YouTube brings its trending charts to the YouTube Music app

YouTube has announced that its YouTube Music Charts will now be integrated within the YouTube Music app on users’ home screens, and they will be available through search. Previously, these charts were only parked and viewable at a separate domain.
Charts should be available in the YouTube Music app starting today. All 29 markets YouTube Music is available in will get five charts playlists: three specific to their country and two global lists. Users can then add charts they like to their library so they can stay up to date on trending material.
The charts, updated weekly, have been around for some time and were last revamped in May of this year. They show what’s trending both locally (by country) and overall across the platform in categories like Top Songs and Top Music Videos. The charts not only show the current position of an artist, song, or video, but whether it’s moved up or down in position since the previous chart. Each chart is also packaged into playlists.
The Trending chart is particularly interesting; back in May, YouTube said it was the company’s “first dedicated external signal of the most viewed new music on the platform.” Stephen Bryan, YouTube’s head of label relations claimed in an interview with Rolling Stone that YouTube charts are “more accurate” than Billboard’s charts, with greater representation from Latin and hip-hop acts.

FCC approves new text message rules, giving carriers more power

On a party-line vote, the FCC today approved a controversial measure that gives mobile phone carriers more power over text messages.
The agency’s Republican leadership has pushed for the measure, which would classify text messaging as an information service. The move will give carriers leeway to stop spam texts without fear of breaking the law, Chairman Ajit Pai and his Republican colleagues have argued, and will keep robotexts from taking over phones the way robocalls have.
The classification, Republican commissioners at the agency have argued, will only preserve the status quo. Chairman Pai said ahead of the vote that “the FCC should not make it easier for spammers and scammers to bombard consumers with unwanted texts” and cited support for the move from a group of attorneys general.
But the move has received criticism from consumer advocates, as well as the agency’s lone Democratic commissioner, Jessica Rosenworcel. While the agency’s rules previously left text messaging in a gray area, they’ve argued it should be more stringently regulated as a telecommunications service. By using the information service classification, the agency is giving carriers enormous power to block messages they find controversial.
“This decision does nothing to curb spam, and is not needed to curb spam,” says Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, which has pushed the agency to classify texts as a telecommunications service. “It is simply the latest example of Chairman Pai’s radical agenda that puts companies ahead of consumers.” Public Knowledge has pointed to controversial decisions, like Verizon’s move to block texts from an abortion rights group in 2007, as a reason for the stricter rules.

How to save your Google Allo chats before the app is shut down

Last week, after pausing work on the app several months ago, Google announced its plans to shut down Allo at the end of March. The company says that it’s shifting all of its focus for a consumer messaging app toward Messages, which is used by over 175 million people monthly. Allo, on the other hand, never managed to gain any sort of real traction with consumers — but some people do actually use it. To help prevent those users from losing any conversations, Google is making it easy to export Allo data. An update with the new option is rolling out on Android now. You’ll know it’s the latest update if the app version is 27, as noted by Android Police. Allo for iOS has also been updated with the export tool.
Go to Settings —> Chat. Right at the top, you’ll see two options for exporting Allo data.
Choose “export messages” to preserve your conversations. This will create a CSV file with a log of all your current chats in the Allo app.
Choose “export media” to preserve the photos, videos, and other files contained in your Allo chats. Allo will combine everything into a single ZIP file.
Picking either option will bring up the Android system share sheet, which will let you conveniently transfer either the chat log or media package to any app you have installed that will accept them. Obvious candidates for backup purposes would be Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. But you should also be able to attach them to an email or drop them into any number of services. You can’t just transfer your Allo chats into Google’s Messages app, however.

Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak

Google+ has suffered another data leak, and Google has decided to shut down the consumer version of the social network four months earlier than it originally planned. Google+ will now close to consumers in April, rather than August. Additionally, API access to the network will shut down within the next 90 days.
According to Google, the new vulnerability impacted 52.5 million users, who could have had profile information like their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed to developers, even if their account was set to private. Apps could also access profile data that had been shared with a specific user, but was not shared publicly.
In October, a similar Google+ vulnerability was revealed to have exposed private user data to developers for as long as three years. The bug was first discovered in March, but not publicly disclosed until October, resulting in significant transparency concerns. In response, Google announced plans to shut down the consumer version of Google+, which had long struggled to attract users. This time around, Google says it discovered the leak on its own and it was live for just six days — between November 7th and November 13th.
“With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days,” reads the blog post, penned by David Thacker, Google’s vice president of project management. “In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”

Google is ending Play Service support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Pour one out for Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich: Google announced today that it’s dropping support for Ice Cream Sandwich for future Play Service API releases, meaning updates for apps on the older version of Android will likely be few and far between, via 9to5Google.
Google is instead having developers target API level 16 (for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) as the minimum level of support. And while, in theory, developers can continue to maintain and update a version of their apps specifically for Ice Cream Sandwich users that support API level 14 or 15, it’s unlikely that many will do so.
It’s not the most surprising news: according to Google’s developer dashboard, as of October 26th, only 0.03 percent of Android users were still running Ice Cream Sandwich. Still, 0.03 percent of the nearly 2 billion Android phones in the world works out to a hefty 6 million or so phones and tablets that might be affected — even if its likely that many of them aren’t still in active use.

