Tell me in a comment below why you clicked on this video and whether me baking fresh cookies a few minutes ago
had anything to do with it. Everybody loves the smell of fresh cookies.
I just thought. Anyway, tech news time. Google has admitted in a court filing posted on Friday
that the open web is already in rapid decline.
Finally, someone said it. As spot, Google of all people,
as spotted by Jason Kint on Twitter.
Google submitted the filing after crashing into a courthouse
dressed in a hot dog costume and assuring everyone that, like them,
Google is just trying to find the guy who caused this rapid decline, okay?
Google's statement here reeks of just trying to get an even weaker punishment in its antitrust case
because the statement conflicts with everything else they've publicly said recently
about how AI search isn't destroying the web by leading to less click-throughs
to publisher websites at all. And in fact, the web is thriving according to Nick Fox,
Google's senior VP of knowledge and information. Pretty sure you have to be pretty smart to get that job.
Probably won Jeopardy at least a couple of times.
Move over, Ken Jennings.
I forgot, I would not win Jeopardy. So it's trying to hear Google say something
that seems to agree with recent research saying that AI tools are negatively affecting traffic
to publisher sites, decreasing the ad revenue they can collect, and imperiling
the already fragile economic model of the web.
Now, obviously Google doesn't want people to get the wrong idea here, as explained on Twitter
by Google VP of Global Ads, Dan Taylor.
What Google meant to imply in the filing is that open web display advertising is in decline.
Not the open web as a whole. The open web isn't going anywhere.
It's just that the only people who will make any money on it is Google.
Aren't they in charge of the display advertising too? I hope this helps.
One and a half billion dollars. That's the amount that Anthropic just agreed to cough up
in a first of its kind copyright settlement with authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graber,
and Kirk Wallace Johnson, because writing a book is so hard
and they just deserve it. It was like a tip, but also because they initiated
a class action against the company, claiming it used tons of pirated books
to train its Claude chatbot. So many tokens.
The settlement is particularly interesting because back in June, a US district judge ruled
that using legally obtained books to train AI software
is not actually a violation of US copyright law,
which implied that you could just buy one copy of a book
and train your AI on it and it's fine. But in the settlement filing, the plaintiff state
that if approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery
in history, setting a precedent for the future of training large language models
using just about anything they can find online,
as long as they pay for it. Because the big takeaway here is that training AI
on copyrighted stuff you actually bought might still be fair use, but pirated books,
well that's gonna be a billion and a half dollar oopsie. Damage to subsea cables in the Red Sea
is wreaking havoc on internet performance across Asia and the Middle East.
On Saturday, multiple critical undersea fiber links decided to cosplay as spaghetti, just on their own,
near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, triggering widespread latency
spikes in India, Pakistan, and the UAE.
Microsoft confirmed that its Azure cloud services were also affected, though traffic wasn't halted,
many users experienced noticeable delays as Microsoft rerouted network traffic
via longer alternative paths. It's actually worse, I think.
Going the long way around. Status updates later indicated that Azure services
in the Middle East have been restored, though ongoing high latency lingers for some users.
Cable operators and monitoring group Netblocks reported that telecom networks across the UAE
also felt the pinch, with disruptions continuing
as repair efforts ramp up. The worst part of all of this is that repair timelines
are still up in the air, partly because the Red Sea
isn't exactly the friendliest neighborhood for weekend cable fixing parties right now.
That was dashedly hoot these. You know, at a certain point in life,
everyone has that moment where they stop and think to themselves, hmm,
I wonder where those quick bits went. Where are they? Well, guess what?
I found them. I found them.
Back in March, Neuralink tried trademarking telepathy
and telekinesis, promising a future where you could move stuff with your mind
or whisper secrets without opening your mouth. Elon should try thinking.
But last week, the US Patent and Trademark Office denied those applications.
Turns out they were snagged way back in May 2023 and August 2024 by Wesley Perry,
founder of a lucid dreaming startup called Prophetic,
which is building a matrix style headset you wear while sleeping to trigger lucid dreams.
Sex dreams you can control. Or any other kind of dreams, Riley.
Still, Neuralink's own filings make it clear they want telepathy on the market,
a brain-computer interface for thought-based communication and device control.
But if you ask me, maybe Elon should try trademarking empathy instead, you know, people have feelings.
And that one's also taken. Amazon's Starlink competitor, Project Kuiper,
is finally showing off what it can do, hitting speeds of up to 1.28 gigabits per second
in tests last week. That's faster than a lot of ground-based ISPs.
But, you know, they have to go through the ground. It's a little harder than- Space, Riley.
It's space. And now it's not just a lab demo either.
JetBlue has signed on as the first airline partner.
Starting in 2027, about a quarter of their fleet will get Kuiper-powered Wi-Fi,
which JetBlue says will be free for passengers,
only two years. Yes, finally, streaming Netflix at 35,000 feet
without watching the buffer wheel do laps, although that can be entertaining
when there's nothing else going on. Just use it to focus when there's a baby crying.
Microsoft has open-sourced Bill Gates and Rick Weilands,
Whalen's 1976 version of 6502Basic,
the code that once powered icons like the Commodore 64, Apple II, and Vic-20.
With nearly 7,000 lines of hand-tuned assembly now free on GitHub,
free lines of assembly, researchers can dig into the DNA
of early personal computing, seeing how software was optimized
when every byte mattered. They have souls. For historians, it's a rare glimpse
into Microsoft's scrappy garage-era roots.
For editors, it's a great way to see Bill Gates' sense of humor in the assembly comments.
He's such a little, you know? He's a little sassy guy, very rich.
And globally, Hollow Knight's silk song is basking in very positive Steam reviews,
but in China, not so much. Over 14,000 negative reviews
have dragged the simplified Chinese version of the game's rating down to mixed.
Why? Players say the translation makes it read less like a game
and more like your buddy's D&D campaign notes after three Red Bulls
if they were tossed into an anime girl dating simulator. Sounds fun, but one localization expert
even compared it to a high school drama club's
Elizabethan improv. Imagine trying to fight bosses
while everyone's talking like Shakespeare. Again, it's not, doesn't sound horrible.
Team Cherry quickly apologized, promising to fix the translation in the coming weeks.
But thanks to Valve's updated review policy, the fallout is mostly quarantined to China.
Global players still see very positive. So the angry reviews are less world-ending bomb
and more localized explosion. Speaking of free things,
which is a segue left over from when there was a different story there,
come back on Wednesday for more tech news. Completely free.
Of bomb. As long as the economic model of the web
is still intact by then. Hopefully there's, hopefully a bomb didn't.
We were saying, we're gonna get demonetized. We're giving you a Houthi free guarantee.
Jeez, Louise.