AI

LinkedIn Removes Accounts of AI 'Co-Workers' Looking for Jobs (404media.co) 17

An anonymous reader shares a report: LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI "co-workers" whose profile images said they were "#OpenToWork." "I don't need coffee breaks, I don't miss deadlines, and I'll outperform any social media team you've ever worked with -- Guaranteed," the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. "Tired of human 'experts' making excuses? I deliver, period." The #OpenToWork flair on profile pictures is a feature on LinkedIn that lets people clearly signal they are looking for a job on the professional networking platform.

"People expect the people and conversations they find on LinkedIn to be real," a LinkedIn spokesperson told me in an email. "Our policies are very clear that the creation of a fake account is a violation of our terms of service, and we'll remove them when we find them, as we did in this case." The AI profiles were created by an Israeli company called Marketeam, which offers "dedicated AI agents" that integrate with a client's marketing team and help them execute their marketing strategies "from social media and content marketing to SEO, RTM, ad campaigns, and more."

United Kingdom

UK Considers Making Netflix Users Pay License Fee to Fund BBC (investing.com) 129

The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC license fee, as part of plans to modernize the way it funds the public-service broadcaster. Bloomberg: Extending the fee to streaming applications is on a menu of options being discussed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office, the Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal government deliberations. Alternatives under discussion include allowing the British Broadcasting Corp. to use advertising, imposing a specific tax on streaming services, and asking those who listen to BBC radio to pay a fee.

The government is the early stages of examining how to overhaul the funding of Britain's public broadcaster when its current 11-year charter ends on Dec. 31, 2027. Ministers are looking to either retain and alter the current television license fee model or scrap it and instead fund the BBC through alternative models such as taxation or subscription. That's because viewing habits have changed as users gravitate toward on-demand services. [...] The license fee dates back to 1946, when consumers watched programs at the time of broadcast. It currently costs households who watch live TV or use BBC iPlayer $210.6 a year, an amount that usually rises annually with inflation. Even if they don't watch BBC programs, households are required to hold a TV license to view or stream programs live on sites including YouTube and Amazon Prime Video. However it's not needed by those who only watch on-demand, non-BBC content.

Social Networks

Peeing Is Socially Contagious In Chimps (404media.co) 56

After observing 20 chimpanzees for over 600 hours, researchers in Japan found that chimps are more likely to urinate after witnessing others do so. "[T]he team meticulously recorded the number and timing of 'urination events' along with the relative distances between 'the urinator and potential followers,'" writes 404 Media's Becky Ferreira. "The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure." The findings have been published in the journal Cell Biology. From the study: The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations. However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored. More specifically, aligning urination in time (i.e. synchrony) and the triggering of urination by observing similar behavior in others (i.e. social contagion) are thought to occur in humans across different cultures (Figure S1A), and possibly also in non-human animals. However, neither has been scientifically quantified in any species.

Contagious urination, like other forms of behavioral and emotional state matching, may have important implications in establishing and maintaining social cohesion, in addition to potential roles in preparation for collective departure (i.e. voiding before long-distance travel) and territorial scent-marking (i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals). Here, we report socially contagious urination in chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, as measured through all-occurrence recording of 20 captive chimpanzees across >600 hours. Our results suggest that socially contagious urination may be an overlooked, and potentially widespread, facet of social behavior.

In conclusion, we find that in captive chimpanzees the act of urination is socially contagious. Further, low-dominance individuals had higher rates of contagion. We found no evidence that this phenomenon is moderated by dyadic affiliation. It remains possible that latent individual factors associated with low dominance status (e.g. vigilance and attentional bias, stress levels, personality traits) might shape the contagion of urination, or alternatively that there are true dominance-driven effects. In any case, our results raise several new and important questions around contagious urination across species, from ethology to psychology to endocrinology. [...]

Facebook

Facebook Flags Linux Topics As 'Cybersecurity Threats' (tomshardware.com) 96

Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.

