Nearly 89% of smart device manufacturers fail to disclose how long they will provide software updates for their products, a Federal Trade Commission staff study found this week. The review of 184 connected devices, including hearing aids, security cameras and door locks, revealed that 161 products lacked clear information about software support duration on their websites.

Basic internet searches failed to uncover this information for two-thirds of the devices. "Consumers stand to lose a lot of money if their smart products stop delivering the features they want," said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. The agency warned that manufacturers' failure to provide software update information for warranted products costing over $15 may violate the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. The FTC also cautioned that companies could violate the FTC Act if they misrepresent product usability periods. The study excluded laptops, personal computers, tablets and automobiles from its review.

The FCC said it has approved a license for T-Mobile and SpaceX's Starlink to provide supplemental coverage to cover internet dead zones. Reuters reports: The license marks the first time the FCC has authorized a satellite operator collaborating with a wireless carrier to provide supplemental telecommunications coverage from space on some flexible-use spectrum bands allocated to terrestrial service. The partnership aims to extend the reach of wireless networks to remote areas and eliminate "dead zones."

T-Mobile and SpaceX announced a partnership in 2022 and in January the first set of satellites supporting the partnership was launched into low-Earth orbit with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. "The FCC is actively promoting competition in the space economy by supporting more partnerships between terrestrial mobile carriers and satellite operators to deliver on a single network future that will put an end to mobile dead zones," said FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel.

The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked "enshittification" as its word of the year. Gizmodo reports: The Australians define the word as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking." We've all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you're trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and recently offered potential solutions to the age-old phenomenon in an interview with The Register.

"We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."

Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors. Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing (PDF) that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers' customer service operations are unnecessary."

Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry. USTelecom, which represents telcos such as AT&T and Verizon, said that "the competitive broadband marketplace leaves providers of broadband and other communications services no choice but to provide their customers with not only high-quality broadband, but also high-quality customer service."

"If a provider fails to efficiently resolve an issue, they risk losing not only that customer -- and not just for the one service, but potentially for all of the bundled services offered to that customer -- but also any prospective customers that come across a negative review online. Because of this, broadband providers know that their success is dependent upon providing and maintaining excellent customer service," USTelecom wrote. While the FCC Notice of Inquiry said that providers should "offer live customer service representative support by phone within a reasonable timeframe," USTelecom's filing touted the customer service abilities of AI chatbots. "AI chat agents will only get better at addressing customers' needs more quickly over time -- and if providers fail to provide the customer service and engagement options that their customers expect and fail to resolve their customers' concerns, they may soon find that the consumer is no longer a customer, having switched to another competitive offering," the lobby group said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court signaled it may take up a case that could determine whether Internet service providers must terminate users who are accused of copyright infringement. In an order (PDF) issued today, the court invited the Department of Justice's solicitor general to file a brief "expressing the views of the United States."

In Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications, the major record labels argue that cable provider Cox should be held liable for failing to terminate users who were repeatedly flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads. There was a mixed ruling at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the appeals court affirmed a jury's finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement but reversed a verdict on vicarious infringement "because Cox did not profit from its subscribers' acts of infringement." That ruling vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Cox and Sony are both seeking a Supreme Court review. Cox wants to overturn the finding of willful contributory infringement, while Sony wants to reinstate the $1 billion verdict.

The Supreme Court asking for US input on Sony v. Cox could be a precursor to the high court taking up the case. For example, the court last year asked the solicitor general to weigh in on Texas and Florida laws that restricted how social media companies can moderate their platforms. The court subsequently took up the case and vacated lower-court rulings, making it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment.

Lawyers for the United States on Monday said that Google had created a monopoly with its services to place ads online, closing out an antitrust trial over the company's dominance in advertising technology that could add to the Silicon Valley giant's mounting woes. From a report: The legal case concerns a system of software that is used by advertisers to place ads on websites around the internet. Aaron Teitelbaum, a lawyer for the Justice Department, told Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that the company had linked its products together in a way that made it hard for publishers and advertisers to use alternatives.

"Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist," he said. "These are the markets that make the free and open internet possible." Google's lead lawyer, Karen Dunn, countered that the government had failed to offer the evidence to prove its case and was on shaky legal ground. "Google's conduct is a story of innovation in response to competition," she said. The arguments conclude U.S. et al. v. Google, an antitrust suit that the Justice Department and eight states filed against Google last year. (More states have joined the suit since then.) The agency and states accused the internet giant of abusing control of its ad technology and violating antitrust law, in part through the acquisition of the advertising software company Doubleclick in 2008. Next, Judge Brinkema will decide the merits of the case in the coming months.

