Canada's Prime Minister "paused an electric-vehicle sales mandate that was set to take effect next year," reports the Wall Street Journal, which argues a kind of retreat from electric-vehicle ambitions "is spreading around the globe."

Even the U.K.'s Prime Minister "has allowed for a more flexible timetable to hit the country's EV targets." And demand is expected to drop in the U.S., where global consulting firm AlixPartners now predicts EVs will make up 18% of new-vehicle sales by 2030 — just half of what they'd predicted two years ago: j U.S. automaker GM will take a $1.6 billion charge "because of sinking EV sales," reports the Wall Street Journal, "a shift it blamed on recent moves by the U.S. government to end EV subsidies and regulatory mandates... That might just be the beginning of a financial reckoning from automakers that poured billions into new electric models — from sports cars and sedans to big pickups and sport-utility vehicles — to try to get ready for the government-backed EV mandates.

Automakers have been saying that consumers aren't adopting EVs as quickly as expected, and government efforts to proliferate the technology are hammering their bottom lines. GM, in announcing its charge, said it is reassessing EV capacity and warned that more losses are possible...Carmakers argue the EV business model is an unprofitable proposition given still-high battery costs, spotty car-charging networks and dwindling government subsidies.

Incentive programs have ended or have been pared back across Europe and in the U.S. and Canada.

Volkswagen, burdened with massive electrification costs, helped spur the reckoning in Europe when it said it would cut 35,000 jobs as part of a deal with its union. The move sent shock waves through the region's political establishment. Weeks later, the EU launched a "strategic dialogue" with the automotive industry that led to a more flexible timetable for automakers to meet its emissions rules for 2025.

The U.S. is awash with scam text messages. Officials say it has become a billion-dollar, highly sophisticated business benefiting criminals in China. From a report: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics.

Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Behind the con, investigators say, is a black market connecting foreign criminal networks to server farms that blast scam texts to victims. The scammers use phishing websites to collect credit-card information. They then find gig workers in the U.S. who will max out the stolen cards for a small fee. Making the fraud possible: an ingenious trick allowing criminals to install stolen card numbers in Google and Apple Wallets in Asia, then share the cards with the people in the U.S. making purchases half a world away.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month.

New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion.

"In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI."

The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.

OpenAI and Broadcom are working together to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips and computing systems over the next four years, a high-profile partnership aimed at satisfying some of the startup's immense computing needs. From a report: OpenAI plans to design its own graphics processing units, or GPUs, which will allow it to integrate what it has learned from developing powerful artificial-intelligence models into the hardware that underpins future systems. As part of the agreement announced Monday, the chips will be co-developed by OpenAI and Broadcom and deployed by the chip company starting in the second half of next year. The new agreement will be worth multiple billions of dollars, people familiar with the matter said.

Broadcom specializes in designing custom AI chips that are specifically tailored to certain artificial-intelligence applications. It began working with OpenAI on creating a custom chip 18 months ago, and the companies broadened their partnership to include work on related components, including server racks and networking equipment.

Cryptologist/CS professor Daniel J. Bernstein is alleging that America's National Security Agency is attempting to influence NIST post-quantum cryptography standards.

Bernstein first emphasizes that it's normal for post-quantum cryptography (or "PQ") to be part of "hybrid" security that also includes traditional pre-quantum cryptography. (Bernstein says this is important because since 2016, "We've seen many breaks of post-quantum proposals...")

"The problem in a nutshell. Surveillance agency NSA and its [UK counterpart] GCHQ are trying to have standards-development organizations endorse weakening [pre-quantum] ECC+PQ down to just PQ." Part of this is that NSA and GCHQ have been endlessly repeating arguments that this weakening is a good thing... I'm instead looking at how easy it is for NSA to simply spend money to corrupt the standardization process.... The massive U.S. military budget now publicly requires cryptographic "components" to have NSA approval... In June 2024, NSA's William Layton wrote that "we do not anticipate supporting hybrid in national security systems"...

[Later a Cisco employee wrote of selling non-hybrid cryptography to a significant customer, "that's what they're willing to buy. Hence, Cisco will implement it".]

