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From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

Gaming

Axios Gaming

A Brazilian video game publisher wants to defy decades of industry wisdom by promoting a line of new games based on how quickly they’ll take to complete, not by how long.

Driving the news: Flux Games is rolling out a new label called Short N Sweet, promoting games for console and PC that can be completed in as little as a sitting or two.

The initial lineup will include the one-player/two-character game Mirrored Souls and delivery game FoodBoy.

Why it matters: Playing video games is a time-consuming pastime — one where many players, aided by marketing campaigns that brag about game length or promise multiple seasons of future content, have come to equate a game’s duration with its quality.

Many great games do demand many hours of their players’ lives. Two of last year’s most acclaimed games, God of War Ragnarök and Elden Ring, have average completion times of 25.5 and  55.5 hours, respectively.

Not so with Short N Sweet’s games, which may run as short as two to four hours, the label’s founder tells Axios.

What they’re saying: “A significant number of players just want to chill and play a nice, fun game on, say, a Tuesday evening or any short time window,” Short N Sweet founder Paulo Luis Santos tells Axios. “But that is surprisingly hard to find!”

Santos says his company’s market research shows that people are looking for shorter games but can’t find them, especially on consoles.

He also believes developers would benefit from a label that can successfully sell short games. “We really want to remove the pressure of adding content for the sake of game length, allowing developers to make their game last as long as they envision it to keep it to the highest quality they can.”

Though Santos says Short N Sweet is still working out pricing for games, he says they’re “committed to pricing them in a way that’s fair and affordable to our community but at the same time fairly rewards the devs and us.”

The big picture: Game publishers have long pointed to lengthy playing times as justification for console and PC games’ relatively high costs, and in recent years, some of the biggest publishers have built business models around maximizing player time in a game.

But backlash hits from time to time. Assassin’s Creed developers promise the franchise’s next installment will be “on a more intimate scale” (aka shorter and also cheaper), following its fans grumbling about swelling playing times.

Short games are also not a new phenomenon. Some of the field’s most acclaimed games, including Gone Home, Unpacking and Portal (running time: 3 hours) were brief, even if there was no label at the time to hype their brevity.

The bottom line: Santos believes Short N Sweet can make money with short games. “Our sales targets are not too high,” he says.

“They are just enough to enable us to get the developers that we are working with in a good position to establish and grow their studios, while Short N Sweet can sign and fund more great games for our 2024-25 games lineup.”

Sign up for the Axios Gaming newsletter here.

Video game publisher tries a novel strategy: Hyping shorter games

Short N Sweet's PC and console games are for people short on time

Video game screenshot of two robed figures in mirrored positions

Mirrored Souls. Screenshot: The Bricks Studios

Video games

Codebook

Axios Codebook

Suspected China-linked hacking groups are continuing to build on a new tactic targeting internet-facing security tools as a way of stealthily breaking into some of the most data-rich organizations, researchers at Google-owned Mandiant warn.

Driving the news: In a report Thursday, researchers said they've uncovered a new bug targeting software security company Fortinet, which makes firewalls, antivirus programs and similar tools. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new bugs.

The new report is the fifth that Mandiant has released in two years in which suspected China-affiliated hackers have targeted internet-facing security tools. Other affected product-makers include SonicWall, VMware and Citrix.

Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant, told the WSJ it's likely that "the problem is a lot bigger than we know today."

What they're saying: "Given how incredibly difficult they are to find, most organizations cannot identify them on their own," Carmakal said in a statement to Axios. "It’s not uncommon for Chinese campaigns to end up as multi-year intrusions."

The big picture: The Biden administration has been laser-focused on cracking down on China-linked espionage and hacking threats.

Last week, the intelligence community said in its 2023 worldwide threats report that China is the "broadest, most active and persistent" cyber espionage threat to the U.S.

Earlier this week, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reportedly told TikTok that, due to surveillance and other national security concerns, it would be banned in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, refused to sell its stake.

Details: Mandiant uncovered two new malware strains, dubbed CastleTap and ThinCrust, targeting recently-patched flaws in Fortinet products to access defense, government, telecom and technology companies.

In one scenario detailed in the report, hackers injected malicious code onto the FortiManager security management tool while it was connected to the internet.

That code then allowed the hackers to establish a "backdoor" onto the network that they could easily use to install malware and move laterally to other products connected to the network.

The intrigue: By targeting internet-facing security tools, malicious actors can gain access to a network without having to interact with a human — as opposed to most other malware schemes, which require someone to click on a phishing link or install a corrupted app.

