The Internet Review was started by Jared White in 1996 for the purpose of presenting timely information in a useful, easy to read format. It eventually went on hiatus for about 25 years (seriously!), and now it’s back and better than ever. More history here.
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This is all occurring during a larger conversation regarding the utility of Threads as a platform for news as well as “large” content creators.The New York Times is Tilting at Electoral Windmills, and Threads Isn’t Having It
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Did you ever stop and think “wait a minute, hold the phone…what if Hype Cycle® is itself a hype cycle?”Hype Cycles, Come Again No More
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Apple marketing in 2024 for computer power users is clear as mud. I’m ready for substantial change—and it appears that won’t be forthcoming from Apple.iPad Professional Postmortem
Continue Browsing: June 2024
Hallelujah! Let Us Celebrate the End of Spotify “Podcast” Exclusives
Pour one out for the era of fake podcasting, not-a-podcast-ing…whatever you want to call it. The Spotify “podcast” exclusive is no more.
The writing has been on the wall for some time now, as Spotify has changed its tune and can be found rolling out their exclusive shows to open podcasting platforms at large. And with top shows like Call Her Daddy not only being made available to the public, but actually moving house and setting up shop with competiting distributors, it’s clear Spotify’s gambit that they could capture the podcast market and it turn into their proprietary fiefdom failed spectacularly.
Deadline reports that “The [Call Her Daddy] deal will start in 2025 and gives SiriusXM advertising and distribution rights to the show as well as shows from Cooper’s Unwell Network. Call Her Daddy will also remain on all podcast platforms.”
As I opined on Fresh Fusion’s episode An Interesting Reflection on the Nature of the Podcast, a podcast is an RSS feed with enclosures of audio files which are playable across the whole ecosystem of podcast players. Despite the protestations of those claiming Spotify’s “exclusive podcasts” were indeed podcasts even though they were only playable within Spotify’s proprietary player, it is clear that the open web platform of podcasting won the day. Hallelujah, indeed.
Spotify knew that sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring exclusive podcasts would only be sustainable if 1) they acquired more subscribers as a result and 2) they were able to generate significant revenue from the advertising that those podcasts brought in. Over the course of three years, the first part of Spotify’s calculation bore fruit; now, it is attempting to cash in on the second part. However, with podcast advertising in limbo, it is worth asking whether the second part of Spotify’s strategic calculation will pay off.
Podcast exclusivity is a loss leader strategy.
Why Spotify’s podcast exclusivity era is coming to an end (midiaresearch.com)
How Web Services Might Flourish as a Result of Google Being Trimmed Down to Size
We recently covered the antitrust ruling handed down to Google by the DOJ, and in particular the negative effect it could possibly have on Mozilla Firefox.
There’s clearly a great deal of potential upside for other Web service companies whose offerings have tended to languish in the shadow of Google’s reign. Lauren Feiner writing for The Verge:
Judge Amit Mehta’s decision on how to restore competition will be just as — if not more – important than his finding that Google violated antitrust law. The recently concluded liability phase determined that Google violated the Sherman Act through exclusionary contracts with phone and browser makers to maintain its default search engine position. In the remedies phase, Mehta will decide how to restore competition in general search services and search text advertising.
Feiner continues, quoting statements from Yelp and DuckDuckGo about the need for a level playing field in the marketplace and what sort of remedies could ensure Google’s search and ads business no longer benefits from its illegal monopoly.
One of the potential remedies, requiring browsers to offer users a choice of default search engine upfront, was already adopted in the EU—but so far hasn’t lived up to the hope such choice would greatly shift marketshare towards competing search engines.
It will be hard to break consumer habit, now that “searching the Web” has become synonymous with Google. But as time goes on and Google is forced to compete more fairly, there’s still a chance we’ll see a more robust and sustainable search ecosystem.
