Mapquest Gets Boost from ‘Lake America’; Sony & Warner Music Sue Anthropic over IP; Reddit & ChatGPT Now Face Toughest EU Safety Rules; Hugging Face-$399 Skating Micro Duck

Mapquest is the beneficiary of a substantial backlash over Trump’s Executive Order that supposedly renames Lake Ontario to Lake America. Macrumors.com reports that since Google Maps jumped in and changed the name in their Maps product, Mapquest has rocketed to the top spot in Apple’s App Store. Mapquest refused to rename Lake Ontario, and apparently people are voting with their digit fingers about that. Mapquest has been kind of an also-ran for years as Google Maps and Apple Maps surpassed it…but now it has had a 50X increase in use of its map since August 30th!

Sony and Warner Music have sued Anthropic, claiming theft of intellectual property. In fact, according to gizmodo.com, their suit alleges “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”  There are already ongoing suits by music publishers against Anthropic, but what makes this one different is that they are suing over song lyrics. The suit alleges that Anthropic violated the plaintiffs’ copyrights by scraping authorized lyric repositories like MusixMatch and LyricFind. And lyrics can allegedly be coaxed out of Claude verbatim.  It will be interesting to see where this suit goes. 

Getting bigger is better, right? Well, with great size comes greater responsibility, and ChatGPT and Reddit…as well as Roblox are about to find that out. Arstechnica.com says each of the platforms has now become large enough to fall under the so-called very large online platforms designation under the European Union’s Digital Services Act. They will now be held to a higher level of scrutiny, and face additional obligations regarding removing illegal content, protecting privacy and security of minors, and can face fines of up to 6% of global revenue for failing to comply. To fall under the tougher regs, each of the service had to pass up 45 million monthly users in the EU. 

Just what everyone needs. Could this be the next Teddy Ruxpin? Pollen Robotics, owned by Hugging Face, has released a little robot called Microduck. Thenextweb.com notes that the little device is $399, and preorders are open now. The robot duck walks, crouches, gets upright when it falls, and can pick up small items with its beak. You can get wheeled feet with an accessory pack so it can basically skate. It has a tiny front cam and LiDAR to help it get around. It sort of sings, too…not really a quack. If things need to be more ducky at your place, this may be your deal.

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