Influencers were paid by Google to promote a Pixel phone they’d never used

Enlarge / The Pixel 4. (credit: Ron Amadeo) 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 (which we found to be overpriced and full of half-working experiments). The FTC and four states say the companies aired “nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements…

Bringing horrible space monsters to life with performance capture tech

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link) We’ve watched the gameplay. We’ve heard the terrifying noises. We’ve seen the scary sights. Now, in the final part of our peek behind the scenes of Glen Schofield’s upcoming horror sci-fi adventure The Callisto…

Twitter quietly removed its ban on COVID-19 misinformation last week

Twitter previously suspended over 11,000 accounts for posting COVID-19 misinformation. Deposit Photos Since January 2020, Twitter’s internal statistics cite over 11,000 accounts suspensions and nearly 100,000 post removals for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Examples included erroneously promoting ivermectin as a viable alternative COVID-19 treatment and spreading conspiracy theories such as claims that vaccines contained 5G microchips. Last…

Meet the extinct sea cow that cultivated Pacific kelp forests

A sketch of the extinct Steller’s Sea Cow from a book published in 1896. Biodiversity Heritage Library/California Academy of Sciences While manatees in the United States today are more associated with the state of Florida, a relative of theirs once swam the seas along North America’s Pacific coast. Millions of years ago, the Steller’s sea…

As BlockFi files for bankruptcy, how contagious will FTX’s downfall become?

Crypto lending platform BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, just a few weeks after once-major crypto exchange FTX did the same. While BlockFi has been struggling to stay afloat for months now (and was even potentially going to be acquired by FTX), this latest filing signals that the bankruptcy contagion may run deeper…

AWS launches DataZone, a new ML-based data management service

At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that can help enterprises catalog, discover, share and — most importantly — govern their data. The nifty part here is that AWS is using machine learning to help businesses build these data catalogs and generate the metadata to make it searchable….

Twitter says it’s no longer enforcing COVID-19 misleading information policy

Twitter is no longer enforcing its policy against misleading information about COVID-19, per an update posted to an official company blog page. Reuters spotted the change earlier — which said the change was effective as of last Wednesday. “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the social media…

Amazon Security Lake is a standards-based data lake for security data

AWS today announced Amazon Security Lake, a new purpose-built data lake for security-related data. It can aggregate data from cloud and on-premises infrastructure, firewalls and endpoint security solutions. It helps enterprises centralize all of their security data in a single data lake, using a standards-based format, and manage the lifecycle of this data. Security Lake…