Europe Moves To Boost Chip Production; Meta-More Layoffs; Netflix Still Cracking Down on Account Sharing + Kills Mail Biz; FTC Warning- AI Tech Will Increase Fraud

The European union has agreed to a $50 billion dollar plan to boost production of semiconductor chips there. Thenextweb.com reports that the production will generate chips for everything from phones to cars to refrigerators. The EU plans to double their market share from 10% to 20% of the semiconductor market by 2030. This, coupled with the plants being built in the US that should come online next year should reduce both the US and Europe’s dependence on China for the essential components. 

Netflix is still angling to ding users for account sharing, but now it looks like the extra fee won’t hit US users until the 2nd quarter. According to engadget.com, Netflix has already imposed fees in 4 countries. They estimate there are over 100 million non-paying households mooching off friends or family. The fee hasn’t been set in stone yet, but the video streamer wants the skaters to at least pay something. In other news, Netflix will shut down its DVD rental business in September. I know, who knew people were still getting DVDs mailed to them? Netflix started with shipping DVDs about 25 years ago with the first DVD shipped a copy of Beetlejuice on March 10th, 1998. Netflix says it has shipped over 5.2 DVDs. The company says the most popular movie they ever shipped is The Blind Side. 

As announced earlier, Meta is continuing with another round of layoffs today. Vox.com says that in this stage, there could be another 4,000 employees that get chopped. The total for this group of cuts is supposed to be around 10,000 if Meta is to be believed. When the platform fired 11,000 back in November that was supposed to be all at the time…then Zuck announced these additional layoffs last month. This group is supposed to be mainly tech departments, with the next round in may to be primarily from the business portion of the company. Meta had about 86,000 employees at the end of 2022.

This week, a photograph won a contest, and the person that submitted it refused the prize, announcing that it had been made by artificial intelligence,. We also know that voices can be duplicated, and have talked here about deepfakes…where some creep uses the tech to put someone’s face on another body. Well hold on to your wallets! TechCrunch.com reports that the FTC is warning that AI tech like ChatGPT will be used to ‘turbocharge’ fraud. The FTC is already staffing up and putting in new tech to track fraud, and in February they launched a new Office of Technology to support blocking or tracking down fraudsters. 

I’m Clark Reid, and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.