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HBO Max, AT&T’s big bet on the future of streaming, will be excused from AT&T’s mobile data caps, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus will use up your data.

That’s the follow-up from a Vergecast conversation with Tony Goncalves, the AT&T executive in charge of HBO Max. Asked whether HBO Max would hit the cap, Goncalves said his team “had the conversation” but didn’t have the answer. AT&T later confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company’s traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans.

According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T’s “sponsored data” system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it’s just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost.

Since ISPs and wireless carriers can do whatever they want to fuck the consumer after the death of Net Neutrality, here's AT&T's latest move.

Today, major publishers Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC went to war with the project by filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive and five ‘Doe’ defendants in a New York court.

The plaintiffs, all member companies of the Association of American Publishers, effectively accuse the Internet Archive (IA) of acting not dissimilarly to a regular pirate site. In fact, the complaint uses those very words.

“The Open Library Is Not a Library, It Is an Unlicensed Aggregator and Pirate Site”

It's become very clear that these publishers and authors want to kill libraries and it would be a dangerous precedent if they win.

For example: libraries never needed permission to lend books, and these same publishers are trying to change that with this suit.

The ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd were caught up in violence again on Saturday, as police all over the country tear-gassed protesters, drove vehicles through crowds, opened fire with nonlethal rounds on journalists or people on their own property, and in at least one instance, pushed over an elderly man who was walking away with a cane. Here are some of the ways law enforcement officers escalated the national unrest.

One of the most powerful headlines in a long while, and it’s well described who is mainly responsible: The Police.

To be clear: the executive order is nonsense. You can't overrule the law by executive order, nor can you ignore the Constitution. This executive order attempts to do both. It's also blatantly anti-free speech, anti-private property, pro-big government -- which is only mildly amusing, given that Trump and his sycophantic followers like to insist they're the opposite of all of those things. But also, because the executive order only has limited power, there's a lot of huffing and puffing in there for very little actual things that the administration can do. It's very much written in a way to make Trump's fans think he's done something to attack social media companies, but the deeper you dig, the more nothingness you find.

For now, we shouldn't be worried about this however watch this space as this develops since there will be court battles to come.

Savant specializes in full smart home systems for the luxury market. Acquiring a lighting business directly will allow it to take advantage of vertical integration and take more control over the physical equipment it installs in consumer' homes. Savant will keep the business's operations in Cleveland, where it is currently based, and will receive a long-term license to keep using the GE branding for its products.

The lighting business is GE's oldest segment, dating all the way back to the company's founding through a series of mergers with Thomas Edison's companies in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The company became a conglomerate early, investing in a wide array of technology and communications businesses. It moved toward aviation and energy and away from consumer products through the 1980s and 1990s under CEO Jack Welch. That industrial mindset lasted into the 21st century, under CEO Jeff Immelt, from 2001 through 2017.

End of an era.

You started getting stuff you didn’t want from people you didn’t know. You lost control over who could reach you. You were forced to inherit other people’s bad communication habits. An avalanche of automated emails amplified the clutter.

And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple, and all the others just let it happen.

Now email feels like a chore, rather than a joy. Something you fall behind on. Something you clear out, not cherish. Rather than delight in it, you deal with it. Your relationship with email changed, and you didn’t have a say.

Nice to see email get a breath of air and life.

That's why traditional, pre-Reagan antitrust banned "mergers to monopoly" and acquisitions of nascent competitors. Growth through acquisition means that companies succeed by having more money, not by having better products or prices. It's a winner-take-all death spiral

In other words, the only difference is enclosure: taking something from the federated, open, competitive web and sticking it inside a walled garden. It's the App Store strategy, the Facebook strategy, the AOL strategy, the MSN strategy.

The internet is running out of open, federated platforms. There's the web (those parts of it that Facebook hasn't swallowed), email (same, but Gmail), RSS, and some Fediverse tools like Mastodon.

They're like national parks, tiny preserves for the open spaces that once dominated the landscape. And like national parks, every time they are discovered to have something good, a plute comes along to enclose them and charge admission.

Scary stuff. Plus Bloomberg reported yesterday that Apple is ramping up its push into original podcasts by seeking an executive and to buy shows, which means they want in the killing open podcasting spree as well. :(

Microsoft’s original Xbox console source code has leaked online, alongside code for a version of Windows NT 3.5. The Xbox source code includes the kernel for the operating system on the original console, a custom version of Windows 2000. We can confirm the leaked Xbox OS is genuine, and appeared online earlier this month. “We’re aware of these reports and are investigating,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge.

While the Xbox OS leak includes some build environments, the Xbox Development Kit, emulators used for testing, and internal documents, we understand this kernel and source code has been passed around privately among enthusiasts previously. That means it’s unlikely to help further homebrew and emulator efforts for original Xbox games.

A number of emulators exist for the Xbox, including CXBX, XQEMU, and CXBX Reloaded, but most have struggled to emulate the original Xbox OS and kernel. Microsoft developed the first Xbox with x86 hardware in mind, but the Xbox kernel was based on a custom and stripped down version of Windows 2000 with DirectX 8 support.

Yikes, Microsoft is going to have to have a long post MS Build period of sorting the legal mess up.

Lofgren and others are now pushing to get their amendment back on the agenda, and it sure sounds like Schiff and Pelosi are trying to stop it, with Nadler -- whose public statements seem to indicate his support, but his actions show otherwise -- the key to actually making a decision.

I still find it bizarre that this amendment is even remotely controversial. First, it's just making it clear that the 4th Amendment applies. Second, if bad shit is happening, the FBI can still get a warrant. Third, both Democrats (stop Trump from abusing his powers) and Republicans (stop the deep state from surveilling Americans) have ready-made stories to explain their votes.

So what's the damn holdup?

Mike Masnick just sums this up and this proves that it's very obvious in the US, no lawmaker or public official from any party gives a shit about civil liberties but a strict few.

AT&T refuses to stop pretending 4G is 5G, and nobody anywhere will do anything about it.

NARB is a self-regulatory apparatus designed to keep regulators from actually cracking down on false advertising, and its fecklessness is laid bare here.

I don't post bird site threads but this is an exception.