Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon’s Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren’t the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider’s examination of leaked “internal documents” brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.

Insider didn’t publish the documents but said they show that “60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors,” such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.

Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.

The documents reportedly pointed to problems with content localization, noting the “poor linguistic quality of assets” related to a “lack of in-house expertise” of some languages. Prime Video pages with these problems suffered from 20 percent more engagement drop-offs, BI said, citing one of the documents.

Following Insider’s report, however, Quartz reported that an unnamed source it described as “familiar with the matter” said the documents were out of date, despite Insider claiming that the leaked reports included data from 2023. Quartz’s source also claimed that customer engagement was not affected,

Ars Technica reached out to Amazon for comment but didn’t hear back in time for publication. The company told Insider that “catalogue quality is an ongoing priority” and that Amazon takes “it seriously and work[s] relentlessly alongside our global partners and dedicated internal teams to continuously improve the overall customer experience.”

Other streaming services have errors, too

Insider’s report focuses on leaked documents regarding Prime Video, but rival streaming services make blunders, too. It’s unclear how widespread the problem is on Prime Video or across the industry. There are examples of people reporting Prime Video inaccuracies online, like on Amazon’s forum or on Reddit. But with some platforms not offering online forums and it being impossible to know how frequently users actually report spotted problems, we can’t do any apples-to-apples comparisons. We also don’t know if these problems are more prevalent for subscribers living outside of the US.

Beyond Prime Video, users have underscored similar inaccuracies within the past year on rival services, like Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix. A former White Collar executive producer pointed out that the show’s episodes were mislabeled and out of order on Netflix earlier this month. Inaccurate content catalogs appear more widespread if you go back two years or more. Some video streamers (like (Disney and Netflix) have pages explaining how to report such problems.

Streaming services have only gotten more expensive and competitive, making such mistakes feel out of place for the flagship video platform of a conglomerate in 2024.

And despite content errors affecting more than just Prime Video, Insider’s report provides a unique look at the problem and efforts to fix it.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2018222

Alexa hasn’t worked out the way Amazon originally planned.

There was a time when it thought that Alexa would yield a robust ecosystem of apps, or Alexa Skills, that would make the voice assistant an integral part of users’ lives. Amazon envisioned tens of thousands of software developers building valued abilities for Alexa that would grow the voice assistant’s popularity—and help Amazon make some money.

But about seven years after launching a rewards program to encourage developers to build Skills, Alexa’s most preferred abilities are the basic ones, like checking the weather. And on June 30, Amazon will stop giving out the monthly Amazon Web Services credits that have made it free for third-party developers to build and host Alexa Skills. The company also recently told devs that its Alexa Developer Rewards program was ending, virtually disincentivizing third-party devs to build for Alexa.

Death knell for third-party Alexa apps

The news has left dozens of Alexa Skills developers wondering if they have a future with Alexa, especially as Amazon preps a generative AI and subscription-based version of Alexa. “Dozens” may sound like a dig at Alexa’s ecosystem, but it’s an estimation based on a podcast from Skills developers Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg, who, in a recent podcast, agreed that “dozens” of third-party devs were contemplating if it’s still worthwhile to develop Alexa skills. The casual summary wasn’t stated as a hard fact or confirmed by Amazon but, rather, seemed like a rough and quick estimation based on the developers’ familiarity with the Skills community. But with such minimal interest and money associated with Skills, dozens isn’t an implausible figure either.

Amazon admitted that there’s little interest in its Skills incentives programs. Bloomberg reported that “fewer than 1 percent of developers were using the soon-to-end programs,” per Amazon spokesperson Lauren Raemhild.

“Today, with over 160,000 skills available for customers and a well-established Alexa developer community, these programs have run their course, and we decided to sunset them,” she told the publication.

The writing on the wall, though, is that Amazon doesn’t have the incentive or money to grow the Alexa app ecosystem it once imagined. Voice assistants largely became money pits, and the Alexa division has endured recent layoffs as it fights for survival and relevance. Meanwhile, Google Assistant stopped using third-party apps in 2022.

“Many developers are now going to need to make some tough decisions about maintaining existing or creating future experiences on Alexa,” Tucker said via a LinkedIn post.

