Posts by FF22

How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom

The real reason

"The limitations of DOS, especially its memory management, are why Intel's successor chip, the 80286, was a bit of a flop."

Nope. 80286 was a flop because for one it didn't support V86 (Virtual 86) mode, so, it was not able to run legacy 8086 software efficiently under a protected mode OS. This totally skewed its value proposition, as if used an OS that actually took advantage of the 286 capabilities, you'd end up with a system that was a lot more expensive than a 8086 DOS PC, but actually ran most software slower than the latter.

Also, the 286 didn't support hardware level paging either, which again, was a great disadvantage, as it made implementing virtual/swapped memory very painful and slow, without which you couldn't a multitasked OS efficiently, because of how much more RAM you'd need for that compared to a single app DOS environment, and how expensive actual physical RAM was back then.

The 80386 DID have all those missing features, hence could run a protected mode multitasking OS with legacy applications efficiently - and that's why it became a success.

IBM unleashes CUGA, an open-source AI agent that actually completes more than half its tasks

In short: it's useless

"Framework looks great for scenarios where a 62 percent completion rate is acceptable" - sounds like the dictionary definition of "useless" to me

Google fixes super-secret 8th Chrome 0-day

Re: What about Chromium and derivatives?

It's something more severe than that. Google regularly discloses vulnerabilities that also affect other Chromium-based browsers. So,that alone would be no reason for them to withhold virtually all information regarding this.

Instead this one must be either very easy to exploit, or is in some more basic library that's used not only in Chrome, but possibly in thousands of other apps as well. Or both.

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

The most frequently asked question was...

"How do I remove Copilot from Windows?"

Also 37.5 million conversations in a world with > 7 billion people and over a course of several month, and "it's seeping into everyday life"? Really?

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

Most likely hacked or bought up

The extension has been most likely either hacked or simply just bought from the original author, in order to spread malware. Hackers have been doing this for decades.

Nobody will create an extension with the intention to wait 7 years only to place some affiliate cookies - especially when such programs could end anytime, or browser extension rules and APIs could change so that manipulating traffic will not be possible or effective. See Manifest V3 changes (which obviously don't hinder this extension, just mentioning as an example of browsers crippling several extensions with API changes).

Microsoft will force its 'superintelligence' to be a 'humanist' and play nice with people

Re: Last attempt

:"Microsoft stock falling?"

Yes. It lost ~$50 or 10% in a week. Was at $542 on 29th of October. Is now at $496.

And that's not even considering that the dollar lost ~15% of its value in the last 9 months. So, anything that wasn't up at least +15% this year has actually lost value.

Learn to cope.

Last attempt

It's just Microsoft's last and final attempt to try to keep AI relevant while the bubble is finally popping and its stocks are falling.

For Microsoft to "force" something a specific way Microsoft would have to have that thing in its posession first or be able to create one. But Microsoft - or any other company for that matter - is not capable of doing that, and it's doubtful that it ever will be.

We won't get to superintelligence through LLMs, as the latter completely and utterly lack of any kind of intelligence on their own. They appear only intelligent because they spit back intelligent thoughts of humans whose content they digested, without actually understanding anything they do.

Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums

Reddit stole it first

Reddit's argument is that it was the first to steal and monetize the user-generated content it didn't pay for, therefore Perplexity shouldn't have the same right. And Perplexity argues that it should also have the right to steal it and monetize it.

In an ideal world both companies would be dissolved and their leaders jailed. Then again, we live in an opposite of an ideal world, lead by the US.

Google reminds EU that Microsoft's cloudy licensing still stinks a year later

Oh, the hipocrisy

So, one day Google complains about the DMA and tells the EU to abandon/reform it, and on the next day it complains to the EU that it should take action based on the DMA against one of its competitors?

Oh, the hipocrisy. If I'd be the EU, I'd make Google pay also Microsoft's fine, just for this.

Apple, Google tell Europe its Digital Markets Act isn't working for them – or consumers

Good

Tech giants complaining about the DMA means one thing: the DMA works as intended, and gives consumers and small comptetitors a leverage to counteract against said tech giants, protecting them from the latter abusing their market power and dominance. If the US wouldn't be an institution serving only the interests of the oligarchy, and of the oligarchy only, they'd adopt the DMA verbatim and impose those rules also, in order to protect American consumers and ensure fair competition.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly decides to do hardly anything to break it up

Clueless

" these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints." - That's all you need to read to learn how clueless the judge is, and how much he did not understand any implications of Google having Chrome or Android under its control. And then I even granted him the benefit of doubt of being really just uninformed and dumb, not corrupt.

