Weekend Edition 40

WE 1 - FTC v Amazon
· Bezos out of picture
· Amazon getting sued
· Dark Patterns
o Prevent users from leaving Prime
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ftc-amazon-tricked-millions-into-signing-up-for-prime-subscriptions
WE 2 - AST 4G Satellite
· First experiments with LEO solar powered 4G satellite
· Off-the-shelf cell phones
· Call from TX to Japan in April
· Data transferred to remote users in HI at 10 MBs
· Partnered with the Blue Devil (AT&T)
· Other carriers are working on these same things as well, so expect satellite cell phone service soon for rural areas
· What about latency?
· How much power does it take to make this happen? How intense do these radio waves have to be in order to xfer data like that from 310 mi up?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/asts-bluewalker-satellite-successfully-delivers-10mbps-download-speeds

WE 3 – AI News
3a – AI Battle Royale
· UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University partnership
· Large Language Model Systems Organization (LLMSys Org)
· 10 students, 4 professors
· Head-to-head blind testing
· Elo rating system
· 40k users
· Best results are from GPT 4, by a small margin
· Generative AI issues
· Privacy (data and user)
· Content quality and incentives for humans to create better things
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chatgpt-bard-or-bing-40k-people-voted-for-the-best-generative-ai-model

3b – Need a Windows Key? Don’t ask AI...
· Duh
· Reasons
· May not work
· Illegal
· ChatGPT and Bing AI are owned by Microsoft...
· Use Linux instead.
https://www.techradar.com/news/dont-ask-chatgpt-or-google-bard-for-a-windows-11-key-heres-why

WE 4 – Google Whines about Competitors Doing What They Do
· FTC asked for comments on the cloud space
· Google Cloud submitted a letter
· Pointed fingers at both MS and Oracle for using similar business tactics
· See what THEY’RE doing!!!!!
· Makes me laugh
· Try a smaller provider
· Altha Tech
· FOSS where possible
· No lock-ins
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/google-accuses-microsoft-of-anticompetitive-practices-in-azure-cloud.html

WE 5 – Meta & Twitter News
WE 5a – Oversight Board Slaps Meta
· Didn’t censor pro-insurrectionist Brazilian video
· Pattern of behavior
· Too much free speech
· Potential damage to Leftist regimes around the world
· Not enough censorship from the US election in 2020
· Leftist drone
https://www.engadget.com/metas-oversight-board-says-the-companys-rules-are-slowly-changing-for-the-better-100059192.html

WE 5b – Cage Match?
· Meta working on Twitter alternative
· Elon mad
· Zuck jokes about cage match
· Elon takes him seriously (apparently)
· Not much else to say here other than that they got some free publicity here for the new project at Meta
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/22/musk-zuckerberg-cage-match-what-to-know-about-metas-twitter-clone.html

WE 5c – Twitter Making New Deal with Google
· Elon wasn’t paying cloud bills
· Wanted to move internal tools in-house to save money
· Yaccarino appointed
· Opens dialog with Google to smooth things over
· Starts making big deals
· No more migration deadline
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-supposedly-started-paying-its-google-cloud-bill-again-213824844.html

WE 5d – Will Elon Continue to Blow Up the Dirty Blue Bird?
· Yaccarino
· glass cliff?
· Time will tell
· My opinion
https://www.techradar.com/computing/twitter/elon-continues-to-drag-twitter-through-the-mud-and-could-face-fines-as-a-result

Wrap up
FTC v Amazon
· FTC making big moves
· Will it mean anything ultimately? No Idea...

4G Satellites
· AST BlueWalker 3
· Partnered with AT&T
· 10 MB/s download speeds in areas (rural HI) where there has never been reliable service at all before
· Looking to implement mid-band 5G soon
· Soon to have competitors (Apple, T Mo, Starlink)

AI News
· GPT 4 is best LLM out there, but costs $20/mo
· Claude, by Anthropic came in 2nd and 3rd (wait listed)
· 40,000 people have used the chatbot battle site to establish ranking for the various LLMs

PSA: Don’t Use Chatbots to Pirate Windows, Use Linux Instead
· Piracy is illegal
· codes produced may not work at all, or may not work completely, or may stop working at some random time
· Just don’t do it.
· Use Linux

Big Tech Is Evil
· ALL Big Tech Cloud outfits try to lock you into their services once you sign up
· Google has been in hot water over this
· FTC asked for tips about others acting badly
· Google obliged, hoping to get MS and Oracle into trouble as well
· As an aside, MS has been scraping your passwords and can snoop on your encrypted OneDrive and SharePoint files. Get away from these services NOW.
· MS has been scraping data from plain files for somewhere close to 10 years now. Just Like Apple and Google. Shouldn’t surprise you in the least.
· Take a look at a smaller cloud provider who will respect your privacy and not lock you into their platform, like Altha Tech.
Meta & Twitter
· Meta in trouble again
· Not enough censoring
· Zuck v Musk
· Yaccarino & Google
· Yaccarino on a glass cliff?

It’s been a wild couple of weeks since my last Weekend Edition, hasn’t it? From the FTC going after Amazon for anti-consumer practices (duh), to satellite based cell phone service, to which AI chatbot is best, to not using chatbots to pirate operating systems, to a PSA about Google and Microsoft, to drama around social media companies.

https://techfreedom.pro/2023/06/22/weekend-edition-40/