Researchers from Darktrace have seen a 135% increase in novel social engineering attack emails in the first two months of 2023. IT Pro reports: The cyber security firm said the email attacks targeted thousands of its customers in January and February 2023, an increase which it said matches the adoption rate of ChatGPT. The novel social engineering attacks make use of "sophisticated linguistic techniques," which Darktrace said include increasing text volume, sentence length, and punctuation in emails. Darktrace also found there's been a decrease in the number of malicious emails that are sent with an attachment or link.

The firm said that this behavior could mean that generative AI, including ChatGPT, is being used by malicious actors to construct targeted attacks rapidly. Survey results indicated that 82% of employees are worried about hackers using generative AI to create scam emails which are indistinguishable from genuine communication. It also found that 30% of employees have fallen for a scam email or text in the past. Darktrace asked survey respondents what the top-three characteristics are that suggest an email is a phish and found:

- 68% said it was being invited to click a link or open an attachment
- 61% said it was due to an unknown sender or unexpected content
- Poor use of spelling and grammar was chosen by 61% too

In the last six months, 70% of employees reported an increase in the frequency of scam emails. Additionally, 79% said that their organization's spam filters prevent legitimate emails from entering their inbox. 87% of employees said they were worried about the amount of their personal information online which could be used in phishing or email scams.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: MicroG is a free-as-in-freedom alternative to proprietary Google services, including the Play Store. Vanced, a popular app that provided an ad-free YouTube experience, relied on microG to operate, something also true for successor ReVanced. In a scheme to damage microG and Vanced-style apps, imposters masquerading as microG have targeted almost two dozen sites with DMCA notices.

On March 30, 2023, someone claiming to be 'MicroG' sent a DMCA complaint to Google. "The following websites use our content, which is a significant loss for our company," it begins, listing the allegedly infringing URLs below. In the majority of cases, the URLs relate to microG's software when utilized in Vanced-related projects, with one notable exception seen at line 8 where the takedown notice targets microG's official website. [...]

At the time of writing, Google has delisted 13% of the URLs in the complaint with 87% currently marked as pending. Other recent complaints, broadly along similar lines (but also completely bogus) were previously rejected in full. Others, including this one sent by 'copyright owner' YouTube Vanced, whoever that is, listed the official YouTube app on Google Play as the original content infringed, before attempting to take down links related to microG and/or Vanced-type software.

Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps. From a report: Google's Nearby Share has been built into Android for a few years now and allows you to locally transfer files over Wi-Fi, with the initial device-pairing happening over Bluetooth. Nearby share has been kind of tough to use in real life, since most people share files over the Internet. And for personal use, most people only have one Android device, their phone, so there has been nothing to share files with. A ton of Android users have Windows PCs, though, so for many this will be the first time Nearby Share has an actual use. Using the app is easy. Just download it from the Android website and click a few "next" buttons in the installer. You need a 64-bit Windows PC (not ARM, ironically) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From there you can easily share by dragging and dropping on Windows or by using the Android "share" button and hitting "Nearby Share." You have the option of signing in to the Windows app or not. If you don't you'll need to manually approve every transaction on both the phone and PC. If you sign in, you can set up auto-accept from yourself, anyone in your contacts, or the probably not advisable "everyone" option.

Google's finance chief Ruth Porat recently said in a rare companywide email that the company is making cuts to employee services. From a report: "These are big, multi-year efforts," Porat said in a Friday email titled: "Our company-wide OKR on durable savings." Elements of the email were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. In separate documents viewed by CNBC, Google said it's cutting back on fitness classes, staplers, tape, and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees. One of the company's important objectives for 2023 is to "deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency." Porat said in the email. "All PAs and Functions are working toward this," she said, referring to product areas.

"What would it look like if we called time on Big Tech's failed experiment?" asks the co-editor of the Oxford-based magazine New Internationalist: A better social media would need to be decentralized... As well as avoiding a single point of failure (or censorship), this would help with other goals: community ownership, and democratic control, would be facilitated by having many smaller, perhaps more local, sites. Existing social media giants must be brought into public (and transnational) ownership — in a way that hands power to citizens, not governments. But they should also be broken up, using existing anti-monopoly rules.

