ryper
@ryper@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Senators Call for The FTC to Launch an Investigation into Spotify for Forcing Subscribers into Higher-Priced Subscriptions Without Their Consent. 15 hours ago:
Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.
Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.
- Comment on Infinite glitch 3 weeks ago:
The music labels have responded by trying to make artists wait much longer before re-record their music:
It’s significant, Greenstein said, that the first Taylor’s Version wasn’t released until she’d been off Big Machine for three years. Until then, she was legally bound not to re-record any of the material, and this time frame was typical of record deals in the past. But this is the part of the equation that Swift likely changed for good.
“For decades, major labels were somewhat rational when it came to the prohibition of re-recordings,” Greenstein said. “But now they’re going to be asking, ‘What’s the risk of a Taylor’s Version?’”
In response, record companies are now trying to prohibit re-recordings for 20 or 30 years, not just two or three. And this has become a key part of contract negotiations. “Will they get 30 years? Probably not, if the lawyer is competent. But they want to make sure that the artist’s vocal cords are not in good shape by the time they get around to re-recording.”
- Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 3 weeks ago:
Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.
- Comment on Australia could tax Google, Facebook and other tech giants with a digital services tax – but don’t hold your breath 3 weeks ago:
Australia has never contemplated imposing a similar tax. New Zealand tried but backed down last week after the United States threatened to impose higher tariffs on New Zealand goods.
What happened in New Zealand is almost certainly what will happen in Australia. This will go nowhere.
- Comment on DOOM: The Dark Ages Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 1 Million Copies 3 weeks ago:
Microsoft owns id’s parent company these days, and Microsoft provides services to the Israeli military.
- Comment on Former Meta exec says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry 3 weeks ago:
Well the AI companies should have understood that building an industry off of doing something questionable was risky and risks don’t always work out.
- Comment on Ben Shapiro's sister 1 month ago:
Slate: The Far Right Thinks Sydney Sweeney Killed Wokeness
It’s a common phenomenon, really. Sydney Sweeney is beautiful now, and would be considered so in any era. But because she’s no longer the only type of woman who’s considered beautiful, certain people on the right think they’re being oppressed and the world has gone to hell.
Why have these weirdos zeroed in on Sweeney in particular? There are lots of beautiful white women with big boobs out there—Kate Upton, Blake Lively, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Ratajkowski, and more. As far as I can tell, part of it seems to be that Sweeney doesn’t shy away from talking about or sharing her body. On Euphoria, she does a lot of nudity, and she’s spoken in interviews about feeling comfortable with it. On SNL, she repeatedly joked about her boobs and even wore a Hooters uniform. The National Post praised Sweeney for “playfully owning her sex appeal with zero apologies” and criticized Vanity Fair for suggesting it might have been nice to give her some material that wasn’t about her beauty.
- Comment on ‘Make all women yours’: Rape game available online for Australian children 2 months ago:
The article is out of date. According to this one, the game was removed from sale on Steam yesterday in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the dev is going to withdraw it from Steam entirely.
Zerat Games has announced it will withdraw its sexually explicit visual novel from Steam after it was removed from sale in the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Posted to the game’s Steam page, which is no longer accessible to those who have not previously purchased the game, the developer defended its title but confirmed it would be removed from the platform.
“We don’t intend to fight the whole world, and specifically, we don’t want to cause any problems for Steam and Valve,” the developer said.
- Comment on How do I fit a network card with a physical x4 slot into an x1 slot? 2 months ago:
An x1 slot is an x1 slot, the PCIe version will downgrade but there will still only be one lane because that’s all the slot physically has connections for. It will effectively be a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.
- Comment on How do I fit a network card with a physical x4 slot into an x1 slot? 2 months ago:
Pretty sure if you put a PCIe 3.0 card in a 4.0 slot the slot will drop to 3.0, and 1 PCIe 3.0 lane probably isn’t going to work great with a card meant for 4 of them.
