Google has agreed to an $8 million settlement with Texas over deceptive ads for its Pixel 4 smartphone, in which radio DJs were hired to provide testimonials without being given the phone to use. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made the announcement last week. Ars Technica reports: At issue was Google's trustworthiness as an advertiser after the tech giant "hired radio DJs to record and broadcast detailed testimonials about their personal experiences with the Pixel 4," but then "refused to provide the DJs with a phone for them to use," Paxton said. The tech giant had previously settled claims from the Federal Trade Commission and six other states for approximately $9 million, and Paxton seemed proud that his "settlement recovers $8 million for the State of Texas alone."

Paxton said that "if Google is going to advertise in Texas, their statements better be true." He decided to take action to hold Google "accountable for lying to Texans for financial gain," saying that large companies should not expect "special treatment under the law." "Texas will do whatever it takes to protect our citizens and our state economy from corporations' false and misleading advertisements," Paxton said.

Three companies "supplied millions of fake public comments to influence a 2017 proceeding by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to repeal net neutrality rules," announced New York's attorney general this week.

Their investigation "found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent," as well as "widespread fraud and abusive practices" Collectively, the three companies have agreed to pay $615,000 in penalties and disgorgement. This is the second series of agreements secured by Attorney General James with companies that supplied fake comments to the FCC... As detailed in a report by the Office of the Attorney General, the nation's largest broadband companies funded a secret campaign to generate millions of comments to the FCC in 2017. These comments provided "cover" for the FCC to repeal net neutrality rules. To help generate these comments, the broadband industry engaged commercial lead generators that used advertisements and prizes, like gift cards and sweepstakes entries, to encourage consumers to join the campaign.

However, nearly every lead generator that was hired to enroll consumers in the campaign instead simply fabricated consumers' responses. As a result, more than 8.5 million fake comments that impersonated real people were submitted to the FCC, and more than half a million fake letters were sent to Congress. Two of the companies, LCX and Lead ID, were each engaged to enroll consumers in the campaign. Instead, each independently fabricated responses for 1.5 million consumers. The third company, Ifficient, acted as an intermediary, engaging other lead generators to enroll consumers in the campaign. Ifficient supplied its client with more than 840,000 fake responses it had received from the lead generators it had hired.

The Office of the Attorney General's investigation also revealed that the fraud perpetrated by the various lead generators in the net neutrality campaign infected other government proceedings as well. Several of the lead generation firms involved in the broadband industry's net neutrality comment campaigns had also worked on other, unrelated campaigns to influence regulatory agencies and public officials. In nearly all of these advocacy campaigns, the lead generation firms engaged in fraud. As a result, more than 1 million fake comments were generated for other rulemaking proceedings, and more than 3.5 million fake digital signatures for letters and petitions were generated for federal and state legislators and government officials across the nation.

LCX and Lead ID were responsible for many of these fake comments, letters, and petition signatures. Across four advocacy campaigns in 2017 and 2018, LCX fabricated consumer responses used in approximately 900,000 public comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Similarly, in advocacy campaigns between 2017 and 2019, Lead ID fabricated more than half a million consumer responses. These campaigns targeted a variety of government agencies and officials at the federal and state levels...

LCX and its principals will pay $400,000 in penalties and disgorgement to New York and $100,000 to the San Diego District Attorney's Office.
Thanks to Slashdot reader gkelley for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act." Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.

Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
- Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
- Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently; - Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
- Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.

Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."

Google plans to introduce generative artificial intelligence into its advertising business over the coming months, as Big Tech groups rush to incorporate the groundbreaking technology into their products. From a report: According to an internal presentation to advertisers seen by the Financial Times, the Alphabet-owned company intends to begin using the AI to create novel advertisements based on materials produced by human marketers. "Generative AI is unlocking a world of creativity," the company said in the presentation, titled "AI-powered ads 2023." Google already uses AI in its advertising business to create simple prompts that encourage users to buy products. However, the integration of its latest generative AI, which also powers its Bard chatbot, means it will be able to produce far more sophisticated campaigns resembling those created by marketing agencies.

