Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending Friday September sixth, twenty twenty four, which my math holds up means that next week is Friday the thirteenth. But we got plenty of unlucky things to talk about today, so I guess I should just hold my horses for next week. First up, we got some updates on some unfolding stories in the world of tech. Pavel Diroff, the CEO of Telegram, has made a statement following his arrest in Paris, France. So if you recall, French authorities are accusing Telegram of harboring illegal activity and doing nothing to stop it. In fact, there are concerns that the platform actively shields criminal users by refusing to cooperate with legal requests for user information. Telegram established itself as a communications platform that was meant to be free of censorship, but many countries have laws about content moderation and if a platform refuses to moderate content and as a result, users conduct illegal activities on the platform, well, then the platform itself can be held at least partly responsible for that, being complicit in that. Durov's statement acknowledges that criminals have made use of Telegram and that this is a problem. He maintained that his arrest was a surprise and in his view, unfair, but he also admitted that Telegram has areas that need attention and improvement. He didn't go into a whole lot of detail, but I inferred that he will be implementing a more active content moderation policy, and that if the allegations that Telegram has in the fact been too slow to respond to legal requests in the past, that could be something that changes as well. Like he pointed out, hey, we have an established way to go through channels and make legal requests, but a lot of government officials have said, yeah, we did that and we didn't get a response. So my guess is that's going to change too. Derov did double down in one way, however. He pointed out that if a country or region makes demands that are counter to Telegram's values, he will not hesitate to pull up stakes and leave that country or region. He has done so in the past and would do so again. Another update, So last week I talked about how a Supreme Court judge in Brazil was threatening to shut X down X formerly known as Twitter, at least in Brazil, and that has happened. So essentially, internet service providers in Brazil are supposed to block traffic to X. Now. All of this also centers around the issue of moderation, similar to the Telegram story. The judge has said that X is giving a platform to hate speech and disinformation campaigns and has demanded that X remove certain accounts, and X refused that, and now we're here Now. Reportedly Brazilians have been flocking to an alternative to X, slash Twitter. It's not Meta's threads, although those have seen you. Downloads for Threads have seen an uptick, But really the big one has been blue Sky. Apparently, downloads for blue Sky spiked this week, with more than two million users joining the service over a matter of days. Now you might remember blue Sky was one of Jack Dorsey's projects, and Dorsey came from the old version of Twitter. As for X's status in Brazil, well, the full Supreme Court weighed in on that. One judge's decision, and essentially they said, yeah, no, that was the right call. So I'm not really sure where things will go from here. Presumably X will remain inaccessible in Brazil unless you're using like a VPN or something until the company changes and starts to comply with the government orders. I don't see that happening necessarily with X. It just doesn't seem like that it would be a thing. And yeah, this to me is kind of icky, Like I'm not a big fan of the entities that prompted this action in the first place, that is, the hard right wing accounts that have concerned the Supreme Court justice in Brazil. But I'm also not a fan of like just a blanket ban going on here. It's a tough situation and I honestly I don't know how I would handle it. I also don't know if the situation that's going on in Brazil influenced the former head of Global affairs over at X, because he just handed in his resignation. Nick Pickles is his name. He has the absolute best name ever, and he has been with Twitter slash X for like a decade. So he sent a message to the company alerting staff that he has resigned in his last days today, and he didn't really give any details regarding the reason behind his departure. And I'm sure there are actually a lot of factors involved. I don't want to suggest that one thing convinced him, oh, it's time to go. And in fact, I don't even know if the situation in Brazil was a contributing factor. I just imagined that being the head of global affairs when an entire country has decided to ban your company's service has to be a rough way to start your day. CNN's Hannah Ziadi posted an article titled advertisers plan to withdraw from X in record numbers And that might sound a little familiar to a lot of y'all. We've seen this actually a few times. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in twenty twenty two, advertisers have shown concern that X slash Twitter isn't really a safe place to advertise. Most brands are not keen about the possibility that their ads could show up next to posts containing like hate speech or misinformation. It's not really a good look if there's a screenshot showing truly horrific content. And meanwhile, there's also an ad for like athletic shoes or maybe a family friendly streaming service or something right next to it. Ziadi references a survey conducted by a market research firm called Cantar and Kantar reported that more than twenty five percent of marketers have plans to decrease spending on X next year. And I think this is really damning. Apparently only four percent of marketers view X as being brand safe, meaning you can be reasonably certain that your advertisers were not going to just show up next to posts from like white supremacists or Russian funded influencers. More on those just a second. Actually, honestly, I think this is really a continuation of a trend we saw not long after elimsk first took control of Twitter. Twitter slash X is no longer a publicly traded company. That means we don't get SEC filings like we would for other organizations, where we could take a really close look at things like revenue vers cost. But I have to imagine the revenue sheets over at X have to look pretty grim unless they've sold a whole lot more of those blue check marks. Now, I just referenced that I would talk about Russian funded influencers, and now we're at that point. So the US Department of Justice unveiled an indictment this week that alleges two Russian nationals have been coordinating with right leaning influencers in the United States in order to publish and distribute content that's aligned with Russia's global goals. So essentially, this is a story about how a group of US influencers are allegedly the paid spokespeople of the Russian government when you really get down to it, so as the saying goes, you gotta follow the money, and some of these influencers landed some really lucrative deals to produce relatively small amounts of work. Not all of them, I mean all of them are making crazy bank compared to someone like I don't know me. But then I also I would like to think that if I were approached to become the mouthpiece of a propaganda arm for a country like Russia, I would have the good sense to say, no, thank you, I appreciate the offer, but this is not in alignment with my own values. However, the money given to these influencers that traces back to a media company in Tennessee, which is believed to be Tenant. In fact, we might as well just say it is Tenant, but it's not overtly named in the indictment. In turn, Tenant was allegedly receiving money from various shell corporations that ultimately were drawing cash from a state backed Russian media outlet called RT. So the DOJ released this indictment that read, in part quote. Many of the videos published by US Company one contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy. While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia's interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine end quote. So the indictment again, it doesn't name specific organizations or people. It uses things like, you know, founder one and founder two or company one to designate the different parties. But it is insanely easy to read between the lines, because, for one thing, the indictment uses a description of this Tennessee based company. That description is literally word for word, the same description that shows up on Tenant media website. A day after the indictment, made News YouTube announced it was quote terminating the Tenant Media channel and four channels operated by its owner, Lauren Chen as part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations end quote. Several of the influencers who were working for Tenant Media have since come forward to claim that they were unaware of the business relationship between Tenant and RT, though it sure is convenient that the videos they were told to produce and share aligned so neatly with the talking points that the Kremlin has been pushing out. I guess if the dollar figure on the piece of paper is big enough, it's really easy to ignore everything else and to not employ, i don't know, some common sense and judgment. So yeah, that also includes ignoring the fact that you could be complicit in violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is what this indictment is all about. The investigation appears to show that Tenant Media's founders figured something was up as the continue to receive pressure to share more videos supporting narratives that were favorable to Russia. Like it may not have been overtly understood, but it certainly appears that they kind of knew where the money was coming from. I'm sure we'll talk about this story a lot more as it develops. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and come back with more tech news after these messages. We're back and turning to AI. Now. Reuter's reports that this week nations had the opportunity to sign on to the AI Convention. This is an international treaty that's aimed at establishing safety measures and best practices for artificial intelligence. It is intended to protect human rights in an era in which more organizations and corporations are integrating AI into their processes, their products, and their services. However, Reuters also talked to a legal expert named Francesca Ferucci about this treaty, and Finucci expressed some concerns. She said, quote, the formulation of principles and obligations in this convention is so overbroad and fraught with caveats that it raises serious questions about their legal certainty and effective enforceability end quote. Honestly, that sounds pretty much on par for how governments typically attempt to legislate technology. They often use language that ends up being so vague or so broad there ends up being no meaningful way to implement or enforce rules. Further, the treaty builds in various exceptions to those rules, and the more exceptions you have to rules, the less useful the rules are. It's kind of like if you