Tim Hardwick (2024): [British consumer group] Which? alleges that the company makes it difficult for customers to use alternative cloud storage providers “by giving its iCloud storage service preferential treatment,” and “‘trapping’ customers with Apple devices into using iCloud.”The consumer group filed the legal action with the Competition Appeal Tribunal, and said it was seeking […]

Mariella Moon: Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright by using their books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. The plaintiffs, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, claimed that Apple used a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that include their works for AI training. […]

John Gruber (Mastodon) has a great post with new details about exactly what’s happening with sharing iPhone Wi-Fi network information in iOS 16.2. In brief, I think this turns the story on its head. The way this has been reported and discussed since November 4 seems to be wrong and almost backwards. First, I want […]

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.

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