Meta
Court rules in favor of a web scraper, Bright Data, which Meta had used and then sued
Meta has lost a claim in its legal battle with an Israeli tech firm Bright Data, which it sued last year for scraping data from Facebook and Instagram via the web. The tech giant, which has a long history of suing data scraping businesses, claimed that Bright Data’s data harvesting was a violation of its …
How Meta built the infrastructure for Threads
On July 5, 2023, Meta launched Threads, the newest product in our family of apps, to an unprecedented success that saw it garner over 100 million sign ups in its first five days. A small, nimble team of engineers built Threads over the course of only five months of technical work. While the app’s production …
These College Dropouts Want to Automate Your Job Away With AI
Updated Oct. 23, 2023 9:12 am ET Listen to article (2 minutes) Govind Gnanakumar was in diapers when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Like the Meta founder, he won’t wait for a university diploma to start his business. The 19-year-old dropped out of the Georgia Institute of Technology in May to focus full time …
Engagement on Instagram’s Threads Has Cratered
Image: rafapress (Shutterstock) Shortly after Meta’s new Twitter clone Threads hits 100 million users, analysts say that the app’s user engagement has precipitously dropped off. Nobody’s Really Watching Reels NBC News reports that data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb indicates that the newly released social media platform from Meta has seen a drop off in …
Threads Becomes Most Rapidly Downloaded App as Twitter Threatens Meta
Two hours after pressing the launch button on Wednesday on Threads, Instagram’s new app for real-time, public conversations, Mark Zuckerberg posted that more than two million people had downloaded his latest creation. That was just the beginning. Another two hours later, five million people had downloaded Threads. By the time Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive …
Meta says its new speech-generating AI tool is too dangerous to release
Meta has unveiled a new AI tool, dubbed ‘Voicebox’, which it claims represents a breakthrough in AI-powered speech generation. However, the company won’t be unleashing it on the public just yet – because doing so could be disastrous. Voicebox is currently able to produce audio clips of speech in six languages (all of which are …
Federal Trade Commission tries to bar Meta from monetizing teens’ data
Comment on this storyComment The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday announced a plan to bar Facebook parent company Meta from monetizing the data of children and teens under the age of 18, citing allegations that the company misled parents about their ability to control their children’s communications in its Messenger Kids app. The agency is …
Do Techno Posers Have the Skills to Pay the Bills?
Sometimes things must get worse before they get better. To completely remodel a kitchen, for instance, you must first demo and gut the old one. These initial steps backward can be demoralizing. But there’s no way around it. And with perseverance and an ample budget, the ultimate result is usually a big improvement. Similarly, remodeling …
Meta Platforms Spent Over $1 Billion On Arista Networking In 2022
The hyperscalers and cloud builders are the toughest customers in the IT sector, demanding the highest performance at the lowest price and an ever-improving ratio between the two. They can be as tough as they want, of course, but unless they want to design their own ASICs and compute, storage, and networking gear, they have …
Meta sues surveillance firm using fake accounts to scrape user data
Meta has filed a legal complaint against a company for allegedly creating tens of thousands of fake Facebook accounts to scrape user data and provide surveillance services for clients. The firm, Voyager Labs, bills itself as “a world leader in advanced AI-based investigation solutions.” What this means in practice is analyzing social media posts en …
