An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For millions of Spotify users, the "Wrapped" feature -- which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits -- is a highlight of every year's end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so "irresistible," while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become "the ultimate status symbol" for tens of millions of music fans. It's no surprise then that, after a decade, some Spotify users who are especially eager to see Wrapped evolve are no longer willing to wait to see if Spotify will ever deliver the more creative streaming insights they crave.

With the help of AI, these users expect that their data can be more quickly analyzed to potentially uncover overlooked or never-considered patterns that could offer even more insights into what their listening habits say about them. Imagine, for example, accessing a music recap that encapsulates a user's full listening history -- not just their top songs and artists. With that unlocked, users could track emotional patterns, analyzing how their music tastes reflected their moods over time and perhaps helping them adjust their listening habits to better cope with stress or major life events. And for users particularly intrigued by their own data, there's even the potential to use AI to cross data streams from different platforms and perhaps understand even more about how their music choices impact their lives and tastes more broadly.

Likely just as appealing as gleaning deeper personal insights, though, users could also potentially build AI tools to compare listening habits with their friends. That could lead to nearly endless fun for the most invested music fans, where AI could be tapped to assess all kinds of random data points, like whose breakup playlists are more intense or who really spends the most time listening to a shared favorite artist. In pursuit of supporting developers offering novel insights like these, more than 18,000 Spotify users have joined "Unwrapped," a collective launched in February that allows them to pool and monetize their data.

Voting as a group through the decentralized data platform Vana -- which Wired profiled earlier this year -- these users can elect to sell their dataset to developers who are building AI tools offering fresh ways for users to analyze streaming data in ways that Spotify likely couldn't or wouldn't. In June, the group made its first sale, with 99.5 percent of members voting yes. Vana co-founder Anna Kazlauskas told Ars that the collective -- at the time about 10,000 members strong -- sold a "small portion" of its data (users' artist preferences) for $55,000 to Solo AI. While each Spotify user only earned about $5 in cryptocurrency tokens -- which Kazlauskas suggested was not "ideal," wishing the users had earned about "a hundred times" more -- she said the deal was "meaningful" in showing Spotify users that their data "is actually worth something." Spotify responded to the collective by citing both trademark and policy violations. The company sent a letter to Unwrapped developers, warning that the project's name may infringe on Spotify's Wrapped branding, and that Unwrapped breaches developer terms. Specifically, Spotify objects to Unwrapped's use of platform data for AI/ML training and facilitating user data sales.

"Spotify honors our users' privacy rights, including the right of portability," Spotify's spokesperson said. "All of our users can receive a copy of their personal data to use as they see fit. That said, UnwrappedData.org is in violation of our Developer Terms which prohibit the collection, aggregation, and sale of Spotify user data to third parties."

Unwrapped says it plans to defend users' right to "access, control, and benefit from their own data," while providing reassurances that it will "respect Spotify's position as a global music leader."

Sega allegedly orchestrated a police raid to recover Nintendo development kits it had accidentally disposed of during an office relocation from Brentford to Chiswick Business Park. An anonymous UK reseller purchased the items -- including Game Boy Advance, DSi, 3DS, Wii, and Wii U development consoles plus prototype games like Sonic Chronicles and Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games -- for roughly $13,575 from a removals worker handling Sega's office clearance.

City of London Police arrested the seller July 14, 2025, on money laundering charges, deploying approximately ten officers to seize the hardware. The seller claims the search warrant was defective and authorized Sega representatives to participate in the raid. Nintendo development kits remain the hardware manufacturer's property regardless of possession, outlet Time Extension writes. Police requested the seller relinquish ownership two days after releasing him from eight hours in custody, which he refused. Sega has not responded to multiple legal letters or six separate pre-action protocol claims from the seller.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday afternoon, Anthropic experienced a brief but complete service outage that took down its AI infrastructure, leaving developers unable to access Claude.ai, the API, Claude Code, or the management console for around half an hour. The outage affected all three of Anthropic's main services simultaneously, with the company posting at 12:28 pm Eastern that "APIs, Console, and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible." As of press time, the services appear to be restored. The disruption, though lasting only about 30 minutes, quickly took the top spot on tech link-sharing site Hacker News for a short time and inspired immediate reactions from developers who have become increasingly reliant on AI coding tools for their daily work. "Everyone will just have to learn how to do it like we did in the old days, and blindly copy and paste from Stack Overflow," joked one Hacker News commenter. Another user recalled a joke from a previous AI outage: "Nooooo I'm going to have to use my brain again and write 100% of my code like a caveman from December 2024."