According to the presentation, advertisers can supply "creative" content such as imagery, video, and text relating to a particular campaign. The AI will then "remix" this material to generate ads based on the audience it aims to reach, as well as other goals such as sales targets. One person familiar with Google's presentation said they were worried the tool could spread misinformation, because text produced by AI chatbots can confidently state falsehoods. "It is optimized to convert new customers and has no idea what the truth is," the person said. Google told the FT it planned to put firm guardrails in place to prevent such errors, known as "hallucinations," when it rolls out its new generative AI features in the coming months.

After launching My Ad Center last fall, Google is now introducing the Ads Transparency Center as a "searchable hub of all ads served from verified advertisers." 9to5Google reports: The Ads Transparency Center will let you view all the advertisements a company has run using Google's networks. Each ad includes the date it last ran, format (text, video, etc.), and what region (country) it was shown in: "For example, imagine you're seeing an ad for a skincare product you're interested in, but you don't recognize the brand, or you're curious to understand if you recognize other ads from this brand. With the Ads Transparency Center, you can look up the advertiser and learn more about them before purchasing or visiting their site."

You can search by advertiser (with approximate ad quantity noted) or website, with filters for topics, time, and country. Once an advertiser is selected, Google will show the feed of ads with the ability to select for more details. You'll be able to access it directly here or from the My Ad Center, which lets you customize advertising that appears in Search, Discover, Shopping, and YouTube.

Vivaldi is a browser founded by Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and launched in 2016 with a heavy focus on privacy and customizations. As someone who has worked on the internet since 1992, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially when it comes to advertising. XDA spoke with Tetzchner at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us." From the report: For the unfamiliar, Android's Privacy Sandbox can track users by creating an offline profile on them and show relevant advertisements based on that. It's a multi-year initiative to introduce more private advertising solutions to end-users and is made possible thanks to the Topics API and FLEDGE. Its goal is to prioritize user privacy by default but still maintain the mobile ecosystem dependent on advertising to support free and ad-supported apps. This is an exclusive-to-Android solution that uses a standalone SDK, separate from the rest of the application code, with the aim of eventually replacing Ad ID. However, Tetzchner doesn't see a difference between standard tracking and companies using the Topics API.

"For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it's a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you... No, no, no, that's wrong. That's just wrong," he tells me. It's not quite where the data goes that seems to bother him the most, but what that data can be used to achieve. He mentions how this data can be used to influence how people vote, a la Cambridge Analytica. Whether that data is on your device or not is irrelevant; political advertisements will still appear regardless. "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored. The idea that you are collecting data to provide ads... I can understand having access to a lot of data to provide a service, but that's not the same as profiling your users."

[...] Tetzchner is deeply disheartened with the state of it. In fact, he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following you." He points out that paywalls have become commonplace across the internet when that wasn't the case 15 years ago. "How is it then that we needed the change that actually created that situation?" he asks. He argues that advertisements are less profitable as a whole thanks to widespread tracking. Advertisers previously paid more because they knew exactly where their advertisements were going. Now with algorithms and Google Ads, not everything is high quality, even if those algorithms try to scan pages for quality content.

"Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible," confesses a staff writer for the Atlantic. "But I don't know what it was." Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

"It does start to drive you mad," says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site's AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, "you get a green dollar sign when it's monetizable, and it goes yellow if it's not." Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time — and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it's better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say....

YouTube operates a three-strike policy for infractions: The first strike is a warning; the second prevents creators from making new posts for a week; and the third (if received within 90 days of the second) gets the channel banned.... Although many types of content may never run afoul of the guidelines...political discussions are subject to the whims of algorithms. Absent enough human moderators to deal with the estimated 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube uses artificial intelligence to enforce its guidelines. Bots scan auto-generated transcripts and flag individual words and phrases as problematic, hence the problem with saying heroin. Even though "educational" references to drug use are allowed, the word might snag the AI trip wire, forcing a creator to request a time-consuming review....

[T]alk with everyday creators, and they are more than willing to work inside the rules, which they acknowledge are designed to make YouTube safer and more accurate. They just want to know what those rules are, and to see them applied consistently. As it stands, Gold compared his experience of being impersonally notified of unspecified infractions to working for HAL9000, the computer overlord from 2001: A Space Odyssey. ["They don't tell me if it's Nazis, heroin, or anything," Gold says later. "You're just left wondering what it was."]
The article notes that YouTube's algorithm seems to flag people who are debunking misinformation as misinformation. (One study found that purveyors of controversial content simply stop worrying about YouTube demonetizing their videos, using them to direct viewers instead to their "affiliate" links offering commissions, or to their content on other still-monetized platforms.)

