The TikTok battle may be just beginning. A major European cloud company makes its simplified cooling system open source. Microsoft Xbox sales continue to tank. Meta gets hammered by the European Union for not tacking Russian disinformation and the sheer scale of disinformation and misinformation my blow your mind.
All this and more on the “truth or consequences” edition of Hashtag Trending. I’m your host, Jim Love. Let’s get into it.
The battle over TikTok’s future in the United States is far from over, despite Congress passing a law that could effectively ban the popular video app unless its Chinese owners divest their stake. TikTok is vowing to wage a court fight, while also potentially facing hurdles from Beijing over selling its core technology.
After failing to stop the legislation targeting TikTok, its parent company ByteDance is gearing up for a legal challenge likely centered on claims the law violates its First Amendment rights and those of its 170 million U.S. users.
However, convincing courts to overturn the law on constitutional grounds could prove an uphill battle, as judges often defer to Congress on national security matters. Many anticipate TikTok’s First Amendment arguments will face skepticism, especially since lawmakers say classified briefings revealed concerning intelligence.
If TikTok’s legal challenge fails, ByteDance may be forced to consider selling the app to avoid an outright U.S. ban after a divestment deadline set for next year. But even a sale could face major roadblocks from the Chinese government.
Under Beijing’s export controls, ByteDance would likely need approval to sell TikTok’s recommendation algorithm – the technology that keeps users hooked by curating an infinite feed of videos. Without it, any sale would be far less valuable.
Experts suggest China may block such a lucrative asset transfer to prevent ByteDance’s homegrown success story from falling into U.S. hands – even if the company’s founders stand to profit immensely.
There are also fears that if Beijing does block a deal, it could prompt retaliation from Washington against U.S. companies with major operations in China like Apple and Tesla, escalating tensions into a broader tech Cold War.
The saga is far from over and TikTok’s fate may lie in a prolonged battle that could go on for years.
Sources include: The Verge
In a move aimed at boosting sustainability in the data center industry, French cloud computing company OVHcloud has open sourced the designs for two key components of its liquid cooling systems. The firm says making these tools publicly available can help operators improve energy and water efficiency as they scale up to meet soaring demand.
OVHcloud unveiled the technical specifications and schematics for its Manual Control Valve and 3 Balls Flow Meter at this week’s Open Compute Project Summit in Lisbon. The cloud provider claims these proprietary cooling innovations offer simpler, more cost-effective alternatives to traditional systems.
The Manual Control Valve uses a standard valve design to regulate hydraulic circuits, avoiding the need for complex shutoff valves and filters required by automatic systems. OVHcloud says this analog approach is cheaper, more reliable, and easier to maintain.
Meanwhile, a new design for a flow meter uses the varying sizes of three balls in a tube to generate flow resistance, providing a simple yet precise way to measure water levels. The design relies on basic push-fitting connectors rather than sophisticated metering equipment.
By open sourcing these components, OVHcloud aims to help data center operators reduce capital and operating costs as they deploy liquid cooling to support energy-intensive workloads like AI while meeting sustainability targets.
The cloud firm argues its simplified, maintenance-free designs can lower both energy and water usage compared to traditional cooling setups. It frames the open sourcing as boosting global efforts to make data centers more environmentally friendly amid power shortages.
Analysts say innovative approaches to liquid cooling will be crucial as the industry scales up to handle a surge in AI computing in an eco-friendly manner. OVHcloud says it’s also working on open firmware to improve data center server security and lifecycle management.
As demand for data center capacity intensifies, OVHcloud’s decision showcases how open sourcing novel cooling technologies could help make this expansion more sustainable across the industry.
Sources include: ITPro
Xbox sales have dropped for the second year in a row – this year by 30% largely due to “lower volume of consoles sold” during the start of 2024. If that sounds familiar, it’s because “Xbox hardware revenue decreased 30%” last year as well.
A number of key titles for the Xbox have “jumped ship” and gone to Playstation 5. In fact, Satya Nadella bragged about having more games the top 25 best sellers on PS5 than any other publisher. “We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices,” he said.
