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.

OpenAI's stated mission is to create the artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google's AI efforts, has the same goal. Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is entering the race. From a report: While he doesn't have a timeline for when AGI will be reached, or even an exact definition for it, he wants to build it. At the same time, he's shaking things up by moving Meta's AI research group, FAIR, to the same part of the company as the team building generative AI products across Meta's apps. The goal is for Meta's AI breakthroughs to more directly reach its billions of users. "We've come to this view that, in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence," Zuckerberg tells me in an exclusive interview. "I think that's important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems."

[...] No one working on AI, including Zuckerberg, seems to have a clear definition for AGI or an idea of when it will arrive. "I don't have a one-sentence, pithy definition," he tells me. "You can quibble about if general intelligence is akin to human level intelligence, or is it like human-plus, or is it some far-future super intelligence. But to me, the important part is actually the breadth of it, which is that intelligence has all these different capabilities where you have to be able to reason and have intuition." He sees its eventual arrival as being a gradual process, rather than a single moment. "I'm not actually that sure that some specific threshold will feel that profound." As Zuckerberg explains it, Meta's new, broader focus on AGI was influenced by the release of Llama 2, its latest large language model, last year. The company didn't think that the ability for it to generate code made sense for how people would use a LLM in Meta's apps. But it's still an important skill to develop for building smarter AI, so Meta built it anyway. External research has pegged Meta's H100 shipments for 2023 at 150,000, a number that is tied only with Microsoft's shipments and at least three times larger than everyone else's. When its Nvidia A100s and other AI chips are accounted for, Meta will have a stockpile of almost 600,000 GPUs by the end of 2024, according to Zuckerberg.

According to Axios, former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg plans to leave Meta's board of directors after holding a seat for the past 12 years. From the report: "With a heart filled with gratitude and a mind filled with memories, I let the Meta board know that I will not stand for reelection this May," Sandberg wrote In a Facebook post announcing her departure. "After I left my role as COO, I remained on the board to help ensure a successful transition," Sandberg said. Acknowledging CEO Mark Zuckerberg's leadership, Sandberg said he and Meta's current leadership team "have proven beyond a doubt that the Meta business is strong and well-positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away." "I will always be grateful to Mark for believing in me and for his partnership and friendship; he is that truly once-in-a-generation visionary leader and he is equally amazing as a friend who stays by your side through the good times and the bad," Sandberg added. She also expressed gratitude to her colleagues and teammates at Meta as well as Meta's board members.

Sandberg left the company she helped build as an executive in September 2022 after 14 years. She remained on Meta's board following her departure, a seat she held for the past 12 years. In announcing her departure, Sandberg said she aimed to focus on more philanthropic work. In the time since leaving the company as an executive, she has focused more her time on her women's leadership philanthropy, Lean In. More recently, Sandberg has also focused on the conversation around rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war, particularly as it pertains to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Axios notes that Meta's revenue "grew 43,000% from $272 million in 2008 to nearly $118 billion in 2021" under Sandberg's business leadership.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In the January 2024 Communications of the ACM, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi minces no words in Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!. He argues that the unintended consequences of the rise of social media and mobile computing include hate mongering on a global scale and a worldwide youth mental health crisis.

"How did the technology that we considered 'cool' just a decade ago become an assault weapon used to hurt, traumatize, and even kill vulnerable people?" Vardi asks. "Looking back at my past columns, one can see the forewarnings. Our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. In the name of efficiency, we aimed at eliminating all friction. In the name of efficiency, it became desirable to move fast and break things, and we allowed the technology industry to become dominated by a very small number of mega corporations. It is time for all computing professionals to accept responsibility for computing's current state. To use Star Wars metaphors, we once considered computing as the 'Rebels,' but it turns out that computing is the 'Empire.' Admitting we have a problem is a necessary first step toward addressing the problems computing has created."
Examples cited in the piece include:

• Amnesty International's 2022 accusation that Meta "substantially contributed" to human rights violations of Myanmar's Rohingya people
• Internal Meta documents saying "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly" in policing harmful content.

