US Internet providers must now display clear pricing and product information. HP Ink controversy continues to stain the company’s reputation with consumers. Is the EU’s competition legislation working? Early numbers seem to show it might be. And there’s a 10 million dollar bet that Elon Musk is wrong about AI.

All this and more on the “all bets are off” edition of Hashtag Trending. I’m your host, Jim Love. Let’s get into it.

New regulations from the Federal Communications Commission have taken effect yesterday, mandating that all broadband internet service providers clearly display labels detailing the prices, speeds, data caps and other key information about their service plans.

The rules are aimed at helping consumers make more informed choices by requiring ISPs to disclose this data in a simple, standardized format akin to nutrition labels on food products.

In addition to fees charged, the labels must also now list any monthly data caps or overage fees, upfront costs like equipment rental fees, a provider’s customer service contact information, and any other plan limitations like throttling policies.

Despite this progress, consumer advocacy group Next Century Cities   continued to push for even more information, saying that these broadband “nutrition labels” often overstate the real-world speeds customers can expect or obscures caps and fees.

Speaking to the FCC last month, one group urged that in addition to maximum speeds, the labels should show the average speeds users actually experience, as estimates of “typical” speeds are frequently overly optimistic.

While comprehensive, some experts warn the amount of required disclosures could overburden smaller ISPs with limited resources compared to industry giants. For now, only providers with more than 100,000 subscribers must comply and smaller providers have been given an additional year to comply.

The FCC is still gathering feedback on whether to mandate the display of promotional pricing periods and expiration dates, as well as taxes and fees beyond the base rate.

Next Century Cities is further advocating for a streamlined complaint process to report issues like digital discrimination in broadband deployment to the commission.

With the labeling rules now in place, the hope is that customers will be better equipped to comparison shop for broadband and avoid being misled about the true costs and capabilities of different internet packages.

Sources include: ArsTechica, Engadget, and BroadbandBreakfast

Of all of the emails I get about stories, the HP printer issue is near the top of the list. People write me, with their frustrations. And it turns out, they take these to the courts as well.

Printer owners are pushing back against HP Inc. in an ongoing class action lawsuit over firmware updates that allegedly disabled their devices from using third-party ink cartridges.

In a filing this week in an Illinois court, the plaintiffs accused HP of using software changes to monopolize the replacement ink market and “take advantage of customers’ sunk costs” in HP printers.

The consumers claim that despite never agreeing to only use HP-branded ink, recent firmware updates prevented their printers from accepting more affordable third-party cartridges.

They allege HP violated several anti-competitive statutes through this “tying scheme” accomplished via unauthorized software changes solely aimed at blocking rival ink suppliers.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages covering the cost of now-useless non-HP cartridges, as well as an injunction forcing HP to undo the firmware lockout.

For its part, HP insists it went to “great lengths” to inform buyers that its printers are designed to exclusively use HP cartridges containing security chips.

The company says the updates represent legitimate “dynamic security” measures to combat counterfeit ink, and that it does not conceal or block remanufactured cartridges reusing official HP chips.

HP also argues the plaintiffs cannot claim overcharge damages from the manufacturer under federal antitrust laws when they purchased through intermediaries.

As printer makers increasingly push subscription models, the controversy highlights long-standing tensions over the high costs of proprietary ink replacements versus third-party alternatives.

The bitter legal battle seems primed to further antagonize HP’s customer base over what critics condemn as anti-competitive practices designed to sustain lucrative ink sales.

Sources include: The Register

We’ve done a number of stories on legisltation and regulation from the EU that is aimed at increasing customer choice and promoting real competition. Is it working? In one case it seems to have had an impact.

It turns out that some alternative web browsers are reporting an uplift in user interest and downloads in the European Union following the recent enforcement of a new digital regulation called the Digital Markets Act or DMA.

The landmark rules, which took effect last month, require dominant tech gatekeepers like Apple and Google to present mobile users with choice screens displaying alternative browsers and other core apps.

The goal is to shake up competition against pre-installed defaults and make users more aware of their options beyond Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android.

While it’s still very early days, several smaller browser makers have already shared positive metrics pointing to increased attention from EU users.

