Roblox, valued last month at $29.5 billion, told prospective investors it is trying to lure older users onto its gaming, concerts and educational platform. Chief executive David Baszucki said the company is counting on older adults not just to join the platform but to buy its stock when it goes public next month. The Apple and Google application has been a top earner during the pandemic, with 2020 revenue jumping 82 percent to $923.9 million and number of hours spent on the platform more than doubling to 30.6 billion. Read more

The SolarWinds hack invaded at least nine U.S. government agencies and 100+ corporations. Now, Microsoft is at odds with Dell Technologies and IBM on the best way to secure data. Microsoft president Brad Smith stated that “cloud migration is critical to improving security maturity,” but the other two companies opine that a hybrid cloud and on-premise data storage is preferable. Smith stated that all the breached accounts Microsoft identified involved on-premise systems and that a hybrid system is more vulnerable to attacks. Read more

Oakland, Portland, San Francisco and Minneapolis have banned police use of facial recognition, mainly due to its inherent racial bias. Massachusetts is now the first U.S. state to legislate its use. The law, which goes into effect in July, has found a middle ground, both allowing law enforcement to use the facial recognition technology to catch criminals and building in protections intended to prevent false arrests. With the new law, police must get a judge’s permission to run a facial recognition search. Read more

OpenAI’s natural language processing (NLP) model GPT-3 offers 175 billion parameters, compared with its predecessor, GPT-2’s mere 1.5 billion parameters. The result of GPT-3’s immense size has enabled it to generate human-like text based on only a few examples of a task. Now, many users have gained access to the API, and the result has been some interesting use cases and applications. But the ecosystem is still nascent and how it matures — or whether it’s superseded by another NLP model — remains to be seen. Read more

With the recent explosion of live audio chat platforms, from Clubhouse to game-centric Discord and Twitter’s Spaces comes a new problem: how to moderate real-time speech. As Discord chief legal officer Clint Smith put it, “audio presents a fundamentally different set of challenges for moderation than text-based communication.” “It’s more ephemeral and it’s harder to research and action,” he added. One problem is that the majority of tools built to detect problematic content are aimed at text comments, not audio. Read more