The most recent outage came at an inopportune time, affecting developers across the US who have integrated Claude into their workflows. One Hacker News user observed: "It's like every other day, the moment US working hours start, AI (in my case I mostly use Anthropic, others may be better) starts dying or at least getting intermittent errors. In EU working hours there's rarely any outages." Another user also noted this pattern, saying that "early morning here in the UK everything is fine, as soon as most of the US is up and at it, then it slowly turns to treacle." While some users criticized Anthropic for reliability issues in recent months, the company's status page acknowledged the issue within 39 minutes of the initial reports, and by 12:55 pm Eastern announced that a fix had been implemented and that the company's teams were monitoring the results.

Britain's road death rate has declined 22-fold per mile driven since 1950, dropping from 111 deaths per billion miles to approximately 5 today, according to new analysis from Our World in Data. Annual road fatalities fell from 5,000-7,000 deaths in the 1920s and 1930s to 1,700 in recent years despite a 16-fold increase in vehicles and 33-fold increase in miles driven.

The UK now ranks among the world's safest countries for road travel at 1.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Key interventions included mandatory breathalyzer tests in 1967 that reduced drunk-driving deaths by 82%, the introduction of motorways beginning in 1958, conversion to roundabouts that cut fatal accidents by two-thirds, and 20-mph speed zones around schools. If global road death rates matched Britain's current levels, approximately one million lives would be saved annually from the current 1.2 million road deaths worldwide.

In a new interview with The Telegraph (paywalled), William Shatner revealed he has never earned residuals from reruns of the original Star Trek series, since syndication royalties weren't in place until after the show ended in 1969. "Nobody knew about reruns," said Shatner. "The concept of syndication only came in after 'Star Trek' was canceled when someone from the unions said: 'Wait a minute, you're replaying all those films, those shows.' There was a big strike. But in the end, the unions secured residual fees shortly after 'Star Trek' finished, so I didn't benefit."

The now 94-year-old actor said he's actually only seen a "few" episodes of his work and has "never seen" any of the spinoffs. "I'm gonna tell you something that nobody knows. I've never seen another 'Star Trek' and I've seen as few 'Star Treks' of the show I was on, I've seen as few as possible," he told Entertainment Tonight. "I don't like to look at myself, and I've never seen any other. I love it, I think it's great. I just don't, you know, I don't watch television, per se."

Jaguar Land Rover has extended the shutdown of its UK and overseas factories after a cyberattack forced it to take IT systems offline, disrupting production, dealerships, and suppliers. The BBC reports: Jaguar Land Rover's (JLR) UK factories are now expected to remain closed until at least Wednesday after work was disrupted by a cyber attack just over a week ago. The car plants at Halewood and Solihull and its Wolverhampton engine facility, along with production facilities in Slovakia, China and India, have been unable to operate since the company fell victim to the cyber attack. Staff who work on the production lines have been told to remain at home. JLR shut down its IT systems in response to the attack on 31 August, in order to protect them from damage. However, this caused major disruption. [...]

Under normal circumstances, the company builds about 1,000 cars a day. The production stoppage has had a significant impact on the company's suppliers, with some understood to have told their own staff not to come into work. As well as forcing the factories to stop building cars, it also left dealerships unable to register new cars and garages that maintain JLR vehicles unable to order the parts they needed -- although it is understood workarounds have since been put in place. The attack began at what is traditionally a popular time for consumers to take delivery of new vehicles. The latest batch of new registration plates became available on Monday, September 1.