Norway’s Opera says new user growth was up 63% from February to late March, while fellow Norwegian browser Vivaldi reports a 36.7% jump in EU downloads, rising to nearly 70% in the eight countries where it appears on Apple’s choice screen.

The privacy-focused Brave browser also cited a doubling of daily iOS installs in the EU compared to pre-choice screen levels.

And little-known Cyprus-based rival Aloha claimed to have seen 250% growth in new users as it jumped from the 4th to 2nd biggest EU market.

However, not all alternative browsers are seeing clear gains yet. Veteran players like Mozilla’s Firefox, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia say it’s too early to accurately assess the DMA’s impact as choice screen rollouts are still ongoing, although some claim that these browsers are purposely holding back from reporting success because they want to keep the pressure on to make the choices even more clear and easier to adopt.

For example, the are complaints that Apple’s iOS implementation in particular has significant design flaws hampering users’ ability to make meaningful choices about switching browsers.

The European Commission has open investigations into suspected cases of improper compliance by the tech giants, including Apple’s choice screen methodology.

With this continued pressure from the largest alternative browsers, and given the EUs track record, it is likely they will be monitoring closely to ensure dominant gatekeepers are genuinely opening their platforms to greater competition and consumer choice as intended.

Sources include: TechCrunch

Some tech industry CEOs are putting their money where their skepticism is when it comes to Elon Musk’s ambitious predictions about artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence in the next few years.

During a recent interview, the billionaire claimed AI will likely exceed the cognitive capabilities of any single human by the end of 2024, with AI as a whole outstripping the combined intelligence of all humans within just five years.

But those bold forecasts are being met with raised eyebrows and big bets from some AI experts who view Musk’s timeline as wildly unrealistic.

Gary Marcus, CEO of machine learning startup Geometric Intelligence, publicly offered up $1 million to anyone, including Musk, who can prove him wrong.

That prompted Damion Hankejh, CEO of ingk.com, to raise the stakes even further, saying he’d cover a $10 million wager against Musk’s AI predictions coming true.

Marcus said Musk has not responded to the million-dollar challenges yet, but added the Tesla CEO has previously ignored Marcus’ smaller $100,000 bet that artificial general intelligence was not actually imminent, as Musk claimed.

For Marcus, the bets are about more than just money. He wants to spark a public discussion with Musk about what artificial intelligence can realistically achieve in the near-term versus the almost utopian promises that have become common from tech leaders.

Marcus argues many in the industry have a track record of making scientifically implausible claims and missing self-imposed deadlines, pointing to the ongoing challenges with self-driving cars as one example.

While large language models have made rapid advances, Marcus contends the notion they could exceed human-level general intelligence within just a couple of years is fanciful, estimating that milestone may still be decades away.

As CEOs literally gamble over contrasting AI outlooks, the high-stakes bets underscore an intensifying debate over whether too much hype is obscuring the real state and timeline of artificial intelligence development.

I don’t know. Just this once and only once. I’m putting my money on Elon being right.

As always, love to hear what you might think.

And that’s our show for today…

Thanks for those who’ve written in with comments including the person who wrote me about their trials and tribulations HP printers and ink purchases.

Keep it coming.  And don’t forget, you can find us on YouTube now. If you check us out there, please give us a like or even a subscribe as we try to build and audience there as well.

I’m your host Jim Love, have a Fantastic Friday.

Vidyard, a popular video messaging company, has recently announced its entry into the virtual digital avatar market and secured new funding of $15M from Export Development Canada (EDC), BMO Capital Partners, and existing investors Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and iNovia Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $90.7M.

According to Gartner Research, AI avatars using generative AI technology will support 70% of digital and marketing communications by 2025, up from less than 5% in 2022. The AI avatar market is valued at USD 14.34B in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47.1% from 2023 to 2030. The growth is driven by increased demand for remote collaboration tools, customer preferences for video content in corporate communications,  hybrid work environments, and advancements in video streaming technology.

Jonathan Lister, Chief Operating Officer at Vidyard says “the increasing demand for authentic and personalized characters for online interactions by companies from various industries is opening up a future where AI-powered video communications can become the cornerstone of productive connections between sellers and buyers.”

