the United States avoids 'operational surprise,' by keeping track of other countries' satellites and movements in space while also being able to 'identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.'"

To address the possibility of enemies shooting down satellites, the Space Force is also "pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver." That's just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains "space superiority," as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space — why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission...?

[Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing] gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future. Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well? "In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. 'I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island.' And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance," he said. "It's a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response — you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area."

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground? Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moment's notice? Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. "Can we lease a room?" Purdy said. "Can we lease a module?"
A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believes the U.S. Space Force is misunderstood — at least partly because much of what it does is classified. "We fundamentally need to normalize the classification," he tells the Washington Post, "so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people."

CNBC has created a 15-minute video titled "The Rise and Fall of Skype," telling the story of how Skype was developed in just nine months in 2003 by a six-person group of childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says Skype's former chief technical architect Ahti Heinla. "We learned on the go. None of us had any telecoms background." But at the end of the interview, he concedes "I myself use Skype right now fairly little. I still have it installed on my phone, but my primary communication methods now are elsewhere."

GigaOm founder Om Malik tells CNBC it was Skype's missteps that enabled the massive growth of WhatsApp, and shared this succinct diagnosis of what's happening to Skype. "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die." From an accompanying article on CNBC's web site: In 2005 eBay bought it. That deal didn't work out as planned, and an investor group led by Silver Lake purchased a majority stake. Microsoft then stepped in, shelling out $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Even backed by the world's largest software company, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly connect with groups of friends and colleagues over smartphones... Microsoft has promoted Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the app with its Bing generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But the numbers still don't look great.

In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that's since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. Microsoft's newer Teams communication app, by contrast, is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record of over 300 million in the first quarter.
Microsoft Teams reached an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to CNBC's video report. But a research VP at International Data Corp says Microsoft Teams was successful — in taking users away from Skype.

GigaOm's Malik says Microsoft "failed to capitalize on Skype, 100%. Steve Balmer was the king of buying things and not knowing what to do with them... What happened with Skype is the story of every large company with a lot of middle management: they didn't innovate on the product for a very long time."

Jordan Novet from CNBC Business News calls Skype "a product with an uncertain future," arguing that Microsoft "is pouring a lot of engineering resources into making Teams a big destination for communication. It's not doing the same thing with Skype." Could Skype make a comeback? "Anything is possible," Novet concedes. "Microsoft is trying to make Skype happen in a bigger way now." He points out that Skype is now equipped with Bing's AI-powered chatbot, so "You can talk to Bing in Skype. Will that make Skype explode in popularity, or make a comeback? I don't think so."

Microsoft's current head of Skype was not available for CNBC's video. But as a kind of epilogue, they report that Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original programmers, now "spends most of his time discussing the dangers of unchecked AI development."

"I don't know what the future holds for Skype..." he tells CNBC. "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out, so it's unlikely that we'll need Skype if that happens."

"Black Swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives," begins a 2021 paper by a computer science professor at the University of California.

Now the Washington Post revisits that exploration of the possibility that "magnetic fields unleashed by a solar superstorm rip through Earth's magnetosphere, sending currents surging through human infrastructure." A widespread internet outage could, indeed, be brought on by a strong solar storm hitting Earth — a rare but very real event that has not yet happened in the digital age, experts say. When a solar storm known as the Carrington Event struck in 1859, telegraph lines sparked, operators were electrocuted and the northern lights descended to latitudes as low as Jamaica. A 1989 solar storm took out the Quebec power grid for hours. And in 2012, a storm just missed Earth.

As the sun, which has roughly 11-year cycles, enters a particularly active period known as the "solar maximum" in 2025, some are worried our interconnected world is not prepared.

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science professor at University of California at Irvine whose paper "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse" has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about internet resilience when the coronavirus began to spread, and she realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread internet failure was scant. "We've never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don't know how our infrastructure would respond to it," Jyothi said. "Our failure testing doesn't even include such scenarios."