It is hard to know what sort of algorithms would best promote real community until we try... But the algorithms that determine what enters peoples' social feeds must be transparent: open source, open for scrutiny, and for change. We could also adapt from sites like Wikipedia (collectively edited) and Reddit (where posts and comments' visibility is determined by user votes). Moderation policies — what content is and isn't allowed — could be decided collectively, according to groups' needs....

An important step towards a decentralized social network would be interoperability, and data portability. Different sites need to be able to talk to each other (or 'federate'), just as email providers or mobile operators are required to. There's no point being on a site if your friends aren't, but if your server can relay messages to theirs there is less of a barrier. Meanwhile encryption will be vital for privacy.

One particularly intriguing idea is that of artist and software developer Darius Kazemi, who suggests every public library — there are 2.7 million worldwide — could host its own federated social media server. As well as providing local accountability and access, and boosting increasingly defunded neighbourhood assets, these servers would benefit from librarians' expertise in curating information.

It's not just the Ford Mustang that's losing its AM radio. The Detroit Free Press reports: "We are transitioning from AM radio for most new and updated 2024 models," Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood told the Free Press. "A majority of U.S. AM stations, as well as a number of countries and automakers globally, are modernizing radio by offering internet streaming through mobile apps, FM, digital and satellite radio options. Ford will continue to offer these alternatives for customers to hear their favorite AM radio music, news and podcasts as we remove amplitude modulation — the definition of AM in this case — from most new and updated models we bring to market." Commercial vehicles will continue to offer AM radio because of longstanding contract language, Sherwood said....

"In essence, EV motors generate a lot of electromagnetic interference that affects the frequencies of AM radio and make it difficult to get a clear signal," said Mike Ramsey, an analyst with Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Research Group, which specializes in digital transformation and innovation. "It could be shielded, but given the diminishing listening habits to AM, the automakers haven't chosen to do it. Most of the content there is available through other means, including podcast and internet streaming. In my view, this isn't that different from automakers discontinuing 8-track players, cassette players and CD players. Technology has advanced. The idea that it is a critical safety channel is a bit suspect given that almost all critical communication now is sent through mobile phones...."

Veteran analyst John McEloy, host of "Autoline After Hours" webcast and podcast said automakers don't need to get rid of AM radio. "It's happening because automakers would love to get rid of the cost of an AM radio," he told the Free Press. "Some of them, like Ford, are using EVs as an excuse to get rid of it. GM shields its AM radios in its electric cars to they don't get any interference."
But the article also quotes a spokesperson for GM saying they're "evaluating AM radio on future vehicles and not providing any further details at this time."

Last month U.S. Senator Markey noted that seven more top automakers have already removed AM radio from their electric vehicles — BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

"Connecticut police have charged two people with cutting more than 2,000 fiber optic cables" on March 24, reports the Associated Press — leaving more than 15,000 people without internet access. Norwalk police said they arrested Asheville, North Carolina, residents Jillian Persons and Austin Geddings on Saturday during a surveillance operation. Both were charged with larceny and criminal mischief crimes, as well as interfering with police. Persons also was accused of giving a false statement to police. Both were detained on $200,000 bail....The outages caused by the cable cutting have since been restored, according to Optimum's website.
The Stamford Advocate investigated how many people were affected: Norwalk Deputy Police Chief Terry Blake said Sunday more than 40,000 customers in the area were left without internet service as a result of the vandalism. However, an Optimum spokesperson claimed at the time the outages only affected roughly 16,000 customers and the inflated numbers were inaccurate because of an issue with the company's online outage map.

America's Department of Defense "is gearing up for a future conflict in space," reports the Wall Street Journal, "as China and Russia deploy missiles and lasers that can take out satellites and disrupt military and civilian communications." The White House this month proposed a $30 billion annual budget for the U.S. Space Force, almost $4 billion more than last year and a bigger jump than for other services including the Air Force and the Navy.... A key aim of a stand-alone force was to plan, equip and defend U.S. interests in space for all of the services and focus attention on the emerging threats. For the first time, the spending request also includes plans for simulators and other equipment to train Guardians, as Space Force members are known, for potential battle....

