Good morning. On this day 22 years ago, a company named Palm introduced a mobile device called Zire, a $99 attempt to woo regular people—consumers—into using handheld computers, then called personal digital assistants.
Two decades later, handheld computers are ubiquitous, and personal assistants are, shall we say, a bit more AI-flavored than they used to be.
But $99? Friend, those days are long gone. —Andrew Nusca
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Ubisoft explores going private
There is not a video game company on earth that hasn’t had a tough time of it in the last two years as the passage of time eroded pandemic gains. But Ubisoft has had it tougher than most.
The market value of the French maker of Assassin’s Creed has been steadily declining since it peaked in 2021. At Ubisoft’s height, you needed the equivalent of $20 to purchase a share on the Paris stock exchange; lately, you needed just $2. Ouch.
So it comes as no surprise that Tencent and Ubisoft’s founding Guillemot family, which both retain minority stakes in the game publisher, are reportedly exploring taking the company private as it approaches its 39th birthday. (Ubisoft’s CEO is Yves Guillemot.) Its share price jumped more than 30% on the news.
A push to go private may shield the company from investors trying to dismantle it, but it won’t rectify its challenges elsewhere. Sales of first-person shooter XDefiant underwhelmed, as did Star Wars Outlaws. Meanwhile, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been pushed to 2025 and the company’s workers in France are on the cusp of a strike.
Remember, Yves: The world is an illusion. One you can either submit to, as most do, or transcend. —AN
Meta goes to the movies
The company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has unveiled a new tool that will let people create short video clips by merely entering simple text prompts describing what they want to see and hear.
Don’t count on using Meta’s new Movie Gen to become the next Steven Spielberg anytime soon, however—it’s not yet publicly available. And the clips the tool produces are limited to just 16 seconds.
In announcing the service, Meta is joining a race that promises to revolutionize filmmaking. Upstarts Runway and Pika already offer similar tools, while OpenAI has developed one that is available only to a small number of users.
Critics fear this new wave of AI for video creation risks being misused to spread disinformation. What is clear, though, is that Hollywood stands to both benefit from using AI to create new films and face challenges if anyone in their bedroom can do the same. —Jason Del Rey
Texas takes on TikTok
The Lone Star State has sued TikTok for allegedly misusing the data of its young users, adding to the social media company’s long list of legal woes in the U.S.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, accuses TikTok of violating a new Texas law banning social media companies from selling or sharing a minor’s data without an adult’s approval. The service is also accused of failing to add tools that let parents see how their children use social media; the current version works only if minors consent to being monitored.
TikTok denied the allegations, telling the Texas Tribune that it complies with data-sharing laws and that parents can request that their kids’ accounts be deleted.
Texas isn’t the only U.S. state to take TikTok to court. Utah, Nebraska, Indiana, and Arkansas have also sued the company, which is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, over alleged privacy and safety violations involving children.
Of course, all of this may soon be moot. TikTok, owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, is fighting for its life against the federal government’s order earlier this year that the service be sold or shut down. The clock ticks until mid-January. —Jenn Brice
Google won’t pay your silly news tax
Over the years, major tech companies have come to define the idea of the “open web” to their own benefit—often to the disadvantage of their users.
Google is the latest example of such tortured redefinition. New proposed legislation in New Zealand will force the U.S. company to compensate the news publishers that provide a significant portion of the content for its massively profitable search engine (not to mention training data for its generative AI models).
Google’s response: Fine, we’ll just stop linking to news articles in our products.
The company’s argument for removing the ability for New Zealand’s 5 million residents to access news articles through its popular search engine and other services is that remunerating publishers for using their content is “in conflict with the principles of the open web.” It would also harm small publishers and create unlimited financial exposure for the company, whose parent Alphabet generated $307 billion of revenue in its last full fiscal year.
In recent years Australia and Canada have passed laws aimed at forcing Google and rival Meta to pay for news content that appears on their platforms. In Australia, the tech giants entered deals worth many millions; in Canada, they stopped linking to news.
How distant a memory is the open web in New Zealand? We’ll soon find out. —Kali Hays
You can’t keep my data forever, Meta
Max Schrems strikes again!
The Austrian-activist-turned-Meta-arch-nemesis has scored a ruling from the EU’s highest court, saying Meta and other online ad players can’t just use every morsel of someone’s personal data to target ads at them, forever.
That’s because the “data minimization” principle in the General Data Protection Regulation says Facebook has to limit how long it can exploit a user’s data and the types of data that can be used for ad targeting.
Schrems has been dragging Meta through the EU courts for a dozen years, leaving the wreckage of multiple EU-U.S. data-sharing agreements and forcing the Facebook owner to ask for users’ consent before targeting ads at them.
He told me he was “happy to have gotten a clear ruling that Meta and other online advertisers have to minimize the use of personal data for ads.” —David Meyer
More data
—Apple Intelligence will arrive Oct. 28. Gird your iPhones.
—“Salt Typhoon” cyberattack affects U.S. telcos. It links to the Chinese government.
—Can you revamp Facebook for Gen Z? Meta is sure trying. (Sus.)
—"Perfctl" malware is going after Linux servers. And has been for three years. Eeek.
—Robinhood will debut margin trading in the U.K. Because at 11, it’s marginal, right?
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