Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Some voices shout more loudly into the abyss of the Internet than others. (credit: getty | Thomas Barwick)

One of the stranger questions of our modern era: when does being "Internet famous" translate into being, well, actually famous? According to a UK regulator, the magic number is 30,000 followers.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) issued a ruling Wednesday in a case featuring drugmaker Sanofi. A British lifestyle blogger with 32,000 Instagram followers shared a sponsored post in February featuring an image of, and talking about, one of Sanofi's products, an antihistamine and sleep aid called Phenergan Night Time tablets.

The ASA said the Instagram ad constituted celebrity endorsement of a medication, which is not allowed under UK law. Sanofi responded that the 32,000 followers that particular lifestyle blogger had at the time was significantly fewer than major celebrities such as comedian Stephen Fry (359,000 followers) or soccer star David Beckham (55 million followers), and therefore the ad should not be subject to the rules.

At this year's E3, Microsoft had a lot to say about its high-end Xbox One successor (code-named "Project Scarlett") and about its previously announced (and newly demoed) Project Xcloud streaming gaming service. But the company was less forthcoming about long-standing reports of low-cost, streaming-focused Microsoft hardware that would bring Xcloud games to the TV easily.

In a new video, Thurrott's Brad Sams (who has a strong track record when it comes to reporting insider information from Microsoft) says that the streaming box is "still being actively developed" inside Microsoft despite the continued public silence from the company itself. "I'm hearing this project has not been killed and is being actively worked on."

According to Sams, Microsoft's streaming hardware would "make the [streaming] gaming experience just a little bit better than if it was playing from a TV or something like that." That's because the low-end hardware would itself have a "marginal amount of compute [power]" that would allow it to handle basic gameplay elements like movement and collision detection locally, with minimal latency. "Everything else would just be streamed from Xcloud," as Sams put it.

Enlarge / "Alexa, does my voice really sound like that?" (credit: Amazon)

If you (like so many of us) hate listening to recordings of your own voice, you may be in for an unpleasant future, as Amazon has confirmed it hangs on to every conversation you've ever had with an Alexa-enabled device until or unless you specifically delete them.

That confirmation comes as a response to a list of questions Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May expressing "concerns" about how Amazon uses and retains customers' Alexa voice assistant data.

Amazon's response to Coons, as first reported by CNET, confirms that the company keeps your data as long as it wants unless you deliberately specify otherwise.