Microsoft recently considered building a "super app" that could combine shopping, messaging, web search, news feeds and other services in a one-stop smartphone app, in what would be an ambitious move by the software giant to expand further into consumer services, The Information reported Tuesday, citing people with direct knowledge of the discussions. From the report: Microsoft executives wanted the app to boost the company's multibillion-dollar advertising business and Bing search, as well as draw more users to Teams messaging and other mobile services. Unlike Apple and Google, Microsoft doesn't operate a mobile app store for smartphone users. By creating an all-in-one app that people don't need to leave to access its other offerings, Microsoft hoped to emulate a mobile strategy that has worked for Tencent. The Chinese firm's WeChat app, which combines messaging with shopping, online games, news and a variety of services including grocery ordering, is a source of inspiration for top Microsoft executives, the people said. While it isn't clear whether Microsoft will ultimately launch such an app, the people with knowledge of the discussions said CEO Satya Nadella has laid the groundwork by pushing the Bing search engine to work better with other Microsoft mobile products. For instance, he has directed Bing to integrate with Microsoft's Teams messaging and Outlook email apps, making it easier for customers to share search results in messages.

Around 2009 Slashdot was abuzz about how over-the-air broadcasting in North America was switching to a new standard called DTV. (Fun fact: North America and South America have two entirely different broadcast TV standards — both of which are different from the DVB-T standard used in Europe/Africa/Australia.) But 2022 ends with us already talking about DTV's successor in North America: the new broadcast standard NextGen TV.

This time the new standard isn't mandatory for TV stations, CNET points out — and it won't affect cable, satellite or streaming TV. But now even if you're not paying for a streaming TV service, another article points out, in most major American cities "an inexpensive antenna is all you'll need to get get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS stations" — and often with a better picture quality: NextGen TV, formerly known as ATSC 3.0, is continuing to roll out across the U.S. It's already widely available, with stations throughout the country broadcasting in the new standard. There are many new TVs with compatible tuners plus several stand-alone tuners to add NextGen to just about any TV. As the name suggests, NextGen TV is the next generation of over-the-air broadcasts, replacing or supplementing the free HD broadcasts we've had for over two decades. NextGen not only improves on HDTV, but adds the potential for new features like free over-the-air 4K and HDR, though those aren't yet widely available.

Even so, the image quality with NextGen is likely better than what you're used to from streaming or even cable/satellite. If you already have an antenna and watch HD broadcasts, the reception you get with NextGen might be better, too.... Because of how it works, you'll likely get better reception if you're far from the TV tower.

The short version is: NextGen is free over-the-air television with potentially more channels and better image quality than older over-the-air broadcasts.
U.S. broadcast companies have also created a site at WatchNextGenTV.com showing options for purchasing a compatible new TV. That site also features a video touting NextGen TV's "brilliant colors and a sharper picture with a wider range of contrast" and its Dolby audio system (with "immersive, movie theatre-quality sound" with enhancements for voice and dialogue "so you get all of the story.") And in the video there's also examples of upcoming interactive features like on-screen quizzes, voting, and shopping, as well as the ability to select multiple camera angles or different audio tracks.

"One potential downside? ATSC 3.0 will also let broadcasters track your viewing habits," CNet reported earlier this year, calling the data "information that can be used for targeted advertising, just like companies such as Facebook and Google use today...

"Ads specific to your viewing habits, income level and even ethnicity (presumed by your neighborhood, for example) could get slotted in by your local station.... but here's the thing: If your TV is connected to the internet, it's already tracking you. Pretty much every app, streaming service, smart TV and cable or satellite box all track your usage to a greater or lesser extent."

But on the plus side... NextGen TV is IP-based, so in practice it can be moved around your home just like any internet content can right now. For example, you connect an antenna to a tuner box inside your home, but that box is not connected to your TV at all. Instead, it's connected to your router. This means anything with access to your network can have access to over-the-air TV, be it your TV, your phone, your tablet or even a streaming device like Apple TV....