Just as it is on Earth, China is the Pentagon's big worry in space. In unveiling a defense strategy late last year, the Biden administration cast China as the greatest danger to U.S. security. In space, the threats from China range from ground-launched missiles or lasers that could destroy or disable U.S. satellites, to jamming and other cyber interference and attacks in space, said Pentagon officials. China has invested heavily in its space program, with a crewed orbiting station, developing ground-based missiles and lasers as well as more surveillance capabilities. This is part of its broader military aims of denying adversaries access to space-based assets.

China is "testing on-orbit satellite systems which could be weaponized as they have already shown the capability to physically control and move other satellites," Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, told a congressional hearing this month. "There's nothing we can do in space that's of any value if the networks that process the information and data are vulnerable to attack," Gen. Saltzman said. A central part of the Space Force's next tranche of military contracts for rocket launches is protecting them from attacks by China and other adversaries. The hope is to make satellites tougher to approach by adversaries' equipment as well as less susceptible to lasers and jamming from space or the ground, said Space Force leaders.
The article also notes the US Defense Department "is moving away from a small number of school bus-size satellites to a planned constellation of hundreds of smaller ones.

"The larger number of targets makes any one satellite less crucial to the network but also requires changes in the capabilities of the satellites themselves, the rockets that put them into orbit and the communications systems they host."

Around 4 in the morning one Tuesday night in San Francisco, an autonomously-driven Cruise vehicle stopped at a red light — and was rear-ended by a Honda. But then "the Honda driver reversed backward several feet, stopped and drove forward again, making contact with the Cruise vehicle a second time," reports NBC News. After damaging the car and injuring its two test drivers, according to a collision report the Honda then "left the scene without exchanging information."

It's just part of "a pattern bedeviling tech companies that are trying to make driverless cars a reality," reports NBC News, after reviewing collision reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles: The reports, which were written by employees of the tech companies, describe 36 instances in 2022 in which a person driving a car or truck left the scene of a crash involving their vehicle and an autonomous vehicle. The problem has continued at a similar pace this year, with seven examples as of early March....

"My best guess is that the drivers think they can't be held liable," said Anderson Franco, a personal injury attorney in the city. "If you are operating your own vehicle and you crash into an autonomous vehicle, the correct thing to do is take photographs, call the police and have it documented," he said. But it's not always clear from the outside of a Cruise or other autonomous vehicle what to do if there's a problem. Cruise said in a statement to NBC News that it was in the process of making its phone number more prominently displayed on the outside of vehicles, so drivers in a crash know who to call....

The human drivers who have hit autonomous vehicles appear to be getting away with little accountability. Autonomous vehicles are usually equipped with a variety of external cameras that could record the license plate numbers of hit-and-run drivers but it's not clear how often the companies have gone down that road.... Cruise said in a statement that the hit-and-runs are usually minor. It said it works with San Francisco police "when necessary" and searches its videos for the license plate numbers of other cars "if needed." Cruise declined to comment on specific cases. Waymo said it has kept its options open about how to respond to hit-and-runs.
California's Department of Motor Vehicles pointed out that because of the limited data available, "it's unclear if the rate of hit-and-run incidents involving autonomous vehicles is higher or lower than the rate involving conventional vehicles."

ProPublica looks at "a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them." While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app's slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.... In an article he wrote for factz.com last year, OBN dubbed himself the "log-out king" because "I have deleted multiple celebrities + influencers on Meta & Instagram... I made about $300k just off banning and unbanning pages," he wrote.

OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta's customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company's standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets' names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they'll be barred for violating Meta's ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account.

Models, businesspeople, marketers and adult performers across the United States told ProPublica that OBN had ruined their businesses and lives with spurious complaints, even causing one woman to consider suicide. More than half a dozen people with over 45 million total followers on Instagram told ProPublica they lost their accounts temporarily or permanently shortly after OBN threatened to report them. They say Meta failed to help them and to take OBN and other account manipulators seriously. One person who said she was victimized by OBN has an ongoing civil suit against Meta for lost income, while others sent the company legal letters demanding payment....