In just the last three months of 2022, YouTube made almost $8 billion in advertising revenue, the article concludes. "There's a very good reason journalism is not as profitable as that: Imagine if YouTube edited its content as diligently as a legacy newspaper or television channel — even quite a sloppy one. Its great river of videos would slow to a trickle."

Microsoft has started discussing with ad agencies how it plans to make money from its revamped Bing search engine powered by generative artificial intelligence as the tech company seeks to battle Google's dominance. Reuters reports: In a meeting with a major ad agency this week, Microsoft showed off a demo of the new Bing and said it plans to allow paid links within responses to search results, said an ad executive, who spoke about the private meeting on the condition of anonymity. [...] Microsoft expects the more human responses from the Bing AI chatbot will generate more users for its search function and therefore more advertisers. Advertisements within the Bing chatbot may also enjoy more prominence on the page compared to traditional search ads. Microsoft is already testing ads in its early version of the Bing chatbot, which is available to a limited number of users, according to the ad executive and ads seen by Reuters this week.

Despite the absence of cryptocurrency ads, this year's Super Bowl still managed some geek-friendly advertisements. There was even a riff on "the classic intro from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the live-action series that ran from 1989-1991," according to Kotaku: the infamous Mario Rap, which advertised Mario's plumbing business (and in its 2023 version featured the URL for a website).

[T]hat website is indeed up and running, and is everything you would hope it would be from a struggling small business servicing the Brooklyn and Queens areas. There's excessive animation, broken image links, a careers page (still under construction, sadly) and even a novelty mouse cursor.
Kotaku's article includes both versions of the rap, along with reactions from Twitter. (Apparently the phone number in the advertisement really works).

There were also several ads from major tech companies. Google purchased a long ad touting their Pixel phone's ability to remove people from photos (starring Amy Schumer, Doja Cat, and Giannis Antetokounmpo), while Workday drew attention to its enterprise-grade finance and HR software with an ad in which actual rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Jett, blues player Gary Clark and members of KISS all urged the software's corporate users to stop calling themselves "rock stars".

Other tech-company ads aired from E*Trade, SquareSpace, and a star-studded Uber One ad in which rapper Puff Daddy auditions singers for their new jingle.

There were also the obligatory celebrity reunions — like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, or the actors from Breaking Bad. But for comic book geeks, a trailer for D.C.'s new movie The Flash included a surprise appearance by Batman — play by both Ben Affleck and by a 71-year-old Michael Keaton, a full 34 years after Keaton played the caped crusader in Tim Burton's 1989 movie Batman. "Worlds collide in The Flash when Barry uses his superpowers to travel back in time in order to change the events of the past," according to a press release cited by People. James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy and new co-CEO of DC Studios, recently said, according to Deadline, that The Flash "is probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made." He added that the film's storyline "resets everything" for the franchise.
The last Blockbuster video rental store in America played its own advertising prank during the Super Bowl. They announced their own ad which could only be viewed on their Instagram feed during halftime -- or in person at their store in Bend, Oregon. But, as CNN points out, "the store is also renting VHS copies of it for $2."

And for those geeks concerned about the drawbacks of climate change-fighting vehicles, RAM trucks ran an ad about "Premature Electrification" — for consumers excited about electric vehicles but "lacking the confidence about getting and being able to keep a charge." (Although a disclaimer printed at the bottom of the ad warned "Get excited, but not too excited. Pre-production model shown. Availability in the U.S. expected late 2024. Range lengthening technology to come later.")

Last year's Super Bowl broadcast was "crypto-happy" as 100 million Americans saw at least three commercials promoting cryptocurrency. This year things will be different. According to the Associated Press, there will be no cryptocurrency advertisements aired during this year's game. From the report: Last year's Super Bowl was dubbed the "Crypto Bowl" because four cryptocurrency companies -- FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and eToro -- ran splashy commercials. It was part of a larger effort by crypto companies to break into the mainstream with sports sponsorships. But in November, FTX filed for bankruptcy and its founder was charged in a scheme to defraud investors. This year, two crypto advertisers had commercials "booked and done" and two others were "on the one-yard line," [Mark Evans, executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports] said. But once FTX news broke, those deals weren't completed. Now, "There's zero representation in that category on the day at all," he said.