What do you do with your control over the U.S. military budget? That's another opportunity to "shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace". You can tell people that you won't authorize purchasing double encryption. You can even follow through on having the military publicly purchase single encryption. Meanwhile you quietly spend a negligible amount of money on an independent encryption layer to protect the data that you care about, so you're actually using double encryption.
This seems to be a speculative scenario. But Bernstein is also concerned about how the Internet Engineering Task Force handled two drafts specifying post-quantum encryption mechanisms for TLS ("the security layer inside HTTPS and inside various other protocols"). For a draft suggesting "non-hybrid" encryption, there were 20 statements of support (plus 2 more only conditionally supporting it), but 7 more statements unequivocally opposing adoption, including one from Bernstein. The IETF has at times said they aim for "rough consensus" — or for "broad consensus" — but Bernstein insists 7 opposers in a field of 29 (24.13%) can't be said to match the legal definition of consensus (which is "general agreement"). "I've filed a formal complaint regarding the claim of consensus to adopt."

He's also written a second blog post analyzing the IETF's decision-making process in detail. "It's already bad that the IETF TLS working group adopted non-hybrid post-quantum encryption without official answers to the objections that were raised. It's much worse if the objections can't be raised in the first place."

Thanks to alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822) for spotting the blog posts.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent: Bitcoin and Ethereum both saw record liquidations as investors reacted to fears over a trade war, which saw many crypto investors move their money to stablecoins or safer assets... Bitcoin fell by more than 10 per cent to below $110,000, before recovering to $113,096 on Saturday morning. The value of Ethereum slumped by 11.2 per cent to $3,878. Other cryptocurrencies, including XRP, Doge and Ada, fell around 19 per cent, 27 per cent, and 25 per cent in the last 24 hours, respectively.
LiveMint shares some statistics from Bloomberg: Citing 24-hour data from Coinglass, the report noted that more than $19 billion has been wiped out in the "largest liquidation event in crypto history", which impacted more than 1.6 million traders. It added that more than $7 billion of those positions were sold in less than one hour of trading on October 10. According to data on CoinMarketCap, the cryptocurrency market cap has dived to $3.74 trillion from the record-high $4.30 trillion level, the previous day. Trading volumes as of the market close were recorded at $490.23 billion.

Bitcoin retreated on Friday, as US-China trade tensions reignited, after racing to record highs earlier in the week as persistent rate-cut bets and signs of some cooling in geopolitical tensions helped boost risk. Bitcoin was trading at $105,505.4 on Friday, down 13.15% on the day.

"Nvidia is investing billions in and selling chips to OpenAI, which is also buying chips from and earning stock in AMD," writes SFGate. "AMD sells processors to Oracle, which is building data centers with OpenAI — which also gets data center work from CoreWeave. And that company is partially owned by, yes, Nvidia.

"Taken together, it's a doozy." There are other collaborations and rivalries and many other factors at play, but OpenAI is the many-tentacled octopus in the middle, spinning its achievement of ChatGPT into a blitz of speculative investments. "We are in a phase of the build-out where the entire industry's got to come together and everybody's going to do super well," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. "You'll see this on chips. You'll see this on data centers. You'll see this lower down the supply chain...."

Some worry that the more closely companies intertwine, the more susceptible they are to creating a bubble, or a market not actually supported by real consumer demand. "You don't have to be a skeptic about AI technology's promise in general to see this announcement as a troubling signal about how self-referential the entire space has become," Bespoke Investment Group wrote in a note to clients, per CNBC. "If NVDA has to provide the capital that becomes its revenues in order to maintain growth, the whole ecosystem may be unsustainable..."

Also, even with Nvidia's investment, AMD's shares and OpenAI's repeated fundraises, the ChatGPT-maker doesn't have the cash to meet all of these vast commitments. And if OpenAI's soaring projections about demand for AI computing don't bear out, there will be a lot of committed money — and a large share of the stock market — that would see its foundations topple.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the news.

"Next time Amazon hypes its Prime Days savings, remember this: The prices during the sale aren't always better," writes a Washington Post technology columnist. "I've got the receipts to prove it." I would have saved, on average, almost nothing during Amazon's recent fall "Prime Big Deal Days" — and for some big-ticket purchases, I would have actually paid amore. For the sale that took place Oct. 7 and 8, my family went in prepared. We had a shopping list with prices we'd been tracking... A TV stand he'd been watching jumped 38 percent to $379, from $275 on Oct. 2. Same story for a few other big-ticket items on his list — another console went up from $219.99 to $299. Those products weren't listed as "big deals" on the site, but we certainly didn't expect their prices to spike during Prime Days.

