Meta Pauses Employee Laptop Tracking Program

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. so Hank decides to bring back the one dollar slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copopilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work Now Aanks has a line out the door. Tank makes the pizza, Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M three sixty five coopilot dot com slash work. Welcome to the teech weite H for Tuesday, june twenty third, twenty six. I'm Bammaa. Today Meta launched new smart glasses, Trump signed two quantum computing executive orders. South Korea's Copsi cratered ten percent in a tech sell off Bite Dance debuted CedDance two point five and Meta paused its laptop tracking program. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech I'm getting to the age where I might pull a muscle just by thinking about stretching. 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Meta platforms which helped popularize smmart gllasses through partnerships with Rayban and Oakley is going down market by launching lower price models under its own brand for the first time The social networking giant on Tuesday unveiled what it calls meta Adventurer and Fury glasses, each priced at two hundred and ninety nine dollars. That's eighty dollars less than the second generation Ray Band Meta Wayfarer model announced last year Meta is also introducing a three hundred and ninety nine dollars Starfire model in collaboration with Kylie Jenner. aiming to appeal to a younger, more fashion focused demographic While Meta designed the glasses, its partner, Esilor Lugxotica, the parent company of Rayban and Oakley, will produce them Eslor Luxotica's logo appears alongside Mets on the inside of the temple arms and on the packaging. The in house designs come ahead of Apple's planned smmart glasses debut next year. Similar to Meta, the iPhone maker designed the upcoming glasses itself In an interview, Meta and Eslor Luxotica executives said the new approach came in response to a desire for a more accessible price point We were looking at brands together and trying to figure out what makes sense, said Axel Himmel. We were looking at brands together and trying to figure out what makes sense, said Alex Himmel, who runs Meta's wearables unit. We didn't really find one, so then it was just all right, you've got Ray Ban Meta here, Oakley Meta here, and Meta at the bottom The adventurer glasses look similar to wayfarers with rectangular designs and thin edges. They come in both regular and large sizes. The Fury looks similar to the adventurer but are thicker. The Kylie Jennerglasses, meanwhile, have a slim ov shape, matching an increasingly popular style among women Mata is offering several colors, including tortoise, black and green, as well as transition, polarized and clear lenses The new weare is also compatible with prescription lenses. The hardware and software features are largely in line with Meta's other screenless smart glasses. One exception is a new option to adjust the width between nose pads to three different levels by manually opening and closing the pads on the glasses Met recently rolled out Muse Spark, its new artificial intelligence model, and the functionality is included out of the box with the new models Meta also hinted that it's considering a version of its glasses without a camera focusing on an audio only experience for phone calls, media playback, and interacting with its AI tools. The company wouldn't comment on when the glasses would be released or how they'd be branded, but said there are consumers who mostly use the microphone and audio based features only camera free option could both lower the price point and enable new styles, it said, given the need to include fewer components The larger the market gets, the more we can afford to have something different for more people, Himmel said The company has explored facial recognition tools for its glasses, although the tool isn't in active development, as Meta works out, the privacy and societal implications, according to Himel Ideally, he said Met's gllasses could name people the user knows and who would want to be identified to the wearer, such as family, friends and associates Met's next step, the company said is further expanding into more styles and brands with its partner and eventually diving into augmented reality glasses. It showed off an AR glasses prototype two years ago and could introduce a consumer grade version as early as next year, Bloomberg News has reported and quote By the way, meta executives said dropping Ray band branding from these glasses helped lower the price point. Also, Meta's starfire glasses with Kylie Jenner include a tiny gemstone on the lens, a metal nose pad to prevent absorbing makeup, and an AI version of Kylie's voice. Speaking of AI, quoting the Verge. Speaking of killer use cases, Meta is quadrupling down on AI. The new Ma glasses will all launch with Muse Spark, the first model out of Meta's super intelligence labs. It'll also be arriving in older Rayban and Oakley glasses in the US and Canada via a software update. Supposedly that means more helpful glasses At my hands on, I was told that metaAI would now be less stiff. I'd be able to talk to it more naturally and get smarter responses. The AI now supports fourteen more languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, and Korean Pedestrian turn by turn navigation is also coming to Meta's display list glasses later this month. There will be a new Dynamic photo feature that automatically takes multiple frames and then recommends the best one. I didn't get to try all of these features, but I did get a few live demos. Live Mandarin translations were pretty smooth though. I did experience a smidge of latency, likely due to all the cross talkalk in the demo space Ongoing conversations were a tad smoother, though Meta AI is still a chatty Cathy. Supposedly, the AI will be better at recommendations in a room with a trayful of trinkets. Meta AI in Kylie Jenner's voice responded to a prompt for recommendations by asking for more context about the types of colors, vibes, and mood I was going for. When I responded with a cute purple keychain charm, meta as Kylie suggested, I think about charms shaped as grapes or perhaps a lavender donoughnut, and that those could easily be found on Etsy or Instagram A bit generic, better answers than what I got when I first tested asking MetaAI for recommendations last year. I also asked MetaAI to estimate the caloric content for a plate of canipies Meta as Kylie gave me a rough estimate of two hundred and eighty calories, but admitted it wasn't sure about one prosciutto and fig concoction Ultimately, it was a slightly better version of what I've tried before. I'll have to give it a more thorough test in everyday life, though I remain skeptical about whether MuseSpark or Gemini or any AI model really is smart and convenient enough now to override the public's privacy concerns regarding this tech Nevertheless, these are affordable, well made smart glasses and the widest available array of colors, styles, prescriptions, and fits But as I've said before, Hardware hasn't been Meta's problem for some time now, and quote President Trump has signed two executive orders aimed at speeding the development of advanced quantum computers and mitigating the security threats they present quitting the journal One of the orders the President signed Monday directs federal agencies, including the Energy Department to work with the private sector and academics to deploy a quantum computer powerful enough to conduct scientific research by twenty twenty eight. Such benchmarks are seen as critical to showing that the technology has real world applications Quantum computers are capable of solving problems much faster than traditional supercomputers, making them a growing priority for countries around the world signed a second executive order directing agencies and government security experts to prepare for quantum systems that can evade standard encryption more quickly than previously anticipated. The goal is to bolster security systems across the government and private sector so that advanced quantum hackers can't take down critical infrastructure The orders coincide with billions of dollars in funding for quantum companies being awarded by the Commerce Department and a private sector investment frenzy from companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Google compomanies are betting on what is seen as a promising sector that can complement advances in artificial intelligence Industry executives, including IBM, Chief executive Areverend Krishna and Ruth Parratt, president of Google Parent Alphabet attended Monday's Oval Office event. giants and a swarm of startups are racing to build larger quantum systems with the eventual goal of deploying computers that can consistently outperform traditional ones Shares of many quantum companies have surged in recent months, though skeptics warn that the field has significant hurdles to overcome to fulfill its promise The administration is hoping that the ambitious twenty twenty eight target for a system that can conduct scientific research will serve as a stepping stone for larger systems that can carry out tasks for businesses, a senior White House official said The order focus on boosting quantum activity the energy Department, which conducts extensive quantum research to identify the technical specifications needed to measure that goal. end quote When inspiration strikes, you're usually not sitting at your desk ready to take notes. 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Amazon and Metas declines extended on Tuesday with shares of both companies shedding just zero point seven percent Despite the pressure building in global markets on Tuesday, Tom Holick, CEO of strategy Asset mananagers told CBC Squbox Europe that he wasn't concerned about a looming catastrophe, noting that markets are very fluid right now I don't think we're anywhere near some type of catastrophic failure in the markets. There's too much liquidity out there and the earnings momentum is very strong right now, he said. AI is going to continue to grow earnings for companies in years to come. When you have a capital expenditure in the trillions of dollars, it can throw valuations a little stratospheric For companies like SpaceX or even Anthropic, Who's to say what's going to change the world with some of these companies and what they can do going forward. In a note on Tuesday morning. Red Bush's Dan Ives said the sell off presents an opportunity for investors. Clearly