Whatever happens, the process could be a drawn-out one. Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker has confirmed the company plans to appeal the ruling, saying the decision “recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”
Like a Pitchbot: The DOJ Won Its Case Against Google. Here’s Why That’s Bad News for Mozilla Firefox
It sounds like a funny meme, but unfortunately this is no laughing matter. Firefox, the little browser that could, could be in serious trouble with the latest ruling against Google.
Jason Del Ray reporting for Fortune:
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
With those words from United States District judge Amit Mehta on Monday, Google suffered a historic antitrust case loss at the hands of the U.S. Department of Justice.
And the fallout could be significant:
But while Apple would certainly take a big hit if the ruling is upheld, Apple is a large, diversified company with many sources of revenue. That’s not the case for another partner of Google’s located in the fallout zone of Monday’s ruling: Mozilla, the non-profit tech org that makes the Firefox web browser.
Jason Del Ray goes on to describe Mozilla’s precarious financial position, as the overwhelming amount of income flowing into the organization comes from a deal to keep Google as the default search engine in Firefox. Bloomberg reported it accounting for a whopping 83% of Mozilla’s income in 2021, even while Firefox’s global market share cratered.
It was arguably never a wise decision to tie Mozilla’s fortunes to Google’s hip, and should a remedy eventually come about that Google is barred from making significant payments to other entities in order to maintain its monopoly in online search, the results would be catastrophic—that is if Mozilla doesn’t immediately plan to take steps to find alternate sources of revenue.
Mozilla may just need to keep Laura Chambers around as interim CEO a bit a longer. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to step into her shoes at a time like this…
For Mozilla, which first rose to prominence in the late 1990s as a community-driven project to challenge Microsoft’s stranglehold on the web browser market via Internet Explorer, Monday’s ruling is the latest setback in a quest to find relevance in a market dominated by Big Tech companies. Mozilla laid off about 60 staffers earlier this year and saw its CEO step down.
ChatG.P.T. Thinks It’s P.H.A.T. (Just Ask Tony Blair)
So let me get this straight.
A research paper, authored by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and presented by the man himself, which claims that AI could automate as much as 40% of the work performed by employees in the public sector—”improving growth and productivity and driving value and efficiency”—was able to make these predictions because…
…they were provided by ChatGPT.
That’s like researching if cats are indeed the best way to catch mice on the farm by walking up to a cat and asking it if it’s the best way to catch mice on the farm. (Although most likely the cat will merely stare at you bemused, then turn around and lick its butt.)
Look, it’s become clear that some amount of task automation can certainly be done by machine learning models. Just ask anybody who’s received a full podcast transcript in a franction of the time it would take a human to perform that work.
But as liguistics professor Emily Bender puts it, “This [research] is absurd—they might as well be shaking a Magic 8 ball and writing down the answers it displays.”
Stop! Don’t give them any ideas! 😂
The researchers then wanted to assess which of these tasks, which are also performed by public sector workers in the UK, could be performed by AI, given the technology’s current capabilities. Amazingly, the researchers concede that answering that question by talking to actual human experts across different fields would be hard, so they just asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to answer the question instead.
Reporting from Christina Warren and Jason Snell on the horrifying news of the “zombie” Internet claiming a classic weblog from the early days of the second coming of Jobs’ Apple renaissance. Sadly the original blog shut down long ago, but it’s just been revived as a dystopian AI-fueled content farm featuring fake articles and authors (but real names!). Wretched.
They’ve re-used the names of key historic contributors, but generated new bios and photos(!) and claim that new stories are written by these historic contributors.
I looked up my friend Scott McNulty, and found this laughable 360-word “deep dive” that references Mac OS X Jaguar and Tiger. It’s dated July 1, 2024. The bio bears no resemblance to reality, and the dude in the photo is not Scott McNulty. The very least these crooks could’ve done is give Scott a hot author photo, but no.
Patreon Creators Can Now Use Bunny for Video
Some news which may have flown under the radar but is actually quite significant: Bunny, a popular CDN provider which offers video hosting and streaming via its Stream service, now offers easy embed integration with Patreon.