were to offer a back door to an otherwise secure communication line. The very presence of a back door means the line is not secure. So, on the one hand, I think it is important that leaders try to understand AI, to understand its potential applications, and specifically to understand any possible negative consequences that we should be on the lookout for, with the implementation of AI, perhaps even being able to prevent those negative consequences, that's the best case scenario, right. So on the other hand, I really worry that anything that comes across as a half measure will give leaders and citizens kind of a false sense of security, like, oh, we got that sorted, we signed a treaty, everything's fine, and then when the AI poop actually hits the fan, things will be really, really bad. The Attorney General of New Mexico has filed a lawsuit against Snap, the company behind Snapchat the lawsuit alleges that Snapchat, through its recommendation algorithm, facilitates and promotes quote illicit sexual material involving children end quote, and that it can quote facilitate sex torsion and the trafficking of children, drugs and guns end quote. Further, the lawsuit of ledges that Snapchat promotes a feature in which images shared on the platform delete themselves shortly after they've been opened, but that in fact it's quite possible to capture and save those images and videos, and people who prey upon children have effectively used this to create a kind of black market for child sexual abuse material. The lawsuit of ledges that snap has violated the state's unfair trade practices law. Now, I haven't seen a response from snap yet. In many ways, I feel this lawsuit resembles what's going on with Telegram. Over in France, Clearview AI has been hit with a fine of thirty and a half million euros or nearly thirty four million dollars. Now, in case you're not familiar with Clearview, it's a company that's largely known for compiling a truly massive database of people's faces for the purposes of developing facial recognition software, which gets used all around the world by different types of organizations and companies. The Dutch Data Protection Authority or DPA, charged that Clearview acquired those images without the permission of the people who are captured in the photos, and that Clearview's business practices violate EU privacy laws. The DPA said that Clearview would be banned from doing business in the Netherlands and that any entity in the Netherlands found to be working with Clearview would face severe penalties. Clearview has in the past argued that it doesn't do business in the EU, so it shouldn't be held accountable to this, but the DPA has said, yeah, well, you still have our photos in your database and you still didn't ask permission to get them from us, and that's still against the laws over here. Bucco. So I'm guessing that Clearview is not going to have a lot of success if they want to try and appeal this fine. Not long ago, Apple began allowing cloud based gaming apps on the App Store, but one notable example has yet to show up there, and that's Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming app. So why is it not on iOS? Well, I bet a lot of you out there already have guessed the answer, and it's largely because of how Apple takes a big old cut of transactions made on iOS devices, to the tune of up to thirty percent. More than that, however, Apple also demands that all subscriptions on iOS devices have to go through the in app purchase process, meaning you can't just port over an existing subscription to Microsoft Cloud Gaming and then use it on iOS. You would have to subscribe through the app itself so that Apple could get its cut. Microsoft has pointed out that this pair of policies mean it's not really feasible to offer a cloud based gaming service on iOS devices because the economics just don't work out, which is a pretty similar argument that we've heard from lots of other companies that Apple's policies cut far too far into revenue. Several years back, Apple made the move to become more services oriented, and while it obviously still produces hardware, and in fact hardware generates the majority of Apple's revenue, the services side is insanely profitable. It doesn't make up as much of the revenue, but it has a much higher profit margin that's largely thanks to policies like these, So I don't see Apple really changing anything soon unless regulators around the world decide that those policies are anti competitive and harmful to consumers. The Internet Archive was handed a legal loss this week that I think was a total mistake. It specifically relates to the archives Open Library, So the Internet Archive would allow people to digitally check out materials in the open library for free, you know, like a library does. The Open Library operated in a way that was meant to prevent unauthorized sharing. For one thing, each digital copy was linked to a copy that had been purchased or gifted to the Internet Archive, and the Archive kept it one to one. That means the Archive couldn't just lend out digital copies of works willy nilly. Each copy had to be linked to one that was actually owned by the archive itself. So if the Archive only had a single copy of a work in its possession, it could only lend out one digital copy of that work at a time. It would not be able to lend it out again until that lending time had elapsed. None of that seemed to matter when publishers argued that the Internet Archive was going to remove all incentive for authors to write anything in the first place, because who would write if their