So far the ACM's piece has attracted one comment. "Deep thanks for your long-term commitment to ethics and how you articulate clearly its challenges."

reg writes: Twenty-five years ago today, CmdrTaco innocently posted a story entitled "Collection of Fun Video Clips" in the days of T1 lines and invited anyone with the bandwidth to check it out. Even though the term "Slashdot Effect" had already been coined, this was the first time it took down a site. The site owner got a personal call from their ISP, which was later reported in the comments, where he also noted that he was writing a novella called "She Hates My Futon." Many old timers started reading that, although it's never been finished, despite having a Good Reads page, a Facebook page, and several promises that he'll complete it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Facebook recently rolled out a new "Link History" setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. Users can opt-out, but Link History is turned on by default, and the data is used for targeted ads. The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers "with your browsing activity saved in one place," rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you'll "never lose a link again," Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that "When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies."

Facebook promises to delete the Link History it's created for you within 90 days if you turn the setting off. According to a Facebook help page, Link History isn't available everywhere. The company says it's rolling out globally "over time." This is a privacy improvement in some ways, but the setting raises more questions than it answers. Meta has always kept track of the links you click on, and this is the first time users have had any visibility or control over this corner of the company's internet spying apparatus. In other words, Meta is just asking users for permission for a category of tracking that it's been using for over a decade. Beyond that, there are a number of ways this setting might give users an illusion of privacy that Meta isn't offering. "The Link History doesn't mention anything about the invasive ways Facebook monitors what you're doing once you visit a webpage," notes Gizmodo's Thomas Germain. "It seems the setting only affects Meta's record of the fact that you clicked a link in the first place. Furthermore, Meta links everything you do on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other products. Unlike several of Facebook's other privacy settings, Link History doesn't say that it affects any of Meta's other apps, leaving you with the data harvesting status quo on other parts of Mark Zuckerberg's empire."

"Link History also creates a confusing new regime that establishes privacy settings that don't apply if you access Facebook outside of the Facebook app. If you log in to Facebook on a computer or a mobile browser instead, Link History doesn't protect you. In fact, you can't see the Link History page at all if you're looking at Facebook on your laptop."

Slashdot's 10 most-visited stories of 2023 seemed to touch on all the themes of the year, with a story about AI, two about electric cars, two stories about Linux, and two about the Rust programming language.

And at the top of this list, the #1 story of the year drew over 100,000 views...

• Can California's Power Grid Handle a 15x Increase in Electric Cars?

• Linux Desktop Powers Consider Uniting For an App Store

• Conservatives Bombarded With Facebook Misinformation Far More Than Liberals In 2020 Election, Study Suggests

• 'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety

• Ask Slashdot: Where Can You Buy a Desktop PC That Makes Linux Easy to Install?

• Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux

• Rust Safety Is Not Superior To C++, Bjarne Stroustrup Says

• 'Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need To Shut It All Down'

• Truck Thief Gunned Down by Owner After AirTag Gives Away Location

• Symbolic Wyoming Proposal Urges Voluntary Phase-out of EV Purchases by 2035

Interestingly, a story that ran on New Year's Eve of 2022 attracted so much traffic, it would've been the second-most visited story for all of 2023 — if it had run just a few hours later. That story?

Systemd's Growth Over 2022.

TechCrunch reports: Apple's warnings in late October that Indian journalists and opposition figures may have been targeted by state-sponsored attacks prompted a forceful counterattack from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. Officials publicly doubted Apple's findings and announced a probe into device security.

India has never confirmed nor denied using the Pegasus tool, but nonprofit advocacy group Amnesty International reported Thursday that it found NSO Group's invasive spyware on the iPhones of prominent journalists in India, lending more credibility to Apple's early warnings. "Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation," said Donncha Ã" Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab, in the blog post.
Cloud security company Lookout has also published "an in-depth technical look" at Pegasus, calling its use "a targeted espionage attack being actively leveraged against an undetermined number of mobile users around the world." It uses sophisticated function hooking to subvert OS- and application-layer security in voice/audio calls and apps including Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Facetime, Viber, WeChat, Telegram, Apple's built-in messaging and email apps, and others. It steals the victim's contact list and GPS location, as well as personal, Wi-Fi, and router passwords stored on the device...