Alexa Skills criticized as “useless”

As of this writing, the top Alexa skills, in order, are: Jeopardy, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and Calm. That’s not exactly a futuristic list of must-have technological feats. For years, people have wondered when the “killer app” would come to catapult Alexa’s popularity. But now it seems like Alexa’s only hope at that killer use case is generative AI (a gamble filled with its own obstacles).

But like Amazon, third-party developers found it hard to make money off Skills, with a rare few pointing to making thousands of dollars at most and the vast majority not making anything.

“If you can’t make money off it, no one’s going to seriously engage,” Joseph “Jo” Jaquinta, a developer who had made over 12 Skills, told CNET in 2017.

By 2018, Amazon had paid developers millions to grow Alexa Skills. But by 2020, Amazon reduced the amount of money it paid out to third-party developers, an anonymous source told Bloomberg, The source noted that the apps made by paid developers weren’t making the company much money. Come 2024, the most desirable things you can make Alexa do remain basic tasks, like playing a song and apparently trivia games.

Amazon hasn’t said it’s ending Skills. That would seem premature considering that its Alexa chatbot isn’t expected until June. Developers can still make money off Skills with in-app purchases, but the incentive is minimal.

“Developers like you have and will play a critical role in the success of Alexa, and we appreciate your continued engagement,” Amazon’s notice to devs said, per Bloomberg.

We’ll see how “critical” Amazon treats those remaining developers once its generative AI chatbot is ready.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2016625

Il nuovo chip per l’AI di Meta

Presentato poche ore fa il nuovo modello di chip per l’intelligenza artificiale (AI) di Meta, che secondo i suoi ingegneri sarà tre volte più efficiente del primo.

Si tratta della nuova versione del Meta training and inference accelerator (Mtia) V1,dedicata specificatamente allo sviluppo e il potenziamento dell’AI generativa dell’azienda.

Un lavoro fatto in casa, sia a livello software, sia hardware, che consente a Meta di controllare l’intero flusso stack, che va dal frontend (l’interfaccia utente e le interazioni con l’applicazione) al backend (l’esecuzione dell’applicazione e la comunicazione con eventuali altri app, compresa l’elaborazione dati).

“Poiché controlliamo l’intero stack, possiamo ottenere una maggiore efficienza rispetto alle GPU disponibili in commercio“, hanno scritto Eran Tal, Nicolaas Viljoen, Joel Coburn e Roman Levenstein nell’articolo di lancio della nuova versione dell’Mtia sul blog di Meta.

Un lavoro a lungo termine

Il nuovo modello di chip però al momento non è ancora utilizzato per lo sviluppo diretto dell’AI proprietaria, più che altro è impiegato nel potenziamento degli algoritmi di classificazione e raccomandazione.

Il prossimo passaggio, secondo quanto affermato dalla società nel testo di presentazione, sarà dedicato proprio al rafforzamento della sua AI, come fa ad esempio Google, con il suo chip AI TPU v5p che addestra i modelli di grandi dimensioni e la famiglia di chatbot Gemini 1,5 Pro.

“Mtia sarà una parte importante della nostra tabella di marcia a lungo termine per costruire e scalare l’infrastruttura più potente ed efficiente possibile per i carichi di lavoro IA unici di Meta“, hanno affermato gli ingegneri di Meta.

La corsa all’AI di Meta, Google, Intel, Microsoft e Amazon

L’annuncio del gigante tecnologico di San Francisco segue di un giorno quello dei rivali Google e Intel.

Google ha rivelato i piani per un nuovo processore basato su tecnologia Arm, che punta su consumi energetici più bassi. Si chiama Axion e offre prestazioni migliori del 30% rispetto agli altri chip con architettura Arm. Sarà disponibile per i servizi cloud che le aziende possono noleggiare e utilizzare, dagli annunci su YouTube all’analisi dei big data.

Intel ha lanciato una nuova versione del suo chip acceleratore di intelligenza artificiale. Si chiama Gaudi 3 e promette prestazioni di calcolo doppie. L’azienda californiana punta a diventare un’alternativa a Nvidia che nel 2023 ha controllato l’83% del mercato dei chip per data center e che ha segnato una ultima trimestrale record.

