Daily Archives: September 3, 2025

Top German court says maybe the Web should be more like television in order to protect copyright and intrusive business models

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Back in 2022, Walled Culture wrote about a legal case involving ad blockers. These are hugely popular programs: according to recent statistics, around one billion people use ad blockers when they are online. That’s a testament to the importance many people attach to being in control of their browser experience, and to a wide dislike of the ads they are forced to view. The 2022 case concerned a long-running attempt by the German media publishing giant Axel Springer to sue Eyeo, the makers of the widely-used AdBlock Plus program. Springer was trying to force people to view the ads on its sites, whether they are wanted or not, and argued that ad blocking programs were illegal. Springer lost every one of its many court cases trying to establish this, but refused to give up on its quixotic quest. It appealed to the German Federal Supreme Court, which has unfortunately sent the case back to the lower court. As a post on the Mozilla blog explains:

The BGH (as the Federal Supreme Court is known) called for a new hearing so that the Hamburg court can provide more detail regarding which part of the website (such as bytecode or object code) is altered by ad blockers, whether this code is protected by copyright, and under what conditions the interference might be justified.

The full impact of this latest development is still unclear. The BGH will issue a more detailed written ruling explaining its decision. Meanwhile, the case has now returned to the lower court for additional fact-finding. It could be a couple more years until we have a clear answer.

Springer’s argument was that a Web page is actually a kind of program, and as such was protected by copyright. An ad blocker installed in a browser, Springer maintained, infringed on its copyright by modifying that Web page program without permission. This is a novel way of looking at browsers and the Web pages they display. For the last 35 years, Web pages have been regarded as an arrangement of raw data in the form of text, images, sounds etc. The Web browser is a specialised program for displaying that data in various formats, controlled by the user. Springer is asserting something far reaching: that a Web page is itself a program that must be run “as is”, and not modified by a Web browser and its add-ons without the explicit permission of the page’s copyright holder.

As the Mozilla blog post points out, if the German courts ultimately adopt this position, the implications would be profound, because this would affect not just ad blockers. There are many other reasons why people use tools like browser extensions to modify Web pages before they are displayed:

These include changes to improve accessibility, to evaluate accessibility, or to protect privacy. Indeed, the risks of browsing range from phishing, to malicious code execution, to invasive tracking, to fingerprinting, to more mundane harms like inefficient website elements that waste processing resources. Users should be equipped with browsers and browser extensions that give them both protection and choice in the face of these risks. A browser that inflexibly ran any code served to the user would be an extraordinarily dangerous piece of software. [Emphasis in original]

Springer’s argument is an attack on the very concept of what a Web browser does. The German publisher wants the browser and extensions to be under the Web page author’s control, with the browser user reduced to a passive viewer. It effectively turns the Web into a form of television, with Web page “broadcasts” that can’t be modified in any significant ways. Mozilla rightly warns:

Such a precedent could embolden legal challenges against other extensions that protect privacy, enhance accessibility, or improve security. Over time, this could deter innovation in these areas, pressure browser vendors to limit extension functionality, and shift the internet away from its open, user-driven nature toward one with reduced flexibility, innovation, and control for users.

In the wider context of copyright, there are two aspects worth noting. One is that Springer is using copyright not to protect creativity, but to enforce its business model – online advertising – after losing multiple court cases that it had brought based on competition law. The other point is that Springer’s argument is only possible because copyright was extended to computer programs some years ago. That was not an inevitable decision, since it could be argued that computer code lacks the human, expressive nature of texts, images or music. It’s true that different coders have different styles that may be visible in their output, but those differences are hardly on the same level as a Shakespeare sonnet, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, or a Beethoven string quartet. To afford them the same protection was a mistake, and a product of the copyright industry’s successful campaign to expand this powerful intellectual monopoly protection to more fields, however inappropriately.

