As reported by PCWorld,
HP said in January that it hoped and dreamed to make printing a subscription. Now, the company has done just that, with the All-In Plan that allows HP customers a limited number of printed pages per month for a monthly fee, with a two-year commitment and potential overage charges, too.
“The HP All-In Plan is an all-inclusive printing subscription that delivers the ultimate in convenience—and provides the dedicated support you need to keep your printer running like new,” HP claims. But you’d better believe in the value of printing regular documents, because signing up locks you in to a two-year contract after thirty days.
When HP chief executive Enrique Lorres said in January that the company aspired to making printing a subscription, he wasn’t kidding.
“Our view is that we need to make printing as easy as possible,” Lorres said. “And our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription. This is really what we have been driving. We know it reduces the barriers to print, it offers a much more convenient solution to customers, and especially, [it] is more sustainable.”
To its credit, HP’s All-In Plan is indeed pretty simple. Customers essentially choose from one of three printers (the HP Envy printer, for $6.99/mo and up; the HP Envy Inspire printer, for $8.99/mo and up; or the HP OfficeJet Pro; for $12.99/mo and up.) The Envy is basically a low-end personal printer/scanner that prints 10 pages per minute; the Envy Inspire offers faster printing while the OfficeJet Pro is fastest of all, and includes fax capabilities.
After two years, HP says it will offer an “upgrade,” presumably to a newer printer model.
All three are double-sided, color printers, and here’s the first advantage HP offers: you can print every page in color, if you so choose, and the printer ink is free. HP’s printers automatically sense when you’re getting low on printer ink, and will rush whatever ink you need by the next day, HP says.
If your printer conks out, HP will also provide round-the-clock support, and, again next-day service if for some reason you need a replacement. HP will also provide mailing labels for returning an old printer and/or cartridges.
HP promises “no upfront cost,” either — you don’t need to buy a printer or ink, just sign up for the All-In Plan and HP takes care of the rest. But it’s not quite so easy as that, either.
The gotchas
For one thing, you have thirty days to cancel after signing up. After that, you’re locked in. And HP’s plans don’t just adhere to their base rate, either.
For example, HP’s Envy printer plan begins at $6.99/mo. But that’s the “light” plan, limiting you to a paltry 20 pages per month. That plan also climbs to monthly fees of $8.99 (50 pages) or $10.99 (100 pages). If you opt for the HP Envy Inspire plan instead, your monthly costs will be $8.99 (20 pages/mo), $10.99 (50 pages), $12.99 (100 pages), or $18.99 (300 pages). And if you’re running a home business, you’ll have $22.99 (300 pages/mo) and $35.99 (700 pages/mo) monthly options, too.
If you go over your monthly printing allotment, HP has that covered, too: you’ll be charged $1 for a “set” of between ten and fifteen pages. Naturally, consumers can always upgrade their plan, too.
But the worst part about HP’s printer subscription is that, yes — it’s still a subscription. And once that 30-day grace period expires, you’re locked in and will be forced to pay a cancellation fee to get out of it, as shown below.
As reported by Polygon,
Nintendo is suing the makers of Yuzu, an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, according to a lawsuit filed in Rhode Island court on Monday. Game File reporter Stephen Totilo first reported the suit.
The 41-page lawsuit was filed against Tropic Haze, the company that makes Yuzu. (Nintendo also specifically references a person aliased as Bunnei, who leads development on Yuzu.) Yuzu is a free emulator that was released in 2018 months after the Nintendo Switch originally launched. The same folks who made Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, made this one. Basically, it’s a piece of software that lets people play Nintendo Switch games on Windows PC, Linux, and Android devices. Emulators aren’t necessarily illegal, but pirating games to play on them is. But Nintendo said in its lawsuit that there’s no legal way to use Yuzu.
Nintendo argued that Yuzu executes codes that “defeat” Nintendo’s security measures, including decryption using “an illegally-obtained copy of prod.keys.”
