Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 2

Spotify is expected to be launching a new premium subscription tier that will finally bring high-fidelity audio to the platform.

Bloomberg has published a new report revealing that Spotify is preparing to launch a new subscription tier that will be it's most expensive yet. The predominate music streaming service has been looking to expand its content offerings for quite some time, flexing into podcasts with the signing on of Joe Rogan, and now audiobooks. Spotify already offers a range of audiobooks, but according to sources close to the matter, the platform is planning on pairing audiobooks with its coming premium subscription tier.

These sources informed Bloomberg that Spotify would offer high-fidelity audio and some kind of benefit with audiobooks, perhaps a free credit every month like Amazon's Audible. According to reports, Spotify was planning on rolling out HiFi audio quality for quite some time, but before the company launched, Apple and Amazon both rolled out their own versions of the feature at no extra cost to paying subscribers.

Apple is attempting to secure the exclusive rights of depictions of apples in a long-standing effort from the company to be given the exclusive rights of owning all apple imagery.

A new report from Wired UK states that Apple has been attempting to acquire a trademark for an apple in Switzerland since 2017 while simultaneously making the same application in other countries such as Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia. Reports indicate that Apple submitted an application to the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) for the exclusive rights to a black-and-white depiction of a Granny Smith apple.

The application was partially awarded by the IPI in 2022, with the regulatory body citing the legal principle of generic images of common goods, such as fruits, or in this case, apples, which are considered to be public domain.

The tumultuous debacle between Redditors and Reddit just got a whole lot more interesting as a ransomware group has claimed they have 80GB of confidential company files it's prepared to release if demands aren't reached.

Reddit has certainly kicked up a storm after the company announced changes to its Application Programming Interface (API), and these changes would essentially make it impossible for third-party developers to continually support third-party apps and tools used by millions of Redditors. Many of these apps improved the general Reddit experience, and many third-party tools were used by volunteer moderators to speed up their moderation process.

Apollo, the most popular third-party Reddit app, said it would no longer be able to keep running as it would be unable to pay the $20 million a year that Reddit's new pricing now states is a requirement. In response to these changes, thousands of subreddits decided to go offline in an almost platform-wide blackout. This digital protest prompted a response from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who said in a recent interview that the API changes are here to stay and that subreddits going dark will eventually pass.

The Biden-Harris administration has announced $930 million will be thrown into expanding and strengthening America's high-speed internet access.

The US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced $930,021,354.34 to expand high-speed Internet infrastructure across 35 states. According to the Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, internet access is "no longer a luxury," and through the Middle Mile program, nearly a billion dollars will be invested in providing the infrastructure needed to "connect communities, military bases, and Tribal lands to the Internet, lower the cost of access, and increase bandwidth."

According to the release on the US Department of Commerce website, there are more than 260 applications that total $7.47 billion in funding requests. Additionally, the projects are expected to result in an additional 12,000 miles of new fiber cable being laid across the country. Notably, these new miles of fiber cable will be laid in the rural areas of Alaska, Texas, and dozens of other places where large gaps in connectivity exist.

Twitter is attempting to make a calculated shift into adopting video content, and the platform has recently shown this by enabling long-form content to be posted.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has previously discussed Twitter's push into video content while he was CEO of the company, and the general goal was echoed again during an investor presentation by Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who outlined the company's strategy to prioritize video content, along with more creator collaborations, and commerce partnerships. These strategies are designed to increase Twitter's overall revenue, which took a massive hit when Musk took over the company in October 2022.

Musk recently revealed in an interview that advertiser demands are costing Twitter about $2 Billion in ad revenue a year, with the Twitter owner quipping, "Freedom of speech is pretty expensive".

It was only a few days ago that Kick.com announced it signed Félix Lengyel (xQc), the world's most-watched streamer, in a new non-exclusive contract worth $100 million.