this downturn will cause selling pressure and white knuckles for tech stocks in the U S this morning as investors worry The overheated Copsy sello has a spillover impact on U. S tech stocks, he said, noting that nervousness was being amplified by Mikeron's looming earnings report due on Wednesday IVves manages Webb Bush's AI Revolution ETF with the fund's top holdings including Micron, TSMC, ADM, and NVvidDA Taking a step back, we continue to believe that in this market, we will continue to go through a number of gut check moments in the tech trade as the AI revolution remains in the third inning. This morning is just another one of those moments. he said in Tuesday's note and quote Dance has unveiled SedDance two point five, saying the AI video model can generate up to thirty second clips from up to fifty reference materials, up from just twelve reference materials with C dense two point zero coding the decod Volcano Engine is Bite Dance's cloud business which offers the company's AI models as services for enterprises the new model on The Volcano Engine generates single video clips up to thirty seconds long without any post stitching complete with scene changes and tempo shifts. It can process up to fifty additional inputs at once, reference images, audio, and more, useful for film scenes with multiple characters. Users can also edit generated videos after the fact while keeping the visual style and look intact Meanwhile, SeedDance two point zero now supports Native four K with ten bit color depth. Volcano engine also announced the Bao two point one Pro language model, the CedDream five point zero Pro image model, and the Sed Audio one point zero audio model. According to the company, Dao Bao two point one Pro costs about eighty percent less than Claude Ovus four point six, and quote. Finally, today, Mena says it is pausing its employee tracking program meant for training AI models after internal security issues exposeed sensitive data from employees' laptops Coating wired Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by Wired and three current employees familiar with the issue The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models is believed to include keystrokes, mouse clicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta's US employees Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton initially confirmed to Wired that the company is investigating the security issue as the story was being published, he added MetA is pausing the data collection program indefinitely. We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards, and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees We're pausing it while we investigate, Clayton says The security notice sent out Monday indicated that employee data across forty five thousand hive tables has been exposed. Those tables included employee activities such as full prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data according to documents viewed by Wired Some employees at Meta quickly seized on the security failure, saying in internal forums that it validated concerns they had raised when the company began tracking workers' corporate laptops in April as part of a program known as the Model Cability Initiative Comments about the incident posted on internal forums Monday included questions about how Meta's privacy reviews failed to prevent the breach and whether everyone whose data was potentially exposed will be allowed to attend a meeting going over what went wrong, according to posts seen by Wired. In one internal forum where staffers are known to trade jokes, an employee posted a meme from the office of the character Jim Halpert holding a sign that reads zero day since our last nonsense Sources at Meta, who were not authorized to speak publicly tell wired the incident has now been marked as closed meaneaning it was likely resolved In an internal post responding to employees questions on Monday Sen by Wired, Andrew Bosworth, meta's Chief technology officer said that the tracking program's implementation had fallen short of the standards outlined in its privacy review and that findings from the incident would be shared. Here we had misconfigured ACL's access control lists and we need to understand how that happened. trrack down every data access and understand it, Bosworth wrote. A couple of months ago, Bosworth told employees concerned about potential data leaks that the tracking program is tightly controlled and uses the same protection standards, storage systems and access controls as other sensitive datas setets, according to internal posts seen by Wired. Last month, more than six thousandteen hundred employees at the tech giant signed an internal petition protesting the laptop surveillance effort, warning that collecting this data introduces both security and regulatory risks for Meta, including the potential for breaches and unauthorized disclosure The petitioners also expressed concerns with what they viewed as a lack of safeguards that Ma had put in place. One engineer also wrote a widely shared internal note, saying having their laptop screen scraped for training data without their consent felt like an invasion of privacy and amounted to exploitation, end quote Nothing more for you today, talk to you tomorrow. 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