In the present case it can be seen how dangerous this mindless maximalist approach is. If the lower German court accepts Springer’s argument, after it has carried out its fact finding, it would chill real Internet innovation for the sake of protecting a deeply-flawed and failing business model that has nothing to do with life-enhancing creativity, but is all about eliminating choice and agency. Although such a result would only apply in Germany, and would in any case be hard to enforce, the EU legal system and the global nature of the Web means it could have wider knock-on effects. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Source: Top German court says maybe the Web should be more like television in order to protect copyright – Walled Culture

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move review: e-ink notepad gets nice and small (7.8″)

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Since I fell in love reviewing the ReMarkable 2 in 2020, I’ve had one wish for the Norwegian whizz kids behind this state-of-the-art e-ink tablet: Make one like this but smaller, please.

Why? Because while it’s nice to write on a super-slim, silver, LED-free “magic legal pad from the future,” as I still call it, there are times when the form factor of a legal pad feels like too much. Use one on a plane tray table, for example, and you might feel exposed to the prying eyes of seatmates. Then there’s the portability factor: An e-ink notebook/sketchbook you can just slip into your pocket like a smartphone, rather than tote it around in a laptop bag, seems like a no-brainer.

[…]

With the launch of the Paper Pro Move ($449 with regular Marker stylus, $499 with Marker Plus, available for order now on Remarkable.com), we have a 7.8-inch notebook screen that’s satisfyingly small and portable. Amazingly, ReMarkable has done this while retaining all the Paper Pro’s color e-ink functionality — and the aspect ratio of its pages.

I’ve been using the Move for two weeks, and I very much like what I’m seeing. Because here’s the ingenious part of the Move’s design: ReMarkable didn’t opt for the form factor of a regular old Kindle (or a medium Moleskine, to put it in paper notebook terms). Instead the company drew inspiration from something so obvious, this reporter has smacked his head that he didn’t think of it: the classic reporter’s notebook.

[…]

It’s not just that reporter’s notebooks are longer and thinner, all the better to take fast notes while on your feet at a press conference. It’s not just that a thinner device is easier to stuff in your pocket (some pockets, to be fair, are too small to fully contain the Move). It’s also what a longer, thinner design means in the context of ReMarkable world.

[…]

In portrait mode, the Paper Pro Move automatically fits the page to the screen. (It also pins the menu bar to the top of the page, which makes more sense than left or right.) If you go back and forth between portrait and landscape mode, you’ll probably be able to tell which mode any particular notes were written in; the words might look too small or too large in the other mode.

A woman in a park writes on a notebook-sized e-ink tablet held in one hand
Using the ReMarkable Paper Pro Move in the wild Credit: Chris Taylor / Mashable

Personally, I’ve really enjoyed writing in tight, tiny lines in portrait mode, as if I’m trying to save paper, and quite enjoy how that looks in regular (landscape orientation) size. But your writing mileage may vary. And if you’re using ReMarkable’s highly effective handwriting-to-text conversion feature, the size of your scrawl may not matter at all.

Your battery mileage will vary too In my enthusiastic testing, the battery life came nowhere close to ReMarkable’s claim that it can last a full two weeks. To be fair, this is going to depend largely on how much you use the e-ink backlight (which also seems improved, and more evenly distributed around the screen, than in the Paper Pro). If you’re not going to use the backlight at all, two weeks of battery life seems a reasonable expectation.

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move comes with caveats

The form factor of a reporter’s notebook isn’t great for everything you can do on an e-ink screen. Many PDFs and EPUB files will look a tad too small in Portrait Mode, so you either have to flip the screen and scroll a lot, or mess around with pinch and zoom. That, unfortunately, is not helped by the one thing that still feels buggy about e-ink screens: if you’re moving through or around pages too fast, they can’t always keep up. A slow refresh rate can have you scrolling through pages faster than you intend.

If you’re used to LED-screen smartphones rather than Kindles, say, this may be an exercise in frustration. Also frustrating is the color refresh problem that carries over from the Paper Pro: Any color you use that isn’t black has to flash on and off. But if you’re new to ReMarkable world, and to writing with e-ink, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised at how fast and natural writing itself (in regular black on white) feels.