She notes that a severe solar storm is likely to affect large-scale infrastructure such as submarine communication cables, which could interrupt long-distance connectivity. If you have not lost power, you might have access to, say, a government website hosted locally, but reaching bigger websites, which could have data stored all over the place, might not be possible. The northern latitudes are also especially vulnerable to solar storms, and that's where a lot of internet infrastructure is concentrated. "This is not taken into account in our infrastructure deployment today at all," she said. Such outages could last for months, depending on the scale and how long it takes to repair the damage. The economic impact of just one day of lost connectivity in the United States alone is estimated to be more than $11 billion, according to the internet watcher NetBlocks.

Still, Jyothi says she has felt bad for using the term "internet apocalypse" in her paper. There's not much ordinary people can do to prepare for such a phenomenon; it falls on governments and companies. And the paper "just got too much attention," she said.
"Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm of sufficient strength to cause catastrophic disruption occurring within the next decade to be 1.6 to 12%," the paper concludes. (It also notes that the U.S. has a higher risk for a disconnection than Asia.)

"Paying attention to this threat and planning defenses against it, like our preliminary effort in this paper, is critical for the long-term resilience of the Internet."

Earlier this week the Society of Automotive Engineers, a U.S.-based standards organization, announced plans to support Tesla's EV "North American Charging Standard" (or NCAS). The Verge reported Tuesday that "With SAE supporting NACS, larger EV charging company holdouts like the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America may have an easier time making the jump."

And two days later, they did. The Associated Press reports: The second-largest electric vehicle fast-charging network in the U.S. says it will add Tesla's connector to its charging stations, another step toward adopting Tesla's plug as the industry standard. Electrify America, with 800 direct-current fast-charging stations and more than 3,600 plugs nationwide, said Thursday it will work to add Tesla's connector to existing and future chargers by 2025.

The Volkswagen subsidiary, formed as part of the settlement to the company's diesel emissions-cheating scandal, is second only to Tesla in number of fast-charging plugs in the U.S. "We look forward to continuing to support industrywide standards that increase vehicle interoperability and streamline public charging," Electrify America CEO Robert Barrosa said in a statement. The company also will keep the Combined Charging System, or CCS, connector at its stations. At present most electric vehicle models in the U.S. use the CCS connector.

But Ford, General Motors, Rivian and Volvo have said they would join Tesla's large Supercharger network and adopt its North American Charging Standard connector in new versions of their electric vehicles. Others such as Stellantis and Hyundai are considering joining Tesla's network. Also, ChargePoint, which has the most charging stations of any U.S. network, said it will start offering Tesla connectors for use by charging site hosts later this year... Others, such as Blink Charging also have announced plans to add the Tesla connector.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Many popular third-party Reddit apps will be shutting down on Friday because of the platform's forthcoming paid API, and fans of the apps are sending them off with heartfelt posts and memes. The Apollo for Reddit subreddit, for example, is filled with posts celebrating the app. "So long and thanks for everything," said one post for an Apollo-themed version of the "was I a good boy" meme. This morning, someone posted a "Dawn of the Final Day" image. Even Carrot Weather seems to be mourning Apollo. Seriously, just scroll through them all.

Communities for other apps are memorializing, too. "Time to go touch some grass instead." A post in the Sync for Reddit community titled "Goodnight Sweet Sync" has more than 100 comments. "Thank you for being my most used app for nearly a decade," said a user on the BaconReader subreddit. And even though the reddit is fun for Reddit (RIF) community has been in a restricted mode for nearly three weeks, the posts you can see are nearly all tributes to the app. [F]or fans of apps like Apollo, RIF, Boost, and more, there's only a few more hours until the apps shut down for good. At least we'll have the memes.

Joby Aviation has been cleared by the FAA to start flight tests on its first production prototype air taxi, the company wrote in a press release. Engadget reports: It's a large step in the company's aim to start shipping the eVTOL aircraft (electric vertical takeoff and landing) to customers in 2024 and launch an air taxi service by 2025. The aircraft can take off and land like a helicopter, then tilt its six rotors horizontally and fly like an airplane at up to 200 MPH. It's designed to carry a pilot and four passengers over a distance up to 100 miles on a charge -- enough range for most types of air taxi operations. At the same time, Joby claims it's nearly silent in cruise mode and 100 times quieter than conventional aircraft during takeoff and landing.