Tutti questi annunci arrivano dopo che Microsoft nel novembre del 2023 fa ha rivelato i propri microprocessori personalizzati progettati per la sua infrastruttura cloud e per addestrare modelli linguistici di grandi dimensioni: l’Azure Maia AI Accelerator e l’Azure Cobalt CPU. Anche Amazon nello stesso mese ha presentato il nuovo processore su tecnologia Arm AWS Graviton4 e l’acceleratore AWS Trainium2.

L’obiettivo delle Big Tech è comunque sempre lo stesso, cioè ridurre la propria dipendenza da partner come Intel e Nvidia, competendo sui chip personalizzati che riescono a smaltire grandi carichi di lavoro sull’IA e il cloud.

Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Nvidia e Amazon hanno effettuato l’acquisto di 88 tra startup e imprese di AI dal 2010 ad oggi.

https://www.key4biz.it/meta-risponde-a-google-e-intel-e-presenta-il-suo-nuovo-chip-ai/486395/

Amazon veleggia poco sotto i massimi in Borsa, chiudendo a 185,19 dollari per azione in apertura di settimana, vicino alla chiusura record di 186,57 dollari per azione nel luglio 2021.

I guadagni azionari arrivano dopo che l’azienda ha fatto grandi scommesse sull’intelligenza artificiale generativa e ha tagliato i costi con diversi licenziamenti nella sua divisione cloud di Amazon Web Services.

Le azioni di Amazon sono aumentate di oltre il 23% quest’anno e di oltre l’81% negli ultimi 12 mesi. L’analista di Morgan Stanley Brian Nowak ha alzato il suo target price da 200 dollari per azione a 215 dollari.

Amazon scommette molto sull’intelligenza artificiale

Amazon è in corsa con le altre Big Tech come Apple, Microsoft e Alphabet, la casa madre di Google, per sfruttare l’intelligenza artificiale. Il mese scorso, Amazon ha investito altri 2,75 miliardi di dollari in Anthropic, una startup di intelligenza artificiale con sede a San Francisco, portando il suo investimento totale in Anthropic a 4 miliardi di dollari.

L’azienda ha anche enfatizzato il modo in cui l’intelligenza artificiale la sta aiutando ad accelerare le consegne in ambito farmaceutico.

Licenziamenti presso Amazon Web Services

Centinaia di dipendenti sono stati licenziati all’inizio di questo mese presso Amazon Web Service (AWS), la divisione cloud computing del gruppo. La ragione principale per la riduzione dei costi è stata la lenta crescita delle vendite negli ultimi trimestri.

Negli ultimi due anni, quasi 30mila dipendenti hanno perso il lavoro in tutta l’azienda, il che ha contribuito alla crescita dei profitti di Amazon. L’ultimo rapporto sugli utili della società ha superato le aspettative, con ricavi che hanno raggiunto i 170 miliardi di dollari e utili per azione pari a 1 dollaro.

https://www.key4biz.it/amazon-sui-massimi-in-borsa-dopo-le-scommesse-sullai-e-i-tagli/486006/

Amazon ha investito 2,75 miliardi di dollari nella start up di Intelligenza Artificiale Anthropic, rafforzando così il suo legame con l’azienda in un momento in cui tutti i big della tecnologia sono in corsa per il predominio dell’AI.

Quello in Anthropic è il maggior investimento in venture capitale realizzato da Amazon che nel complesso ha portato a 4 miliardi di dollari il suo impegno per lo sviluppo della startup.

Diversi investimenti in AI delle Big Tech

Si tratta di uno dei numerosi investimenti dei big del tech Google, Amazon, Microsoft nello sviluppo dell’Intelligenza Artificiale generativa, un nuovo fiorente mercato che attira gli appetiti più svariati.

In un primo round, Amazon aveva versato 1,25 miliardi di dollari in Anthropic lo scorso mese di settembre, riservandosi la possibilità di arrivare a 4 miliardi entro fine marzo. E così alla fine ha fatto. Amazon non è certo l’unico investitore di Anthropic, che sta raccogliendo centinaia di milioni di nuovi fondi in venture capital.

Nel compelsso, gli accordi potrebbero fornire ad Anthropic miliardi di dollari in capitale e crediti per utilizzare servizi informatici e cloud per una valutazione secondo stime di oltre 18 miliardi di dollari.