A Meta spokesperson acknowledged that OBN has had short-term success in getting accounts removed by abusing systems intended to help enforce community standards. But the company has addressed those situations and taken down dozens of accounts linked to OBN, the spokesperson said. Most often, the spokesperson said, OBN scammed people by falsely claiming to be able to ban and restore accounts.... After banning an account, OBN frequently offers to reactivate it for a fee as high as $5,000, kicking off a cycle of bans and reactivations that continues until the victim runs out of money or stops paying.
A Meta spokesperson told the site they're currently "updating our support systems," including a tool to help affected users and letting more speak to a live support agent rather than an automated one. But the Meta spokesperson added that "This remains a highly adversarial space, with scammers constantly trying to evade detection by social media platforms."

ProPublica ultimately traced the money to a 20-year-old who lives with his mother (who claimed he was only "funnelling" the money for someone else). After that conversation OBN "announced he would no longer offer account banning as a service" — but would still sell his services in getting your account verified.

The Fresno Bee newspaper reports that flooding in parts of California "have also ground work to a halt at several key construction sites for California's high-speed rail project." But while standing water at some locations has prevented work crews from reaching their job sites, the Central Valley director for the Cailfornia High-Speed Rail Authority said it's the prospects for a lengthy summer run of water in local irrigation canals that present a greater potential disruption to construction later this year....

At the Tule River viaduct near Highway 43 and Avenue 144 south of Corcoran, drone video posted to social media on March 22 by the Tulare County Sheriff's Office shows vehicles stranded in floodwaters and support columns for the structure sticking out of the water. "There's a lot of work we can't get to," Garth Fernandez, who heads up the rail agency's Central Valley region, told The Fresno Bee in a telephone interview this week. "So at Tule River and Deer Creek, right now we are not working. ... We don't even have access to that (Deer Creek) site right now because it's all under water." Fernandez added that in the meantime, the rail agency and its contractor have turned their attention to providing what help they can to nearby communities that are being affected by flooding....

While some construction locations are facing delays because of standing flood water, crews have been able to continue working at other sites in Madera, Fresno, Kings and Kern counties — a 119-mile stretch covered by three separate construction contracts.... So far, no significant damage has been reported on any of the high-speed rail structures that have been completed or are in various stages of construction. "From north to south, water is flowing underneath all of our completed structures," Fernandez said. "All of our structures are on piles and deep foundations, so I don't believe we'll have an issue with damage to our structures... We may have some areas of erosion, some embankments washed out in a couple of places, but that minor damage can be resolved rather easily," he added. "But for all of our major structures, the current reporting is that we are holding good."

The rail line has been designed to cope with major floods; viaducts and a railbed that will elevated above the level of the surrounding land are expected to minimize the risk of damage from future floods, Fernandez said. "Our facilities are designed for a 100-year flood, so (the current events are) showing that our design is actually working," he said. "It's designed in a way that even though it's a large system north to south, it's able to convey all the flood water past our embankments and our alignment."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Friday said it was approving California's plans to require a rising number of zero-emission heavy-duty trucks as the state pushes to cut pollution. Reuters reports: California Governor Gavin Newsom said as a result of the plan, "half of all heavy duty trucks sold in CA will be electric by 2035." "Time to stop playing small ball," he added. Under an executive order Newsom signed in 2020, California plans to mandate by 2045 that all operations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles be zero emission where feasible, shifting away from diesel-powered trucks.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) had sought waivers from the Clean Air Act to set heavy-duty vehicle and engine emission standards. California has been joined by Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington and Vermont in adopting the rules. CARB has noted heavy-duty vehicles greater than 14,000 pounds comprised 3% of vehicles on California roads, but account for more than 50% of nitrogen oxides and fine particle diesel pollution.

The EPA said it is not yet approving California's request to set new regulations on pollutant exhaust emission standards for nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate matter for 2024 and future medium- and heavy-duty engines and vehicles. Separately, California in August moved to require all new light-duty cars and trucks sold in the state by 2035 to be either electric or plug-in electric hybrids. California needs an EPA waiver for that regulation.

A YouTuber has published a video where he tricks ChatGPT into generating usable Windows 95 activation keys. Tom's Hardware reports: After asking Open AI's chatbot directly for Windows 95 keys, he received an expected reasoned refusal. YouTuber Enderman then asked the same thing but from a different angle. The result was a success which was somewhat limited by ChatGPT's ability to process natural language requests into formulas. [...] Some of the tested results were checked by attempting to activate a fresh Windows 95 install in a virtual machine. While the keys passed a casual inspection, it turns out that only about 1-in-30 keys seem to work as expected.

