News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Twitter to charge users to secure accounts via text message

After March 20, “only Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to use text messages as their two-factor authentication method,” the company tweeted.

Two-factor authentication, meant to make accounts more secure, requires an account holder to use a second authentication method in addition to a password. Twitter allows 2FA by text message, authentication app and a security key.

The company believes phone-number-based 2FA is being abused by “bad actors,” according to a Wednesday blog post that the company’s tweet linked to.

Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted “Yup” in reply to a user tweet that the company was changing policy “because Telcos Used Bot Accounts to Pump 2FA SMS,” and that the company was losing $60 million a year “on scam SMS.”

The situation in Facebook's parent company Meta is getting quite ugly indeed.

Meta gives 7K workers poor performance reviews as more layoffs loom

The tech company, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, gave some 7,000 employees, or 10% of Meta’s workforce, subpar reviews.
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Employees who score low on the key performance metrics often leave the company, sources told the paper. Zuckerberg will consider another round of layoffs if not enough depart, the people said.

Last November, Meta culled 11,000 jobs — or roughly 13% of its 87,000 global workforce — from its payroll.

The company on Friday also slashed a key bonus metric — part of Zuckerberg’s overall strategy of making 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
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But Meta’s stock fell by more than 70% last year as the company lost billions in its metaverse investment.
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Zuckerberg won praise from investors on Wall Street earlier this month when he pledged to oversee even more cost-cutting and restructuring.

31 new emoji are coming with your iPhone iOS 16.4 upgrade

The company has not announced when the new emoticons will be available to all iOS users, but they are expected to be released in the coming months.

The 31 new emoji all come from Unicode’s September 2022 recommendation list, Emoji 15.0, and include some highly anticipated designs, like the pink heart.

While some alterations may still occur before the public release, the 31 new emoji include: shaking face, pink heart, light blue heart, gray heart, donkey, moose, goose, wing, jellyfish, black bird, hyacinth, pea pod, ginger, folding hand fan, hair pick, flute, maracas, khanda and wireless.

There will also be a rightward pushing hand and a leftward pushing hand in a variety of skin tones.

David Guetta deepfakes Eminem’s voice in new song: ‘Future of music is in AI’

This week, Grammy-winning artist David Guetta claimed the crowd at a Feb. 3 performance “went nuts” when he played a track featuring the voice of Eminem — despite the fact that the 50-year-old rapper never recorded the song.

The French DJ shared his computer-generated Marshall Mathers impression on social media, in which a voice eerily similar to that of the “Not Afraid” rapper’s sings: “This is the future rave sound / I’m getting awesome and underground.”

Guetta, 55, also stated that he won’t release the song commercially, but is “opening a conversation about how AI is going to change the music industry.”

“There’s something I made as a joke, and it worked so good I could not believe it,” Guetta said about the track in a video shared to his social media followers.
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“There’s no doubt — but as a tool,” he clarified. “Nothing is going to replace taste. What defines an artist is, you have a certain taste, you have a certain type of emotion you want to express, and you’re going to use all the modern instruments to do that.”