Software & Apps - Page 33

Only a few days after making its announcement, Twitch has officially walked back its content policy changes that permitted sexual content on the platform.

Twitch has issued an update to its controversial content policy that expanded the possibilities of what type of content is allowed on the livestreaming platform. According to the update, which has since been revoked, Twitch permitted sexual content if it was appropriately categorized under the new "Sexual Themes" label.

Additionally, the revoked policy allowed for "fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender," and content that "deliberately highlight[s] breasts, buttocks or pelvic region" as well as "body writing". Moreover the rules allowed for dances such as "twerking, grinding and pole dancing." These changes were very divisive for the livestreaming community, with one group of people raising the question - how will this now-permitted sexualized content impact the younger audience on Twitch?

Twitch has announced that it is updating its policies on what content is allowed on its platform and what isn't, with the online streaming platform now widening the possibilities for content that contains sexual themes.

The new changes involve the acceptance of content that contains sexual themes if it is appropriately labeled. More specifically, the new rules accept content containing "artistic" depictions, meaning drawn, sculpted, or animated, of "fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender". Furthermore, this content needs to be labeled with a "Sexual Themes" label, while fictionalized sexual acts such as masturbation remain prohibited.

Additionally, Twitch's new rules allow content that "deliberately highlight[s] breasts, buttocks or pelvic region" as well as "body writing". Moreover, the new rules pass content such as dances like "twerking, grinding and pole dancing" and don't require any label. If you are wondering about nudity, Twitch has made no changes to its policy regarding that topic, along with its rules regarding nudity and games, sexual violence, or sex.

Adobe tells investors that it is facing an FTC probe for its widely-contested cancellation fees.

Digital creative software giant Adobe could be facing considerable fines from US regulators. The Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating the cancellation policy for Adobe's subscription-based software suite.

The consumer protection agency is scrutinizing Adobe under the lens of the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, a new law passed in 2023 that requires businesses to clearly identify the terms of subscriptions, including any cancellation fees, upon consumer signup. The FTC recently filed a complaint alleging that Amazon's policies violate ROSCA.

When Apple released the iOS 17.2 software update to the public yesterday it brought with it a number of new features and improvements. But alongside those was a whole new app. Dubbed Journal, the app is designed to make it easier for people to get into journaling, allowing them to be more mindful in the process.

The new app is included free with all iOS 17.2 installations and includes a Journaling Suggestions feature. That feature is perhaps the biggest part of the whole app because it can make recommendations for things that you might want to journal about. Those recommendations are based on real things, too, including the photos that you take, the music you listen to, and the activities that you partake in. All of that and more can then be fed into a journal entry with the whole thing protected by iCloud backup and Face ID biometric security.

But that isn't the most vital part of this new app, because Apple is also making that Journaling Suggestions feature into an API, allowing third-party apps to also hook in and make use of the same information. That means that users of apps like Day One can also be prompted with ideas for a new journal entry, with the app's developer already confirming support. We can also expect other developers to follow suit, too.

Alongside the release of new software updates for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Aooke TV, Apple also recently released a new macOS update for the Mac. That update, dubbed macOS Sonoma 14.2, brings with it a number of new features and a few of them are going to make a big difference to the way people get things done. But perhaps the biggest change is one that will make it way easier for people to fill out those pesky PDFs that they sometimes receive.

We've all had to fill out PDFs for companies, whether they're insurance documents or perhaps the paperwork for a new job. Whatever the reason, entering data just got easier with macOS Sonoma 14.2 thanks to the arrival of an enhanced AutoFill feature.

Apple says that the new feature identifies fields in those PDFs and other forms and then enables users to populate those documents with information such as names and addresses from contacts. That could be a really big improvement for some, especially if you're someone who spends their days filling out such forms.

Apple is reportedly ready to start paying artists and record labels more money for the songs that are streamed if those songs also have a version with spatial audio support - notably, the song streamed doesn't have to be a spatial audio one, just so long as there is a spatial audio version in Apple Music's library.

Spatial audio uses Dolby Atmos technology to create a 3D soundscape that can sound pretty great, especially when used with headphones. The HomePod supports spatial audio, but it's when listening with earbuds or headphones that things can come alive. But right now the number of songs with spatial audio support is limited and some of those that have it already sound pretty poor. Now, Apple seems to be ready to throw money at the problem.

That's according to a new Bloomberg report which says that unnamed sources have reported that Apple is in talks with those involved in the industry to make the new payment model work. It's one that should see more music have spatial audio versions available, with the report noting that the costs involved with making a Dolby Atmos version of a song are not prohibitive.

Earlier this year, Linux hit its highest market share in decades, and even though that meant only 3% of PCs were rocking the open-source operating system, it was still something to celebrate for Team Penguin. Linux will probably never reach the same height as Microsoft Windows or even Apple's macOS (though it is more popular with PC gamers). Still, the long-standing OS will continue to receive updates and improvements for the foreseeable future.