Microsoft is rebuilding its Edge browser on Chrome and bringing it to the Mac

Microsoft is announcing some significant changes to its Edge browser today. The software giant is beginning to rebuild Microsoft Edge to run on Chromium, the same open-source web rendering engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser. This means Edge will soon be powered by Blink and the V8 JavaScript engines. It’s a big move that means Microsoft is joining the open-source community in a much bigger way for the web.
“Ultimately, we want to make the web-experience better for many different audiences,” explains Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Windows. “People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all web sites, while getting the best-possible battery life and hardware integration on all kinds of Windows devices.”
Microsoft Edge isn’t going away, nor is the brand name. If you already use Edge on Windows, then that won’t change. All you’ll ultimately notice is that websites will render more consistently once Microsoft makes this under-the-hood change.
So why is Microsoft changing its rendering engine? Why now? Edge has fallen massively behind Chrome in terms of market share, and it’s getting to the point where Chrome is the new IE6. Developers are optimizing for Chrome, and Google has also been creating Chrome-only web services because it’s often the first to adopt emerging web technologies. Microsoft has struggled to keep its Edge rendering engine in stride with Chromium.
The Verge understands Microsoft has been considering this move for at least a year, and a lot of the push has been from consumers and businesses who wanted the company to improve web compatibility. Edge has been improving on this front, but even small compatibility issues have caused headaches for users along the way. A move to Chromium will immediately solve these web compatibility issues, and it aligns Edge with Chrome and other browsers that also use Blink.

Google releases Chrome 71 with features to block abusive ads

Google has announced that Chrome 71 has left beta and is publicly rolling out for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as spotted by 9to5Google. The latest version of Google’s browser was in the works over the past few months, touting features to help fight against abusive ad experiences by blocking manipulative ad designs and showing billing warning screens.
With Chrome 71, Chrome will filter experiences on websites that fall under Google’s definition of abusive. These include web experiences that aren’t just limited to ads, such as auto-redirects that happen without any action from a user or trick-to-click experiences like a warning notification that actually leads to an ad or another website’s landing page. Sites that are reported to have abusive experiences will be given a 30-day grace period to clean up their behavior before every ad on the site is blocked.
Google has been expanding the way it tackles bad ad practices for some time. Back in 2017, it announced that Chrome 64 would prevent websites from opening pop-up ads, tabs, and automatic redirects to new pages. Separately, in 2017, Google said it planned to support the guidelines set by Better Ads Standards for what constituted a bad ad, which includes flashing, animated ads and full-screen rollover ads.
Users will have the option to turn Chrome 71’s filtering for abusive experiences on or off, but the likelihood is that most will not opt out. Google hopes that the more users upgrade and use Chrome 71, sites will be subject to better ad practices or risk losing a significant portion of revenue. Additionally, this means that Google, the company with the largest online ad network, is now the same entity making decisions about what ads to block on the most-used browser. Though Google says it anticipates this new policy will only affect a “small number of sites with persistent abusive experiences,” Google Ads is Google’s main source of revenue, which presents a potential conflict.

YouTube’s mobile apps will now autoplay videos on the Home tab by default

YouTube has announced it’s trickling down a feature from its YouTube Premium apps, though it’s not the background playback that everyone really wants. Rolling out now, Autoplay on Home is a new default for YouTube’s Android and iOS apps that will automatically start playing videos you see on your Home tab. Google will allow the option to disable it, or only keep it on when connected to Wi-Fi, but the company appears convinced that Autoplay on Home is a better way to experience and browse YouTube on the move.
Autoplay on Home will certainly help in one respect: inflating view counts. Google’s main goal with this feature is to make videos more digestible in a mobile context, so the company is serving them up as frictionlessly as possible and in a format that doesn’t require sound (muted, with captions on). For creators, this means a greater chance to monetize their stuff — should Google’s algorithms determine it’s attractive enough to propagate to people’s YouTube Home feeds — and for YouTube it means ever higher engagement metrics.
In a video explaining the change, YouTube product manager David Sharon dives a little deeper into the Autoplay on Home implications. Google has worked to reduce the mobile data consumption of autoplayed videos, and it’s also offering three different types of captions: automatic, creator-uploaded, and crowdsourced. Additionally, with the company conscious of how much time creators spend on crafting the perfect thumbnail for every video, the autoplay previews will only start playing after pausing briefly to show off the thumbnail.

Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th

Tumblr will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th in a move that will eradicate porn-related communities on the platform and fundamentally alter how the service is used. The ban includes explicit sexual content and nudity with a few exceptions, the company tells The Verge. The new policy’s announcement comes just days after Tumblr was removed from Apple’s iOS App Store over a child pornography incident, but it extends far beyond that matter alone. “Adult content will no longer be allowed here,” the company flatly stated in a blog post published on Monday.
Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay — so long as sex acts aren’t depicted — and so are breastfeeding and after-birth photos.
After December 17th, any explicit posts will be flagged and deleted by algorithms. For now, Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying them that their content will soon be hidden from view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community.
Users have a chance to appeal Tumblr’s decision in situations where they think there’s been a mistake, and the platform admits there’s a chance that the automated tools it’s using could make errors. It’s a process that could take a while, as a bulk of Tumblr posts feature explicit content. Users who run adult blogs can also export their content before the change takes place in order to save what they have.

Uber said to be negotiating a multibillion-dollar takeover of scooter-sharing startup

Uber, the premier name in ride-hailing apps, wants to be known as the go-to destination for all on-demand transportation needs, and so its latest efforts have naturally gravitated toward growing its share of the booming electric scooter rental business. The company seems to have decided that its best path for acquiring a leadership position in this market is to literally acquire the leaders. The Information reports that Uber has held talks with Bird on a possible “multibillion-dollar” acquisition and, as a fallback, Uber has also been talking to smaller competitor Lime as well.
Uber already owns a minority stake in Lime. The partnership agreed between the two companies this summer brought electric scooters to Uber’s app for the first time.
There’s strong impetus for getting a deal done from both sides, as Uber seeks to lock up the market before it’s fully formed and the budding unicorn startups work to secure the funding to match their hyper-accelerated growth. The Information suggests that Uber is looking to secure a deal with either Bird or Lime before the end of the year, which suggests negotiations are already at an advanced stage.