Archived version

China’s relentless e-commerce price war leaves sellers struggling to make ends meet as shopping platforms compete with ever-more aggressive policies and a domestic economy slowing down

https://theadvisermagazine.com/market-research/stock-market/chinas-relentless-e-commerce-price-war-leaves-sellers-struggling-to-make-ends-meet-by-reuters

A once-thriving e-commerce industry punctuated by shopping bonanzas featuring galas and celebrities is bearing the brunt of a sputtering economy that has seen consumers all but tie knots in their purse strings.

While extreme discounting, influencer-led sales campaigns and generous returns policies did much to enrich the sector, those same practices by which vendors have to abide are now hurting those upon which the sector rests.

“The good times for e-commerce are over,” said Shanghai-based e-commerce operator Lu Zhenwang, who sells everyday items for small vendors. “This year there is fierce competition and I don’t think a lot of sellers will survive another three years.”

Profit margins are being squeezed at big platforms such as those of Alibaba and JD, but also at the thousands of small businesses which joined the e-commerce boom decade that started around 2013.

That boom has left e-commerce accounting for 27% of retail, with 12 trillion yuan ($1.65 trillion) of goods sold annually.

But as the economy slows, so does e-commerce, with the double-digit growth of recent years set to be replaced by single digits, showed data from Euromonitor.

[...]

[One e-commerce shop owner] said major platforms, upon which vendors rely, should not use “consumer first” policies that add to the burden of businesses, many of which have to sell below cost to maintain high positions in search results amid multiple discount events.

They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers - and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza.

Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - a claim they dispute.

"They killed my life online," said Eiad Hametto, who lives in Saudi Arabia.

"They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years - It was connected to all my work," he told the BBC.

He also said being cut off from Skype was a huge blow for his family.

The internet is frequently disrupted or switched off there because of the Israeli military campaign - and standard international calls are very expensive.

Israel launched its offensive in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack on 7 October, which killed about 1,200 people. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 38,000 people have been killed in the war.

Archived version

Russia's telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor confirmed to Interfax that the order targets multiple apps (including NordVPN, Proton VPN, Red Shield VPN, Planet VPN, Hidemy.Name VPN, Le VPN, and PIA VPN) used to gain access to content tagged as illegal in Russia.

Archived version

The US elections are less than five months away, and the public has less visibility than ever into political messaging on Facebook and Instagram.

In August, Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle, a popular social media monitoring tool used to track misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. The company says its replacement, the Meta Content Library (MCL), is a better tool for researchers.

But a joint investigation by Proof News, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and the Algorithmic Transparency Institute found that Meta’s replacement tool is less transparent and accessible than CrowdTangle. On eleven key topics, Meta’s new tool has fewer features than CrowdTangle. And researchers say the process of getting access to the tool is cumbersome and slow—and some journalists can’t access it at all.

Archived link

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, received criticism from researchers after it labeled a link by the investigative journalism group Bellingcat about Russia’s attack on a children’s hospital in Kyiv as “potentially spammy or unsafe.”

In their latest research, Bellingcat identified a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile that struck Ukraine's largest children's medical center, Okhmatdyt, during an attack on Kyiv over the weekend that killed 33 people, including 5 children.

Bellingcat’s investigation debunked claims from pro-Russian accounts that denied responsibility for the attack and “sought to shift the blame for the incident onto Ukraine,” researchers said.

[...]

Despite its reputation, X marked the link to the group’s latest research as “unsafe,” saying that it could lead users to “violent or misleading content” or to a website that misleads people, disrupts their experience, or steals their personal information.

I have a number of Google Photos accounts that I believe I had backed up my iPhone to over the years. However, I hadn't deleted the backed up photos from my iPhone each time, so there are many duplicates across the multiple Google Photos accounts.

Can you please help me identify the most efficient way to remove these duplicate photos that are taking up so much space? I tried to compare two accounts at a time manually but this method is extremely time-consuming, and it would really help a lot to learn a more efficient way. I know how to move photos from one account to another, but the issue is one of the two accounts containing duplicate photos is at full capacity and the other is almost full. Even if they had free space though, would the duplicates show up side by side in the account they're moved to? Because if not, it'll be hard to tell if each photo was in fact a duplicate and therefore no photos were lost somehow in the transfer process, unless I again manually check at a detailed level. Maybe I can eyeball it and send the duplicate photos to a third account with more free space, delete the same photos from both originating accounts, and then send this batch of photos back from the third account to one of the originating accounts?

This has been bothering me for a long time and I would like to do all that I can to avoid buying Google storage over and over. Thank you!

Full toot:

Many have tagged us in discussions about a specific Google extension built into Chromium browsers and asked us what we've done about it.

This is a part of the Google Meets browser extension, which we bundle in order to allow Google Meets to work. This can be disabled in Settings > Privacy and Security > Google Extensions > Meets. Disabling it will break Meets. We expose this as a setting because we want you to be able to control it, and disable it if you want to.

Disabling it by default would be great, but doing so would break Meets for users who are not able to understand why it’s broken, or what they need to change in order to allow it to work. Unfortunately, when websites break, either because of browser detection, or missing features, users invariably assume the browser is at fault rather than the website, and we have to make choices about what needs to be done to make websites work. We do not take these kinds of decisions lightly.

We do find it very interesting that Google, who run the Chromium browser project, choose to give Meets additional information that is not given to other videoconferencing websites, and this could easily be seen to be uncompetitive behaviour. Hopefully, the EU's competition enforcement agencies can add this to their radar, and require a change in Google's Meets functionality.

It seems YT started another attempt at blocking alternative clients. They changed something in their API and both SmartTube and Tubular (NewPipe fork) are completely broken. Apparently it started happening this past week, but we personally just felt it today.

Edit: SmartTube already has an update but still not working for 4K videos it seems. Tubular still not working but it might be due to the upstream (NewPipe) is still working on a fix.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/645247

Here is the report (pdf)

Individuals affiliated with RT - formerly Russia Today - leveraged “Meliorator,” an artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced software package which allowed for the creation of authentic appearing fictitious personas to post content on X. The tool also allowed for the management of the persona profiles through an administrator panel called “Brigadir” and the spreading of disinformation through these profiles through a seeding tool called “Taras.”

Affiliates of RT, a Russian state-sponsored media organization, used this tool to create fictitious online personas, representing a number of nationalities, to post content on a social media platform.

The report is joint effort of security agencies in the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/

It's so easy to sanitize tech stories about murder weapons. Just say "Ukraine" in the title!

Despite Paramount Global’s corporate decision to purge MTV News’ online content (as well as that of Comedy Central, TVLand and CMT), much of the site has been resurrected on the Internet Archive, which now offers “a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published at mtv.com/news.”