Enlarge/ The Chrome nightly download page with an important section highlighted.
Ron Amadeo
Chrome is landing on a new platform: Windows on Arm. We don’t have an official announcement yet, but X user Pedro Justo was the first to spot that the Chrome Canary page now quietly hosts binaries for “Windows 11 Arm.”
Chrome has run on Windows for a long time, but that’s the x86 version. It also supports various Arm OSes, like Android, Chrome OS, and Mac OS. There’s also Chromium, the open source codebase on Chrome, which has run on Windows Arm for a while now, thanks mostly to Microsoft’s Edge browser being a Chromium derivative. The official “Google Chrome” has never been supported on Windows on Arm until now, though.
Windows may be a huge platform, but “Windows on Arm” is not. Apple’s switch to the Arm architecture has been a battery life revelation for laptops, and in the wake of that, interest in Windows on Arm has picked up. A big inflection point will be the release of laptops with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC in mid-2024. Assuming Qualcomm’s pre-launch hype pans out, this will be the first Arm on Windows chip to be in the same class as Apple Silicon. Previously, Windows on Arm could only run Chrome as an x86 app via a slow translation layer, so getting the world’s most popular browser to a native quality level in time for launch will be a big deal for Qualcomm.
The “Canary” channel is Chrome’s nightly builds channel, so fresh Arm builds should be arriving at a rapid pace. Usually, Canary features take about two months to hit the stable channels, which would be plenty of time for the new Snapdragon chip. It’s hard to know if Google will stick to that timeline, as this is a whole new architecture/OS combo. But again, most of the work has been ongoing for years now. The next steps would be rolling out Windows Arm dev and beta channels soon.
Step 1: get the phone as close to your face as possible.
Google
Step two: Over a period of four seconds, move the phone from the center of your forehead to your temple.
Google
Do all that correctly and you’ll get a body temperature reading.
Google
Most Pixel 8 Pro owners have probably forgotten that there’s an infrared temperature sensor on the back of the phone next to the LED camera flash. But it’s still there, and almost four months after launch, it’s getting a new feature: body temperature measurement. The four-month hold-up is because body temperature sensors are regulated as medical devices, so Google needed FDA approval to enable the feature. The company has a blog post detailing the feature, which says: “In clinical trials, our software algorithm was able to calculate body temperature in the range of 96.9°F–104°F (36.1°C–40°C) to within ±0.3°C when compared with an FDA-cleared temporal artery thermometer. In layman’s terms, this means the Pixel body temperature feature is about as accurate as other temporal artery thermometers.” The feature only works in the US.
Like everything about the Pixel 8 Pro’s temperature sensor, the basic feature idea sounds fine (if not several years late), but the execution leaves much to be desired. Google has a support page detailing how to use the body temperature sensor, and you’ll need to slowly swipe the phone across your entire face over four seconds to get a reading. The sensor needs to be extremely close to your face to work; Google says it wants the phone “as close as possible to the skin without touching.” If you wear glasses, you’ll need to take them off, because the phone needs to be so close to your face it will hit them. If you manage all that, you’ll get a body temperature reading that you can save to your Fitbit profile.
We found the temperature sensor to be the biggest negative mark in our Pixel 8 Pro review. I’m not entirely sure a well-executed temperature sensor would be a useful feature on a phone, but the Pixel 8’s temperature sensor is just such a hassle to use. Besides forehead measuring, it can also check the temperature of objects, but it only has a range of two inches. There’s also no camera feed or any targeting system to be sure of what you’re measuring—you get a blank screen with a “measure” button, you press it, and a number appears. Temperature sensing also stops the instant it reads any single temperature—it’s not continuous. All the user experience problems made the temperature sensor instantly forgettable. The body temperature addition isn’t helping and feels like a feature that would be better suited for a smartwatch.
The feature is rolling out as part of the January 2024 Pixel update (this isn’t the Google Play update that’s bricking phone storage. That’s a different update!). It also includes the “Circle to Search” feature that was announced during the Galaxy S24 launch, and AI-powered “Magic compose” for the Google Messages app. Google says the features will roll out “over the next few weeks.”