If you're wondering if there might be something specific to DistroWatch.com, something on the site that the owners/operators perhaps don't even know about, for example, then it seems pretty safe to rule out such a possibility. Reports show that "multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed." However, we tested a few other Facebook posts with mentions of Linux, and they didn't get blocked immediately. Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has tried to appeal against the Community Standards-triggered ban. However, they say that a Facebook representative said that Linux topics would remain on the cybersecurity filter. The DistroWatch writer subsequently got their Facebook account locked...
DistroWatch points out the irony at play here: "Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers."

UPDATE: Facebook has admited they made a mistake and stopped blocking the posts.
Businesses

Internet-Connected 'Smart' Products for Babies Suddenly Start Charging Subscription Fees (msn.com) 134

The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...)

But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep." The internet-connected bassinet... reliably comforted her 1-month-old — just as it had her first child — until it started charging $20 a month for some abilities, including one that keeps the bassinet's motion and sounds at one level all night. The level-lock feature previously was available without a fee. "It all felt really intrusive — like they went into our bedroom and clawed back this feature that we've been depending on...." When the Snoo's maker, Happiest Baby, introduced a premium subscription for some of the bassinet's most popular features in July, owners filed dozens of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau, coordinated review bombs and vented on social media — saying the company took advantage of their desperation for sleep to bait-and-switch them...

Happiest Baby isn't the only baby gear company that has rolled out a subscription. In 2023, makers of the Miku baby monitor, which retails for up to $400, elicited similar fury from parents when it introduced a $10 monthly subscription for most features. A growing number of internet-connected products have lost software support or functionality after purchase in recent years, such as Spotify's Car Thing — a $90 Bluetooth streaming device that the company announced in May it plans to discontinue — and Levi's $350 smart jacket, which let users control their phones by swiping sensors on its sleeve...

Seventeen consumer protection and tech advocacy groups cited Happiest Baby and Car Thing in a letter urging the FTC to create guidelines that ensure products retain core functionality without the imposition of fees that did not exist when the items were originally bought.

The Times notes that the bassinets are often resold, so the subscription fees are partly to cover the costs of supporting new owners, according to Happiest Baby's vice president for marketing and communications. But the article three additional perspectives:
  • "This new technology is actually allowing manufacturers to change the way the status quo has been for decades, which is that once you buy something, you own it and you can do whatever you want. Right now, consumers have no trust that what they're buying is actually going to keep working." — Lucas Gutterman, who leads the Public Interest Research Group's "Design to Last" campaign.
  • "It's a shame to be beholden to companies' goodwill, to require that they make good decisions about which settings to put behind a paywall. That doesn't feel good, and you can't always trust that, and there's no guarantee that next week Happiest Baby isn't going to announce that all of the features are behind a paywall." — Elizabeth Chamberlain, sustainability director at iFixit.
  • "It's no longer just an out-and-out purchase of something. It's a continuous rental, and people don't know that." — Natasha Tusikov, an associate professor at York University

Social Networks

Cory Doctorow Asks: Can Interoperability End 'Enshittification' and Fix Social Media? (pluralistic.net) 69

This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints." If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it." Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform...
But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto): I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences.

"Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."
Power

Could New Linux Code Cut Data Center Energy Use By 30%? (datacenterdynamics.com) 65

Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.

It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article: The team tested their solution's effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration, and the code was published this month as part of Linux's newest kernel, release version 6.13. "All these big companies — Amazon, Google, Meta — use Linux in some capacity, but they're very picky about how they decide to use it," said Martin Karsten [professor of Computer Science in the Waterloo's Math Faculty]. "If they choose to 'switch on' our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the Internet could be positively affected by this."

The University of Waterloo is building a green computer server room as part of its new mathematics building, and Karsten believes sustainability research must be a priority for computer scientists. "We all have a part to play in building a greener future," he said. The Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of the Linux OS, is a founder member of the Green Software Foundation, an organization set up to look at ways of developing "green software" — code that reduces energy consumption.

Karsten "teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly" to develop the 30 lines of code, according to an announcement from the university. "The Linux kernel code addition developed by Karsten and Damato was based on research published in ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review" (by Karsten and grad student Peter Cai).

