RIP Metaverse. Montana banned TikTok. Google will delete accounts #WEEK ~ May 22nd

A former ByteDance executive in the US is suing the company for wrongful dismissal, alleging that ByteDance stole its competitors’ content and gave the Chinese Communist Party “superior access”. Content was stolen in the early days, mainly from Instagram and Snapchat. He should have been fired for complaining about it. (New York Times)

Twitter bowed to Erdogan’s pressure and silenced key voices in Turkey on the eve of the election. He refuses to say who they blocked. It is worth recalling that the government there she made it inaccessible Twitter completely after the recent earthquake. (Turkish Minute)

RIP Metaverse. The obituary of the latest fad in the technological graveyard. (Insider)

US Montana bans TikTok on personal devices. The ban will apply from January 1. It prohibits TikTok from being made available in app stores, but it doesn’t solve the fact that someone already has it on their phone. Not even the fact that he puts it there differently/elsewhere. Nonsense, of course. (BBC)

Requiring big tech companies to pay news servers is a bad approach because their fates will be intertwined, increased investment in news is not guaranteed (Cory Doctorow)

Ten years after Snowden: some things are better, some we’re still fighting for (EFF)

This is hard to understand. If you pay $1000 for a gold “whistle” and Twitter doesn’t approve it, you lose $1000. Incredibly enough, Musk had it included in the terms of the request. (Mashable)

Internet, web design

Searches for “Zelda” on Pornhub are soaring. More specifically, a popular search term is “Legend of Zelda rule 34”. (Mashable)

Google has shortened the inactivity period for account deletion for two years. Moreover, it will actually start at the end of this year lubricate such accounts, in full, the content, the email address, the account itself. Except for those associated with YouTube videos. (Google)

The new MOV AND ZIP tlds have caused an uproar. Security experts warn against exploits for phishing and malware. The reason is, of course, that file extensions are often used across the Internet. Newly (for example) “test.zip” in posts will be changed to an active link to the test.zip domain (Bleeping Computer, Ars Technica)

Shares of Netflix jumped more than 10% after the streaming service said it has nearly 5 million monthly active users on its ad-supported plan, which was introduced in early November 2022. More than 25% of new subscribers are on the ad-supported tier. (Variety)

Neeva (search engine focused on privacy and artificial intelligence) is ending. They cite the difficulty of persuading users to pursue a “better choice” and that there is no longer a path to creating a sustainable consumer search business. (Neva)

Hardware

Sonos will stop playing local files on Android devices later this month. And Android, which makes such a thing difficult, is said to be to blame. Sonos removed the same functionality from iOS over the years. Interestingly. (The Verge, Sonos)

Amazon announces new devices: $40 Echo Pop with half-circle design, updated Echo Show 5 and 5 Kids Edition, $50 Echo Buds, expanded Echo Auto, and more (TechCrunch)

There will be enough Raspberry Pi already in the third quarter of 2023. The CEO says so, so you can hope. Eben Upton also says that “the hardest decision I’ve had to make in my business career was to either let amateurs and educators down under the pressure of a pandemic, or let the small businesses built on his company’s platform fail.” (Ars Technica)

Meet the radical new Spacetop laptop without a screen. This is replaced by AR glasses that create a 100-inch virtual display in the space in front of your face. It certainly looks interesting in the video, how it will be realistically usable is hard to estimate. (PC World)