Netflix has said it plans to be in gaming for years to come. Now the company is trying to figure out how to make money from it, a potential shift in strategy for the streamer. From a report: Executives at the streaming giant have had discussions in recent months about how to generate revenue from its games, according to people familiar with the discussions. Netflix games are currently free for all subscribers, part of a strategy to keep users coming back to the streaming service when their favorite shows are between seasons as well as to attract new fans.

Some of the ideas that have been discussed include in-app purchases, charging for more sophisticated games it is developing or giving subscribers to its newer ad-supported tier access to games with ads in them, the people said. Such moves would mark a pivot for Netflix, which has resisted putting ads or in-app purchases in its games. [...] Netflix encourages open debate internally on its strategy, which is a key pillar of its culture, and such discussions don't mean the company will decide to monetize games.

All new cars and vans bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035, according to the latest legal mandate updated this week. From a report: The date for all new petrol and diesel cars to be banned was originally set for 2030. However, in September, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pushed this date back to 2035. The government says this is giving consumers more time to make the switch and deal with the UK's charging infrastructure.

The transition will still be challenging. Eighty percent of new cars and 70 percent of new vans sold in Great Britain must be zero emission by 2030, increasing to 100 percent by 2035. While the government points to statistics indicating a 41 percent increase in zero-emission vehicles registered for the first time -- note, the vast majority of newly registered vehicles still remain conventionally powered -- charging infrastructure is an altogether different story. The government boasts of more than 50,000 public charge points, an increase of 44 percent year on year, but not all chargers are born equal. According to research from RAC, a local roadside assistance business, the government has failed to meet its target of having six or more rapid or ultra-rapid electric vehicle chargers at every motorway service area in England.

Alex Hern reports via the Guardian: The email newsletter service Substack is facing a user revolt after its chief executive defended hosting and handling payments for "Nazis" on its platform, citing anti-censorship reasons. In a note on the site published in December, the chief executive, Hamish McKenzie, said the firm "doesn't like Nazis," and wished "no one held these views." But he said the company did not think that censorship -- by demonetising sites that publish extreme views -- was a solution to the problem, and instead made it worse. Some of the largest newsletters on the service have threatened to take their business elsewhere if Substack does not reverse its stance.

On Tuesday Casey Newton, who writes Platformer -- a popular tech newsletter on the platform with thousands of subscribers paying at least $10 a month -- became the most prominent yet. [...] Substack takes a 10% cut of subscriptions from paid newsletters, meaning the loss of Platformer alone could represent six figures of revenue. Other newsletters have already made the jump. Talia Lavin, a journalist with thousands of paid subscribers on her newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich, moved to a competing service, Buttondown, on Tuesday. Substack's leadership team said in a statement: "As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation."

smooth wombat writes: The advent of streaming services heralded a new era of movie watching. No longer tied to an inconvenient time at a theater, movies could now be watched at your convenience any time of the day or night in your own home. However, with that convenience comes a sinister side: those same movies disappearing from streaming services. Once the movie is removed from the streaming service you can't watch it again. As a result, more people, particularly younger people, are buying DVDs, and even records, to preserve their ability to watch and listen to what they want when they want. Before his release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan encouraged fans to embrace "a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you". From the BBC article:

Other directors have chimed in to sing the praises of physical media. James Cameron told Variety:"The streamers are denying us any access whatsoever to certain films. And I think people are responding with their natural reaction, which is 'I'm going to buy it, and I'm going to watch it any time I want.'" Guillermo del Toro posted on X that "If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to come." His tweet prompted people to reply, sharing evidence of their vast DVD collections. [...]

Intuit is being questioned by US lawmakers who say federal tax credits the company received could have been better spent to build a free government alternative to Intuit's popular online tax preparation software, TurboTax. From a report: "For years, Intuit's corporate lobbyists have argued that the federal government should not set up a program for Americans to file their taxes online and for free because it would be too costly for taxpayers," the lawmakers, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, wrote in a letter to the company. "Your company's disclosure reveals that Intuit's research tax break from 2022 alone could have been enough to fund a year of a free e-File program for millions of Americans."