Their paper "reviews the performance characteristics of network stack processing for communication-heavy server applications," devising an "indirect methodology" to "identify and quantify the direct and indirect costs of asynchronous hardware interrupt requests (IRQ) as a major source of overhead...

"Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45% increased throughput..."
Social Networks

Pixelfed Creator Crowdfunds More Capacity, Plus Open Source Alternatives to TikTok and WhatsApp (techcrunch.com) 11

An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps' further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon... [and] challenge Meta's social media empire... "Help us put control back into the hands of the people!" [Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps] said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter's Thursday launch.

As of the time of writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter site has been surpassed, Supernault said that he hopes to raise $1 million or more so he can hire a small team... A fourth project, PubKit, is also a part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse... The stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a not-for-profit and grow its team beyond volunteers. This could help address the issue with Supernault being a single point of failure for the project... Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko made a similar decision earlier this month to transition to a nonprofit structure. If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal at some point in the future.

The funds will also help the apps manage the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed instance, (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the mobile app's launch, according to the campaign details shared with TechCrunch. The server is also now the second-largest in the fediverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to network statistics from FediDB. New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs, and compute power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. In addition, they'll help Supernault dedicate more of his time to the apps and the fediverse as a whole while also expanding the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs that social apps need.

As a part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse.

The Kickstarter campaign promises "authentic sharing reimagined," calling the apps "Beautiful sharing platforms that puts you first. No ads, no algorithms, no tracking — just pure photography and authentic connections... More Privacy, More Safety. More Variety. " Pixelfed/Loops/Sup/Pubkit isn't a ambitious dream or vaporware — they're here today — and we need your support to continue our mission and shoot for the moon to be the best social communication platform in the world.... We're following the both the Digital Platform Charter of Rights & Ethical Web Principles of the W3C for all of our projects as guidelines to building platforms that help people and provide a positive social benefit.
The campaign's page says they're building "a future where social networking respects your privacy, values your freedom, and prioritizes your safety."
Power

Heat Pumps Are Now Outselling Gas Furnaces In America (cleantechnica.com) 155

CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans "bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces."

And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023. Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one furnace. Nevertheless, the trend for heat pumps is up. Russell Unger, the head of decarbonizing buildings at RMI, said, "There's just been this long term, consistent trend."

It's easy to understand why heat pumps are gaining in popularity. In addition to providing heated air in the winter and cool air in the summer, they are far more efficient than conventional heat sources — delivering three to four times more heat per dollar spent than oil- or gas-fired heating equipment or old fashioned electric baseboard heat. They also create far less carbon pollution. How much less depends on the source of electricity in the local area,

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
Sony

Sony To End Blu-ray Media Production After 18 Years (tomshardware.com) 40

Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.
Power

Chinese Fusion Reactor Maintains Steady State For Almost 18 Minutes (charmingscience.com) 50

Longtime Slashdot readers smooth wombat and AmiMoJo shares a fusion energy breakthrough from China. Charming Science reports: China's "artificial sun," officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in fusion energy research. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), EAST recently sustained high-confinement plasma operation for an unprecedented 1,066 seconds, shattering the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023. [...] The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors. This breakthrough, accomplished by the Institute of Plasma Physics under the CAS, signifies a major leap towards realizing the potential of fusion energy. [...] The success of EAST's recent experiment can be attributed to several key advancements. Researchers have made significant strides in improving the stability of the heating system, enhancing the accuracy of the control system, and refining the precision of the diagnostic systems. Warning: the source originates from China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. It's rated "questionable" by Media Bias/Fact Check because of its association with the CCP.
AI

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots 87

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source "tar pit" to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed "offensively" as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies' resources.

