Australia Bans Social Media For Teens Under 16 – DTH
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oracle.com slash tech headlines. These are the daily tech headlines for Thursday, November 28th, 2024. I'm Rob Dunwood.

Australia has passed into law one of the world's most restrictive social media bans, the Social Media Minimum Age Bill, which was passed by both houses of parliament and had over 77% support from Australians before social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, X, TikTok and others to stop minors under the age of 16 from logging in or face fines of up to $32 million. A trial of methods to enforce the ban will start in January, with the ban expected to take effect in a year.

Following an email last week from the Biden administration informing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it is considering adding as many as 200 Chinese chip companies to a trade blacklist, which would prevent most U.S. suppliers from shipping to them, China responded by stating that it would take, quote, necessary actions, end quote, to protect Chinese firms if the U.S. escalated chip control measures, end quote.

Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Ye Dong said China strongly opposes the U.S. broadening the concept of national security and the abuse of control measures targeting Chinese companies.

Microsoft is being investigated by the FTC over antitrust concerns in its cloud and software licensing business, security services, and AI offerings. The FTC's interest in Microsoft picked up in the wake of several security incidents impacting its products, particularly because Microsoft is a top supplier of software to U.S. government agencies. According to sources familiar with the matter, one focus of the probe is on how Microsoft bundles productivity and security software with its Azure cloud.

In other FTC news, the regulator is investigating complaints about Uber's Uber One subscription program. Customers alleged that the company signed users up for the service without their consent and made it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions. In a statement, an Uber spokesperson said, quote,

The Uber One cancellation process follows both the letter and spirit of the law. Uber One members can easily cancel their membership in the app. In fact, the majority of those cancellations take 20 seconds or less. Xbox president Sarah Bond says new features allowing gamers to play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox app on Android is ready to go. But, quote, due to a temporary administrative stay recently granted by the courts, we are currently unable to launch these features as planned, end quote.

The problem, as Bond puts it, is that Xbox would only be able to launch the features once a court order takes effect that forces sweeping changes for Google's Play Store on Android, like opening it up to competition and ending the requirement for apps to use Google Play billing.

Alibaba's Quint team has released a new AI model, QWQ32B Preview, which is one of the only few models to rival OpenAI's O1 and the first available for download under a permissive license. QWQ32B Preview contains 32.5 billion parameters and can consider prompts of up to approximately 32,000 words in length, and it performs better on certain benchmarks than OpenAI's O1 Preview and O1 Mini.

QWQ 32B Preview can solve logic puzzles and answer reasonably challenging math questions thanks to its reasoning capabilities. But as Alibaba points out in a blog post, the model might switch languages unexpectedly, get stuck in loops, and underperform on tasks that require common sense reasoning.

Google Chat is adding an instant on audio first meeting feature called Huddles to the platform. Huddles are available in direct messages, group conversations, and spaces. And since they are powered by Google Meet, Huddles give users the ability to add a video and share their screen. Users won't have to send a link as recipients will receive a chat chip in the message thread that the sender has started a Huddle. Huddles in the Google Chat website are rolling out over the coming weeks for Google Workspace users.

And finally, Huawei has unveiled its first Android-free mobile OS made entirely in-house. This is part of the company's plan to build a platform entirely free of major U.S. tech sources, both for hardware and software. Many of the features and screens look rather iOS-inspired, like the drop-down menu. There is also a consistency across Huawei's phones, tablets, and foldables. Huawei said the new OS still needs several months of refinement to improve its user experience, but the aim is to install it on all future smartphones.

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