Tea

In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

Edit: I changed the link to the official source.

Governments frequently disagree over the names of places. Here’s how mapping apps have dealt with various feuds.

Mozilla has just deleted the following:

“Does Firefox sell your personal data?”

“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "

Source: Lundke journal.

A sustained campaign by U.S. authorities has led to the seizure of a growing number of pirate sports streaming domains. The IPR Center is now listed as the owner of dozens of .DEV domains, which were signed over as part of the seizure operation. Previously, close to a hundred .APP domains linked to piracy suffered the same fate.

We’re releasing a research preview of GPT‑4.5—our largest and best model for chat yet. GPT‑4.5 is a step forward in scaling up pre-training and post-training. By scaling unsupervised learning, GPT‑4.5 improves its ability to recognize patterns, draw connections, and generate creative insights without reasoning.

Today we’re launching Octave (Omni-capable text and voice engine), the first LLM for text-to-speech. Unlike conventional TTS that merely “reads” words, Octave is a speech-language model that understands what words mean in context, unlocking a new level of expressiveness and nuance—and new AI voice capabilities. It acts out characters, generates voices from prompts, and takes instructions to modify the emotion and style of a given utterance.

We are excited to announce Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini, the newest models in Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models (SLMs). These models are designed to empower developers with advanced AI capabilities. Phi-4-multimodal, with its ability to process speech, vision, and text simultaneously, opens new possibilities for creating innovative and context-aware applications. Phi-4-mini, on the other hand, excels in text-based tasks, providing high accuracy and scalability in a compact form. Now available in Azure AI Foundry, HuggingFace, and the NVIDIA API Catalog where developers can explore the full potential of Phi-4-multimodal on the NVIDIA API Catalog, enabling them to experiment and innovate with ease.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Ocelot, a new quantum computing chip that can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, compared to current approaches. Developed by the team at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, Ocelot represents a breakthrough in the pursuit to build fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving problems of commercial and scientific importance that are beyond the reach of today’s conventional computers.

This is very interesting:

After pulling 250,000 mentions of 30 different search engines from 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” /pol/ board, we identified 1,218 comments that both mentioned at least three search engines and recommended one or more search engines. Comments meeting these criteria appeared an average of 15 times per month between January 2018 and July 2024. Figure 1 displays the monthly mentions of each search engine in the 1,218 /pol/ comments in this same time period. We have noted that spikes in comparisons occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and during the vaccine rollout in the spring of 2021. Much of the 2020 spike was driven by a thread titled “The Great Jewtube Exodus,” which was reposted 45 times between March 7 and March 23, 2020.7 In each reposting, the author encouraged others to use Yandex, Bing, Startpage, or Brave Search instead of Google. These threads repeatedly resulted in conversations about search engine quality in the comments.

It may seem like AI chatbots are taking over every digital application, whether we like it or not. You might have noticed more AI note-taking bots in online conferencing platforms, some of which offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Then Apple Intelligence plans were announced, promising application redesigns to offer AI features across its phone and laptop operating systems. The latest changes have come from Meta AI’s integration in WhatsApp, replete with “bots nobody wants.”

Any time new features are added to an E2EE messaging app, it raises concerns about privacy and security. So, what concerns are raised by the addition of AI bots? How can we evaluate those concerns? As AI becomes more embedded into encrypted services, is it possible to resolve the tension between the privacy users expect from E2EE and the data access needed for AI functionality? With our colleagues at Cornell and NYU, we set out to answer these questions.

We uncovered several facets of this question from both a technical and legal perspective and published a paper laying practical recommendations for E2EE messaging platforms and regulators. It’s also important that we outline the practical solutions and recommendations for the public. You can read the full preprint paper here.

In short:

Meta has removed a page that published two dozen sexually graphic ads that were able to circumvent the platform's auto-review process.

An ABC NEWS Verify analysis of the ads has linked them to a dubious store that is hawking erectile dysfunction supplements and is filled with deceptive practices.

What's next?

The eSafety Commissioner's office asked the social media industry to include proposed safety measures against pornographic materials in draft codes to the commissioner by February 28.