Enlarge/ Still images of AI-generated video examples provided by Google for its Lumiere video synthesis model.
On Tuesday, Google announced Lumiere, an AI video generator that it calls “a space-time diffusion model for realistic video generation” in the accompanying preprint paper. But let’s not kid ourselves: It does a great job at creating videos of cute animals in ridiculous scenarios, such as using roller skates, driving a car, or playing a piano. Sure, it can do more, but it is perhaps the most advanced text-to-animal AI video generator yet demonstrated.
According to Google, Lumiere utilizes unique architecture to generate a video’s entire temporal duration in one go. Or, as the company put it, “We introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution—an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve.”
In layperson terms, Google’s tech is designed to handle both the space (where things are in the video) and time (how things move and change throughout the video) aspects simultaneously. So, instead of making a video by putting together many small parts or frames, it can create the entire video, from start to finish, in one smooth process.
The official promotional video accompanying the paper “Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation,” released by Google.
Lumiere can also do plenty of party tricks, which are laid out quite well with examples on Google’s demo page. For example, it can perform text-to-video generation (turning a written prompt into a video), convert still images into videos, generate videos in specific styles using a reference image, apply consistent video editing using text-based prompts, create cinemagraphs by animating specific regions of an image, and offer video inpainting capabilities (for example, it can change the type of dress a person is wearing).
In the Lumiere research paper, the Google researchers state that the AI model outputs five-second long 1024×1024 pixel videos, which they describe as “low-resolution.” Despite those limitations, the researchers performed a user study and claim that Lumiere’s outputs were preferred over existing AI video synthesis models.
As for training data, Google doesn’t say where it got the videos they fed into Lumiere, writing, “We train our T2V [text to video] model on a dataset containing 30M videos along with their text caption. [sic] The videos are 80 frames long at 16 fps (5 seconds). The base model is trained at 128×128.”
Enlarge/ A block diagram showing components of the Lumiere AI model, provided by Google.
AI-generated video is still in a primitive state, but it’s been progressing in quality over the past two years. In October 2022, we covered Google’s first publicly unveiled image synthesis model, Imagen Video. It could generate short 1280×768 video clips from a written prompt at 24 frames per second, but the results weren’t always coherent. Before that, Meta debuted its AI video generator, Make-A-Video. In June of last year, Runway’s Gen2 video synthesis model enabled the creation of two-second video clips from text prompts, fueling the creation of surrealistic parody commercials. And in November, we covered Stable Video Diffusion, which can generate short clips from still images.
AI companies often demonstrate video generators with cute animals because generating coherent, non-deformed humans is currently difficult—especially since we, as humans (you are human, right?), are adept at noticing any flaws in human bodies or how they move. Just look at AI-generated Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Judging by Google’s examples (and not having used it ourselves), Lumiere appears to surpass these other AI video generation models. But since Google tends to keep its AI research models close to its chest, we’re not sure when, if ever, the public may have a chance to try it for themselves.
As always, whenever we see text-to-video synthesis models getting more capable, we can’t help but think of the future implications for our Internet-connected society, which is centered around sharing media artifacts—and the general presumption that “realistic” video typically represents real objects in real situations captured by a camera. Future video synthesis tools more capable than Lumiere will make deceptive deepfakes trivially easy to create.
To that end, in the “Societal Impact” section of the Lumiere paper, the researchers write, “Our primary goal in this work is to enable novice users to generate visual content in an creative and flexible way. [sic] However, there is a risk of misuse for creating fake or harmful content with our technology, and we believe that it is crucial to develop and apply tools for detecting biases and malicious use cases in order to ensure a safe and fair use.”
It’s almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones’ internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit, user “Liv-Lyf” compiled a dozen posts that complain of an “internal storage access issue” and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update.
In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, “The symptoms are all the same” as that October bug, with “internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc.” When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, “We’re aware of this issue and are looking into it,” and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments.
