ShinyShiny snippets: Amazon’s Book Depository to close down
UK-based online store Book Depository is being closed down by its parent company, the US technology giant Amazon. Book Depository has told customers it will cease operations later this month after almost two decades in business. It comes after Amazon announced plans to cut thousands of jobs as it shakes up its businesses globally. The news was met with sadness by many of Book Depository’s customers from around the world. “We are sorry to let you know that Book Depository will be closing on 26 April 2023,” the company said. BBC
A criminal online marketplace selling millions of stolen identities for as little as 56p has been taken down in an international crackdown. The sting, led by the FBI and Dutch police with the involvement of law enforcement agencies across 18 countries, including the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), took Genesis Market offline on Tuesday evening. Users trying to access the site now see a page with the FBI investigation name “Operation Cookie Monster”. The marketplace had 80m sets of personal credentials available for sale, covering 2 million people. Online banking, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal and Netflix account information were up for sale alongside so-called digital fingerprints containing data from the victims’ devices. The Guardian
In the latest sign that live audio is well and truly on its way out, Music Ally reports that Spotify is shutting down its Spotify Live app. On the app, which still has a handful of chat rooms going, users get a notification saying that the service will go away at the end of the month. After a period of experimentation and learnings around how Spotify users interact with live audio, we’ve made the decision to sunset the Spotify Live app,” Spotify spokesperson Gayle Gaviola Moreau said in a statement to Hot Pod. The Verge
Meta, the company once known as Facebook, has already started slimming down its virtual operations. Disney is cutting its division. Microsoft is shutting its unit. The metaverse, the imaginary universe we were all meant to migrate to just a couple of years ago, is turning into a great corporate collapse, at least in the immediate term, with billions of dollars of investment at risk, and reputations taking a hammering. Over the last three years, the internet giants have built a vast new world, only to discover that many people don’t want to go there. Telegraph
Italy has become the first Western country to block ChatGPT, a popular chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The country’s data protection watchdog said it’s opening an investigation against OpenAI, the company behind the massively popular chatbot due to data privacy concerns after ChatGPT experienced a data breach involving user conversations and payment information. ChatGPT can pretty much answer any questions, pass exams and even code a whole website for you. Hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022. Euronews
Microsoft is no stranger to making elaborate laptop docks, but its latest may be particularly appealing if you need a genuinely robust hub for work. The company has unveiled a Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock that, as the name implies, uses speedy Thunderbolt 4 (and hence USB 4) to connect your laptop or tablet to all your peripherals. There’s enough bandwidth to connect two 4K monitors at 60Hz, as well as 96W of power that’s enough to recharge some demanding portable PCs. Engadget
