In a blog post today, Meta announced that it'll stop showing political content across Instagram and Threads unless users explicitly choose to have it recommended to them. The Verge reports: Meta announced that it's expanding an existing Reels policy that limits political content from people you're not following (including posts about social issues) from appearing in recommended feeds to more broadly cover the company's Threads and Instagram platforms. "Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person's appetite for it," said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, announcing on Threads that the changes will be applied over the next few weeks. Facebook is also expected to roll out these new controls at a later, undisclosed date.

Users who still want to have content "likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large" recommended to them can choose to turn off this limitation within their account settings. The changes will apply to public accounts when enabled and only in places where content is being recommended, such as Explore, Reels, in-feed recommendations, and suggested users. The update won't change how users view content from accounts they choose to follow, so accounts that aren't eligible to be recommended can still post political content to their followers via their feed and Stories.

For creators, Meta says that "if your account is not eligible to be recommended, none of your content will be recommended regardless of whether or not all of your content goes against our recommendations guidelines." When these changes do go live, professional accounts on Instagram will be able to use the Account Status feature to check if posting political content is impacting their eligibility for recommendation. Professional accounts can also use Account Status to contest decisions that revoke this eligibility, alongside editing, removing, or pausing politically related posts until the account is eligible to be recommended again.

The Biden administration on Thursday said leading AI companies are among more than 200 entities joining a new U.S. consortium to support the safe development and deployment of generative AI. From a report: Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), which includes OpenAI, Alphabet's Google, Anthropic and Microsoft along with Facebook-parent Meta Platforms, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Palantir, Intel, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. "The U.S. government has a significant role to play in setting the standards and developing the tools we need to mitigate the risks and harness the immense potential of artificial intelligence," Raimondo said in a statement.

Meta will start detecting and labeling images generated by artificial intelligence from Google and OpenAI's services, among others. According to Reuters, the company will use a set of invisible markers built into the files to help with the identification process. From the report: Meta will apply the labels to any content carrying the markers that is posted to its Facebook, Instagram and Threads services, in an effort to signal to users that the images -- which in many cases resemble real photos -- are actually digital creations, the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, wrote in a blog post. The company already labels any content generated using its own AI tools. Once the new system is up and running, Meta will do the same for images created on services run by OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe , Midjourney, Shutterstock and Alphabet's Google, Clegg said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down its Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23, Meta announced the release of its Facebook Graph API v19.0, which included the news that the company would be deprecating its existing Facebook Groups API. The latter, which is used by developers and businesses to schedule posts to Facebook Groups, will be removed within 90 days, Meta said. This includes all the Permissions and Reviewable Features associated with the API, it also noted.

Meta explained that a major use case for the API was a feature that allowed developers to privately reply in Facebook Groups. For example, a small business that wanted to send a single message to a person who posted on their Facebook Group or who had commented in the group could be messaged through the API. However, Meta said that another change in the new v19.0 API would enable this feature, without the need for the Groups API. But developers told TechCrunch that the shutdown of the API would cause problems for companies that offer solutions to customers who want to schedule and automate their social media posts. [...]

What's more, developers tell us that Meta's motivation behind the API's shutdown is unclear. On the one hand, it could be that Facebook Groups don't generate ad revenue and the shutdown of the API will leave developers without a workaround. But Meta hasn't clarified if that's the case. Instead, Meta's blog post only mentioned one use case that would be addressed through the new v.19.0 API. [...] On Meta's forum for developers, one developer says they're "pretty shocked" by the company's announcement, noting their app relies on the Groups API and will essentially no longer work when the shutdown occurs. Others are frustrated that Meta hasn't clearly explained if posting on Groups will be done with a Page Access token going forward, as the way the announcement is worded it seems that part is only relevant for those posting private replies, not posting to the group as a whole. [...] the whole thing could just be some messaging mistake -- like Meta perhaps forgot to include the part where it was going to note what its new solution would be. There is concern, however, that Meta is deprioritizing developers' interests having recently shut down its developer bug portal as well.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the San Francisco Chronicle's senior political writer: The next House member representing Silicon Valley wants to change a key piece of federal law that shields internet companies like X, Facebook and Snapchat from lawsuits over content their users post. That protection is considered the lifeblood of social media.