In the October bug, users were locked out of their system storage due to a strange permissions issue. Having a phone try to run without any user access to your own storage is a mess. It breaks the camera and screenshots because you can’t write media. File Managers read “0 bytes” for every file and folder. Nothing works over USB, and some phones, understandably, just fail to boot. The issue in October arrived as part of the initial Android 14 release and only affected devices that had multiple users set up.
Picking through the posts, it’s unclear if there’s a certain type of user that should be more wary of the January 2024 Google Play update. Some users say they haven’t enabled the multiple-user functionality, but severalmention having a work profile enabled. Work Profiles aren’t quite “multiple users,” but the system leverages a lot of multi-user features to let users have duplicate “personal” and “work” copies of the same apps. Many users don’t say if they have a work profile or not.
The “January 2024 Google Play system update” isn’t the usual OTA system update but is a Project Mainline or APEX module. These take core system components and wrap them up into easily distributable packaging where they can be delivered via the Play Store, much like an app, but with way more permissions (only Google can make Play system updates). Google posts release notes for Play system updates, and there’s nothing in the January 2024 update that jumps out as the potential cause of a storage access problem. You can check your current version on a Pixel phone by going to Settings, Security & Privacy, then “System & updates.” At the bottom, you’ll see a month and year for your “Google Play system update” level. DO NOT tap on this section because that will bring up the update screen.
Google’s “we’re looking into it” statement doesn’t give users much guidance on how they should deal with this in the meantime. A good first step, at any time, is to ensure you have backups of all your important phone data. Obviously, avoiding the January 2024 Google Play system update is recommended for now, but I don’t think there’s a way for users to do that. Google Play system updates don’t offer users any controls, so you’re mostly hoping an automatic update doesn’t brick your phone. The good news is that the Google Play system often fails to check for updates. They get installed on reboot, so try not to power cycle your phone. Disabling a work profile and any other multi-user features sounds like a good idea if you can manage that. There are instructions here.
Enlarge/ Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018.
Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wasn’t kidding when, earlier this month, he said more layoffs are coming. The latest group to be hit is Alphabet’s X Lab, which is losing “dozens of employees,” according to a new report from Bloomberg. This is something like the 11th Google layoff announcement we’ve covered in the past 12 months and the fourth one this month.
The X Lab is Alphabet’s “moonshot” experimental group, which is responsible for wild concepts like a wearable head-up display, a self-driving car, smart contact lenses, flying Internet balloons, and delivery drones. This is the age of Google cost-cutting, and you’ll notice none of those projects is a rip-roaring commercial success. On Google’s financials, the X Lab is part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” group, which burns through around a billion dollars every quarter. It’s a research arm, so the hope is that spending all this money will someday lead to new revenue streams. For the short-term Wall Street types, though, it’s a money loser, quarter to quarter, and that makes it a prime candidate for cuts.
Bloomberg has a copy of the memo announcing the cuts to the X Labs staff, and there’s more in there than just layoffs. X Lab CEO Astro Teller writes: “We’re expanding our approach to focus on spinning out more projects as independent companies funded through market-based capital. We’ll do this by opening our scope to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to emphasize lean teams and capital efficiency.” Basically, Google wants these money losers to find their own funding somewhere else, at least partially.
The “outside funding” model isn’t new for some of Alphabet’s biggest and most promising “Other Bets” projects. The self-driving car company, Waymo, took rounds of outside funding in 2020 and 2021, racking up over $5 billion of cash that didn’t come from the Google Ads money geyser. Verily, Alphabet’s health care data analytics company, has also raised billions in outside funding. Both groups started as X projects and later “graduated” to full-fledged Alphabet companies. Others, like Project Loon (Internet balloons) and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (infrastructure planning), were X or Alphabet companies and were spun out as fully independent entities, separate from the Alphabet earnings sheet. Apparently, Alphabet wants to push X projects down one of those two paths.