Without that interaction, the attacks are much more difficult to notice, allowing intruders more time to collect data and other information.

Sign up for Axios’ cybersecurity newsletter Codebook here

China-backed espionage is getting harder to spot, researchers say

Researchers said they've uncovered a new bug targeting software security company Fortinet.

Illustration of a computer keyboard with a red return key resembling China's flag 

Cybersecurity

A recent data breach involving millions of AT&T customers is bringing renewed attention to the fault lines in major telecommunications providers' security programs.

Why it matters: Telecom companies collect a wealth of data about their customers, including financial, demographic and other sensitive information. That data can later be abused to steal someone's identity or break into their other online accounts.

Driving the news: AT&T started notifying 9 million wireless customers last week that their customer information was accessed during a breach on a third-party marketing vendor.

A report from cyber intelligence firm Cyble last month estimates that more than 74 million U.S. telecom customers have already had their data leaked on the dark web so far in 2023. Each of the attacks in the report involved breaches at third-party vendors.

The big picture: The telecom sector is uniquely vulnerable to cyberattacks given the constant industry pressure to bring in new vendors to help them expand their business lines, Marcus Fowler, CEO of Darktrace Federal, told Axios.

Most major telecom and wireless providers sell customers' mobile data to advertisers, roping in a potential set of new vendors who can access and create weak spots in their security systems.

But those added third-party vendors create a mounting security risk since it's difficult for companies to completely vet a new contractor's security stack before they sign a contract, Michael Sikorski, chief technology officer at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 research lab, told Axios.

"We're definitely seeing a huge uptick in telecom attacks now, not necessarily directly against them," Sikorski said. "They tend to have pretty large security budgets, but if you think about how much outsourcing those entities are doing, it's significant."

Catch up quick: AT&T isn't the only household name reeling from a recent data breach.

T-Mobile said earlier this year that it suffered a data breach in November that impacted 37 million current customers. That announcement came after other publicly reported breaches at T-Mobile in 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018.

Between the lines: Data breaches have become so frequent that consumers are now seemingly numb to the headlines, Mauricio Sanchez, research director at telecom market research firm Dell'Oro Group, told Axios.

That numbness leaves some companies unmotivated to invest more in their security, leaving consumers vulnerable to breaches, he said.

The intrigue: Nation-state hacking groups and financially motivated cybercriminals are interested in breaking into telecoms, Sikorski said.

The most popular attack types go beyond the high-profile data breaches making headlines: Malicious actors can also use the information they access to initiate so-called SIM-swapping attacks, where a hacker can take over a phone number remotely.

Those SIM-swapping attacks can then lead to malicious hackers stealing multifactor authentication codes, giving them access to people's most secured accounts.

Yes, but: Some experts argue that leaving it up to the telecom industry to improve their own security postures isn't enough anymore.

Creating regulations for required baseline cybersecurity measures for the telecom sector and its vendors could go a long way to ensuring all companies are prioritizing their security, Fowler said.

"This is not a situation where carrots are going to work, and the stick here is pretty weak in so far that, in the regulatory environment, they can shrug these things off because it wasn’t them, it wasn't their systems," Sanchez said.

What's next: The Federal Communications Commission is working on an update to its data breach notification rules for telecom and wireless carriers.

Mobile carriers will soon start implementing new FCC rules finalized Thursday requiring them to block text messages that come from "invalid, unallocated or unused numbers."

Wave of telecom data breaches highlight industry's weaknesses

Telecommunications companies collect a wealth of data about their customers.

Illustration of a phone screen displaying a person peeking through blinds with binoculars.

As generative AI tools like Dall-E and MidJourney become more mainstream, some illustration competitions are banning the submission of AI-generated artworks.

Why it matters: Debate in the art world around the impact of technology is nothing new. But AI's unique legal and ethical considerations have prompted some organizations to take a definitive public stance.

Zoom in: Of the nine major illustration competitions Axios reviewed, only three allow AI submissions. 

 The ADC Awards told Axios via email that the competition "is the advertising and design industry’s first global awards program to establish a separate discipline with a dedicated jury for AI work."

 The Society of Publication Designers allows submissions created with AI, but clarified over email that they "are absolutely against art theft, but support artists who use [AI] legally and ethically." 

Society for News Design currently has no guidelines or bans on AI submissions: "Everything is moving so quickly," says executive director LeeAnn Mandrillo over email.

Generative AI tools are currently under legal scrutiny for their use of licensed imagery in their training models. Several lawsuits have already been filed against major AI art tools over copyright infringement. 

Complex questions over how the legal system will view human/AI collaborations will need to be settled by the courts.