Vidyard’s advantage over leading AI video and avatar providers, such as Synthesia, HeyGen, and Tavus, is that its products are embedded in a sales workflow, making it easy to create personalized videos and send them to buyers all within the sales ecosystem. Market leaders like Microsoft, Marketo, and Hubspot are already using Vidyard.

Hubspot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem, Scott Brinker, who has been testing Vidyard’s AI Avatar platform, says that “Virtual avatars will address a lot of critical pain points for HubSpot users, including the stage fright associated with traditional video recording, the massive amount of time it takes to get them ‘right,’ the difficulty of finding the right place and time to do it, and the fact that it’s rarely their top priority.”

In a recent customer survey by GTM Partners, Vidyard found that when video was added, sales funnel performance increased by 85%, four to five times more meetings were booked. In addition, two to four times more sales-qualified opportunities were generated. This resulted in a 25% increase in close rates.

According to Gartner, AI’s capability to help sellers engage more effectively with prospects and customers and to do so at scale by automating labor-intensive tasks is one of the most valuable contributions to using AI in sales.  As communications continue to shift in customer preferences, virtual avatars are making it extremely easy for sales and marketers to get messages out highly personalized and improve customer and buyer interactions.

Kelvin Beachum, a National Football Athlete of the Arizona Cardinals, has found Vidyard’s virtual avatar technology useful. He says “AI technology is just beginning to crack the surface of its capabilities. For me, time is money. As an organization, we are always trying to be efficient with our time to accomplish as much as possible at a high level. Using AI for efficiency allows for a high-velocity workflow of my daily operations, and I am excited to continue implementing it.”

Lister says “B2B buying and selling is fundamentally broken. Buyers want timely and relevant information and automation that helps simplify their complex buying journey. While the sellers struggle to build meaningful relationships, communicate with an ever-increasing number of stakeholders, and deliver high-quality insights given the limitations of current sales technology.”

As this market continues to unfold, there is a need to keep a vigilant eye on deep fakes and the increasing risks of video communication. Stanford has released guidelines on digital communication ethics to help mitigate deep fake risks.

In May, a research team from MIT announced a new programming language, Finch.

It’s designed to support both flexible control flow and diverse data structures. “Finch facilitates a programming model which resolves the challenges of computing over structured arrays by combining control flow and data structures into a common representation where they can be co-optimized,” say its creators.

Not to be confused with the Swedish fintech of the same name (or equally, another identically-named language), Finch offers a sea-change in how programmers can approach structured array programming.

Arrays are a computer science fundamental, and along with lists, are the foundations of data structures. Universal across programming languages, arrays were introduced in Fortran in 1957 and are still used now in languages like Python, for example.

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“Arrays have revolutionised how we express computation,” say the language’s authors. “However, arrays in these, and almost all prominent systems, can only handle dense rectilinear integer grids. Real-world arrays often contain underlying structure, such as sparsity, runs of repeated values, or symmetry. Support for structured data is fragmented and incomplete. Existing frameworks limit the array structures and program control flow they support to better simplify the problem.”

Because of this challenge, Finch is designed to address the limitations of existing implementations.

Sources agree, “One of Finch’s key innovations lies in its support for a rich, structured array programming language. By offering familiar constructs like for-loops, if-conditions, and early breaks over structured data, Finch elevates the productivity level to that of dense arrays. This allows programmers to work with complex data structures without sacrificing expressive power or efficiency.”

Because it is so new, Finch is a way off from being widely understood and adopted. Being specialised, it doesn’t yet have a broad community or as many learning resources compared to more general-purpose languages like Python, which also has strong support for array programming through libraries like NumPy and SciPy​.

So why should developers get to know the language?

Its authors say that Finch offers “more complex array structures than ever before. We are the first to extend level-by-level hierarchical descriptions to capture banded, triangular, run-length-encoded, or sparse datasets, and any combination thereof.”

3 tech roles to explore across the EU

Finch use cases

When it comes to its use cases, it has a wide range of implementations. Finch’s core ability to handle sparse and structured arrays is what makes it a powerful tool for a wide range of applications.

It has technical advantages in areas such as control flow integration. Because it includes advanced compiler techniques to optimise sparse computations, this can reduce overhead and improve execution times on modern hardware platforms.

