Thursday’s top tech news: copyright and AI are a complicated mix

Twitter Spaces, the company’s social audio rooms, no longer lets you use captions if you’re listening on iOS. Twitter still advertises that you can turn on captions through the three-dot menu in a Space, but on iOS, that option currently isn’t there.

On other platforms, it seems like captions should work but don’t. When listening to a Space on the web, captions don’t show, and while the “CC” closed captions button is present, clicking it on or off doesn’t change anything. On Android, the option to turn on captions is there, but it didn’t work for one Verge staffer.

An investigation into data safety labels on the Google Play Store has allegedly uncovered “serious loopholes” that allow apps like Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook to easily provide false or misleading information regarding how user data is shared. The study, conducted by the Mozilla Foundation, identified 40 of the most globally downloaded Android apps on the Google Play Store and discovered almost 80 percent had discrepancies between their privacy policies and the information listed on Google Play’s data safety section.

Google launched its data privacy section for the Play Store last year, noting that developers had sole responsibility to provide “complete and accurate declarations” for the information collected by their apps by filling out a Google data safety form. Mozilla argues that these self-reported privacy labels may not accurately reflect what user data is actually being collected due to shortcomings in the safety form’s honor-based system, such as having vague definitions for “collection” and “sharing” and failing to require apps to report data shared with “service providers.”

Federal prosecutors hit FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried with four new charges Thursday as part of their criminal case against the former crypto wunderkind.

The new 12-count superseding indictment adds new bank fraud and money laundering counts against Bankman-Fried as well as modified campaign finance charges. In the new document, prosecutors describe how Bankman-Fried and two unnamed defendants conspired to defraud the Federal Elections Commission by using straw donors to “evade contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom” the former CEO had already donated.

Google has announced that the Magic Eraser feature, which tried to automatically remove unwanted parts of a picture and debuted with the Pixel 6, will no longer be exclusive to phones with its custom chips. Starting on Thursday, it’s going to be rolling out to Google One subscribers who use the Google Photos app on Android or iOS as well as “all Pixel users.”

Magic Eraser, as well as the “Camouflage” function that lets you desaturate potentially distracting background objects rather than erasing them from a picture completely, will come with any level of Google One plan. If you have a Pixel, you won’t have to have a plan at all to get it.

Google’s Workspace apps are getting a makeover. Google plans to refresh the design of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides in the coming weeks to more closely align with its Material Design 3 design system, the company announced on Thursday.

If you’re familiar with Gmail’s refreshed look, the new designs take a lot of cues from that. Google appears to be adding a few more darker hues to things like the toolbar and comments to make them stand out from the white page of a document. The “Share” button is also more rounded, a change from the rounded-corner rectangle Google currently uses for the button.

When it comes to browsing entertainment, is there really a big difference between organizing content in different tabs or splitting it into totally separate pages? Google seems to think so. Today, the company is announcing some tweaks to the Google TV interface. “Movies” and “Shows” are being dropped from the main navigation bar at the top and will now be found beneath the row of your favorite streaming apps in the “For You” tab.

In that spot, they’ll be joined by two new sections: Family and Español. Both are pretty self-explanatory. “With content ratings of PG or lower, it’s easy to find something the whole family can watch together,” Google says of the family page. (Kids will still be able to have their own profiles that are limited to age-appropriate programming.)

Podcasts are coming to YouTube Music. The streaming music service plans to add podcasts “in the near future,” YouTube’s head of podcasting, Kai Chuk, told Ariel Shapiro at Hot Pod Summit this morning. The addition will pit YouTube Music even more directly against Spotify, which has looked to podcasts — and big exclusives like Joe Rogan — as a way to retain users and grow its audience.

“If someone wants to watch a podcast, we have a solution,” Chuk said. “If someone wants to listen to a podcast only, we should have a great experience for that as well.”

Outside of tech blogging, my background is mainly film, and my main gig is primarily as a video editor and producer. If you, like me, have spent more than 15 years in front of a computer pulling your hair out trying to fix problems, you’ll probably end up accruing a go-to list of problem-solving programs to install on every computer you use.

