Twitter Misses Ad Revenue, User Growth Estimates

Twitter reported weaker-than-expected quarterly advertising revenue and user growth on Thursday and forecast revenue short of Wall Street targets, indicating that its turnaround plan has yet to bear fruit. Reuters reports: Still, the social networking site said it made “meaningful progress” toward its goal of reaching 315 million users and $7.5 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2023, and said user growth should accelerate in the United States and internationally this year. Shares of the San Francisco-based company rose more than 8% after the results, but pared those gains in morning trading.

Monetizable daily active users, or users who see ads, grew 13% to 217 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, missing consensus estimates of 218.5 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. That was up from 211 million users in the previous quarter. […] Advertising revenue for the fourth quarter grew 22% year over year to $1.41 billion, missing analysts’ estimates of $1.43 billion. Twitter gained 6 million users during the quarter, but will need to add over 12 million each quarter over the next two years to hit its target of 315 million people by the end of 2023, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, calling it “an incredibly lofty goal.”

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TikTok Shares Your Data More Than Any Other Social Media App, Study Says

According to a recent study published by mobile marketing company URL Genius, YouTube and TikTok track users’ personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data — “and from there, it’s hard to say what happens with it,” reports CNBC. From the report: With third-party trackers, it’s essentially impossible to know who’s tracking your data or what information they’re collecting, from which posts you interact with — and how long you spend on each one — to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app. As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.

To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple’s iOS to count how many different domains track a user’s activity across 10 different social media apps — YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp — over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account. YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study’s average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.

Ten of YouTube’s trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity. For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn’t opt into allowing tracking in each app’s settings, according to the study. “Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used,” the report’s authors wrote.

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A Geomagnetic Storm May Have Effectively Destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink Satellites

Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink just got dealt an expensive blow — the company’s currently estimating that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched on February 3rd will be destroyed because of a geomagnetic storm. The Verge reports: The storm caused “up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches,” keeping the deployed satellites from reaching their proper orbit around the Earth. And while Starlink tried to fly them “edge-on (like a sheet of paper)” to reduce that drag, it now looks like as many as 40 of them will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere instead of reaching their destinations. SpaceX recently crossed the 2,000 satellite launch milestone, and has plans to launch 12,000 if not a great many more — so losing 40 of them might not be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Still, that’s the vast majority of an entire Falcon 9 rocket’s Starlink launch capacity burning up in the atmosphere.

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Nvidia Is Now Worth More Than Meta

Nvidia is now a larger company than social media giant Meta. PC Gamer reports: In a meteoric turn of events, Nvidia has surged to become the 7th largest company in the US, despite being nowhere close only a few years ago, and helped along by Meta’s recent share price collapse. Meta’s fall from stock market grace this past week saw 30% of its share value wiped out, leaving it with a total value in shares, or market cap, of just $615.70B (at time of writing). That’s clearly still a lot of money, but it’s notably less money than it was worth at the beginning of last week — around $260B less.

Compare that to Nvidia’s market cap of $657.06B, and the green team is out on top. Perhaps not for long, but we’ll see. That’s still a little shy of Berkshire Hathaway in 6th place at over $720B, but it’s markedly higher up than Nvidia was only a few years ago, when its share value was a small fraction of what it is today. […] Nvidia officially terminated its attempt to buy Arm, the UK-based chip designer, for $40B, and that did see some value wiped off its share price in the following days. Though clearly that dark cloud hasn’t stuck around Nvidia’s Santa Clara HQ, as it’s now back up to around $260. That’s over 40% up on its lowest point this year, and just under 22% down on its all-time high of $334.

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Every M1 Mac Is Due For a 2022 Refresh With Faster M2 Chip, New Designs

According to tech reporter and Apple leaker Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to launch four M2 Macs throughout 2022. MacWorld reports: The first models will likely arrive later in the year, with the redesigned MacBook Air leading the way, followed by a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and entry-level Mac mini. A DigiTimes report on Tuesday said the 13-inch MacBook Pro may launch at Apple’s spring event to usher in the new chip. Like 2021, Apple will be releasing Macs with several different chips in 2022. The M2 will be a successor to the M1, likely with the same 8-core design (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), and the M1 Pro and M1 Max will make their way into more high-end Macs. The first of those, the 27-inch iMac, could arrive at Apple’s spring event, with a Mac mini coming later in the year. […] There’s also a new Mac Pro due in 2022 as the culmination of the Apple silicon transition. That would mean every Mac line is due for a refresh this year and nearly every model, with only the recently released 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro escaping without a refresh.