work was just given away for free? But that's obviously not what's happening here, at least not in my opinion. The archive is just serving as a library, you know, those things that already exist. They give citizens access to works that they might otherwise never encounter, whether it's because they couldn't afford to buy their own copy or they just didn't even know it existed. There's tons more about this story on tech Dirt. I recommend you go there to read about it. It's written by Mike Masnik. It's a really great article. It's thoroughly researched. He goes into a lot more detail. The title of the article is second Circuit says libraries disincentivize authors to write books by lending them for free. Check that out over at ours Technica. BENJ. Edwards has another fun article titled FBI busts musicians elaborate AI powered ten million dollars streaming royalty heist. And I can't quite decide if I find this story amusing or infuriating. Anyway, here's the quick version. A guy named Michael Smith used AI to create a whole bunch of songs, and he assigned these songs to various fake bands and then upload the material to different streaming platforms. Then he created a essentially a bot army to quote unquote listen to these streams and thus drove up royal ty for those songs. So songs he didn't write he used AI to create them were being listened to bots, not people, and over the course of several years, this scheme netted him somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million dollars until he was found out, and now he faces charges a fraud because using bots to make music that other bots tune into isn't really the spirit of streaming services, though it is increasingly what the Internet is turning into. I mean, I've talked about that a lot, but it's a real problem that generative AI is creating a lot of stuff that no one other than other bots that are scraping content are actually consuming. And that just means that the next generation of generative AI is worse than the one before it. Now, this case is not generative AI in that regard. I mean, it was for creating the songs in the first place, but the bots weren't trying to scrape data to make future songs. They were just there to drive the numbers up for those listens. It's kind of like when people would pay to get bots to boost their follower numbers on various plays platforms like Twitter or whatever. But of course this scam involves money changing hands and that's where the fraud comes in. Anyway, I'm really curious to know how many actual human beings listen to any of these songs, and whether there are any human fans of this AI generated music, or if this literally was just a case where bots were listening to stuff made by bots. That's it for this week. I hope all of you are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending Friday September sixth, twenty twenty four, which my math holds up means that next week is Friday the thirteenth. But we got plenty of unlucky things to talk about today, so I guess I should just hold my horses for next week. First up, we got some updates on some unfolding stories in the world of tech. Pavel Diroff, the CEO of Telegram, has made a statement following his arrest in Paris, France. So if you recall, French authorities are accusing Telegram of harboring illegal activity and doing nothing to stop it. In fact, there are concerns that the platform actively shields criminal users by refusing to cooperate with legal requests for user information. Telegram established itself as a communications platform that was meant to be free of censorship, but many countries have laws about content moderation and if a platform refuses to moderate content and as a result, users conduct illegal activities on the platform, well, then the platform itself can be held at least partly responsible for that, being complicit in that. Durov's statement acknowledges that criminals have made use of Telegram and that this is a problem. He maintained that his arrest was a surprise and in his view, unfair, but he also admitted that Telegram has areas that need attention and improvement. He didn't go into a whole lot of detail, but I inferred that he will be implementing a more active content moderation policy, and that if the allegations that Telegram has in the fact been too slow to respond to legal requests in the past, that could be something that changes as well. Like he pointed out, hey, we have an established way to go through channels and make legal requests, but a lot of government officials have said, yeah, we did that and we didn't get a response. So my guess is that's going to change too. Derov did double down in one way, however. He pointed out that if a country or region makes demands that are counter to Telegram's values, he will not hesitate to pull up stakes and leave that country or region. He has done so in the past and would do so again. Another update, So last week I talked about how a Supreme Court judge in Brazil was threatening to shut X down X formerly known as Twitter, at least in Brazil, and that has happened. So essentially, internet service providers in Brazil are supposed to block traffic to X. Now. All of this also centers around the issue of moderation, similar to the Telegram story. The judge has said that X is giving a platform to hate speech and disinformation campaigns and has demanded that X remove certain accounts, and X refused that, and now we're here Now. Reportedly Brazilians have been flocking to an alternative to X, slash Twitter. It's not Meta's threads, although those have seen you. Downloads for Threads have