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2 | These are the Daily Tech Headlines for Wednesday August 7th, 2024. I'm Sarah Lane. | |||||
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6 | Disney CEO Bob Iger said on the company's latest quarterly earnings call Wednesday that in September, Disney Plus will start cracking down on password sharing. The company has been hinting this for a while now.. back in February, Disney announced plans to roll out paid sharing, which it did in June but only to a “few countries”. Disney hasn't said yet what a paid sharing plan will cost, but for comparison Netflix charges an extra $7.99 per month. Disney is also hiking prices across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus starting in October. As for its earnings, Disney's revenue way up 4% YoY to $23.2B and posted $47M in its streaming business operating income, a nice turnaround from its $512M loss in the same quarter last year. | https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/7/24215224/disney-password-sharing-crackdown-september | ||||
7 | On Tuesday, X filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the "Global Alliance for Responsible Media" or GARM and its members—which include major tech companies, advertisers, and ad tech firms. X says the group abused its influence over marketers and ad agencies, prompting an unfair ad boycott against X. GARM was created by members of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) in 2019 in an effort to standardize brand safety for digital advertisers. Conservative media firms accuse GARM of colluding with ad-buying giant GroupM to discourage clients from buying ads on sites with prominent conservative political discourse. | https://www.axios.com/2024/08/06/scoop-x-sues-major-brands-ad-industry-group-for-antitrust | ||||
8 | Apple's macOS Sequoia beta 5 for developers now includes includes Safari's Distraction Control, which lets you hide distracting elements on a webpage like ads, popups, and sign-in prompts. Nothing gets hidden by default but content you select will stay hidden on future page loads. But other ads will still reappear, as ads tend to rotate between page visits. | https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/safari-can-block-distracting-ads-and-other-website-clutter-with-the-latest-ios-18-and-macos-betas-172041678.html | ||||
9 | The practice of Google paying to be the default search engine in Apple's Safari browser was part of the discussion that led Judge Amit Mehta to rule Monday that Google is a monopolist in the United States vs Google antitrust case. But during the trial, Apple Senior VP of services Eddy Cue said there's no real alternative, and used Microsoft's Bing as an example, saying “I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.” According to recent numbers from StatCounter, Google dominates search with 91.04% of the market. Bing only holds 3.86%. During the same trial last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft could pay up to $15 billion annually to replace Google's deal with Apple, and even proposed sharing 100% of its Bing revenue to secure it. | https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/apple-says-theres-no-price-microsoft-could-pay-to-make-it-ditch-google-they-offered-to-give-us-bing-for-free | ||||
10 | AMD announced pricing for its Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs, which were initially delayed due to what AMD said was "an abundance of caution". The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X with 16 cores will sell for $649, $50 less than the Ryzen 9 7950X that launched in 2022. The Ryzen 7 9700X at $359 and the Ryzen 5 9600X at $279 both launch Thursday August 8th, and the 9950X plus the 9 9900X at $499 launch next Thursday August 15th. AMD is also launching X870 and X870E motherboard chipsets for the 9000 series CPUs at some point in the future, but existing AM5 motherboards are also supported until at least 2027. | https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/7/24215164/amd-ryzen-9000-series-pricing-launch-dates | ||||
11 | Google announced the $280 Nest Learning Thermostat 4, with a thinner design, a bezel-free 60% larger display, four different face designs, and some Gemini to improve its learning. It also includes an extra sensor to put in another part of your home, with additional sensors at $40 each or three for $99. Pre-orders are open now, shipping August 20. Google also plans to add Gemini to Google Assistant on Nest speakers and displays to all users in 2025. | https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/06/after-nine-years-googles-nest-learning-thermostat-gets-an-ai-makeover/ | ||||
12 | Roku announced plans to launch The Roku Sports Channel.. a free-with-commercials premium sports channel next Monday Aug. 12. It will feature sports Roku already owns and licenses as part of a Free, Ad-Supported Streaming Television or FAST service, including some live Major League Baseball games with MLB Sunday Leadoff, live Formula E car races, Top Rank boxing matches and sports-themed Roku Originals. | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/roku-launch-sports-channel-1235968164/ | ||||
13 | 404 Media reports that Nvidia told its employees to download videos from YouTube, Netflix and other providers to train its generative models like Omniverse 3D. YouTube tells Engadget that its stance remains that such use of its content is a violation of its terms of service. Nvidia says it's operating within copyright law. | https://www.engadget.com/ai/nvidias-ai-team-reportedly-scraped-youtube-netflix-videos-without-permission-204942022.html | ||||
14 | Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told investors during the company's earnings call on Tuesday that Reddit plans to test AI-powered search result pages to “summarize and recommend content" which is designed to help users discover new communities. The experiment will use both first-party and third-party technology and start later this year. Huffan didn't offer other details on partnerships, but Reddit has current agreements with both Google and OpenAI to train their LLMs on Reddit data and in turn provide Reddit new AI-powered tools. Reddit reported 342.3 million weekly active users, that's up 57% jump from the year prior, and revenue grew to $281.2 million. | https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/06/reddit-ai-powered-search-results/ | ||||
15 | OpenAI cofounder John Schulman announced Tuesday he's leaving the company for a role at ompetitor Anthropic in order to to "deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work”. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman also announced a leave of absence from the company through the end of the year. Product leader Peter Deng is also leaving. What isn't going away is OpenAI DevDay conference, which will be a series of sessions in San Francisco on October 1, London on October 30, and Singapore on November 21. OpenAI says it won't be announcing its next model on any of those dates. | https://www.theinformation.com/articles/trio-of-leaders-leave-openai | ||||
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22 | For more discussion of the tech news of the day subscribe to DailyTechNewsShow.com, [MWF] you can find show notes and links to all headlines there as well. [TTH] and if you enjoy the show, remember to tell a friend to check it out! | http://dailytechnewsshow.reddit.com | ||||
23 | Thanks for listening, we'll talk to you next time. | |||||
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27 | END OF SHOW |