Amazon Ends Partnership with Tech Company Flock after Super Bowl Commercial

The Amazon-owned video doorbell company, Ring, has ended its partnership with technology company Flock. This comes after backlash from the initial announcement of the partnership and the widely criticized Super Bowl commercial, which advertised a feature to help lost pets that many felt overstepped privacy and unwanted surveillance.

The company initially planned to incorporate Flock’s technology that uses cameras to read license plates into their Community Requests feature which would allow law enforcement to request video footage from users to use in investigations.

In a statement released by Ring, “We determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.”

Chief Communications Officer of Flock, Josh Thomas, told CNN the terminating the partnership was a mutual agreement.

Word Press Incorporates AI Assistant to Help Edit, Create Images and More

Using WordPress for your website customization just got a bit easier (not sponsored). The webhosting platform just added a built-in AI feature that allows site owners to make customization changes with natural language commands. This tool allows for site layouts, style and other patterns by giving commands to the AI assistant.

The commands don’t have to follow any detailed prompts. Simple commands such as “make this section feel more modern or spacious” or “make my site’s colors more vibrant and bolder.”  The Word Press AI assistant can update your website’s content by asking it to rewrite your bio to make it sound a certain way. It has the capacity to act as an editor, creating headlines or provide grammar and editing suggestions.

This feature is opt-in and made available through the WordPress 6.9 update. There is a plan with WordPress where the AI website builder feature is automatically enabled.

Global YouTube Outage affects 33,000 in US, Over 1 million Worldwide

On Tuesday, February 17, a YouTube outage occurred affecting over 33,000 users in the US and 1 million worldwide. The outage occurred around 7:50 ET/ 12:50am GMT. It lasted around 90 minutes, and Google later stated the issue was with “our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids).”