seen an uptick, But really the big one has been blue Sky. Apparently, downloads for blue Sky spiked this week, with more than two million users joining the service over a matter of days. Now you might remember blue Sky was one of Jack Dorsey's projects, and Dorsey came from the old version of Twitter. As for X's status in Brazil, well, the full Supreme Court weighed in on that. One judge's decision, and essentially they said, yeah, no, that was the right call. So I'm not really sure where things will go from here. Presumably X will remain inaccessible in Brazil unless you're using like a VPN or something until the company changes and starts to comply with the government orders. I don't see that happening necessarily with X. It just doesn't seem like that it would be a thing. And yeah, this to me is kind of icky, Like I'm not a big fan of the entities that prompted this action in the first place, that is, the hard right wing accounts that have concerned the Supreme Court justice in Brazil. But I'm also not a fan of like just a blanket ban going on here. It's a tough situation and I honestly I don't know how I would handle it. I also don't know if the situation that's going on in Brazil influenced the former head of Global affairs over at X, because he just handed in his resignation. Nick Pickles is his name. He has the absolute best name ever, and he has been with Twitter slash X for like a decade. So he sent a message to the company alerting staff that he has resigned in his last days today, and he didn't really give any details regarding the reason behind his departure. And I'm sure there are actually a lot of factors involved. I don't want to suggest that one thing convinced him, oh, it's time to go. And in fact, I don't even know if the situation in Brazil was a contributing factor. I just imagined that being the head of global affairs when an entire country has decided to ban your company's service has to be a rough way to start your day. CNN's Hannah Ziadi posted an article titled advertisers plan to withdraw from X in record numbers And that might sound a little familiar to a lot of y'all. We've seen this actually a few times. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in twenty twenty two, advertisers have shown concern that X slash Twitter isn't really a safe place to advertise. Most brands are not keen about the possibility that their ads could show up next to posts containing like hate speech or misinformation. It's not really a good look if there's a screenshot showing truly horrific content. And meanwhile, there's also an ad for like athletic shoes or maybe a family friendly streaming service or something right next to it. Ziadi references a survey conducted by a market research firm called Cantar and Kantar reported that more than twenty five percent of marketers have plans to decrease spending on X next year. And I think this is really damning. Apparently only four percent of marketers view X as being brand safe, meaning you can be reasonably certain that your advertisers were not going to just show up next to posts from like white supremacists or Russian funded influencers. More on those just a second. Actually, honestly, I think this is really a continuation of a trend we saw not long after elimsk first took control of Twitter. Twitter slash X is no longer a publicly traded company. That means we don't get SEC filings like we would for other organizations, where we could take a really close look at things like revenue vers cost. But I have to imagine the revenue sheets over at X have to look pretty grim unless they've sold a whole lot more of those blue check marks. Now, I just referenced that I would talk about Russian funded influencers, and now we're at that point. So the US Department of Justice unveiled an indictment this week that alleges two Russian nationals have been coordinating with right leaning influencers in the United States in order to publish and distribute content that's aligned with Russia's global goals. So essentially, this is a story about how a group of US influencers are allegedly the paid spokespeople of the Russian government when you really get down to it, so as the saying goes, you gotta follow the money, and some of these influencers landed some really lucrative deals to produce relatively small amounts of work. Not all of them, I mean all of them are making crazy bank compared to someone like I don't know me. But then I also I would like to think that if I were approached to become the mouthpiece of a propaganda arm for a country like Russia, I would have the good sense to say, no, thank you, I appreciate the offer, but this is not in alignment with my own values. However, the money given to these influencers that traces back to a media company in Tennessee, which is believed to be Tenant. In fact, we might as well just say it is Tenant, but it's not overtly named in the indictment. In turn, Tenant was allegedly receiving money from various shell corporations that ultimately were drawing cash from a state backed Russian media outlet called RT. So the DOJ released this indictment that read, in part quote. Many of the videos published by US Company one contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy. While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia's interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine end quote. So the indictment again, it doesn't name specific organizations or people. It uses things like, you know, founder one and founder two or company one to designate the different parties. But it is insanely easy to read between the