Not in my browser! Vivaldi capo doubles down on generative AI ban

The only reason

The only reason Vivalid is doing this, because they've recognized that if gen AI takes over, then browsers will be useless, and most people will just use the AI apps for everything, instead of actually browing the web.

AI robs jobs from recent college grads, but isn't hurting wages, Stanford study says

Impossible

If AI "robs jobs", then it's impossible for it to not have a negative effect on wages, because of the rules of supply and demand.

Developer jailed for taking down employer's network with kill switch malware

Dead man's switch

The correct term is not "kill switch" (which is just a general term for any mechanism that deactivates something), but "dead man's switch", which is a term for a deactivation mechanism that automatically executes in the absense of preventive action in a specified time period

Microsoft researchers: To fend off AI, consider a job as a pile driver

CEOs and AI job market researchers

They forgot the two most important jobs that AI is already be able to take over. It's the jobs of company CEOs and researchers who try to predict what jobs AI will take over.

White House bans 'woke' AI, but LLMs don't know the truth

Woke = truth

"Woke" is a short for "the truth I don't like" for right wing nutjobs

EU businesses want a pause on AI regulations so they can cope with unregulated Big Tech players

Re: Let's pause regulation for just a couple of years

You seem to be very, very confused about how laws work. They're not there to make it _impossible_ to break them (ie. do something people agreed on is evil or not desirable). They are there so that when people still break them there's a legally defined way to punish them for that.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Simple guy

Seems like Trump's politics is "do the opposite / revert what Democrats did". Which is obviously the stupides thing you can do, for a multitude of reasons. But that's the only thing the demented orange man is capable of.

AI agents don't care about your pretty website or tempting ads

Re: AI clicking ads generates zero money

* Don't ANYTHING to optimize return of investment.

There's no point for ad-supported websites to provide either services or content to any party that doesn't actually view ads, or can make purchase decisions.

Actually, there's a counterincentive to do so, because any computing/bandwidth/storage resouces wasted on serving such AI agents will degrade the resources available for actual humans, who can provide some return on the invesment in the website.

Re: Oh yuck

Without ads, there will be zero free content on the web, that's not an ad itself. Simple as that.

You don't have to like ads. You just have to accept, that it's the very thing that pays for the content and services instead of you. If ads won't do that anymore, you'll have to shell out the cash yourself.

Actually, it will be worse than that, because payments don't scale as good as ads do, so, like 99% of sites and services you use today will not exist, and the ones that will, will be under control of giant corporations.

Nvidia joins made-in-America party, hopes to flog $500B in homegrown AI supers by 2029

False promises

Nvidia & co have promised this already years ago, and it never materialized. By 2029 Trump will be gone either way. So, this is merely virtue signaling.

But even if Nvidia would actually live up to its promises, they'd be barely any jobs created (like in the hundreds at best) through this, and all Nvidia would use the new factories for would be to maximize and swallow all the profits.

And don't even get me started about how in the next few years even the remaining of the AI bubble will have burst, and those $1 trillion of accelerators will be worth $100 million, at best.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

They were all blinded by their hatred, racism and entitlement. It's not like Donald didn't tell them in advance most of what he actually did then, and he even plain out told them that he doesn't need them, just their votes. And they still voted for him, because they wanted more that other people ("liberals", people of different color, people from different countries, people with different xual preferences, etc) to suffer, than to follow their own financial, democratic, etc. interests.

Mozilla pleads with Uncle Sam to not turn off that sweet, sweet Google search money

"OK, so you list maybe 30 million for executive pay, out of 500 million from Google. That leaves $470 million. You claim to have looked at expense sheets? And somehow concluded that 30 is near 100% of 500? "

No, that's _your_ conclusion, because you obviously failed math class and can't argue what I actually wrote, so, you made up your own straw man.

The good news is though that you - or someone you know an actually knows numbers - can look at Mozilla's financial reports, and realize that what I wrote (and which is not what _you_ wrote above) is true: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/

You can also check for ex. Opera's financial report for comparison: https://investor.opera.com/news-releases/news-release-details/opera-reports-third-quarter-2024-results-acceleration-beyond/ and realize, that they just do fine and can actually add more new features to their browser than does Mozilla, despite having only 1/4th of the yearly revenue, and about the same market share.