You’ll have to decide whether to go naked without the Folio covers, which cost extra, or spend up to $100 more to protect your screen from whatever scratch-creating objects might be in your pocket or bag.

[…]

There’s one final caveat on cost. if you want more than your 50 most recent documents to sync to other devices (including the ReMarkable desktop, iOS and web app readers), you’ll need the ReMarkable Connect service. This is free for the first 100 days, and costs $2.99 a month or $29 a year thereafter.

Conclusion: This notebook is magic

Ultimately, the proof is in the writing. And I have been writing, in more places than ever: On planes, on trains, in automobiles (I don’t recommend the latter if you get carsick easily, but the desire was there). I’ve written in bed while disturbing my partner less. I’ve pulled it out of my pocket in waiting rooms; I’ve jotted notes on it while friends I was having coffee with were busy typing “just one quick email” on their smartphones.

The best notebook or writing tablet, to paraphrase a common saying about cameras, is the one you have with you. And the ReMarkable Paper Pro Move is a notebook you’re going to want to have with you, for the sharpness of the result as well as the portability factor. If you’ve got room in your pockets for a second gadget to tote everywhere like you tote your smartphone, and if you’re prepared to leave your wallet a little roomier, then this may be the Move.

Source: ReMarkable Paper Pro Move review: e-ink gets nice and small | Mashable

Now let’s hope it’s a little more durable than the ReMarkable 2, which busted the USB port, the power button and cracked the screen when I hauled it around for 2x 2 weeks holiday.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly says no need for punishment.

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So the judge says that because things changed  in the search space (AI / GPT searching) that changes the advertising space (which the GPTs don’t really do much of – yet) which is what the case was about. The anti-competitive facts of the case were before GPTs came along and are not relevant to the current GPTs but all of that somehow doesn’t matter so Google doesn’t really have to change much.

Champagne will be flowing at Google HQ after US District Judge Amit Mehta decided to do very little to rein in the monopolistic web giant.

In his 230-page ruling Mehta, who last August ruled that Google broke US competition law, decided the search behemoth will not have to divest its Chrome browser or Android operating systems, and can continue to pay billions to the likes of Apple to secure a prominent place for its search engine.

“Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,” he ruled. “Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”

That decision will disappoint the US Department of Justice, because Mehta rejected the remedies it called for.

The only government proposal Mehta accepted was that Google must share access to user-side data, albeit only to “qualified competitors.” While this includes things like a search index and user-interaction data, it doesn’t have to hand over specific advertising data.

“If you think of ingredients as data, like users’ search index, recipes are what they do with that data and how they use that data to make search results more relevant,” Adam Kovacevich, CEO of technology non-profit Chamber of Progress and a former Googler, told The Register.

“What you had is Google’s rivals arguing that Google had to share its recipes’ secret sauce. And the judge rejected that. He said: ‘You only have to share their ingredient list, effectively their search and search index.'”

The ruling also includes a requirement for Google to stop entering into exclusive deals that make the search giant the default search engine on mobile devices. It also requires Google to submit to six years of regulatory oversight by a technical committee that will monitor it to ensure it’s not backsliding.

You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot

The DoJ is likely to appeal but had no comment at the time of publication. However, the ruling has infuriated antitrust groups.

“You don’t find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot,” said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the non-profit American Economic Liberties Project.

“Similarly, you don’t find Google liable for monopolization and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. This feckless remedy to the most storied case of monopolization of the past quarter century is a complete failure of his duty and must be appealed.”

Yet another thing AI has ruined

So what was it that caused the judge – who said barely a year ago that the ad slinger was an “overbearing illegal monopoly” – to do so little to change the status quo?

Mehta found that AI has changed the competitive landscape Google faces since the DoJ first brought its case in October 2020.

“The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” he wrote. “No witness at the liability trial testified that GenAI products posed a near-term threat to general search engines (GSE).

“The very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among GSEs as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space.”

Mehta argued that over the past year he has sought out multiple sources of testimony to discuss AI and the issues that surround it, and is therefore cognizant of the issues it creates. But the original case was about Google’s existing advertising practices. The judge claims he addressed that matter.