lines, because, for one thing, the indictment uses a description of this Tennessee based company. That description is literally word for word, the same description that shows up on Tenant media website. A day after the indictment, made News YouTube announced it was quote terminating the Tenant Media channel and four channels operated by its owner, Lauren Chen as part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations end quote. Several of the influencers who were working for Tenant Media have since come forward to claim that they were unaware of the business relationship between Tenant and RT, though it sure is convenient that the videos they were told to produce and share aligned so neatly with the talking points that the Kremlin has been pushing out. I guess if the dollar figure on the piece of paper is big enough, it's really easy to ignore everything else and to not employ, i don't know, some common sense and judgment. So yeah, that also includes ignoring the fact that you could be complicit in violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is what this indictment is all about. The investigation appears to show that Tenant Media's founders figured something was up as the continue to receive pressure to share more videos supporting narratives that were favorable to Russia. Like it may not have been overtly understood, but it certainly appears that they kind of knew where the money was coming from. I'm sure we'll talk about this story a lot more as it develops. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and come back with more tech news after these messages. We're back and turning to AI. Now. Reuter's reports that this week nations had the opportunity to sign on to the AI Convention. This is an international treaty that's aimed at establishing safety measures and best practices for artificial intelligence. It is intended to protect human rights in an era in which more organizations and corporations are integrating AI into their processes, their products, and their services. However, Reuters also talked to a legal expert named Francesca Ferucci about this treaty, and Finucci expressed some concerns. She said, quote, the formulation of principles and obligations in this convention is so overbroad and fraught with caveats that it raises serious questions about their legal certainty and effective enforceability end quote. Honestly, that sounds pretty much on par for how governments typically attempt to legislate technology. They often use language that ends up being so vague or so broad there ends up being no meaningful way to implement or enforce rules. Further, the treaty builds in various exceptions to those rules, and the more exceptions you have to rules, the less useful the rules are. It's kind of like if you were to offer a back door to an otherwise secure communication line. The very presence of a back door means the line is not secure. So, on the one hand, I think it is important that leaders try to understand AI, to understand its potential applications, and specifically to understand any possible negative consequences that we should be on the lookout for, with the implementation of AI, perhaps even being able to prevent those negative consequences, that's the best case scenario, right. So on the other hand, I really worry that anything that comes across as a half measure will give leaders and citizens kind of a false sense of security, like, oh, we got that sorted, we signed a treaty, everything's fine, and then when the AI poop actually hits the fan, things will be really, really bad. The Attorney General of New Mexico has filed a lawsuit against Snap, the company behind Snapchat the lawsuit alleges that Snapchat, through its recommendation algorithm, facilitates and promotes quote illicit sexual material involving children end quote, and that it can quote facilitate sex torsion and the trafficking of children, drugs and guns end quote. Further, the lawsuit of ledges that Snapchat promotes a feature in which images shared on the platform delete themselves shortly after they've been opened, but that in fact it's quite possible to capture and save those images and videos, and people who prey upon children have effectively used this to create a kind of black market for child sexual abuse material. The lawsuit of ledges that snap has violated the state's unfair trade practices law. Now, I haven't seen a response from snap yet. In many ways, I feel this lawsuit resembles what's going on with Telegram. Over in France, Clearview AI has been hit with a fine of thirty and a half million euros or nearly thirty four million dollars. Now, in case you're not familiar with Clearview, it's a company that's largely known for compiling a truly massive database of people's faces for the purposes of developing facial recognition software, which gets used all around the world by different types of organizations and companies. The Dutch Data Protection Authority or DPA, charged that Clearview acquired those images without the permission of the people who are captured in the photos, and that Clearview's business practices violate EU privacy laws. The DPA said that Clearview would be banned from doing business in the Netherlands and that any entity in the Netherlands found to be working with Clearview would face severe penalties. Clearview has in the past argued that it doesn't do business in the EU, so it shouldn't be held accountable to this, but the DPA has said, yeah, well, you still have our photos in your database and you still didn't ask permission to get them from us, and that's still against the laws