Mark Heflin, director of American Illustration-American Photography, says that his organization’s stance on prohibiting generative AI is consistent with existing guidelines. 

In the case of generative AI, artists wouldn't be able to say the work is entirely their own — a requirement for the competition.

“Even if we wanted to change our rules, the concern is the way that some of these generative AI tools have been built by scraping licensed material.” Such training models make confirming authorship of the work precarious, Heflin says.

The onset of people sharing AI-generated images via apps like Lensa and Dall-E on social media prompted the Society of Illustrators to ban such images in its competitions.

“The gluttony of the sharing was startling. I saw the harm in this, and what it could mean to illustrators and artists," says Tim O’Brien, who served as president of the Society of Illustrators and worked with colleagues to issue a statement against allowing AI submissions. 

"This was a pro-human effort to celebrate what humans can do," he says. 

Yes, but: Technological controversies in the art world have sprung up in the past, including with the advent of photography. 

More recently, the use of stock imagery to create photo-composited work or even switching from physical to digital submissions for competitions have generated debate among art organizations, according to Heflin. And for a brief time, the Society of Illustrators did not include digitally constructed artwork in their annual competition.

But for now, says Heflin: “I don't know where the copyright lives and that's not for me to say. It's going to have to go to Congress.”

Between the lines: Congress has rarely moved quickly enough to keep up with new technologies' impact on intellectual property rules, and the odds are very high that these conflicts will arrive in the courts before new legislation can help untangle them, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg notes.

Disclosure: Shoshana Gordon served as a juror for American Illustration 41 in 2022.

Illustration competitions grapple with generative AI

AI's unique legal and ethical considerations have prompted some organizations to take a definitive public stance.

Illustration of a red ribbon with a "no" symbol on painting in a frame with binary code 

Artificial intelligence

Automation and AI

Media Trends

Axios Media Trends

YouTube will lift its restrictions on former President Trump's channel Friday, a spokesperson confirmed to Axios.

Why it matters: The restrictions have prevented Trump from posting any new YouTube videos to his account, which has more than 2.6 million followers, for over two years. 

taDHihannel has been frozen in time since January 7h.  . 

Catch up quick: YouTube initially suspended Trump's account in January 2021, several days following the January 6 insurrection, after his account violated its policies for posting content that incited calls to violence. 

A month later, the company said it would lift the restrictions — which prohibited Trump from posting new videos — when it determined that "the risk of violence has decreased."

YouTube also took additional restrictive measures, such as disabling comments on videos on Trump’s channel. Those restrictions will also be lifted. 

Details: On Friday, YouTube's vice president of public policy Leslie Miller told Axios that beginning March 17, the Donald J. Trump channel "is no longer restricted and the ability to upload new content is restored." 

"We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, balancing that with the importance of preserving the opportunity for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election," Miller said.

"This channel will continue to be subject to our policies, just like any other channel on YouTube."

Be smart: Following the insurrection, YouTube did remove some videos on Trump's channel that violated its policies for inciting violence. Those videos will not be restored. 

With the restrictions lifted, Trump will also now be able to buy YouTube ads for his campaign, assuming they comply with YouTube's ads policies.

The big picture:  Ahead of the 2024 election, more Big Tech platforms are reviving Donald Trump's accounts that were frozen in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.

Meta reinstated Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts last month following a two-year suspension.

Under Elon Musk as its new owner, Twitter has also reinstated Trump's account. 

What to watch: Trump has yet to post anything on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and has instead continued to rely on his account at Truth Social, the social platform he launched in 2021. 

It's unclear whether he will begin leveraging bigger platforms ahead of his 2024 race. 

A source said YouTube plans to inform the Trump campaign of its decision later today. 

Scoop: YouTube restores Trump's channel

The former president's YouTube channel had been frozen after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Photo Illustration: Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Donald Trump

Global <span style='color:#ff942f;'>Metaverse</span> vs <span style='color:#835bff;'>generative AI</span> funding

A year and a half after renaming itself after its metaverse initiative, Meta has noticeably de-emphasized that vision for the future.

The big picture: Meta is fully in sync with a moment that has many large companies cutting headcounts, shuttering side projects and chasing the promise of generative AI. 

This week the firm announced a massive second round of layoffs. It recently killed off its Portal platform. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while not disavowing his metaverse dream, sounds more eager to talk about AI. 

By the numbers: Meta is moving in tandem with the wider industry. 

According to PitchBook data compiled by Axios Media Deals' Tim Baysinger, through March 16, 2022, companies that played in the metaverse or web3 space had raised nearly $2 billion in funding. So far this year, metaverse and web3 companies have raised $586.7 million, a bit more than a quarter of last year's total.