Evans said most Super Bowl ads sold much earlier than usual, with more than 90% of its Super Bowl ad inventory gone by the end of the summer, as established advertisers jockeyed for prime positions. But the remaining spots sold slower. Partly that was due to the implosion of the crypto space, as well as general advertiser concerns about the global economy, Evans said. Last year, NBC sold out of its ad space briskly and said an undisclosed number of 30-second spots went for $7 million, a jump from the $6.5 million that 2021's ads went for.

A 13-minute segment on a recent episode of CBS's 60 Minutes appeared to be a news story on Novo Nordisk's weight-loss drug Wegovy, but was actually a sponsored promotion violating federal regulations, according to the nonprofit public health advocacy organization Physicians Committee. From a report: The group filed a complaint with the Food and Drug Administration last week, arguing that the segment, which aired on January 1, violates the FDA's "fair balance" requirement. This law requires that drug advertisements give a fair balance to a drug's risks and benefits. The Physicians Committee claims that CBS's 60 Minutes received advertising payments from Novo Nordisk prior to the coverage, and that the aired segment only included experts who had also been paid by Novo Nordisk. The segment lauded the drug with words and phrases such as "highly effective," "safe," "impressive," "fabulous," and "robust," but didn't delve into side effects or alternative treatments and strategies for weight loss.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to a new study, a little over 70 percent of prescription drugs advertised on television were rated as having "low therapeutic value," meaning they offer little benefit compared with drugs already on the market. The study, appearing in JAMA Open Network, aligns with longstanding skepticism that heavily promoted drugs have high therapeutic value. "One explanation might be that drugs with substantial therapeutic value are likely to be recognized and prescribed without advertising, so manufacturers have greater incentive to promote drugs of lesser value," said the authors, which include researchers at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.

For the new study, researchers led by Aaron Kesselheim, who leads Harvard's Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), looked at monthly lists of the top-advertised drugs on TV in the US between 2015 and 2021. They also looked up therapeutic value ratings for those drugs from independent health assessment agencies in Canada, France, and Germany. The value ratings were based on drugs' therapeutic benefit, safety profile, and strength of evidence, as compared with existing drugs. Any drug rated "moderate" or above was classified as a "high value" drug for the study. For drugs with multiple ratings, the study authors used the most favorable rating, which they note could overestimate the proportion of higher-benefit drugs.

Of the top advertised drugs, 73 had at least one value rating. Collectively, pharmaceutical companies spent $22.3 billion on advertising for those 73 drugs between 2015 and 2021. Even with the generous ratings, 53 of the 73 drugs (roughly 73 percent) were categorized as low-benefit. Collectively, these low-benefit drugs accounted for $15.9 billion of the ad spending. The top three low-benefit drugs by dollar amount were Dulaglutide (type 2 diabetes), Varenicline (smoking cessation), and Tofacitinib (rheumatoid arthritis). The outlook for change is bleak, the authors note. "Policy makers and regulators could consider limiting direct-to-consumer advertising to drugs with high therapeutic or public health value or requiring standardized disclosure of comparative effectiveness and safety data," Kesselheim and his colleagues concluded, "but policy changes would likely require industry cooperation or face constitutional challenge." The report notes that the U.S. is "one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials." The other is New Zealand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Headlines: In a recent voice assistant test conducted by popular YouTuber MKBHD, Google Assistant emerged as the best voice assistant, outperforming Apple's Siri, Samsung's Bixby, and Amazon's Alexa. There are several reasons why Google Assistant stands out as the top voice assistant. Firstly, it is backed by Google's powerful artificial intelligence, which helps it to understand and interpret user requests accurately. Secondly, Google Assistant has access to a vast amount of data from its users, which allows it to provide a more personalized experience. The company also collects data from various services such as search, maps, and email to improve the functionality and performance of Google Assistant. However, one of the biggest reasons behind Google Assistant's win is its strong conversation skills. Google's AI uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the meaning and context of words and phrases, which helps to keep the conversation going.