"Turns out, maintaining a browser is expensive, something that's very hard to fund when you're a not-for-profit "

It's really not, if you look at the expense sheets of Mozilla. What costs them the most is not "maintaining the browser", but all the executive pays. Like Mozilla's CEO made $7 million already back in 2022, and the compensation most likely went up several millions since. And Mozilla has like two dozen second line executives who also make around half to a million, at least.

The maintanence and development of the Firefox browser most likely could have been secured for a decade from just one year of revenue Mozilla got from Google (which were around half a billion or more each year), if they only wouldn't have it all spent on executive pays, again, every single year.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

And you're wrong about everything, even about the digital theft thing. Because when you steal an intellectual property, that automatically devalues every other copy of the same thing, despite the original owner or all other licenced owners still also retaining their copies. That's just how supply and demand works. So, you're still stealing value from others.

Also, and again, because of rules of supply and demand, tangible objects don't have an intrinsic value either. Their value depends completely on supply and demand, and their sale price is also set arbitrarily by the seller.

I mean there was literally not a single word in your whole comment that would be actually correct.

Elon Musk tops US political donor list with $270M+ for Team Trump

They are. However, they have been legalized. So, you can't get in jail because of them.

Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China

Don't repeat the Trump lie!

"America's neighbors now face 25% because of fentanyl and immigration, China just 10% on top of existing duties"

That's completely wrong semantics. It's not Mexico or China that "face" the tariffs, and will have to pay them, but the American companies and ultimately consumers that import and buy goods from said countries.

It's the exact lie that got Trump elected, but will completely backfire on Americans when actually implemented.

Musk agrees with fan that worries over orbital Starlink traffic a 'silly narrative'

Reporting needs to stop on Musk

There's nothing in it for anyone to report on what a pathological liar known to be a clueless technical illiterate has to say anything on any topic, only for him. He has vested interests in saying what he is, even if it's not true, and how could he know better anyway, when he's not an engineering or business genius, just a ruthless narciissist born into a rich family who pursued and does pursue money and power even to this day without consideration for anyone or anything than himself.

He gets his power mostly from the media reporting all his nonsense, and most of the time not even calling it out as being a nonsense.

QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

Yeah, no

"We stress genuine microkernel, because microkernels were very trendy in the late 20th century for a while and as a result everyone and their dog claimed their OSes were microkernels. Microsoft bruited it about the massively monolithic Windows NT kernel."

Yeah, no. Microsoft never claimed Windows NT's kernel to be a microkernel, but instead advertised as being a hybrid kernel, which is a mix of microkernel and monolithic kernel design. It also isn't or wasn't "massively" monolithic, but had very good microkernel tendencies - which, however, proved to be very ineffective and performance constraining in practice, and that's why it shifted more towards the monolithic end during its first few iterations (Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000). However, even today Windows kernels are far from as monolithic as for ex. the Linux kernel is, which is the epitome of a truly monolithic kernel.

Nvidia CEO whines Europeans aren’t buying enough GPUs

Sounds like

... he knows the AI bubble is about to pop shortly.

Also "catching up" in AI use is as desirable as catching up in STD infections.

Just because you have a high number of occurrence is something doesn't mean you're in any means ahead of others.

AI in its current forms and use cases is mostly just plague on society, and countries that limit its use will be better off in the long term than those that pump a bubble or chase something that actually hurts them.

OpenAI reportedly considering for-profit plans, but what would that be good for?

What's it good for?

It's good for letting people like Sam Altman to cash out billions before the AI bubble inevitably bursts.

MongoDB CEO says if AI hype were the dotcom boom, it is 1996

"Very hard to see it as anything other"

You forgot:

spreading propaganda

This can not be underestimated. Right wing people are easily influenced by seeing that apparently a lot of people are saying the same thing, as their whole world view depends on there being authority figures telling what and how to think and on the herd mentality of doing just exactly that (as opposed to liberal world view which values individual thinking and getting to the truth through validation and logical arguments). AI can make to these people appear as if even more people would say the same thing, and regardless of what they saying is being completely illogical and contradicting actual facts, they'll believe it, because of the former.

enshittification of news and the web in general

Even if AI generated content is not used to spread propaganda, it is used to try to extract money from the web economy without putting the actual work into it. The prime examples of that are the ChatGPT like chatbots which were trained on billions of web pages, but also millions of new web pages are born every day with the sole purpose of regurgiating content that was already present on the web in order to be able to show ads alongside of them, killing original content creation, and generally lowering content quality because of AI hallucinations. Same thing with books/e-books, which are not also written in thousands if not million on a daily basis using AI.

