Silicon Valley Tech News Roundup – August 28th

California bans sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 – 8/26

California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued a new rule that will ban the sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. By 2026, 35% of all vehicles sold must be hybrid, electric, or hydrogen-powered. By 2030, the regulation will apply to 68% of vehicle sales.

Liane Rudolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board, stated the regulation would lead to a 50% drop in pollution from cars and light trucks by 2040.

Two years prior, Governor Gavin Newsom asked the agency to create “passenger vehicle and truck regulations requiring increasing volumes of new zero-emission vehicles sold in the state towards the target of 100 percent of in-state sales by 2035.”

With 39 million residents, California is the most populous state in the United States. The state is at the forefront of implementing strict emission standards. Other states (like Massachusetts and New York) are following suit.

Microsoft and ByteDance partner on an AI project – 8/26

Engineers from Microsoft and ByteDance (TikTok parent company) are working on a project called KubeRay, software created to allow companies to more efficiently run AI apps. The principal software engineers from both companies met at the Ray Summit in San Francisco to discuss their progress with developers, machine learning experts, and data scientists.

Ali Kanso (Microsoft principal software engineer) and Jiaxin Shan (ByteDance software engineer) shared the details behind the software. Its purpose is to help power AI apps running on multiple computers (or distributed computing).

Ali Kanso stated: “Jiaxin and I have been working for like a year on an open source project and this is the beauty of a community gathering like this… We’re not in the same company, but we meet every week, we collaborate every week.”

The Microsoft and ByteDance collaboration comes at the time of an increased rivalry between the U. S. and China. Points of contention include AI and intellectual property. Likewise, there are growing concerns about privacy intrusion and how companies and other organizations can use technological advancements for surveillance.

Twitter and Meta remove accounts spreading pro-US propaganda – 8/25

Graphika (a social media analytics firm) and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) published a report which revealed Twitter and Meta partnered with them to remove an online pro-US propaganda campaign. It is the first major operation of this type. The companies banned dozens of accounts that belonged to the campaign in July and August this year.

The identity of the organization, government, or individuals behind the campaign is unknown. However, Twitter identified the countries of origin as United Kingdom and the U.S. Meta said the U.S. is the country of origin for the campaign.

In a statement to the BBC, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) said: “We do not have the necessary information to attribute this activity to a single country or organization… What is clear, is that the activity is meant to further Western interests, including those of the US and allies.”

The researchers said the campaign targeted Central Asia and the Middle East and ran in multiple languages. The campaign ran on social media platforms globally, created fake personas, and tailored the messaging based on the regions. The report states: “We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western (influence operations) on social media to be reviewed and analyzed by open-source researchers to date.”

Instagram claims it never shares users’ precise locations – 8/27

This week Instagram refuted claims location tags can reveal users’ exact location.

The company issued a statement in response to viral posts that claim the “precise location” toggle in the app location settings on Android and iOS devices can be shared with other Instagram users. Several viral posts suggested an Instagram or iOS update was the reason behind it. The setting is automatically enabled for apps permitted to access users’ locations. Other apps (where the precise location is turned off) only use the approximate location.

Instagram claims this is not the case, and the feature does not share the location with other users. Instagram Public Relations team, InstagramComms, tweeted: “To be clear, we don’t share your location with others. Similar to other social media companies, we use precise location for things like location tags and maps features.” Adam Mosseri backed up these claims saying the location services are a device setting rather than an Instagram feature.