The lawmakers asked Intuit to provide details on its research expenses dating to 2018. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, were joined on the letter by Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat from California. The Internal Revenue Service, in a report to Congress last year, estimated it would cost $64 million to $249 million annually for the agency to run a free-filing program. In the fiscal year ending in July 2023, Mountain View, California-based Intuit received $106 million in federal research and experimentation credits, which amounted to about 4% of its total R&D expenses, according to a regulatory filing.

"For several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in," reports the Los Angeles Times: Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left. Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed...

The reversal, largely in response to the state's high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California's overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments. State budget analysts recently projected a record $68 billion deficit in the next fiscal year because of a 25% drop in personal income tax collection in 2023. Some city, county and other local taxing authorities, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, have also recorded revenue declines. With investors and high-income taxpayers receiving substantial compensation in the form of stocks, last year's sluggish stock market accounted for a major share of the decline in state income tax revenues. So did layoffs and financial weakness in the tech sector. But rising unemployment in the state and the growing flight of professionals, business operators and others making good salaries were also notable contributors. And those factors will be harder to reverse, at least in the foreseeable future.

"There's a price to pay for the movement of middle- and upper-income people and corporations," said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University who has researched the flight from California and the resulting threat to the state's fiscal outlook. "People who are leaving are taking their tax dollars with them."

The accelerating exodus from California in recent years, of both companies and people, has been well documented. The pandemic-induced rise in remote work, inflated housing prices and changing social conditions have spurred more Californians to pull up stakes... Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi analyzed moves in and out of California for The Times using Equifax credit data, to zero in on the age of the movers. He found that since the pandemic in early 2020, California has lost residents in every age group, but by a significant margin the biggest net out-migration came from those 35 to 44 years old. "This is probably motivated by the severe housing affordability crisis in California," Zandi said. "It's all but impossible for them to become homeowners in the state."

Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who has written about demographic trends in migration, thinks the increased loss of higher-educated Californians to other states in recent years can be traced in significant part to the rise of remote work since the pandemic. As more employers call workers back to the office, and the share of fully remote work appears to have settled at around 10% of all employees, McGhee expects the net out-migration from California to slow...

Even if the outflow of residents reverts to pre-pandemic levels, the broader economic climate doesn't bode well for the state's budget and economic outlook, at least in the immediate future. The U.S. economy is slowing, and California's economy is decelerating faster than the nation's, with the state's unemployment rate, most recently at 4.8%, already a full point higher than nationwide.
The article clarifies that "it's not just the sheer numbers of people who have left. What's different is that in each of the prior two years, more than 250,000 Californians with at least a bachelor's degree moved out, while an average of 175,000 college graduates from other states settled in California, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. In prior periods over the last two decades, that balance was about even or slightly in California's favor."

And besides billionaires, "There's been a broader exodus of ordinary Californians in the upper-income spectrum as well. In the tax filing years 2020 and 2021, the average gross income of taxpayers who had moved from California to another state was about $137,000. That was up from $75,000 in 2015 and 2016, according to migration and personal income data from the Internal Revenue Service."

"Electric cars are already upending America," argues a new article in the Atlantic, citing booming sales and new models that are "finally starting to push us into the post-gas age." Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. "This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles," Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me.... Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn't go half that distance....

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that's only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers... The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars — no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks... If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that's roughly what's going on here.

"The transition to EVs is completely changing everything," Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. "It's changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It's changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that...." Job cuts are already happening, and more may come — even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit.

None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

After losing more than $5 billion in the past year, the world's largest traditional entertainment companies -- Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount -- are contemplating cuts and possible mergers to ultimately help better compete with Netflix. The Financial Times reports (via Ars Technica): Shari Redstone, Paramount's billionaire controlling shareholder, has effectively put the company on the block in recent weeks. She has held talks about selling the Hollywood studio to Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, people familiar with the matter say. Paramount chief executive Bob Bakish also discussed a possible combination over lunch with Warner CEO David Zaslav in mid-December. In both cases the discussions were said to be at an early stage and people familiar with the talks cautioned that a deal might not materialize.

Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Paramount's deal discussions were a reflection of the "complete and utter panic" in the industry. "TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing," he said. "Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs." But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution. "For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars," analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. "Now, we are finally starting to feel the hangover and the weight of the unpaid bar bill." For companies that have been trying to compete with Netflix, Nathanson added, "the shakeout has begun."

After a bumpy 2022, Netflix has set itself apart from rivals -- most notably by being profitable. Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street's expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers -- the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump. "Netflix has pulled away," says John Martin, co-founder of Pugilist Capital and former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. For its rivals, he said, the question is "how do you create a viable streaming service with a viable business model? Because they're not working." The leading streaming services aggressively raised prices in 2023. Now, analysts, investors and executives predict that consolidation could be ahead next year as some of the smaller services combine or bow out of the streaming wars.

Boeing instructed customer airlines to inspect their 787 Max jets for loose bolts, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced this week. From a report: The request comes after the manufacturer discovered two aircraft with missing bolts in the rudder control system, raising concerns about faults across all aircraft. "The issue identified on the particular airplane has been remedied," Boeing told CNN in a statement. "Out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending operators inspect their 737 Max airplanes and inform us of any findings." The inspection request entails a two-hour probe of the aircraft's safety-critical parts for each of the approximately 1,300 787 Max jets in service, the FAA said.

Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky and Larry David. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage. The New Yorker: Tips have long provided a convenient way to foist payment obligations onto others. Kerry Segrave, the author of the comprehensive history "Tipping," identified the gratuity's potential origins, in Europe during the late Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay "vails" to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with "To Insure Promptitude." Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to "tip." By the end of the nineteenth century, some business owners demanded their employees' tips. Some cafes charged waiters a fee for the privilege of working there. In France, tips were placed directly into a wooden box called le tronc, controlled by the proprietor. French waiters went on strike in 1907, identifying two of the great evils of their profession: le tronc, and a ban on mustaches. They eventually prevailed on both counts.

American visitors to Europe brought tipping back to the United States. Perhaps no entity did more to spread the practice than the Pullman Company. George Pullman preferred hiring formerly enslaved Black men as railroad porters. He paid them as little as possible, and used tips as a subsidy. The system spread as far as the train lines. By the nineteen-twenties, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters estimated that the policy had saved the Pullman Company a hundred and fifty million dollars. The porters had long fought to eliminate tipping. Their efforts had been rebuffed by the Pullman Company's president and, later, chairman, Robert Todd Lincoln.

Once the practice gets its hooks in, it can be hard to dislodge. In New York, at the turn of the twentieth century, some enterprising concessionaires paid restaurants thousands of dollars a year to run their coatrooms. These concessionaires became known as the tip trust. At least one dressed young women in theatrical French-maid outfits to collect coats, hats, and tips; the young women turned over all revenues to the trust. (When skimming was discovered, the trusts banned pockets.) Men joked that they bought a hat for five dollars and paid seventy-three dollars a year to wear it. A hat manufacturer sold roll-up models that men could hide inside their coats. The greatest of the tip-trust barons, known as the Hatcheck King, brought in the equivalent of sixty million dollars a year. The trusts were powerful politically. Today, businesses in New York are not allowed to take their employees' tips, with one exception: hat-and-coat checks.

Amazon aims to make online car purchases as seamless as getting everyday essentials. But it's not as easy as selling other items. WSJ: Car sales represent Amazon's next bet in e-commerce dominance and come after the Covid-19 pandemic made online car purchases more popular. Amazon executives want to make buying vehicles through its website as simple as purchasing toilet paper or dog food, and the company is looking to strike broad partnerships with carmakers. The company is set to face several challenges in expanding the program beyond a pilot phase for employees starting early next year: One is dealerships, which remain at the center of most new-car sales and depend on service revenue for profit incentives. A second will be trying to get customers who visit its website mainly for lower-priced items to turn to the platform for one of the biggest purchases of their lives. Amazon also will have to navigate different government regulations.

