Monday, 24 July 2023

The Morning After: Twitter rebrands itself as X and ditches the bird

In a series of tweets last Saturday, Musk said the company’s famous bird logo and name would soon disappear. The company will change from Twitter to “X.” According to Platformer, Musk emailed staff later over the weekend saying the company would become X and his note “was the last email he’ll ever send from a Twitter email address.” And a lot of those changes have now happened.

Twitter’s own account is now all “X” branding, and it’s rolled out quickly elsewhere. Twitter employees are getting an “X” tag to their Twitter handles, next to their blue check, while the “X” logo has already been projected on a building, like a bat signal for self-aggrandizing tech executives and their minions. (I’m still not sure what this tweet (X?) even means.)

X.com was once an online bank co-founded by Musk in 1999. It eventually became PayPal and was bought by eBay. Of course, we already have SpaceX, his recently announced AI venture is called xAI and Twitter’s holding company was rammed to X Corp in April. Musk has also talked about how X would help Twitter become an “everything app.”

Terms that still need to be rebranded: subtweets, retweets, fail whales.

– Mat Smith

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Engadget Podcast: How AI created a 'South Park' episode around us

Plus, we chat with the director and writers of Netflix's ‘They Cloned Tyrone.’

AI can now place us inside South Park episodes – should we be worried? This week, Devindra and Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham chat with Edward Saatchi, the CEO of The Simulation, about his company’s new AI technology that can generate TV episodes, movies and more. We preview a test South Park episode featuring Devindra and discuss if this technology is actually a good thing for creatives. Also, Editor at Large James Trew joins to discuss his piece on AI-powered immortality.

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Redditors troll AI content farm into covering a fake 'WoW' feature

The hugely anticipated Glorbo feature is not a feature.

TMA
Blizzard

Some redditors were very excited about a new World of Warcraft feature called Glorbo. Just one problem: Glorbo isn't real. Their faux enthusiasm for Glorbo caught the attention of a blog named The Portal, which publishes "gaming content powered by Z League" – often tenuously rewritten subreddit scraping, seemingly done by AI. (We hope it’s not a human.)

Redditor u/kaefer_kriegerin noticed The Portal was turning discussions from some gaming subreddits into blog posts. They decided to try to trick the content farm into covering a fake WoW feature. The ruse was a success. The Portal's now-deleted blog post even quoted u/kaefer_kriegerin as stating, "Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot-operated news websites to publish an article about this."

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Our favorite VPN is Express VPN

It’s the best one for gaming and streaming.

The best VPNs stay out of your way, and you'll barely even notice they’re running. But ExpressVPN internet speeds outperformed even our baseline internet speed measures. The service is likely circumventing traffic shaping by the internet service provider or a similar anomaly because every other VPN will hurt internet speed in some way. It was also easy to access geo-blocked content using ExpressVPN, with little-to-no buffering – which is the cheeky reason a lot of us invest in a VPN.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/JhoUdm1

from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/JhoUdm1

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