Apple's Siri took second place in the competition. It performed well when asked to complete tasks like setting a timer and searching the internet, but struggled when asked to answer more complex or conversational questions. Additionally, Siri was unable to perform tasks that required interacting with apps. In contrast, Samsung's Bixby excelled in device control thanks to its integration with Samsung devices. This integration enables Bixby to control system settings and integrate more deeply with apps than any other voice assistant. Bixby can send text messages, check sports scores, turn down screen brightness, check your calendar, launch apps, and more.

Of all the digital assistants, Amazon's Alexa performed the worst in the voice assistant test. This is due to several factors. Firstly, Alexa is not integrated into smartphones, which means it lacks the personalized touch of other voice assistants. This can make it feel less intuitive and less convenient to use. Secondly, Alexa's inaccuracy in finding facts, inability to interact with other apps and poor conversational models all combine to create a subpar experience when used on a phone. These issues make it difficult for Alexa to provide useful and reliable information, which is a key expectation of voice assistants. In addition, the inclusion of Amazon advertisements between tasks can be annoying and disrupt the user experience.

A year-long investigation by a Congressional commitee is accussing the fossil fuel industry of spreading climate disinformation. CNN reports: The committee found the fossil fuel industry is "posturing on climate issues while avoiding real commitments" to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers said it has sought to portray itself as part of the climate solution, even as internal industry documents reveal how companies have avoided making real commitments. "Today's documents reveal that the industry has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come," House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney told CNN in a statement....

The committee said documents uncovered also showed the fossil fuel industry has presented natural gas as a so-called "bridge fuel" to transition to cleaner sources of energy, all while doubling down on its long-term reliance on fossil fuels with no clear plan of action to fully transition to clean energy....

In a 2016 email from a BP executive to John Mingé, then-Chairman and President of BP America, and others, about climate and emissions, an employee assessed that the company often adopted an obstructionist strategy with regulators, noting, "we wait for the rules to come out, we don't like what we see, and then try to resist and block."

"The fossil fuel industry has of late been involved in extensive "greenwashing" — misleading claims in advertisements, particularly on social media, claiming or suggesting that they are "Paris aligned," and that they are committed to meaningful solutions," Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor who has studied the fossil fuel industry's rebuke of climate science and consulted for law firms that have brought suits against the fossil fuel industry, told CNN. "Numerous analyses shows that these claims are untrue."

Apple has "paused ads related to gambling and a few other categories on App Store product pages" after developers and commentators criticized the types of advertisements showing up in the iPhone's App Store, according to a statement from spokesperson Trevor Kincaid. From a report: On Tuesday, Apple announced that companies could advertise their apps on the store pages for other apps, putting their icon in the "you might also like" section. Almost immediately, developers started showing examples of ads for gambling apps being recommended under their apps. Twitter is also full of screenshots of very inappropriate ad placements: one Twitter user shows a slot machine app being advertised alongside gambling addiction recovery apps, and there are examples of other betting apps being advertised on pages for apps aimed towards children, adult video chat apps showing up on the Apple Books page, and dating apps being placed under apps designed to improve existing relationships.

Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: This past June, Stockholm introduced a new shared bicycle service to replace Stockholm City Bikes, which operated from 2006 until 2018. Since that service shut down, the city was one of many around the world swamped by shared e-scooters that littered sidewalks and streets. As a result, the city wanted to reboot a bikeshare program with a more modern approach without succumbing to the trappings of the dockless scooter and bike craze. The new service, Stockholm eBikes, started relatively small, with just over a thousand bikes this past summer, but will grow to more than 5,000 for this coming summer. However, this is not just another bikeshare program. First, all of the bikes are electric. And second, it is ridiculously, ludicrously, almost impossibly cheap to use.