The totals for generative AI companies are the inverse: Through March 16, 2022, the generative AI space saw $612.8 million in funding. This year, it's up to $2.3 billion.

Driving the news: In a note Tuesday announcing Meta would lay off 10,000 more employees, Zuckerberg spotlighted AI work and reduced the metaverse to an "also."

“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”

Last month, Zuckerberg shared that the company is “creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area.”

One of Meta’s most touted metaverse products, Horizon Workrooms, was designed to facilitate a collaborative, virtual working environment. In Tuesday’s note, however, Zuckerberg stressed the importance of employees working together in an office.

“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he wrote. “I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.”

Flashback: In October of 2021, then-Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta.

The move was seen as an attempt to shift attention away from  intensifying scrutiny and criticism of Facebook and Instagram, as well as a way to capitalized on the metaverse buzz that had enchanted investors and developers.

Since then, Meta faced user declines and an ad market slowdown, with experts questioning whether the social behemoth was facing an identity crisis.

State of play: Over the past few months, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have dominated tech conversations.  Meanwhile, Meta has reportedly had a difficult time keeping users on its virtual reality products.

According to an internal presentation shared with The Verge last month, Meta’s vice president for VR Mark Rabkin told employees that the three-year-old Quest 2 is struggling with new users.

“Sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in, the people who bought it this last Christmas, they’re just not as into it," Rabkin said, comparing recent purchases with early adopters. "We need to be better at growth and retention and resurrection.”

Further reporting from The Verge found that users weren’t coming back to Meta’s flagship Horizon Worlds social space, with only one in 10 users returning to the app within a month.

What they’re saying: “Our priorities haven’t changed since last year,” Zuckerberg said in last month’s fourth quarter earnings call. “The two major technological waves driving our roadmap are AI today and over the longer term the metaverse.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Yes, but: For all its talk of AI, Meta still has big metaverse plans in the works for both hardware and software.

The internal presentation reported by The Verge showed that Meta is dedicated to a robust hardware roadmap over the next few years, with new VR headsets, AR glasses and a “neural interfaces watch.”

Additionally, much of its messaging around AI positions new generative AI capabilities as tools to help build experiences within the metaverse.

What to watch: A hardware war is still brewing as companies continue to iterate on, or introduce new, metaverse-adjacent products.

Sony released its PlayStation VR 2 last month.

And rumors suggest that Apple is still committed to unveiling its long-gestating mixed reality headset this year.

PitchBook data compiled by Axios Media Deals' Tim Baysinger

Meta's metaverse is on the back burner

The company formerly known as Facebook is talking more about AI than the metaverse these days.

Metaverse

Human-shaped robots with dexterous hands will be staffing warehouses and retail stores, tending to the elderly and performing household chores within a decade or so, according to a Silicon Valley startup working toward that vision.

Why it matters: Demographic trends — such as a persistent labor shortage and the growing elder care crisis — make fully-functioning, AI-driven humanoid robots look tantalizingly appealing.

Companies such as Amazon are reportedly worried about running out of warehouse workers, whose jobs are physically and mentally demanding with high attrition.

Driving the news: A heavy-hitting startup called Figure, which just emerged from stealth mode, is building a prototype of a humanoid robot that the company says will eventually be able to walk, climb stairs, open doors, use tools and lift boxes — perhaps even make dinner.

The company is the brainchild of Brett Adcock, a tech entrepreneur who previously founded Archer Aviation (a "flying taxi" maker that went public) and Vettery (an online hiring marketplace that he and a partner sold for $100 million).

He's assembled an all-star team of 40, including leading roboticists from Boston Dynamics and Tesla.

They've moved into a 30,000-square-foot facility in Sunnyvale, California, where they plan to set up a mock warehouse to test their prototype.

"We just got done in December with our full-scale humanoid," Adcock tells Axios. "We'll be walking that in the next 30 days."

Where it stands: The prototype — called Figure 01 — stands about 5'6" and weighs 130 pounds. 

It'll be fully electric, run for five hours on a charge and is intended for warehouse use.

"We think we can get into commercial operation within a few years," Adcock tells Axios. "We should be able to do most jobs — physical labor jobs that humans don't want to do." 

Yes, but: Humanoid robots are staggeringly difficult to build and engineer to perform reliably.

There are a host of design challenges, from simple balance to replicating human movements. 

"We need to be able to push it and have it not fall down," says Adcock about the Figure 01. (Boston Dynamics has plenty of robot blooper videos on YouTube.)