According to news reports, NSO Group sells weaponized software that targets mobile phones to governments and has been operating since 2010, according to its LinkedIn page. The Pegasus spyware has existed for a significant amount of time, and is advertised and sold for use on high-value targets for multiple purposes, including high-level espionage on iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Thanks to Slashdodt reader Mirnotoriety for sharing the news.

"Billions of people" uses social media every month, notes the Wall Street Journal.. But "fewer and fewer are actually posting."

Instead they're favoring "a more passive experience, surveys of users and research from data-analytics firms say." In an October report from data-intelligence company Morning Consult, 61% of U.S. adult respondents with a social-media account said they have become more selective about what they post. The reasons are varied: People say they feel they can't control the content they see. They have become more protective about sharing their lives online. They also say the fun of social media has fizzled. This lurker mentality is widespread, across Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook along with X and TikTok....

In a survey conducted in the U.S. this summer, research firm Gartner found more than half of respondents believed the quality of social media has declined in the past five years. They cited misinformation, toxicity and the proliferation of bots as reasons it has gotten worse. "The less you trust social-media brands, the less of a good experience you're having," says Gartner analyst Emily Weiss. Users are less likely to share opinions or insight into their lives since the community they are looking for isn't there, she adds. Ads and suggested posts have also sucked the joy out of apps, some users say... The algorithmic spotlight on creators and their hyper-curated content has made some users feel insecure and less likely to share their own photos and videos, says Kevin Tran, media and entertainment analyst at Morning Consult. In turn, some now think of social apps more as sources of entertainment, like YouTube or Netflix.

Gartner estimates that 50% of users will either abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media in the next two years.
Any threat to interacting is a threat to business, the article notes, adding "The companies are responding." They are investing in more private user experiences like messaging, and making interactions more secure. And encouraging people to post to a more intimate audience — as with Instagram's recently expanded Close Friends feature... Meta responded to user complaints, saying it would continue to work on improving recommendations to help creators reach more people. The company added a snooze button that pauses suggested posts for 30 days at a time, and chronological feeds that temporarily only show posts from accounts people follow... Meta began shifting its resources toward messaging, including efforts to enable end-to-end encryption by default across all of its messaging services... TikTok has also shown signs of investing more in the messaging portion of its app, nudging users to chat with people they haven't messaged in a while.
When the Wall Street Journal posted their article on Threads, Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) responded that "People are sharing to feeds less, but to Stories more," and "even more still" in Messages ("even photos and videos"). Mosseri also said that Instagram's Notes feature — basically a post where you cab specify a smaller subset of your followers to see it — "have quickly become a big thing, particularly for young people.

"So it's no so much that people are sharing less," Mosseri argued, "but rather than they're sharing differently."

CNN describes them as "towering waves," driven into California's coastline by powerful storms and "posing a significant risk to people and structures along the coast."

Monstrous, 20-foot-plus waves on Thursday crashed over seawalls and swept away and injured several people, forced rescues and sent a damaging surge of water through coastal California streets.

Dangerous waves continued to slam the coast on Friday, forcing beaches to close. All Ventura County beaches will be closed through New Year's Eve because of the 15- to 20-foot waves expected along the central and Southern California coasts through Saturday evening... Sea levels have risen along most of the California coastline over the past century, NOAA data shows, as global temperatures climb and melt glaciers and ice sheets. Higher sea levels are making coastal flooding events worse and will continue to do so in the future.

The first round of dangerous waves hit alongside high tide Thursday morning. Several people were injured by a huge wave that slammed into Pierpont in the Ventura Beach area... Nearly 20 people were briefly swept away in the incident and eight people were taken to the hospital, Ventura officials said.
One bystander even filmed what CNN calls a"monster" wave, "the surge sweeping people and vehicles down the street... The massive waves pummeling the coastline, reeking havoc, flooding streets and businesses."