And in other cases, Amazon marketed discounts that turned out to be the exact price it had charged in recent weeks. One example: an Oral-B electric toothbrush was listed as 39 percent off, but actually the same price as in August... Other consumer advocates have warned one common trick is for Amazon to feature artificially inflated "before" prices to make discounts appear larger than they are. Ahead of Amazon's 2017 Prime Day, the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog reported that 61 percent of reference prices on Amazon were higher than any price the company had charged for those items in the prior 90 days... I found products listed as Prime Day discounts that cost the same as I'd paid less than a month earlier. For example, a pack of coronavirus tests I bought on Sept. 12 was the same price on Oct. 8, but listed as "39 percent off." Amazon said I'd gotten a particularly good deal in September, and the Prime Big Deal Days price offers "meaningful savings compared to the typical price customers have paid on Amazon over the last 90 days...."

To actually get a good deal on Amazon, go in with a plan. I use a free website called CamelCamelCamel, which tracks Amazon's historical prices. You can see what's really a discount — and set alerts when prices drop to your target.
The reporter checked every non-grocery purchase they'd made on Amazon for six months. Purchasing the same products on Amazon's "Big Deal Days" would have brought savings of just 0.6%. "And that doesn't include the $139 annual fee to be a member of Amazon Prime."

Apple is finalizing a deal to acquire the team and computer vision technology of Prompt AI. CNBC reports: Leadership at Prompt told employees of the pending transaction at an all-hands meeting on Thursday and said that those who don't end up joining Apple will be paid a reduced salary, and encouraged to apply for open roles at the company, according to audio that was accessed by CNBC.

Prompt was founded in 2023 and raised a $5 million seed round that year led by AIX and Abstract Ventures. Co-founders include CEO Tete Xiao, a notable AI researcher with a Phd in computer science from UC Berkeley, and President Trevor Darrell who was a founder of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab. Investors will get paid some money in the deal but "won't be made whole," executives said in the meeting. Prompt employees were asked to refrain from mentioning Apple until further notice while searching for other jobs or updating friends and family on their situation.

Prompt's flagship app, Seemour, connects to home security cameras, adding sophisticated capabilities. The technology helps cameras detect specific people, pets and other animals or objects around a household, and to send alerts and text-based descriptions of unusual activity or answer questions about what's been happening in front of the camera. Xiao told employees at the meeting that while Prompt AI's technology and the Seemour app were working well, the business model wasn't. The company is retiring the Seemour app, and plans to inform users their data will be deleted and privacy protected, executives said.

Lyft is teaming up with Tensor Auto to launch hundreds of AI-powered "Robocars" across Europe and North America starting in 2027. Bloomberg reports: Tensor Robocars, the first deliveries of which are planned in late 2026, have more than 100 sensors including cameras, lidars and radars, and processes sensor data with artificial intelligence technology powered by Nvidia Corp. chips on board. The vehicles will come from the manufacturer with Lyft's platform installed, which will allow owners to make money on the rideshare network in markets where level 4 autonomous technology is available, according to the joint statement. Lyft has reserved hundreds of Robocars via its affiliates for its own fleet operations, subject to regulatory approvals.

A new book, by Wall Street Journal reporter Saabira Chaudhuri, traces how disposability became a deliberate business strategy rather than an accidental consequence of modern commerce. The book, titled "Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic," emerged from her reporting on how plastic bottles transformed bottled water from an occasional restaurant treat into an everyday staple.

Excerpts from a Bloomberg story: After World War II, the plastics industry made a conscious pivot. Lloyd Stouffer, an industry figure, openly said plastics should move from durable goods to disposables because companies make more money selling something a thousand times than once. The industry sold consumers on hygiene, convenience, modernity and easier household management. McDonald's dropped polystyrene clamshells in the late 1980s under activist pressure but simply swapped one single-use product for another.

Paper containers still cannot be recycled well once food soaks in. The old diaper-service model disappeared. Companies collected, washed and returned cloth diapers like the milkman, but plastics helped kill that business model. Chaudhuri argues companies built their businesses on disposability and will not change unless regulation forces everyone to move together. Executives admit that if they launch a reusable product but competitors do not, they lose market share and face shareholder backlash. Packaging standardization would improve recycling economics. Colored plastics like red shampoo bottles cannot be recycled in a closed loop and are down-cycled into gray products like pipes.