On one hand, outside funding will result in a tougher, more critical eye for some of these projects. On the other hand, the Bloomberg report notes that “Alphabet could only accommodate so many Other Bets, creating a bottleneck for X ventures that were ready to take the next step, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. Startups within X often faced a choice between waiting for a spot to open up or striking out on their own.”
It’s not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
The study, first spotted by 404media, “monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries,” using queries like “best headphones” to study search results. The focus was on product review queries because the researchers felt those searches were “particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing due to its inherent conflict of interest between users, search providers, and content providers.”
Overall, the study found that “the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam.” Search engines occasionally update their ranking algorithms to try to combat spam, but the study found that “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam” and that there are “strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content.”
The study found “an inverse relationship between a page’s optimization level and its perceived expertise, indicating that SEO may hurt at least subjective page quality.” Google and its treatment of pages is the primary force behind what does and doesn’t count as SEO, and to say Google’s guidelines reduce subjective page quality is a strike against Google’s entire ranking algorithm.
The bad news is that it doesn’t seem like this will get better any time soon. The study points out generative AI sites one or two times, but that was only in the past year. The elephant in the room is that generative AI is starting to be able to completely automate the processes of SEO spam. Some AI content farms can scan a human-written site, use it for “training data,” rewrite it slightly, and then stave off the actual humans with more aggressive SEO tactics. There are already people bragging about doing AI-powered “SEO heists” on X (formerly Twitter). The New York Times is taking OpenAI to court for copyright infringement, and a class-action suit for book publishers calls ChatGPT and LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) “industrial-strength plagiarists.” Artists are in the same boat from tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Most websites do not have the legal capacity to take on an infinite wave of automated spam sites enabled by these tools. Google’s policy is to not penalize AI-generated content in its search results.
A Google spokesperson responded to the study by pointing out that Google is still doing better than its competition: “This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day. We’ve launched specific improvements to address these issues – and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.”
This post was updated at 6: 00PM ET to add a statement from Google.
Not quite one year ago, Microsoft announced a “multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment” in OpenAI, a company that had made waves in 2022 with its ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E image creator. The next month, Microsoft announced that it was integrating a generative AI chatbot into its Bing search engine and Edge browser, and similar generative AI features were announced for Windows in the apps formerly known as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, and other products.
Adding AI features to Bing was meant to give it an edge over Google, and reports indicated that Google was worried enough about it to accelerate its own internal generative AI efforts. Microsoft announced in March 2023 that Bing surpassed the 100 million monthly active users mark based on interest in Bing Chat and its ilk; by Microsoft’s estimates, each percentage of Google’s search market share that Bing could siphon away was worth as much as $2 billion to Microsoft.
A year later, it looks like Microsoft’s AI efforts may have helped Bing on the margins, but they haven’t meaningfully eroded Google’s search market share, according to Bloomberg. Per Bloomberg’s analysis of data from Sensor Tower, Bing usage had been down around 33 percent year over year just before the AI-powered features were added, but those numbers had rebounded by the middle of 2023.
Microsoft hasn’t given an official update on Bing’s monthly active users in quite a while—we’ve asked the company for an update, and will share it if we get one—though Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Medhi told Bloomberg that “millions and millions of people” were still using the new AI features.
StatCounter data mostly tells a similar story. According to its data, Google’s worldwide market share is currently in the low 90s, and it has been for virtually the entire 15-year period for which StatCounter offers data. Bing’s worldwide market share number over the same period has been remarkably stable; it was about 3.5 percent in the summer of 2009, when what had been known as Live Search was renamed Bing in the first place, and as of December 2023, it was still stuck at around 3.4 percent.
Recent US data is slightly more flattering for Microsoft, where Bing’s usage rose from 6.7 percent in December 2022 to 7.7 percent in December 2023. But that doesn’t necessarily suggest any kind of AI-fueled influx in new Bing search users—usage remained in the mid-to-high 6 percent range through most of 2023 before ticking up right at the end of the year—and Bing’s US usage has floated in that same 6–7 percent zone for most of the last decade.
