Good morning. It’s a new week, and it’s time to get into the tech news.
1. eSafety registers two new standards
The Australian eSafety Commissioner has registered two new standards for regulating child abuse imagery and terrorist content online.
The new standards will come into force in six months and cover apps, websites, file storage services, AI tools, dating sites, games, and messaging services.
“These standards will be enforceable and require industry to take meaningful steps to prevent their platforms and services from being used to solicit, generate, store and distribute the most abhorrent and harmful online material imaginable, including child sexual abuse,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.
eSafety has also provided greater clarity on end-to-end encrypted services, indicating to companies that they don’t need to break their encryption to comply with laws.
2. ACCC makes the call on mobile terminating access service
The Mobile Terminating Access Service, the service that allows telco customers of one network to call customers of other networks (for example, a customer on the Telstra network calling another on the Optus network), will continue to be regulated in Australia, with the ACCC to reconsider in 2029.
“Our inquiry found that some consumers continue to rely on traditional voice services, such as phone calls via mobile phones and landlines, despite increasing adoption of alternative app-based calling services,” ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey said.
“Given this, the regulation of the mobile terminating access service remains essential to promoting the competitive supply of traditional voice services to consumers.”
3. Yikes
Perplexity AI, an AI company focused on a Google Search alternative, is in hot water, after a Wired investigation revealed that the AI company was crawling websites that explicitly state they don’t want to be crawled. A follow-up article revealed that Perplexity crawled Wired’s story about crawling. Now, per Fast Company, Perplexity’s CEO has some odd answers. “Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it,” Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas said, in reference to the protocol that’s meant to thwart bots, noting that it’s not a legal framework. “We don’t just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well.”
4. Speaking of AI
Reuters reports that ChatGPT maker OpenAI has purchased data analytics company Rockset. The company’s technology will go on to fuel OpenAI’s enterprise products, with hopes that it will turn the GPT into a much more accurate tool for businesses with real-time search and analytics tools.
5. Cheaper Vision Pro in focus
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has the scoop on Apple’s soul-searching in the immersive computing space, reporting that a cheaper version of the Vision Pro, what he dubs the ‘Apple Vision’ for simplicity, is now the focus of the Vision team. That product is hoped to launch at the end of 2025, however, Cupertino is struggling to get the costs of the product down in time. A second-generation Pro model is also in the works, and the company is starting to refocus on an AR ‘glasses’ product.
BONUS ITEM: CPU (Cat Processing Unit).
NO WAY pic.twitter.com/mvJD62SIUE
— Linus Tech Tips (@LinusTech) June 21, 2024
Have a lovely week.
Image: iStock