Amazon sta aumentando il suo peso in Anthropic nonostante il controllo delle autorità di regolamentazione di Ua, Regno Ue siano aumentati a causa del timore che gli accordi tra grandi gruppi tecnologici e importanti startup di intelligenza artificiale potrebbero comportare rischi anticoncorrenziali.

Microsoft ha preso subito un comando nello spazio dell’intelligenza artificiale generativa, impegnando 13 miliardi di dollari in OpenAI, il cui chatbot ChatGPT ha scatenato una frenesia di entusiasmo tra gli investitori.

Da allora, Microsoft ha anche investito in Mistral, l’unicorno francese di intelligenza artificiale, e la scorsa settimana ha siglato un accordo da 650 milioni di dollari per assumere il gruppo dirigente e i ricercatori della società di intelligenza artificiale Inflection.

AWS fornitore cloud di Anthropic

Amazon, dal canto suo, ha ribadito mercoledì che sarà il “fornitore cloud principale” di Anthropic per i carichi di lavoro chiave, che verranno eseguiti su Amazon Web Services (AWS). Anthropic utilizzerà anche chip di intelligenza artificiale sviluppati internamente da Amazon e sta lavorando con il fornitore di servizi cloud per sviluppare e migliorare l’hardware, che mira a competere con i chip più apprezzati di Nvidia.

Tuttavia, l’accordo non lega Anthropic esclusivamente al cloud di Amazon, come diversamente fa la partnership di OpenAI con Microsoft, e la startup continuerà a utilizzare anche il cloud di Google. Google ha accettato di investire fino a 2 miliardi di dollari in Anthropic.

Anthropic è stata fondata nel 2021 da un gruppo di ricercatori che hanno lasciato OpenAI. L’azienda con sede a San Francisco è ampiamente considerata la contendente più probabile per il dominio iniziale di OpenAI nel settore. Il suo ultimo modello, Claude 3, supera il GPT4 di OpenAI in diversi parametri di riferimento del settore.

https://www.key4biz.it/amazon-investe-275-miliardi-di-dollari-nellai-di-anthropic/484888/

There’s a strong consensus that tackling most useful problems with a quantum computer will require that the computer be capable of error correction. There is absolutely no consensus, however, about what technology will allow us to get there. A large number of companies, including major players like Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, and IBM, have all committed to different technologies to get there, while a collection of startups are exploring an even wider range of potential solutions.

We probably won’t have a clearer picture of what’s likely to work for a few years. But there’s going to be lots of interesting research and development work between now and then, some of which may ultimately represent key milestones in the development of quantum computing. To give you a sense of that work, we’re going to look at three papers that were published within the last couple of weeks, each of which tackles a different aspect of quantum computing technology.

Hot stuff

Error correction will require connecting multiple hardware qubits to act as a single unit termed a logical qubit. This spreads a single bit of quantum information across multiple hardware qubits, making it more robust. Additional qubits are used to monitor the behavior of the ones holding the data and perform corrections as needed. Some error correction schemes require over a hundred hardware qubits for each logical qubit, meaning we’d need tens of thousands of hardware qubits before we could do anything practical.

A number of companies have looked at that problem and decided we already know how to create hardware on that scale—just look at any silicon chip. So, if we could etch useful qubits through the same processes we use to make current processors, then scaling wouldn’t be an issue. Typically, this has meant fabricating quantum dots on the surface of silicon chips and using these to store single electrons that can hold a qubit in their spin. The rest of the chip holds more traditional circuitry that performs the initiation, control, and readout of the qubit.

This creates a notable problem. Like many other qubit technologies, quantum dots need to be kept below one Kelvin in order to keep the environment from interfering with the qubit. And, as anyone who’s ever owned an x86-based laptop knows, all the other circuitry on the silicon generates heat. So, there’s the very real prospect that trying to control the qubits will raise the temperature to the point that the qubits can’t hold onto their state.

That might not be the problem that we thought, according to some work published in Wednesday’s Nature. A large international team that includes people from the startup Diraq have shown that a silicon quantum dot processor can work well at the relatively toasty temperature of 1 Kelvin, up from the usual milliKelvin that these processors normally operate at.

