Facebook inked a multi-year agreement with News Corp in Australia, resolving a standoff on paying publishers for content. The News Corp content will include the national newspaper The Australian, The Daily Telegraph in New South Wales, the Herald Sun in Victoria and The Courier-Mail in Queensland. News Corp’s cable channel Sky News Australia reached a separate deal with Facebook. Now, 17 million Facebook users in Australia will be able to access News Corp publications’ breaking news and news articles behind a paywall. Read more

Shopify, BigCommerce and Magneto are companies that offer online sales solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses that don’t want to do business via Amazon, eBay or Walmart or go it alone and try to attract buyers via advertising. With Shopify and others, the merchant can retain her branding and customer relationships while taking advantage of established cloud-based payments and fulfillment services. These companies can also list merchandise on the dominant e-commerce sites, a time-consuming effort for the smaller businesses. Read more

Arizona, Maryland and Virginia are just three states pushing legislation to limit Big Tech companies such as Google and Apple on issues including digital advertisements, app-store fees and online privacy. Their actions appear to highlight a growing trend: that state capitals are emerging at the forefront of potentially regulating Silicon Valley behemoths. While the federal government is holding hearings and suing some Big Tech companies, states may beat them to passing laws that will become de facto national standards. Read more

Russia and China recently ran sophisticated hacks from servers inside the United States, going undetected by the National Security Agency, which is prohibited from conducting surveillance in the U.S., as well as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. Private computer security firms were the first to raise the alarm on these foreign attacks, and Microsoft reported that its patches are being reverse-engineered by criminal groups to launch ransomware attacks on corporations. The White House is paying attention. Read more

Facebook debuted Learning from Videos, a project designed to learn audio, images and text from publicly available Facebook videos to improve its core AI systems. By culling data from hundreds of languages and countries, said Facebook, the project will also help to enable “entirely new experiences.” Learning from Videos, which began in 2020, has also helped to improve recommendations in Instagram Reels. Facebook, Google and others are focused on self-supervised techniques rather than labeled datasets to improve AI. Read more