An inquiry group setup by the U.K.’s antitrust authority has provisionally found that Apple’s policies are “holding back innovation in the browsers we use to access the web on mobile phones.”

While the report focuses substantively on Apple, it also highlighted a revenue-sharing agreement with Google, noting that the duo “earn significant revenue” when Google Chrome is used on iOS, which reduces their “financial incentives to compete.” 

The announcement comes in the same week as the Department of Justice (DoJ) in the U.S. said that Google should divest its Chrome browser, after a judge ruled in August that the internet giant was tantamount to an illegal monopoly on online search.

Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start "digital end of life planning" and offered tips on how to do it. The Center's somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn't know their usernames or passwords. The resulting "digital legacy" can be unpleasant to resolve, the agency warns, so suggested four steps to simplify ensure our digital legacies aren't complicated:

• Ensuring family members can unlock your smartphone or computer in case of emergency;
• Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords;
• Consider putting those details in a document intended to be made available when your life ends;
• Use a service that allows you to designate someone to have access to your smartphone and other accounts once your time on Earth ends.

The Center suggests now is the time for it to make this suggestion because it is aware of struggles to discover and resolve ongoing expenses after death. With smartphones ubiquitous, the org fears more people will find themselves unable to resolve their loved ones' digital affairs -- and powerless to stop their credit cards being charged for services the departed cannot consume.

I've looked at several data points and statistics for the past like two decades, and the problem is not that technology is not advancing, or that it is somehow getting worse. No, in fact, it's slowly progressing at a snail's pace but it's definitely advancing. The problem though is that leaders in tech are squandering the opportunities available to them, and hindering those that once made technology great.

The biggest threat is definitely outsourcing. You have an entire country of 50 huge ass states. What do you do with that, exactly? You strip the jobs from those states and transfer them to another country overseas, Philippines, Malaysia Thailand, India probably gets the most of them. Any way to cheapen the product that you're providing in the USA, while simultaneously stealing from those who live in the USA by removing their jobs from them. Long-term, this is not sustainable. Because if you look at layoffs and job shrinkage in the USA and where jobs are actually going, they are not meaningful places. Jobs are being created in lower paying industries, outsourced from higher paying industry is, and the highest paying industries like managerial positions, are not moving at all. It's embarrassing to say the least.

People think that they are doing a good thing by raising the stock price and jacking it up as high as they can go. Sure, your investments are increasing slowly over time. But the pool of investors becomes smaller because less people can afford to invest, and now you don't have an educated group of investors, you have a smaller and smaller list of elites that keeps growing, and isn't wholly owned by everyone in society because the majority of stock owners for big companies are the rich. People who can throw any amount of money they want into a company. So you don't have good decision making for tech companies.

Bad decision making is what we have come to today, big companies making horrible decisions because they are poorly led by elites who don't know what they're doing. Just look at Microsoft if you need any example of this, which of their products is actually well built today? Every one of them functions like crap, their gaming division is collapsing, computers are moving towards copilot which is the worst AI model and platform I have ever seen in my life which is crazy because they I just came out and they are already the worst. But still, they are ruining computing with that, windows 11 is terrible in every single way I can imagine. It is bad decision making every single step of the way.

Then, we have the collapse of industry, the final stage which we are approaching soon. As you can see, big tech in the USA has started to fold in on itself in a way that has never happened before. Microsoft bought out Activision Blizzard and is basically for all intents and purposes, now a monopoly in the tech industry for gaming. Activision Blizzard barely has any competitors, other than maybe EA games which owns so many different smaller gaming companies that it has swallowed up and basically deleted to own the IP for. So tech industry is basically collapsing in on itself, we haven't seen the worst of it yet but soon, there will be very few tech companies left, only big ones, no choices available and if you want to play games or enjoy any sort of technology you'll have very few options.

Bonus: alternative market is growing rapidly which is really concerning. The alternative market is what I call Amazon's scam products. They don't have any logical name to them, each of them has a different name entirely, they're mostly just Chinese gibberish, but you can find watches, tablets, any sort of technology on there, there is an off-brand made in Asia or elsewhere cheaply, that has no reviews other than bot generated reviews to make it seem like a real product, and these are not actually tested for anything, I would assume. Not tested for safety, not tested for dangerous materials chemicals or any of that. This is a symptom of widespread poverty, especially among the middle class. People simply can't afford to buy name brand products anymore. It's not possible to buy a Samsung or Apple watch every 2 years, so what do they do? Go on Amazon and find 'Ufolgewits' brand.

This blog post details GLASSBRIDGE—an umbrella group of four different companies that operate networks of inauthentic news sites and newswire services tracked by the Google Threat Intelligence Group (consisting of Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant). Collectively these firms bulk-create and operate hundreds of domains that pose as independent news websites from dozens of countries, but are in fact publishing thematically similar, inauthentic content that emphasizes narratives aligned to the political interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since 2022, Google has blocked more than a thousand GLASSBRIDGE-operated websites from eligibility to appear in Google News features and Google Discover because these sites violated our policies that prohibit deceptive behavior and require editorial transparency.

Later this month, the United States Justice Department will offer its closing argument in its antitrust case against Google’s advertising technology business. I have a personal interest in this case because I used to be an advertiser. As a marketing executive in the 1990s and into the 2010s, I leveraged changes in consumer behavior to exploit the precision and cost efficiency of digital advertising. But I left my career in marketing after it became clear that digital advertising capabilities were not only oversold but also causing harm by eroding people’s privacy, compounding challenges for publishers, and facilitating the amplification of harmful content. The DOJ’s case exemplifies how significant Google’s role was in creating and sustaining those harms.

I hope that by sharing how this unfolded, I can help convey why everyone – not just advertisers and publishers – has a personal interest in this case.

New phone day for Android users should get a whole bunch easier.

For years, hashing technology has made it possible for platforms to automatically detect known child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) to stop kids from being retraumatized online. However, rapidly detecting new or unknown CSAM remained a bigger challenge for platforms as new victims continued to be victimized. Now, AI may be ready to change that.

Today, a prominent child safety organization, Thorn, in partnership with a leading cloud-based AI solutions provider, Hive, announced the release of an AI model designed to flag unknown CSAM at upload. It's the earliest use of AI technology striving to expose unreported CSAM at scale.

An expansion of Thorn's CSAM detection tool, Safer, the new "Predict" feature uses "advanced machine learning (ML) classification models" to "detect new or previously unreported CSAM and child sexual exploitation behavior (CSE), generating a risk score to make human decisions easier and faster."

The model was trained in part using data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipline, relying on real CSAM data to detect patterns in harmful images and videos. Once suspected CSAM is flagged, a human reviewer remains in the loop to ensure oversight. It could potentially be used to probe suspected CSAM rings proliferating online.

Today, a prominent child safety organization, Thorn, in partnership with a leading cloud-based AI solutions provider, Hive, announced the release of an AI model designed to flag unknown CSAM at upload. It's the earliest AI technology striving to expose unreported CSAM at scale.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/47918240