It’s barely been four months since Amazon placed ads in its Prime Video streaming service, but the retail giant is already introducing more annoying promotional tactics — such as displaying ads whenever someone hits the pause button.

On Tuesday, Amazon announced it will roll out three new ad formats for Prime Video later this year to tempt subscribers to purchase promoted items while watching content. Shoppable carousels will soon appear during ad breaks in shows and movies that present viewers with a “sliding lineup” of products they can buy on Amazon. That essentially makes this an ad within another ad, and it even “automatically pauses” if interacted with to give viewers time to browse.

TV shows, movies, and live sports will also show interactive brand trivia ads that can provide rewards “like Amazon shopping credits” and pause ads that bring up a translucent overlay, allowing viewers to directly add the promoted product to their Amazon carts. Amazon says this overlay will only appear while the video is paused but does note that pause ads “extend the engagement opportunity beyond a traditional ad break.”

Hulu introduced a similar pause-activated advertising feature back in 2019, which is now catching on with other streamers like YouTube. Amazon hasn’t specified when it will roll out these new ad formats, only that they’ll be available “in the upcoming broadcast year” — which typically ends on August 31st.

Prime Video users who want an ad-free experience have to pay Amazon an additional $2.99 per month on top of their existing subscription for the privilege, but plenty of people apparently aren’t doing that. Amazon says its cheaper ad-supported tier has an average monthly reach of over 200 million global customers. The company hasn’t disclosed how many Prime Video subscribers it has, but Amazon said it had 200 million global subscribers across its entire Prime membership program in 2021.

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FrostWire is a free, open source BitTorrent client, first released as a fork of LimeWire. In version 5, Gnutella support was dropped entirely, and now FrostWire only uses the BitTorrent network.

FrostWire 6.13.2

FrostWire homepage

Meta is encouraging more users to post to its X rival Threads. In its latest experiment, the company is providing an easy toggle for users to cross-post from Instagram to Threads, the company told TechCrunch.

Earlier today, users shared that they saw control for cross-posting on their Instagram accounts. Users could cross-post an individual post to turn on the feature for all of them.

Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is running a global test to let users cross-post images from Instagram to Threads. That means you can’t post Reels to Threads automatically. However, given Instagram’s shift to promoting video, Threads might be a good place to promote your photography.

The company said that this is an opt-in experience, and you can turn it off at any point in time. When users cross-post their Instagram posts, the caption will become text for the Thread post, and hashtags will be converted into plain text.

Meta has used its other properties, including Facebook and Instagram, to promote Threads regularly. Last year, it started showing a carousel of suggested posts from Threads on both Instagram and Facebook. Earlier this year, the social media company also started testing cross-posting from Facebook to Threads.

In addition to the cross-posting test, Meta is also running an active creator bonus program on Threads to incentivize accounts with high follower counts to post on social networks. Last month, Threads passed the 150 million monthly active users mark, Mark Zuckerberg noted on the Q1 2024 earnings call.

TechCrunch

Meta is offering some creators thousands of dollars if they go viral on Threads. The payouts are part of a new invitation-only bonus program that rewards creators who use Meta’s newest app.

An Instagram support page offers some details about the bonus program, which Meta hasn’t formally announced. It states that creators can earn money “based on the performance of your Threads posts” or “the number of posts you create.” It appears that specific terms of the bonuses are individualized to each creator. “Details of the bonus program may vary by participant,” the company notes.

The program seems to be a small-scale effort for now — the company refers to it as being in “testing” — but it offers a preview of how Meta may look to ramp up its efforts to use creators to boost engagement on the service. Meta has previously offered bonuses for posting Reels on Facebook and Instagram, but it’s the first time the company has paid for posts on Threads. The Threads bonus program was first reported by Business Insider earlier this month.

Some creators are already being offered thousands of dollars for high-performing posts. According to one screenshot making the rounds on Threads, at least one creator was offered “up to $5,000” for Threads posts or replies with 10,000 views or more. That’s not nearly as high as the $10,000 bonuses Reels creators could once earn on Instagram, but is still quite generous considering posting on Threads requires far less effort than shooting and editing a compelling video.

Meta isn’t the only platform trying to lure creators with promises of potential payouts. X also offers creators direct payments based on their engagement, but that program is a revenue sharing arrangement for users who pay for premium subscriptions.

Engadget

Instagram is introducing a few new changes to its ranking systems to better highlight content from smaller, original creators across the social network. The Meta-owned platform says that historically, creators with large followings and accounts that share reposted content have gotten the most reach on the platform. So now it’s seeking to give all creators an equal footing in terms of reach with a set of new changes that will be implemented over the next few months.

The change comes after months of criticism from creators’ who said their reach has been negatively impacted by the algorithm, leading to Instagram head Adam Mosseri fielding complaints on Threads nearly as often as he promoted new features.

The platform is introducing a ranking change that will give smaller creators more distribution, replacing reposts with original content in recommendations, adding labels to reposted content and removing content aggregators from recommendations.

Instagram says it has been working on a new way to rank recommendations that will show eligible content to a small audience that it thinks will enjoy it. As people engage with the content, the top performing set of Reels will be shown to a slightly wider audience, then the best of these will be shown to an even wider group and so on. Instagram believes this change will give all creators an equal chance of finding audiences.

In addition, if Instagram finds two or more identical pieces of content on Instagram, it will only recommend the original one. This change means that the original content will directly replace the reposted content in the app’s recommendations. The company notes that it won’t replace content if it has been significantly changed. For instance, Instagram won’t replace content that has been edited to become a meme or a parody. Plus, the content will only be replaced in places where Instagram recommends posts, such as the explore page, Reels and in-feed recommendations.

Instagram is also going to start adding labels to reposted content that will link users to the original creator. The label will be visible to followers of the account reposting it. The company says that for now, the original creator or the account reposting the content has the option to remove the label. It’s possible that Instagram might not let creators remove the label in the future.

Another new change will go after meme accounts or pages dedicated to reposting other creators’ content. The company says that in the coming months, accounts that repeatedly post content from other users that they didn’t create or enhance will not be shown in recommendations. Instagram notes that this change won’t affect how it shows people content from aggregator accounts they follow.

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Microsoft reportedly locked down a server last month that exposed passwords, keys, and credentials of Microsoft employees to the open internet, as the company faces mounting pressure to bolster its software security.

According to Techcrunch, three security researchers at SOCRadar — a company specializing in detecting corporate cybersecurity weaknesses — discovered that an Azure-hosted server storing sensitive data linked to Microsoft’s Bing search engine was left open with no password protection, meaning it could be accessed by anyone online. The server contained a variety of security credentials used by Microsoft employees to access internal systems, housed within various scripts, code, and configuration files.

One of the researchers, Can Yoleri, told Techcrunch that hackers could potentially use this exposed data to find and access other areas where Microsoft stores internal data, which “could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use.”

Microsoft was notified about the vulnerability on February 6th, and locked it down by March 5th. It’s unclear if anyone else accessed the exposed server during this time. We have reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

Microsoft has faced several cybersecurity mishaps in recent years, and is currently in the process of overhauling its security practices. Earlier this month, a review from the US Cyber Safety Review Board said Microsoft could have prevented a breach in its Exchange Online software that allowed Chinese hackers to access US government email systems in 2023, accusing the tech giant of developing a “corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.” Another incident in 2022 saw sensitive login credentials for Microsoft’s systems being uploaded by its own employees on GitHub.

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