The headline focuses on the wrong thing. Making a bunch of crappy songs and uploading the to Spotify and other streaming services is perfectly legal, AI or not.

The illegal part is that he created lots and lots of fake accounts that constantly streamed his songs and masked them to look like authentic listens. So much so that he was making $110k per month. That is straight-up fraud, which is what he was arrested for.

It has nothing to do with AI, but that makes more people click on the article.

Thing is, it already was ubiquitous before the AI “boom”. That’s why everything got an AI label added so quickly, because everything was already using machine learning! LLMs are new, but they’re just one form of AI and tbh they don’t do 90% of the stuff they’re marketed as and most things would be better off without them.

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So they’re adopting a similar structure to OpenAI, a for-profit company majority controlled by a non-profit organization.

Outrage, yes, but what about decreased usage? What’s the effect on revenue and stock price? C-suite pay?

The interesting question is what happens if Valve is still around after all of us are long gone and there are millions of 150+ year old accounts, many under active use?

If they said or implied anything else, they would lose all leverage. The public couldn’t care less about who owns tiktok, so they need people to think they’ll lose it to have any public support.

From Signal’s blog footnotes:

Usernames in Signal are protected using a custom Ristretto 25519 hashing algorithm and zero-knowledge proofs. Signal can’t easily see or produce the username if given the phone number of a Signal account. Note that if provided with the plaintext of a username known to be in use, Signal can connect that username to the Signal account that the username is currently associated with. However, once a username has been changed or deleted, it can no longer be associated with a Signal account.

Their blog post says explicitly that phone number is still required for sign-up and that usernames are purely meant as an avenue to message new people without sharing your phone number. Your username isn’t even visible to anyone but you and you can change it whenever you want.

Awesome! I love Signal and the lack of usernames has always been one of it’s bigger downsides, especially when comparing against other messaging apps.