The Rubik's Cube has been reimagined as a $299 tech gadget featuring 24 mini IPS screens, a gyroscope, accelerometer, speakers, and Bluetooth connectivity. Called the WOWCube, it runs its own "CubiOS" system, supports downloadable games and apps, and can transform into everything from a mini arcade to a virtual aquarium. Ars Technica reports: Rather than a solid-colored sticker, each of the toy's 24 squares is a 240x240 IPS display. The cube itself is composed of eight "cubicle modules," as Cubios, the company behind the toy, calls them. Each module includes three of those IPS screens and a dedicated SoC. [A Cubios support page has additional details.] Each of the 24 displays can be set to show a solid color for solving a simpler, but still captivating, Rubik's puzzle. Alternatively, the screens can be twisted and turned to play dozens of different games, including Block Buster, Space Invaders, and Jewel Hunter.

Also part of the toy is a gyroscope, 6-axis accelerometer, and eight speakers. Cubios claims the integrated battery can last for up to seven hours before needing a recharge. In order to add games or other apps to the WOWCube, you must download the WOWCube Connect iOS or Android app, pair the toy with your phone over Bluetooth, and then use the mobile app to download games onto the WOWCube. Currently, the WOWCube's online app store lists 47 games; some cost money to download, and some aren't available yet. The WOWCube runs its own operating system, dubbed CubiOS, and Cubios (the company) offers a free DevKit. WOWCube attempts to bring additional functionality to Rubik's cubes with, as of this writing, nine additional apps, including a timer and apps that make the toy look like an aquarium or snow globe, for instance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: MEPs voted on Wednesday by 355 in favor to 247 against to reserve names such as "steak", "burger" and "sausage" exclusively for products derived from meat, a longstanding demand of farm unions. In order to come into effect, the idea would have to be approved by a majority of the EU's 27 member states, which is far from certain. The vote is a victory for the French centre-right MEP Celine Imart, who drafted the amendment to legislation intended to strengthen the position of farmers in the food supply chain.

Imart, who is also a cereals farmer in north-west France, said: "A steak, an escalope or a sausage are products from our livestock, not laboratory art nor plant products. There is a need for transparency and clarity for the consumer and recognition for the work of our farmers." She argues the proposal is in line with EU rules that already ban the use of terms such as "milk" and "yoghurt" for non-dairy products.

The European parliament rejected a ban on meaty names for plant-based products in 2020, but the 2024 elections shifted the parliament to the right, bringing in more lawmakers who seek close ties with farmers. Opposition was led by Green MEPs, who decried what they saw as a populist move to rename plant-based foods. "Veggie burgers, seitan schnitzel and tofu sausage do not confuse consumers, only rightwing politicians," Thomas Waitz, an Austrian Green MEP, said after the vote. "This tactic is a diversion and a pathetic smokescreen. No farmer will earn more money or secure their future with this ban."

Shayne Coplan, a 27-year-old NYU dropout who founded Polymarket from his bathroom in 2020, has become the youngest self-made billionaire after Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) invested up to $2 billion in his once-controversial prediction market platform. Bloomberg reports: A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Shayne Coplan was so broke that he took an inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so that he could sell belongings to make rent. Fed up with crypto grifts, in 2019 he started to explore economist Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets and their potential for improving society's ability to identify likely outcomes. "This is too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers," he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid struck -- the perfect time to develop an app for stuck-at-home folks to bet on real-world outcomes, he reasoned. He began building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020.

It wasn't a smooth road. The company's move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it wasn't a registered exchange. A week after the 2024 presidential election -- one that Polymarket users wagered more than $3 billion on -- Coplan's apartment was raided by FBI agents. But he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays. And yet for all the millions of words he's published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification. The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow's telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.

Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe -- a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. "It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying," Doctorow said in a 2024 speech. On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Doctorow's book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly. Further reading: The Enshittification Hall of Shame

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pay-advance apps are marketed as a way to help workers living paycheck to paycheck pay for unexpected expenses, but workers are often using the apps to manage basic expenses like groceries, rent and other needs, a new report found. The tools, consumer advocates say, can carry costs akin to those of traditional payday loans.