Palo Alto Networks boasts 70,000 customers in 150 countries, including 85% of the Fortune 500.

But this week "thousands of Palo Alto Networks firewalls were compromised by attackers exploiting two recently patched security bug," reports the Register: The intruders were able to deploy web-accessible backdoors to remotely control the equipment as well as cryptocurrency miners and other malware. Roughly 2,000 devices had been hijacked as of Wednesday — a day after Palo Alto Networks pushed a patch for the holes — according to Shadowserver and Onyphe. As of Thursday, the number of seemingly compromised devices had dropped to about 800. The vendor, however, continues to talk only of a "limited number" of exploited installations... The Register has asked for clarification, including how many compromised devices Palo Alto Networks is aware of, and will update this story if and when we hear back from the vendor.

Rumors started swirling last week about a critical security hole in Palo Alto Networks appliances that allowed remote unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on devices. Exploitation requires access to the PAN-OS management interface, either across the internet or via an internal network. The manufacturer did eventually admit that the firewall-busting vulnerability existed, and had been exploited as a zero-day — but it was still working on a patch. On Tuesday, PAN issued a fix, and at that time said there were actually two vulnerabilities. The first is a critical (9.3 CVSS) authentication bypass flaw tracked as CVE-2024-0012. The second, a medium-severity (6.9 CVSS) privilege escalation bug tracked as CVE-2024-9474. The two can be chained together to allow remote code execution (RCE) against the PAN-OS management interface... once the attackers break in, they are using this access to deploy web shells, Sliver implants, and/or crypto miners, according to Wiz threat researchers.

Craig Newmark "is alarmed about potential cybersecurity risks in the U.S.," according to Yahoo Finance. The 71-year-old Craigslist founder says "our country is under attack now" in a new interview with Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi on his Opening Bid podcast.

But Newmark also revealed what he's doing about it: [H]e started Craig Newmark Philanthropies to primarily invest in projects to protect critical American infrastructure from cyberattacks. He told Sozzi he is now spending $200 million more to address the issue, on top of an initial $100 million pledge revealed in September of this year. He encouraged other wealthy people to join him in the fight against cyberattacks. "I tell people, 'Hey, the people who protect us could use some help. The amounts of money comparatively are small, so why not help out,'" he said... The need for municipalities and other government entities to act rather than react remains paramount, warns Newmark. "I think a lot about this," said Newmark.

"I've started to fund networks of smart volunteers who can help people protect infrastructure, particularly [for] the small companies and utilities across the country who are responsible for most of our electrical and power supplies, transportation infrastructure, [and] food distribution.... A lot of these systems have no protection, so an adversary could just compromise them, saying unless you do what we need, we can start shutting off these things," he continued. Should that happen, recovery "could take weeks and weeks without your water supply or electricity."
A web page at Craig Newmark Philanthropies offers more details Craig was part of the whole "duck and cover" thing, in the 50s and 60s, and realizes that we need civil defense in the cyber domain, "cyber civil defense." This is patriotism, for regular people.

He's committed $100 million to form a Cyber Civil Defense network of groups who are starting to protect the country from cyber threats. Attacks on our power grids, our cyber infrastructure and even the internet-connected gadgets and appliances in our homes are real. If people think that's alarmist, tell them to "Blame Craig." The core of Cyber Civil Defense [launched in 2022] includes groups like Aspen Digital, Global Cyber Alliance, and Consumer Reports, focusing on citizen cyber education and literacy, cyber tool development, and cybersecurity workforce programs aimed at diversifying the growing field.
It's already made significant investments in groups like the Ransomware Task Force and threat watchdog group Shadowserver Foundation...

CNN reports that investigators "are trying to crack the mystery of how two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea were cut within hours of each other." But there's now two competing viewpoints, "with European officials saying they believe the disruption was an act of sabotage and U.S. officials suggesting it was likely an accident." The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were "deeply concerned" about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a "hybrid warfare," specifically mentioning Russia in their statement. Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow. And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed months of suspicious movements of Russian vessels in European waters and the significant beefing up of a dedicated Russian secretive marine unit tasked with surveying the seabed...

But two US officials familiar with the initial assessment of the incident told CNN on Tuesday the damage was not believed to be deliberate activity by Russia or any other nation. Instead, the two officials told CNN they believed it likely caused by an anchor drag from a passing vessel. Such accidents have happened in the past, although not in a quick succession like the two on Sunday and Monday.
Cloudflare's blog also reminds readers that the two cable cuts resulted in little-to-no observable impact
Cloudflare attributes this largely to "the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe." (Their Cloudflare Radar graphs show that after the Sweden-Lithuania cable cut "there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged.") Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com illustrates, at least in part, the resilience in connectivity enjoyed by these two countries. In addition to the damaged cable, it shows that Lithuania is connected to neighboring Latvia as well as to the Swedish mainland. Over 20 submarine cables land in Sweden, connecting it to multiple countries across Europe. In addition to the submarine resilience, network providers in both countries can take advantage of terrestrial fiber connections to neighboring countries, such as those illustrated in a European network map from Arelion (formerly Telia), which is only one of the large European backbone providers.