Google clearly agrees with Mehta when it comes to AI changing the antitrust situation. In a statement, it welcomed the ruling and said it will continue to dispute his initial finding that it is an illegal monopoly.

“Today’s decision recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information,” Google said in a canned statement. “This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”

Google and Mehta do have a point. The Chamber of Progress’s Kovacevich – who attended many of the hearings – pointed out that when the case was heard generative AI was very new, and the AI search market was still in its infancy. In the nearly five years since, much has changed.

“Anybody who has been paying attention to technology in the last two years would say that generative AI does pose a competitive challenge to traditional search engines,” he opined.

Anybody who has been paying attention to technology in the last two years would say that generative AI does pose a competitive challenge to traditional search engines

“So I think what the judge was grappling with was this reality that it changes the game, and it changed the game since Google was found liable in the first phase of the trial. So I thought it was great that he was acknowledging that, and spent so many pages [of the ruling] just talking about how much that poses a competitive challenge to traditional search engines.”

And the billions will keep flowing

Google’s stock price shot up by eight percent in after-hours trading and Apple’s jumped 2.5 percent, suggesting investors like this ruling.

That sentiment may stem from the fact that during the trial it emerged that in 2021 Google paid more than $26 billion to other companies to make sure that it was the default search engine on their platforms. Apple raked in $18-20 billion in 2020 alone, around a quarter of its profit in that year [PDF]. Google wouldn’t spend that sort of money unless it paid off, so its shareholders may be pleased that a big source of revenue remains viable.

Mozilla is another beneficiary of Google’s largesse. While the amount it gets is trivial in comparison to Cook & Co, thought to be around $400 million, the foundation has very few other sources of revenue. Earlier this year Mozilla’s CFO warned that cutting the Google subsidy would “potentially start a downward spiral of usage as people defected from our browser, which … could at the end of the day put Firefox out of business,” the judge notes.

At the time of publication, Apple and Mozilla had no comment.

Mehta noted that the loss of such payments would be “crippling,” and “downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.”

So what will change for consumers? In effect, almost nothing. Google will carry on as before, and the case will drag on for years.

“Users will be in much the same position as before,” Mitch Stoltz, litigation director for the EFF told The Register.

“The lack of any restructuring of Google, or even a ban on the massive revenue sharing payments to Apple and others for default search placement that were at the heart of the government’s case, mean that Google’s incentives won’t change, and the data-sharing remedies may be undermined.” ®

Source: Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly orders modest remedies • The Register

 

Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model

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There’s a new player in the AI race, and it’s a whole country. Switzerland has just released Apertus, its open-source national Large Language Model (LLM) that it hopes would be an alternative to models offered by companies like OpenAI. Apertus, Latin for the world “open,” was developed by the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), all of which are public institutions.

“Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity,” said Joshua Tan, a leading proponent in making AI a public infrastructure.

The Swiss institutions designed Apertus to be completely open, allowing users to inspect any part of its training process. In addition to the model itself, they released comprehensive documentation and source code of its training process, as well as the datasets they used. They built Apertus to comply with Swiss data protection and copyright laws, which makes it perhaps one of the better choices for companies that want to adhere to European regulations. The Swiss Bankers Association previously said that a homegrown LLM would have “great long-term potential,” since it will be able to better comply with Switzerland’s strict local data protection and bank secrecy rules. At the moment, Swiss banks are already using other AI models for their needs, so it remains to be seen whether they’ll switch to Apertus.

Anybody can use the new model: Researchers, hobbyists and even companies are welcome to build upon it and to tailor it for their needs. They can use it to create chatbots, translators and even educational or training tools, for instance. Apertus was trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages, with 40 percent of the data in languages other than English, including Swiss German and Romansh. Switzerland’s announcement says the model was only trained on publicly available data, and its crawlers respected machine-readable opt-out requests when they came across them on websites. To note, AI companies like Perplexity have previously been accused of scraping websites and bypassing protocols meant to block their crawlers. Some AI companies have also been sued by news organizations and creatives for using their content to train their models without permission.