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Douglas Trumbull, VFX Whiz For ‘Blade Runner’, ‘2001’ and Others, Dies At 79

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father’s death followed a “two-year battle” with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke. Engadget reports: Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film’s Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick’s high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull’s ad hoc technique “was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do,” he said during a lecture at TIFF. Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President’s Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. […] He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today’s film industry.

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ExpressVPN Offering $100,000 To First Person Who Hacks Its Servers

ExpressVPN has updated its bug bounty program to make it more inviting to ethical hackers, now offering a one-time $100,000 bug bounty to whoever can compromise its systems. Bleeping Computer reports: Today, ExpressVPN announced that they are now offering a $100,000 bug bounty for critical vulnerabilities in their in-house technology, TrustedServer. “This is the highest single bounty offered on the Bugcrowd platform and 10 times higher than the top reward previously offered by ExpressVPN,” the company shared in an email to BleepingComputer. The new $100,000 one-time bounty is offered with the following conditions:

– The first person to submit a valid vulnerability, granting unauthorized access or exposing customer data, will receive the $100,000 bounty. This one-time bonus is valid until the prize has been claimed.
– The one-time $100,000 bounty is only eligible for vulnerabilities in ExpressVPN’s VPN Server.
– Activities should remain in scope to the TrustedServer platform. If unsure that your testing is considered in-scope, please reach out to support@bugcrowd.com to confirm first.

ExpressVPN also invites security researchers to uncover possible ways to leak the actual IP address of clients and monitor user traffic. The bug bounty program is run through BugCrowd, which offers a safe harbor for researchers who attempt to breach ExpressVPN’s servers as part of the program.

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Meta Introduces ‘Personal Boundary’ Feature To VR Worlds

Meta has introduced a new “personal boundary” feature within its VR social spaces, starting with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. Hypebeast reports: By enacting a personal boundary, a user will by default have a nearly 4-foot (1.2 m) distance between their avatar and others. Via an invisible barrier, the system will halt the forward movement of other avatars as they reach the boundary. Meta says that the feature will make it easier for users to avoid unwanted interactions such as harassment.

Users can still walk past other avatars with personal boundaries enabled and can even give them a high-five or fist bump. The feature will be rolled out as always-on, by default, which Meta says will “help to set behavioral norms” in the VR space. In the future, the company will consider adding new controls, such as allowing users to customize the size of their personal boundaries. In a statement to Ars Technica, a Meta spokesperson said: “Personal Boundary builds upon our existing harassment measures that were already in place – for example, where an avatar’s hands would disappear if they encroached upon someone’s personal space. When we launched Horizon Worlds as an invite-only beta in 2020 we knew this was just the beginning and over time we would be iterating and improving based on community feedback. We’re constantly shipping new features based on people’s feedback, including this one.”

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Nissan Is Ending Engine Development, Except For US-Bound Vehicles

Nissan is pulling the plug on its internal combustion engine development, except for the United States. Ars Technica reports: According to Nikkei Asia, the Japanese automaker has looked at the likely next set of European emissions rules and has decided it would be too expensive to design a new generation of engines that comply. Nissan is also not planning on any new internal combustion engines for Japan or China, although it will apparently keep refining existing engines and continue to work on hybrid powertrains. However, this new policy isn’t a global one — it doesn’t apply to the US. That’s because here, the automaker expects continuing demand for internal combustion engines, particularly in pickup trucks. If Nikkei Asia’s reporting is correct, Nissan is just making explicit the fact that electrification of light passenger vehicles is going to be much more rapid in regions where governments create strong policy incentives.

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Next-Generation Spinal Implants Help People With Severe Paralysis Walk, Cycle, and Swim

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Three men paralyzed in motorcycle accidents have become the first success stories for a new spinal stimulation device that could enable faster and easier recoveries than its predecessors. The men, who had no sensation or control over their legs, were able to take supported steps within 1 day of turning on the electrical stimulation, and could stroll outside with a walker after a few months, researchers report today. The nerve-stimulating device doesn’t cure spinal cord injury, and it likely won’t eliminate wheelchair use, but it raises hopes that the assistive technology is practical enough for widespread use.

For now, sending commands to the device is cumbersome. Users must select their desired movement on a tablet, which sends Bluetooth commands to a transmitter worn around the waist. That device must be positioned next to a ‘pulse generator’ implanted in the abdomen, which then activates electrodes along the spine. Setting up to use the stimulation takes 5 to 10 minutes. But the next generation of devices should allow users to activate the pulse generator by giving voice commands to a smartwatch. The company behind the technology plans to test this newer mobility system in a multisite clinical trial of 70 to 100 participants that the team hopes will lead to U.S. regulatory approval. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Nature Medicine.

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