Less than a day later, the C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki, Finland and Rostock Germany was reportedly damaged during the early morning hours of Monday, November 18... In this situation as well, as the Cloudflare Radar graphs below show, there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged...

Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com shows that both Finland and Germany also have significant redundancy and resilience from a submarine cable perspective, with over 10 cables landing in Finland, and nearly 10 landing in Germany, including Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1), which connects to the United States over two distinct paths. Terrestrial fiber maps from Arelion and eunetworks (as just two examples) show multiple redundant fiber routes within both countries, as well as cross-border routes to other neighboring countries, enabling more resilient Internet connectivity.
See also Does the Internet Route Around Damage?

"The past 15 years were unique in ways that might be a bad predictor of our future," writes the Washington Post, with a surge in the number of internet users since 2010, and everyone spending more time online.

But today, "lots of smart people believe that artificial intelligence will upend how you find information. Googling is so yesterday." Sam Altman, the top executive overseeing ChatGPT, has said that AI has a good shot at shoving aside Google search. Bill Gates predicted that emerging AI will do tasks like researching your ideal running shoes and automatically placing an order so you'll "never go to a search site again." In defending itself from a judge's decision that it runs an illegal monopoly, Google says the company might be roadkill as AI and other new technologies change how you find information. (On Wednesday, the U.S. government asked the judge to overhaul Google to undo its monopoly.)

But predictions of Google's looming obsolescence have been wrong before, which calls for humility in fortune-telling our collective technology habits. We're devilishly unpredictable.... Maybe it's right to extrapolate from how people are starting to use AI today. Or maybe that's the mistake that Jobs made when he said no one was searching on iPhones. It wasn't wrong in 2010, but it was within a few years. Or what if AI upends how billions of us find information and we still keep on Googling? "The notion that we can predict how these new technologies are going to evolve is silly," said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who has spent decades studying the technology industry.

Amit Mehta, the judge overseeing the Google monopoly case, formed his own view on AI moving us away from searching Google. "AI may someday fundamentally alter search, but not anytime soon," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: It's early on a Sunday morning in late 1994, and you're shuffling your way through Fitzrovia in Central London, bloodstream still rushing after a long night at Bagley's. The sun comes up as you come down. You navigate side streets that you know like the back of your hand. But your hand's stamped with a party logo. And your brain's kaput. Coffee... yes, coffee. Good idea. Suddenly, you find yourself outside a teal blue cafe. Walking in is like entering an alien world; rows of club kids, tech heads, and game developers sit in front of desktops, lost in the primitive version of some new reality. Tentacular cables hang from the ceiling. Ambient techno reverberates from wall to wall. Cigarette smoke fills the air.

Welcome to Cyberia, the world's first internet cafe. Which, if you're too young to remember, are basically cafes with computers in them. It all began when Eva Pascoe, a Polish computing student living in London, crossed paths with Tim Berners Lee and other early internet mavericks at the dawn of the 90s. "I was very interested in cyberfeminism and wanted to figure out how women could reclaim tech," she recalls. The internet was still in its infancy. Diabolically slow dial-up modems only emerged around 1992; the World Wide Web was a pipe dream until 1993 and hardly anyone had the internet at home. But there wasn't just a lack of javascript; Eva remembers there being no good java, either. "There were no coffee shops in London," she says, which today seems ludicrous. "Just greasy spoons and everyone drank tea. I wanted a European-style cafe."

Linking up with like-minded pioneers David Rowe and husband and wife Keith and Gene Teare, Eva found a spot on the corner of Whitfield Street and launched Cyberia there in 1994. With Hackers-style aesthetics and futuristic furniture, it was based around a U-shaped layout that meant visitors could see each other's screens. "I wanted women to feel safe, because a lot of the stuff on the net was dodgy," she explains. Many of Eva's mates chipped in to help out -- architects, interior designers, graphic artists, publishers, and ravers among them.