This also means it's possible we'll see mobile devices with built-in tuners, so you can watch live TV while you're out and about, like you can with Netflix and YouTube now. How willing phone companies will be to put tuners in their phones remains to be seen, however. You don't see a lot of phones that can get radio broadcasts now, even though such a thing is easy to implement.
But whatever you think — it's already here. By August NextGen TV was already reaching half of America's population, according to a press release from a U.S. broadcaster's coalition. That press release also bragged that 40% of consumers had actually heard of NextGen TV — "up 25% from last year among those in markets where it is available."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: An Australian law giving the government power to make internet giants Facebook owner Meta and Alphabet's Google negotiate content supply deals with media outlets has largely worked, a government report said. But the law, which took effect in March 2021 after talks with the big tech firms led to a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country, may need to be extended to other online platforms, the review said.

Since the News Media Bargaining Code (PDF) took effect, the tech firms had inked more than 30 deals with media outlets compensating them for content which generated clicks and advertising dollars, said the Treasury department report, published late Thursday. "At least some of these agreements have enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations," said the report. "While views on the success or otherwise of the Code will invariably differ, we consider it is reasonable to conclude that the Code has been a success to date."

The report mostly recommended that the government consider new methods of assessing the administration and effectiveness of the law, and did not suggest changing the law itself. But it did note the law lacked "a formal mechanism to extend the Code to other platforms", and suggested the government order the competition regulator, which led the design of the law, to "prepare reports on this question." Google director of government affairs and public policy in Australia Lucinda Longcroft said the company had "furthered our significant contribution to the Australian news industry" by signing deals representing 200 mastheads across the country and "the majority of these outlets are regional or local."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google and iHeartMedia -- the US's biggest radio station operator -- are being hit with a false advertising lawsuit for ads they ran about the Pixel 4 [...]. The FTC and four states say the companies aired "nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements by radio personalities" during 2019 and 2020, with Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine saying that "Google and iHeartMedia paid influencers to promote products they never used, showing a blatant disrespect for truth-in-advertising rules." The two companies have settled the lawsuit and will be required to pay $9.4 million in penalties.

Google's ads had on-air personalities give first-hand accounts of how much they liked the Pixel 4, but, to quote the FTC's press release, "the on-air personalities were not provided with Pixel 4s before recording and airing the majority of the ads and therefore did not own or regularly use the phones." Therefore the first-person claims made in the ads, like, "It's my favorite phone camera out there, especially in low light, thanks to Night Sight Mode," "I've been taking studio-like photos of everything," and "It's also great at helping me get stuff done, thanks to the new voice-activated Google Assistant that can handle multiple tasks at once," can't be true. [...] As part of the settlement, Google and iHeartMedia are barred from "misrepresenting that an endorser has owned or used, or about their experience with, certain products." The agreement is subject to a public comment period of 30 days, after which the commission will vote on whether to make the proposed consent orders final. A Google spokesperson commented to TechCrunch, saying, "We are pleased to resolve this issue. We take compliance with advertising laws seriously and have processes in place designed to help ensure we follow relevant regulations and industry standards."

In a series of tweets Monday, Elon Musk said Apple had mostly stopped advertising on Twitter and had threatened to withhold the Twitter app from the App Store. Musk said the iPhone-maker won't disclose why it is making the threat.

"When you search for a product on Amazon, you may not realize that most of what you see at first is advertising," reports the Washington Post's technology columnist, introducing some eye-opening interactive graphics. (Alternate URL here.)

The Post's graphics show that Amazon's first six search results — basically everything on their first screen — were all ads. Scrolling to the second screen, we finally start to see non-ads. These are the first products that were actually chosen because they've got the best combination of price and quality. But the real results don't last long.

Scroll to the next screen, and it's all ads again. Here's a set of listings labeled "Highly rated," but don't be fooled.... These are also just ads. [Later the article points out that while customers can't specifically buy their way into the highly-rated section, it's still just "often stacked with sponsored listings that don't have terrible customer reviews." And then on the next screen three of the six displayed results are "top rated for our brands" — that is, Amazon's own products. And then...]

Keep on scrolling, and the ads keep coming — even if they're repeats. On these first five screens, more than 50 percent of the space was dedicated to ads and Amazon touting its own products....

