Software & Apps - Page 43

Meta released Threads under its Instagram subsidiary on Wednesday, and the app has already reached a milestone amount of users.

The news was confirmed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who took to his personal Threads account to announce that Threads reached 100 million sign-ups over the weekend and that the new text-based app, that's a direct competitor to Elon Musk's Twitter, achieved this through "mostly organic demand" as the company hasn't even "turned on many promotions yet".

The same shocked sentiment was echoed by the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, who wrote on his personal Threads account that he's struggling to make sense of the fact that 100 million people have signed up for Threads.

The creator of the account dedicated to tracking the location of Elon Musk's private jet has popped up on Threads, reigniting the public appeal of knowing where Musk is flying to.

Jack Sweeney, the creator of what was the Twitter bot account called ElonJet, has brought the bot back from the dead on Meta's newly launched Threads app. The app created quite a stir when it was available on Twitter, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers and the attention of Elon Musk, who offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account. Sweeney declined the offer, and when Musk bought Twitter, he banned the account.

Musk claimed that his son was followed by a "crazy stalker" due to the actions of the account, and threatened legal action against Sweeney if he continued operating it. Notably, Sweeney has other bot accounts dedicated to tracking private jets of prominent figures, such as Russian oligarchs.

Twitch announced a bunch of new features at its TwitchCon Paris event, and according to the company's blog post, streamers and viewers can expect these features to be implemented sometime later this year.

The company writes in its blog post that it will be bringing Stories to Twitch, which will enable creators to interact with their communities when they are offline. Stories on Twitch will be similar to how Stories work on Instagram and Snapchat, as it will include the use of clips, images, text, and even polls. Creators will have the option of making certain stories only available to subscribers or the public.

Twitch explained that Stories will appear on the Following page within the Twitch app and that all Stories will fall under Twitch's community guidelines policy. "Because Twitch is all about live, interactive channels, it's not our goal for viewers to spend hours in a Clips feed," Twitch said. "Our investment in Clips is to help viewers discover your channel so they join you and your community when you stream."

Meta has released its answer to Twitter, and it's called Threads, a new text-based app that is a direct competitor to Elon Musk's $44 billion Twitter.

Rumors circulated social media platforms in the days leading up to the launch of Threads, and while there was hardly any marketing, if any at all, for Threads, that didn't stop the app from seeing a massive rise in popularity within the first days of it being available to download. Now, reports are indicating, along with statements from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that Threads is on its way to having 100 million users, as it's already reached 70 million within its first 5 days of being available.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has continued firing shots off at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg since the company debuted the Threads app, which has earned the title of "Twitter-killer".

While it remains to be seen if Threads will be the complete demise of Twitter, the owners of both apps are continuing their public back and forth on their respective apps, with Musk throwing the majority of the shots on his personal Twitter account. The most recently fired shots were only a few hours ago at the time of writing, with Muck responding to a screenshot of a Threads post from Wendy's that said, "Hey @zuck, you should go to space just to really make him mad lol". Zuckerberg replied with a crying laughing emoji.

The screenshot was then shared with Musk, who responded with, "Zuck is a cuck", and then followed up by adding, "I propose a literal dick measuring contest". At first, I thought it was the Elon Musk parody account that was posting these replies, which recently went viral for seemingly pulling the wool over millions of eyeballs. However, it's not the parody account, it's the real Musk, and he just called Meta's CEO a "cuck", or a weak servile man whose wife is unfaithful.

A fake account of Elon Musk has seemingly pulled the wool over millions of people's eyes as a post claiming Mark Zuckerberg is a "lizard boy" has gone viral.

An Elon Musk parody account has put out a tweet that has gained more than 30 million views, more than half a million likes, and even the attention of the real Elon Musk. The Musk parody account posted a tweet that said, "I spent $44 billion for this app, and now Lizard boy just decided to hit copy and paste. It's personal now. See you in the cage, Zuck."

It seems that despite the word 'parody' in the Twitter account's name, many people were fooled by the post, even to the point where the real Elon Musk jumped in and wrote, "So many people think this account is me". Furthermore, users have voiced some concerns within the thread about having parody accounts on Twitter at all, even if it's clearly displayed within the Twitter account's name.

Many subreddits are still continuing to protest the recent changes Reddit made to its API policy, and now the platform has issued a final warning to subreddits that choose to stand against the changes.