It even seems like Microsoft is making moves to distance its AI efforts from Bing a bit. What began as “Bing Chat” or “the new Bing” is now known as Windows Copilot—both inside Windows 11 and elsewhere. Earlier this week, the Bing Image Creator became “Image Creator from Designer.” Both products still feature Bing branding prominently—the Copilot screen in Windows 11 still says “with Bing” at the top of it, and the Image Creator tool is still hosted on the Bing.com domain. But if these new AI features aren’t driving Bing’s market share up, then it makes sense for Microsoft to create room for them to stand on their own.
That’s not to say Google’s search dominance is assured. Leipzig University researchers published a study earlier this week (PDF) suggesting Google, Bing, and the Bing-powered DuckDuckGo had seen “an overall downward trend in text quality,” especially for heavily SEO-optimized categories like purchase recommendations and product reviews.
Enlarge/ Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days.
Aurich Lawson
Today’s Google layoff announcement concerns YouTube, which plans to lay off 100 employees. Tubefilter was the first to report the news. This is the third Google layoff announcement in eight days (the other two were at Google Assistant/Hardware and Google Ads) and the 10th Google layoff announcement we’ve covered in the past 12 months. It feels like we could be doing this kind of reporting via a template by now.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says to expect more layoffs. The Verge got hold of an internal memo from Pichai to Google’s remaining employees on January 10, telling them to brace for “tough choices” in the future and that “to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted.” Last year Google cut 12,000 jobs in January and continued to make smaller additional cuts all year. Pichai told his employees that this year, “these role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team.”
The January 10 date of the memo means Googlers got a heads up about the Google Assistant, Hardware, Google Ads, and YouTube layoffs, but no one knows when the layoffs will stop. Making investors happy is a big factor in all these layoffs, so if you’re interested in the Wall Street perspective on Google’s headcount, back in March 2023, activist investor Christopher Hohn of TCI Fund Management wanted to see Pichai cut another 25,000 people after the 12,000 original layoffs. Hohn wants to see Alphabet/Google go back to 150,000 employees, which was the company headcount at the end of 2021.
Even after what seemed like an endless amount of layoff announcements last year, as of Q3 2023, Alphabet’s headcount was still at 182,381. Even though the company laid off over 12,000 people, it was still hiring people during that time, so year over year, Alphabet’s headcount only dropped by 4,400 people.
For years, one of Google’s big advantages was being a great workplace, with endless employee perks, 20 percent time to work on pet projects, and whimsical offices. Budget cutbacks and another year of looming layoffs will put a serious dent in the already awful morale at the company. Back when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced Google to Wall Street in an IPO founders letter, the two said: “Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything.” Page and Brin are no longer in charge, though, and the company has changed significantly since then.
Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube’s policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.
What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading “old” forms of climate denial—including claims that “global warming is not happening” or “human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming”—have moved on.
Now they’re increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that “impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless,” “climate solutions won’t work,” and “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”
The CCDH uncovered these new climate-denial tactics by using artificial intelligence to scan transcripts of 12,058 videos posted on 96 YouTube channels that the CCDH found had previously posted climate-denial content. Verified by researchers, the AI model used was judged accurate in labeling climate-denial content approximately 78 percent of the time.
According to the CCDH’s analysis, the amount of content disputing climate solutions, climate science, and impacts of climate change today comprises 70 percent of climate-denial content—a percent that doubled from 2018 to 2023. At the same time, the amount of content pushing old climate-denial claims that are harder or impossible to monetize fell from 65 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2023.
These “new forms of climate denial,” the CCDH warned, are designed to delay climate action by spreading disinformation.
“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the CCDH’s chief executive, said on a call with reporters, according to Reuters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”
Since 2018—based on “estimates of typical ad pricing on YouTube” by social media analytics tool Social Blade—YouTube may have profited by as much as $13.4 million annually from videos flagged by the CCDH. And YouTube confirmed that some of these videos featured climate denialism that YouTube already explicitly bans.
In response to the CCDH’s report, YouTube de-monetized some videos found to be in violation of its climate change policy. But a spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the majority of videos that the CCDH found were considered compliant with YouTube’s ad policies.
