Tech

The start of this carriage dispute even nixed a US Open viewing session on a screen at New York’s Hudson Yards. While DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-verse customers miss the services they pay for and Venu Sports remains on hiatus, both sides point fingers over the blackout.

Disney / ESPN:

...we will not enter into an agreement that undervalues our portfolio of television channels and programs.

DirecTV:

Disney is again taking an anti-consumer approach, demanding that customers from DirecTV and other TV distributors be forced to pay for channels they don’t watch...

AB 1836, which requires studios to get express consent from dead performers’ estates before producing digital replicas of them, passed the state Senate yesterday, reports Variety.

The bill’s passage yesterday came days after California’s legislature passed AB 2602 with similar consent requirements for living actors. SAG-AFTRA released a statement calling the bill a “legislative priority” and encouraging Governor Gavin Newsom to sign it.

The feature, which lets developers put live-updating info on iPhone lock screens (things like sports scores), is limited to refreshing “between 5–15 seconds” in a recent iOS 18 beta, according to an app developer who says their app could do it once a second before.

Apple told them the change was intentional, according to a post spotted by 9to5Mac.

Apple could release a new keyboard accessory for “an entry-level iPad or the new iPad Airs” by mid-2025, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.

The keyboard won’t have glitzier iPad Pro Magic Keyboard features like a metal palm rest, but could come with a function row, he writes.

Apple Stores’ stock of FineWoven products — phone cases and watch bands alike — is running low, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. As he points out, that’s normal before a big Apple event and doesn’t strictly mean that the no-good, very bad case material is disappearing.

As a refresher, here’s The Verge’s Allison Johnson talking about FineWoven last year.

The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.

Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.

Kevin Roose, whose New York Times story about horny Bing chats went viral last year, writes that chatbots are at times very negative about him since, having seemingly picked up on criticism of his piece.

Now, he writes about how he used techniques that could be considered an AI-focused version of SEO to influence how they respond when asked about him — and what that portends.

That’s according to Forbes, which reports that the man had used a GoPro to record children at Disney World for the purpose:

... Justin Culmo, who was arrested in mid-2023, admitted to creating thousands of illegal images of children taken at the amusement park and at least one middle school, using a version of AI model Stable Diffusion ...

Itsuno says he will “start developing a new game in a new environment” beginning next month. He has directed some of Capcom’s most well-regarded games, including most of the Devil May Cry games, Power Stone 2, and, most recently, Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Check out Andrew Webster’s 2019 Verge interview with Itsuno, where he talked about his approach to Devil May Cry 5.

Alongside its big funding round that could include investments from Apple and Nvidia, OpenAI may also change its structure “so that it is more appealing to investors,” The New York Times reports. OpenAI is a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary.

The NYT also says OpenAI has elevated Chris Lehane, who worked at Airbnb and in the Clinton administration, to be its VP of global policy.

Brazilian fans of musicians, actors, and other celebrities play a huge role in cultivating fandoms online — and it’s unclear what will happen to stan Twitter (X) now that a judge in Brazil has ordered a ban on platform. A Timothée Chalamet updates account has already announced it’ll cease operations, and I bet this won’t be the only unexpected collateral damage.

Last year, Stanford researchers found that LAION-5B — the dataset used by Stable Diffusion — contained thousands of links to child abuse imagery. LAION has since attempted to address this issue by re-releasing a clean version of the model, now called RE-LAION-5B:

In all, 2236 links were removed after matching with the lists of link and image hashes provided by our partners. These links also subsume 1008 links found by the Stanford Internet Observatory report in Dec 2023. 

Users apparently can’t adjust the brightness on the new Nest Learning Thermostat, leaving the display too dim at times. Fortunately, it seems a fix is on the way, as Google has told 9to5Google that it will soon roll out a way to adjust brightness.