Friday’s top tech news: job cuts come for Google

Twitter’s next update should make it less insistent that you use the “For You” algorithmic timeline, according to a tweet from Elon Musk. He says the app will “stop switching you back to recommended tweets,” and remember if you left it on the reverse-chronological “Following” timeline or a pinned list.

Musk’s promises should be taken with a grain of salt, but I hope the company delivers on this one. Until last month, Twitter had a button that let you set a preference on which version of the timeline you wanted to use. That option went away when the company rolled out a UI that let you swipe between the two timelines, with the app defaulting to opening on the algorithmic one.

Elon Musk will never stop posting, no matter who tells him to stop.

That was one of the takeaways from his brief testimony during his securities fraud trial, which took place in a San Francisco courthouse Friday. Lawyers for the plaintiffs peppered Musk with questions about his tweets as they work up to his infamous “funding secured” tweet from 2018 at the center of this case. Musk is being sued by a class of Tesla investors who claim his bumbling attempts to take Tesla private that year cost them millions of dollars.

TikTok has confirmed to Forbes that some of its US employees have the ability to boost videos in order to “introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community.” The statement comes as part of a report about TikTok’s “Heating” button, which Forbes says can be used to put selected videos onto users’ For You pages, helping boost views by sidestepping the algorithm that supposedly drives the TikTok experience.

Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok, told Forbes that increasing views to particular videos isn’t the only reason for heating. TikTok will also “promote some videos to help diversify the content experience” (read: make sure your feed isn’t entirely made up of one or two trends), he said. Favazza also suggests TikTok doesn’t do it that often, claiming only “.002% of videos in For You feeds” are heated. According to an internal document obtained by Forbes, however, heated videos reportedly make up “around 1-2 percent” of “total daily video views.”

Here’s your PSA to remind you that the Humble Bundle Winter Sale has started, knocking up to 90 percent off a variety of titles until February 7th. The sale features discounts on a plethora of AAA and eccentric indie games, but we’ve put together a short list of highlights that we can personally vouch for. Buying a game off the Humble Bundle store allows you to donate a portion of your purchase to the charity of your choice once you’ve set up an account.

The majority of the games on sale are unlocked via your Steam account, but a handful may require an Epic Games Store or Ubisoft Connect account.

Nintendo is planning to increase production of the Switch for the upcoming fiscal year beginning in March, according to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources. The news arrives on the same weekend as the company’s first big release in 2023, Fire Emblem Engage, and ahead of the long-anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which will go on sale in May.

Nintendo reportedly has pinged its suppliers and assembly partners about increasing production without putting a firm number on its expectations. In November, the company had decreased its Switch sales forecast for the current year to 19 million units (down from its initial 21 million projection in May) due to ongoing component shortages, but the sources said the number would be around the 21 million originally projected.

CNET will pause publication of stories generated using artificial intelligence “for now,” the site’s leadership told employees on a staff call Friday.

The call, which lasted under an hour, was held a week after CNET came under fire for its use of AI tools on stories and one day after The Verge reported that AI tools had been in use for months, with little transparency to readers or staff. CNET hadn’t formally announced the use of AI until readers noticed a small disclosure.

If you have a guest over to your house for any amount of time, there’s a fair chance they’ll ask you for the Wi-Fi password, which may begin a dreaded dance of you trying to remember what it is or read out a complicated string of numbers, letters, and symbols.

Of course, you could always buy a Wi-Fi password sign or write it on a sticky note that you can quickly point guests to, but that’s not always the most convenient solution; if your password is long or contains hard-to-read symbols (is that an O or a 0?), it can be a pain to get your friends and family connected.

T-Mobile has revealed the company’s second major breach in less than two years, admitting that a hacker was able to obtain customer data, including names, birth dates, and phone numbers, from 37 million accounts. The telecom giant said in a regulatory filing on Thursday that it currently believes the attacker first retrieved data around November 25th, 2022, through one of its APIs.

T-Mobile says it detected malicious activity on January 5th and that the attacker had access to the exploited API for over a month. The company says it traced the source of the malicious activity and fixed the API exploit within a day of the detection. T-Mobile says the API used by the hacker did not allow access to data that contained any social security numbers, credit card information, government ID numbers, passwords, PINs, or financial information.

I really wanted to like the Polar Ignite 3.

The $329.95 Ignite 3 was one of Polar’s more memorable launch announcements in recent years. With a shiny new OLED display, it looked like a Pixel Watch doppelgänger in photos. It also got new features like multiband GPS and Sleepwise, which helps you visualize when you’ll be at your best during the day — an “alertness forecast,” if you will. I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I had a good experience with the original Ignite watch back in 2019. Sleeker design, better components, new features — on paper, it sounded like a formula for a successful update.

The recent launch of OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT has raised alarms within Google, according to reports from The New York Times. Now, the Times says Google has plans to “demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year” and unveil more than 20 projects powered by artificial intelligence.

As recently as December, we’d heard Google execs were worried that despite investing heavily in AI technology, moving too fast to roll it out could harm the company’s reputation. But things are changing quickly. Earlier this morning, Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance.

Microsoft is copying features from a popular third-party audio tool for Windows. In the latest test build of Windows 11, a new volume mixer can be enabled that looks a lot like EarTrumpet. The new Windows 11 feature provides quick access from the taskbar to switch audio outputs and control individual app volumes.

That’s exactly what EarTrumpet was built for nearly five years ago. The awesome utility has improved audio in Windows for years, and I once called it “the Windows 10 volume control app Microsoft should have created.” How ironic.

Google is cutting approximately 12,000 jobs — the latest technology firm to initiate significant layoffs as inflation rises and global markets brace for a downturn.

Google SEO Sundar Pichai announced the cuts in an email to staff on Friday and a blog post. The job losses constitute around 6 percent of Google’s global workforce, compared to recent layoffs at Microsoft (10,000 jobs or 5 percent of the workforce), Amazon (18,000 jobs / 6 percent), and Meta (11,000 / 13 percent). Earlier this month, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced much smaller cuts at Verily, its health-focused subsidiary, and Intrinsic, a subsidiary developing software for industrial robots.

The era of Netflix password sharing will soon come to a close. Netflix has plans to enforce password-sharing rules “more broadly” toward the end of the first quarter of 2023, the company announced in its earnings report today.

“While our terms of use limit use of Netflix to a household, we recognize this is a change for members who share their account more broadly,” Netflix writes. “As we roll out paid sharing, members in many countries will also have the option to pay extra if they want to share Netflix with people they don’t live with.”