You can use it for implementations across database management, image and signal processing, machine learning and data science, or to create graph algorithms.

Ultimately, whether you decide to learn it will depend on what your needs are. If your work involves significant use of sparse matrices, structured arrays, or high-performance computing tasks, then Finch can be very beneficial.

If you are looking for a more general-purpose language with a larger community and a broader range of applications, other languages may better fit the bill.

To explore even more inspiring career opportunities, visit the House of Talent Job Board

The reported investment plans follows a similar move by AWS, while Microsoft has announced various data centre investments around the world recently.

Read more: Microsoft plans to pour €6.69bn into new Spanish data centres

Hackers linked to Hamas have been implicated in five cyberespionage campaigns targeting Palestine and Egypt.

The evidence emerged in new research from ESET, a cybersecurity company based in Slovakia. Analysts at the firm detected five campaigns spreading trojanized apps to Android users. The attacks focus on user data espionage in Palestine and Egypt.

The campaigns deploy multistage Android spyware, which ESET calls “AridSpy.”

To distribute the spyware, the hackers used dedicated websites that impersonate real apps. In Palestine, they primarily harnessed a malicious Palestinian Civil Registry app.

“In order to gain initial access to the device, the threat actors try to convince their potential victim to install a fake, but functional, app,” said Lukáš Štefanko, the ESET researcher who discovered AridSpy.

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“Once the target clicks the site’s download button, myScript.js, hosted on the same server, is executed to generate the correct download path for the malicious file.”

ESET attributed the campaigns — with “medium confidence” — to the notorious Arid Viper APT group.

Who is Arid Viper?

Arid Viper is also known as APT-C-23, Desert Falcons, or Two-tailed Scorpion. Active since at least 2013, the cyberespionage group is notorious for targeting countries in the Middle East. It’s also known for deploying a vast arsenal of malware for Android, iOS, and Windows platforms.

Cybersecurity vendors have previously linked the group to Hamas. It primarily targets entities in Israel and Palestine, but its reach extends beyond these borders. Analysts have said this hints at a broader geopolitical agenda.

ESET’s new research, however, makes no accusations of political connections. The company has instead focused on the cyberespionage techniques.

These techniques enable the hackers to spy on messaging apps and exfiltrate content from devices. ESET said their campaigns began in 2022. Three of them remain active today.

As we count down to TNW conference in Amsterdam on June 20 and 21, we’re profiling some of the sessions we’re most amped about.

As a cycling fanatic, I’m eagerly anticipating my conversation with Eliott Wertheimer, who joined VanMoof as co-CEO last year to rejuvenate the struggling ebike brand.

VanMoof filed for bankruptcy last year, leaving tens of thousands of riders stranded. Despite being one of the most heavily funded ebike startups in the world, VanMoof had been making major losses on its ebikes for years.

All startups struggle, especially those with big ambitions. Sometimes they go down for good, but other times they get a second chance. Thankfully, engineering firm McLaren Applied gave VanMoof a lifeline. They bought it out of administration in August of last year.

Reviving VanMoof

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Eliott, who was working for Lavoie at the time, a subsidiary of McLaren Applied, got the job as co-CEO. He and his team had the tough task of saving a sinking ship — and they’ve done a bloody good job so far. In less than a year, they’ve managed to restart delivery of spare parts, opened dozens of third-party service centres, and resumed ebike sales.

Eliott will be pedalling into TNW Conference on Thursday, June 20, for an exclusive interview with yours truly on the Vision Stage. We’ll be discussing the trials and tribulations of reviving a struggling startup. How to pivot your strategy under pressure. And, most crucially, ways to build back trust in your brand.

A VanMoof arguably remains one of the most elegant, reliable, and high-performance ebikes around. Join the session and make up your own mind — do you think the company is doomed or will it return to its former glory like a phoenix from the ashes?

If you’re interested in attending TNW Conference (and saying hi to our editorial team) we’ve got a special offer for our readers. At the ticket checkout, use the code TNWXMEDIA to get 30% off your business pass, investor pass, or startup packages (Bootstrap and Scaleup).

SFI will support the temporary placement of these researchers in companies, where they can collaborate on a variety of projects.

Read more: 15 researchers score SFI funding to collaborate with industry