And then there was the Amish community in Pennsylvania. Eva had to fly out there to negotiate for the "Cyberia.com" domain name they had bought. "It was a proper barn with horse carts and a wall of modems as they were running a bulletin board and an early ecommerce company. Apparently, there was always one family nominated to be the tech support," she remembers. Back in London, Cyberia quickly became a hotspot. "Virtually the second we opened, we had three lines deep around the block," she says. It's hard to imagine, but nowhere else in the world was doing what they were doing. It was the world's first cybercafe. "If you wanted to collect your emails, we were the only place in town," Eva says. Cyberia opened around 20 cafes worldwide, including branches in Bangkok, Paris, and Rotterdam. "For a fleeting moment it became like a sexier version of Richard Branson's Virgin empire: there was Cyberia Records, Cyberia Channel (a pioneering streaming service), Cyberia Payments, the Cyberia magazine, a Cyberia show on UK TV -- even a Cyberia wedding," writes VICE's Kyle MacNeill. He attended Cyberia's 30th birthday party in September and spoke with some of the cafe's original innovators, "shooting the shit about the good times and the not-so-good coffee."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has sued one of its former engineers in Texas federal court, accusing him of stealing trade secrets related to its chip designs and sharing them publicly on the internet. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday (PDF), said that Harshit Roy "touted his dominion" over the secrets in social media posts, tagging competitors and making threatening statements to the company including "I need to take unethical means to get what I am entitled to" and "remember that empires fall and so will you."

Google hired Roy in 2020 to develop computer chips used in Google Pixel devices like smartphones. Google said in the lawsuit that Roy resigned in February and moved from Bangalore, India to the United States in August to attend a doctorate program at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the complaint, Roy began posting confidential Google information to his X account later that month along with "subversive text" directed at the company, such as "don't expect me to adhere to any confidentiality agreement." The posts included photographs of internal Google documents with specifications for Pixel processing chips.

The lawsuit said that Roy ignored Google's takedown requests and has posted additional trade secrets to X and LinkedIn since October. Google alleged that Roy tagged competitors Apple and Qualcomm in some of the posts, "presumably to maximize the potential harm of his disclosure." Google's complaint also said that several news outlets have published stories with confidential details about Google's devices based on the information that Roy leaked. Google asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and court orders blocking Roy from using or sharing its secrets.

Longtime Slashdot reader Zarhan writes: On Sunday and Monday, two undersea cables in Baltic sea were cut. There is talk of a hybrid operation by Russia against Europe, and a Chinese ship has been detained by Danish Navy. However, the interesting part is did the cuts really have any effect, or does the internet actually route around damage? RIPE Atlas tests seem to indicate so. RIPE Atlas probes did not observe any noticeable increase of packet loss and only a minimal and perfectly expected increase of latency as traffic automatically switched itself to other available paths. While 20-30% of paths experienced latency increases, the effects were modest and no packet loss was detected. That said, questions remain about the consequences of further cable disruptions. "We are blind on what would happen if another link would be severed, or worse, if many are severed," reports RIPE Labs.

Pakistan's IT Industry Association (P@SHA) -- the nation's sole tech biz lobby group -- has warned that government policy could lead to business closures and financial losses among its constituents, and damage the nation's IT exports. From a report: P@SHA's main beef is with a slowing of internet access speeds, and government-imposed service outages. Pakistan went offline in May 2022 around the time of mass political protests and blackouts have since persisted -- prompting services like freelance gig platform Fiverr to warn clients that hiring members from Pakistan could mean potential disruptions.

Fiverr matters in Pakistan, because the nation has a policy of encouraging freelancers to sell their services online as part of a plan to grow tech services exports. The nation even floated the idea of providing its freelance workers with a tax holiday, subsidized broadband and health insurance as a way of supporting the online labor force.

But freelancers have had a hard time of it since the August 2024 introduction of what appears to be a new national firewall. Pakistan has long tried to limit access to what it feels is inappropriate content, and the firewall was aimed at helping that effort. But it greatly slowed internet access speeds -- making life hard for freelancers and other online businesses.

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to propose new rules governing undersea internet cables in the face of growing security concerns, as part of a review of regulations on the links that handle nearly all the world's online traffic. From a report: The FCC voted 5-0 on proposed updates to address the national security concerns over the global network of more than 400 subsea cables that handle more than 98% of international internet traffic. [...]

Baltic nations said this week they are investigating whether the cutting of two fiber-optic undersea telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea was sabotage. Rosenworcel noted that in 2023 Taiwan accused two Chinese vessels of cutting the only two cables that support internet access on the Matsu Islands and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea may have been responsible for the cutting of three cables providing internet service to Europe and Asia.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet -- or roughly 57% of the world's population. Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million.

Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.