The fact that most of these videos remain compliant is precisely why the CCDH is calling on YouTube to update its policies, though.
Currently, YouTube’s policy prohibits monetization of content “that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” YouTube’s spokesperson told Ars. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional information on climate change and context from third parties.”
The CCDH worries that YouTube standing by its current policy is too short-sighted. The group recommended tweaking the policy to instead specify that YouTube prohibits content “that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.”
If YouTube and other social media platforms don’t acknowledge new forms of climate denial and “urgently” update their disinformation policies in response, these new attacks on climate change science “will only increase,” the CCDH warned.
“It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly,” the CCDH’s report said, adding that “demonetizing climate-denial” content “removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content.”
Enlarge/ Artist’s conception of iOS developers after today’s Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling.
Epic Games
The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic’s complaints about Apple’s practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.
It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google’s app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic’s claim that Apple’s App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.
The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of “games” and “marketplace” were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple’s App Store itself wasn’t a “walled garden” that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.
Today’s denial of petitions for certiorari means that Apple has mostly run out of legal options to prevent changes to its App Store policies now that multiple courts have found its “anti-steering” language anticompetitive. Links and messaging from developers should soon be able to send users to alternative payment options for apps rather than forcing them to stay entirely inside Apple’s App Store, resulting in a notable commission for Apple.
Epic’s goals to see Fortnite restored to the App Store or see third-party stores or sideloading on iPhones remain unfulfilled. This is not the case with Epic’s antitrust suit against Google, which in mid-December went strongly in Epic’s favor. With a unanimous jury verdict against Google, a judge this month will determine how to address Google’s violations—potentially including Epic’s request that it and other developers be allowed to issue their own app stores and payment systems on Android devices.
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that the Supreme Court’s denial means the “battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States” and that it was a “sad outcome for all developers.” Sweeney noted that as of today, developers on Apple’s platforms can “tell US customers about better prices on the web.” And he noted that regulatory and policy actions around the world, including the upcoming EU Digital Markets Act, may have further impact.
Apple has yet to comment on today’s Supreme Court decision.
YouTube appeared to be continuing its war on ad blockers, with users complaining that the company was slowing down the site for users it catches running an ad blocker. 9to5Google spotted this Reddit thread filled with users seeing poor loading performance with ad blockers enabled.
A video at the top of the Reddit post shows what some users are seeing: A video with an ad blocker on can’t load quickly enough to keep up with the playback speed (which isn’t on normal; it’s maybe 2x) and has to pause at around 30 seconds. Turning off the ad blocker immediately improves loading performance, with the white line on YouTube’s progress bar showing significantly more buffering runway. Users report that the ad-block detection causes strange issues, like “lag” that makes full screen or comments not work or Chrome being unable to load other webpages while YouTube is open.
YouTube has used all sorts of tactics to get people to turn off ad blockers and subscribe to YouTube Premium. The company previously has been showing pop-up messages saying ad blockers violate YouTube terms of service. Earlier, the company was caught adding a five-second delay to the initial site load for ad blockers. The changes have kicked off a cat-and-mouse game between Google/YouTube and the ad blocker community.
But the slowdowns may be a big accident from ad blockers altering YouTube’s code: Adblock Plus has published a bug report covering “performance issues” introduced by version 3.22 and says things should be fixed in version 3.22.1. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill says the issue is limited to AdBlock Plus and its spinoffs and that blaming YouTube is “an incorrect diagnosis.”
Regardless of whether this is due to the updated Adblock code, it’s not the first time this has happened with YouTube. The straightforward thing would be to show more of these pop-ups and not send people on a wild goose chase after fake technical issues. Users in the thread certainly seem confused about why YouTube suddenly stopped working. The top comment says, “I thought there was something wrong with my internet connection,” while another high-ranking user’s comment was to plan to reinstall Chrome.
This post was updated on January 15 at 4: 20 pm ET with Adblock Plus’ bug report information and developer Raymond Hill’s statement.
