AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.

Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened.

A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip — albeit not as quickly as its huge launch — while Musk hasn’t shared comparable metrics for X since he took over.

I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram.

And given Meta’s intentional decision to deprioritize politics and encourage lighthearted content, it could be a compelling place for advertisers looking for a more brand-safe alternative to X.

“It would be great if it gets really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in if it becomes culturally relevant and if it gets hundreds of millions of users,” the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told me when Threads first launched.

The original article contains 450 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

We do not wish to simply orphan the package, as we are afraid it would not receive proper care if taken by somebody else.

If there are potential maintainers interested in maintaining Python 2 in Fedora beyond Fedora 41, they can talk to us and demonstrate their ability and will to take care of Python 2 by joining the maintenance early.

Users who need to run their application in Python 2 should do so on a platform that offers support for it.

Developers who still need to test their software on Python 2 can use containers with older Fedora releases or unsupported CentOS/RHEL versions."

The F41 change proposal still needs the approval of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but it will presumably proceed – well, assuming GIMP 3.0 finally releases this summer so as to not block the Python 2.7 removal.

The original article contains 379 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If you’re on Mastodon, you might notice new author bylines appearing alongside articles — including those from The Verge.

Click on the byline, and you’ll jump directly to the author’s fediverse account, allowing you to track their work wherever it’s posted.

You can see how author bylines appear beneath articles in this post, which links you to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko’s profile.

It can also lead to a person’s profile on Threads, Flipboard, WordPress with ActivityPub, PeerTube, and others.

Mastodon is working to open up the feature to more outlets, too, but it currently requires “manual review” to prevent “malicious sites framing users as their authors.” However, Mastodon plans on launching “a self-serve system” to manage the sites authors can appear from in the future.

Even though it’s not widely rolled out just yet, it does seem like a neat way to quickly find out who wrote an article and check out their other work across multiple platforms.

The original article contains 242 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 35%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Adoption of the two nonbinding resolutions shows that the United States and China, rivals in many areas, are both determined to be key players in shaping the future of the powerful new technology — and have been cooperating on the first important international steps.

Fu Cong, China’s U.N. ambassador, told reporters Monday that the two resolutions are complementary, with the U.S. measure being “more general” and the just-adopted one focusing on “capacity building.”

Nate Evans, spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said Tuesday that the Chinese-sponsored resolution “was negotiated so it would further the vision and approach the U.S. set out in March.”

The Chinese resolution calls on the international community “to provide and promote a fair, open, inclusive and nondiscriminatory business environment,” from AI’s design and development to its use.

China is actively participating in negotiations in Geneva on controlling lethal autonomous weapons, Fu said, adding that some countries are considering proposing a U.N. General Assembly resolution this year on the military dimension of AI — “and we are in broad support of that initiative.”

He said China also wanted to highlight the central role the United Nations should play in AI governance as “the most representative and most inclusive international forum.”

The original article contains 752 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A weird new app lets San Francisco residents monitor local bars via live video feed to see what’s happening there and to check how busy the venues are.

2Nite, which launched earlier this year, uses a network of cameras at various Bay Area establishments to provide remote insights into what’s happening at those locations.

In fact, some local bar patrons have predictably been a bit perturbed (creeped out, even) by an app that remotely monitors them and streams their drunken revelry to an unknown amount of strangers on the internet.

“You should be able to let loose in a bar where Big Brother isn’t watching you,” a young woman told the Standard when asked about the app.

Lucas Harris, the co-founder of 2Nite, has said that businesses that partner with the app are in control of the cameras and that the feeds are mainly meant to “offer a glimpse of live shows at bars, clubs, and other event venues,” the Standard writes.

Harris and his co-founder, Francesco Bini, also told the outlet they had introduced live stream blurring to anonymize the feeds and keep individual partygoers from being identified.

The original article contains 356 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand “due to a structural failure.”

Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site.

The statement from Space Pioneer sought to downplay the incident, saying it had implemented safety measures before the test, and there were no casualties as a result of the accident.

Located in the Henan province in eastern China, alongside the Yellow River, Gongyi has a population of about 800,000 people.

Typically, during a static fire test, the mass of propellant on board a vehicle combined with strong clamps hold a rocket down.

This was a notable achievement, but the rocket’s engines were provided by a Chinese state-operated firm, the Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology, rather than the private company.

The original article contains 572 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.

Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is a board member) hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology in a way that seemed designed to make its investors whole.

Last Friday, Amazon announced that it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another would-be OpenAI competitor that raised about $400 million from top-tier investors to build, in the words of CEO David Luan, “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.”