The work was done on a two-qubit prototype made with materials that were specifically chosen to improve noise tolerance; the experimental procedure was also optimized to limit errors. The team then performed normal operations starting at 0.1 K, and gradually ramped up the temperatures to 1.5 K, checking performance as they did so. They found that a major source of errors, state preparation and measurement (SPAM), didn’t change dramatically in this temperature range: “SPAM around 1 K is comparable to that at millikelvin temperatures and remains workable at least until 1.4 K.”

The error rates they did see depended on the state they were preparing. One particular state (both spin-up) had a fidelity of over 99 percent, while the rest were less constrained, at somewhere above 95 percent. States had a lifetime of over a millisecond, which qualifies as long-lived int he quantum world.

All of which is pretty good, and suggests that the chips can tolerate reasonable operating temperatures, meaning on-chip control circuitry can be used without causing problems. The error rates of the hardware qubits are still well above those that would be needed for error correction to work. However, the researchers suggest that they’ve identified error processes that can potentially be compensated for. They expect that the ability to do industrial-scale manufacturing will ultimately lead to working hardware.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2013053

Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called “Ghostbusters,” designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.

The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them,” Zuckerberg continued. “Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”

At the time, Olivan was Facebook’s head of growth, but now he’s Meta’s chief operating officer. He responded to Zuckerberg’s email saying that he would have the team from Onavo—a controversial traffic-analysis app acquired by Facebook in 2013—look into it.

Olivan told the Onavo team that he needed “out of the box thinking” to satisfy Zuckerberg’s request. He “suggested potentially paying users to ‘let us install a really heavy piece of software'” to intercept users’ Snapchat data, a court document shows.

What the Onavo team eventually came up with was a project internally known as “Ghostbusters,” an obvious reference to Snapchat’s logo featuring a white ghost. Later, as the project grew to include other Facebook rivals, including YouTube and Amazon, the project was called the “In-App Action Panel” (IAAP).

The IAAP program’s purpose was to gather granular insights into users’ engagement with rival apps to help Facebook develop products as needed to stay ahead of competitors. For example, two months after Zuckerberg’s 2016 email, Meta launched Stories, a Snapchat copycat feature, on Instagram, which the Motley Fool noted rapidly became a key ad revenue source for Meta.

In an email to Olivan, the Onavo team described the “technical solution” devised to help Zuckerberg figure out how to get reliable analytics about Snapchat users. It worked by “develop[ing] ‘kits’ that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” the Onavo team said.

Olivan was told that these so-called “kits” used a “man-in-the-middle” attack typically employed by hackers to secretly intercept data passed between two parties. Users were recruited by third parties who distributed the kits “under their own branding” so that they wouldn’t connect the kits to Onavo unless they used a specialized tool like Wireshark to analyze the kits. TechCrunch reported in 2019 that sometimes teens were paid to install these kits. After that report, Facebook promptly shut down the project.

This “man-in-the-middle” tactic, consumers and advertisers suing Meta have alleged, “was not merely anticompetitive, but criminal,” seemingly violating the Wiretap Act. It was used to snoop on Snapchat starting in 2016, on YouTube from 2017 to 2018, and on Amazon in 2018, relying on creating “fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis.”

Ars could not reach Snapchat, Google, or Amazon for comment.

Facebook allegedly sought to confuse advertisers

Not everyone at Facebook supported the IAAP program. “The company’s highest-level engineering executives thought the IAAP Program was a legal, technical, and security nightmare,” another court document said.

Pedro Canahuati, then-head of security engineering, warned that incentivizing users to install the kits did not necessarily mean that users understood what they were consenting to.

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay,” Canahuati said. “No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works.”

Mike Schroepfer, then-chief technology officer, argued that Facebook wouldn’t want rivals to employ a similar program analyzing their encrypted user data.

“If we ever found out that someone had figured out a way to break encryption on [WhatsApp] we would be really upset,” Schroepfer said.

While the unsealed emails detailing the project have recently raised eyebrows, Meta’s spokesperson told Ars that “there is nothing new here—this issue was reported on years ago. The plaintiffs’ claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.”