The first page of Amazon results includes an average of about nine sponsored listings, according to a study of 70 search terms conducted in 2020 and 2021 by data firm Profitero. That was twice as many ads as Walmart displayed, and four times as many as Target... The Amazon we experience today is pretty much the opposite of how Amazon used to work. Even as recently as 2015, Amazon's results pages were filled with actual results, ranked by relevancy to your search....

Here's a modest proposal: No more than half of any screen we see at any given time — be it on desktop web or a smartphone — should contain ads.... Another idea: Shill results should be much more clearly marked. A label disclosing that a shill listing is "Sponsored" should have the same font, size and contrast as the most prominent text in the ad. Even better: It should have to go on the top-left part of the ad, where our eyes go first. No more burying it in the far-right corner.
The article notes that even typing the name of a specific brand may first bring up off-brand rivals who've paid for higher placement. (An Amazon spokesman tells the Post, "This practice is good for customers — it drives discovery and presents them with more choices.")

But Post argues Amazon's various sponsored results "fill up spaces people have every reason to expect to contain trustworthy, independent information," ultimately warning that Amazon "is betraying your trust in its results to make an extra buck.... Sure, Google and Facebook are chock full of ads, too. But on Amazon, we're supposed to be the customers, not the eyeballs for sale."

Ironically, since 2013 the Washington Post has been owned by... Jeff Bezos.

The president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, has confirmed there are multiple ongoing investigations into TikTok. From a report: The probes concern the transfer of EU citizens' data to China and targeted advertising aimed at minors. Investigators are seeking to ensure that TikTok meets General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. "The data practices of TikTok, including with respect to international data transfers, are the object of several ongoing proceedings," Ursula von der Leyden wrote in a letter shared by Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr.

"This includes an investigation by the Irish [Data Protection Commission] about TikTok's compliance with several GDPR requirements, including as regards data transfers to China and the processing of data of minors, and litigation before the Dutch courts (in particular concerning targeted advertising regarding minors and data transfers to China)." Von der Leyden was responding to concerns raised by members of the European Parliament regarding Chinese public authorities potentially gaining access to EU citizens' TikTok data, following a report by BuzzFeed News. The app's data practices have been under the EU's spotlight for a while. Earlier this year, TikTok agreed to enforce certain policies concerning ads and branded content following a complaint that accused the app of breaching EU consumer rules.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. From the report: The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users' income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents' college scholarship amounts.

The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner Meta. Each year, the Internal Revenue Service processes about 150 million individual returns filed electronically, and some of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The Markup found.

Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Peter is an IT manager for a technology manufacturer that got hit with a Russian ransomware strain called "Zeppelin" in May 2020. He'd been on the job less than six months, and because of the way his predecessor architected things, the company's data backups also were encrypted by Zeppelin. After two weeks of stalling their extortionists, Peter's bosses were ready to capitulate and pay the ransom demand. Then came the unlikely call from an FBI agent. "Don't pay," the agent said. "We've found someone who can crack the encryption." Peter, who spoke candidly about the attack on condition of anonymity, said the FBI told him to contact a cybersecurity consulting firm in New Jersey called Unit 221B, and specifically its founder -- Lance James. Zeppelin sprang onto the crimeware scene in December 2019, but it wasn't long before James discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the malware's encryption routines that allowed him to brute-force the decryption keys in a matter of hours, using nearly 100 cloud computer servers.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, James said Unit 221B was wary of advertising its ability to crack Zeppelin ransomware keys because it didn't want to tip its hand to Zeppelin's creators, who were likely to modify their file encryption approach if they detected it was somehow being bypassed. This is not an idle concern. There are multiple examples of ransomware groups doing just that after security researchers crowed about finding vulnerabilities in their ransomware code. "The minute you announce you've got a decryptor for some ransomware, they change up the code," James said. But he said the Zeppelin group appears to have stopped spreading their ransomware code gradually over the past year, possibly because Unit 221B's referrals from the FBI let them quietly help nearly two dozen victim organizations recover without paying their extortionists. [...]