In an internal memo published by GeekWire’s Taylor Soper, SVP Rohit Prasad said that, like Microsoft with Inflection, Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology to “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”

Adept’s corporate blog post about the news suggests it was running out of money: “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.” Recent reports say the company has been looking to sell itself.

Reid Hoffman, meanwhile, should probably be congratulated for more than just an accurate prediction about the future of these deals — one of Adept’s earliest investors was none other than his venture capital firm, Greylock.

The original article contains 561 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on.

“Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”

The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods.

This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38367, resided in the session_controller class of the trunk server source code, which handles the session validation URL.

The trunk server relies on RFC822 formalized in 1982 to verify the uniqueness of registered developer email addresses and check if they follow the correct format.

The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on.

“Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”

The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods.

This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38367, resided in the session_controller class of the trunk server source code, which handles the session validation URL.

The trunk server relies on RFC822 formalized in 1982 to verify the uniqueness of registered developer email addresses and check if they follow the correct format.

The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers’ credentials for email and social media services.

The man was investigated after an airline “reported concerns about a suspicious Wi-Fi network identified by its employees during a domestic flight.”

The AFP subsequently arrested a man who was found with “a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone” in his hand luggage.

It’s alleged the accused’s collection of kit was used to create Wi-Fi hotspots with SSIDs confusingly similar to those airlines operate for in-flight access to the internet or streamed entertainment.

Airport Wi-Fi was also targeted, and the AFP also found evidence of similar activities “at locations linked to the man’s previous employment.”

AFP Western Command Cybercrime detective inspector Andrea Coleman pointed out that free Wi-Fi services should not require logging in through an email or social media account.

The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The European Commission writes in a preliminary ruling that the “pay or consent” advertising model that launched last year for Facebook and Instagram users runs afoul of Article 5(2) of the DMA by not giving users a third option that uses less data for ad targeting but is still free to use.

Regulators found in their investigation that Meta gives users a “binary choice” that forces them to either choose to pay a monthly subscription fee to get the ad-free version of Facebook and Instagram or consent to the ad-supported version.

Where Meta runs afoul of its rules, it says, is by not letting users opt for a free version that “uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the ‘personalised ads’ based service” and by not allowing them to “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data.”

“Our preliminary view is that Meta’s advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act,” wrote Margrethe Vestager, who leads the region’s competition policy.

“Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and complies with the DMA,” Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard told The Verge in an email.

The commission asserted last week that Apple’s App Store “steering” policies don’t allow sufficient competition.

The original article contains 390 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 46%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers’ credentials for email and social media services.

The man was investigated after an airline “reported concerns about a suspicious Wi-Fi network identified by its employees during a domestic flight.”

The AFP subsequently arrested a man who was found with “a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone” in his hand luggage.

It’s alleged the accused’s collection of kit was used to create Wi-Fi hotspots with SSIDs confusingly similar to those airlines operate for in-flight access to the internet or streamed entertainment.

Airport Wi-Fi was also targeted, and the AFP also found evidence of similar activities “at locations linked to the man’s previous employment.”

AFP Western Command Cybercrime detective inspector Andrea Coleman pointed out that free Wi-Fi services should not require logging in through an email or social media account.

The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The $3 trillion company intends to mass-produce revamped earbuds with built-in infrared cameras by 2026, according to a new report from analyst and longtime Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo.

The cameras could help Apple shore up its current and future augmented-reality headsets with enhanced spatial audio features, the analyst wrote.

Citing a supply-chain survey, Kuo indicated that pairing these enhanced buds with Vision Pro goggles could make Apple’s spatial-computing experience more lifelike.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo.

The analyst’s report follows an earlier story from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

After turning its minimalistic white buds into status symbol in the iPod era, Apple has gradually made them smarter over the years, adding features such as wireless connectivity, noise cancellation, head tracking, touch controls and voice commands.

The original article contains 288 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 45%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If you’re disappointed that the only AI model that will integrate with Apple devices so far will be ChatGPT, it sounds like you won’t have to wait long for that to change.

Apple will announce “at least” one other deal — to add Google Gemini, too — this fall, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter today.

Anthropic has been mixed up in these rumors as well, and Gurman also suggests Apple could announce a deal with that company at some point, if not this fall.

Beyond chatbot integration lies Apple Intelligence, which is only supposed to emerge, initially, in beta form this fall.

Apple reportedly wants to make AI an avenue for direct profits, not just as a set of features aimed at moving hardware products.

As part of that, Gurman suggests that the company “could eventually” roll out subscription-only Apple Intelligence features.

The original article contains 350 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Advances in artificial intelligence are leading to medical breakthroughs once thought impossible, including devices that can actually read minds and alter our brains.