The top eight Democratic candidates vying to succeed Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo in her very blue district agree that something has to change with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was created in 1996, back when lawmakers shied away from doing anything that could limit the growth of the industry. Their unanimity is a sign that Eshoo's successor won't be a tool for the hometown industry. At least not on this issue. The challenge is what to do next. Whoever is elected, their actions as the voice of Silicon Valley will carry outsize weight in Congress. They can lead the charge to actually do something to clean up the bile on social media...

The good news is that they will have bipartisan support to address the bile and disinformation online. The bad news is that finding the right solution will still be hard.

In the behavior of tech companies, the Atlantic's executive editor warns us about "a clear and coherent ideology that is seldom called out for what it is: authoritarian technocracy. As the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley have matured, this ideology has only grown stronger, more self-righteous, more delusional, and — in the face of rising criticism — more aggrieved." The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values — reason, progress, freedom — but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs.... above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they've built or are building — to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more — impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs.
The article calls out Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto for saying "We believe in adventure... rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community..." (The Atlantic concludes Andreessen's position "serves only to absolve him and the other Silicon Valley giants of any moral or civic duty to do anything but make new things that will enrich them, without consideration of the social costs, or of history.")

The article notes that Andreessen "also identifies a list of enemies and 'zombie ideas' that he calls upon his followers to defeat, among them 'institutions' and 'tradition.'" But the Atlantic makes a broader critique not just of Andreessen but of other Silicon Valley elites. "The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us..." None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability — that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. "In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments," [Sam] Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI's attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: "Isn't it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? ... If we didn't do this someone else would have done it."
The article includes this damning chat log from a 2004 conversation Zuckerberg had with a friend:

Zuckerberg: If you ever need info about anyone at Harvard.
Zuckerberg: Just ask.
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Friend: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks.'

But the article also reminds us that in Facebook's early days, "Zuckerberg listed 'revolutions' among his interests." The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political, at least not in the traditional sense. Still, a select few already have authoritarian control, more or less, to establish the digital world's rules and cultural norms, which can be as potent as political power...

[I]n recent years, it has become clear that regulation is needed, not least because the rise of technocracy proves that Silicon Valley's leaders simply will not act in the public's best interest. Much should be done to protect children from the hazards of social media, and to break up monopolies and oligopolies that damage society, and more. At the same time, I believe that regulation alone will not be enough to meaningfully address the cultural rot that the new technocrats are spreading.... We do not have to live in the world the new technocrats are designing for us. We do not have to acquiesce to their growing project of dehumanization and data mining. Each of us has agency.

No more "build it because we can." No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don't let them.

• The article specifically recommends "challenging existing norms about the use of apps and YouTube in classrooms, the ubiquity of smartphones in adolescent hands, and widespread disregard for individual privacy. People who believe that we all deserve better will need to step up to lead such efforts."
• "Universities should reclaim their proper standing as leaders in developing world-changing technologies for the good of humankind. (Harvard, Stanford, and MIT could invest in creating a consortium for such an effort — their endowments are worth roughly $110 billion combined.)"

Quora "used to be a thriving community that worked to answer our most specific questions," writes Slate. "But users are fleeing," while the site hosts "a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries..."

The site has faced moderation issues, spam, trolls, and bots re-posting questions from Reddit (plus competition for ad revenue from sites like Facebook and Google which forced cuts in Quora's support and moderation teams). But automating its moderation "did not improve the situation...

"Now Quora is even offering A.I.-generated images to accompany users' answers, even though the spawned illustrations make little sense." To top it all off, after Quora began using A.I. to "generate machine answers on a number of selected question pages," the site made clear the possibility that human-crafted answers could be used for training A.I. This meant that the detailed writing Quorans provided mostly for free would be ingested into a custom large language model. Updated terms of service and privacy policies went into effect at the site last summer. As angel investor and Quoran David S. Rose paraphrased them: "You grant all other Quora users the unlimited right to reuse and adapt your answers," "You grant Quora the right to use your answers to train an LLM unless you specifically opt out," and "You completely give up your right to be any part of any class action suit brought against Quora," among others. (Quora's Help Center claims that "as of now, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train LLMs used for generating content on Quora. However, this may change in the future." The site offers an opt-out setting, although it admits that "opting out does not cover everything.")

This raised the issue of consent and ownership, as Quorans had to decide whether to consent to the new terms or take their work and flee. High-profile users, like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey, are removing their work from their profiles and writing notes explaining why. "The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I'm out of there," Lackey told me. It's not that all Quorans want to leave, but it's hard for them to choose to remain on a website where they now have to constantly fight off errors, spam, trolls, and even account impersonators....