- Comment on Democratic Senators Team Up With MAGA To Hand Trump A Censorship Machine 2 months ago:
No, because they can afford the legal fees. It will be worst for smaller sites. From the article:
With Section 230, if a website (or a user!) wants to defend its right to keep content up (or take it down), winning such a case typically costs around $100,000. Without those protections, even if you’d ultimately win on First Amendment grounds, you’re looking at about $2 million in legal fees. For Meta or Google, that’s a rounding error. For a small news site or blog, it’s potentially fatal. And this includes users who simply forward an email or retweet something they saw. Section 230 protects them as well, but without it, they’re at the whims of legal threats.
- Comment on Microsoft Outlook servers down, reports say 3 months ago:
I guess that explains why the iOS Mail app asked me to sign into my account again. I switched away from the Outlook app last week and I was thinking the Mail app must only be able to stay logged in for a few days at a time.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 3 months ago:
Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option.
When was the last time you checked? Jellyfin has had an app on LG’s webOS store for a couple of years now, although older TVs didn’t get it until a few months later. I’d given up on it and bought a lifetime Emby Premiere licence by the time by TV was finally supported.
- Comment on After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad 3 months ago:
- Comment on Microsoft gives up on users experiencing problems updating their Windows 11 machines. Now recommends a "manual correction" 4 months ago:
They rewrote the taskbar and Start menu for Windows 11, and left out stuff like being able to move the taskbar or even have separate taskbar items for each instance of an application. Rewriting the whole OS would be a disaster.
- Comment on Six days of horror: America’s thirst for executions returns with a vengeance 5 months ago:
Says right at the top of the article “This article is more than 3 months old” (their bold, not mine)
- Comment on Rainbolt never misses 5 months ago:
We have literally every biome here, more vacation options than you could fit into a human lifetime of just visiting them all
Americans just don’t have enough vacation days; Europeans might be able to manage it.
- Comment on The Verge raises a partial paywall: ‘It’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls’ | Semafor 6 months ago:
The official announcement says they did because people have been asking for a way to support the site, but it’s not at all clear those people had a paywall in mind. Ars Technica has had subscriptions for years, and they paywall extra site functionality like topic filtering and a full-text RSS feed, not content.
- Comment on X adds Twitch to its advertising boycott lawsuit 6 months ago:
According to the article, not that likely:
Terms requiring users to sue in specific courts are usually enforceable, Vanderbilt Law School Professor Brian Fitzpatrick told Ars today. “There might be an argument that there was no consent to the new terms, but if you have to click on something at some point acknowledging you read the new terms, consent will probably be found,” he told us in an email.
A user attempting to sue X in a different state or district probably wouldn’t get very far. “If a suit was filed in the wrong court, it would be dismissed (if filed in state court) or transferred (if filed in federal court),” Fitzpatrick said.
- Comment on X adds Twitch to its advertising boycott lawsuit 6 months ago:
And changed the twitter ToS to require suits in a specific part of texas.
- Comment on Court Orders Google (a Monopolist) To Knock It Off With the Monopoly Stuff. 7 months ago:
The payments requirement was the only win Epic got in its case against Apple. Apple now allows external purchase links, with a bunch of requirements and restrictions.
- Comment on Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users 7 months ago:
Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year.
This is for the quarter that covers July, August and September. Last year, the API fee kicked in on July 1, killing most third-party apps, and the quarter would have also included any lingering drop in users from June’s protests. So, it’s a big year-over-year increase in users but that’s compared to what might not have been a very good quarter last year.
- Comment on Elon Musk's X further squeezes developers with apparent new API fees 7 months ago:
Yes. Twitter was first, then Reddit, now Twitter is another fee
- Comment on An investigation exposes data brokers using ads to help track almost any phone 7 months ago:
They’re tracking people using their phone’s advertising ID. Here’s an EFF post about resetting it.
On newer versions of iOS apps have to ask for permission to access your device’s advertising ID; Facebook was very unhappy about that. Turning off Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Tracking -> Allow Apps to Request to Track will (should?) keep apps from getting your advertising ID. I’m not sure if Android has anything like that, but Google is an advertising company so my guess is No.
- Comment on Few truly shocked that NFL player used illegal stream to watch his own team 7 months ago:
Apple already supports buying individual episodes on the iTunes Store.