Full disclosure: I use Bunny Stream for video hosting at The Spicy Web and elsewhere and have talked about it before on my Fresh Fusion podcast. I’m a big fan of the service, because it effectively lets you create your own streaming service. Video quality is excellent, it’s snappy, the automatic captioning is impressive, and customizing the video player to look native to your web platform of choice is straightforward.
Now with this news, Patreon creators have the ability to publish and monetize their video content by using Patreon for what it does best—writing posts, collecting subscription payments, encouraging comments, etc.—all while keeping full control over video hosting and distribution by using Bunny (for example, you could let patrons watch videos early, and then later publish those exact same videos on your own website for public consumption).
Anything which helps creators wean themselves off of total YouTube dependency is a win in my book. Patreon + Bunny appears to be an attractive proposition.
Until now, content creators on Patreon have lacked good video hosting service options to control their content. This turns into platform dependency, putting the creator’s valuable business at risk. One wrong move and their content could vanish into a rabbit hole.
With Bunny Stream, you’re in the driver’s seat, so you can fully own your content and say goodbye to the hassle of using the traditional video hosting platforms Vimeo or YouTube. This was possible thanks to our integration support for Player.js and because we also became an official embed.ly provider.
Ghost Embraces the Fediverse, Collaborating with Buttondown
The news that Ghost is federating over ActivityPub and plans to release a host of Fediverse-centric features by the end of the year has taken the community building the open social web by storm.
Nilay Patel writes for The Verge:
It seems like the platforms betting on [federation] in various ways — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Flipboard, and others — are where all the energy is, while attempts to rebuild closed systems keep hitting the rocks. …at this point I’m not sure any social platform that launches without an eye towards federation stands a chance, really.
Anuj Ahooja writes in Ghost is about to beat Substack in Discoverability:
The problem with Substack’s Inbox is that it only includes Substack newsletters, RSS feeds, and their walled-garden “Notes” that you cannot access anywhere except their feed. Ghost, on the other hand, choosing to not go the walled-garden route is now tapping into what will be the largest sharing network available on the internet.
It appears that Ghost is not only planning to allow content creators to share posts out via ActivityPub, but is building a reading experience right into Ghost itself—thus making the software a fully-fledged participant in open social networking.
Buttondown, a platform for publishing email newsletters, is also joining the Fediverse and working alongside Ghost:
We’re very, very excited to work alongside Ghost to evolve and proselytize ActivityPub as a great tool for authors to stay connected with their audience without tethering themselves to Yet Another Algorithm or Yet Another Walled Garden.
John O’Nolan, Ghost’s founder, had previously posted that:
Our most-requested feature in the past few years has been to federate Ghost over ActivityPub.
and with this latest news is also hoping to build bridges with rivals like Medium by reaching out to Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine.
Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, praises Ghost on its federation plans:
The blogging platform Ghost is working on adding ActivityPub integration. That means, among other things, being able to follow Ghost-powered blogs and comment on articles right from your Mastodon account. The website they made to explain their plans is really nice! This is what momentum looks like.
While it’s clear that an increasing number of significant players in web publishing and discourse are seeing ActivityPub integration as a must-have feature in this era of social networking, it remains to be seen if these features resonate with the general populace. Many users on Threads continue to indicate their confusion over what the Fediverse is, or their lack of interest in federation regardless, and have yet to enable Thread’s federation functionality on their own profiles.
But these are early days yet for mainstream adoption of Fediverse technology, and just as it took years for concepts like email addresses and URLs to become second nature to Internet users, it may take some time yet for the vernacular of ActivityPub to loom large in public consciousness.
Steps like we’re seeing now with Ghost and Buttondown are another major step forward in this process.
Email gave us private messaging technology that isn’t owned by a single company. You can communicate with anyone, whether you use Gmail or Outlook.