Pauzaskie says our brain waves are like encrypted signals and, using artificial intelligence, researchers have identified frequencies for specific words to turn thought to text with 40% accuracy, “Which, give it a few years, we’re probably talking 80-90%.”

Researchers are now working to reverse the conditions by using electrical stimulation to alter the frequencies or regions of the brain where they originate.

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies - that are amassing large caches of brain data - are not.

The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

With companies and countries racing to access, analyze, and alter our brains, Pauzauskie suggests, privacy protections should be a no-brainer, "It’s everything that we are.

The original article contains 796 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.

The move attracted the attention of critics including Representative Ilhan Omar, who spoke out in Congress against Shirion’s screening of the footage to the University of California, Los Angeles protest encampment.

And since late last year, it has claimed to have developed an AI technology, Project Maccabee, whose goal it has described as “Hitting and creating AGI for the PROTECTION and survival of our people”, and “EXPOSING these putrid antisemites”.

On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days!, and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.

The original article contains 1,975 words, the summary contains 235 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As negotiations to end the long legal brawl between Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so madcap that a person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.

In April, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a sly workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually inside mainland America?

By early 2024, leaders in Australia, including Kevin Rudd, the ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began pressuring their American counterparts to reach a deal — not so much out of solidarity with Mr. Assange, or support for his actions, but because he had spent so much time in captivity.

But after a short period of internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach, drafting a somewhat tougher counteroffer: Mr. Assange would plead to a single felony count, conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a more serious offense that encompassed his interactions with Ms. Manning.

Instead, his initial refusal to plead guilty to a felony was rooted in his reluctance to appear in an American courtroom, out of fear of being detained indefinitely or physically attacked in the United States, Ms. Robinson said in the TV interview.

Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service, which is responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the ruling might have “triggered” an acceleration of the plea deal.

The original article contains 1,459 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

You can transform it from a sleek work laptop to a decent gaming machine in two minutes flat, one which charges with the world’s first 180W USB-C power adapter.

The product gave me multiple Blue Screens of Death, glitched, felt flimsy in places, and ran hotter and louder than its performance would suggest.

I’m happy to say I’ve only seen the computer fail once during that entire month — an “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly” error I haven’t been able to reproduce.

We even figured out my mystery issue where the excellent 2560 x 1600 screen would suddenly seem to wash out — that’s due to AMD’s Vari-Bright setting, which attempts to save battery when the integrated GPU is in command.

Despite this replacement coming with a slightly weaker 7840HS, I’ve measured 100.8°C at peak while playing a game — and as high as 92.5°C one day when I was just writing a story in a web browser.

After a month, I’ve decided I could live with the lid flex and the uneven surfaces created by Framework’s modular spacers and touchpad.

The original article contains 931 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In communications with a federal confidential informant, the pair allegedly planned to “coordinate to get multiple [substations] at the same time.” Clendaniel pleaded guilty to conspiring to damage or destroy electrical facilities in May of this year.

But in a court filing, the ACLU attorneys say Russell has “reason to believe” that the government “intercepted his communications” and subjected him to a warrantless “backdoor search” by querying the Section 702 databases.

And less than a month after that initial query, we disrupted that US person who, it turned out, had researched and identified critical infrastructure sites in the US and acquired the means to conduct an attack.” The defense’s motion to compel the federal government to provide notice of use of Section 702 surveillance of Russell includes both the Politico report and Wray’s speech as exhibits.

The ACLU’s response, filed this Monday, notes that the government “does not dispute that Mr. Russell was subject to warrantless surveillance under Section 702” but instead claims it has no legal obligation to turn over FISA notice in this instance.

Legislators’ attempts to rein in the controversial surveillance authority failed, and multiple amendments requiring the FBI to obtain warrants to search or access Americans’ communications under Section 702 were voted down.

“Especially as recently expanded and reauthorized by Congress, this spying authority could be further abused by a future administration against political opponents, protest movements, and civil society organizations, as well as racial and religious minorities, abortion providers, and LGBTQ people.”

The original article contains 915 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“Since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT there have been lots of anecdotal reports about students submitting AI-generated work as their exam assignments and getting good grades.

His team created over 30 fake psychology student accounts and used them to submit ChatGPT-4-produced answers to examination questions.

The anecdotal reports were true—the AI use went largely undetected, and, on average, ChatGPT scored better than human students.

Scarfe’s team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Shorter submissions were prepared simply by copy-pasting the examination questions into ChatGPT-4 along with a prompt to keep the answer under 160 words.

Turnitin’s system, on the other hand, was advertised as detecting 97 percent of ChatGPT and GPT-3 authored writing in a lab with only one false positive in a hundred attempts.

The original article contains 519 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!