From there, programming a robot to move boxes in a warehouse is a lot easier than, say, engineering it to cook a meal.

What they're saying: "We face high risk and extremely low chances of success," Adcock wrote in a mission statement.

But he exuded optimism in an interview: "This stuff just wasn't possible 10 years ago — I think it's possible now."

A decade ago, "you just didn’t have the energy or the power density to make this work."

Reality check: Engineering robots is expensive. Adcock says he is self-financing Figure: "I put in $10 million last year."

Zoom in: Goldman Sachs put out an initial research report on the humanoid robot sector in November, estimating that "a $6 billion market (or more) in people-sized-and-shaped robots is achievable in the next 10 to 15 years."

This market "would be able to fill 4% of the projected U.S. manufacturing labor shortage by 2030 and 2% of global elderly care demand by 2035."

The big picture: The modern quest to build a robot that looks and feels like a human began in earnest more than a decade ago, with Boston Dynamics' Atlas — which tech writer John Markoff once compared to C-3PO from "Star Wars" — in the lead.

Today, Atlas and Xiaomi's CyberOne tilt more toward research than commercial applications.

Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot is likely to be Figure's chief competition — Elon Musk has described similar ambitions to Adcock's for the "Tesla Bot." (See it in action here.)

Another competitor: Agility Robotics, whose humanoid robot, Digit, is also aimed at warehouse work. (Watch it perform here.) 

But there's robot-fever everywhere. At SXSW in Austin, Disney just unveiled a rollerblading, somersaulting bunny rabbit bot that's meant to look like Judy Hopps from "Zootopia."

And non-humanoid robots are starting to flex their muscles as security guards, window washers, food deliverers and fry cooks. (Sometimes with mixed results.)

The bottom line: It will take decades for humanoid robots to be able to replicate the sophisticated things our bodies can do, but visionaries are hard at work trying to make it happen.

Humanoid robots are coming

A startup called Figure is building a human-sized robot, initially for warehouse work.

A rendering of Figure 01, a humanoid robot being built by a startup called Figure. Image courtesy of Figure

Robotics

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Amid mounting layoffs in the tech sector, more than a third of industry workers now say they're more likely than they were a year ago to work on military projects, according to a new Morning Consult analysis shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: Continuing tech layoffs could give the Pentagon and defense contractors a fighting chance to recruit top-tier coding talent.

The Pentagon and broader defense sector has struggled to compete with Silicon Valley salaries and job benefits, but layoffs across the sector could help the government attract new talent.

What they're saying: "From a recruiting standpoint, tech workers are looking for stability," Jordan Marlatt, tech analyst at Morning Consult, told Axios. "They're looking for interesting things to work on, and they're also looking for work-life balance."

Catch up quick: The tech sector has publicly shied away from discussing its work with the military in recent years amid employee backlash over the ethics of using certain technologies in combat.

But the industry has started to embrace Pentagon work again amid growing tension with Russia and China.

Meanwhile, more than 138,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi.

By the numbers: 34% of the 441 U.S. tech workers surveyed in a Morning Consult poll said they're more likely than they were a year ago to apply their skills to military projects.

38% of those workers said they like the prospect of working on interesting projects, and 33% said they're more likely to head to defense work because of "financial considerations."

Nearly half of all surveyed tech workers (48%) said they support their employer considering defense contracts that involve battlefield technologies.

Between the lines: Government agencies could have a better chance of recruiting tech talent if they emphasize the job stability of their positions and the new technologies they'll be able to contribute to, Sonnet Frisbie, Morning Consult's lead geopolitical risk analyst focused on Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Axios.

"They should really play to applicants' interest, not just their values," Frisbie said.

Yes, but: Despite increased interest in military work, most tech workers still think the tech sector is best positioned to give them better salaries, benefits and mission-driven opportunities, according to the analysis.

struggled to compete with Silicon Valley salaries

Exclusive: New poll finds tech workers considering defense work amid layoffs

New survey shows a third of tech workers are more likely to consider Pentagon work

A briefcase covered in camouflage print, on a red background.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew insisted Thursday that forcing the app's Chinese parent company, Bytedance, to sell it would not address the the national security concerns of the U.S. and other governments.

The big picture: Chew's comments to the Wall Street Journal coincided with the U.K. and New Zealand becoming the latest to announce new TikTok restrictions on government devices due to security concerns.

TikTok CEO: App sale won't address U.S. concerns

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's comments to the WSJ coincided with the U.K. and New Zealand announcing restrictions due to security concerns.

Saturday's technology stories