Apple and Microsoft Want to Be Excluded From EU’s ‘Gatekeeper’ Definition

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Apple and Microsoft Want to Be Excluded From EU’s ‘Gatekeeper’ Definition

Apple and Microsoft are arguing that their services should be exempt from the EU’s “gatekeeper clause,” arguing they are not big enough.

The EU passed the Digital Markets Act, labeling companies that meet user base and income thresholds as “gatekeepers.” Such companies will be required to allow their services to work with competitors. The bloc is set to release its initial list of gatekeepers this week.

According to Financial Times, via AppleInsider, Apple and Microsoft are arguing that their “flagship services” — iMessage and Bing, respectively — do not have enough users to qualify as gatekeepers.

It is conceivable that Microsoft may be able to successfully make that argument, especially given Bing’s distant second-place status in the search market. It’s less clear if Apple will be successful in making its case. The EU has a relatively low user base threshold to be labeled a gatekeeper, at just 45 million monthly active users. Even with the popularity of WhatsApp and other services in the EU, it’s hard to believe Apple’s iMessage doesn’t have at least 45 million users.

If the bloc decided iMessage does qualify as a gatekeeper service, Apple will be forced to allow third parties to work with iMessage. Google has been pushing Apple to adopt RCS in an effort to improve Android/Apple texting, but Apple has resisted all such calls.

The EU may finally achieve what Google has failed to do and help unify mobile messaging.

Apple and Microsoft Want to Be Excluded From EU’s ‘Gatekeeper’ Definition
Matt Milano

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Apple May Be Prepping a Chromebook-Killing MacBook

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Apple May Be Prepping a Chromebook-Killing MacBook

Apple is reportedly preparing to go to war over the education market, with plans to release a Chromebook-killing MacBook.

Apple was once the king of the education market, but Google-powered Chromebooks have dethroned it thanks to their cheap price. According to DigiTimes, via AppleInsider, Apple is preparing to strike back with a more affordable MacBook aimed at the education market.

According to the outlet’s sources, the new MacBook would be priced below the MacBook Air and be differentiated technically. The new model could debut in the second half of 2024. Aside from that, there were few details.

If DigiTimes’ report is true, it would mark a major shift in strategy for Apple, from being dismissive of the Chromebook to taking it as a serious threat worthy of countering.

Apple May Be Prepping a Chromebook-Killing MacBook
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IBM Cloud Is Raising Prices

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IBM Cloud Is Raising Prices

IBM Cloud is raising its cloud prices, substantially in some cases, following in the footsteps of rivals.

IBM has been reinventing itself as a hybrid cloud provider. While it still lags behind the industry’s biggest players, it is mimicking them in one major way: price hikes.

The company just revealed 2024’s pricing in a GitHub post:

Location	Current Uplift	New Uplift	Effective Increase
Dallas \n San Jose \n Washington DC	0%	0%	No Change
Amsterdam \n Montreal \n Toronto	3%	6%	+2.9%
London	7%	13%	+5.6%
Frankfurt \n Madrid \n Milan \n Paris	10%	16%	+5.5%
Osaka \n Singapore \n Tokyo	13%	20%	+6.2%
Chennai \n Sydney	20%	20%	No Change
Sao Paulo	20%	29%	+7.5%

The post says the price change applies to the following services:

Bare Metal Servers, Virtual Server Instance, File and Block Storage, and Networking infrastructure, for both Classic and VPC offerings, and, in Sao Paulo only, Cloud Object Storage.

IBM Cloud Is Raising Prices
Matt Milano

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SpaceX Dumps YouTube for X Livestreams

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SpaceX Dumps YouTube for X Livestreams

SpaceX appears to have dumped YouTube for its livesteams, opting to use X instead…to absolutely no one’s surprise.

SpaceX famously livestreams its rocket launches, drawing millions of viewers. X has been improving video since Musk’s takeover, significantly increasing the length of videos that users can upload.

Given that Musk owns SpaceX and X, it’s no surprise the former is moving exclusively to the latter for future livestreams, according to Space Explored.

X has had a tumultuous few months, in the wake of Musk’s purchase. Headline events like the SpaceX launches could help boost the site’s viewership.

SpaceX Dumps YouTube for X Livestreams
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Microsoft Unveils Pricing for Teams Recording and Transcription APIs

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Microsoft Unveils Pricing for Teams Recording and Transcription APIs

Microsoft has unveiled its pricing for API access to Teams recording and transcriptions, which are currently available as a public preview.

Microsoft has been developing APIs for recording and transcripts in Teams, but the company has begun charging for access beginning September 1. Ayan Chakraborty announced the news in one of the company’s developer blog posts:

In Microsoft Teams, users can record and transcribe their Teams meetings to capture and review the meeting content. On September 1, 2023, we are starting billing in public preview for the Recording and Transcript APIs that allows developers to fetch content from meetings transcripts & recordings. These APIs are priced as follows:

Recording — $0.03 per minute Transcription — $0.024 per minute

Developers looking to get started can read more here.

Microsoft Unveils Pricing for Teams Recording and Transcription APIs
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Jitsi Meet Backtracks On Anonymity Promise

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Jitsi Meet Backtracks On Anonymity Promise

Jitsi Meet, the private and anonymous alternative to Zoom, has just killed off its most popular feature: anonymity.

Jitsi Meet has been a popular video conferencing option for journalists, activist, and many others for whom anonymous operation was a critical feature. The service allowed users to start and join video conferences without requiring an account, an option that is unfortunately disappearing, according to a company blog post:

Starting on August 24th, we will no longer support the anonymous creation of rooms on meet.jit.si, and will require the use of an account (we will be supporting Google, GitHub and Facebook for starters but may modify the list later on). This is a first for us, so users may encounter a few bumps here and there as we are tweaking the experience to make sure there is as little friction as possible on the way into a meeting.

8×8, the developers behind Jitsi Meet, say the decision is the result of significant abuse of the platform by bad actors:

Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.

Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.

How does this impact user privacy on meet.jit.si?

It is a good time to have a look at our privacy terms. 8×8 will now store the account responsible for creating rooms. Aside from the changes to our privacy terms referenced above, there is no other change to our meetings. We are still very much committed to holding user privacy in the highest regard and we still have no tools that would allow us to compromise the privacy of the actual audio or video content of a meeting, nor do we intend to create any.

8×8 says users that want to avoid these changes can still host their own private instance of Jitsi Meet.

Jitsi Meet Backtracks On Anonymity Promise
Matt Milano

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The End of An Era: Microsoft Is Retiring WordPad

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The End of An Era: Microsoft Is Retiring WordPad

Love it or hate it, WordPad has gone hand-in-hand with Microsoft Windows for decades, but that is about to change.

According to a post on Microsoft’s Learn website, the company is deprecating WordPad and will be removing it:

WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.

The move is not entirely surprising, but marks the end of an era nonetheless.

The End of An Era: Microsoft Is Retiring WordPad
Matt Milano

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