About that Windows Installer 'make me admin' security hole. Here's how it's exploited

"What kind of OS can be hijacked by clicking a link at just the right time?"

Any. We've had protocol handler and browser engine vulnerabilities also both on Linux, macOS and Android, for ages, and in hundreds of instances.

Google insists the ad tech business ain't broke, urges Washington not to fix it

In reality if anything it's the ad exchanges that need to be taken away from Google

... because currently Google is present both at the supply and demand side of ads, and has (near-)monopolies on both sides, which obviously gives them not only a chance but also incentives to manipulate the market, which they do. They also do it when their Chrome browser blocks certain type of ads which Google judges not to be preferable, or when Google Search ranks pages higher or lower depending on what kinds of ads they're running.

Now obviously you can't force Google to not show ads (or if you did, then you'd have to do the same thing with every other vendor company), so, the only solution to resolve that conflict is to remove the other side from the equation, and take away their ad exchanges. This will force Google to compete for the ads like anyone else does, and will not allow them to manipulate the ad market (or at least to a lesser degree) than currently in their own favor.

Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build

Re: They closed this loophole a year ago

We're talking about Insider builds here. 23H2 is a stable release, with a build number of 22631. As said, Microsoft patched this out in build 25977, last October.

They closed this loophole a year ago

Microsft has closed the "setup.exe /product server" loophole already a year ago in build 25977.

"setupprep /product server" was - and most likely is - still working though.

California trims AI safety bill to stop tech heads from freaking out

Just stupid

Loosening or neutering AI laws in fear of tech exodus is as stupid as banning the selling of pangolin meat on your wet markets in fear that the next COVID pandemic won't start to spread from your hometown.

It's crystal clear at this point that LLMs and most other AI have a lot more drawbacks than benefits, and that letting them run unregulated doesn't benefit neither society, nor economy in general. Most AI models and uses just add to income inequality and let companies enshittify products and services because of depriving them of actual intelligence and insight. Neither of which you want to be leading at.

Then again, as someone nicely put it: in American companies will rip open pandora's box without hesitation just because they think there's a few dollars inside - and you're unamerican if you don't support that!

Websites clamp down as creepy AI crawlers sneak around for snippets

Victim blaming

"Part of this is down to the restrictions in robots.txt and the ToS not lining up. 34.9 percent of the top training websites make it clear in the ToS that crawling isn't allowed, but fail to mirror that in robots.txt"

A classic case of victim blaming. For one, robots.txt can not mirror the ToS anyway, because the former is a technical, and the latter a legal document, designed to express very different things that are only marginally related to each other. Also the robots.txt format does not allow to include instructions for any yet unknown entity (crawler), is not legally binding, and even if it would be could be easily circumvented by simply renaming the user-agent in question.

And finally robots.txt and copyright law have completely opposing defaults. The robots.txt spec essentially says that if the file is missing or any explicit disallow directive is missing, then you're free to crawl whatever url you want. Copyright law on the other side says that unless there's explicit permission, you're not allowed to access or use any copyrighted content. So, of course robots.txt - which is not law and not a contract anyway - can not possibly used to override copyright law (and the ToS), but AI companies act as if it would, and that the lack of explicit disallow directives would give them permission to use any content for training.

Also large internet corporations, like for ex. Google or Facebook, etc. are actively working to make robots.txt useless for blocking AI crawler even at the theoretical/technical level, by simply using the very same user agent that they use for collecting content for other purpose. So, for ex. Facebook is using the very same user agent ("facebookexternalhit") for obvious AI crawling that they've been and are still using for building the link previews in shares - which in the end means that you can't tell to them to not train their AI models with your data but show meaningful link previews in shares.

Similarly Google has Googlebot-Extended, which supposedly is there so you can prevent them using your data for AI training - but that only applies to training for ex. their Bard model, but doesn't affect AI Summaries, which are shown based on what data their regular Google crawlerbot has retrieved.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: Realization

"Having viable operating systems and browsers that aren't controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google does make the world a better place."

You claim is based on the false premise that

1. there weren't operating systems and browsers available before open source, that weren't controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google, and that

2. operating systems and browsers aren't currently controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google, just because of open source.