One of these updates is a long-standing feature from Windows that is finally making its way to Linux, the Blue Screen of Death or BSOD. Windows users know all about the Blue Screen of Death, a full-screen error message that follows a full system crash requiring a complete reboot. With error codes and messages, it also doubles as a troubleshooting tool to figure out what's going on.

The Blue Screen of Death will work similarly in Linux, with the new system-BSOD component (currently listed as "experimental") generating an error message and QR Code when a Linux system crashes.

"Victory over Google!" writes Epic Games' Tim Sweeney after the jury handed down a verdict in favor of Epic in its case against Google, which the company sued for allegedly running its app store and billing service as a monopoly. Epic Games, the creator of the super popular Fortnite (which this is all about), began its legal battle against Apple and Google three years ago - and earlier today, it recorded a landmark victory.

"After four weeks of detailed court testimony, the California jury found against the Google Play monopoly on all counts," Tim Sweeney continues in his post-victory post on X. "The Court's work on remedies will start in January. Thanks for everyone's support and faith! Free Fortnite!"

The ruling was a unanimous yes to the question of Google's monopoly power on the Android platform, app distribution, and billing services. It was also a yes to Google acting in an anti-competitive fashion and, in the process, harming Epic Games. In a post on its website, Epic Games calls the victory "a win for all app developers and consumers around the world."

There are now more social networks out there than ever before and some of them are actually rather good, including Threads. The Meta-owned social network continues to grow with new features being added all the time. Now, the Instagram-linked social network has gained new support for tags but they're very different from the hashtags that you're familiar with on Instagram itself.

Tags have long been used in posts on special networks like Twitter and the aforementioned Instagram as a way for people to link multiple posts together. If you tag a post with #cats, that post will then show up in all searches for that tag, creating something of a saved search scenario. It's great for discoverability, and now Threads has tags of its own.

But where Threads differs from the norm is the way tags actually work. For starters, they don't have anything before them which means that the ugly hashtag has been removed entirely. Instagram's Adam Mosseri detailed how the new feature works, saying that people can choose any word to be a tag, and that tag can have special characters inside it. They can even have spaces, making for an easier reading experience.

If you're a YouTuber who has found themselves on the receiving end of trolling or just plain old hate in the comments you'll know that just turning them off is probably the best way to go. But YouTube has now rolled out another option that it hopes will act as a happy middle ground between letting people comment and blocking them for good.

The new feature, pausing of comments, allows people to pause comments to prevent new ones from being added. Those that are already approved will remain visible, but the addition of new ones will stop until the YouTuber chooses to reenable them. YouTube says that the aim here is to give people more flexibility rather than just turn comments off and lose all of those that were previously there.

The new feature is one that YouTube has been experimenting with since October with TechCrunch reporting that the experiment group reported they felt less overwhelmed when trying to manage the inflow of comments. Pausing them will allow time for the previous comments to be vetted without the backlog constantly being added to, something that can no doubt help with the anxiety created by having to vet the comments in the first place.

A few days ago we saw a report by MacRumors that suggested that Spotify was getting ready to bring in-app purchases back to the iPhone, potentially allowing music fans to sign up for Spotify Premium in-app for the first time in years. However, the streamer now says that isn't the case after all.

The original report by MacRumors claimed that there was an indication in the most recent Spotify beta app that there were references to a new in-app purchase system. Spotify hasn't allowed new subscribers to its Premium subscription to pay via the App Store's in-app purchase system in more than seven years. Nor can people pay for audiobooks in the app, either. It was suggested that might be about to change, but in a statement provided to The Verge, we're told that very much isn't the case after all.

Spotify's global head of corporate and policy communications, Farshad Shadloo, told The Verge that the company has no plans to witch in-app purchases on at the moment, which seems to fly in the face of what MacRumors reported.

While the world continues to discuss whether Apple should open iMessage to make it work with other platforms like WhatsApp, the meta-owned messaging service is pushing on with new features of its own. The app has had new features added over the last few months and now a new one is on the way after it appeared in the latest WhatsApp beta that's now available to testers.

The new feature adds support for filtering chat threads to make it easier to find the one that you're looking for. The WhatsApp beta watchers at WABetaInfo have reported on the change that is now available to users of the latest build that is now in the hands of those running the latest TestFlight beta.

The new WhatsApp feature adds a filter row to give users the chance to filter out chats that they don't want to see. One example is being able to filter unread messages so that they are easier to find in a sea of chat threads. Other options include the ability to filter group chats and more.

The instant messaging platform WhatsApp has announced a new feature that could well help keep voice messages more private after they have been sent. Normally, sending a voice message to someone means that the message is there forever and that the recipient can listen to it whenever they want to. However, a new change allows people to now send the same voice messages but have them automatically disappear immediately after they have been listened to.

Such listen-once voice messages can be used for sending messages that are only valid for a short period of time. WhatsApp's announcement blog post includes the example of reading out your credit card details to a friend, although we're not sure that's something you should be doing all that much anyway. Another example is when planning a surprise, too.

Voice messages of the listen-once variety are clearly marked as such so those who receive them will immediately know what the situation is before they listen to that message. The new voice messages work in much the same way as the existing view once photos and videos that are already supported by WhatsApp.