AI Overviews have lowered click-through traffic to Daily Mail sites by as much as 89%, the publisher told a UK government body that regulates competition. So they've joined other top news organizations (including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Periodical Publishers Association) in asking the regulators "to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers," reports the Guardian: Publishers — already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news — argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or "drop out of all search results", according to several sources... In recent years, Google Discover, which feeds users articles and videos tailored to them based on their past online activity, has replaced search as the main source of click-throughs to content. However, David Buttle, founder of the consultancy DJB Strategies, says the service, which is also tied to publishers' overall search deals, does not deliver the quality traffic that most publishers need to drive their long-term strategies. "Google Discover is of zero product importance to Google at all," he says. "It allows Google to funnel more traffic to publishers as traffic from search declines ... Publishers have no choice but to agree or lose their organic search. It also tends to reward clickbaity type content. It pulls in the opposite direction to the kind of relationship publishers want."

Meanwhile, publishers are fighting a wider battle with AI companies seeking to plunder their content to train their large language models. The creative industry is intensively lobbying the government to ensure that proposed legislation does not allow AI firms to use copyright-protected work without permission, a move that would stop the "value being scraped" out of the £125bn sector. Some publishers have struck bilateral licensing deals with AI companies — such as the FT, the German media group Axel Springer, the Guardian and the Nordic publisher Schibsted with the ChatGPT maker OpenAI — while others such as the BBC have taken action against AI companies alleging copyright theft. "It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement," says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. "Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis."
"At the moment the AI and tech community are showing no signs of supporting publisher revenue," says the chief executive of the UK's Periodical Publishers Association...

The blog OMG Ubuntu notes that Microsoft Copilot chatbot support has been added in the latest Firefox Nightly builds. "Firefox's sidebar already offers access to popular chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Le Chat's Mistral and Google's Gemini. It previously offered HuggingChat too." As the testing bed for features Mozilla wants to add to stable builds (though not all make it — eh, rounded bottom window corners?), this is something you can expect to find in a future stable update... Copilot in Firefox offers the same features as other chatbots: text prompts, upload files or images, generate images, support for entering voice prompts (for those who fancy their voice patterns being analysed and trained on). And like those other chatbots, there are usage limits, privacy policies, and (for some) account creation needed. In testing, Copilot would only generate half a summary for a webpage, telling me it was too long to produce without me signing in/up for an account.

On a related note, Mozilla has updated stable builds to let third-party chatbots summarise web pages when browsing (in-app callout alerts users to the 'new' feature). Users yet to enable chatbots are subtly nudged to do so each time they right-click on web page. [Between "Take Screenshot" and "View Page Source" there's a menu option for "Ask an AI Chatbot."] Despite making noise about its own (sluggish, but getting faster) on-device AI features that are privacy-orientated, Mozilla is bullish on the need for external chatbots.
The article suggests Firefox wants to keep up with Edge and Chrome (which can "infuse first-party AI features directly.") But it adds that Firefox's nightly build is also testing some non-AI features, like new task and timer widgets on Firefox's New Tab page. And "In Firefox Labs, there are is an option to enable JPEG XL support, a super-optimised version of JPEG that is gaining traction (despite Google's intransigence).

Other Firefox news:

• There's good news "for users still clinging to Windows 7," writes the Register. Support for Firefox Extended Support Release 115 "is being extended until March 2026."

• Google "can keep paying companies like Mozilla to make Google the default search engine, as long as these deals aren't exclusive anymore," reports the blog It's FOSS News. (The judge wrote that "Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial — in some cases, crippling — downstream harms to distribution partners..." according to CNBC — especially since the non-profit Mozilla Foundation gets most of its annual revenue from its Google's search deal.)

• Don't forget you can now search your tabs, bookmarks and browsing history right from the address bar with keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, and @history. (And @actions pulls up a list of actions like "Open private window" or "Restart Firefox").

"A raft of articles have been retracted from publications including Business Insider and Wired in recent month," reports the Washington Post, "with links between them suggesting a possible broader scheme to pass off fake stories that these outlets now suspect were written using artificial intelligence." A Washington Post probe into the retractions found a connection between Onyeka Nwelue, the purported author of one of 38 essays removed this week by Business Insider, and someone using the name Margaux Blanchard, two of whose stories were previously removed by the same outlet. In recent months SFGate, Index on Censorship and Wired also retracted articles under the Blanchard byline, after it was identified as bogus by the British publication Press Gazette...