ActivityPub is doing the same for social technology. It’s a protocol that allows people across different platforms to follow, like and reply to one another. No algorithms. No lock-in. No bullshit.
The open web is coming back, and with it returns diversity. You can both publish independently and grow faster than ever before with followers from all over the world & the web.
iPad Fans, You Won’t Be Happy Until June
Rumor has it that new iPad Pro and iPad Air models are imminent. MacRumors by way of Bloomberg is reporting a switch to OLED screens for the Pros, and a larger 12.9” option for the Airs, plus all the usual improvements around moving to M3 processors.
But you won’t be happy. If like me you’re a fan of Apple’s unique tablet ecosystem, you know full well the software is always lagging behind the hardware. No doubt the new iPad Pros & Airs will be flashy, impressive, and boast fancy new accessories. But what we’re really waiting for is iPadOS to suck less. (sigh)
We’ll have to wait until June for that…and pray to the dogcow gods that iPadOS 18 won’t disappoint. 🙇
Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) online from June 10 through 14, 2024. Developers and students will have the opportunity to celebrate in person at a special event at Apple Park on opening day.
Free for all developers, WWDC24 will spotlight the latest iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS advancements. As part of Apple’s ongoing commitment to helping developers elevate their apps and games, the event will also provide them with unique access to Apple experts, as well as insight into new tools, frameworks, and features.
GNOME 46 Released, Featuring Improvements to Files and Notifications
GNOME 46, code-named “Kathmandu”, has been released and will be part of the upcoming Fedora Linux 40 release in May 2024. Some of the noticeable improvements include:
- A global search icon in the top-left corner of the Files window, along with performance improvements and other UI enhancements around progress updates and network discovery.
- Remote login is now available using the RDP protocol.
- Many refinements made to the Settings app.
- Enhanced notifications with headings and groupings to make them easier to visually scan and manage.
- Display improvements around font rendering and scaled interfaces as well as experimental variable refresh rate (VRR) support.
More details and screenshots are available in the release notes here.
Jared’s Take: I’ve been running Fedora Linux in an VM (ARM) on my Mac mini M1 for a while now, and I’ve truly fallen in love with modern GNOME and the experiences made possible by GTK 4. In the not-so-distant past, I couldn’t have imagined desiring to use any desktop OS other than macOS as my daily driver. Now I’m starting to investigate Linux-compatible laptops. The FLOSS FOMO is real! 😅
Start Labeling Your Deepfakes on YouTube…Unless They’re for Kids?
As reported by Ars Technica, YouTube has recently added an upload control to the Studio interface to indicate if your video contains content that “makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn’t say or do” or “alters footage of a real event or place”.
This is a welcome improvement, as the proliferation of AI-generated content has exploded on YouTube as it has on many platforms. While this disclosure doesn’t cover all uses of generative AI, it covers the ones most damaging to news, information gathering, and celebrity coverage.
However, as discovered by WIRED, the new policies do not seem to apply when it comes to showing scenes which are “fantastical” (aka “someone riding a unicorn”). Presumably this means a lot of children’s content being dumped on YouTube would be excempt. It’s also unclear if AI-generated voiceovers would require this disclosure. The rules only mention “voice cloning someone else’s voice to use it for voiceover”.
Let’s hope this proves to be the start of a series of policy updates for YouTube, not a definitive answer to the onslaught of generative AI content.
Google previewed the “misleading AI content” policy in November, but the questionnaire is now going live. Google is mostly concerned about altered depictions of real people or events, which sounds like more election-season concerns about how AI can mislead people. Just last week, Google disabled election questions for its “Gemini” chatbot.
As always, the exact rules on YouTube are up for interpretation. Google says it’s “requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content—content a viewer could easily mistake for a real person, place, or event—is made with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI,” but doesn’t require creators to disclose manipulated content that is “clearly unrealistic, animated, includes special effects, or has used generative AI for production assistance.”
Continue Browsing: March 2024