The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is randomly generated on each machine it infects. "If we can recover the RSA-512 Public Key from the registry, we can crack it and get the 256-bit AES Key that encrypts the files!" [James and co-author Joel Lathrop wrote in a blog post]. "The challenge was that they delete the [public key] once the files are fully encrypted. Memory analysis gave us about a 5-minute window after files were encrypted to retrieve this public key." Unit 221B ultimately built a "Live CD" version of Linux that victims could run on infected systems to extract that RSA-512 key. From there, they would load the keys into a cluster of 800 CPUs donated by hosting giant Digital Ocean that would then start cracking them. The company also used that same donated infrastructure to help victims decrypt their data using the recovered keys. A more technical writeup on Unit 221B's discoveries (cheekily titled "0XDEAD ZEPPELIN") is available here.

YouTube is ramping up its push into ecommerce by introducing shopping features to the world's biggest videos site, seeking to diversify revenue streams during a slowdown in digital advertising. From a report: The platform, a division of Google parent Alphabet, has introduced the new function to Shorts, YouTube's short-form video offering that was launched in 2020 to compete against the popularity of fast-growing rival TikTok. This will mean users will be able to buy products as they scroll through videos. YouTube is also testing new commission schemes for influencers who sell products through links in videos, as it battles to hold on to its so-called creators -- users who make content on YouTube -- against fierce competition from rivals.

"Our goal is to focus on the best monetisation opportunities for creators in the market," Michael Martin, YouTube Shopping's general manager, told the Financial Times in his first interview since joining the company six months ago. YouTube's expansion of its shopping features comes as tech groups rush to diversify their revenue streams in response to a slowing economy and a depressed digital advertising market. At Alphabet's last earnings, YouTube's ad sales revenue declined and missed analyst estimates for the first time since the parent company started reporting its performance separately in 2020.

The macro story unfolding today is all the layoffs taking place in the tech industry. "Tech giants including Meta and Amazon have been slowing down their hiring for months, while smaller tech companies such as Robinhood and Coinbase have announced layoffs," reports the New York Times. "But rarely have so many job cuts and hiring freezes in the industry been disclosed on the same day." From the report: The technology industry's slowdown came into even sharper relief on Thursday as Amazon publicly said it had paused hiring for its corporate work force and several other technology companies announced job cuts. [...] At the same time, Lyft said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. [...] Tech companies have led the way for the U.S. economy over the past decade, lifting the stock market during the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic. But in recent weeks, many of the largest firms reported financial results that suggested they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters, soaring inflation and rising interest rates.

Social media companies in particular have been grappling with a pullback in digital advertising over the last few months. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last week that its head count would remain "roughly flat" through the end of next year. The company plans to shrink some teams and hire only for high-priority areas. Snap, Snapchat's parent company, laid off 20 percent of its employees in August, blaming challenging macroeconomic conditions. Last week, Microsoft told investors that new hires in this quarter "should be minimal." Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also said that in this quarter it would hire fewer than half the number of people it added in the third quarter.

More layoffs at tech companies are in the works. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, has ordered cuts across the company, which employs about 7,500 people. Workers at Twitter have started circulating a "Layoff Guide" with tips on how to handle being laid off. On Thursday, Lyft said it had decided on layoffs in the face of "a probable recession sometime in the next year." All teams will be affected, said Logan Green and John Zimmer, the company's founders, in an email to employees. Over the summer, Lyft cut 2 percent of its employees, mostly as a result of shutting down its car rental business, and froze hiring. But the company still has "to become leaner," its founders said. It is "not immune to the realities of inflation and a slowing economy," which have led to increasing ride-share insurance costs. Lyft also said it planned to sell its first-party vehicle service business and expected employees on that team to be offered jobs at the acquiring company.

The Register: A number of job postings -- including this now-closed ad from late September for a principal software engineering manager -- are looking for engineers and others to become part of the "newly formed Windows Incubation team" whose mission is to "build a new direction for Windows in a cloud first world."

The lofty goal is to "move Windows to a place that combines the benefits of the cloud and Microsoft 365 to offer more compute resources on demand and creates a hybrid app model that spans from on-premises to the cloud." According to the ad, it also includes "building a Web-based shell with direct integration with Windows 365." Included in the possible models are low-cost PCs available via subscriptions, with advertising helping to offset some of the costs. (Also mentioned in the job are direct-to-cloud devices.)

