Facebook Launches New Monetization Program; Darksword iOS Exploit; Judge Orders 1,000 Voice of America Staff Back; Trump Administration Sued over Shutdown of Climate Center

Posted: March 18, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

I have a friend (in real life, not just a Facebook friend) who has really worked things, and has 3 Facebook pages making her a lot of money lately. Now, Facebook has launched a new monetization program to try to woo popular creators from TikTok and YouTube. Techcrunch.com reports that it is called ‘Creator Fast Track.’ The new program is designed to help creators grow on Facebook with guaranteed pay and increased content reach. The social network also shared that it paid creators nearly $3 billion through its monetization programs in 2025, a 35% increase from the previous year and its highest annual total to date. Creators in the program can earn $1,000 per month if they have at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, and $3,000 per month if they have over one million followers on any one of those platforms. No cigar for those with a few hundred followers or even a few thousand….actually, not even coffee money. Oh, well….

Here we go again. At least weekly, bad guys have a new way to hack and steal our info. This time, it’s a new exploit kit for iOS devices and a delivery framework called ‘Darksword.’ According to bleepingcomputer.com, it has been used to steal a wide range of personal information, including data from cryptocurrency wallet apps. Darksword targets iPhones running iOS 18.4 through 18.7, and it appears to be the work of multiple actors…which are suspected to be Russian. Apple has addressed the exploit in their latest release, so if you haven’t already, update your phone to the latest system. 

A federal judge has order the parent agency of Voice of America to reinstate the networks 1042 full time employees by Monday. Npr.org says the court ruled that the Trump administration official…Kari Lake….was ‘arbitrary and capricious’ in the effort to dismantle the news outlet. The Federal judge, Royce Lamberth, ruled that Lake had unlawfully taken on almost all powers of the chief executive of the network’s federal parent, called the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and therefore that her actions since joining as senior adviser to the agency were invalid. He ruled that she failed to take into account Congress’ intentions in setting aside money for the agency and the network or to consider what the implications would be of effectively shutting it down.

A group that overseas star atmospheric research center in the US has sued the Trump administration over plans to shut it down. Arstechnica.com notes that The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, provides a home for interdisciplinary and collaborative research focused on anything atmospheric. Many of the country’s leading academic researchers in the field have spent time working there or have been involved in collaborations that involve NCAR. The suit names all the agencies that contribute to their budget….including the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation. This administration has been dangerously anti-science and anti-medical research. Let’s hope this consortium prevails in court. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now. 

Automatic Leveling Coming to YouTube Music; 3 Big Siri Upgrades in iOS 19; OpenAI o3 Model-Fudging on Benchmark; Nintendo Switch 2 Preorders Start Thursday 

Posted: April 21, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Here’s a feature I can really get behind, and plead for all others to follow suit…consistent volume on songs! YouTube is apparently going to bring automatic audio leveling to YouTube Music. This has been something radio has had for decades. Who wants to keep turning the volume up and down all the time…whether at home or in the car? Arstechnica.com reports that the automatic gain control…or ‘normalizing,’ in more recent computer audio lingo, won’t just make the songs all the same volume throughout…so you can still have the normal soft passages you would expect…but at least the average level between the songs will be consistent. I hope that the folks over at Apple will follow suit! It is ridiculous in 2025 to have to manually go for the volume control so you don’t get your eardrums fried when a new song comes on!

Apple has been known for years to wait in the wings, then come out with hardware that leaps past competitors. That certainly isn’t the case with Siri, which is a poor excuse for an also-ran of an assistant. According to 9to5mac.com, after delaying promised upgrades that should be out now, Apple will roll out improvements in Siri this fall…in iOS 19. What can we look for? For starters, personalization. You might ask ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ It will supposedly scan your texts, calendar, contacts, and email and pull the info, then hit the web and check flight tracker to give you the touchdown time. Another feature will be actual hands-free computing. Up to now, you could set timers, turn things on and off, and so forth…but that’s about it. The upgrade will let you do things across apps. You could tell Siri to add a photo to one of your notes, for example, and it will find and pull the pic, and drop it into the note described, without opening either app. Thirdly, it should get onscreen awareness…you might get a text from a friend with a new address. You can just ask Siri to add it to that person’s contact card. My big complaint about this and all the ‘assistants,’ whether Siri, Google, or Alexa…is that hands-free computing will be annoying in public or on public transit. We already have those nuts who hold their phone in front of them on speaker mode and talk loudly into them. Use your earbuds! Actually, I rather prefer the quiet and privacy typing brings!

We just reported on how Meta had exaggerated their latest AI model…and now along comes OpenAI with their newest o3 model and surprise…there’s a discrepancy between first and third party benchmarks! More fudging, it seems. To me, this seems silly as hell since no regular people outside the world of AI makers and those who test them has any idea about these benchmarks, but here we are. Techcrunch.com says in December, OpenAI claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the competition away — the next-best model managed to answer only around 2% of FrontierMath problems correctly. As it turns out, Epoch AI, the research institute behind FrontierMath, released results of its independent benchmark tests of o3 on Friday. Epoch found that o3 scored around 10%, well below OpenAI’s highest claimed score. That’s a bit more than a rounding error! In OpenAI’s defense the 25% was the ‘upper-bound’ score, and the ‘lower-bound’ score for version o3 was around 10%. This reminds me of the ‘stereo wars’ of the 70’s, when some makers claimed a big number of watts for their rigs…and then it turns out that that was driving only one channel at a time…they were way less powerful when running music through both channels…you know, like the way people actually listen to the things! Do better, AI makers…you don’t need to BS us on how magical your large language model is.

After a delay in both the US and Canada, Nintendo will open preorders for the new Switch 2 on Thursday. The base price is $450, according to engadget.com. This price is unchanged even in the face to the Trump tariffs. If you actually want a game though, it will be $500 for Mario Kart World in a ‘bundle.’ I love how it’s now a bundle…at least on the original Nintendo you got one cartridge game so you could play the damned thing. Nintendo did warn that it may adjust the price of Switch 2 accessories due to ‘market conditions.’ It should still be available June 5th. This was a topic of discussion at a family lunch over the weekend. You might just want to wait until another game or two drops for the Switch 2.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now