Month: August 2022

Enlarge (credit: Tetra Images | Tetra images)

As TikTok’s popularity and earnings soar, the company has decided to crack down on political content creators—sometimes with thousands of followers—who violate the app's policies against paid political ads. TikTok says it has been aware of the problem since 2020, but it became an issue of public concern in 2021. That’s when the Washington Post and The Mozilla Foundation uncovered TikToks from both left- and right-wing content creators that appeared to be violating FTC guidelines, which require, at a minimum, that posts must be marked with an "#ad" hashtag.

TikTok has always left it up to content creators to self-disclose when they conduct deals with business partners off-site. However, in June 2021, the company made it easier to flag posts as ads (or “branded content”) in an effort to encourage more self-disclosure. Mozilla considered this a step in the right direction, but it recommended that TikTok work harder ahead of the next elections to promptly remove undisclosed paid political ads.

This week, TikTok appears to have taken that advice, with its head of US safety, Eric Han, announcing that the company will remove any content that violates TikTok's rules on paid political ads. To prepare creators for stricter enforcement, Han said TikTok will post an educational series in its Creator Portal and host briefings with content creators to ensure “the rules of the road are abundantly clear when it comes to paid content around elections.”

Enlarge / It's a good time to restart or update Chrome—if your tabs love you, they'll come back. (credit: Getty Images)

Google announced an update on Wednesday to the Stable channel of its Chrome browser that includes a fix for an exploit that exists in the wild.

CVE-2022-2856 is a fix for "insufficient validation of untrusted input in Intents," according to Google's advisory. Intents are typically a way to pass data from inside Chrome to another application, such as the share button on Chrome's address bar. As noted by the Dark Reading blog, input validation is a common weakness in code.

The exploit was reported by Ashley Shen and Christian Resell of the Google Threat Analysis Group, and that's all the information we have for now. Details of the exploit are currently tucked behind a wall in the Chromium bugs group and are restricted to those actively working on related components and registered with Chromium. After a certain percentage of users have applied the relevant updates, those details may be revealed.

Enlarge / The iPhone 13 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and new iPhones in September. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that this year's iPhone event will be held on Wednesday, September 7th.

According to Gurman, the non-pro iPhone 14 lineup will axe the 5.4-inch mini display size that Apple has sold for the last couple of generations. The standard 6.1-inch model will instead be joined by a large-screened 6.7-inch version, matching the screen size of the current iPhone Pro Max model. But these phones will also continue to use the current Apple A15 Bionic chip and will look externally similar to the iPhone 13.

The iPhone 14 Pro will reportedly be more exciting, replacing the current camera notch with a pair of pinhole cutouts for the front-facing camera and FaceID scanner; many Android phones have already switched to similar pinhole cutouts to save screen space. The Pro phones will also reportedly get a faster chip and an even-larger three-lens camera assembly anchored by a 48-megapixel wide-angle camera plus 12-megapixel ultra-wide and telephoto cameras.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's Wednesday, which means it's time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes another round of discounts on Amazon's Fire HD tablets, with both the 10.1-inch Fire HD 10 and the 8-inch Fire HD 8 on sale for $100 and $50, respectively. While neither deal marks an all-time low—these two slates were available for $75 and $45 during Amazon's latest Prime Day sale, for instance—they're still a good ways below the usual street prices we've seen.

In general, the song remains the same with Amazon's tablet offerings: they can't touch any iPad when it comes to build quality, app support, or future-proofed performance, and they're all pretty aggressive about steering their users toward Amazon content and services. But if you can live with that and just need a tablet on the cheap, they still have their uses.

The Fire HD 10 in particular offers good value at this deal price, with a serviceable 1080p display and enough in the performance and battery life departments to make casual video watching, ebook reading, and web browsing not too frustrating. The Fire HD 8 is a drop-off across the board, but at $50, it's inexpensive enough to be justifiable if price is all that matters. Both models here come with lock-screen ads and 32GB of storage, though you can remove the former for an extra $15 and upgrade the latter with a microSD card if needed.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Google cannot be held liable for defamation simply for providing hyperlinks to other webpages, Australia's highest court ruled today. By itself, providing a URL is not "participation in the communication of defamatory matter which happens to be at that address... In reality, a hyperlink is merely a tool which enables a person to navigate to another webpage," the High Court of Australia ruling said.

The case relates to a Google search result that linked to a 2004 article published by The Age with the title, "Underworld loses valued friend at court." The article described Melbourne-based lawyer George Defteros, who was charged with conspiracy to murder and incitement to murder the day before it was published. The charge was withdrawn in 2005.

Defteros sued Google after becoming aware that a Google search of his name produced a link to the article and a snippet. Google refused to remove the article from search results despite a request from Defteros in 2016.

Enlarge / The stylish leads of We Are OFK—and yes, that includes the cartoony cat, though I'll leave its involvement in the series vague for now. (credit: Team OFK)

Imagine versions of The Monkees TV series or Beatles films like Hard Day's Night for the modern era. What might those look like? I don't just mean aesthetically—even though any "songs within the show" would certainly differ from the jangly '60s likes of "Daydream Believer." What kind of story would it tell? Where would the series air? How would it be presented?

I returned to this thought often while enjoying this week's We Are OFK, which is as close to an answer to my question as I've seen in a modern, hyper-connected era. This format-blurring experience may be marketed as a video game, out Thursday on PlayStation consoles, Switch, and PC, but it's somewhere between an interactive experience, a passive TV series, and a visual novel. And its production values and brave storytelling choices benefit wildly from this platform-agnostic approach.

A “video game” that leaves exes on read

We Are OFK includes an ample variety of lushly detailed locales for its characters to hash out their personal and artistic lives. (credit: Team OFK)

The six-hour experience, broken up into five "episodes," follows four restless and disaffected Los Angelenos in a fictional, slightly modified version of our own world. Certain brand names are changed (Twitter is now "Twibber," Tinder is "Phoenix," etc.), but its characters otherwise order ride-share cars, leave messages on read, and doomscroll like modern-day twenty-somethings. Each of the four lead characters came to LA to escape their old lives—an issue each reckons with in different ways—and, at the outset of this series' episodes, find themselves drawn to each other as a "band" while chasing their own respective artistic and romantic dreams.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple has released a trio of operating system updates to patch security vulnerabilities that it says "may have been actively exploited." The macOS 12.5.1, iOS 15.6.1, and iPadOS 15.6.1 updates are available for download now and should be installed as soon as possible.

The three updates all fix the same pair of bugs. One, labeled CVE-2022-32894, is a kernel vulnerability that can allow apps "to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The other, CVE-2022-32893, is a WebKit bug that allows for arbitrary code execution via "maliciously crafted web content." Both discoveries are attributed to an anonymous security researcher. WebKit is used in the Safari browser as well as in apps like Mail that use Apple's WebViews to render and display content.

Apple didn't release equivalent security patches for macOS Catalina or Big Sur, two older versions of macOS that are still receiving regular security updates. We've contacted Apple to see whether it plans to release these patches for these older OSes, or if they aren't affected by the bugs and don't need to be patched.