Encrypted messaging app Signal will soon have an ephemeral "stories" feature, with video, pictures or text that disappear after 24 hours. From a report: Signal, often used by journalists, activists and privacy minded individuals, plans to roll out the feature on Monday, the nonprofit's president Meredith Whittaker told Axios at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal Thursday. Signal has been beta-testing the feature since last month.

User updates that last on profiles for 24 hours, often called "stories," are something popularized by Snapchat and Instagram, both companies with targeted advertising based business models who also monetize the feature, something Signal is vehemently opposed to. "The short answer is that people want [stories]," Whittaker told Axios in an exclusive interview when asked why the privacy-focused app is rolling out such a feature.

Uber recently launched its new advertising division and in-app ads. Apparently, those ads aren't staying within the app. From a report: Instead, ads from other companies are being sent out as push notifications, much to the chagrin of some Uber users. Over the weekend, people turned to Twitter to complain about the notifications, sharing screenshots of ads, including one particularly popular one from Peloton that Uber had sent out. One of the primary complaints: notifications are being sent out when users aren't engaging with the app. When Uber first announced its in-app ad "experience," the company didn't mention the potentially intrusive implications.

Here's the Guardian's report on new cryptographic techniques where "you can share data while keeping that data private" — known by the umbrella term "privacy-enhancing technologies" (or "Pets). They offer opportunities for data holders to pool their data in new and useful ways. In the health sector, for example, strict rules prohibit hospitals from sharing patients' medical data. Yet if hospitals were able to combine their data into larger datasets, doctors would have more information, which would enable them to make better decisions on treatments. Indeed, a project in Switzerland using Pets has since June allowed medical researchers at four independent teaching hospitals to conduct analysis on their combined data of about 250,000 patients, with no loss of privacy between institutions. Juan Troncoso, co-founder and CEO of Tune Insight, which runs the project, says: "The dream of personalised medicine relies on larger and higher-quality datasets. Pets can make this dream come true while complying with regulations and protecting people's privacy rights. This technology will be transformative for precision medicine and beyond."

The past couple of years have seen the emergence of dozens of Pet startups in advertising, insurance, marketing, machine learning, cybersecurity, fintech and cryptocurrencies. According to research firm Everest Group, the market for Pets was $2bn last year and will grow to more than $50bn in 2026. Governments are also getting interested. Last year, the United Nations launched its "Pet Lab", which was nothing to do with the welfare of domestic animals, but instead a forum for national statistical offices to find ways to share their data across borders while protecting the privacy of their citizens.

Jack Fitzsimons, founder of the UN Pet Lab, says: "Pets are one of the most important technologies of our generation. They have fundamentally changed the game, because they offer the promise that private data is only used for its intended purposes...." The emergence of applications has driven the theory, which is now sufficiently well developed to be commercially viable. Microsoft, for example, uses fully homomorphic encryption when you register a new password: the password is encrypted and then sent to a server who checks whether or not that password is in a list of passwords that have been discovered in data breaches, without the server being able to identify your password. Meta, Google and Apple have also over the last year or so been introducing similar tools to some of their products.
The article offers quick explanations of zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and fully homomorphic encryption (which allows the performance of analytics on data by a second party who never reads the data or learns the result).

And "In addition to new cryptographic techniques, Pets also include advances in computational statistics such as 'differential privacy', an idea from 2006 in which noise is added to results in order to preserve the privacy of individuals."

Today ProPublica published "the largest-ever analysis of Google's ad practices on non-English-language websites," saying their report shows Google "is funneling revenue to some of the web's most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa," and "reveals how the tech giant makes disinformation profitable...." The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google's sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.... The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn't faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public. Google's publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

ProPublica's examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails. A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets....
The former Google leader suggests Google focuses on English-language problems partly because they're sensitive to bad PR and the posibility of regulatory scrutiny (and because English-language markets have the biggest impact).

Google is spending more money to patrol non-English content, a spokesperson told ProPublica, touting the company's "extensive measures to tackle misinformation... In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world."