CNN's report also includes footage from nearly 300 miles north, showing a wave flooding a beachfront restaurant's courtyard in Santa Cruz, California. ("I just feel bad for the restaurants," says one local. "I know they just went through renovations from the last time this happened.") CNN's original article notes the sheriff's office there briefly issued an evacuation warning for some areas for part of Thursday, including one "where seawater filled beachside roadways and pushed against some homes, CNN affiliate KION reported."

And CNN's video report concludes by noting that "Parts of the California coast could see towering waves through the weekend, coastal flood and high surf alerts stretching from the southern border to the Bay Area."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Social media companies collectively made over $11 billion in U.S. advertising revenue from minors last year, according to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published on Wednesday. The researchers say the findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.

To come up with the revenue figure, the researchers estimated the number of users under 18 on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube in 2022 based on population data from the U.S. Census and survey data from Common Sense Media and Pew Research. They then used data from research firm eMarketer, now called Insider Intelligence, and Qustodio, a parental control app, to estimate each platform's U.S. ad revenue in 2022 and the time children spent per day on each platform. After that, the researchers said they built a simulation model using the data to estimate how much ad revenue the platforms earned from minors in the U.S. The platforms themselves don't make public how much money they earn from minors. [...]

According to the Harvard study, YouTube derived the greatest ad revenue from users 12 and under ($959.1 million), followed by Instagram ($801.1 million) and Facebook ($137.2 million). Instagram, meanwhile, derived the greatest ad revenue from users aged 13-17 ($4 billion), followed by TikTok ($2 billion) and YouTube ($1.2 billion). The researchers also estimate that Snapchat derived the greatest share of its overall 2022 ad revenue from users under 18 (41%), followed by TikTok (35%), YouTube (27%), and Instagram (16%). "As concerns about youth mental health grow, more and more policymakers are trying to introduce legislation to curtail social media platform practices that may drive depression, anxiety, and disordered eating in young people," said senior author Bryn Austin, professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harms to young people, they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children."

theodp writes: Back in May 2021, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org touted the signing of a licensing agreement with WhiteHat Jr., allowing the edtech company with a controversial past (Whitehat Jr. was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, an edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm) to integrate Code.org's free-to-educators-and-organizations content and tools into their online tutoring service. Code.org did not reveal what it was charging Byju's to use its "free curriculum and open source technology" for commercial purposes, but Code.org's 2021 IRS 990 filing reported $1M in royalties from an unspecified source after earlier years reported $0. Coincidentally, Whitehat Jr. is represented by Aaron Kornblum, who once worked at Microsoft for now-President Brad Smith, who left Code.org's Board just before the lawsuit was filed.

Fast forward to 2023 and the bloom is off the rose, as Court records show that Code.org earlier this month sued Whitehat Education Technology, LLC (Exhibits A and B) in what is called "a civil action for breach of contract arising from Whitehat's failure to pay Code.org the agreed-upon charges for its use of Code.org's platform and licensed content and its ongoing, unauthorized use of that platform and content." According to the filing, "Whitehat agreed [in April 2022] to pay to Code.org licensing fees totaling $4,000,000 pursuant to a four-year schedule" and "made its first four scheduled payments, totaling $1,000,000," but "about a year after the Agreement was signed, Whitehat informed Code.org that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled license payments." While the original agreement was amended to backload Whitehat's license fee payment obligations, "Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended" and "has continued to access Code.org's platform and content."

That Byju's Whitehat Jr. stiffed Code.org is hardly shocking. In June 2023, Reuters reported that Byju's auditor Deloitte cut ties with the troubled Indian Edtech startup that was once an investor darling and valued at $22 billion, adding that a Byju's Board member representing the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had resigned with two other Board members. The BBC reported in July that Byju's was guilty of overexpanding during the pandemic (not unlike Zuck's Facebook). Ironically, the lawsuit Exhibits include screenshots showing Mark Zuckerberg teaching Code.org lessons. Zuckerberg and Facebook were once among the biggest backers of Code.org, although it's unclear whether that relationship soured after court documents were released that revealed Code.org's co-founders talking smack about Zuck and Facebook's business practices to lawyers for Six4Three, which was suing Facebook.