"It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself -- the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself," Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media. "Of course, these crawlers are massively scaled, and are downloading links from large swathes of the internet at any given time," they added. "But they are still consuming resources, spinning around doing nothing helpful, unless they find a way to detect that they are stuck in this loop."
You can try Nepenthes via this link (it loads slowly and links endlessly on purpose).
Google

Trump Blasts EU Regulators for Targeting Apple, Google, Meta (bloomberg.com) 228

US President Donald Trump blasted European Union regulators for targeting Apple, Alphabet's Google and Meta, describing theircases against American companies as "a form of taxation." From a report: The EU has established a reputation globally for its aggressive regulation of major technology companies, often sparring with major social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, over content moderation, and the likes of Apple and Google over antitrust concerns. "These are American companies whether you like it or not," Trump said in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"They shouldn't be doing that. That's, as far as I'm concerned, a form of taxation. We have some very big complaints with the EU." Trump specifically referenced a court case that Apple lost last year over a $14.4 billion Irish tax bill. The EU's Court of Justice in Luxembourg backed a landmark 2016 decision that Ireland broke state-aid law by giving Apple an unfair advantage, requiring Ireland to claw back the money that had been sitting in an escrow account pending the final ruling.

Social Networks

Pakistan's Parliament Passes Bill With Sweeping Controls on Social Media (apnews.com) 21

Pakistan's lower house of parliament on Thursday passed a controversial bill that will give the government sweeping controls on social media, including sending users to prison for spreading disinformation. From a report: The bill was quickly passed after lawmakers from the opposition party of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan staged a walkout to denounce the law. Critics say the government is seeking to further suppress freedom of speech.

Farhatullah Babar, a leading human rights activist, said the latest changes to cybercrime law were aimed at "further stifling the freedom of expression through setting up of multiple authorities under executive control, enlarging the print of unaccountable intelligence agencies." He said the law also "gives sweeping powers to the executive not only over the contents of the message but also the messengers, namely the social media platforms."

Under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, which was introduced in the National Assembly Wednesday, authorities would create an agency with the power to order the immediate blocking of content deemed "unlawful and offensive" from social media, such as content critical of judges, the armed forces, parliament or provincial assemblies. Individuals and organizations posting such content may also be blocked from social media.

Medicine

Hospitals No Longer Allowed To Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures 136

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals' repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require hospitals to enter into repair contracts with the manufacturer, which will ultimately drive up medical costs, a person familiar with the devices said.

The company, Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a device called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which is used to reroute blood during open-heart surgeries and essentially keeps a patient alive during the surgery. Last month, the company sent hospitals a letter alerting them to the "discontinuation of certification classes," meaning it "will no longer offer certification classes for the repair and/or preventative maintenance of the System 1 and its components." This means it will no longer teach hospital repair techs how to maintain and fix the devices, and will no longer certify in-house hospital repair technicians. Instead, the company "will continue to provide direct servicing for the System 1 and its components." [...]

In a brochure for hospitals, Terumo advertises both its device and its maintenance program: "Advanced, precision medical equipment requires genuine parts and top-quality, specialized service -- just as getting the best medical care from qualified specialists. Terumo Cardiovascular Service has the unrivaled expertise, experience, equipment, and parts to provide the optimal level of planned service and repairs needed. Use Terumo Cardiovascular Service and avoid exposure to liability issues." A spokesperson for Terumo told 404 Media that the company "saw declining participation in this program and determined that the best way forward was to require servicing through Terumo Cardiovascular's genuine in-house Service team to continue to ensure Terumo devices are properly maintained."

"Terumo Cardiovascular's Biomed Certification Program was originally structured to train non-Terumo personnel (hospital Biomeds) to service Terumo heart-lung machines and associated hardware. Properly maintained medical devices are necessary for optimal performance which is essential for quality of patient care and outcomes," they added. "Hospitals' existing Terumo Cardiovascular Biomed certifications will remain valid through their expiration dates but will not be renewed once they expire."
"It's no secret that America's healthcare system is the most expensive, and this is one of the reasons why. These machines are actually highly reliable, we've had a low cost of service for it over the last few years. And when something isn't right, we have people in-house who can fix it," a source familiar with Terumo machine repair said. "But the cost of having a service contract with a manufacturer, you're probably talking 10 times the cost. It's not a big deal having a contract for one device, but when that starts happening across many devices, it adds up in the end. If you took every hospital in America and said for every medical device in the hospital, you need to put it on an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] maintenance contract, it would tank your financial system. You just can't do that."
AI

Adobe Premiere Pro Now Lets You Find Video Clips By Describing Them 17

Search in Premiere Pro has been updated with AI-powered visual recognition, allowing users to find videos by describing the contents of the footage. From a report: It's just one of several quality-of-life features Adobe is adding to Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io that aim to save video editors time on their projects. Users can enter search terms like "a person skating with a lens flare" to find corresponding clips within their media library.