Reddit changed its policy around its API which forces third-party developers to pay the platform to use Reddit's data. These changes came after Reddit realized that its API was being used to train artificial intelligence tools that could be potentially very lucrative. Reddit didn't want these AI tools to freely get its data, but because of these changes, third-party developers, such as the popular Apollo app, now need to pay Reddit a substantial fee for access to its API.

Many of these third-party Reddit apps/tools are unable to afford to pay Reddit, resulting in them having to close down or face a legal battle. In protest of these changes, thousands of subreddits went dark, which prompted Reddit to issue a stark warning to subreddit moderators, saying if they don't reopen the subreddit, the moderators will be replaced with new ones. This warning resulted in many subreddits conceding to Reddit's demands, but it didn't stop the protesting.

The launch of Meta's new text-based app Threads has certainly shaken up the social media world as millions of users are flocking to the new app.

For those that don't know, Threads is Meta's Twitter competitor, and following its launch on Wednesday, large swaths of early adopters have already begun calling it the "Twitter killer". Notably, Twitter owner Elon Musk doesn't seem to be overly thrilled about the launch as Twitter lawyers, or more specifically, Alex Spiro, Musk's lawyer, has sent a heated letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that Threads was built unlawfully with confidential Twitter information and former Twitter employees.

Musk has stopped his hard-hitting approach to Meta's newest app as the Tesla CEO has recently taken to Twitter to voice his opinion about the app. The Twitter owner says that Threads is just Instagram without the pictures and that the main reason people use Instagram in the first place is because of "thirst pics". Musk continued by writing that Threads "makes no sense" since it's Instagram without images.

Meta's release of Threads has certainly caught the attention of millions of people, as the app has seen more than 30 million users already create an account.

However, many of those users are reporting the app's lackluster features in comparison to the app's direct competitor - Twitter. Many of the features that users are requesting are already staple features of Twitter, such as the Following tab, Search, and messaging capabilities.

At the forefront of requests is the Following tab, as many users are reporting they don't want to exclusively see content provided by the Threads algorithm, which presents content to users based on what it thinks that users would like.

More than 30 million people have already downloaded and tried Threads, Meta's new text-based app that's a direct competitor to Elon Musk's Twitter.

However, not everyone is going to enjoy Threads, especially if Twitter is already not quite their cup of tea. After trying out Meta's new app for a while and realizing they don't want to use it, a user may feel the need to delete their newly created account, a standard practice for many individuals. Unfortunately, users that have carried out this process have reported their Instagram account also being deleted since Threads is fully integrated with Meta's Instagram.

Meta has acknowledged this problem, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has taken to his Threads account and announced that Meta staff are currently looking into creating a way users can delete their Threads account without also deleting their Instagram account. So, why is this happening? According to Mosseri, "Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account", with the Instagram head going on to remind users that they can deactivate their Threads account which hides their profile and post.

Over the weekend, Twitter was slapped with some changes that limited the number of tweets non-Twitter Blue accounts could see.

Twitter has taken to its Twitter Business blog to explain the mentality behind the limitations and why the company was unable to notify the public ahead of them being rolled out. According to Twitter, the company decided to limit the number of tweets an account could see to stop bad actors from scraping public data that is then used to train artificial intelligence models. Additionally, Twitter writes that the limitations were to stop people and their conversations from being manipulated in various ways.

Furthermore, Twitter writes that these limitations only affect a small number of users and that once the work behind the scenes is completed, the company will issue an update. Notably, many users pointed out that tweet limitations per account would result in Twitter losing money as advertisements would reach fewer eyeballs. However, Twitter writes in its blog post that these limitations have had a minimal effect on advertising.

Many subreddits are still protesting the recent API changes made by Reddit, and some of these subreddits are getting creative in how they are making themselves heard.

For those that don't know, Reddit recently announced it was changing its rules around its API, which is used by many third-party developers to create new apps and tools to improve the overall Reddit experience.

Reddit's API was originally free, but the company changed its tune after it realized people were using Reddit's data to train artificial intelligence systems that could be potentially extremely lucrative. Reddit changed its API rules to charge third-party developers access to its API, forcing many third-party developers to close down their tools and services.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has commented on the recent unveiling of Threads, an Instagram app, created by Meta to compete directly with Twitter.

According to a new listing on the App Store and the Google Play Store, Meta is preparing to launch its answer to Twitter on July 6. The new app, which will essentially operate like Twitter in how people interact with each other, is called Threads, an Instagram app, and according to its listing, it will come with full integration with Instagram as users can sign into the new app with their Instagram account and migrate their followers.

