Tech
Bluesky addresses trust and safety concerns around abuse, spam, and more
Social networking startup Bluesky, which is building a decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), offered an update on Wednesday about how it’s approaching various trust and safety concerns on its platform. The company is in various stages of developing and piloting a range of initiatives focused on dealing with bad actors, harassment, spam, fake accounts, video safety, and more.
To address malicious users or those who harass others, Bluesky says it’s developing new tooling that will be able to detect when multiple new accounts are spun up and managed by the same person. This could help to cut down on harassment, where a bad actor creates several different personas to target their victims.
Another new experiment will help to detect “rude” replies and surface them to server moderators. Similar to Mastodon, Bluesky will support a network where self-hosters and other developers can run their own servers that connect with Bluesky’s server and others on the network. This federation capability is still in early access. However, further down the road, server moderators will be able to decide how they want to take action on those who post rude replies. Bluesky, meanwhile, will eventually reduce these replies’ visibility in its app. Repeated rude labels on content will also lead to account-level labels and suspensions, it says.
To cut down on the use of lists to harass others, Bluesky will remove individual users from a list if they block the list’s creator. Similar functionality was also recently rolled out to Starter Packs, which are a type of sharable list that can help new users find people to follow on the platform (check out the TechCrunch Starter Pack).
Bluesky will also scan for lists with abusive names or descriptions to cut down on people’s ability to harass others by adding them to a public list with a toxic or abusive name or description. Those who violate Bluesky’s Community Guidelines will be hidden in the app until the list owner makes changes to comply with Bluesky’s rules. Users who continue to create abusive lists will also have further action taken against them, though the company didn’t offer details, adding that lists are still an area of active discussion and development.
In the months ahead, Bluesky will also shift to handling moderation reports through its app using notifications, instead of relying on email reports.
To fight spam and other fake accounts, Bluesky is launching a pilot that will attempt to automatically detect when an account is fake, scamming, or spamming users. Paired with moderation, the goal is to be able to take action on accounts within “seconds of receiving a report,” the company said.
One of the more interesting developments involves how Bluesky will comply with local laws while still allowing for free speech. It will use geography-specific labels allowing it to hide a piece of content for users in a particular area to comply with the law.
“This allows Bluesky’s moderation service to maintain flexibility in creating a space for free expression, while also ensuring legal compliance so that Bluesky may continue to operate as a service in those geographies,” the company shared in a blog post. “This feature will be introduced on a country-by-country basis, and we will aim to inform users about the source of legal requests whenever legally possible.”
To address potential trust and safety issues with video, which was recently added, the team is adding features like being able to turn off autoplay for videos, making sure video is labeled, and ensuring that videos can be reported. It’s still evaluating what else may need to be added, something that will be prioritized based on user feedback.
When it comes to abuse, the company says that its overall framework is “asking how often something happens vs how harmful it is.” The company focuses on addressing high-harm and high-frequency issues while also “tracking edge cases that could result in serious harm to a few users.” The latter, though only affecting a small number of people, causes enough “continual harm” that Bluesky will take action to prevent the abuse, it claims.
User concerns can be raised via reports, emails, and mentions to the @safety.bsky.app account.
Tech
X makes it more expensive to post links through its API
Social network X has made it more expensive to post links through its API. The change is designed to thwart spam and “vectors of misuse,” the company said. The new pricing increased costs from $0.01 per link to $0.20
Last week, the X developer account posted changes to its API rates. The two most notable hikes were an increase in link posting price and an increase in posting price, which went up from $0.01 to $0.15 per post.
This move might discourage many publications from posting links. For instance, tech news aggregator Techmeme stopped adding links to the original articles in its posts on X this week. Instead, the posts say “Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!”
Earlier this week, Techmeme said that the price increase was one of the reasons to remove links, which it said may return later. The publication also cited a Nieman Lab study, which noted that including links with posts on X resulted in dropped engagement.
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, refuted the study’s results and said that accounts covered in the study were “habitual headline+link posters” that posted no additional context. He also replied to the Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, that there is “no there is no code that is deboosting links.”
He added that Techmeme should post a screenshot of reactions to the news along with the link.
Earlier in the week, Rivera reacted to API price changes and said that this would force news sites to pay hundreds of dollars or post manually.