So what is the problem with these keys? Enderman complains that "the only issue keeping ChatGPT from successfully generating valid Windows 95 keys almost every attempt is the fact that it can't count the sum of digits and it doesn't know divisibility." In the five-digit string divisible by seven section, the AI appears to provide a stream of random numbers that don't pass this simple mathematical test. The report adds: "[W]hile quizzing ChatGPT about key generating may be fun, it would have probably been more productive to manipulate the AI into writing a Python script to generate a conforming key or to DIY it."

Technical glitch during a scheduled upgrade affected all automated immigration clearance systems and led to rare delays at Singapore's Changi Airport, which recently was again named the world's best airport. ZDNet reports: Long lines were spotted Thursday morning at the country's airport where travelers usually would not need more than mere minutes to clear immigration. In a series of posts on Facebook and Twitter, Singapore's Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) said it was experiencing "system slowness" at several passenger clearance checkpoints, including all automated departure lanes at all terminals at Changi Airport. Selected automated systems at the Woodlands and Tuas border checkpoints, through which travelers would enter neighboring country Malaysia, also were affected. Immigration systems at coastal checkpoints were the only ones that were not disrupted.

Passengers were advised to postpone non-essential travel and expect delays, as they would be redirected to manual lanes for immigration clearance. By 4pm the same day, automated immigration clearance at all checkpoints were back up and running. ICA said in a statement late-Thursday that preliminary investigations revealed a "technical glitch" had occurred during a pre-scheduled system upgrade, causing an "unanticipated system overload". This brought down the automated immigration clearance systems, which affected all departure terminals at Changi Airport and arrival terminals at Terminals 2 and 4. ICA did not provide details on the system upgrade or whether the procedure was tested before the scheduled live rollout.

General Motors plans to phase out widely-used Apple CarPlay and Android Auto technologies that allow drivers to bypass a vehicle's infotainment systems, shifting instead to built-in infotainment systems developed with Google for future electric vehicles. Reuters reports: GM's decision to stop offering those systems in future electric vehicles, starting with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer, could help the automaker capture more data on how consumers drive and charge EVs. GM is designing the on-board navigation and infotainment systems for future EVs in partnership with Alphabet's Google. GM has been working with Google since 2019 to develop the software foundations for infotainment systems that will be more tightly integrated with other vehicle systems such as GM's Super Cruise driver assistant. The automaker is accelerating a strategy for its EVs to be platforms for digital subscription services.

GM would benefit from focusing engineers and investment on one approach to more tightly connecting in-vehicle infotainment and navigation with features such as assisted driving, Edward Kummer, GM's chief digital officer, and Mike Hichme, executive director of digital cockpit experience, said in an interview. "We have a lot of new driver assistance features coming that are more tightly coupled with navigation," Hichme told Reuters. "We don't want to design these features in a way that are dependent on person having a cellphone."

Buyers of GM EVs with the new systems will get access to Google Maps and Google Assistant, a voice command system, at no extra cost for eight years, GM said. GM said the future infotainment systems will offer applications such as Spotify's music service, Audible and other services that many drivers now access via smartphones. "We do believe there are subscription revenue opportunities for us," Kummer said. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra is aiming for $20 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue from subscriptions by 2030.

Google Drive is enforcing a new file limit for the total number of files you can store on an account. 9to5Google reports: Some Google Drive users have recently noticed a message on their accounts which says that the account has reached its "creation limit" and won't accept any new files until existing ones are deleted. The issue was first highlighted by Ars Technica, and appears to be enforced for both free accounts as well as those subscribed to Google Workspace and Google One.

The issue was flagged by users on Reddit as well as Google's Issue Tracker and appears to have been put in place around mid-February. The file limit in place puts a hard ceiling on the total number of files stored in Google Drive at five million items. This limit ignores file size and type, and is a simple count of the number of files in your online storage bucket. This also includes items stored in the trash (which is automatically emptied every 30 days). When that limit is reached (or if the account has already exceeded it), Google Drive shows the following message: "This account has exceeded the creation limit of 5 million items. To create more items, move items to the trash and delete them forever."