With the the FAA's special airworthiness certificate in hand, Joby can perform flight tests of full production aircraft, following tests with full-scale prototypes that began in 2017. In May last year, the company received another crucial permit, the FAA's Part 135 air carrier certificate for commercial operations. It recently teamed with Delta Air Lines to offer travel to and from airports, and its website shows a scenario of flying from downtown NYC to JFK airport in just seven minutes compared to 49 minutes in a car.

Now, Joby must clear the largest hurdle with full FAA type and production certification in order to take paying passengers on commercial flights. That's likely about 18 months away, aerospace engineer and Vertical Flight Society director Mike Hirschberg told New Scientist. Its first customer would be the US Air Force, as part of a $131 million contract under the military's Agility Prime program, with deliveries set for 2024.

VMware has joined AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V community to work on an open and cross-platform framework for the development and operation of applications using confidential computing hardware. The Register reports: Revealing the effort at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023 in San Francisco, the companies say they aim to bring about an industry transition to practical confidential computing by developing the open source Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project. Among other goals, the project aims to standardize on a set of platform-independent developer APIs that can be used to develop or adapt application code to run in a confidential computing environment, with a Certifier Service overseeing them in operation. VMware claims to have researched, developed and open sourced the Certifier Framework, but with AMD on board, plus Samsung (which develops its own smartphone chips), the group has the x86 and Arm worlds covered. Also on board is the Keystone project, which is developing an enclave framework to support confidential computing on RISC-V processors.

Confidential computing is designed to protect applications and their data from theft or tampering by protecting them inside a secure enclave, or trusted execution environment (TEE). This uses hardware-based security mechanisms to prevent access from everything outside the enclave, including the host operating system and any other application code. Such security protections are likely to be increasingly important in the context of applications running in multi-cloud environments, VMware reckons.

Another scenario for confidential computing put forward by Microsoft, which believes confidential computing will become the norm -- is multi-party computation and analytics. This sees several users each contribute their own private data to an enclave, where it can be analyzed securely to produce results much richer than each would have got purely from their own data set. This is described as an emerging class of machine learning and "data economy" workloads that are based on sensitive data and models aggregated from multiple sources, which will be enabled by confidential computing. However, VMware points out that like many useful hardware features, it will not be widely adopted until it becomes easier to develop applications in the new paradigm.

Some of the biggest companies in Europe have taken collective action to criticize the European Union's recently approved artificial intelligence regulations, claiming that the Artificial Intelligence Act is ineffective and could negatively impact competition. From a report: In an open letter sent to the European Parliament, Commission, and member states on Friday, over 150 executives from companies like Renault, Heineken, Airbus, and Siemens slammed the AI Act for its potential to "jeopardise Europe's competitiveness and technological sovereignty." On June 14th, the European Parliament greenlit a draft of the AI Act following two years of developing its rules, and expanding them to encompass recent AI breakthroughs like large language AI models (LLMs) and foundation models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4. There are still several phases remaining before the new law can take effect, with the remaining inter-institutional negotiations expected to end later this year. The signatories of the open letter claim that the AI Act in its current state may suppress the opportunity AI technology provides for Europe to "rejoin the technological avant-garde." They argue that the approved rules are too extreme, and risk undermining the bloc's technological ambitions instead of providing a suitable environment for AI innovation.

Huawei has claimed it will offer everything a carrier needs to run a 5.5G network next year. Which sounds great -- even if 5.5G is a little mysterious. From a report: Huawei announced its future products at the Shanghai incarnation of Mobile World Congress on Thursday. The Chinese firm's director and president of ICT Products & Solutions, Yang Chaobin, proclaimed Huawei intends for its launch "to mark the beginning of the 5.5G era for the ICT industry." But as The Register has previously reported, 5.5G is a contested label.

The 3GPP, which oversees development of 5G and other standards, is yet to formally declare 5.5G is a thing. It is, however, continuing to evolve 5G and is currently steering work on Release 18 -- which it has styled "5G-Advanced." It includes some significant changes, such as the ability to offer 10Gbit/sec connections -- if carriers can use 800MHz of spectrum. Release 18 will also require mmWave frequencies. Huawei appears to be referring to Release 18 as 5.5G, for reasons that aren't entirely clear.