According to Business Insider, advertisers suing said that Meta never disclosed its use of Onavo “kits” to “intercept rivals’ analytics traffic.” This is seemingly relevant to their case alleging anticompetitive behavior in the social media ads market, because Facebook’s conduct, allegedly breaking wiretapping laws, afforded Facebook an opportunity to raise its ad rates “beyond what it could have charged in a competitive market.”

Since the documents were unsealed, Meta has responded with a court filing that said: “Snapchat’s own witness on advertising confirmed that Snap cannot ‘identify a single ad sale that [it] lost from Meta’s use of user research products,’ does not know whether other competitors collected similar information, and does not know whether any of Meta’s research provided Meta with a competitive advantage.”

This conflicts with testimony from a Snapchat executive, who alleged that the project “hamper[ed] Snap’s ability to sell ads” by causing “advertisers to not have a clear narrative differentiating Snapchat from Facebook and Instagram.” Both internally and externally, “the intelligence Meta gleaned from this project was described” as “devastating to Snapchat’s ads business,” a court filing said.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2012980

For months, some of the biggest tech companies have been wrapped up in discussions with the European Commission (EC), seeking feedback and tweaking their plans to ensure their core platform services comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of that law taking force in the European Union tomorrow.

Under the DMA, companies designated as gatekeepers—Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—must follow strict rules to ensure that they don’t engage in unfair business practices that could limit consumer choice in core platform services. These include app stores, search engines, social networking services, online marketplaces, operating systems, web browsers, advertising services, cloud computing services, virtual assistants, and certain messaging services.

At its heart, the DMA requires more interoperability than ever, making it harder for gatekeepers to favor their own services or block other businesses from reaching consumers on their platforms.

Each gatekeeper will publish compliance reports in the coming days, detailing for the first time what changes they’ve made to comply with the DMA. All companies have already previewed changes coming in the buildup to the deadline. Some companies, like Google, have announced various changes impacting businesses and users, while others, like TikTok-owner ByteDance, are begrudgingly updating services now while still contesting their gatekeeper status.

Although the EC has said that the DMA is intended to protect fair and open markets—theoretically offering users more choices to enhance transparency, privacy, security, and competition online—some tech companies have warned that some of the changes coming under the DMA may increase risks or decrease choices for their users.

Last January, Apple warned that complying with the DMA required the company to take additional new steps “to reduce privacy and security risks the DMA creates.” According to Apple, DMA requirements linked to user choice—such as options to choose an alternative default contactless payment method other than Apple’s—could introduce new threats, like malware or malicious code used to scam users, that Apple can’t promise to protect against.

So far, all gatekeepers except for ByteDance have specified that changes coming soon will only impact users in the EU, the European Economic Area (EEA), and Switzerland. In a TikTok blog, ByteDance announced in March that new functionality added for DMA compliance will “roll out globally in the near future.”

However, it’s possible that other gatekeepers adjusting services may end up doing a cost-benefit analysis and, like ByteDance, eventually updating services in other parts of the world. This would potentially extend the DMA’s reach beyond the EU’s borders.

It also seems possible that other regions will quickly adopt the DMA’s standards. The EU and the US, for example, formed the EU-US Trade and Technology Council in 2021, which has been meeting more consistently in the ramp-up to DMA enforcement. Partly formed to cooperate on setting best practice technology standards, the next meeting is scheduled for this spring, just after the EC publishes summaries of gatekeepers’ compliance reports. Other countries, including Turkey, Australia, Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom, have already embraced the DMA model, according to the nonprofit tech policy think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Some critics of the DMA, including ITIF, have urged countries to “carefully consider the full implications before copying the EU’s digital regulatory system,” warning of potentially burdensome restrictions possibly hampering innovation and distorting competition.

Now that the EC is preparing to enforce the DMA officially, its impact will soon become clearer. However, the EC does not expect the online world to immediately look different tomorrow in the EU than it does today.

Some companies, like Microsoft, have estimated that DMA updates may not be available to all EU users until April, while other companies may fall short of DMA standards and be ordered to make more changes after submitting their first compliance reports.

Gatekeepers are expected to share compliance reports starting this afternoon, but for now, here’s a brief overview of changes coming to core services offered in the EU by all six gatekeepers.

Apple warns DMA creates potential risks

In January, Apple announced changes coming to iOS, Safari, and the App Store that will “become available to users in the 27 EU countries beginning in March 2024.”

