Euractiv: “Internal documents reveal Commission fears over Microsoft dependency”

The EU’s data protection watchdog, the EDPS, has ordered the Commission to bring its Microsoft use into compliance. This implies exploring less intrusive alternatives than Microsoft, but little has been done in this regard.

The case offers a stark example of the chasm between Europe’s desire for autonomy in highly sensitive areas such as IT, and the on-the-ground reality of its dependence on American tech.

There are no known credible offerings from European providers, reads an internal Commission document seen by Euractiv.

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In another recent report by the Directorate-General for Digital Services (DG DIGIT), also seen by Euractiv, concerns about excessive power in the hands of a few non-European companies, risks associated with a single supplier (price hikes, migration difficulties), and the potential loss of in-house competencies were mentioned – concerns the Commission has not yet publicly acknowledged.

The report also gives a very positive description of member state initiatives to develop open and sovereign alternatives to Microsoft, yet concludes only that DG DIGIT will plan to evaluate them internally as a possible complement for small scale initiatives with very restricted scope.

Jacob Wulff Wold

In terms of digital sovereignty, I think this is a far more pressing issue than, say, the amount of VC funding for EU startups or whether these companies end up listing on a European stock market. It should have become a priority a decade ago when the Obama administration was caught spying on Angela Merkel’s conversations. And it is undoubtedly imperative now, with geopolitical pressure on European states mounting from all sides.

Ars Technica: “Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg”

The news comes after leaders of other social networks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have sparked backlash over sudden changes to popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). For years, Musk has drawn criticism for changing Twitter's hate speech policies through his X rebranding. And more recently, Zuckerberg this month defended Meta’s decision to relax hate speech policies (permitting women to be called “property” and gay people to be called “mentally ill”) by calling bans on such speech out of touch with mainstream discourse.

Mastodon is hoping to provide an alternative social network for users who are potentially frustrated with their lack of control over their timelines and content on other networks.

But to achieve the envisioned independence for all users, Mastodon’s structure needed to evolve, the blog said, as the community grew to about 1.5 million monthly active users in 2023. Remaining headquartered in Europe primarily, Mastodon’s day-to-day operations will be managed by the new European not-for-profit entity, establishing a new legal home for Mastodon.

Ashley Belanger

Good intentions, but there is already precedent of a company starting out as a nonprofit with good intentions on paper, only to succumb to investor pressure once its product became a hit – on course, I’m talking about OpenAI.

The Verge: “Dell kills the XPS brand”

The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus”, “pro”, and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex from its new laptops, desktops, and monitors and replacing them with three main product lines: Dell (yes, just Dell), Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max.

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That yields new products like the freshly announced Dell Plus 32-inch 4K QD-OLED monitor and Dell Pro Premium laptops. In the future, it means we can also expect product names like Dell Pro Max Plus. Since a laptop like the Dell Pro Premium comes in two sizes, 13-inch and 14-inch, their proper full names are Dell Pro 13 Premium and Dell Pro 14 Premium. They’re spiritual successors to outgoing Dell Latitude laptops.

Dell’s XPS line, which has been a prominent name in premium laptops for years, is being replaced by new Dell Premium models. So they’re part of the base-tier Dell line, at the Premium sub-tier.

Antonio G. Di Benedetto

People have mocked this rebranding as too Apple-like, but honestly it’s much worse than that. Apple laptops (MacBook) at least have a brand distinct from the company name (Apple); throwing everything under Dell sounds generic and lazy. On top of that, you’re getting rid of a now-well-known name (XPS), which was associated with premium products.

TechCrunch: “OpenAI is losing money on its pricey ChatGPT Pro plan, CEO Sam Altman says”

ChatGPT Pro’s price point wasn’t a slam dunk at launch. It’s $2,400 per year, and the value proposition of o1 pro mode in particular remains murky. But judging by Altman’s posts, it seems that users who have bitten the bullet are making the most of it — at OpenAI’s expense.

It’s not the first time OpenAI has priced a product somewhat arbitrarily. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Altman said that the original premium plan for OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, didn’t have a pricing study.