over here. Bucco. So I'm guessing that Clearview is not going to have a lot of success if they want to try and appeal this fine. Not long ago, Apple began allowing cloud based gaming apps on the App Store, but one notable example has yet to show up there, and that's Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming app. So why is it not on iOS? Well, I bet a lot of you out there already have guessed the answer, and it's largely because of how Apple takes a big old cut of transactions made on iOS devices, to the tune of up to thirty percent. More than that, however, Apple also demands that all subscriptions on iOS devices have to go through the in app purchase process, meaning you can't just port over an existing subscription to Microsoft Cloud Gaming and then use it on iOS. You would have to subscribe through the app itself so that Apple could get its cut. Microsoft has pointed out that this pair of policies mean it's not really feasible to offer a cloud based gaming service on iOS devices because the economics just don't work out, which is a pretty similar argument that we've heard from lots of other companies that Apple's policies cut far too far into revenue. Several years back, Apple made the move to become more services oriented, and while it obviously still produces hardware, and in fact hardware generates the majority of Apple's revenue, the services side is insanely profitable. It doesn't make up as much of the revenue, but it has a much higher profit margin that's largely thanks to policies like these, So I don't see Apple really changing anything soon unless regulators around the world decide that those policies are anti competitive and harmful to consumers. The Internet Archive was handed a legal loss this week that I think was a total mistake. It specifically relates to the archives Open Library, So the Internet Archive would allow people to digitally check out materials in the open library for free, you know, like a library does. The Open Library operated in a way that was meant to prevent unauthorized sharing. For one thing, each digital copy was linked to a copy that had been purchased or gifted to the Internet Archive, and the Archive kept it one to one. That means the Archive couldn't just lend out digital copies of works willy nilly. Each copy had to be linked to one that was actually owned by the archive itself. So if the Archive only had a single copy of a work in its possession, it could only lend out one digital copy of that work at a time. It would not be able to lend it out again until that lending time had elapsed. None of that seemed to matter when publishers argued that the Internet Archive was going to remove all incentive for authors to write anything in the first place, because who would write if their work was just given away for free? But that's obviously not what's happening here, at least not in my opinion. The archive is just serving as a library, you know, those things that already exist. They give citizens access to works that they might otherwise never encounter, whether it's because they couldn't afford to buy their own copy or they just didn't even know it existed. There's tons more about this story on tech Dirt. I recommend you go there to read about it. It's written by Mike Masnik. It's a really great article. It's thoroughly researched. He goes into a lot more detail. The title of the article is second Circuit says libraries disincentivize authors to write books by lending them for free. Check that out over at ours Technica. BENJ. Edwards has another fun article titled FBI busts musicians elaborate AI powered ten million dollars streaming royalty heist. And I can't quite decide if I find this story amusing or infuriating. Anyway, here's the quick version. A guy named Michael Smith used AI to create a whole bunch of songs, and he assigned these songs to various fake bands and then upload the material to different streaming platforms. Then he created a essentially a bot army to quote unquote listen to these streams and thus drove up royal ty for those songs. So songs he didn't write he used AI to create them were being listened to bots, not people, and over the course of several years, this scheme netted him somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million dollars until he was found out, and now he faces charges a fraud because using bots to make music that other bots tune into isn't really the spirit of streaming services, though it is increasingly what the Internet is turning into. I mean, I've talked about that a lot, but it's a real problem that generative AI is creating a lot of stuff that no one other than other bots that are scraping content are actually consuming. And that just means that the next generation of generative AI is worse than the one before it. Now, this case is not generative AI in that regard. I mean, it was for creating the songs in the first place, but the bots weren't trying to scrape data to make future songs. They were just there to drive the numbers up for those listens. It's kind of like when people would pay to get bots to boost their follower numbers on various plays platforms like Twitter or whatever. But of course this scam involves money changing hands and that's where the fraud comes in. Anyway, I'm really curious to know how many actual human beings listen to any of these songs, and whether there are any human fans of this AI generated music, or if this literally was just a case where bots were listening to stuff made by bots. That's it for this week. I hope all of you are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.