“In other words, without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” Nintendo wrote in the lawsuit. As to the alleged damages created by Yuzu, Nintendo pointed to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Tears of the Kingdom leaked almost two weeks earlier than the game’s May 12 release date. The pirated version of the game spread quickly; Nintendo said it was downloaded more than 1 million times before Tears of the Kingdom’s release date. People used Yuzu to play the game; Nintendo said more than 20% of download links pointed people to Yuzu.
Though Yuzu doesn’t give out pirated copies of games, Nintendo repeatedly said that most ROM sites point people toward Yuzu to play whatever games they’ve downloaded.
Nintendo said its “expended significant resources to stop the illegal copying, marketing, sale, and distribution” of its Nintendo Switch games. It says that Yuzu earns the team $30,000 per month on its Patreon from more than 7,000 patrons. Nintendo said the company has earned at least $50,000 in paid Yuzu downloads. Nintendo said that Yuzu’s Patreon doubled its paid members in the period between May 1 and May 12, when Tears of the Kingdom was released.
Nintendo is asking the court to shut down the emulator, and for damages.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware,
AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver has hit a roadblock in adding HDMI 2.1+ due to the HDMI Forum’s legal requirements. Despite lengthy attempts to find a solution, the HDMI Forum has rejected AMD’s proposal, leaving users of some of the best graphics cards without the ability to use advanced features like 4K@120Hz and 5K@240Hz via HDMI 2.1. As a result, AMD recommends Linux users to switch to DisplayPort instead.
“The HDMI Forum has rejected our proposal unfortunately” said AMD Linux engineer Alex Deucher in a statement published in the bug report. “At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements.”
For three years, AMD has been grappling with a bug report indicating the absence of 4K@120Hz and 5K @ 240Hz support through HDMI 2.1for Linux users. This occurred because in 2021 the HDMI Forum restricted public access to its specifications. This move was to ensure that only authorized manufacturers and developers can access the technical details required to implement HDMI features in their products (and pay royalties to developers of respective technologies). On the one hand, this move ensures the quality and consistency of HDMI experience. But on the other hand, this greatly hindered open-source driver support.
In response, AMD and the X.Org Foundation engaged with the HDMI Forum to devise a solution that would allow open-source implementations of the now-private HDMI specifications. AMD’s Linux engineers, in collaboration with the company’s legal team, dedicated months to evaluating all of the HDMI features to determine if they could be exposed in the open-source Radeon driver. They have reportedly developed internal code and awaited approval from the HDMI Forum.
Unfortunately, the HDMI Forum ultimately denied AMD’s request for open-source driver support. The rejection is especially frustrating considering the months AMD spent engineering and prototyping code for HDMI 2.1+ features within its internal open-source AMDGPU codebase, notes Phoronix. This effort, aimed at showcasing HDMI 2.1+ capabilities for review by the HDMI Forum, now appears to be a largely wasted investment of significant resources.
In light of these challenges, AMD may need to explore alternative solutions, such as incorporating more features into its closed-source firmware or utilizing their PSP IP block to protect certain aspects of the HDMI specification. However, for the time being, the lack of HDMI 2.1+ feature support in open-source drivers remains reality. Consequently, open-source supporters are advised to use DisplayPort for the best experience.
As reported by The Verge,
Microsoft has announced a new multiyear partnership with Mistral, a French AI startup that’s valued at €2 billion (about $2.1 billion). The Financial Times reports that the partnership will include Microsoft taking a minor stake in the 10-month-old AI company, just a little over a year after Microsoft invested more than $10 billion into its OpenAI partnership.
The deal will see Mistral’s open and commercial language models available on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, the second company to offer a commercial language model on Azure after OpenAI. Much like the OpenAI partnership, Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral will also be focused on the development and deployment of next-generation large language models.
Mistral is announcing a new AI model today, called Mistral Large. It’s designed to more closely compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Unlike some of Mistral’s previous models, it won’t be open source. “Mistral Large achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world’s second-ranked model generally available through an API (next to GPT-4),” says the Mistral AI team.
Mistral Large is available on Mistral’s own infrastructure, hosted in Europe, or through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. Mistral Small will also be available today, offering improved latency over Mistral’s 8x7B model. Mistral is also releasing a new conversational chatbot, Le Chat, that’s based on various models from Mistral AI.