The tragedy of Quora is not just that it crushed the flourishing communities it once built up. It's that it took all of that goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity and assumed that it could automate a system that equated it, apparently without much thought to how pale the comparison is. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] has a grim prediction for the future: "Eventually Quora will be robot questions, robot answers, and nothing else." I wonder how the site will answer the question of why Quora died, if anyone even bothers to ask.
The article notes that Andreessen Horowitz gave Quora "a much-needed $75 million investment — but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe."

The Verge reports that Threads is "booming," according to figures shared by Mark Zuckerberg on Meta's earnings call, with 130 million active users a month.

TechCrunch reports: Threads is continuing to grow, having tripled its downloads month-over-month in December, which gave it a place in the top 10 most downloaded apps for the month across both the App Store and Google Play...

Threads famously had a record-breaking launch, reaching 100 million registered users within its first five days. However, the app saw its daily downloads decline starting last September through the end of the year. But in December, Threads once again returned to growth, likely due to the push Meta had given the app by displaying promos on Facebook that featured Threads' viral posts. Today, there are an estimated 160 million Threads users, according to one tracker...

The app could also be benefiting from its move into the "fediverse" — the social network comprised of interconnected servers that communicate via the ActivityPub protocol, like Mastodon... In addition, Threads recently announced the launch of an endpoint, allowing developers of third-party apps and websites to use a dynamic URL to refill text into the Threads composer. For example, there's now a website where anyone can generate Threads share links and profile badges. Marketing tool provider Shareaholic also just launched Threads Share buttons for websites, including both desktop and mobile sites. This flurry of activity around Threads is helping to move the app up in the chart rankings, though some inorganic boosts from Meta itself are likely also responsible for the jump in downloads, given the size.

Nicholas Wise is a fluid dynamics researcher who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, reports Science magazine. And last June he "was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before." Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell or buy author slots and reviews on scientific papers — the signs of a busy paper mill. Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications even if they lack resources to undertake quality research, these furtive intermediaries by some accounts pump out tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles every year. Many contain made-up data; others are plagiarized or of low quality. Regardless, authors pay to have their names on them, and the mills can make tidy profits.

But what Wise was seeing this time was new. Rather than targeting potential authors and reviewers, someone who called himself Jack Ben, of a firm whose Chinese name translates to Olive Academic, was going for journal editors — offering large sums of cash to these gatekeepers in return for accepting papers for publication. "Sure you will make money from us," Ben promised prospective collaborators in a document linked from the Facebook posts, along with screenshots showing transfers of up to $20,000 or more. In several cases, the recipient's name could be made out through sloppy blurring, as could the titles of two papers. More than 50 journal editors had already signed on, he wrote. There was even an online form for interested editors to fill out...

Publishers and journals, recognizing the threat, have beefed up their research integrity teams and retracted papers, sometimes by the hundreds. They are investing in ways to better spot third-party involvement, such as screening tools meant to flag bogus papers. So cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts. An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, in partnership with Wise and other industry experts, identified several paper mills and more than 30 editors of reputable journals who appear to be involved in this type of activity. Many were guest editors of special issues, which have been flagged in the past as particularly vulnerable to abuse because they are edited separately from the regular journal. But several were regular editors or members of journal editorial boards. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
The spokesperson for one journal publisher tells Science that its editors are receiving bribe offers every week..

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article..

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta is poised to become Wall Street's top comeback kid. It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits. The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly $200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the $190 billion gains made by Apple and Amazon in 2022.

"Solid execution, faster growth, and increased capital structure efficiency improve the outlook from here," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note Friday. "Meta's AI pipeline for both users and advertisers is robust, with more tools set to launch and scale throughout '24," he added. Meta, which reduced headcount by 22% in 2023, unveiled plans for a $50 billion stock buyback, and announced its first quarterly dividend on Thursday, a sign to investors that it has money to spare and a reason for them to stick around. While the company is making big cost cuts, it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence advancements, namely in generative AI but also on the background technologies to help feed its social media products and power its ad targeting.