Some changes are small. The only change in Safari, for example, is that users will be prompted to choose a default browser when they first open Safari in iOS 17.4 or later.

But changes to the App Store and iOS are more significant.

In the App Store, developers can expect extensive changes “affecting apps across Apple’s operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.” These include new options to process payments for digital goods with alternative service providers or by linking out to a website. Developers can now offer deals, discounts, and promotions outside their apps, too.

To help developers navigate these options, Apple also developed business tools to estimate fees or potentially reduced commissions.

Specifically for iOS, updates include new options to distribute iOS apps in alternative marketplaces and new APIs enabling developers to create alternative app marketplaces, use alternative web browser engines for in-app browsing, and “submit additional requests for interoperability with iPhone and iOS hardware and software features.”

Perhaps more significantly for users, Apple introduced “new controls that allow users to select a third-party contactless payment app—or an alternative app marketplace—as their default.”

Using these alternatives, Apple warned, may diminish the user experience by impacting system performance or draining battery life. And some features, like Family Purchase Sharing and Ask to Buy, won’t work “with apps downloaded from outside of the App Store.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2008325

Amazon has issued an update to Fire TV streaming devices and televisions that has broken apps that let users bypass the Fire OS home screen. The tech giant claims that its latest Fire OS update is about security but has refused to detail any potential security concerns.

Users and app developers have reported that numerous apps that used to work with Fire TV devices for years have suddenly stopped working. As first reported by AFTVnews, the update has made apps unable to establish local Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connections and execute ADB commands with Fire TV devices. The update, Fire OS 7.6.6.9, affects several Fire OS-based TVs, including models from TCL, Toshiba, Hisense, and Amazon’s Fire TV Omni QLED Series. Other devices running the update include Amazon’s first Fire TV Stick 4K Max, the third-generation Fire TV Stick, as well as the third and second-generation Fire TV Cubes and the Fire TV Stick Lite.

A code excerpt shared with AFTVnews by what the publication described as an “affected app developer,” which you can view here, shows a line of code indicating that Fire TVs would not be allowed to make ADB connections with a local device or app. As pointed out by AFTVnews, such apps have been used by Fire TV modders for abilities like clearing installed apps’ cache and using a different home screen than the Fire OS default. Other uses include advanced tweaks, like console emulators, as How-To Geek noted.

Ars Technica asked Amazon why it decided to block Fire TVs from making local ADB connections and what, if any, specific security concerns were related. A spokesperson responded with a company statement reading:

We implemented a software update to protect customer security. We are aware of reports that some apps have been impacted by a recent security update. If developers have questions, they can contact their Amazon Fire TV Appstore representative, or visit https://developer.amazon.com/support/contact-us.

This suggests that Amazon’s changes are connected to security concerns. But it’s unclear what Amazon is claiming to protect users from as the company declined multiple requests for comments on the specific security risk.

Further adding to the confusion around the “security” update, Amazon Fire TV devices can still make ADB connections to external devices, like computers. And numerous devices with stronger security concerns, like Android phones, support local ADB connections.

Home screen suspicions

While Amazon is vague about its reasons for the update, aside from security concerns, it provides Amazon with at least one benefit: Apps that enabled people to use Fire TV devices without seeing the Fire OS home screen are no longer working. As explained by AFTVnews, “apps commonly used by the Fire TV modding community will often use local ADB connections to detect remote button presses. That detection allows the use of alternate home screens.”

It’s not hard to see why people might want to avoid the Fire OS home screen nor why Amazon would want to force users to see it. Like many TV vendors, Amazon is trying to drive long-term revenue from TV sales by including ads into the TVs’ OS, allowing Amazon to sell ad space and insight around ad engagement. Fire TV streaming devices and televisions have made names for themselves with low prices. But since Amazon debuted Fire TV in 2014, it has updated Fire OS to include more ads and has plans to increase ad revenue further as it works to build the generative AI version of Alexa.

We’ve previously seen what Amazon is willing to do to protect Fire TV-related ad revenue. Last year, Amazon broke Remapper, a free app that made Fire TV remotes programmable. Remapper was a revenue threat since companies pay Amazon (and other companies with TV OSes, like Roku) to put their streaming service buttons on remotes, which drives subscriptions.

