Meta banned TikTok ads in tit-for-tat row, Anthropic now offers a free vulnerability-finding service, and the Webb telescope detected the galaxy origin of the farthest fast radio burst

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know, and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow, and host the experts, authors and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

SPEAKER_2 (0:40)

Metaband TikTok ads from its platforms in a tit-for-tat row.

Anthropic now offers a free vulnerability finding service for open-source software.

And the Web Telescope detected the galaxy origin of the farthest fast radio burst we've seen to date. It's Friday, October 9th, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech this morning from Engadget.

Meta confirmed that it has banned ads from rival platform Tik Tok, saying that declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice. The news follows Tik Tok's own ban of Instagram and Facebook profile links, and Meta adds pressuring Tik Tok and other social media sites to follow its lead with safety features for miners. On Thursday, Meta placed a complete ban on ads and marketing from Tik Tok's US minority owner, China's ByteDance. The ban is in effect in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. It also applies to third-party advertisers running Tik Tok-linked campaigns in those countries. A Meta spokesperson said, We don't have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps. Back in August, Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with US states that also forced it to implement child safety features on Facebook and Instagram. Legal experts said that could pressure the company's competitors, particularly Tik Tok and YouTube, to reshape their apps as well. This summer, the European regulators wrote that Tik Tok has not done enough to insure miners' safety and that it could impose a fine of up to 6% on the platform's annual revenue. That puts Tik Tok and YouTube on the back foot, with both government regulators and Meta itself pressuring them to follow Meta's child safety lead. Meta recently placed ads in major newspapers demanding similar moves from its rivals, while calling out Tik Tok for failing to show at several US government meetings around screen time and child safety. Tik Tok, now owned by a consortium of US and UAE investors, including Larry Ellison's Oracle, has so far said very little on the issue.

Anthropic is offering open-source projects a new way to check for vulnerabilities with its OSS scanner. As they've shown recently, AI models are excellent at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. The new scanner could give open-source coders early alerts about potential security issues for free, albeit with the trade-off that reports won't be reviewed by humans. Anthropic explained, the outputs of this opt-in vulnerability scanner will be fully model-generated without human review or triage. This will enable faster and more frequent scanning, but means that it is possible reports will be incorrect or invalid. These reports will be generated by our strongest models, including Claude Mythos, to give open-source projects the largest defensive advantage. As Anthropic mentioned, it was inspired by OSS Fuzz open-source software scanner, created by Google and the OpenSSF, or Open Source Security Foundation, that has been available since 2016 Anthropic already has a paid product called Claude Security, that can perform general access code scanning and patching. But OSS scanner performs similar security audits at no cost. Google and Anthropic are not necessarily providing these products out of altruism. Both companies rely heavily on open source code projects that underpin the internet, often run by unpaid workers. Security vulnerabilities in such code are highly dangerous, with a recent example of that being the XZUtil's backdoor that could have handed hackers administrative control over millions of systems around the world.

Well, back in 2024, scientists detected the farthest fast radio burst we've ever seen to date, thanks to observations by the Meerkat Ground Telescope Array. Fast radio bursts are ultra-fast radio waves from deep space, which last a fraction of a second, but release as much energy as what the sun emits in three days. They were first discovered back in 2007, and not much is known about them. Now, astronomers have used the James Webb Telescope to pinpoint the origin of the burst detected in 2024, and it could shed light on the phenomenon's origins. Webb's near-infrared instruments detected a galaxy in the right location from where the burst had come. Based on measurements from the way its light stretches, the fast radio burst occurred just three billion years after the Big Bang. Its origin galaxy existed way back when star formation was at its peak in the universe. In addition, the galaxy that produced it is also 1,000 times smaller than expected. The previous fast radio bursts we've detected took place billions of years later in massive star-forming galaxies. There are a couple of theories on how fast radio bursts are produced. One proposes that they're generated by the merger of two neutron stars, but it takes billions of years before two neutron stars, the collapsed cores of massive supergiant stars, collide, which means that bursts can only come from older galaxies. Another theory suggests that the bursts can come from massive stars exploding in a supernova and leaving behind magnetars, which are a rare type of neutron stars that have highly powerful magnetic fields. The researchers said their work suggests that it's very unlikely this fast radio burst was produced by a merger.