Apertus is currently available in two sizes with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters. It’s currently available via Swisscom, a Swiss information and communication technology company, or via Hugging Face.

 

https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus

Source: Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model

 

 

Study finds cannabis improves sleep where other drugs fail

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Insomnia patients taking cannabis-based medical products reported better quality sleep after up to 18 months of treatment, according to a study published August 27 in the open-access journal PLOS Mental Health by Arushika Aggarwal from Imperial College London, U.K., and colleagues.

About one out of every three people has some trouble getting a good night’s rest, and 10 percent of adults meet the criteria for an insomnia disorder. But current treatments can be difficult to obtain, and the drugs approved for insomnia run the risk of dependence. To understand how cannabis-based medical products might affect insomnia symptoms, the authors of this study analyzed a set of 124 insomnia patients taking medical cannabis products. They examined the patient’s reports of their sleep quality, anxiety/depression, and quality of life changes between one and 18 months of treatment.

The patients reported improved sleep quality that lasted over the 18 months of treatment. They also showed significant improvements in anxiety/depression as well as reporting less pain. About nine percent of the patients reported adverse effects such as fatigue, insomnia, or dry mouth, but none of the side effects were life-threatening. While randomized controlled trials will be needed to prove that the products are safe and effective, the authors suggest that cannabis-based medical products could improve sleep quality in insomnia patients.

[…]

He adds: “Conducting this long-term study provided valuable real-world evidence on patient outcomes that go beyond what we typically see in short-term trials. It was particularly interesting to observe signs of potential tolerance over time, which highlights the importance of continued monitoring and individualized treatment plans.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Arushika Aggarwal, Simon Erridge, Isaac Cowley, Lilia Evans, Madhur Varadpande, Evonne Clarke, Katy McLachlan, Ross Coomber, James J. Rucker, Mark W. Weatherall, Mikael H. Sodergren. UK Medical Cannabis Registry: A clinical outcomes analysis for insomnia. PLOS Mental Health, 2025; 2 (8): e0000390 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000390

Cannabis-based medicinal products

Details of cannabis-based medicinal product treatment at baseline and the maximum titrated dose were available for all participants (n = 124) (Table 4). Administration routes were also available at baseline (n = 124), follow-up months 1, 3, 6, and 12 (n = 123) and 18-months (n = 124). The median daily CBD dose at baseline was 1.00 [0.00-20.00] mg/day and increased to 10.00 [0.00-25.00] mg/day by month 3, and this was sustained until 18-month follow-up (10.00 [5.00-35.75] mg/day). For THC, the median daily dose was 20.00 [2.00-20.00] mg/day at baseline, and by 18-month follow-up, increased to 120.00 [95.00-210.38] mg/day. The most prescribed regimen at baseline (n = 51; 41.13%) and throughout every follow-up month until month 18 (n = 54; 43.55%) was dried flower only.

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Table 4. Data on prescribed cannabis-based medicinal products recorded for participants (n = 124).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000390.t004

Source: Study finds cannabis improves sleep where other drugs fail | ScienceDaily

Stolen Salesforce Drift OAuth tokens expose Palo Alto customer data

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Palo Alto Networks is writing to customers that may have had commercially sensitive data exposed after criminals used stolen OAuth credentials lifted from the Salesloft Drift break-in to gain entry to its Salesforce instance.

Marc Benoit, chief information security officer at PAN, confirmed in a note to clients – seen by The Register – that it was informed on August 25 that the “compromise of a third-party application, Salesloft’s Drift, resulted in the access and exfiltration of data stored in our Salesforce environment.”

It immediately disconnected the third-party application from its Salesforce CRM, he said. “The investigation [by the Unit 42 team] confirms that the event was isolated to our Salesforce environment and did not affect any Palo Alto Networks products, systems or services.”

Benoit said it “further confirmed that the data involved includes primarily customer business contact information, such as names and contact info, company attributes, and basic customer support case information. It is important to note that no tech support files or attachments to any customer support cases were part of the exfiltration.”