One user reports having seven million items in their account prior to the limit being enforced, with their account no longer able to add any new files. Effectively, that user and anyone else in the same situation are locked out of their accounts, with the files stored now in a "read-only" mode. Google appears to have confirmed the limit to some users via support, but has yet to speak out publicly about it.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit's transparency reports go beyond what most social media companies offer, providing copious data on content moderation and global legal requests. Now, the company has introduced a transparency center serving as a hub for safety, security and policy information. It also announced plans to release transparency reports biannually rather than just once per year and said that in 2022, it removed significantly more offensive content, including child abuse and revenge porn, than in 2021. Last year, Reddit saw a big jump in moderation and legal requests, according to its 2022 transparency report. Government and law enforcement removal account information requests were up by 51 percent and 61 percent respectively, while copyright notices jumped 43 percent. The story was similar on the moderation front. Last summer, the BBC reported that Reddit was still leaving up "thousands" of non-consensual intimate (NCII) images (aka revenge porn), despite making changes to its policy earlier in this year.

Synopsys has introduced the industry's first full-stack AI-powered suite of electronic design automation tools that covers all stages of chip design, from architecture to design and implementation to manufacturing. From a report: The Synopsys.ai suite promises to radically reduce development time, lower costs, improve yields, and enhance performance. The set of tools is set to be extremely useful for chips set to be made on leading-edge nodes, such as 5nm, 3nm, 2nm-class, and beyond. As chips gain complexity and adopt newer process technologies, their design and manufacturing costs escalate to unprecedented levels. Designing a reasonably complex 7 nm chip costs about $300 million (including ~ 40% for software). In contrast, the design cost of an advanced 5 nm processor exceeds $540 million (including software), according to International Business Strategies (IBS) estimates. At 3 nm, a complex GPU will cost about $1.5 billion to develop, including circa 40% for software.

People haven't exactly been impressed in the short time since Google released its "experimental conversational AI service" Bard. Coming up against OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat (also powered by OpenAI's GPT-4) users have found its responses to not be as knowledgeable or detailed as its rivals. That could be set to change, however, after Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed on The New York Times podcast "Hard Fork" that Bard will soon be moving from its current LaMDA-based model to larger-scale PaLM datasets in the coming days. From a report: When asked how he felt about responses to Bard's release, Pichai commented: "We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding." To frame the difference, Google said it had trained LaMDA with 137 billion parameters when it shared details about the language-based models last year. PaLM, on the other hand, was said to have been trained with around 540 billion parameters. Both models may have evolved and grown since early 2022, but the contrast likely shows why Google is now slowly transitioning Bard over to PaLM, with its larger dataset and more diverse answers.

Meta announced that starting next Wednesday, some Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union will for the first time be able to opt out of sharing first-party data used to serve highly personalized ads, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move marks a big change from Meta's current business model, where every video and piece of content clicked on its platforms provides a data point for its online advertisers. Ars Technica reports: People "familiar with the matter" told the Journal that Facebook and Instagram users will soon be able to access a form that can be submitted to Meta to object to sweeping data collection. If those requests are approved, those users will only allow Meta to target ads based on broader categories of data collection, like age range or general location. This is different from efforts by other major tech companies like Apple and Google, which prompt users to opt in or out of highly personalized ads with the click of a button. Instead, Meta will review objection forms to evaluate reasons provided by individual users to end such data collection before it will approve any opt-outs. It's unclear what cause Meta may have to deny requests.

A Meta spokesperson told Ars that Meta is not sharing the objection form publicly at this time but that it will be available to EU users in its Help Center starting on April 5. That's the deadline Meta was given to comply with an Irish regulator's rulings that it was illegal in the EU for Meta to force Facebook and Instagram users to give consent to data collection when they signed contracts to use the platforms. Meta still plans to appeal those Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) rulings, believing that its prior contract's legal basis complies with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In the meantime, though, the company must change the legal basis for data collection. Meta announced in a blog post today that it will now argue that it does not need to directly obtain user consent because it has a "legitimate interest" to collect data to operate its social platforms. "We believe that our previous approach was compliant under GDPR, and our appeal on both the substance of the rulings and the fines continues," Meta's blog said. "However, this change ensures that we comply with the DPC's decision."