In fact they are, and they have been for decades. Open source has not changed a tiny bit about this. Even open source projects like Linux or Chromium are in the end still controlled by Microsoft, Apple and Google (because they pay the developers who ultimately put new stuff into these) - and more importantly: they (ie. these open source projects) are used by them to retain control of and shape the market.

It is actually the open source nature of these projects that gives Microsoft, Apple and Google even more control than before over the operating system and and browser market, because now that these types of software have become not only a cheap but an essentially free commodity, thanks to open source, nobody could possibly enter the market of OSes or browsers and make a dent in it, let alone disrupt it. Even mega corporations like Microsoft have failed at that with for ex. Windows Phone or with their EdgeHTML-based Edge browser.

And that's the problem. Open source would be only beneficial to us, as a society, if it would foster competition and innovation. But we see the opposite of that. What we see is that - as already explained - open source is mostly used to stifle and drive out competition, gain control over a market, and create demand for omplementary goods that have nothing open-source about them (because they're services, hardware or data, that are not open sourced, and not even replicable or feasible at individual level). Individual people are essentially unable to take advantage of open source, but large mega corporations benefit from them enourmously, because they raise the barrier to entry of any competing commercial entity enormously, and because they can take advantage of them at scale.

Realization

Imho it's far simpler than most people think.

The reason why open source is not growing anymore and is actually shrinking, because by now even the most zealous fans have realized, that it was all built on a false premise and offered false promises. OS doesn't really make the world a better place, it just allows others to take advantage of those who have put time and effort into it, without receiving any payment in return. Or if they did, then the whole point of that open source development was to displace competitors and inrcrease demand for complementer products.

Also the source itself is being available is less and less relevant with online services and big data taking over from locally run software. The role of the software itself has become marginal in most cases, and the service and the data are either locked down to begin with, or is not even feasible for everyone wanting to store and process them themselves. Like what use do you have for your media player or codec being open source, if the content you could play with it is only available through online services and takes up petabytes and exabytes of storage? What use is it if the social media app source code is available, if there's only place for one or for a few central social media hubs? What use do you have for open source AI models, when training them requires 1000s of high-end accelerator cards costing >$10.000 each, downloading and storing petabytes of training data, and the resulting model weights are not available openly as is the source? Etc.

Some of use have realized this decades ago - after we have also put several years of hard work into OSS projects -, others are realizing it just now. Open source mostly benefits behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. and the most a small everyday guy can get out of it is not having to pay $50 or 100 for a Windows licence. The average developer, who put 1000s of work hours into OS project is even worse off, and is in an actually net negative of several hundred thousands of dollars (when comparing how much he gained through OS, and how much he put into it).

Those who still do open source mostly do it, because

1. they're paid for it (in which case it's not really open source, as originally conceived, and again merely a business tool to disrupt the market, crush competition or generate demand for non-open-source services, parts, etc)

2. they still didn't realize all the above, or are just unable to admit it to themselves. they're considering only their sunk (personal time and effort) costs, and don't want to give up on the (false) idea, because that would also mean admitting to they having wasted large chunks of their lives on said false idea.

The latter people will be slowly too old to contribute and even possibly die, and the former will still be around, but they're not really making open source stuff, and with said rise of the cloud and data the source being available will be getting even less and less irrelevant, than it is today.

I know this post will not be popular (especially amongst "believers"), but it's still he truth, unfortunately.

SoftBank boss says 'artificial superintelligence' could be three years away

Bean counter says something something...

..he has no actual clue about

Mastodon delays firm fix for link previews DDoSing sites

Re: I don't use Mastodon, but...

The preview does not differ in any way from the link in trustability. If the link can be trusted, then the preview can be also. If the link can not be trusted, then the preview still does not pose an additional risk and the problem lies with the system that allows sharing and propagation of an untrusted or possible harmful link.

It's just lazyness, and pushing the cost of that onto third parties, as already explained.

Re: A side effect of success

A federated server is also a client. And the privacy issue is still there.

Maybe next time educate yourself about the basics of network architectures before commenting

Re: A side effect of success

"This issue has always existed of course [..] What happens is essentially the 'Slashdot effect'"

No. This is a far more severe issue.

The problem is twofold. For one, in this case it's not only those users who actually click through to the referred site, that are generating network traffic, but everyone else who gets the shared content shown in the form of a thumbnail. And that's generally a 50-100-fold increase in traffic to let's say having an excerpt of an article posted to Slashdot, Facebook, or whatever - as most people who get the preview shown usually don't click through to the source; but with Mastodon they (their client) will still all download the full page.