"Customers tell us it's really hard to buy a car," Fan Jin, Amazon's director of vehicle sales, said in an interview. Vehicle-buying software is fragmented, with dealers using a range of software providers. Varying regulations across states also make it difficult. "It's a process that we've heard time and again could use improvement, and we have an opportunity to go and prove it," she said. When the new service launches later next year, Amazon said shoppers will be able to complete every step of the car-buying process through its website. Only new Hyundai vehicles will be available at the start. Consumers will have different financing options, but the company said it is still working through details. Eventually, Amazon wants to expand to trade-in vehicles and used cars. Many dealers might be loath to accept a high volume of online sales because they make a significant amount of money on service and warranty deals that customers agree to when they finance a car purchase.

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.

Nigeria's central bank has lifted a ban on transacting in cryptocurrencies, while saying global trends had shown a need to regulate such activities, the bank said in its latest circular. From a report: The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in Feb. 2021 barred banks and financial institutions from dealing in or facilitating transactions in crypto assets, citing money laundering and terrorism financing risks. Subsequently Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in May last year published regulations for digital assets that signalled Africa's most populous country was trying to find a middle ground between an outright ban on crypto assets and their unregulated use.

In a circular dated Dec. 22, the CBN said current trends globally have shown there is a need to regulate the activities of virtual asset service providers (VASPs), which include cryptocurrencies and crypto assets. The latest guidelines spell out how banks and financial institutions (FI) should open accounts, provide designated settlement accounts and settlement services and act as channels for forex inflows and trade for firms transacting in crypto assets. VASPs would need to be licensed by the Nigerian SEC to engage in the crypto business.

Alphabet's Google considered changing its app store pricing model to circumvent a regulatory crackdown, but abandoned a proposal to charge a set fee per app after it became clear that could cost the company billions of dollars, according to documents released late week. From a report: Google created Project Everest in 2021 to reconsider the Play Store billing model, according to the documents, which were released as part of an antitrust suit by Epic Games. Google last week lost the suit brought by the maker of Fortnite when a federal jury found the tech giant abused its monopoly power over the app store. Sparked by mounting pressure from regulators and developers over Google Play's hefty 30% commission, the presentation showed the search giant was concerned about staving off what it saw as potential regulatory overreach.

"We can defend the status quo for a few months," Google said in the presentation. "Making proposed changes sooner may help support reasonable legislation, position Google as a leader, and prevent more draconian legislation." Project Everest explored charging developers piecemeal service fees for putting their apps or games in the Play Store, with additional fees for user downloads, updates and referrals. But the company estimated that model created "potential for significant loss" from $1 billion to $2 billion for apps and $6 billion to $9 billion for games.

The New York Times reports: Last month, I received an alarming email from someone I did not know: Rui Zhu, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University Bloomington. Mr. Zhu had my email address, he explained, because GPT-3.5 Turbo, one of the latest and most robust large language models (L.L.M.) from OpenAI, had delivered it to him. My contact information was included in a list of business and personal email addresses for more than 30 New York Times employees that a research team, including Mr. Zhu, had managed to extract from GPT-3.5 Turbo in the fall of this year. With some work, the team had been able to "bypass the model's restrictions on responding to privacy-related queries," Mr. Zhu wrote.

My email address is not a secret. But the success of the researchers' experiment should ring alarm bells because it reveals the potential for ChatGPT, and generative A.I. tools like it, to reveal much more sensitive personal information with just a bit of tweaking. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it does not simply search the web to find the answer. Instead, it draws on what it has "learned" from reams of information — training data that was used to feed and develop the model — to generate one. L.L.M.s train on vast amounts of text, which may include personal information pulled from the Internet and other sources. That training data informs how the A.I. tool works, but it is not supposed to be recalled verbatim... In the example output they provided for Times employees, many of the personal email addresses were either off by a few characters or entirely wrong. But 80 percent of the work addresses the model returned were correct.
The researchers used the API for accessing ChatGPT, the article notes, where "requests that would typically be denied in the ChatGPT interface were accepted..."

"The vulnerability is particularly concerning because no one — apart from a limited number of OpenAI employees — really knows what lurks in ChatGPT's training-data memory."

And there was a broader related warning in another article published the same day. Microsoft may be building an AI silo in a walled garden, argues a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's school of information, calling the development "detrimental for technology development, as well as costly and potentially dangerous for society and the economy." [In January] Microsoft sealed its OpenAI relationship with another major investment — this time around $10 billion, much of which was, once again, in the form of cloud credits instead of conventional finance. In return, OpenAI agreed to run and power its AI exclusively through Microsoft's Azure cloud and granted Microsoft certain rights to its intellectual property...

