Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to), page 8

A good question is how often tactics like this have worked given how unlikely the discovery was?

A bunch of gamers in France are trying to get regulators to stop game companies from shutting down online games after a few years.

They argue that they bought a good that the seller has rendered inoperable not a service.

This won’t work. You can’t force companies to maintain online services forever.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/stop-killing-games-campaign/

AI companies calling each other out as copyright theives is my jam.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-04/youtube-says-openai-training-sora-with-its-videos-would-break-the-rules?embedded-checkout=true

I remember all of the skepticism about how Threads was not really going to integrate with fediverse. And now it’s here and actually quite mundane. Joe Biden’s Threads account can now be followed on Mastodon.

Interoperability between social networks is here.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24119353/joe-biden-threads-mastodon-activitypub-fediverse

Google has settled the lawsuit suing it for the fact that Incognito mode in Chrome didn’t actually stop Google’s websites from tracking you.

The company will destroy “billions of data points” collected about users to settle the lawsuit.

https://www.engadget.com/google-says-it-will-destroy-browsing-data-collected-from-chromes-incognito-mode-172121598.html

20 years ago today, Google launched a product so amazing that people thought it was an April Fool’s joke. Email with 1GB of storage for free when Hotmail was 2MB free and charged $20/year for 10MB was insane. It broke the internet.

A far cry from Google of today.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1241959412/google-launched-gmail-20-years-ago-many-thought-it-was-an-april-fools-prank

Whenever people complain about their favorite intellectual property from their childhood becoming “woke” it’s usually because it simply went over their heads as kids.

Boeing is an example of the observation that by the time you realize you've made a strategic mistake, it's too late.

At least 3 class action lawsuits have been filed by iPhone owners who claim Apple inflated the cost of its products through anticompetitive conduct.

I've long argued it's straightforward to show consumer harm from Apple's actions. It looks like the DOJ and multiple lawyers agree.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/consumers-sue-apple-taking-page-us-justice-department-lawsuit-2024-03-25/

The BBC used generative AI to help draft promotional emails about Doctor Who and got a bunch of complaints. They will no longer use the technology because of that.

This is a bit silly and is akin to complaining that a spell checker was used to send you email spam. There is a lot of Luddite energy around generative AI and overreactions from companies both for and against it

https://deadline.com/2024/03/bbc-doctor-who-ai-complaints-1235867333/

A key form of value creation by smartphones was creating more time for consumer entertainment. You could now use social media, stream movies or play games from anywhere at anytime.

However all that time is now used up. Every new consumer app or platform has to compete for your time against TikTok, Fortnite and Invincible season 2.

VCs hoping for the “next platform” to solve this problem are waiting in vain unless that platform can add more than 24 hours to a day.

https://spyglass.org/being-real/

Really incredible that someone can be good at running companies full of rocket scientists (SpaceX) or brain surgeons (NeuraLink) but then totally 💩the 🛏️ running a social media site.

It really makes you wonder…

A cold take on Microsoft + Inflection AI.

• Microsoft is hedging its bet on OpenAI by investing in Mistral and acquihiring most of Inflection AI.

• Despite raising $1.3B in funding, Inflection seems to be a struggling “me too” which has now pivoted away from chatbots to now build enterprise APIs.

• The CEO, chief scientist and others jumping ship to Microsoft while Microsoft offers to make investors whole is effectively the startup failing.

The AI space is speed running a tech generation

The interesting thing about the EU's Digital Markets Act is that it's "we're just going to treat all the biggest American tech companies as monopolies" as a law. It's both unprecedented and amazing that the Biden administration sleepwalked into it.

This is like the EU's version of the TikTok divestment law but killing multiple birds with one stone.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/apple-google-set-to-be-hit-by-first-probes-under-eu-digital-law

Apple is going to face a lawsuit about AirTags being negligently designed as a tool that enables stalkers after failing to get the case dismissed.

There’s a good discussion here on how much misuse of your product are you liable for because your threat model didn’t consider them?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-15/apple-must-face-suit-claiming-air-tags-are-weapon-of-stalkers

Time passing makes terrible ideas attractive again. Nazism has gone from being abhorrent to taboo to being provocative over 80 years.

I expect collectivism to be next. Instead of corporations exploiting workers just embrace communist practices and everyone farms, cooks, etc.

The punchline is that millions of people died in every country that tried this yet I can see leftists online getting closer to these ideas every day.

The FTC is investigating Reddit selling access to its trove of user data to Google for $60M to train their AI.

I doubt any laws are being broken here but it’s definitely interesting to see social media companies literally selling user data with no regulatory oversight.

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/15/reddit-generative-ai-license-user-data

Few things show how much the media has memory like goldfish as the handwringing around the TikTok “ban”.

1. It’s not a ban. It’s a forced sale.

2. The US has banned lots of Chinese companies and this is mild compared to Huawei and ZTE.

3. There’s lots of precedent for this.

TikTok’s employee stock grants contain a non-disparagement clause that allows them to take back your RSUs if you talk bad about the company.

This takes NDAs to the next level. 🤯

https://fortune.com/2024/03/08/tiktok-non-disparagement-clause-shares-seized/

No matter how bad it looks to postpone a meeting you were supposed to host at the last minute, it would have been even worse to show up unprepared.