[…]

The breach of the Drift application has led to supply chain attacks at “hundreds” of organizations, including PAN, said Benoit in a blog post. He said the “incident” was “isolated to our CRM platform.”

Google said last week that it didn’t have enough signs to confirm that the recent spate of Salesforce data thefts claimed by ShinyHunters on Google itself, Workday, Allianz, Quantas and LVMH brand Dior were connected to the same group that masterminded the Salesloft attack.

The Unit 42 team at PAN advised organizations to monitor Salesforce and Salesloft updates, and take steps such as token revocation to secure platforms. It recommends conducting a review of all Drift integrations and all authentication activity with third-party systems for evidence of “suspicious connections, credential harvesting and data exfiltration.”

Unit 42 also recommends that you probe your Salesforce log-in history, audit trail, and API access logs from August 8 – when Salesloft says attackers first used “OAuth credentials to exfiltrate data from our customers’ Salesforce instances” – to the present day. It also advises combing over Identity Provider Logs and Network Logs. ®

Source: Stolen OAuth tokens expose Palo Alto customer data • The Register

So Spotify Public Links Now Show Your Personal Information. You Need to Disable Spotify DMs To Get Rid Of It.

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Spotify wants to be yet another messaging platform, but its new DM system has a quirk that makes me hesitant to recommend it. Spotify used to be a non-identity based platform, but things changed once it added messaging. Now, the Spotify DM system is attaching account information to song links and putting it in front of users’ eyes. That means it can accidentally leak the name and profile picture of whoever shared a link, even if they didn’t intend to give out their account information, too. Thankfully there’s a way to make links more private, and to disable Spotify DMs altogether.

How Spotify is accidentally leaking users’ information

It all starts with tracking URLs. Many major companies on the web use these. They embed information at the end of a URL to track where clicks on it came from. Which website, which page, or in Spotify’s case, which user. If you’ve generated a Share link for a song or playlist in the past, it contained your user identity string at the end. And when someone accessed and acted on that link, by adding the song or playing it, your account information was saved in their account’s identity as a connection of sorts. Maybe a little invasive, but because users couldn’t do much with that information, it was mostly just a way for Spotify to track how often people were sharing music between each other.

Before, this happened in the background and no one really cared. But with the new Spotify DM feature, connections made via tracking links are suddenly being put front and center right before users’ eyes. As spotted by Reddit user u/sporoni122, these connections are now showing up in a “Suggested” section when using Spotify DMs, even if you just happened to click on a public link once and never heard of the person who shared it. Alternatively, you might have shared a link in the past, and could be shown account information for people who clicked on it.

Even if an account is public, I could see how this would be annoying. Imagine you share a song in a Discord server where you go by an anonymous name, but someone clicks on it and finds your Spotify account, where you might go by your real name. Bam, they suddenly know who you are.

Reddit user u/Reeceeboii added that Spotify is using this URL tracking behavior to populate a list of songs and playlists shared between two users even if they happened via third-party messaging services like WhatsApp.

So, if you don’t want others to find your Spotify account through your shared songs, what do you do? Well, before posting in anonymous communities like Discord or X, try cleaning up your links first.

My colleagues and I have previously written about how you can remove tracking information from a URL automatically on iPhone, how you can use a Mac app to clean links without any effort, or how you can use an all-in one extension to get the job done regardless of platform. You can also use a website like Link Cleaner to clean up your links.

Or you can take the manual approach. In your Spotify link, remove everything at the end starting with the question mark.

What do you think so far?

So this tracked link:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/74BUi79BzFKW7IVJBShrFD?si=28575ba800324

Becomes this clean link:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/74BUi79BzFKW7IVJBShrFD

Here, the part with “si=“ is your identifier. Of course, if it’s a playlist you’re sharing, it will still show your name and your profile picture—that’s how the platform has always worked. So if you want to stay truly anonymous, you’ll want to keep your playlists private.