Recent reports that U.K. competition authorities and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission are scrutinizing Microsoft's investment in OpenAI are encouraging. But Microsoft's failure to report these investments for what they are — a de facto acquisition — demonstrates that the company is keenly aware of the stakes and has taken advantage of OpenAI's somewhat peculiar legal status as a non-profit entity to work around the rules...

The U.S. government needs to quickly step in and reverse the negative momentum that is pushing AI into walled gardens. The longer it waits, the harder it will be, both politically and technically, to re-introduce robust competition and the open ecosystem that society needs to maximize the benefits and manage the risks of AI technology.

According to Axios, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, met with Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish to discuss a possible merger. "The combination would create a news and entertainment behemoth that would likely trigger further industry consolidation," reports Axios. From the report: Zaslav also has spoken to Shari Redstone, who owns Paramount's parent company, about a deal. WBD's market value was around $29 billion as of Wednesday, while Paramount's was just over $10 billion, so any merger would not be of equals. The meeting between Zaslav and Bakish, which sources say lasted several hours, took place at Paramount's headquarters in Times Square.

The duo discussed ways their companies could complement one another. For example, each company's main streaming service -- Paramount+ and Max -- could merge to better rival Netflix and Disney+. It's unclear whether WBD would buy Paramount Global or its parent company, National Amusements Inc. (NAI), but a source familiar with the situation says that both options are on the table. WBD is said to have hired bankers to explore the deal.

The deal could drive substantial synergies. WBD could use its international distribution footprint to boost Paramount's franchises, while Paramount's children's programing assets could be essential to WBD's long-term streaming ambitions. CBS News could be combined with CNN to create a global news powerhouse. CBS' crime dramas, such as "NCIS" and "Criminal Minds," could be combined with Investigation Discovery and TruTV. CBS Sports' footprint could be combined with WBD's. For example, CBS and WBD's Turner Sports currently share TV rights for March Madness.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed sweeping changes to bolster the key federal rule that has protected children's privacy online, in one of the most significant attempts by the U.S. government to strengthen consumer privacy in more than a decade. The changes are intended to fortify the rules underlying the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, a law that restricts the online tracking of youngsters by services like social media apps, video game platforms, toy retailers and digital advertising networks. Regulators said the moves would "shift the burden" of online safety from parents to apps and other digital services while curbing how platforms may use and monetize children's data.

The proposed changes would require certain online services to turn off targeted advertising by default for children under 13. They would prohibit the online services from using personal details like a child's cellphone number to induce youngsters to stay on their platforms longer. That means online services would no longer be able to use personal data to bombard young children with push notifications. The proposed updates would also strengthen security requirements for online services that collect children's data as well as limit the length of time online services could keep that information. And they would limit the collection of student data by learning apps and other educational-tech providers, by allowing schools to consent to the collection of children's personal details only for educational purposes, not commercial purposes. [...]

The F.T.C. began reviewing the children's privacy rule in 2019, receiving more than 175,000 comments from tech and advertising industry trade groups, video content developers, consumer advocacy groups and members of Congress. The resulting proposal (PDF) runs more than 150 pages. Proposed changes include narrowing an exception that allows online services to collect persistent identification codes for children for certain internal operations, like product improvement, consumer personalization or fraud prevention, without parental consent. The proposed changes would prohibit online operators from employing such user-tracking codes to maximize the amount of time children spend on their platforms. That means online services would not be able to use techniques like sending mobile phone notifications "to prompt the child to engage with the site or service, without verifiable parental consent," according to the proposal. How online services would comply with the changes is not yet known. Members of the public have 60 days to comment on the proposals, after which the commission will vote.

Most companies are not ready to deploy generative AI at scale because they lack strong data infrastructure or the controls needed to make sure the technology is used safely, according to the chief executive of the consultancy Accenture. From a report: The most hyped technology of 2023 is in an experimental phase at most companies and macroeconomic uncertainty is holding back IT spending generally, Julie Sweet told the Financial Times in an interview ahead of the company publishing quarterly results on Tuesday. Accenture reported another big jump in revenues from generative AI projects in the three months to November 30, with $450mn in bookings compared with $300mn over the previous six months. But they remain small relative to group sales of $64bn annually.