Interestingly, these tend to be free, probably because most of the common problems are universal, and that usually means someone has thought of that already and gotten mad enough to fix it. And if someone on GitHub or an obscure video encoding forum has not solved the issue, there’s some great shareware software out there that won’t break the bank.

It’s the 23rd day of the second month of the year 2023. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing. So let’s get to today’s deals.

The 2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD with an included heatsink is selling for a new low price of $159.99 at Amazon and Best Buy on a one-day deal. That beats its previous low by $10, saving you an outright $110 off its full price. While this is a speedy drive for a desktop PC, you can use it to upgrade the storage of your PlayStation 5, especially since it includes the requisite heatsink. If you haven’t opened up your PS5 and given it a storage boost yet, we can’t recommend this SSD enough because it’s very easy to install, and the 667GB of available built-in storage runs out quickly when you install 100GB-plus games.

Say you’re in the US and shopping for a fancy Android phone. You don’t want something over the top or a phone that folds in half, but you do want plenty of bells and whistles. Which one should you buy? In any of the past few years, the answer would have been easy: just get the Samsung S-series phone. This year? It’s a little more complicated.

That’s because Google has produced some worthy competitors that are putting on the pressure. They have the high-end touches that previous Pixel phones lacked, like a high-res display, premium build quality, and a flagship-level chipset — the kind of stuff you can count on getting from an S-series Galaxy phone but for a little less money. The S23 starts at $799, and the S23 Plus starts at $999. Meanwhile, the Google Pixel 7 starts at $599 and the 7 Pro at $899, putting on the pressure indeed.

Netflix is lowering the price of its subscription in over three dozen countries, except for the US, Canada, and the majority of Europe, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. These reductions reportedly only affect specific Netflix tiers but sometimes cut the price of the subscription in half.

Netflix spokesperson Kumiko Hidaka confirmed that the company’s “updating” the pricing of its plans in “certain countries” but didn’t specify which ones. As noted by the Journal, some of the countries expected to receive price cuts include Yemen, Jordan, Libya, Iran, Kenya, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. However, an earlier report from Cord Cutters News indicates that the cuts also apply to Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia, and Slovakia.

YouTube is going to let thousands more creators include multi-language audio tracks with their videos. The company was already testing the feature with a small number of creators, and beginning Thursday, many more will be able to include multi-language dubs with their videos to make them accessible to broader audiences.

If you want to try this feature for yourself, check out this video on MrBeast’s YouTube channel. If you click on the gear icon, you’ll see an option for “audio track,” and if you click that, you’ll see the different language options available. Videos will also default to a user’s preferred language.

Snapchat users will soon have a handful of new tools to make content that includes trending songs or sounds.

First, the company is introducing a sound recommendation system for Lenses, its popular augmented reality (AR) filters. Users will be able to discover which sounds other people are using with the lens they’ve applied and add popular audio to their own photos or videos. The feature is now available to US users and rolling out globally.

The US Copyright Office has reconsidered the copyright protection it granted last fall to Kristina Kashtanova for her comic book Zarya of the Dawn, reports Reuters. It featured pictures created by feeding text prompts to Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generator.

According to this letter (PDF) sent to her lawyer by Robert Kasunic, the associate Register of Copyrights, the US Copyright Office has decided that Kashtanova “is the author of the Work’s text as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements.”

Realme, a subbrand of Chinese phone maker Oppo, might be the first Android OEM to clone Apple’s Dynamic Island, a deleted tweet from a company executive and a leaked animation suggest. It comes at a time when Apple seems like it might prove that Dynamic Island is worth copying, as the mostly ornamental UI fixture is finally getting some real third-party support.

This doesn’t come as a major surprise. As 9to5Google points out, Realme basically told everyone it wanted to clone Dynamic Island back in September. It appears that a feature called the “Mini Capsule” has been in the works since then. A photo in the removed tweet indeed shows a pill-shaped UI element at the top of the screen with Oppo’s SuperVOOC charging logo displayed. The animation, shared by reliable leaker OnLeaks via Smartprix, shows the capsule expanding and collapsing to display charging status information. Cute!