Given that Microsoft bought gaming company Activision Blizzard for 68 billion dollars less that 2 years ago, it’s a good thing that at least Microsoft’s games are popular.
But Microsoft is claiming that they haven’t given up on the Xbox and that they have a major new development for their game console that will be “the biggest technical leap” in their hardware history.
And if your once again thinking, “we heard that before…”
Sources include: Kokatu.com
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is set to face a formal investigation by European Union regulators as soon as Monday. The probe stems from concerns that Meta is not doing enough to counter disinformation efforts – particularly from Russia – that could undermine the integrity of upcoming EU elections.
According to two sources, the European Commission will announce the investigation focused on whether Meta’s content moderation practices sufficiently limit the spread of political advertising and foreign disinformation campaigns across its platforms.
Regulators suspect Meta’s systems are failing to properly identify and restrict the dissemination of false or manipulative political content, including efforts by Russia to sow discord ahead of Europe-wide elections in early June.
The probe will assess if Facebook and Instagram’s ad-targeting mechanisms for political content comply with the EU’s new Digital Services Act. This landmark law requires tech platforms to disclose their policies for tackling misinformation and propaganda.
Investigators plan to examine whether Meta has fallen short in mitigating risks related to its planned shutdown of the CrowdTangle tool for monitoring viral content. Concerns around Meta’s data-sharing with fact-checkers and journalists will also reportedly be scrutinized.
If violations are found, Meta could face fines as high as 6% of its global annual revenue under the Digital Services Act’s enforcement provisions.
The investigation comes amid growing fears among EU countries over Russia exploiting social media to spread disinformation aimed at undermining democracy and electoral integrity across the bloc.
In a statement, Meta said it has “a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks” and looks forward to cooperating with the Commission’s probe.
Sources include: ArsTechnica
We got this report in last week, and the scope and scale of it, knocked us for a loop. In light of the last story we dug in a little deeper.
There is a staggering scale of disinformation being spread across major social media platforms each day, at least according to a report from a company called ID Crypt Global who estimate that 1.5 billion fake news posts are created or shared daily by disinformation actors active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok.
The firm analyzed data from the recent Code of Disinformation report, done in Europe across three countries, Spain, Slovakia and Poland. The report was supported by a consortium of all major social media networks, although it appears that X pulled out of the group partway through.
For Crypt Global’s findings you have to assume that the ratios in this three-country sample report can be generalized across the entire social media.
But if that is true, it means there are over 516 million users classified as disinformation actors across the six leading platforms – accounting for 5% of their total 10.5 billion user base.
On average, each of these actors creates or shares 3.9 pieces of disinformation content per day, resulting in the eye-opening 1.5 billion daily fake news posts.
Again, assuming that you can generalize the findings from the three countries surveyed – Facebook would be the largest source – with an estimated 1 billion of these misleading posts created on the site alone every single day by actors making up 7.8% of its user base.
Twitter, or X as it’s now called, had the highest proportion of disinformation actors at 8.7% of all users, translating to over 205 million fake posts spread on that platform daily.
But perhaps most surprisingly, LinkedIn was identified as hosting the most rampant disinformation actors, with each one creating or sharing 6.6 posts per day on average for a total of 97 million daily disinformation posts on the professional networking site.
In contrast, YouTube had the smallest percentage of disinformation actors at just 0.8% of its user base, resulting in a relatively lower 78 million fake news posts being spread there daily.
The analysts note limited data was available on the extent of the issue on TikTok, due to it being a Chinese company.
It would be very interesting to see this study repeated in North America to see if those percentages really do hold true, and getting some transparency on TikTok would also be useful, given how many people claim to be getting their news from social media in general and for more and more younger people, TikTok in particular.
I’ve always said, you can’t solve a problem you can’t measure. And this is a problem.
“Democracy dies in darkness” which is also the motto of the Washington Post but a more appropriate phrase might be that Democracy also dies in disinformation. Just a thought.
Love to hear from you on this topic and if anyone knows of other research in this area, please do let us know.
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