Business Insider Editor in Chief Jamie Heller explained to staff Tuesday in an email, obtained by The Post, that the report of a phony writer spurred a fuller investigation that turned up dozens of suspicious articles under various bylines. "We recently learned that a freelance contributor misrepresented their identity in two first-person essays written for Business Insider. As soon as this came to light, we took down the essays and began an investigation," Heller said. "As part of this process, we've removed additional first-person essays from the site due to concerns about the authors' identity or veracity. No news articles or videos were found to have this issue." On Tuesday Business Insider removed 38 pieces that had been published under bylines other than Blanchard. Business Insider deleted the author pages of 19 individuals, including Blanchard and Nwelue, and replaced their essays with editor's notes.

The website's investigation involved reviewing "tens of thousands of records," Business Insider spokesperson Ari Isaacman D'Angelo said in a statement to The Post. But it hadn't determined whether artificial intelligence was used to produce the yanked essays, she said, noting that AI-detection tools are often unreliable... Essays under [Nate] Giovanni's byline feature contradictory information. One piece, published in December 2024, refers to the author having two teenage daughters and a two-and-a-half-year-old son. Another, published three months later mentions two sons, aged eight and nine. Pieces that ran in May and July — about house-sitting around the world and applying to PhD programs — make no mention of a family at all...

On Aug. 21, Wired wrote a longer mea culpa about the article it published under Blanchard's name, with the headline "How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer." "If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it's WIRED," the publication wrote. ["In fact we do, all the time. Our editors receive transparently AI-generated pitches on a regular basis, and we reject them accordingly..."] "Unfortunately, one got through," referring to a story that ran under Blanchard's byline in May about two people who were married in the video game Minecraft.
The site Index on Censorship also published an article under the Blanchard byline about threats to journalists in Guatemala. "In the age of very intelligent AI it's clear we will have to look at things differently," the site's editor told the Washington Post.

The Post's article notes that one sign the pitches were AI-generated "is that while they sounded interesting, they featured details that were erroneous — including fictitious locales." Reached for a comment, one of the authors told the Post "Don't mention my name in your stupid article," claiming their acocunt was recently "compromised" (though their X.com account had also recently tweeted one of their articles.) But another author emailed the Post from their actual academic email address, saying they had no connection to the Gmail account The Post had been corresponding with. And here's how the person at that Gmail account responded to a follow-up query from the Post.

"What is one to do? With a few savvy prompts, AI could probably generate a 'long-lost' novel by Proust."

A UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot found no clear productivity gains despite user satisfaction with tasks like summarizing meetings and writing emails. While the tool sped up some routine work, it actually slowed down more complex tasks like Excel analysis and PowerPoint creation, often producing lower-quality results. The Register reports: The Department for Business and Trade received 1,000 licenses for use between October and December 2024, with the majority of these allocated to volunteers and 30 percent to randomly selected participants. Some 300 of these people consented to their data being analyzed. An evaluation of time savings, quality assurance, and productivity was then calculated in the assessment (PDF). Overall, 72 percent of users were satisfied or very satisfied with their digital assistant and voiced disappointment when the test ended. However, the reality of productivity gains was more nuanced than Microsoft's marketing materials might suggest. Around two-thirds of the employees in the trial used M365 at least once a week, and 30 percent used it at least once a day -- which doesn't sound like great value for money. [...]

According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user. "Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively. "PowerPoint and Excel were slightly more popular; both experienced peak activity of 7 percent of license holders using M365 Copilot in a single day within those applications," the study states. The three most popular tasks involved transcribing or summarizing a meeting, writing an email, and summarizing written comms. These also had the highest satisfaction levels, we're told.