Meta, the company that makes Facebook Messenger and owns the similar instant-messaging platform WhatsApp, has announced that it finally supports end-to-end encryption as standard with that being the default for all new chats. The move comes after Meta promised to make this change some time ago. Messenger has been around since 2016 and launched against a very different instant messaging backdrop.

By adding end-to-end encryption Facebook Messenger ensures that all messages and calls are protected from snooping eyes before they leave the sending device. They are then unencrypted when they are received at the other end, with nobody between those two points able to decipher what was going on. That also goes for Meta, although that will change should the message be reported for violation of the Facebook Messenger terms.

Meta does say that it might take a little while for all chats to be updated with the new default, but there will be no limitation on the functionality that is available to the people using those chats once end-to-end encryption has been enabled.

In 2020, Meta, which at the time was called Facebook, announced it was going to merge direct-messaging between Instagram and Messenger, in a bid to unify the instant messaging experience. Now, three years later, the company is moving to disconnect it.

The severing of chatting across Instagram and Messenger comes from a new support page update that states cross-app chatting between the two aforementioned apps will no longer be available as of "mid-December 2023".

The support page details what the end of support (EOS) means for users that were taking advantage of the feature; users won't be able to start new conversations or calls with Facebook accounts from Instagram, existing chats will become read-only, Facebook accounts won't be able to view your Activity Status or "seen" in messages, and any existing chats with Facebook accounts will move to your inbox on Facebook or Messenger.

Microsoft has taken to its website to announce that Windows 10 has reached its end of support (EOS) phase, meaning Microsoft will sever support with the operating system.

It was only early last month that data from StatCounter revealed that Windows users are currently migrating to Windows 11 from Windows 10, with earlier operating systems such as Windows 7 and Windows 8 taking up a small percentage of total Windows users. Notably, Windows 10 remains the dominant Operating System with a massive 71.64% market share. More interestingly, Windows 10 market share hasn't changed for the past year, as figures from September 2023 are identical to September 2022.

Microsoft announcing its ending support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, is clearly a move to get users off of old operating systems onto new versions, and with this recent announcement, the move is likely going to work as users will want to be running the latest security updates. Microsoft writes, "Ensure that your organization isn't left running unsupported software that is no longer receiving security updates. Organizations running legacy software are vulnerable to significant security risk and potential compliance violations."

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has announced that Twitch will be shutting down its Korean division over unsustainable operating costs.

The CEO of the world's largest livestreaming company took to a blog post to publish an update on Twitch in Korea, where he explained that the cost for Twitch to operate in Korea is "prohibitively expensive", and despite efforts to reduce operating costs, the company has made little headway on reaching its goal. Clancy gave examples, such as trialing peer-to-peer streaming and restricting video quality to 720p, as attempts at reducing operational costs, and while they did reduce running costs, it simply wasn't enough.

Taiwan publication The Commercial Times reports that Microsoft's Windows 12 will launch in June 2024, and the operating system will feature several AI technologies. With that, Microsoft's next Windows will launch alongside a wave of new AI PCs from companies like Acer, MSI, GIGABYTE, and Quanta.

According to the report, 2024 is shaping up to be "the first year of AI PCs," with dedicated hardware built for generative AI. This means Microsoft is positioning Windows 12 as the first version of the operating system built for the age of AI - so it will be interesting to see what it brings to the table compared to Windows 11.

The publication doesn't say where it got the June 2024 launch info for Windows 11. However, the article does feature quotes from Acer CEO Jason Chen and Quanta's Barry Lam from the recent Taiwan Medical Technology Exhibition.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has announced it removed nearly 5,000 fake accounts that were attempting to influence US politics, and these accounts can be linked back to China.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced that it deleted 4,800 fake accounts that it says were part of a China-based influence campaign whose goal was to post polarizing content ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Meta writes that the influence operation was one of two campaigns detected by Meta during the third quarter of 2023 and that these accounts actively posted in English about US politics and US-China relations, criticizing both sides of the US political spectrum.

Meta explained that these accounts used what appears to be "copy-pasted partisan content from people on X" and that these accounts acquired their information from both liberal and conservative sources. Additionally, these accounts mixed in resharing into their posts by resharing genuine content from politicians and news outlets.

Discord is one of the most popular voice, video, and text communication platforms today, especially among gamers. Thanks to the new Discord Store, the latest feature to arrive is all about customizing your profile and avatar/icon. Available through the desktop client and the web app, users can now make their profile more unique and animated with Avatar Decorations and Profile Effects.

Discord is popular with PC and console gamers, so one way to describe the addition is to say it's like a cosmetic microtransaction storefront for your profile. Granted, this is not inherently bad as most features on Discord are free to use - and there's a definite market for sprucing up your Discord Avatar with festive lights in time for the holiday season.

And for those who currently shell out for the premium Discord Nitro service, there's special member pricing and an exclusive set of cosmetic items "only available for Nitro members to use with an active membership."