News Links

The State of Texas sued Allstate on Monday, accusing the insurer of illegally tracking drivers by way of their phones through a subsidiary called Arity that claimed to have the “world’s largest driving behavior database.”

“Allstate and Arity paid mobile apps millions of dollars to install Allstate’s tracking software,” Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement. “The personal data of millions of Americans was sold to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent in violation of the law. Texans deserve better and we will hold all these companies accountable.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new measure on Friday that could protect your Robux from scammers and hackers.

The proposed rule would interpret terms in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, or EFTA, which has traditionally been used to protect consumers from unauthorized debit transactions, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and cryptocurrency companies.

Meta employees are furious with the company’s newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness,” according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content moderation on Meta platforms.

“I am LGBT and Mentally Ill,” one post by an employee on an internal Meta platform called Workplace reads. “Just to let you know that I’ll be taking time out to look after my mental health.”

The U.S. government has secured final approval in the Northern District Court of California to liquidate crypto's largest-ever federal seizure, signaling the closure of a complex four-year legal battle over billions in Bitcoin tied to the infamous Silk Road marketplace.

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied a motion to block the forfeiture of 69,370 Bitcoin, clearing the Department of Justice to sell the $6.5 billion assets, according to a court document filed December 30.

Google is kicking off a new experiment in Search Labs today called “Daily Listen.” It’s a bit like NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews, while there are also podcast parallels.

Through Discover and Search, Google is aware of what you are interested in. Daily Listen takes all that into account to create a 5 minute or so episode that provides an overview of stories and topics that you follow.

Phi-4 excels in benchmarks that test advanced reasoning and domain-specific capabilities. Highlights include:

• Scoring over 80% in challenging benchmarks like MATH and MGSM, outperforming larger models like Google’s Gemini Pro and GPT-4o-mini.

• Superior performance in mathematical reasoning tasks, a critical capability for fields such as finance, engineering and scientific research.

• Impressive results in HumanEval for functional code generation, making it a strong choice for AI-assisted programming.

The Heritage Foundation plans to “identify and target” volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are “abusing their position” by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward.

Employees of Heritage, the conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 policy blueprint for the second Trump administration, said they plan to use facial recognition software and a database of hacked usernames and passwords in order to identify contributors to the online encyclopedia, who mostly work under pseudonyms. It’s not clear exactly what kind of antisemitism the Wikipedia effort, which has not been previously reported, is intended to address. But in recent months some Jewish groups have complained about a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.

Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.

The company is also changing its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.

"We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

Getty Images Holdings and Shutterstock agreed to combine in a deal that creates a $3.7 billion visual content company.

The agreement is subject to regulatory approval and shareholder approval for both companies.

If you own a Windows PC and want to use Google, you might just tap the address bar in Microsoft Edge, search for Google in the address bar powered by Bing, then open the Google blue link from Bing, and may not go back to Bing ever again. Later, you might even figure out a way to change the default search engine to Google.com.

Microsoft may have found a way, which is somewhat sneaky, to reduce the bounce rate here (the number of users going away from Bing).

At the CES technology conference on Monday, the company previewed upgraded Google TV software that adds more natural voice commands, improved content search and deeper YouTube integration.

The Gemini upgrade, due to roll out later this year, will allow users to hold back-and-forth conversations with third-party TVs without the need to use the “Hey Google” trigger phrase for each command, Google showed in a demo for reporters. The company also showcased the ability to more naturally call up content, such as asking for videos from a recent trip that were saved to a user’s Google Photos account.

Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.

The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to "further clarify" when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.

The tech giant is facing calls to pull the technology after its flawed performance.