ZDNet: “Can Microsoft recover from the collapse of its Surface business?”

In the chart above, I’ve projected what the Surface revenue number might look like if the company rebounds to a loss of only 24%, repeating this year’s performance. Basically, they’re back to what the business was in 2016 and 2017, which is… not good?

At Microsoft, a division needs to be able to bring in $10 billion of revenue per year to be considered a “needle mover”. Surface once looked like it was on its way to building that kind of steady, growing business. It doesn’t anymore.

Maybe this explains the sudden departure of Windows & Devices boss Panos Panay, just days ahead of the company’s fall Surface showcase event. His portfolio had expanded dramatically in recent years to cover not just Surface devices but also Windows 11. A report in Business Insider, quoting “anonymous insiders”, says Panay was unhappy with recent changes in the Windows + Devices division, including significant cuts to simplify the Surface business ... and focus more on Microsoft’s hits rather than the more experimental devices the company funded in flush times.

Ed Bott

I’m going to play the contrarian here and say that, first of all, a collapse of the Surface business doesn’t make a noticeable dent in Microsoft’s financial results, secondly the entire PC market, including Apple, recorded lower sales than expected after people rushed to upgrade their devices during the pandemic, and finally higher interest rates drove companies to reduce headcounts, cut costs wherever possible, and slash extraneous projects – all external factors that marked the entire tech sector over the course of 2023. On top of that Surface devices are more premium than the average PC, so naturally their sales are more impacted by lower demand and lower disposable incomes caused by inflation.

Ethan Zuckerman: “How Big is YouTube?”

Here’s how this works: YouTube URLs look like this: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM

That bit after “watch?v=” is an 11 digit string. The first ten digits can be a-z,A-Z,0-9 and _-. The last digit is special, and can only be one of 16 values. Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many. Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.

We refer to this method as “drunk dialing”, as it’s basically as sophisticated as taking swigs from a bottle of bourbon and mashing digits on a telephone, hoping to find a human being to speak to. Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often. Kevin Zheng wrote a whole bunch of scripts to do the dialing, and over the course of several months, we collected more than 10,000 truly random YouTube videos.

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Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.

Ethan Zuckerman

Fascinating method – and fascinating results! If these are anywhere near accurate, in 2023 there was a new YouTube video for every other person living on the planet! The stats also highlight the extreme inequality in traffic between a tiny minority of popular uploads and the typical YouTube video, which can’t even top 10,000 views.

noyb: “noyb files GDPR complaint against Meta over ‘Pay or Okay’”

“Freely given” consent at a high price? Under EU law, consent to online tracking and personalized advertising is only valid if it is “freely given”. This is to ensure that users only give up their fundamental right to privacy if it is their genuine free will to do so. Meta has now implemented the exact opposite of a genuinely free choice: Facebook alone will introduce a “privacy fee” of up to €12.99 per month if users do not consent to their personal data being processed for targeted advertising. Each linked account (such as Instagram) will cost another €8, making a total of €251.88 a year for one person using Instagram and Facebook. By comparison: Meta says its average revenue per user in Europe between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023 was $16.79. This equates to an annual revenue of just €62,88 per user – and puts the monthly fee way out of proportion.

Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: EU law requires that consent is the genuine free will of the user. Contrary to this law, Meta charges a “privacy fee” of up to €250 per year if anyone dares to exercise their fundamental right to data protection.

noyb

Back at the end of October, Facebook (or I should say Meta, since this applies to multiple products) introduced an advertising-free subscription for EU users at the whopping monthly price of €9.99. It was obvious from the start that this limited choice between consenting to tracking and ‘privacy as a luxury’ does not comply with the principles of GDPR, so it’s good to see this move immediately challenged – the European Consumer Organisation has filed a complaint as well, calling out Meta’s practice as amounting to charging for privacy.

Ars Technica: “Gmail unleashes ‘email emoji reactions’ onto an unsuspecting world”

You can now reply to an email just like it’s an instant messaging chat, tacking on a “crying laughing” emoji to an email instead of replying. Google has a whole support article detailing the new feature, which allows you to express yourself and quickly respond to emails with emojis. Like a messaging app, a row of emoji reaction counts will appear below your email now, and other people on the thread can tap to add to the reaction count. Currently, it’s only on the Android Gmail app, but it’s presumably coming to other Gmail clients.

Of course, email is from the 1970s and does not natively support emoji reactions. That makes this a Gmail-proprietary feature, which is a problem for federated emails that are expected to work with a million different clients and providers. If you send an emoji reaction and someone on the email chain is not using an official Gmail client, they will get a new, additional email containing your singular reactive emoji. Google is not messing with the email standard, so people not using Gmail will be the most affected.

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If the idea of emoji reactions to email has you selecting the puke emoji, as far as we can tell, there’s no way to just turn this off.

Ron Amadeo

This so-called feature rolled out to my Gmail account on the web just last week, and I have to say it’s a serious contender for most useless update of 2023 – too bad Silicon Valley doesn’t have something like the Golden Raspberry Awards. Not only is it utterly unoriginal, since every messaging app and social network has something similar, it fits very badly into the more longform and serios medium of email. At this point, most personal communication flows through messaging, not email, and the types of discussion taking place over email are not well suited to quick emoji reactions.

The Verge: “Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe”

Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, is now available in the European Union, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced. Today we’re opening Threads to more countries in Europe, Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads. The launch follows the service’s debut in the US and over 100 other countries across the world, including the UK, in July 2023. But until now, Threads hasn’t been available to the 448 million people living in the EU, and the company has even blocked EU-based users from accessing the service via VPN.

To coincide with today’s launch, Meta is giving users in the region the ability to browse Threads without needing a profile. Actually posting or interacting with content will still require an Instagram account, however. The move was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Jon Porter

Looks like I was right that Threads would launch in the European Union before having full ActivityPub compatibility. Threads is starting to test this, but it’s limited and one-sided at this stage, meaning you can’t post from other ActivityPub networks to Threads, nor move your account between services – a cynic might say this is a great tactic to improve the reach of Threads posts while giving nothing in return to the wider fediverse.

Euronews: “Behind the global scam targeting WhatsApp users with fake job offers”

According to Keith Rosser, who is both a group director at Reed and co-director and chair of JobsAware, a non-profit looking out for the safety of the UK labour market, this scam began in November 2022. It became “huge” in the UK, he says, from March 2023.

We’re receiving dozens of reports a day, specifically about WhatsApp-based scams copying the names of legitimate recruitment firms, both job boards and recruitment agencies, Rosser told Euronews Next.

JobsAware receives about 50 such complaints a day, and they believe only 5 per cent of victims reach out to them, bringing the approximate number of people getting these texts in the UK to 1,000 per day.

The UK’s communications regulator OFCOM recently found that nearly one in three Britons had encountered fake employment ads, and Rosser believes most of them were targeted by this specific WhatsApp scam.

Aylin Elci

I have started receiving similar scam messages over WhatsApp since last month, from phone numbers in Iraq and the Philippines. I obviously blocked them immediately, though it was notable that some of them were written in Romanian, probably intended to reach more people here. The recent availability of AI tools to generate text and translate it into various languages clearly makes it much easier for these kinds of schemes to proliferate. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook will implement measures to prevent or limit these frauds – or if they can, considering the end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp messages would make it impossible for the company to scan the contents of texts in transit.