Participants were asked to record the time taken for each task with M365 Copilot compared to colleagues not involved in the trial. The assessment report adds: "Observed task sessions showed that M365 Copilot users produced summaries of reports and wrote emails faster and to a higher quality and accuracy than non-users. Time savings observed for writing emails were extremely small. "However, M365 Copilot users completed Excel data analysis more slowly and to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users, conflicting time savings reported in the diary study for data analysis. PowerPoint slides [were] over 7 minutes faster on average, but to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users." This means corrective action was required.

A cross-section of participants was asked questions in an interview -- qualitative findings -- and they claimed routine admin tasks could be carried out with greater efficiency with M365 Copilot, letting them "redirect time towards tasks seen as more strategic or of higher value, while others reported using these time savings to attend training sessions or take a lunchtime walk." Nevertheless, M365 Copilot did not necessarily make them more productive, the assessment found. This is something Microsoft has worked on with customers to quantify the benefits and justify the greater expense of a license for M365 Copilot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Tencent released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, a new open-weights AI model that generates 3D-consistent video sequences from a single image, allowing users to pilot a camera path to "explore" virtual scenes. The model simultaneously generates RGB video and depth information to enable direct 3D reconstruction without the need for traditional modeling techniques. However, it won't be replacing video games anytime soon.

The results aren't true 3D models, but they achieve a similar effect: The AI tool generates 2D video frames that maintain spatial consistency as if a camera were moving through a real 3D space. Each generation produces just 49 frames -- roughly two seconds of video -- though multiple clips can be chained together for sequences lasting "several minutes," according to Tencent. Objects stay in the same relative positions when the camera moves around them, and the perspective changes correctly as you would expect in a real 3D environment. While the output is video with depth maps rather than true 3D models, this information can be converted into 3D point clouds for reconstruction purposes. There are some caveats with the tool. It doesn't generate true 3D models (only 2D frames with depth maps) and each run produces just two seconds of footage, with errors compounding during longer or complex camera motions like full 360-degree rotations. Furthermore, because it relies heavily on training data patterns, its ability to generalize is limited and it demands enormous GPU power (60-80GB of memory) to run effectively. On top of that, licensing restricts use in the EU, UK, and South Korea, with large-scale deployments requiring special agreements.

Tencent published the model weights on Hugging Face.

After 26 years and over 1,000 episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down as presenter of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, leaving behind a legacy of intellectual curiosity and broadcasting excellence. While he will no longer host the series, he will remain involved with the BBC and is set to launch a new project in 2026. The BBC reports: Over the last quarter of a century, Melvyn has skilfully led conversations about everything from the age of the Universe to 'Zenobia', Queen of the Palmyrene Empire. He has welcomed the company of the brightest and best academics in their fields, sharing their passion and knowledge with a fascinated audience right around the globe. While he will be much missed on In Our Time, Melvyn will continue to be a friend of Radio 4 with more to come to celebrate his extraordinary career, and a new series in 2026 (details to be announced soon).

Melvyn Bragg says: "For a program with a wholly misleading title which started from scratch with a six-month contract, it's been quite a ride! I have worked with many extremely talented and helpful people inside the BBC as well as some of the greatest academics around the world. It's been a great privilege and pleasure. I much look forward to continuing to work for the BBC on Radio 4. Thank you for listening." [...] In Our Time will be back on Radio 4 with a new presenter who will be announced in due course.

Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions.

The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9.

The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland."

"VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.

UK weather agency Met Office, in a blog post: Provisional Met Office statistics confirm that summer 2025 is officially the warmest summer on record for the UK. Analysis by Met Office climate scientists has also shown that a summer as hot or hotter than 2025 is now 70 times more likely than it would be in a 'natural' climate with no human caused greenhouse gas emissions.

The UK's mean temperature from 1 June to 31 August stands at 16.10C, which is 1.51C above the long-term meteorological average. This surpasses the previous record of 15.76C, set in 2018, and pushes the summer of 1976 out of the top five warmest summers in a series dating back to 1884.

"I have no musical talent at all," says Oliver McCann. "I can't sing, I can't play instruments, and I have no musical background at all!"