The first time I stumbled on the Stockholm eBikes website and did a currency conversion, I figured there must be some mistake. The website says a 24-hour plan "just to unlock a bike and enjoy Stockholm eBikes for 24 hours" costs 11 Krona, or 98 cents at current conversion rates. A 7-day plan is 26 Krona ($2.32). A 30-day plan is 35 Krona ($3.12). And a whole year of unlimited 90-minute e-bike rides costs a measly 157 Krona, or just about $14. If you want to ride more than 90 minutes in one trip, you will be charged an extra 11 Krona (about $1) per extra hour. This is not simply cheap by e-bike rental standards. It is several orders of magnitude cheaper. And it is a story with global implications for the bikeshare industry and urban transportation in general. Because bikeshare systems have entered a paradox. The invention and proliferation of e-bikes have the potential to make bikeshare systems even more useful thanks to the effortless pedaling including on hills and higher speeds. But virtually every system has surcharges to ride an e-bike, making it expensive to use over time. "It's a truly unique system," [said Daniel Mohlin, Nordics Regional Manager for Inurba Mobility, the company that won the seven-year contract for the new bikeshare program]. "Both in terms of the technology and the setup and the pricing in combination with it." So I asked Mohlin the obvious question: How can Stockholm offer essentially the same product and service for so much less than basically every other city? The obvious assumption would be that, unlike most every bikeshare system in the world which is expected to break even without public subsidies in contrast to traditional public transportation like buses and subways, the government is helping to foot the bill of Stockholm eBikes. [...] But Mohlin said that isn't the case in Stockholm. The city isn't giving Inurba any money.

Mohlin says they plan to run a profitable bikeshare system by doing one thing most other systems do and another thing he says is too often missing. The first thing, the one that everyone does, is advertising. Inurba will be selling advertisements on the bikes and on 350 advertising locations near where the bikes are parked. But the brand will remain Stockholm eBikes. [...] Advertising will only get them so far. The entire bikeshare system, Mohlin said, has been designed to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. And this, he says, is the biggest difference between Stockholm's system and the ones other cities offer. [...] Inurba adopted a hybrid solution that some e-scooter companies have piloted in a few cities. Instead of traditional docks, there are virtual stations, painted lines on the ground with a sign post. Users lock and unlock the bikes via an app. Locking the bikes requires being within one of the station's geofenced zones. These virtual stations not only save Inurba lots of money not having to outfit and maintain physical docks, but it also provides operational flexibility. Because there is some wiggle room in the geofence by nature of GPS's imprecision, the stations can "swallow a lot more bikes" than traditional docks, as Mohlin put it. This helps avoid the always-empty-or-always-full phenomenon many docked bikeshare systems struggle with.

Mohlin also talked up Inurba's IT infrastructure that helps them learn which stations tend to get full at what time of day and which tend to get empty. He says this enables them to be more efficient with bike-balancing efforts, that it's "basically, do the right task in the right order at the right time." Another smaller money-saver is the company uses cargo e-bikes to go around swapping out batteries, which has to happen about once every three days per bike on average. This means battery swappers aren't stuck in traffic driving a van and can swap out more batteries per worker. So far, the model appears to be working. "55,000 active users took almost 450,000 trips, averaging six per day per bike, which is generally considered high for a bikeshare system," writes Gordon. "Plus, the average trip was almost 40 minutes, much higher than most bikeshare schemes with mechanical bikes, including Helsinki where Inurba also operates the bikeshare system where the average trip is between 12 and 16 minutes."

"We're really looking forward for next year when we can get the full system in operation," Mohlin said. "But I'm confident this is a really unique system that is going to have an impact."

Uber is launching a dedicated advertising arm in a push to cash in on a captive audience and tap the higher-margin revenue stream. From a report: The new division encompasses ad offerings on Uber's ride-hailing and food-delivery apps. On Uber Eats, for example, brands will be able to pay for sponsored listings, prominent placing on the homepage or checkout, and featured menu items. Uber also rolled out Journey Ads, a new service that runs advertisements for ride-share users while they wait for their driver and during their trip. More than 40 brands have partnered with Uber to run Journey Ads, including NBCUniversal and Heineken NV, Uber said in a statement on Wednesday. The move expands Uber's prior efforts to monetize an audience of 122 million monthly active users.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: UNDARK has an interesting interview with NYU professor emeritus Gary Marcus (PhD in brain and cognitive sciences, MIT) about Why Mastering Language Is So Difficult for AI. Marcus, who has had a front-row seat for many of the developments in AI, says we need to take AI advances with a grain of salt.