Layoffs are being mentioned on US earnings calls at the highest rate since the pandemic -- and as Meta Platforms shows, such cost cutting can pay off for investors. Bloomberg: Efforts by the Facebook parent to slash costs and refocus its business upended the lives of thousands of workers, but has since helped propel its stock 340% from a 2022 low. With an economic soft landing being the base case for many, positioning by firms to protect margins -- particularly in the technology sector -- is being welcomed by investors. Mentions of job cuts and synonyms per earnings calls this season have jumped to the highest levels since the second quarter of 2020, according to a Bloomberg transcript analysis of S&P 1500 Composite Index firms. For the technology industry in particular, "more recent cuts come out of a position of strength," said Wolf von Rotberg, equity strategist at Bank J. Safra Sarasin. "Confidence in the sector appears high that growth can persist even with a smaller workforce," he said.

Mark Zuckerberg explaining why Meta open-sources its AI on an earnings call Thursday: I know that some people have questions about how we benefit from open sourcing, the results of our research and large amounts of compute. So I thought it might be useful to lay out the strategic benefits here. The short version is that open sourcing improves our models. And because there's still significant work to turn our models into products because there will be other open-source models available anyway, we find that there are mostly advantages to being the open-source leader, and it doesn't remove differentiation for our products much anyway. And more specifically, there are several strategic benefits.

First, open-source software is typically safer and more secure as well as more compute-efficient to operate due to all the ongoing feedback, scrutiny and development from the community. Now this is a big deal because safety is one of the most important issues in AI. Efficiency improvements and lowering the compute costs also benefit everyone, including us.

Second, open-source software often becomes an industry standard. And when companies standardize on building with our stack, that then becomes easier to integrate new innovations into our products. That's subtle, but the ability to learn and improve quickly is a huge advantage. And being an industry standard enables that.

Third, open source is hugely popular with developers and researchers. And we know that people want to work on open systems that will be widely adopted. So this helps us recruit the best people at Meta, which is a very big deal for leading in any new technology area. And again, we typically have unique data and build unique product integrations anyway, so providing infrastructure like Llama as open source doesn't reduce our main advantage. This is why our long-standing strategy has been to open source general infrastructure and why I expect it to continue to be the right approach for us going forward.

In an interview with The Register, author and activist Cory Doctorow offers potential solutions to stop "enshittification," an age-old phenomenon that has become endemic in the tech industry. It's when a platform that was once highly regarded and user-friendly gradually deteriorates in quality, becoming less appealing and more monetized over time. Then, it dies. Here's an excerpt from the interview, conducted by The Register's Iain Thomson: [...] Doctorow explained that the reasons for enshittification are complex, and not necessarily directly malicious -- but a product of the current business environment and the state of regulation. He thinks the way to flush enshittification is enforcing effective competition. "We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."

The frustrating part of this is that the laws needed to break up the big tech monopolies that allow enshittification, and encourage competition, are already on the books. Doctorow lamented those laws haven't been enforced. In the US, the Clayton Act, the Federal Trade Act, and the Sherman Act are all valid, but have either not been enforced or are being questioned in the courts. However, in the last few years that appears to be changing. Recent actions by increasingly muscular regulatory agencies like the FTC and FCC are starting to move against the big tech monopolies, as well as in other industry sectors. What's more, Doctorow pointed out, these are not just springing from the Democratic administration but are being actively supported by an increasing number of Republicans. He cited Lina Khan, appointed as chair of the FTC in part thanks to the support of Republican politicians seeking change (although the GOP now regularly criticizes her positions).

The sheer size of the largest tech companies certainly gives them an advantage in cases like these, Doctorow opined, noting that we've seen this in action more than 20 years ago. "Think back to the Napster era, and compare tech and entertainment. Entertainment was very concentrated into about seven big firms and they had total unity and message discipline," Doctorow recalled. "Tech was a couple of hundred firms, and they were much larger -- like an order of magnitude larger in aggregate than entertainment. But their messages were all over the place, and they were contradicting each other. And so they just lost, and they lost very badly." Doctorow discusses the detrimental effects of mega-companies on innovation and security, noting how growth strategies focused on raising costs and reducing value can lead to vulnerabilities and employee demoralization. "Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company before striking out on their own to put that big company out of business? Then that dream shrank to working for a few years, quitting and doing a fake startup to get hired back by your old boss in the world's most inefficient way to get a raise," he told the Def Con crowd last August. "Next it shrank even further. You're working for a tech giant your whole life but you get free kombucha and massages. And now that dream is over and all that's left is work with a tech giant until they fire your ass -- like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years. We deserve better than this."