Twitter owner Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have highlighted an aspect of Threads that many people will have a problem with, users that download Threads will surrender a lot of privacy rights as the app collects a lot of personal data. For example, the Threads listing states that the following data may be collected and linked to the user identify: health and fitness, financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, usage data, diagnostics, purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers, sensitive info and more.

Twitter's competition has seemingly gained a massive boost following Elon Musk's changes that were rolled out over the weekend.

The Twitter owner announced on his personal account that Twitter developers are combating "extreme levels of data scraping" and that temporary limitations will be put on each account for the number of tweets an individual account can view. These new limitations were specifically for accounts that weren't signed up to Twitter Blue, Twitter's premium subscription program that enables several new features and adds a verification checkmark. Accounts were limited to 600 tweets per day.

These changes caused a massive influx, or perhaps outflux, of Twitter users rushing to competing apps such Spill, or Twitter found Jack Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Reports indicate that Spill was the top app over the weekend, with more than 100,000 new accounts created and trending top on the App Store's social networking for the weekend and third overall. Bluesky is invite-only, and despite this limitation, users jumped from 184,000 on Friday to 238,000 on Saturday.

Windows 11 will get even tighter security in the future, according to recent comments from a Microsoft executive.

As you're likely aware, Windows 11 took a tougher line with security than Windows 10, focusing on security from the 'ground up' and notably bringing in the requirement for TPM (that means some PCs fail to qualify for the upgrade to the newer OS).

Microsoft intends to strengthen the defenses of future versions of Windows, though, as David Weston, vice president of Enterprise and OS Security at the company, made clear.

Microsoft has been busy fixing a couple of problems with File Explorer in Windows 11, so it'll run more smoothly in general, and not eat CPU resources in the case of one of the bugs that's been fixed with a freshly released preview update.

This is the optional update for June, KB5027303, and as Windows Latest reports, it resolves an issue where high CPU usage could be caused in a particular scenario with File Explorer.

That spiked processor usage is encountered when using the 'View effective access' button (in the Advanced Security Settings dialog).

The ongoing battle between Microsoft and the FTC over the company's planned $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard has been making headlines for a while now, with several Xbox, gaming, and even PlayStation revelations as the case is being heard before a judge. Company emails, testimonies, and even internal-only plans are surfacing - one being Windows related.

According to an internal Microsoft document outlining the company's immediate and long-term plans, it's planning to shift Windows to become a cloud-based operating system that can stream to any device. Similar to the current Windows 365 service exclusive to Microsoft's commercial customers, except for all Windows users with an eye towards Chromebook-like devices.

The information comes from a June 2022 presentation slide about the state of the company's business under the heading "Move Windows 11 increasingly to the Cloud" as a long-term opportunity. It states that the cloud and client will "enable improved AI services and full roaming of people's digital experience."

In a development you can file under 'pointless but hilarious,' a software developer has made their own version of ChatGPT for an extremely old version of Windows.

In fact, as The Register spotted, DialupDotNet made a ChatGPT client for Windows 3.1 - called WinGPT, and written in C - which is very much in keeping with that period in computing history (the early nineties).

Ask WinGPT what's the easiest way to share photos with friends, for example, and the 'chatbot' will happily inform you that the best course of action is to give them the (physical) photos, or post them (on a floppy disk), or put the pics in a scrapbook.

DuckDuckGo's browser, which is designed to offer tight levels of privacy when scooting about the web, is now out for Windows.

The browser has previously been on the Mac platform (and for some time - the best part of a year), so its arrival on Windows will see it reach a much larger audience.

This is the public beta release of the Windows flavor of DuckDuckGo's browser, and it's available to Windows 10 or Windows 11 users (the requirement is to be running at least Windows 10 May 2020 Update, although that version is now out of support, we should point out).

Remember Clippy? Of course you do - if you were around in the 90s anyway, when the iconic paperclip was unleashed as Microsoft's assistant for Office. But the helper wasn't created on a Windows 95 PC, as you might imagine.

No siree Bob, as PC Gamer spotted, a YouTube video from Great Big Story, in which Clippy creator Kevan Atteberry is interviewed, reveals that the character was first conceived on a Mac.

Atteberry (now a children's book author and illustrator) actually worked on Microsoft Bob (another high-profile flop) before being asked to come up with an assistant for Microsoft Office.