Software & Apps News - Page 1

The beginning of the end of TikTok in the United States is here as the Senate has passed a bill that bans the ByteDance-owned app from the app store as it's considered to be a piece of software that is controlled by an adversary nation, China.

The bill was recently passed in the House with 350-58 votes and has now passed in the Senate with 79 votes to 18. Notably, the act was bundled into HR 815, a law that included authorized military funding to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. TikTok has been suspected as a surveillance application that is harvesting the data of millions of Americans, which doesn't sit well with many lawmakers, security experts, and the US government, especially considering TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company.

The new legislation deems TikTok a national security risk as the app can scrape the personal data of 170 million Americans, which could then be shared with China's government. The app also has the potential to be used to spread misinformation in the US. However, the legislation gives TikTok one way of staying available in the US - ByteDance sells its share of TikTok to an entity the US government is satisfied with.

Australia's government recently declared a video that was making the rounds on social media platforms a "terrorist attack," which has resulted in Australia's eSafety Commissioner asking social platforms to remove the content in question.

Australia demanded social platforms respect its laws that prohibit social platforms from hosting any content that depicts a terrorist attack, with the eSafety Commissioner asking Elon Musk's X to remove the content of an Australian man attacking bishop Mari Emmanuel in Sydney, Australia. Australia's government defined the incident as a terrorist attack due to it involving religious or ideological violence.

Elon Musk's X responded by blocking the content for Australian users, but Christopher Tran, the barrister for the eSafety commissioner, argued this decision doesn't represent the removal of the posts, which violates Australian law. The eSafety Commissioner demanded that X remove global access to the content to abide by its laws, which Musk promptly responded to by vowing to challenge the requirement.

The banning of TikTok has been talked about since the Trump administration but recently caught wind again last month when the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require TikTok's owner, ByteDance, to either sell the app or face a ban from regulators.

The first bill that was passed in the House last month didn't attract much attention from the Senate, meaning the app wasn't forced to be sold. However, efforts to get rid of TikTok have increased again with another bill that has already been passed in the House. This new bill expands the timeframe ByteDance has to sell the app, increasing the window from six months to nine months, along with the addition of a presidential ability to grant a further 90-day extension.

The bill was passed in the House 360-58 and was included in a larger package that featured foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. TechCrunch reports that the inclusion of TikTok within this larger bill was a way for House Speaker Mike Johnson to "attract more conservative support". It's expected the Senate will vote on this bill within the next couple of weeks, with President Joe Biden saying that it has already earned his support and that he will sign it if it passes.

The former White House cyber policy director has said Microsoft has a stunning amount of control over the US federal government and is not afraid to use it.

In a recent interview with The Register, ex-White House cyber policy director AJ Grotto explained that Microsoft has a surprising amount of control within the US federal government and that the company's recent security failings are an illustration of how Microsoft is a national security threat to the US.

Grotto explains that Microsoft accounts for 85% of the federal government productivity software services, and a result of that market dominance is Microsoft gaining an "awful lot" of leverage over the government, as it simply cannot walk away from such an engrained vendor. Microsoft's recent hacking by a Russian-linked group that resulted in corporate email accounts being compromised is one example of Microsoft's failings, which the company hasn't shown any significant response to.

Microsoft has been preparing the release of new AI features for Windows 11 for quite some time now, and it appears at least one of those features will be hardware restricted.

Beta testers have already gotten their hands on these new AI features that are expected to be officially unveiled at the Microsoft event scheduled to take place on May 20. At the event, Microsoft is expected to unveil how AI will be integrated into Windows 11 and new Arm-powered Surface hardware. One of these beta testers has taken to X to share the requirements for a feature called "AI Explorer," which turns everything you do on your computer into a searchable memory through the use of natural language.

AI Explorer will be able to navigate to conversations you have had with people across various applications, locate documents, specific web pages, images, files, and even have the capabilities of understanding context and tasks that are on-screen. @thebookisclosed posted a screenshot of the requirements for AI Explorer, which appear to be an ARM64 CPU, 16GB RAM, 225GB storage, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite NPU. If these requirements are correct, AI Explorer appears to be exclusive to ARM-based PCs, cutting out any AI PCs built with AMD and Intel NPUs.

If you're running Windows 10 and are using a local account - as opposed to being signed into a Microsoft Account with your OS installation - then prepare for a fresh round of nagging from Microsoft.

As Windows Latest reports, a change which has been in testing is supposedly coming through to arrive for the release version of Windows 10 with the next cumulative update for the OS (in May 2024).

What it means is that when you go into Settings, if you are working with a local Windows 10 install, there'll be a bar at the top of the panel - complete with a warning exclamation mark - telling you to sign in to a Microsoft Account.

Microsoft is testing a new idea for the Photos app in Windows 11, namely the ability to directly send an image you're editing in the client to Microsoft Designer.

The idea is to implement a 'Designer' button in the Photos application which when clicked sends the current image straight over to the Microsoft Designer site.

Designer is an online app that allows for considerable exercising of various AI abilities, so you can go to town on the image in question in that respect.

In a somewhat concerning development for people who are running Windows 11 without activating the OS, it appears that Microsoft is taking some initial steps - in testing - to punish those folks via its Edge browser.

Punish them how, exactly? Essentially by blocking off all access to any settings in Edge for those who haven't activated their Windows 11 (or Windows 10) installation.

Windows Report (via TechRadar) picked up on the move Microsoft has made which is being tested in Edge (the Canary version of the browser in preview).

If you're someone who likes to make use of the WhatsApp instant messaging app you're already probably familiar with the way the Meta-owned company updates the app and adds new features relatively regularly. The latest instance of that is a new feature that makes it easier for people to find their chats, especially when they have a lot of them going on at once.

Announced by a WhatsApp blog post, the new chat filter feature is exactly what it sounds like. When users receive the new feature they will notice three filter options at the top of the screen including the ability to see all messages, filter out read messages so they only see threads with something new to read, and grroups.

WhatsApp says that the new filter options are rolling out right now and that users should expect to be able to make use of them in the coming weeks. You'll need to make sure that you're using the latest version of the WhatsApp app for your device of course, and even then there is no guarantee that you will see the new filter option immediately. Instead, it appears that WhatsApp is enabling chat filters per account, which means you may have to wait longer than your friends before you see the option.

You may have noticed that recently, there's been a bit of a fuss about a Copilot application being installed quietly on some Windows PCs without the user's knowledge - and this has happened again.

However, this time around, it's an even stranger scenario as the Copilot app in question has been pushed onto Windows Server 2022 installations in some cases.

Windows Latest picked up on this development and has spoken to Microsoft about what has gone on here. The long and short of it is that the app getting onto Windows Server 2022 is a mistake.