The other - more severe issue - is that most of that extra traffic does not yield any income to the operators/publishers of the target site. Under normal circumstances, when someone clicks through the original site, they'll not only generate network traffic, take up server resources, etc., but also allow - by actually loading the page in their browsers - the operators/publishers to cover the costs of said network traffic, server resources, etc. for ex. through the showing of ads. However, when it's only a link preview that's shown to the user, there's no way for the operators/publishers to recoup the costs of serving the data for the preview.

So, even if their server and network connection can actually handle the excess traffic, they'll now only be able to recoup like 1/50th-1/100th of the costs than under normal circumstances. And this generally breaks to business model the free web is built on. All that because Mastodon developers are lazy to implement some kind of preview caching or preview distribution alongside the messages themselves.

Btw the lack of cached previews is also disadvantegous to the privacy of Mastodon users, because it makes it easy for bad actors to track who's been reading a particular feed or following a particular source - just because every single user who has the referred content link appearing in their feeds will have their IPs revealed as their Mastodon client is accessing the target site in order to retrieve the content that's needed to generate the link preview. For every single one of them.

John Deere now considers VMs to be legacy tech, Ethernet and Wi-Fi on the brink

What they actually mean is...

... that they'll grad every opportunity to hinder you running anything locally, because that means freedoms for end users and accountability for them. Instead they want to make everything online, so, they will have total control over everything 24/7, and will also not be subject - or just in a limited fashion - to privacy, right to repair and warranty laws, because they'll be able to pull the strings behind the curtain as they wish.

Official: EU users can swerve App Store and download iOS apps from the web

It's different in that it's harder, most costly, and because of that no developer will offer it, and no iPhone user will actually do it. As designed an intended by Apple. Hopefully the EU will hit them with a fine in the billions.

AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality

Re: Not interested

As long as people find the things they were looking for on Google's result pages, they won't care whether they found it in paid ads or found it through organic results that appeared for free. However, for Google it matters whether people find things through ads or organic results, because they earn on the former, but not (or not the full sum, if the page is using Adsense) on the latter.

That's why they're interested or even counter-interested in keeping their organic results also as relevant as their ads. Even if they show relevant hits ultimately, it makes more sense for them to rank irrelevant ones higher, because that increases ad engagement, and the number of ads shown to people as they have to scroll down to ultimately more to find the organic results they wanted.

Anyone not understanding that rationale needs to read again.

Not interested

There's a fundemantal misunderstanding here in that Google is somehow interested in making organic results better or even just good, but is unable to do that, and is hence losing.

That's not the case. Google is actually completely disinterested or even counter-interested in making organic results better. What they care about instead is how many ads they can show, and how much money those make for them. Until their revenue starts dropping - or even just stop increasing, as it has been doing every year anew, over and over - they have no incentive to make the organic search results better.

Actually, they are even interested in making the organic result as worse as possible, because that means that no one (no web site) will get a free pass and be able to appear for free on Google's result list for relevant results, but this will be a privilege only for those, who actually pay Google, through ads.

Ads will be kept relevant and organic search results irrelevant, which automatically increases demand and also prices for ads on Google's pages, while at the same time also makes it impossible for other sites to earn money through competing ads shown by them.

US legislators propose American Privacy Rights Act - and it looks quite good

Sounds like...

an American GDPR, just with inches and ounces instead of meters and gramms

No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU

Misleading

This is just another attempt from Apple to fool legislators and users alike. Successfully- as proven by the article.

The apps downloadable from the web will be subject to the same agreement that applies to all other apps, meaning they will still have to be presented to Apple, and Apple will have to approve them in order for users to be actually be able to download and install them onto their iPhones. Apple will also charge the developers the same amount of money they'd have charged if the latter published their apps through an alternative app store.

Which means Apple will still have total control over what iPhone users can install, will know how and how many times installed it, and will still make everyone pay the "Apple tax". And it will still make no financial sense to make apps directly downloadable from a website, as that will actually cost developers more, than if they'd have just put their apps into the App Store.

Hopefully the EU will fine Apple into oblivion, because of the definitive breach of the DMA, and force them to actually open up the iPhone, so that app vendors and users will be able to sell and buy apps without the involvement of Apple at all.