Code.org's curriculum is also used by the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) initiative, but it is unclear what royalties -- if any -- Amazon pays to Code.org for the use of Code.org curriculum. While the AFE site boldly says, "we provide free computer science curriculum," the AFE fine print further explains that "our partners at Code.org and ProjectSTEM offer a wide array of introductory and advance curriculum options and teacher training." It's unclear what kind of organization Amazon's AFE ("Computer Science Learning Childhood to Career") exactly is -- an IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search failed to find any hits for "Amazon Future Engineer" -- making it hard to guess whether Code.org might consider AFE's use of Code.org software 'commercial use.' Would providing a California school district with free K-12 CS curriculum that Amazon boasts of cultivating into its "vocal champion" count as "commercial use"? How about providing free K-12 CS curriculum to children who live where Amazon is seeking incentives? Or if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies Amazon "funds computer science coursework" for schools as he attempts to counter a Congressional antitrust inquiry? These seem to be some of the kinds of distinctions Richard Stallman anticipated more than a decade ago as he argued against a restriction against commercial use of otherwise free software.

"10 years later, the demise of Google Reader still stings," writes PC Magazine. But "Time marches on and corporate priorities shift. Here are the products and services that took a final bow in 2023..."

Some of the highlights? 'Clubhouse' Clones
In the early days of the pandemic, when Zoom happy hours and sourdough starters proliferated, Clubhouse burst onto the scene with an app that facilitated audio-only chats between groups large and small. Tech giants quickly churned out their own Clubhouse clones, but these party-line throwbacks were not long for this world. Facebook was the first to go, ditching its Live Audio Rooms in December 2022, but 2023 also saw the end of Reddit Talk, Spotify Live, and Amazon's live radio DJ Amp app. [X Spaces is still around]

Amazon Smile
Launched in 2013, AmazonSmile saw Amazon donate 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases made through smile.amazon.com to charity, with consumers able to choose from over a million charitable organizations to support. On Feb. 20, however, the program shut down because it "has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped," Amazon said at the time.

NFTs on Facebook and Instagram
Remember non-fungible tokens (NFTs)? Somehow, crypto bros convinced people to spend big bucks on what are essentially JPEGs. (Don't try to convince me otherwise.) Meta got in on the action in 2022, allowing Instagram users to create NFTs and Facebook users to share them. It didn't exactly set either social network on fire and Meta said in March it would be "winding down digital collectibles."

Cortana on Windows
In June, AI claimed its latest victim by coming after Microsoft's Cortana. The voice assistant never really made a splash compared to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, and with the launch of Bing Chat (now Copilot), Microsoft removed Cortana as a built-in app on Windows.
Also on the list are Blizzard's Overwatch League, third-party Reddit clients, and Venmo as a payment option on Amazon (effective this January 10).

Looking further into the future, Gmail's Basic HTML View disappears in 2024, while Wordpad will eventually be removed in an unspecified future release of Windows.

Apple is in negotiations with major news and publishing organizations (source paywalled; alternative source), "seeking permission to use their material in the company's development of generative artificial intelligence systems," reports the New York Times. From the report: The technology giant has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles [...]. The news organizations contacted by Apple include Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens. The negotiations mark one of the earliest examples of how Apple is trying to catch up to rivals in the race to develop generative A.I., which allows computers to create images and chat like a human. [...]

Some of the publishers contacted by Apple were lukewarm on the overture. After years of on-again-off-again commercial deals with tech companies like Meta, the owner of Facebook, publishers have grown wary of jumping into business with Silicon Valley. Several publishing executives were concerned that Apple's terms were too expansive, according to three people familiar with the negotiations. The initial pitch covered broad licensing of publishers' archives of published content, with publishers potentially on the hook for any legal liabilities that could stem from Apple's use of their content.