[...] In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet -- 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So it's no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed. But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan -- where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. The practice, first reported by 404 Media in April, has since exploded in popularity, showing that Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood of AI-generated content on its platform and protect the human creators on Instagram who say they are now competing with AI content in a way that is impacting their ability to make a living.

According to our review of more than 1,000 AI-generated Instagram accounts, Discord channels where the people who make this content share tips and discuss strategy, and several guides that explain how to make money by "AI pimping," it is now trivially easy to make these accounts and monetize them using an assortment of off-the-shelf AI tools and apps. Some of these apps are hosted on the Apple App and Google Play Stores. Our investigation shows that what was once a niche problem on the platform has industrialized in scale, and it shows what social media may become in the near future: a space where AI-generated content eclipses that of humans. [...]

Out of more than 1,000 AI-generated Instagram influencer accounts we reviewed, 100 included at least some deepfake content which took existing videos, usually from models and adult entertainment performers, and replaced their face with an AI-generated face to make those videos seem like new, original content consistent with the other AI-generated images and videos shared by the AI-generated influencer. The other 900 accounts shared images that in some cases were trained on real photographs and in some cases made to look like celebrities, but were entirely AI-generated, not edited photographs or videos. Out of those 100 accounts that shared deepfake or face-swapped videos, 60 self-identify as being AI-generated, writing in their bios that they are a "virtual model & influencer" or stating "all photos crafted with AI and apps." The other 40 do not include any disclaimer stating that they are AI-generated. Adult content creators like Elaina St James say they're now directly competing with these AI rip-off accounts that often use stolen content. Since the explosion of AI-generated influencer accounts on Instagram, St James said her "reach went down tremendously," from a typical 1 million to 5 million views a month to not surpassing a million in the last 10 months, and sometimes coming in under 500,000 views. While she said changes to Instagram's algorithm could also be at play, these AI-generated influencer accounts are "probably one of the reasons my views are going down," St James told 404 Media. "It's because I'm competing with something that's unnatural."

Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of trust and safety intelligence at Google, started researching the problem to see where AI-generated content is taking social media and the internet. "It felt like a possible sign of what social media is going to look like in five years," said Mantzarlis. "Because this may be coming to other parts of the internet, not just the attractive-people niche on Instagram. This is probably a sign that it's going to be pretty bad."

Comcast plans to spin off several of its cable TV networks into a standalone company as it shifts focus to streaming and other profitable ventures like Peacock, theme parks, and broadband services. The Associated Press reports: Those one-time stars for Comcast's NBCUniversal cable television networks include USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel, as well as CNBC and MSNBC. Movie ticketing platform Fandango and the Rotten Tomatoes movie rating site would also become part of the new company. Peacock will remain with Comcast, as will Bravo, which provides significant content for the Peacock streaming service.

Comcast telegraphed the potential shift last month as it released quarterly earnings before confirming Wednesday that it will spin off assets that generated about $7 billion in revenue over he past 12 months ending September 30. That's about 5.5% of Comcast's total revenue during that period, according to the company. But there is a shrinking pool of cable subscribers as millions cut the cord and rely increasingly on streaming platforms for entertainment.

Mark Lazarus, current chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, will serve as the new entity's chief executive officer. Anand Kini, the current chief financial officer of NBCUniversal, will take on the same title with the new company as well as the chief operating officer role. [...] Comcast expects the new company to have the financial flexibility to be "a potential partner and acquirer of other complementary media businesses." The spin-off is targeted for completion in about a year, the entertainment giant said, pending financing and approval from its board and government regulators. "Like millions of US consumers, Comcast finally cut the cord by divesting itself of most of its cable TV channels," said Paul Verna, principal analyst at market research company eMarketer. "The benefits are clear to Comcast. It's dropping money-losing assets from a technology and media empire that will retain its lucrative (internet service provider) business, theme parks, broadcast networks, and Peacock streaming service."

The Belgian region of Flanders is rolling out personal data "pods" to 7 million citizens in a trial of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's vision for user-controlled data privacy.

Five Belgian hospitals have begun storing patient visit information in the data pods, developed by Berners-Lee's startup Inrupt over the past five years. The system aims to help compliance with European privacy regulations by giving citizens control over their personal information, from medical records to social media posts.

The initiative counters the current internet landscape dominated by major technology companies like Google and Meta, which store user data across their servers. Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, advocates for returning data control to users through decentralized systems rather than leaving it vulnerable to harvesting by tech platforms and governments.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game's influence's 20 years later.

For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a real preview of a future where everyone would connect to friends and strangers online. For another, the game made billions of dollars with a business model combining monthly subscriptions with in-game purchases (including for pets and animals that players could ride), becoming a massive cash cow for Blizzard and pointing the way to future internet business models.