The Epic vs. Apple legal drama is over, with the US Supreme Court refusing to hear either side's requests to appeal the decisions of lower courts. The end result of all this is Apple now has to allow 3rd party in-app payments for iOS apps. That means, on the US App Store at least, Apple has released the "StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement (US)", with a mandatory scary warning pop-up for users and a 12%-27% commission on any payments made via that link. Developers also need to still provide in-app purchases as an option and give Apple a report every month of each sale made via the link so you can pay Apple its cut. Sounds like a pain in the arse and not worth the hassle - just as Apple intended. Epic's CEO has already said they plan to legally challenge Apple's "bad-faith compliance plan".
Last year the Australian government said "we want your views on how the Australian Government can mitigate any potential risks of AI and support safe and responsible AI practices". 6 months, over 500 submissions, 345 virtual town hall attendees and over 200 roundtable attendees later, the government has come up with a summary of what they heard (or at least their interpretation of what they were told). They're gonna do more consultations, but "immediate actions are being taken", which include: "a voluntary AI Safety Standard", "options for voluntary labelling and watermarking of AI-generated materials" and "an expert advisory group to support the development of options for mandatory guardrails". Alright, cool, good luck with that voluntary bullshit, it's worked so well in the past! The full discussion paper is on the Department of Industry, Science and Resource's website.
A study by German academics has observed "an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns" - i.e: the incentives for affiliate marketing are driving such intense SEO that the search engines can't keep up and as a result, much of what search engines give us as results are affiliate marketing not genuine product reviews, the type of content this study focused on. To make matters worse, "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry — a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI". Lots of outlets are reporting this study as Google sucks, but Google was actually the best (barely) out of Bing and DuckDuckGo at combating SEO affiliate junk. It's an existential problem for all search engines.
A quick heads up that if you want to let the government know that its amendments to the already draconian Online Safety Act to expand the Basic Online Safety Expectations with such vague language and apply to such a broad range of online services, that it would effectively break end-to-end encryption in Australia, then make a submission before the 16th of February. If you've never done something like this before, Digital Rights Watch and Electronic Frontiers Australia have a handy how-to. If you want more background info on why these amendments suck, read Digital Rights Watch's submission for inspiration. Give those bastards in government a piece of your mind - it's one of the few ways plebs like us get an opportunity to influence decision makers!
Orbital nighttime peeks through the International Space Station's cupola, or "window to the world," nearly 270 miles above the Indian Ocean. In the right window, the cymbal-shaped solar array that powers Northrop Grumman's Cygnus spacecraft can be seen. (NASA Johnson / Flickr)
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