Month: November 2024

EU fines Meta €800 million for breaking law with Marketplace

EU: Tying the free Facebook Marketplace to the social network undermines rivals.

Meta has been fined nearly €800 million by Brussels after regulators accused Facebook’s parent company of stifling competition by “tying” its free Marketplace services with the social network.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s outgoing competition chief, said on Thursday that by linking Facebook with its classified ads service Meta had “imposed unfair trading conditions” on other providers.

She added: “It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that [others] could not match. This is illegal.”

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Faulty Colorsofts have left some Kindle owners without an e-reader

A trade-in program doesn’t work too well when the new product has tech issues.

The launch of the first-ever color Kindle isn't going so great. Amazon's Colorsoftbegan shipping on October 30, but shipments were paused after some customers complained about a yellow bar at the bottom of the screen and discoloration around the edges. Amazon is working on a fix and is offering a replacement or refund.

That's where another problem comes in. Leading up to the launch, Amazon ran a promotion advertising that its customers could trade in their old Kindle for a 20 percent discount on the Colorsoft. And some of those customers are now returning their new Colorsoft due to the yellow bar defect—leaving them without an e-reader altogether. Amazon has yet to provide any concrete information on when the fix will be ready for the Colorsoft and when it will resume shipping. It's a mess.

It started with an advertisement for a limited-time discount on the Colorsoft via Amazon's trade-in program. If the device was eligible, you had to answer a few questions about its condition and then ship it off. Once Amazon appraises it, the trade-in value appears in the form of an Amazon gift card. Amazon also offered an additional 20 percent off the Colorsoft along with the trade-in credit.

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Half-Life 2 pushed Steam on the gaming masses… and the masses pushed back

Back in 2004, many players saw Valve’s new platform as nothing but “fancy DRM.”

It's Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day leading up through the 16th, we'll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

When millions of eager gamers first installed Half-Life 2 20 years ago, many, if not most, of them found they needed to install another piece of software alongside it. Few at the time could imagine that piece of companion software–with the pithy name Steam–would eventually become the key distribution point and social networking center for the entire PC gaming ecosystem, making the idea of physical PC games an anachronism in the process.

While Half-Life 2 wasn’t the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players that saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time.

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AI Agent: OpenAI soll an KI-Steuerung für PCs arbeiten

OpenAIs KI-Helfer namens Operator soll PCs ohne Zutun der Nutzer bedienen und so beispielsweise Flüge buchen oder Texte schreiben können. (KI, PC)

OpenAIs KI-Helfer namens Operator soll PCs ohne Zutun der Nutzer bedienen und so beispielsweise Flüge buchen oder Texte schreiben können. (KI, PC)

70 Jahre Godzilla: Urgigant im Rentenalter

Sieben Jahrzehnte mit dem größten Monster aller Zeiten: Godzilla ist ein Phänomen – und der erste aller Kaiju ist immer noch der Beste! Von Peter Osteried (Science-Fiction, Film)

Sieben Jahrzehnte mit dem größten Monster aller Zeiten: Godzilla ist ein Phänomen - und der erste aller Kaiju ist immer noch der Beste! Von Peter Osteried (Science-Fiction, Film)

Here’s how to survive your relatives’ uninformed anti-EV rant this Thanksgiving

Need to bust anti-EV myths at the Thanksgiving dinner table? Here’s how.

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it, all manner of uncomfortable conversations with relatives who think they know a lot about a lot but are in fact just walking examples of Dunning-Kruger in action. Not going home is always an option—there's no reason you should spend your free time with people you can't stand, after all. But if you are headed home and are not looking forward to having to converse with your uncle or parent over heaped plates of turkey and potatoes, we put together some talking points to debunk their more nonsensical claims about electric vehicles.

Charging an EV takes too long

The No. 1 complaint from people with no experience with driving or living with an electric car, cited as a reason for why they will never get an EV, is that it takes too long to recharge them. On the one hand, this attitude is understandable. For more than a century, humans have become accustomed to vehicles that can be refueled in minutes, using very energy-dense liquids that can be pumped into a fuel tank at a rate of up to 10 gallons per minute.

By contrast, batteries are not at all fast to recharge, particularly if you plug into an AC charger. Even the fastest fast-charging EVs connected to a fast DC fast charger will still need between 18–20 minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent state of charge, and that, apparently, is more time than some curmudgeons are prepared to wait as they drive from coast to coast as fast as they possibly can.

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