Other broken apps

Beyond breaking apps that let users skip the Fire OS home screen, the update has reportedly bricked other apps.

For example, since the update, TDUK APP Killer, which closes all background apps with one click, and TDUK APP Cache Cleaner, which clears app caches with one click, haven’t worked. AFTVnews reported that Amazon originally told the apps’ developer that Fire TVs no longer supported the apps because the apps were showing error messages during testing. However, testing wasn’t performed on Fire TVs, the only type of device that the apps claim to support. Eventually, the developer was told via email that, “because your app overrides the native user experience (e.g., with a lockscreen or widget), it has not been published on Amazon devices,” AFTVnews reported.

The change has possible implications for how Fire TVs’ app ecosystem might look in the future, when Amazon has even more power, as it’s planning to ditch its Android-based Fire OS in favor of its own OS. Codenamed Vega, the upcoming OS is expected to be based on Linux. It’s unclear how Amazon might use its in-house OS to control the Fire TV experience further, including whether it will continue to allow sideloading apps.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2006190

Streaming services like Amazon Prime Video promote annual subscriptions as a way to save money. But long-term commitments to streaming companies that are in the throes of trying to determine how to maintain or achieve growth typically end up biting subscribers in the butt—and they’re getting fed up.

As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, a lawsuit seeking class-action certification [PDF] hit Amazon on February 9. The complaint centers on Amazon showing ads with Prime Video streams, which it started doing for US subscribers in January unless customers paid an extra $2.99/month. This approach differed from how other streaming services previously introduced ads: by launching a new subscription plan with ads and lower prices and encouraging subscribers to switch.

A problem with this approach, though, as per the lawsuit, is that it meant that people who signed up for an annual subscription to Prime Video before Amazon’s September 2023 announcement about ads already paid for a service that’s different from what they expected.

And that’s not the only risk people face when opting-in to a yearlong relationship with streaming services these days.

Paying extra “for something they already paid for”

The lawsuit recently filed against Prime Video names California resident Wilbert Napoleon as a plaintiff and argues that Amazon’s advertisements for Prime Video made “reasonable consumers” think that they would get ad-free movie and TV-show streaming for the duration of their subscription.

The lawsuit reads:

Reasonable consumers expect that, if you purchase a subscription with ad-free streaming of movies and tv shows, that the ad-free streaming for movies and tv shows is available for the duration of the purchased subscription.

… however, Plaintiff and class members’ reasonable expectations were not met. Instead of receiving a subscription that included ad-free streaming of [TV] shows and movies, they received something worth less.

Napoleon bought an annual subscription to Prime Video in June 2023, per the court filings. The lawsuit accuses Amazon of falsely advertising Prime Video.

“Subscribers must now pay extra to get something that they already paid for,” the lawsuit says.

The idea of expectations not being met is common for streaming customers. That said, the lawsuit hasn’t gotten far enough yet where we should expect big changes to Prime Video or financial penalties for Amazon. Changing the user experience mid-deal is aggravating for customers, but Prime Video’s terms of use claim that Amazon maintains the right to diminish the value of Prime Video:

Offers and pricing for subscriptions (also referred to at times as memberships), the subscription services, the extent of available Subscription Digital Content, and the specific titles available through subscription services, may change over time and by location without notice (except as may be required by applicable law).

But there’s still a broader point to be made around streaming services trying to lure people into yearlong commitments knowing that the product they offer today might drastically change over the next 12 months.

Amazon, for example, announced that it would bring commercials to Prime Video in September and didn’t confirm when it would introduce ads until December, about a month ahead of the changes. Yet, Amazon reportedly had plans to bring ads to the service as early as June, per a report from The Wall Street Journal that cited anonymous “people familiar with the situation.” Despite these reported plans to alter the user experience significantly, Amazon continued to sell annual subscriptions to Prime Video. For months, people were committing to something that they expected would include commercial-free viewing, which used to be a popular draw of Prime Video compared to rival streaming services.

Prime Video also seemingly didn’t give a heads-up that it was removing Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support unless subscribers agreed to pay $2.99 more per month for an ad-free plan.

Amazon declined to comment on this story. Lawyers for the lawsuit filed against Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2003105