Félix Lengyel (xQc)

Kick.com launched in 2022 and has been making waves in the streaming space by slowly picking up massive creators and pulling them away from Twitch with lucrative non-exclusive contracts. xQc announced that the recent deal with Kick.com promises as much as $100 million, including incentives, and according to xQc's agent Ryan Morrison, who spoke to The New York Times, this deal is bigger than most contracts signed by pro athletes.

Morrison is right, as xQc's deal means he's getting paid more than the likes of NBA superstars Lebron James and Steph Curry, who receive salaries of $44.47 and $48.07 million, according to ESPN. So, how can Kick.com afford to shell out $100 million to xQc? Kick.com is run by part-owner of Stake.com, Ed Craven, who has pushed Stake, the online casino, to a global gross revenue of $2.6 billion (2022). Kick.com is seemingly funded through the popularity of Kick.com, a correlation that is actually openly discussed by Craven in his Medium column.

Microsoft has confirmed that an outage to its cloud servers was a result of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and that the attack can be traced back to a malicious hacking group called Anonymous Sudan.

Microsoft's servers experienced an outage earlier this month that knocked out key Microsoft services such as Outlook and OneDrive, while also affecting other areas of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. While the servers were rocked, Microsoft kept quiet about the situation until it spoke out over the weekend, confirming the attack was a DDoS attack and that it appears Anonymous Sudan's claim of being responsible is true.

Microsoft has yet to say how many customers were affected by the outage, but with services such as Outlook and OneDrive offline, you can expect it to be at least in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Microsoft explained that it tracked the activity of what it identified as "Storm-1359" and found that the perpetrator appeared to be "focused on disruption and publicity".

During a conference in Paris, Tesla CEO Elon Musk joked about purchasing Twitter for the staggering figure of $44 billion.

Musk explained on stage during a conference on Friday his mentality behind carrying out the purchase of Twitter, something he has done since the acquisition was finalized and the rollercoaster of a takeover began to settle. Musk said that he was "concerned" that Twitter was going in a direction that would have a "negative" or a "corrosive" impact on society, and that while the social media platform was admittedly "expensive," he wanted to make sure it would be a "positive force for civilization".

Looking from the outside in it may be hard to wholeheartedly determine that Twitter is in a better place than it was, but if you were to ask Musk, he would say that the platform is in a much healthier state post-October 2022. Musk said he thinks that any regular Twitter user would say their "experience has improved" as there has been a mass reduction in the number of bots and scams on the platform. Additionally, Musk points out that Twitter has removed "95% of child exploitation material on Twitter, which was a shock to see ... some of what was going on for 10 years."

As a large number of subreddits continue to say offline in protest to Reddit's new API changes, Reddit's CEO has conducted an interview that has no doubt thrown more fuel on the already enraged Reddit community fire.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sat down with The Verge for a quick 30-minute interview where he gave more context on the reasoning behind Reddit's API changes. For those that don't know, Reddit recently announced that it will be starting to charge third-party developers to use the platform's API. This change came after Reddit discovered that its API was being used to train potentially extremely lucrative AI tools.

However, the API pricing change will also wipe out the most popular third-party Reddit app Apollo, along with some popular third-party tools used by subreddit moderators. The Reddit community has decided to protest these changes by conducting an almost platform-wide blackout, with some of the largest subreddits going offline. Huffman doubled down on the decision to change Reddit's API pricing, saying in the interview:

Nearly 10,000 subreddits have joined the digital picket line by protesting the recent changes Reddit has made to its API pricing for third-party developers.

More than 8,000 subreddits that contain more than 40 million members have decided to go dark, or offline, in protest to Reddit's changes to its API pricing that are expected to be implemented as early as next month. Reddit communities have expressed their distain for company's changes to its API as third-party developers that are behind some extremely popular third-party Reddit tools will now need to pay exorbitant fees to keep their apps up and running.

Notably, these changes to Reddit's API pricing came after the company realized a large portion of the platform's data was being used to train potentially lucrative AI-powered tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In an effort to charge AI developers for Reddits plethora of data the company has increased its price, which has led to Reddit moderators feeling the pinch. Many moderators of subreddits use third-party tools to speed up their moderating process, which they do voluntarily.