Corporate executives are keen to deploy the technology to understand data across their organisation better or to automate more customer service, Sweet said. "The thing that is going to hold it back, though, isâ...âmost companies do not have mature data capabilities and if you can't use your data, you can't use AI. That said, in three to five years we expect this to be a big part of our business." Accenture and other consulting groups have boasted of multibillion-dollar investments in generative AI, including hiring and training staff, in the hope of a windfall from deploying the technology to clients across the world.

Sweet said executives were being âoeprudentâ in rolling out the technology, amid concerns over how to protect proprietary information and customer data and questions about the accuracy of outputs from generative AI models. "We are still at the stage where most CEOs, asked if there is someone in their organisation who can tell them where AI is being used, what the risks are and how they're being mitigated, the answer is still 'no.'"

Travel website Expedia wants to get people to start their travel search on its site with AI instead of using an external search engine. From a report: Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels. The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site. It's a long-term plan to shift the balance of power on the web -- albeit one that's still in its earliest stages for the company.

Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia, says the goal is to get users started on their trips in one place. Expedia hopes to produce recommendations trained with its library of flight and hotel information and informed by users' travel preferences. "By being able to train large language models on our data, this rich 70 petabytes' worth of data we've gathered over the years, we can eventually recommend places to go and stay and do and continue to refine and personalize that," Naidu tells The Verge in an interview. According to Naidu, when people plan trips, they often start by going to a search engine to look for a destination. Only then do they visit services like Expedia to start booking travel and accommodation. There's nothing inherently wrong with going to Google and typing "best vacation that isn't cold and not that far from New York," but Naidu believes there's value in streamlining the travel planning process even more.

In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning story. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that a Southern California maker of pornographic films named Strike 3 Holdings is also "a copyright troll," according to U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth: Lamberth cwrote in 2018, "Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM." He likened its litigation strategy to a "high-tech shakedown." Lamberth was not speaking off the cuff. Since September 2017, Strike 3 has filed more than 12,440 lawsuits in federal courts alleging that defendants infringed its copyrights by downloading its movies via BitTorrent, an online service on which unauthorized content can be accessed by almost anyone with a computer and internet connection.

That includes 3,311 cases the firm filed this year, more than 550 in federal courts in California. On some days, scores of filings reach federal courthouses — on Nov. 17, to select a date at random, the firm filed 60 lawsuits nationwide... Typically, they are settled for what lawyers say are cash payments in the four or five figures or are dismissed outright...

It's impossible to pinpoint the profits that can be made from this courthouse strategy. J. Curtis Edmondson, a Portland, Oregon, lawyer who is among the few who pushed back against a Strike 3 case and won, estimates that Strike 3 "pulls in about $15 million to $20 million a year from its lawsuits." That would make the cases "way more profitable than selling their product...." If only one-third of its more than 12,000 lawsuits produced settlements averaging as little as $5,000 each, the yield would come to $20 million... The volume of Strike 3 cases has increased every year — from 1,932 in 2021 to 2,879 last year and 3,311 this year.

What's really needed is a change in copyright law to bring the statutory damages down to a level that truly reflects the value of a film lost because of unauthorized downloading — not $750 or $150,000 but perhaps a few hundred dollars.
Anone of the lawsuits go to trial. Instead ISPs get a subpoena demanding the real-world address and name behind IP addresses "ostensibly used to download content from BitTorrent..." according to the article. Strike 3 will then "proceed by sending a letter implicitly threatening the subscriber with public exposure as a pornography viewer and explicitly with the statutory penalties for infringement written into federal copyright law — up to $150,000 for each example of willful infringement and from $750 to $30,0000 otherwise."

A federal judge in Connecticut wrote last year that "Given the nature of the films at issue, defendants may feel coerced to settle these suits merely to prevent public disclosure of their identifying information, even if they believe they have been misidentified."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Beerismydad for sharing the article.