Mistral’s models have typically been open source, but the partnership with Microsoft means the French AI company can now explore more commercial opportunities. Neither Microsoft nor Mistral are disclosing details of the investment, though.
As reported by BNN Bloomberg,
Elon Musk sued OpenAI and chief executive officer Sam Altman, alleging they violated the artificial intelligence startup’s founding mission by putting profit ahead of benefiting humanity.
Musk said in a suit filed late Thursday in San Francisco that the company’s close relationship with Microsoft Corp. has undermined its original mission of creating open-source technology that wouldn’t be subject to corporate priorities.
Musk has been among the most outspoken about the dangers of AI and artificial general intelligence. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT more than a year ago popularized advances in AI technology and raised concerns about the risks surrounding the race to develop AGI, where computers are as smart as an average human.
“To this day, OpenAI Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity,’” the lawsuit said. “In reality, however, OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
Musk helped establish OpenAI in 2015 but stepped away from the company some two years later over philosophical differences about how to profit from the technology. In addition to leading Tesla, he owns the social network X and is raising money for an AI venture he founded called xAI that features its own ChatGPT-type chatbot, Grok.
In the filing, Musk took aim at the restructuring of OpenAI’s leadership last year, a tumultuous period during which Altman was ousted as CEO and then quickly reinstated with support from Microsoft. Musk argued in the suit that Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Microsoft worked together to oust the majority of the startup’s board, who had been responsible for enforcing its original mission of developing technology for the benefit of humanity.
Since introducing ChatGPT and GPT-4, the large language model that powers the chatbot, OpenAI has set off a wave of AI adoption in enterprises around the world. Microsoft has been one of the most aggressive in incorporating the technology into its wide array of cloud and enterprise services.
“Altman hand-picked a new board that lacks similar technical expertise or any substantial background in AI governance, which the previous board had by design,” the lawsuit said. “The new Board consisted of members with more experience in profit-centric enterprises or politics than in AI ethics and governance. They were also reportedly ‘big fans of Altman.’”
The case marks an escalation in the one of the highest-profile clashes in the emerging field of AI, pitting two of its most prominent players against each other. The lawsuit will have implications not just for OpenAI, which is seeking to raise funds at a valuation of US$100 billion or more, but also for Microsoft. The Seattle-based firm’s shares have soared 68 per cent in the last year, making it the most valuable company in the world, as it seeks to become a leader in AI adoption.
“With this restructuring, OpenAI Inc. abandoned its non-profit mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity broadly, thereby keeping it out of the hands of a large for-profit corporation in which vast power would be unduly concentrated,” the lawsuit said.
As reported by 9To5Mac,
Last month, Apple confirmed that iOS 17.4 would remove support for Home Screen web apps in the European Union. At the time, Apple said this decision was due to requirements under the Digital Markets Act related to support for alternative browser engines on iPhone.
Apple is now walking back that decision and says it will “continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability in the EU.”
Apple’s decision to remove Home Screen web apps, also known as progressive web apps or PWAs, faced a lot of criticism. The Open Web Advocacy organization, for example, said “entire categories of apps will no longer be viable on the web as a result” of the change. There were also reports the EU was going to investigate the decision.
At the time, Apple explained that it would have to build an “entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS” to address the “complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines.” This, the company said, “was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.”
With today’s announcement, Apple has reversed course and said that Home Screen web apps will continue to exist as they did pre-iOS 17.4 in the European Union. “This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS,” Apple explains today.
This means that all Home Screen web apps will still be powered by WebKit, regardless of whether the web app is added using Safari or not – exactly as it works today and has for years.
Here is Apple’s full statement:
Previously, Apple announced plans to remove the Home Screen web apps capability in the EU as part of our efforts to comply with the DMA. The need to remove the capability was informed by the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps to support alternative browser engines that would require building a new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS.
We have received requests to continue to offer support for Home Screen web apps in iOS, therefore we will continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability in the EU. This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS.
Developers and users who may have been impacted by the removal of Home Screen web apps in the beta release of iOS in the EU can expect the return of the existing functionality for Home Screen web apps with the availability of iOS 17.4 in early March.
