### Issue 1941 - Wednesday 27th September, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- FTC calls Amazon a monopolist and sues for being bastards to sellers
- Eddy Cue gets mildly peppered in court with questions about Apple & Google's relationship
- macOS 14 Sonoma is ready to eat, Google Podcasts enters the graveyard 2024, Microsoft wants a nuclear energy expert
- Quora's incorrect GPT generated answer gets top placing in Google search results
- Cheap Catch & Telstra SIMs, Philips Hue Bridge, Nintendo eShop Gold bonus points, DJI MIni 3 Pro, Corsair DDR5 RAM, iPad Air & iPad, Samsung 49" monitor, Bose Soundbar 900, Xbox controllers

## The News

### FTC calls Amazon a monopolist and sues for being bastards to sellers

The USA's Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general have sued Amazon, alleging that Amazon "is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anti-competitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power". The total list of things that piss off the FTC is long, so read their press release for a deeper summary (or the 172-page complaint in full if you're really keen), but the core of the the FTC's beef is that Amazon does a whole bunch of shifty acts that make life as a seller on their platform really difficult. Bias towards Amazon's own products, banishing products that are cheaper elsewhere to the end of search results, forcing sellers to cough up more and more fees to be eligible for Prime shipping, muddying organic search results with paid results and more.

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### Eddy Cue gets mildly peppered in court with questions about Apple & Google's relationship

Apple's Eddy Cue has taken the stand in the court case between Google and the US government. Most of the interesting stuff was behind closed doors due to commercial sensitivities (boooo), but what was public is kinda interesting. The government argued that Apple's devotion to privacy is at odds at making Google the default search engine, in an attempt to prove that Apple doesn't pick the default browser based on what's best for its users like they vehemently claim, but because Google keeps dumping truckloads of cash (billions!) on Apple's doorstep. Cue's responses are evasive at best and said that they don't present an option to select your own search engine on device setup as "showing people a bunch of search engines they've never heard of would just be a bad user experience". Hmm, I wonder why they've never heard of them???

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### macOS 14 Sonoma is ready to eat, Google Podcasts enters the graveyard 2024, Microsoft wants a nuclear energy expert

- macOS 14 Sonoma is ready to download. Lots of in-depth reviews of the new features are online. MacStories and Arstechnica have good ones. Apple has a "whats new for enterprise in macOS Sonoma" support document. I still don't trust doing an upgrade, so will likely wait a few weeks and do a full erase & re-install. I know it's 90s era thinking but it has never let me down.
- It's a day ending in Y, so Google has shitcanned yet another service I'm sure a non-insignificant number of people enjoyed. This time it's Google Podcasts, which will be shut down "later in 2024" as "part of its broader transition to move its streaming listeners over to YouTube Music" and will be "further increasing its investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music and making it more of a destination for podcast fans with features focused on discovery, community and switching between audio podcasts and video".
- Microsoft posted a job ad over in the USA for a "Principal Program Manager Nuclear Technology". According to The Verge, "Microsoft is specifically looking for someone who can roll out a plan for small modular reactors (SMR)" to power data centers. Not surprising considering Billy G's hard-on for SMRs and his role at TerraPower. Microsoft's also backing a very experimental fusion power startup (Helion).

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Quora's incorrect GPT generated answer gets top placing in Google search results

A bloke on Twitter noticed that if you ask Google "can you melt eggs", its Featured Snippet (i.e: the top/prime/first thing a user sees) says that "yes, an egg can be melted" - which is wrong, you can't melt an egg. How did the incorrect answer get there? Google pulls the answer from Quora, which is SEO'd to the eyeballs specifically to be that top result (and for some reason Google still trusts this dumpster fire). Quora's website reckons you an melt an egg because it has infused GPT-3 into its platform, adding its responses to common questions alongside human responses. Welcome to the human centipede of information.

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## Bargains

- Catch Connect 365-day SIM, 120GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $119 from Catch
- Telstra 365-day SIM with 220GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $253 from Oztechtrader's eBay store
- Philips Hue Bridge - $59 from Optus
- Renew or sign up for a 12m Nintendo Switch Online account and get 20% gold bonus points
- DJI Mini 3 Pro with RC, or the Fly More Kit Plus on its own - $992.80/$305.15 from The Good Guys
- Corsair Vengeance 48GB (2x24GB) 5600MHz CL40 DDR5 RAM - $182.25 from Amazon
- 5th-gen iPad Airs & 10th-gen iPads on sale at JB Hi-Fi ($849 for a 64GB Air)
- Samsung CRG90 49" curved QLED 120Hz monitor 5120x1440 - $1155.15 from The Good Guys
- Bose Soundbar 900 - $845.75 from The Good Guys
- Xbox Wireless Controllers - $56.95 from The Good Guys

## Image Of The Day

Apple 1 Schematic Diagram, March 10, 1976 (The Henry Ford)

## The End

📻 Shake Some - The Hovercrafts

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