Month: March 2023

Enlarge / The Google Workspace icons. (credit: Google)

"Please delete 2 million files to continue using your Google Drive account." That was the message that Reddit user ra13 woke up to one day. Google apparently decided to put a hard limit on the number of files you're allowed to have on one Google Drive account. Google rolled out this file limit without warning anyone it would happen. Users over the limit found themselves suddenly locked out of new file uploads, and it was up to them to figure out what was going wrong.

Did we mention this all started in February? A post on the Google Drive API issue tracker shows some users have been seeing this error for almost two months now. The original message said: "The limit for the number of items, whether trashed or not, created by this account has been exceeded." And sometime in March, it was updated to say, "Error 403: This account has exceeded the creation limit of 5 million items. To create more items, move items to the trash and delete them forever." Since there is nothing anywhere that informs users Google Drive has a file limit, users originally thought this was a bug and asked Google to quickly fix it. It has been two months now, though, and Google has not issued a public response. Some users say they have gotten Google Support to privately confirm the limit is intended, and a pop-up message is starting to show up in the Drive UI for some users.

It might be understandable to limit a data hog abusing a free account, but that's not what's happening here. Google is selling this storage to users, via both the Google Workspace business accounts and the consumer-grade Google One storage plans. Google One tops out at 30TB of storage, which costs an incredible $150 a month to use. Google Workspace's formal plans cap out at 5TB, but an "Enterprise" plan promises "As much storage as you need." From what we can tell in the various comments on Reddit and the issue tracker, both consumer and business account types are subject to this hidden 5 million file limit.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Today an Italian regulator, the Guarantor for the Protection of Personal Data (referred to by its Italian acronym, GPDP), announced a temporary ban on ChatGPT in Italy. The ban is effective immediately and will remain in place while the regulator investigates its concerns that OpenAI—the developer of ChatGPT—is unlawfully collecting Italian Internet users’ personal data to train the conversational AI software and has no age verification system in place to prevent kids from accessing the tool.

The Italian ban comes after a ChatGPT data breach on March 20, exposing “user conversations and information relating to the payment of subscribers to the paid service,” GPDP said in its press release. OpenAI notified users impacted by the breach and said it was "committed to protecting our users’ privacy and keeping their data safe," apologizing for falling "short of that commitment, and of our users’ expectations."

Ars could not immediately reach OpenAI to comment. The company has 20 days to respond with proposed measures that could address GPDP’s concerns or face fines of up to 20 million euro or 4 percent of OpenAI’s gross revenue.

Enlarge / When Chevrolet launches the new Blazer EV later this year it will be GM's first new car to lack CarPlay or Android Auto. (credit: General Motors)

In surprising car news today, we've learned that General Motors is planning to drop support for both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from new electric vehicles it plans to launch in the next few years. The decision won't affect any GM vehicles already on the market, nor will it apply to gasoline- or diesel-powered GM vehicles in the coming years—just EVs.

"As we scale our EVs and launch our Ultifi software platform, we can do more than ever before with in-vehicle technologies and over-the-air updates. All of this is allowing us to constantly improve the customer experience we can offer across our brands," said Edward Kummer, GM's chief digital officer.

GM told Ars that it's moving away from phone projection to offer customers a more integrated solution that sees Google Maps, Google Assistant, Audible, Spotify, and other applications run natively on its cars' infotainment systems.

Enlarge / FTC Chair Lina Khan speaks during the Spring Enforcers Summit at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on Monday, March 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Twitter owner Elon Musk requested a meeting with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan late last year, but he was rebuffed and told to stop dragging his heels on providing documents and depositions needed for the FTC investigation into Twitter's privacy and data practices, a New York Times report said yesterday.

"In a Jan. 27 letter declining the meeting, Ms. Khan told a Twitter lawyer to focus on complying with investigators' demands for information before she would consider meeting with Mr. Musk," the NYT wrote.

Twitter has to comply with conditions in a May 2022 settlement in which it agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Last year's settlement was reached after the FTC said Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 settlement that prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.

Enlarge / RIP to a real one. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Update (Dec. 12, 2023): After missing four years in a row due to COVID and waning industry interest, the Entertainment Software Association formally announced a permanent end to the Electronic Entertainment Expo today.

"After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye," the organization wrote. "Thanks for the memories. GGWP."

Despite today's formal announcement, E3's imminent demise has been apparent for a while, even before former organizer ReedPop parted ways with the ESA in September. Let this piece, originally written when the 2023 show was cancelled in March, serve as our epitaph for an annual industry gathering that grew to be a cultural touchstone in the gaming world.

This year's edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been canceled. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and show promoter ReedPop announced late Thursday that the planned June event—which was set to be the first in-person E3 since 2019—"did not garner the sustained interest necessary” from major publishers and potential attendees to justify a massive convention.

At this point, the cancellation of the 2023 show wasn't a huge surprise. All three major console makers had already confirmed that they wouldn't be attending, and major publishers Ubisoft and Sega publicly abandoned the show more recently. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis cited economic headwinds, digital marketing opportunities, and COVID-related game development timeline changes as reasons the companies backed out.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has spent a lot of time and energy over the last few months adding generative AI features to all its products, particularly its long-standing, long-struggling Bing search engine. And now the company is working on fusing this fast-moving, sometimes unsettling new technology with some old headaches: ads.

In a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi said the company was "exploring placing ads in the chat experience," one of several things the company is doing "to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response." The company is also looking into ways to let Bing Chat show sources for its work, sort of like the ways Google, Bing, and other search engines display a source link below snippets of information they think might answer the question you asked.

Sharing ad revenue with partners is an attempt to address a looming supply-and-demand problem for AI chatbots that dig through the Internet to find answers to user queries—someone needs to be making the content that Bing Chat uses to formulate its answers. If AI chatbots make content creation less lucrative, there's less information out there for AI chatbots to sift through, making it even harder for them to do what they're trying to do.

Enlarge / Until the beginning of this year, an EV's tax credit was determined by the storage capacity of its battery pack. Now, the tax credit is linked to local manufacturing of components and locally sourced critical minerals. (credit: Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)

It has been a confusing few months for potential electric vehicle customers after the introduction of complicated new rules for the clean vehicle tax credit at the beginning of the year. Now the rules are changing once again.

On Thursday, the Internal Revenue Service published a draft of new guidance for the $7,500 clean vehicle tax credit and said that starting on April 18, it will begin enforcing the domestic sourcing requirement for battery minerals and components. As a result, many new EVs may not qualify for the tax credit.

Tell me the rules again

As we've detailed before, the revised clean vehicle tax credit has quite a few conditions that must be satisfied in order for that vehicle to be eligible.