An analysis of anonymous data found worrisome behavior among users of the apps, including quick increases in the number of advances, advances from multiple apps at the same time and more frequent bank overdraft fees. "These findings reveal persistent patterns of financial strain that raise serious concerns about the long-term effects of these loans," said the report from the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. The group analyzed data from SaverLife, a nonprofit that promotes saving and sound financial practices among people with low or moderate incomes. The analysis found that heavy users of the apps paid $421, on average, in total loan and overdraft fees over a year, or almost triple the average paid by moderate users.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tucked in the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains is a factory that has figured out a way to manufacture in America that's cheaper, quicker and better. It's the home of a famous American writing implement: the Sharpie marker. Pen barrels whirl along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them with ink. At least half a billion Sharpie markers are churned out here every year, each one made of six parts. Only the felt tip is imported, from Japan.

It didn't used to be this way. Back in 2018, many Sharpies were made abroad. That's when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie maker Newell Brands challenged his team to answer a question: How could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia? "I felt like we had an opportunity to dramatically improve our U.S. manufacturing," he said. Peterson is now the CEO. And these days, most Sharpies -- in all 93 colors -- are made at this 37-year-old factory. Newell did it without reducing the employee count, and without raising prices. But to get to this place took close to $2 billion in investments across the company, thousands of hours of training and a total overhaul of the production process. The result is a playbook for making low-cost, high-volume products domestically, albeit one that requires long-term planning and a lot of investment.

The director of a tour operation remembers two tourists arriving in a rural town in Peru determined to hike alone in the mountains to a sacred canyon recommended by their AI chatbot. But the canyon didn't exists — and a high-altitude hike could be dangerous (especially where cellphone coverage is also spotty). They're part of a BBC report on travellers arriving at their destination "only to find they've been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot..."

"According to a 2024 survey, 37% of those surveyed who used AI to help plan their travels reported that it could not provide enough information, while around 33% said their AI-generated recommendations included false information." Some examples? - Dana Yao and her husband recently experienced this first-hand. The couple used ChatGPT to plan a romantic hike to the top of Mount Misen on the Japanese island of Itsukushima earlier this year. After exploring the town of Miyajima with no issues, they set off at 15:00 to hike to the montain's summit in time for sunset, exactly as ChatGPT had instructed them. "That's when the problem showed up," said Yao, a creator who runs a blog about traveling in Japan, "[when] we were ready to descend [the mountain via] the ropeway station. ChatGPT said the last ropeway down was at 17:30, but in reality, the ropeway had already closed. So, we were stuck at the mountain top..."

- A 2024 BBC article reported that [dedicated travel AI site] Layla briefly told users that there was an Eiffel Tower in Beijing and suggested a marathon route across northern Italy to a British traveller that was entirely unfeasible...

- A recent Fast Company article recounted an incident where a couple made the trek to a scenic cable car in Malaysia that they had seen on TikTok, only to find that no such structure existed. The video they'd watched had been entirely AI generated, either to drum up engagement or for some other strange purpose.
Rayid Ghani, a distinguished professor in machine learning at Carnegie Melon University, tells them that an AI chatbot "doesn't know the difference between travel advice, directions or recipes. It just knows words. So, it keeps spitting out words that make whatever it's telling you sound realistic..."

"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast," writes Cory Doctorow. Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

He succinctly explains "this moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening" using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. "And become a giant pile of shit."

So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)... These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too... [M]erchants' dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts...

[Amazon] uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to cream off its merchants' bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a "service" in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.

All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods.... Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the "Amazon tax" on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot... [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it's key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon...

If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Doctorow knows what we need to do:

• Ban predatory pricing — "selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again)."

• Impose structural separation, "so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform."

• Curb junk fees, "which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in."

• End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants "to raise their prices everywhere else, too.

• Unionise drivers and warehouse workers.

• Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are.

These are policy solutions. (Because "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly," Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, "Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care."

In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — "the enshitternet" — calling it "a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love.

"The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers mspohr and fjo3 for sharing the article.

Friday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced two changes coming "soon" to Sora: First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls...

Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.
"We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of 'interactive fan fiction'," Altman wrote, "and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all)."