Adobe says the media intelligence AI can automatically recognize "objects, locations, camera angles, and more," alongside spoken words -- providing there's a transcript attached to the video. The feature doesn't detect audio or identify specific people, but it can scrub through any metadata attached to video files, which allows it to fetch clips based on shoot dates, locations, and camera types. The media analysis runs on-device, so doesn't require an internet connection, and Adobe reiterates that users' video content isn't used to train any AI models.
Businesses

Netflix Raises Prices Again 77

Netflix will raise prices on most U.S. and Canadian subscription tiers after adding a record 19 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, bringing its global total to 302 million users.

The standard plan without ads will increase to $17.99 from $15.49, while its premium tier rises $2 to $24.99. The ad-supported tier will cost $7.99, up $1. The streaming service's quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, jumping 16%, while operating income rose 52% to $2.3 billion. The company credited recent successes including the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match and "Squid Game" season two for the subscriber surge.
Social Networks

'Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative To the Tech Oligarchy' (404media.co) 170

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from 404 Media's Jason Koebler: If it wasn't already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon's ActivityPub and Bluesky's AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon -- which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug -- but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I'm just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn't mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky's growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it's going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.
"This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk's X, Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become," concludes Koebler. "It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms' relevance and importance doesn't necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it."

Further reading: 'The Tech Oligarchy Arrives' (The Atlantic)
Wine

Wine 10.0 Released (betanews.com) 34

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: The Wine team has officially released Wine 10.0, marking a full year of extensive development with over 6,000 changes. This stable release introduces major updates designed to enhance performance, compatibility, and visual experience when running Windows applications on Linux and other non-Windows platforms. Here's a list of the new changes and features:

- Full ARM64EC Support: Now on par with ARM64, allowing the creation of hybrid ARM64X modules blending ARM64EC and ARM64 code in a single binary.
- 64-bit x86 Emulation: Leverages ARM64EC to run internal processes natively, reducing the need for resource-intensive emulation.
- High-DPI Scaling Overhaul: Automatic adjustments for non-DPI-aware applications on high-resolution displays with customizable compatibility flags.
- Vulkan Improvements: Support for Vulkan child window rendering under X11 and compatibility with Vulkan 1.4.303.
- Direct3D Updates: Fixed-function pipeline for legacy Direct3D versions and introduced Dynamic Vulkan extensions to reduce stuttering.
- Experimental FFmpeg Backend: Better multimedia playback for applications with complex media pipelines.
- New Display Configuration Tool: Allows inspection and modification of settings, including virtual desktop resolutions.
- Wayland Graphics Driver: Enabled by default on Linux, with support for OpenGL and improved popup window placement (X11 takes precedence unless disabled).
- Input Device Improvements: Enhanced touchscreen support for X11 and expanded Bluetooth functionality.
- Internationalization Enhancements: Updated Unicode character tables and timezone data for better global compatibility.
- Upgraded Libraries: Includes FluidSynth, LibPng, and Vkd3d, alongside new developer tools like the Clang Static Analyzer and improved ARM64 support for C++ exceptions.

You can download Wine 10.0 and learn more about the release here.
Communications

Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC (theverge.com) 71

An anonymous reader shares a report: Brendan Carr is now formally the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, giving him the power to set the agency's agenda and usher through a host of regulations with major implications for the tech and media industries as soon as he has a Republican majority. In a statement, Carr named a few areas of focus: "issues ranging from tech and media regulation to unleashing new opportunities for jobs and growth through agency actions on spectrum, infrastructure, and the space economy."

Carr's priorities might also be gleaned from a document you might have already heard about: Project 2025. That's because he authored the FCC chapter of the Heritage Foundation's wishlist for a Donald Trump presidency. In that chapter, Carr proposes actions including: limiting immunity for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content, requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas, and more, quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk's Starlink.

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