The music labels have responded by trying to make artists wait much longer before they can try something similar:

It’s significant, Greenstein said, that the first Taylor’s Version wasn’t released until she’d been off Big Machine for three years. Until then, she was legally bound not to re-record any of the material, and this time frame was typical of record deals in the past. But this is the part of the equation that Swift likely changed for good.

“For decades, major labels were somewhat rational when it came to the prohibition of re-recordings,” Greenstein said. “But now they’re going to be asking, ‘What’s the risk of a Taylor’s Version?’”

In response, record companies are now trying to prohibit re-recordings for 20 or 30 years, not just two or three. And this has become a key part of contract negotiations. “Will they get 30 years? Probably not, if the lawyer is competent. But they want to make sure that the artist’s vocal cords are not in good shape by the time they get around to re-recording.”

Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.

Australia has never contemplated imposing a similar tax. New Zealand tried but backed down last week after the United States threatened to impose higher tariffs on New Zealand goods.

What happened in New Zealand is almost certainly what will happen in Australia. This will go nowhere.

Well the AI companies and investors should have understood that building an industry off of doing something questionable was risky and risks don’t always work out.

Slate: The Far Right Thinks Sydney Sweeney Killed Wokeness

It’s a common phenomenon, really. Sydney Sweeney is beautiful now, and would be considered so in any era. But because she’s no longer the only type of woman who’s considered beautiful, certain people on the right think they’re being oppressed and the world has gone to hell.

Why have these weirdos zeroed in on Sweeney in particular? There are lots of beautiful white women with big boobs out there—Kate Upton, Blake Lively, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Ratajkowski, and more. As far as I can tell, part of it seems to be that Sweeney doesn’t shy away from talking about or sharing her body. On Euphoria, she does a lot of nudity, and she’s spoken in interviews about feeling comfortable with it. On SNL, she repeatedly joked about her boobs and even wore a Hooters uniform. The National Post praised Sweeney for “playfully owning her sex appeal with zero apologies” and criticized Vanity Fair for suggesting it might have been nice to give her some material that wasn’t about her beauty.

The article is out of date. According to this one, the game has been removed from sale on Steam in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the dev is going to withdraw it from Steam entirely.

Zerat Games has announced it will withdraw its sexually explicit visual novel from Steam after it was removed from sale in the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Posted to the game’s Steam page, which is no longer accessible to those who have not previously purchased the game, the developer defended its title but confirmed it would be removed from the platform.

“We don’t intend to fight the whole world, and specifically, we don’t want to cause any problems for Steam and Valve,” the developer said.

You left out the important bit before that:

When users enable “include related matches in Find on page”, Microsoft Edge submits the following data to Microsoft cloud services using a HTTPS connection:

Seems like nothing gets sent if you do a normal exact search.