Apple was also vague about how it intended to apply generative A.I. to the news industry, the people said, a potential competitive risk given Apple's substantial audience for news on its devices. Still, some news executives were optimistic that Apple's approach might eventually lead to a meaningful partnership. Two people familiar with the discussions struck a positive note on the long-term prospects of a deal, contrasting Apple's approach of asking for permission with behavior from other artificial intelligence-enabled companies, which have been accused of seeking licensing deals with news organizations after they had already used their content to train generative models. Further reading: Apple's AI Research Signals Ambition To Catch Up With Big Tech Rivals

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear. Some might say it's well past time. As Google declared, "Over the last several years, legitimate activity in text-based Usenet groups has declined significantly because users have moved to more modern technologies and formats such as social media and web-based forums. Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam." True, these days, Usenet's content is almost entirely spam, but in its day, Usenet was everything that Twitter and Reddit would become and more.

In 1979, Duke University computer science graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived of a network of shared messages under various topics. These messages, also known as articles or posts, were submitted to topic categories, which became known as newsgroups. Within those groups, messages were bound together in threads and sub-threads. [...] In 1980, Truscott and Ellis, using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), hooked up with the University of North Carolina to form the first Usenet nodes. From there, it would rapidly spread over the pre-Internet ARPANet and other early networks. These messages would be stored and retrieved from news servers. These would "peer" to each other so that messages to a newsgroup would be shared from server to server and to user to user so that within hours, your messages would reach the entire networked world. Usenet would evolve its own network protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to speed the transfer of these messages. Today, the social network Mastodon uses a similar approach with the ActivityPub protocol, while other social networks, such as Threads, are exploring using ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and the other social networks that support ActivityPub. As the saying goes, everything old is new again.

[...] Usenet was never an organized social network. Each server owner could -- and did -- set its own rules. Mind you, there was some organization to begin with. The first 'mainstream' Usenet groups, comp, misc, news, rec, soc, and sci hierarchies, were widely accepted and disseminated until 1987. Then, faced with a flood of new groups, a new naming plan emerged in what was called the Great Renaming. This led to a lot of disputes and the creation of the talk hierarchy. This and the first six became known as the Big Seven. Then the alt groups emerged as a free speech protest. Afterward, fewer Usenet sites made it possible to access all the newsgroups. Instead, maintainers and users would have to decide which one they'd support. Over the years, Usenet began to decline as discussions were replaced both by spam and flame wars. Group discussions were also overwhelmed by flame wars. "If, going forward, you want to keep an eye on Usenet -- things could change, miracles can happen -- you'll need to get an account from a Usenet provider," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "I favor Eternal September, which offers free access to the discussion Usenet groups; NewsHosting, $9.99 a month with access to all the Usenet groups; EasyNews, $9.98 a month with fast downloads, and a good search engine; and Eweka, 9.50 Euros a month and EU only servers."

"You'll also need a Usenet client. One popular free one is Mozilla's Thunderbird E-Mail client, which doubles as a Usenet client. EasyNews also offers a client as part of its service. If you're all about downloading files, check out SABnzbd."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A bill that mandates tech giants pay news outlets for their content has come into effect in Canada amid an ongoing dispute with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta over the law. Some have hailed it as a game-changer that sets out a permanent framework that will see a steady drip of funds from wealthy tech companies to Canada's struggling journalism industry. But it has also been met with resistance by Google and Meta -- the only two companies big enough to be encompassed by the law. In response, over the summer, Meta blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadians. Google looked set to follow, but after months of talks, the federal government was able to negotiate a deal with the search giant as the company has agreed to pay Canadian news outlets $75 million annually.

No such agreement appears to be on the horizon with Meta, which has called the law "fundamentally flawed." If Meta is refusing to budge, so is the government. "We will continue to push Meta, that makes billions of dollars in profits, even though it is refusing to invest in the journalistic rigor and stability of the media," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Friday. According to a study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, the views of Canadian news on Facebook dropped 90% after the company blocked access to news on the platform. Local news outlets have been hit particularly hard.

"The loss of journalism on Meta platforms represents a significant decline in the resiliency of the Canadian media ecosystem," said Taylor Owen, a researcher at McGill and the co-author of the study. He believes it also hurts Meta's brand in the long run, pointing to the fact that the Canada's federal government, as well as that of British Columbia, other municipalities and a handful of large Canadian corporations, have all pulled their advertising off Facebook and Instagram in retaliation.