Popular search engines like Google and Bing are making it easy to surface nonconsensual deepfake pornography by placing it at the top of search results, NBC News reported Thursday.
These controversial deepfakes superimpose faces of real women, often celebrities, onto the bodies of adult entertainers to make them appear to be engaging in real sex. Thanks in part to advances in generative AI, there is now a burgeoning black market for deepfake porn that could be discovered through a Google search, NBC News previously reported.
NBC News uncovered the problem by turning off safe search, then combining the names of 36 female celebrities with obvious search terms like “deepfakes,” “deepfake porn,” and “fake nudes.” Bing generated links to deepfake videos in top results 35 times, while Google did so 34 times. Bing also surfaced “fake nude photos of former teen Disney Channel female actors” using images where actors appear to be underaged.
A Google spokesperson told NBC that the tech giant understands “how distressing this content can be for people affected by it” and is “actively working to bring more protections to Search.”
According to Google’s spokesperson, this controversial content sometimes appears because “Google indexes content that exists on the web,” just “like any search engine.” But while searches using terms like “deepfake” may generate results consistently, Google “actively” designs “ranking systems to avoid shocking people with unexpected harmful or explicit content that they aren’t looking for,” the spokesperson said.
Currently, the only way to remove nonconsensual deepfake porn from Google search results is for the victim to submit a form personally or through an “authorized representative.” That form requires victims to meet three requirements: showing that they’re “identifiably depicted” in the deepfake; the “imagery in question is fake and falsely depicts” them as “nude or in a sexually explicit situation”; and the imagery was distributed without their consent.
While this gives victims some course of action to remove content, experts are concerned that search engines need to do more to effectively reduce the prevalence of deepfake pornography available online—which right now is rising at a rapid rate.
And nonconsensual deepfake porn isn’t just being traded in black markets online. In November, New Jersey police launched a probe after high school teens used AI image generators to create and share fake nude photos of female classmates.
With tech companies seemingly slow to stop the rise in deepfakes, some states have passed laws criminalizing deepfake porn distribution. Last July, Virginia amended its existing law criminalizing revenge porn to include any “falsely created videographic or still image.” In October, New York passed a law specifically focused on banning deepfake porn, imposing a $1,000 fine and up to a year of jail time on violators. Congress has also introduced legislation that creates criminal penalties for spreading deepfake porn.
Although Google told NBC News that its search features “don’t allow manipulated media or sexually explicit content,” the outlet’s investigation seemingly found otherwise. NBC News also noted that Google’s Play app store hosts an app that was previously marketed for creating deepfake porn, despite prohibiting “apps determined to promote or perpetuate demonstrably misleading or deceptive imagery, videos and/or text.” This suggests that Google’s remediation efforts blocking deceptive imagery may be inconsistent.
Google told Ars that it will soon be strengthening its policies against apps featuring AI-generated restricted content in the Play Store. A generative AI policy taking effect on January 31 will require all apps to comply with developer policies that ban AI-generated restricted content, including deceptive content and content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children.
Experts told NBC News that “Google’s lack of proactive patrolling for abuse has made it and other search engines useful platforms for people looking to engage in deepfake harassment campaigns.”
Google is currently “in the process of building more expansive safeguards, with a particular focus on removing the need for known victims to request content removals one by one,” Google’s spokesperson told NBC News.
Microsoft’s spokesperson told Ars that Microsoft updated its process for reporting concerns with Bing searches to include non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) used in “deepfakes” last August because it had become a “significant concern.” Like Google, Microsoft allows victims to report NCII deepfakes by submitting a web form to request removal from search results, understanding that any sharing of NCII is “a gross violation of personal privacy and dignity with devastating effects for victims.”
In the past, Microsoft President Brad Smith has said that among all dangers that AI poses, deepfakes worry him most, but deepfakes fueling “foreign cyber influence operations” seemingly concern him more than deepfake porn.
This story was updated on January 11 to include information on Google’s AI-generated content policy and on January 12 to include information from Microsoft.