I believe we tested two prices, $20 and $42, he told the publication. People thought $42 was a little too much. They were happy to pay $20. We picked $20. Probably it was late December of 2022 or early January. It was not a rigorous ‘hire someone and do a pricing study’ thing.

Kyle Wiggers

Looks like the concerns around the ballooning costs and ultimate profitability of generative AI were very on point. With the CEO openly admitting it, investors should be questioning the horizon on their returns on investment – and the massive valuations of any vaguely AI-related stock.

The Washington Post: “In online drone panic, conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream”

However, more than a million drones are lawfully registered with the FAA, including thousands of commercial, hobbyist and law enforcement drones lawfully in the sky on any given day, the joint statement said. With the technology landscape evolving, we expect that number to increase over time.

The Defense Department has said unidentified drones have long been a common problem close to military bases. In addition to perfectly legal drones, the sightings probably involve misidentified airplanes, other agencies have said.

Indeed, Nelson Delgado, the Newark FBI office’s acting special agent in charge, issued a video Monday warning of an increase in pilots of manned aircraft being hit in the eyes with lasers because people on the ground think they see a drone.

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Even some politicians have been caught up in the online fervor. Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) — who recently lost a campaign for U.S. Senate — posted a video on X last week showing what he said were drones flying over his house. They turned out to be stars in the constellation Orion, according to Washington Post meteorologist Matthew Cappucci.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-New Jersey) posted a long thread on X describing strange lights he saw during a ride-along with local police. A day later, he clarified that after further research, he’d concluded that what he saw was probably an airplane.

Tatum Hunter

Whenever online chatter about UFOs flares up, I chuckle to myself remembering how basically every time Venus becomes bright in the evening sky there’s renewed reports of people mistaking it for a UFO. My personal explanation (without invoking aliens or other unexplained phenomena, which are certainly possible, but overall unlikely) is that enough people are both sufficiently ignorant about their environment and self-absorbed to think that their first reaction is the real explanation of what they’re seeing and they need to instantly share it with others to prove their insight. A perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories.

Financial Times: “Klarna’s US listing is a sad reflection of Europe’s failings”

But the biggest investors and venture capital funds were in the US, and over time that pull of its markets became irresistible. Spotify listed in New York in 2018. Now, Klarna is looking at something similar, filing listing documents in the US last week. Bankers and investors talk of a possible listing in the first half of next year that would value the company at up to $20bn. That would be a far cry from the $46bn Klarna was valued at in 2021 but better than the $6.7bn it achieved a year later in its last official fundraising round.

There is just no question: the US has the customers, the market; it has the VC funds; it has the investors. If you are going to list, why would you choose Europe today? asks one of the continent’s biggest industrialists, one of whose companies is examining a potential move from Europe to the US to try to boost its flagging share price.

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That underscores the scale of the challenge for European policymakers: it is not just simply about developing a better financing ecosystem for start-ups of all sizes, there is also a need to properly complete the EU single market in so many areas from services to capital markets. Until it does, more like Klarna are likely to choose the US.

Richard Milne

This article is a good example of what happens when you start with a predefined notion (the EU is hopelessly behind and absolutely must chase the American VC-centric startup model) and force facts to fit the desired narrative (amusing to see the author being vigorously slammed in the comments).

Suchir Balaji: “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?”

Fair use is defined in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which I’ll quote verbatim below:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Fair use is a balancing test which requires weighing all four factors. In practice, factors (4) and (1) tend to be the most important, so I’ll discuss those first. Factor (2) tends to be the least important, and I’ll briefly discuss it afterwards. Factor (3) is somewhat technical to answer in full generality, so I’ll discuss it last.

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None of the four factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data. That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.

Suchir Balaji

Interesting analysis by a former OpenAI researcher who left the company and publicly spoke against their business practices, going as far as an interview with The New York Times – a publication which last year sued OpenAI (and Microsoft) for copyright infringement, so naturally they would want to distribute Balaji’s views. Moreover, in November he became a potential witness in this trial after the Times’ attorneys named him in court filings as having material helpful to their case, along with at least twelve people, including past or present OpenAI employees.