But in some cases Google's ads appeared on false online article published years ago, the article points out, "suggesting that the company's failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem... [T]he investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Cartridges and discs used to be how you got the latest games, but that's been changing as downloads have become more convenient and reliable. But some people prefer the sure thing: a physical copy, so they can play offline or with a bad connection. To them, Activision says "qq": the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II disc is basically just a link to a 150-gigabyte download. Now, to be fair, games that size don't fit neatly on even high capacity Blu-ray discs, which for distribution purposes max out at around 50 gigs. Not that we haven't seen multi-disc games before (I never finished Final Fantasy VIII because the final disc was scratched someday, Edea), but clearly Activision decided it wasn't worth the bother in this case. [...] Far from having the full game on it, the disc is almost completely empty. This 72-megabyte app is basically just an authenticator and shell that initiates the enormous download process. I'd be willing to bet that most of those 72 megabytes are 4K video files of logos. There's even a pre-order steelbook bonus (that's a metal case for the disc and anything else it comes with). Players may be disappointed to find that this fancy reinforced packaging protects nothing of value.

Obviously there is great waste entailed in the production of perhaps millions of discs (though the numbers are likely much lower than they used to) for no reason. But waste is endemic in consumerism. The bait and switch of it is the galling thing -- that Activision is taking the worst of both worlds. There's literally no point in even providing a physical version of the software if none of the reasons for doing so are fulfilled by it. It's the equivalent of the next season of Stranger Things coming on a disc that just loads up Netflix and starts streaming. Why bother? It's worth asking whether Activision could have built a version of the game that fit on a disc at all. Considering how proudly they've been advertising the realism of the graphics, probably not. A single 4K texture unit, say for a building front or character model, may be scores of megabytes, and any AAA game will have countless such textures. Meanwhile the audio and video assets also have to fit on there, and they can only be compressed so far before they degrade.

The social networking company, which is trying to shift into the so-called metaverse, posted falling sales and said it was "making significant changes" to operate more efficiently. The New York Times reports: This year, Meta's earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. Its stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year. On Wednesday, Meta continued that trajectory and indicated that the decline would not end anytime soon. It said it would be "making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently," including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.

The company reported a 4 percent drop in revenue for its third quarter -- to $27.7 billion, down from $29 billion a year earlier. Net income was $4.4 billion, down 52 percent from a year earlier. Spending soared by 19 percent from a year earlier. The company's metaverse investments remained troubled. Meta said its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the virtual reality and augmented reality efforts that are central to the metaverse, had lost $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. It said operating losses for the division would grow "significantly" next year. For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue of between $30 billion and $32.5 billion, which would be down from a year ago. The company's shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, acknowledged "near-term challenges on revenue." But he added that "the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth" and that he was "approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency."

Digital simulations of Elon Musk, Tom Cruise, Leo DiCaprio and others have shown up in ads, as the image-melding technology grows more popular and presents the marketing industry with new legal and ethical questions. From a report: Celebrity deepfakes are coming to advertising. Among the recent entries: Last year, Russian telecommunications company MegaFon released a commercial in which a simulacrum of Hollywood legend Bruce Willis helps defuse a bomb. Just last week, Elon Musk seemed to star in a marketing video from real-estate investment startup reAlpha Tech. And last month a promotional video for machine-learning firm Paperspace showed talking semblances of the actors Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio. None of these celebrities ever spent a moment filming these campaigns. In the cases of Messrs. Musk, Cruise and DiCaprio, they never even agreed to endorse the companies in question. All the videos of digital simulations were created with so-called deepfake technology, which uses computer-generated renditions to make the Hollywood and business notables say and do things they never actually said or did.

Some of the ads are broad parodies, and the meshing of the digital to the analog in the best of cases might not fool an alert viewer. Even so, the growing adoption of deepfake software could eventually shape the industry in profound ways while creating new legal and ethical questions, experts said. Authorized deepfakes could allow marketers to feature huge stars in ads without requiring them to actually appear on-set or before cameras, bringing down costs and opening new creative possibilities. But unauthorized, they create a legal gray area: Celebrities could struggle to contain a proliferation of unauthorized digital reproductions of themselves and the manipulation of their brand and reputation, experts said.

Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: This past June, Stockholm introduced a new shared bicycle service to replace Stockholm City Bikes, which operated from 2006 until 2018. Since that service shut down, the city was one of many around the world swamped by shared e-scooters that littered sidewalks and streets. As a result, the city wanted to reboot a bikeshare program with a more modern approach without succumbing to the trappings of the dockless scooter and bike craze. The new service, Stockholm eBikes, started relatively small, with just over a thousand bikes this past summer, but will grow to more than 5,000 for this coming summer. However, this is not just another bikeshare program. First, all of the bikes are electric. And second, it is ridiculously, ludicrously, almost impossibly cheap to use.

The first time I stumbled on the Stockholm eBikes website and did a currency conversion, I figured there must be some mistake. The website says a 24-hour plan "just to unlock a bike and enjoy Stockholm eBikes for 24 hours" costs 11 Krona, or 98 cents at current conversion rates. A 7-day plan is 26 Krona ($2.32). A 30-day plan is 35 Krona ($3.12). And a whole year of unlimited 90-minute e-bike rides costs a measly 157 Krona, or just about $14. If you want to ride more than 90 minutes in one trip, you will be charged an extra 11 Krona (about $1) per extra hour. This is not simply cheap by e-bike rental standards. It is several orders of magnitude cheaper. And it is a story with global implications for the bikeshare industry and urban transportation in general. Because bikeshare systems have entered a paradox. The invention and proliferation of e-bikes have the potential to make bikeshare systems even more useful thanks to the effortless pedaling including on hills and higher speeds. But virtually every system has surcharges to ride an e-bike, making it expensive to use over time. "It's a truly unique system," [said Daniel Mohlin, Nordics Regional Manager for Inurba Mobility, the company that won the seven-year contract for the new bikeshare program]. "Both in terms of the technology and the setup and the pricing in combination with it." So I asked Mohlin the obvious question: How can Stockholm offer essentially the same product and service for so much less than basically every other city? The obvious assumption would be that, unlike most every bikeshare system in the world which is expected to break even without public subsidies in contrast to traditional public transportation like buses and subways, the government is helping to foot the bill of Stockholm eBikes. [...] But Mohlin said that isn't the case in Stockholm. The city isn't giving Inurba any money.

Mohlin says they plan to run a profitable bikeshare system by doing one thing most other systems do and another thing he says is too often missing. The first thing, the one that everyone does, is advertising. Inurba will be selling advertisements on the bikes and on 350 advertising locations near where the bikes are parked. But the brand will remain Stockholm eBikes. [...] Advertising will only get them so far. The entire bikeshare system, Mohlin said, has been designed to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. And this, he says, is the biggest difference between Stockholm's system and the ones other cities offer. [...] Inurba adopted a hybrid solution that some e-scooter companies have piloted in a few cities. Instead of traditional docks, there are virtual stations, painted lines on the ground with a sign post. Users lock and unlock the bikes via an app. Locking the bikes requires being within one of the station's geofenced zones. These virtual stations not only save Inurba lots of money not having to outfit and maintain physical docks, but it also provides operational flexibility. Because there is some wiggle room in the geofence by nature of GPS's imprecision, the stations can "swallow a lot more bikes" than traditional docks, as Mohlin put it. This helps avoid the always-empty-or-always-full phenomenon many docked bikeshare systems struggle with.

Mohlin also talked up Inurba's IT infrastructure that helps them learn which stations tend to get full at what time of day and which tend to get empty. He says this enables them to be more efficient with bike-balancing efforts, that it's "basically, do the right task in the right order at the right time." Another smaller money-saver is the company uses cargo e-bikes to go around swapping out batteries, which has to happen about once every three days per bike on average. This means battery swappers aren't stuck in traffic driving a van and can swap out more batteries per worker. So far, the model appears to be working. "55,000 active users took almost 450,000 trips, averaging six per day per bike, which is generally considered high for a bikeshare system," writes Gordon. "Plus, the average trip was almost 40 minutes, much higher than most bikeshare schemes with mechanical bikes, including Helsinki where Inurba also operates the bikeshare system where the average trip is between 12 and 16 minutes."

"We're really looking forward for next year when we can get the full system in operation," Mohlin said. "But I'm confident this is a really unique system that is going to have an impact."