Yang sprinkled a little hype dust on his announcement -- claiming that Huawei has "been working on applying AI-native technologies to 5.5G core networks to continuously enhance network capabilities and availability." Doing so will apparently "allow AI capabilities to be delivered to the very ends of networks." Righto. Just keep saying "AI" a lot and people will love it.

Online piracy, now being linked with malware, identity theft, and banking fraud, has prompted a coordinated concerning campaign for tougher legislation beyond copyright laws. The French government, news website TorrentFreak reports, is considering an ambitious approach: integrating state-operated domain blacklists into web browsers. This step is well-intentioned, indicating an evolving strategy in battling piracy.

The UK made last-minute amendments toughening up its sweeping, long-awaited Online Safety Bill following scrutiny in Parliament's upper chamber, the House of Lords. From a report: Internet companies carrying pornographic content will be explicitly required to use age verification or estimation measures, and ensure these methods are effective, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said in an emailed statement Friday. Executives will be held personally responsible for child safety on their platforms, the statement said.

DSIT didn't respond to follow-up questions about the detail of this policy. Regulator Ofcom will be empowered to retrieve data on the online activity of deceased children to understand if and how their online activity may have played any role in their death, if requested by a coroner, the government said. It also announced Ofcom will research the role that app stores play in children's access to harmful content. The watchdog will also publish guidance on how platforms can reduce risks to women and have to improve public literacy of disinformation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Social media firms will be ordered to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms under changes to the online safety bill. The legislation will explicitly refer to content that "encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury" as the type of material that under-18s should be protected from. The bill will also require social media companies to proactively prevent children from seeing the highest risk forms of content, such as material encouraging suicide and self-harm. Tech firms could be required to use age-checking measures to prevent under-18s from seeing such material.

In another change to the legislation, which is expected to become law this year, social media platforms will have to introduce tougher age-checking measures to prevent children from accessing pornography -- bringing them in line with the bill's measures for mainstream sites such as Pornhub. Services that publish or allow pornography on their sites will be required to introduce "highly effective" age-checking measures such as age estimation tools that estimate someone's age from a selfie. Other amendments include requiring the communications watchdog Ofcom to produce guidance for tech firms on protecting women and girls online. Ofcom, which will oversee implementation of the act once it comes into force, will be required to consult with the domestic abuse commissioner and victims commissioner when producing the guidance, in order to ensure it reflects the voices of victims.

The updated bill will also criminalize the sharing of deepfake intimate images in England and Wales. In a further change it will require platforms to ask adult users if they wish to avoid content that promotes self-harm or eating disorders or racist content. Once the law comes into force breaches will carry a punishment of a fine of £18m or up to 10% of global turnover. In the most extreme cases, Ofcom will be able to block platforms.

In a landmark ruling (PDF) on Thursday, the New Jersey Supreme Court sided with Facebook in a major court decision that requires prosecutors to get a wiretap order if they want to eavesdrop on social media accounts without adequate evidence of a crime. New Jersey Monitor reports: In a reversal of lower court decisions, the high court ruled against authorities who argued a warrant is sufficient to obtain nearly real-time release of such communications. That argument is unsupported by federal or state statute, the court said, adding that allowing such releases would effectively neuter New Jersey's wiretap law.

In separate cases focused on two men under investigation for drug offenses, authorities obtained a communications data warrant to force Facebook to disclose social media postings -- within 15 minutes of their creation -- made by the pair over a 30-day span. The state contended such releases, which Facebook said were as close to real-time as technology allows, could be made without meeting the higher bar for a wiretap order because by the time Facebook provided them, they would already have been transmitted and electronically stored.

But Thursday's decision says allowing such releases would make the state's wiretap statute obsolete because "law enforcement today would never need to apply for a wiretap order to obtain future electronic communications from Facebook users' accounts on an ongoing basis." Authorities must show probable cause to obtain a warrant. To obtain a wiretap order, they must also demonstrate that other investigatory methods would fail -- because they are too dangerous, for example -- according to criminal defense lawyer Brian Neary. Neary argued on behalf of the New Jersey State Bar Association, which joined the case as a friend of the court. "It's great to see the New Jersey Supreme Court make clear that whenever the government seeks ongoing access to our private conversations, it must meet the heightened protections required under state law and the federal and state constitutions," said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.