Starting with GPT-3, Marcus begins, "I think it's an interesting experiment. But I think that people are led to believe that this system actually understands human language, which it certainly does not. What it really is, is an autocomplete system that predicts next words and sentences. Just like with your phone, where you type in something and it continues. It doesn't really understand the world around it.

"And a lot of people are confused by that. They're confused by that because what these systems are ultimately doing is mimicry. They're mimicking vast databases of text. And I think the average person doesn't understand the difference between mimicking 100 words, 1,000 words, a billion words, a trillion words — when you start approaching a trillion words, almost anything you can think of is already talked about there. And so when you're mimicking something, you can do that to a high degree, but it's still kind of like being a parrot, or a plagiarist, or something like that. A parrot's not a bad metaphor, because we don't think parrots actually understand what they're talking about. And GPT-3 certainly does not understand what it's talking about."

Marcus also has cautionary words about Google's LaMDA ("It's not sentient, it has no idea of the things that it is talking about."), driverless cars ("Merely memorizing a lot of traffic situations that you've seen doesn't convey what you really need to understand about the world in order to drive well"), OpenAI's DALL-E ("A lot of AI right now leverages the not-necessarily-intended contributions by human beings, who have maybe signed off on a 'terms of service' agreement, but don't recognize where this is all leading to"), and what's motivating the use of AI at corporations ("They want to solve advertisements. That's not the same as understanding natural language for the purpose of improving medicine. So there's an incentive issue.").

Still, Marcus says he's heartened by some recent AI developments: "People are finally daring to step out of the deep-learning orthodoxy, and finally willing to consider "hybrid" models that put deep learning together with more classical approaches to AI. The more the different sides start to throw down their rhetorical arms and start working together, the better."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter is seemingly working to remind people that interesting tweets are something you should click, load, and view while logged into the company's ad-funded service, not merely see in a screenshot. That's why some users are seeing a "Share Tweet?" pop-up whenever the Twitter app notices them taking a screenshot. Social media analyst Matt Navarra noted the two kinds of nudge prompts in a tweet: "Copy link" and "Share Tweet." TechCrunch noted that some of its staff members were receiving the prompt and pointed to another tweet in which Twitter provided both "Copy link" and "Share Tweet" buttons.

Twitter makes money when people visit the site in a browser or load it in Twitter's official apps, then see sponsored tweets or pre-roll advertisements on native videos (users can also sign up for a Twitter Blue subscription). Screenshots, whether shared directly or on competing social platforms, don't create revenue. Engaging with Twitter itself could encourage people to sign up and do more of that. Twitter reported 237.8 million "average monetizable daily active usage" in Q2 2022, up 16.6 percent compared to the same quarter in 2021. The company claims this increase was driven by "ongoing product improvements" and "global conversation around current events." It makes sense why Twitter, the corporate entity, prefers tweet links to screenshots, enough so to A/B/C test a prompt that can make users feel like the Twitter app is both closely watching and scolding them. But for Twitter, the cultural entity, screenshots are enormously valuable, likely more so than links alone. If you've been engaging in Internet culture for years, you've seen why.

Since the data of about roughly 1 billion Chinese citizens appeared for sale on a popular dark web forum in June, researchers have observed a surge in other kinds of personal records from China appearing on cybercriminal marketplaces. From a report: In the aftermath of that record leak, an estimated 290 million records about people in China surfaced on an underground bazaar known as Breach Forums in July, according to Group-IB, a cybersecurity firm based in Singapore. In August, one seller hawked personal information belonging to nearly 50 million users of Shanghai's mandatory health code system, used to enforce quarantine and testing orders. The alleged hoard included names, phone numbers, IDs and their Covid status -- for the price of $4,000.

"The forum has never seen such an influx of Chinese users and interest in Chinese data," said Feixiang He, a researcher at Group-IB. "The number of attacks on Chinese users may grow in the near future." Bloomberg was unable to confirm the authenticity of the datasets for sale on Breach Forums. The website, like other markets where illicit goods are sold, has been home to false advertisements meant to generate attention, as well as legitimate data apparently stolen in security incidents, including an instance where users marketed user information taken from Twitter.