“I think they’re saying if you have a news site that tweets links, and you don’t tweet them manually, you now have to pay X hundreds of dollars per month?” he argued.
The debate of X reducing the reach of posts with links is not new. A few years ago, the company cut headlines from the link previews on the platform but reverted the change after a few weeks.
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Tech
UK government says 100 countries have spyware that can hack people’s phones
More than half of the world’s governments have access to commercial spyware that can break into computers and phones to steal sensitive information, according to U.K. intelligence.
The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre plans to reveal its findings Wednesday, according to Politico. The report suggests that the barrier to access this types of surveillance technology has fallen, potentially making it easier for foreign governments and hackers to target U.K. citizens, companies, and critical infrastructure with spyware.
It’s also an increase in the number of countries with access to these type of hacking tools, to 100, up from the 80 countries U.K. intelligence estimated in 2023.
Commercial spyware, developed by private companies like NSO Group’s Pegasus and Paragon’s Graphite, often relies on exploiting security flaws in phone and computer software to break into the devices and steal the data within. While governments have claimed that they only use spyware against top criminal and terror suspects, security researchers and human rights defenders have long warned that governments have misused spyware to target their critics and political adversaries, including journalists.
U.K. intelligence now says that the victimology has “expanded” in recent years to include bankers and wealthy businesspeople.
Richard Horne, who runs the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre, said in a speech at the CYBERUK conference in Glasgow that British companies are “failing to grasp the reality of today’s world,” per a pre-released copy of his speech seen by TechCrunch.
Horne said that the majority of nationally significant cyberattacks targeting the United Kingdom has originated from foreign adversarial governments, rather than cybercriminal gangs.
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The U.K., along with several other countries, also continues to experience China-linked intrusions aimed at stealing sensitive data, spying on high-profile individuals, and setting the groundwork for potentially disruptive hacks to stall a Western military response ahead of an anticipated Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The spyware threat facing the U.K. is not just from governments, but also cybercriminals with access to these tools. Earlier this year, a hacking toolkit dubbed DarkSword, containing several exploits capable of hacking into modern iPhones and iPads, leaked online. The tools allowed anyone to set up websites capable of hacking Apple customers who had not yet updated to the most recent version of its mobile software.
The leak of the hacking tools showed — and not for the first time — that even tightly guarded hacking tools developed by and for governments can leak and proliferate out of control, putting potentially millions of people at risk from malicious hacks.
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Tech
OpenAI teams up with Infosys to bring AI tools to more businesses
OpenAI has partnered with Infosys to integrate its artificial intelligence tools, including coding assistant Codex, into the Indian IT giant’s Topaz AI platform.
Infosys said the integration will be used to help its clients modernize software development, automate workflows and deploy AI systems at scale, initially focusing software engineering, legacy modernization, and DevOps.
India’s IT services firms face mounting pressure from a mix of slowing client spending and rapid advances in generative AI. Shares of Infosys have fallen over 22% this year amid a broader sell-off triggered by weak forecasts, investor concerns that AI tools could automate parts of traditional outsourcing work, and macroeconomic turmoil due to the U.S.-Iran war.
The move also reflects a broader trend of AI firms teaming up with global IT services providers to scale adoption in large enterprises. OpenAI has previously partnered with HCLTech, and Infosys has struck a similar deal with Anthropic.
OpenAI gains a distribution channel into large enterprises through Infosys’ global client base and delivery capabilities across more than 60 countries. The companies said the deal is aimed at helping enterprises move from experimentation to large-scale deployment.
Infosys has been ramping up its AI business. The company said earlier this year that AI-related services generated ₹25 billion (about $267 million) in revenue in the December quarter, or roughly 5.5% of its total.
The deal is part of a broader push by OpenAI to expand its enterprise footprint through initiatives such as Codex Labs, announced on Tuesday, which involves engineers working with clients to help deploy its tools. Initial partners include Accenture, Capgemini, CGI, Cognizant, Infosys, PwC and Tata Consultancy Services, as OpenAI aims to build a distribution network to scale adoption of Codex, which now has more than 4 million weekly active users.
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The companies did not disclose financial details of the deal.
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X makes it more expensive to post links through its API