How to disable Spotify DMs

If you don’t see yourself using Spotify DMs, it might also be a good idea to just get rid of them entirely. You’ll probably still want to remove tracking information from your URLs before sharing, just for due diligence. But if you don’t want to worry about getting DMs on Spotify or having your account show up as a Suggested contact to strangers, you should also go to Settings > Privacy and social > Social features and disable Messages. That’ll opt you out of the DM feature altogether.

Disable Spotify DM.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Source: If You’ve Ever Shared a Spotify Link Publicly, You Need to Disable Spotify DMs

Phonenstien Flips Broken Samsung Into QWERTY Slider but won’t share how

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The phone ecosystem these days is horribly boring compared to the innovation of a couple decades back. Your options include flat rectangles, and flat rectangles that fold in half and then break. [Marcin Plaza] wanted to think outside the slab, without reinventing the wheel. In an inspired bout of hacking, he flipped a broken Samsung zFlip 5 into a “new” phone.

There’s really nothing new in it; the guts all come from the donor phone. That screen? It’s the front screen that was on the top half of the zFlip, as you might have guessed from the cameras. Normally that screen is only used for notifications, but with the Samsung’s fancy folding OLED dead as Disco that needed to change. Luckily for [Marcin] Samsung has an app called Good Lock that already takes care of that. A little digging about in the menus is all it takes to get a launcher and apps on the small screen.

Because this is a modern phone, the whole thing is glued together, but that’s not important since [Marcin] is only keeping the screen and internals from the Samsung. The new case with its chunky four-bar linkage is a custom design fabbed out in CNC’d aluminum. (After a number of 3D Printed prototypes, of course. Rapid prototyping FTW!)

The bottom half of the slider contains a Blackberry Q10 keyboard, along with a battery and Magsafe connector. The Q10 keyboard is connected to a custom flex PCB with an Arduino Micro Pro that is moonlighting as a Human Input Device. Sure, that means the phone’s USB port is used by the keyboard, but this unit has wireless charging,so that’s not a great sacrifice. We particularly like the use of magnets to create a satisfying “snap” when the slider opens and closes.

Unfortunately, as much as we might love this concept, [Marcin] doesn’t feel the design is solid enough to share the files. While that’s disappointing, we can certainly relate to his desire to change it up in an era of endless flat rectangles.  This project is a lot more work than just turning a broken phone into a server, but it also seems like a lot more fun.

 

Source: Phonenstien Flips Broken Samsung Into QWERTY Slider | Hackaday

EU Google antitrust penalty halted by low level commissioner amid Trump’s tariff threats

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BRUSSELS — EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Late last week, Google was given a heads up to expect a decision on Monday in the EU’s four-year-old Adtech investigation, two people familiar with the case, granted anonymity to discuss a confidential process, told POLITICO. The case is especially sensitive as it hits at the heart of the company’s business model in placing online ads.

But the delivery of the decision was ultimately halted by Šefčovič against the wishes of Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera.

MLex first reported the story.

The move to hold fire on hitting Google comes amid increasing fears in Europe that Trump is ramping up more pressure on Europe after striking a one-sided trade deal in July. The U.S. leader is now threatening to “impose substantial additional Tariffs” and stop selling tech and chips to countries with digital rules he deems discriminatory to American companies.

The EU executive’s antitrust decisions are led by Competition Commissioner Ribera but need to be signed off by the whole College of Commissioners to be formally adopted. It is unusual for a commissioner who is not in the lead of a file to stand in the way, particularly one like Šefčovič who is officially lower in the EU executive hierarchy.

The Commission’s preliminary view, detailed in a charge sheet sent to Google two years ago, is that the company breached EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in the advertising technology industry. Momentum has grown around a potential fine from the EU since the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) called for a breakup of the search giant earlier this year.

The Commission declined to go into detail when asked about the decision. “The investigation is ongoing,” a spokesperson said during the EU’s daily press briefing on Tuesday, adding: “The investigation is concluded once the decision is adopted.”

Ribera echoed this comment on the sidelines of an event at the European Parliament and said that relationships with her peers at the DoJ remained “good.”

Source: EU Google antitrust penalty halted amid Trump’s tariff threats – POLITICO