Additionally, Doctorow emphasizes the growing movement toward labor organizing in the tech industry, which could be a pivotal factor in reversing the trend of enshittification. "We're so much closer to tech unionization than we were just a few years ago. Yeah, it's still nascent, and yes, it's easy to double small numbers, but the strength is doubling very quickly and in a very heartening way," Doctorow told The Register. "We're really at a turning point. And some of it is coming from the kind of solidarity like you see with warehouse workers and tech workers."

Ultimately, Doctorow argues it should be possible to reintroduce a more competitive and innovative tech industry environment, where the interests of users, employees, and investors are better balanced.

Meta's latest update to its code generation AI model, Code Llama 70B, is "the largest and best-performing model" yet. From a report: Code Llama tools launched in August and are free for both research and commercial use. According to a post on Meta's AI blog, Code Llama 70B can handle more queries than previous versions, which means developers can feed it more prompts while programming, and it can be more accurate. Code Llama 70B scored 53 percent in accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark, performing better than GPT-3.5's 48.1 percent and closer to the 67 percent mark an OpenAI paper (PDF) reported for GPT-4. Built on Llama 2, Code Llama helps developers create strings of code from prompts and debug human-written work. Meta simultaneously launched two other Code Llama tools last fall, Code Llama -- Python and Code Llama -- Instruct, which focused on specific coding languages.

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it's about what's hiding in plain sight [non-paywalled link] . From a report: A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that's starting to change. In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community's approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community's national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

Barrett's appointment, which hasn't previously been reported publicly, comes after more than a year of work on the strategy led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has for years headed up the government's efforts on OSINT. The challenge with other forms of intelligence-gathering, such as electronic surveillance or human intelligence, can be secretly collecting enough information in the first place. With OSINT, the issue is sifting useful insights out of the unthinkable amount of information available digitally. "Our greatest weakness in OSINT has been the vast scale of how much we collect," says Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise division. Nixon's office has developed a tool similar to ChatGPT that uses AI to sift the ever-growing flood of data. Now available to thousands of users within the federal government, the tool points analysts to the most important information and auto-summarizes content. Government task forces have warned since the 1990s that the US was at risk of falling behind on OSINT. But the federal intelligence community has generally prioritized information it gathers itself, stymying progress.

In response to new EU regulations, Apple on Thursday outlined plans to allow iOS developers to distribute apps outside the App Store starting in March, though developers must still submit apps for Apple's review and pay commissions. Now critics say the changes don't go far enough and Apple retains too much control.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney: They are forcing developers to choose between App Store exclusivity and the store terms, which will be illegal under DMA (Digital Markets Act), or accept a new also-illegal anticompetitive scheme rife with new Junk Fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process. 37signals's David Heinemeier Hansson, who is also the creator of Ruby on Rails: Let's start with the extortion regime that'll befell any large developer who might be tempted to try hosting their app in one of these new alternative app stores that the EU forced Apple to allow. And let's take Meta as a good example. Their Instagram app alone is used by over 300 million people in Europe. Let's just say for easy math there's 250 million of those in the EU. In order to distribute Instagram on, say, a new Microsoft iOS App Store, Meta would have to pay Apple $11,277,174 PER MONTH(!!!) as a "Core Technology Fee." That's $135 MILLION DOLLARS per year. Just for the privilege of putting Instagram into a competing store. No fee if they stay in Apple's App Store exclusively.

Holy shakedown, batman! That might be the most blatant extortion attempt ever committed to public policy by any technology company ever. And Meta has many successful apps! WhatsApp is even more popular in Europe than Instagram, so that's another $135M+/year. Then they gotta pay for the Facebook app too. There's the Messenger app. You add a hundred million here and a hundred million there, and suddenly you're talking about real money! Even for a big corporation like Meta, it would be an insane expense to offer all their apps in these new alternative app stores.

Which, of course, is the entire point. Apple doesn't want Meta, or anyone, to actually use these alternative app stores. They want everything to stay exactly as it is, so they can continue with the rake undisturbed. This poison pill is therefore explicitly designed to ensure that no second-party app store ever takes off. Without any of the big apps, there will be no draw, and there'll be no stores. All of the EU's efforts to create competition in the digital markets will be for nothing. And Apple gets to send a clear signal: If you interrupt our tool-booth operation, we'll make you regret it, and we'll make you pay. Don't resist, just let it be. Let's hope the EU doesn't just let it be. Coalition of App Fairness, an industry body that represents over 70 firms including Tinder, Spotify, Proton, Tile, and News Media Europe: "Apple clearly has no intention to comply with the DMA. Apple is introducing new fees on direct downloads and payments they do nothing to process, which violates the law. This plan does not achieve the DMA's goal to increase competition and fairness in the digital market -- it is not fair, reasonable, nor non-discriminatory," said Rick VanMeter, Executive Director of the Coalition for App Fairness.