But the Associated Press describes 37-year-old McCann as a British "AI music creator" — and last month McCann signed with an independent record label "after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what's billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator." McCann is an example of how ChatGPT-style AI song generation tools like Suno and Udio have spawned a wave of synthetic music, a movement most notably highlighted by a fictitious group, Velvet Sundown, that went viral even though all its songs, lyrics and album art were created by AI. Experts say generative AI is set to transform the music world. However, there are scant details, so far, on how it's impacting the $29.6 billion global recorded music market, which includes about $20 billion from streaming.

The most reliable figures come from music streaming service Deezer, which estimates that 18% of songs uploaded to its platform every day are purely AI generated, though they only account for a tiny amount of total streams, hinting that few people are actually listening. Other, bigger streaming platforms like Spotify haven't released any figures on AI music... "It's a total boom. It's a tsunami," said Josh Antonuccio, director of Ohio University's School of Media Arts and Studies. The amount of AI generated music "is just going to only exponentially increase" as young people grow up with AI and become more comfortable with it, he said. [Antonuccio says later the cost of making a hit record "just keeps winnowing down from a major studio to a laptop to a bedroom. And now it's like a text prompt — several text prompts." Though there's a lack of legal clarity over copyright issues.]

Generative AI, with its ability to spit out seemingly unique content, has divided the music world, with musicians and industry groups complaining that recorded works are being exploited to train AI models that power song generation tools... Three major record companies, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed lawsuits last year against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In June, the two sides also reportedly entered negotiations that could go beyond settling the lawsuits and set rules for how artists are paid when AI is used to remix their songs.

GEMA, a German royalty collection society, has sued Suno, accusing it of generating music similar to songs like "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega and "Forever Young" by Alphaville. More than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn, released a silent album to protest proposed changes to U.K. laws on AI they fear would erode their creative control.

Meanwhile, other artists, such as will.i.am, Timbaland and Imogen Heap, have embraced the technology. Some users say the debate is just a rehash of old arguments about once-new technology that eventually became widely used, such as AutoTune, drum machines and synthesizers.

"For months, tens of thousands of people around the world have been complaining Meta has been banning their Instagram and Facebook accounts in error..." the BBC reported this month... More than 500 of them have contacted the BBC to say they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended — but some also speak of the profound personal toll it has taken on them, including concerns that the police could become involved.

Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all. It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing — though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it.
One examples is a woman lost the Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop. ("Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant.") "After the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta's press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated... Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again — but the account for the dress shop remained."

Another user spent a month appealing. ("In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked," but concluded he'd breached a policy.) And then "his account was abruptly restored at the end of July. 'We're sorry we've got this wrong,' Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong." Hours after the BBC contacted Meta's press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook... His Facebook account was back two days later — but he was still blocked from Instagram.
None of the banned users in the BBC's examples were ever told what post breached the platform's rules. Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it. Their central accusation — Meta's AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated.

Meta has not commented on these claims. Instagram states AI is central to its "content review process" and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies.
The Guardian reports there's been "talk of a class action against Meta over the bans." Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected... But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement. "We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake," a spokesperson for Meta said.
"It happened to me this morning," writes long-time Slashdot reader Daemon Duck," asking if any other Slashdot readers had their personal (or business) account unreasonably banned. (And wondering what to do next...)

At the moment, the Spotify exodus of 2025 is a trickle rather than a flood, writes the Guardian, citing the departure of five notable bands "liked in indie circles," but not "the sorts to rack up billions of listens."

"Still, it feels significant if only because, well, this sort of thing wasn't really supposed to happen any more." Plenty of bands and artists refused to play ball with Spotify in its early years, when the streamer still had work to do before achieving total ubiquity. But at some point there seemed to a collective recognition that resistance was futile, that Spotify had won and those bands would have to bend to its less-than-appealing model... This artist acquiescence happened in tandem — surely not coincidentally — with a closer relationship between Spotify and the record labels that once viewed it as their destroyer. Some of the bigger labels have found a way to make a lot of money from streaming: Spotify paid out $10bn in royalties last year — though many artists would point out that only a small fraction of that reaches them after their label takes its share...

