Fresh from enforcing the DMA on Apple, the European Commission said "Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365" and is now investigating them. If you've watched Microsoft's activity with Teams during the COVID pandemic to now, is very hard to disagree with. So many smaller players in the collaboration/meeting/team communication space that were gaining a foothold were kicked to the curb when most businesses realised Teams (despite its faults) is good enough and free with Microsoft/Office 365 they're already paying for. By the time Microsoft started charging for Teams, it was entrenched in most businesses so they just kept the status quo going and coughed up the cash. If you're Microsoft, of course you'd do this, it makes so much sense - but is it fair to the rest of the market? Absolutely not and of all companies, Microsoft should know better.
We know that if the federal government continues to force Meta into paying publishers for the privilege of linking to news articles via the News Media Bargaining Code, Meta will just stop allowing links to those publishers rather than pay their ransom - something they did in Canada a year ago. Treasury knows this and told a parliamentary inquiry into social media yesterday that they are "exploring" what they can do to "encourage them to continue, to encourage or force them [to] continue to carry news in those circumstances". Meanwhile, News Corp told the inquiry last week that "new laws should be introduced to force the social media companies to comply, and if they refuse then they should be banned in Australia". Yes, ban Facebook in Australia. I'm all for it.
Also in Meta related news, they're slowly integrating Threads into the fediverse/Mastodon. From Meta's blog post: "People 18 and over with public Threads profiles in 100+ countries can turn on sharing to the fediverse. If you turn on sharing to the fediverse, people on other fediverse servers will be able to search for and follow your Threads profile, see and interact with your content, and share your content with anyone on or off their server". According to Threads' documentation, "you currently can't share or reply back to replies you see on Threads from users on other servers". You can't follow Mastodon users on Threads yet either. There's also the issue where your Mastodon server is ideologically anti-Meta and blocks threads.net from interacting with the server's users.
LWN has a nice write up about the Ladybird web browser. If that name sounds familiar, it's a project by Andreas Kling, who was responsible for the cool SerenityOS hobby operating system. Serenity needed a web browser, so Andreas and other contributors started to build their own browser too. After working on both the OS and browser for a few years, Andreas decided to split Ladybird out as a separate project from SerenityOS and lead Ladybird's development, leaving the work on SerenityOS to the large community he assembled. Andreas doesn't mention it, but Ladybird could actually be a legitimate alternative to Firefox or Chrome or Webkit one day, whereas SerenityOS - as lovely and nostalgic as it is - will probably never be anyone's first choice daily driver operating system.
Apple Media Image Disc August 1995 (Sketch the Cow / Internet Archive)
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