Apple's cynical changes to the App Store and iOS to appease the EU have pissed off practically everyone it was supposed to benefit. Mozilla told The Verge is "extremely disappointed" and the changes Apple made make it "as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari". Spotify made a blog post with their take on the situation and their summary is "Apple has proposed an unworkable alternative" and "Apple is forcing developers to stay with the status quo - this alternative that offers no alternative at all completely negates the goal of the DMA". The Coalition for App Fairness said "Apple clearly has no intention to comply with the DMA" and is "a shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent". Fun times ahead.
AI-generated art is doing what it does best - making deep fake nudes of Taylor Swift - and now that those lewd images escaped the creepy nerd part of the internet and serendipitously viewed by Swifites on normie social media, something needs to suddenly be done about it. The White House's press secretary said they want Congress to make new lews against it and begged social media platforms to "enforce their own rules". Of course the social network doing nothing about the spread of AI-generated deep fake nudes of Taylor Swift is X. It wasn't until this morning that X just blocked people searching for "Taylor Swift" and said they are "actively removing" the images, but they're still easy to find on X.
Cam Wilson over at Crikey busted the AFP using Clearview AI again, despite previously saying it doesn't, any third parties it works with doesn't and that AFP staff who participate in task forces only use "approved tools" - which Clearview AI is not. The usage was part of Operation Renewed Hope, a global program to review unsolved cases of child sexual exploitation by running material in Interpol's Child Sexual Exploitation and the USA's Homeland Security databases through Clearview AI to see if there's any people they can identify and question. The AFP supplied material for Interpol's database and that's how AFP data fell in to Clearview AI without the permission of the victim in the data and who was already known to the AFP anyways as they had already gone to police to disclose their abuse. When confronted about this, the AFP "gave Crikey a general statement that didn't seem to answer our question about whether the agency believes it should have access to Clearview AI’s technology" - i.e: they don't care.
We all know Amazon dominates online retail I didn't realise the immense capture of the online retail market Amazon has until I read this 2021 report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Their research found that Amazon earned US$121b in seller fees in 2021, which if it was split out into its own company, would be in the top 25 businesses in terms of revenue in the world. 60% of Americans that want to buy something online "start their product search on Amazon, rather than a search engine" and "in 15 of 23 major product categories, the tech giant captures more than 70% of online transactions". As the report surmises, "companies large and small must either sell on Amazon or forfeit access to much of the market" - which is a problem as Amazon keeps jacking up the cut of each sale they keep for themselves, knowing they have sellers by the balls.
Zen and The Art Of Macintosh by Michael Green (Sketch the Cow / The Internet Archive)
📻 I Only Want You - Eagles Of Death Metal
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