So why have those five bands departed in quick succession? The trigger was the announcement that Spotify founder Daniel Ek had led a €6oom fundraising push into a German defence company specialising in AI weapons technology. That was enough to prompt Deerhoof, the veteran San Francisco oddball noise pop band, to jump. "We don't want our music killing people," was how they bluntly explained their move on Instagram. That seems to have also been the animating factor for the rest of the departed, though GY!BE, who aren't on any social media platforms, removed their music from Spotify — and indeed all other platforms aside from Bandcamp — without issuing a statement, while Hotline TNT's statement seemed to frame it as one big element in a broader ideological schism. "The company that bills itself as the steward of all recorded music has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it does not align with the band's values in any way," the statement read.

That speaks to a wider artist discontent in a company that has, even by its own standards, had a controversial couple of years. There was of course the publication of Liz Pelly's marmalade-dropper of a book Mood Machine, with its blow-by-blow explanation of why Spotify's model is so deleterious to musicians, including allegations that the streamer is filling its playlists with "ghost artists" to further push down the number of streams, and thus royalty payments, to real artists (Spotify denies this). The streamer continues to amend its model in ways that have caused frustration — demonetising artists with fewer than 1,000 streams, or by introducing a new bundling strategy resulting in lower royalty fees. Meanwhile, the company — along with other streamers — has struggled to police a steady flow of AI-generated tracks and artists on to the platform...

[R]emoving yourself from such an important platform is highly risky. But if they can pull it off, the sacrifice might just be worth it. "A cooler world is possible," as Hotline TNT put it in their statement.
The Guardian's culture editor adds that "I've been using Bandcamp more, even — gasp — buying albums..."

"Maybe weaning ourselves off not just Spotify, but the way that Spotify has convinced us to consume music is the only answer. Then a cooler world might be possible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: After bringing 4G and 5G connectivity to the Underground, London's public transport authority has started scolding noisy passengers who subject everyone to music and calls blasting out of their phones. A new poster campaign launched by Transport for London (TfL) this week encourages customers to wear headphones when watching or listening to content on their devices to reduce disruption for other commuters.

"Please don't disturb others with loud music or calls when traveling on the network," reads the "Headphones On" poster. The posters are already being displayed on the Elizabeth rail line, according to TfL, and will expand to bus, Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, London Underground, and London Tram services from October.

The campaign targets headphone dodgers as data coverage becomes more available across the underground rail network, making it easier for passengers to stream content and make calls on the go. People who do so without donning headphones are annoying other commuters, however, with TfL research showing that 70 percent of 1,000 surveyed customers reported loud music and phone calls disrupting their journeys. "The vast majority of Londoners use headphones when traveling on public transport in the capital, but the small minority who play music or videos out loud can be a real nuisance to other passengers and directly disturb their journeys," says London's deputy transport mayor, Seb Dance. "TfL's new campaign will remind and encourage Londoners to always be considerate of other passengers."

A newly published Investigatory Powers Tribunal filing indicates the UK government's Technical Capability Notice to Apple went beyond the company's Advanced Data Protection encryption to include standard iCloud services used by millions [non-paywalled source]. The document states the UK Home Office order "is not limited to" ADP data and applies "globally in respect of the relevant data categories of all iCloud users."

The filing emerged days after Trump administration officials claimed the UK had agreed to drop efforts targeting American citizens' data. Apple launched its legal challenge in March after receiving the TCN, which the company cannot discuss publicly under the Investigatory Powers Act. The tribunal scheduled a hearing for early next year. Apple withdrew ADP from UK customers in February.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Valve has started to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act, by rolling out a requirement for all Brits to verify their age with a credit card to access "mature content" pages and games on Steam. UK users won't even be able to access the community hubs of mature content games unless a valid credit card is stored on a Steam account.

While platforms like Reddit, Bluesky, and Discord have opted for age verification checks using selfies, Valve is restricting its age checks to just credit cards, according to a support article. "Among all age assurance mechanisms reviewed by Valve, this process preserves the maximum degree of user privacy," says Valve. "Having the credit card stored as a payment method acts as an additional deterrent against circumventing age verification by sharing a single Steam user account among multiple persons."