"Apple's proposal forces developers to choose between two anticompetitive and illegal options. Either stick with the terrible status quo or opt into a new convoluted set of terms that are bad for developers and consumers alike. This is yet another attempt to circumvent regulation, the likes of which we've seen in the United States, the Netherlands and South Korea. Apple's 'plan' is a shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent -- it must not stand and should be rejected by the Commission."

The 2023 Hugo Awards for science fiction hosted in China sparked controversy by excluding several authors without explanation, raising censorship concerns. Works removed included RF Kuang's bestseller "Babel," an episode of "The Sandman," and author Xiran Jay Zhao. The prestigious Hugo Awards are voted on by science fiction fans and marked the first time the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) was held in China. With no reasons given for the exclusions, revealed only when nomination statistics were posted, questions emerged whether there had been interference or censorship in the process from Chinese authorities. The removed works included Kuang's speculative fiction novel "Babel," which recently won fiction book of the year in the British book awards.

Bruce66423 shares a report: Recently released documents showed that several works or authors -- some with links to China -- had been excluded from the ballot despite receiving enough nominations to be included on their respective shortlists. The excluded nominees include Kuang and Zhao, authors who were born in China but are now based in the west. Concerns have been raised that the authors were targeted for political reasons, connected to the fact that the ruling Chinese Communist party exerts a tight control on all cultural events that take place inside its borders.

[...] Episode six of The Sandman, which is based on a comic book written by Neil Gaiman, was excluded from the best dramatic presentation category, despite receiving enough nominations to be on the final ballot. Gaiman has publicly criticised the Chinese authorities for imprisoning writers. [...] Writing on Facebook, Gaiman said: "Until now, one of the things that's always been refreshing about the Hugos has been the transparency and clarity of the process ... This is obfuscatory, and without some clarity it means that whatever has gone wrong here is unfixable, or may be unfixable in ways that don't damage the respect the Hugos have earned over the last 70 years."

To comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Meta is rolling out changes to give users in Europe the ability to unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts. Neowin reports: One key choice users will have is how information is shared between Facebook and Instagram. Instagram and Facebook users will be able to choose whether or not they want information shared between the apps. Those who currently have connected Instagram and Facebook accounts can opt to keep sharing data between the apps or separate their accounts. Furthermore, Messenger is getting a standalone option. Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook. This new Messenger account will still offer core features like messaging, chat, and voice/video calls, but without Facebook.

For Facebook Marketplace, the options will be a personalized marketplace experience that taps into Facebook profiles or an anonymized experience where buyers and sellers only communicate via email instead of Messenger. For gamers, Meta offers a similar choice to Facebook Gaming. Users can keep their Facebook info linked for access to features like multiplayer, in-game purchases, and personalized recommendations. Alternatively, they can opt for a Facebook-free gaming experience. Finally, an option introduced in November 2023 remains relevant -- European users can choose to pay a subscription to Facebook and Instagram ad-free. It ensures that their information is not used for targeted advertising.

"Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill," writes journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (in an op-ed for New Jersey's Star-Ledger newspaper).

"The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more." I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.

The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World's Fair.

There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society.

Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell...? The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school... Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research.
The text of Jarvis's piece is behind subscription walls, but has apparently been re-published on X by innovation theorist John Nosta.

In one of the most interesting passages, Jarvis remembers visiting Bell Labs in 1995. "The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history."

According to Reuters, Reddit plans to launch its initial public offering (IPO) in March, "moving forward with a listing it has been eyeing for more than three years." From the report: It would be the first IPO of a major social media company since Pinterest's, opens new tab debut in 2019, and would come as Reddit and its peers face stiff competition for advertising dollars from the likes of TikTok and Facebook. The offering would also test the willingness of some Reddit users to back the company's stock market debut.

Reddit, which filed confidentially for its IPO in December 2021, is planning to make its public filing in late February, launch its roadshow in early March, and complete the IPO by the end of March, two of the sources said. The San Francisco-based company, which was valued at about $10 billion in a funding round in 2021, is seeking to sell about 10% of its shares in the IPO, the sources added. It will decide on what IPO valuation it will pursue closer to the time of the listing, according to the sources.