Apple will acquire the major Swedish classical music record label BIS Records, intending to fold it into Apple Music Classical and Platoon. MacRumors reports: BIS Records was founded in 1973 by Robert von Bahr. The label focuses on a range of classical music, with particular focus on works that are not well represented by existing recordings. It is an award-winning name in the world of classical music, acclaimed for its vast catalog and impressive audio quality. The label celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. The company announced its impending acquisition by Apple earlier today.

BIS is set to become a part of Apple Music Classical and the Apple-owned label Platoon. Apple acquired Platoon, a London-based A&R startup focused on discovering rising music artists, in 2018. In 2021, Apple announced that it had purchased the classical music streaming service Primephonic and would be folding it into Apple Music via a new app dedicated to the genre. Apple released the Apple Music Classical app in March. The app offers a simpler interface for interacting with classical music specifically. Unlike the main Apple Music app, Apple Music Classical allows users to search by composer, work, conductor, catalog number, and more. Users can get more detailed information from editorial notes and descriptions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Epic Games will let developers keep 100 percent of their net revenues from the Epic Games Store for six months if they choose to make their games or apps exclusives for that time through its new First Run program, the company announced on Wednesday. Typically, Epic lets developers keep 88 percent of their revenues, with the company taking a 12 percent cut. For developers who launch a product through First Run, the split will return to 88 / 12 once the six months are up.

Developers who choose to participate in the Epic First Run program will see a few other benefits as well. Epic says First Run games and apps will be presented to Store users with "new exclusive badging, homepage placements, and dedicated collections" and will be featured in "relevant store campaigns including sales, events, and editorial as applicable." The program is open now, and the first products that will be eligible to be part of the program must launch on or after October 16th. [...] However, developers can be a part of First Run and still release their products on their own stores. Here's what Epic says about which products are eligible: "A new release game or app which has not been previously released on another third-party PC store or included in a subscription service available on another third-party PC store. Games or apps with a pre-existing exclusivity deal with the Epic Games Store are not eligible for the program."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Associated Press published standards today for generative AI use in its newsroom. The organization, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, listed a fairly restrictive and common-sense list of measures around the burgeoning tech while cautioning its staff not to use AI to make publishable content. Although nothing in the new guidelines is particularly controversial, less scrupulous outlets could view the AP's blessing as a license to use generative AI more excessively or underhandedly.

The organization's AI manifesto underscores a belief that artificial intelligence content should be treated as the flawed tool that it is -- not a replacement for trained writers, editors and reporters exercising their best judgment. "We do not see AI as a replacement of journalists in any way," the AP's Vice President for Standards and Inclusion, Amanda Barrett, wrote in an article about its approach to AI today. "It is the responsibility of AP journalists to be accountable for the accuracy and fairness of the information we share." The article directs its journalists to view AI-generated content as "unvetted source material," to which editorial staff "must apply their editorial judgment and AP's sourcing standards when considering any information for publication." It says employees may "experiment with ChatGPT with caution" but not create publishable content with it. That includes images, too. "In accordance with our standards, we do not alter any elements of our photos, video or audio," it states. "Therefore, we do not allow the use of generative AI to add or subtract any elements." However, it carved an exception for stories where AI illustrations or art are a story's subject -- and even then, it has to be clearly labeled as such.

Barrett warns about AI's potential for spreading misinformation. To prevent the accidental publishing of anything AI-created that appears authentic, she says AP journalists "should exercise the same caution and skepticism they would normally, including trying to identify the source of the original content, doing a reverse image search to help verify an image's origin, and checking for reports with similar content from trusted media." To protect privacy, the guidelines also prohibit writers from entering "confidential or sensitive information into AI tools." Although that's a relatively common-sense and uncontroversial set of rules, other media outlets have been less discerning. [...] It's not hard to imagine other outlets -- desperate for an edge in the highly competitive media landscape -- viewing the AP's (tightly restricted) AI use as a green light to make robot journalism a central figure in their newsrooms, publishing poorly edited / inaccurate content or failing to label AI-generated work as such. Further reading: NYT Prohibits Using Its Content To Train AI Models

According to Gizmodo, CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results. From the report: Archived copies of CNET's author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET's editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

"Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic," said Taylor Canada, CNET's senior director of marketing and communications. "In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site."

CNET shared an internal memo about the practice. Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results," the document reads. According to the memo about the "content pruning" the company considers a number of factors before it "deprecates" an article, including SEO, the age and length of the story, traffic to the article, and how frequently Google crawls the page. The company says it weighs historical significance and other editorial factors before an article is taken down. When an article is slated for deletion, CNET says it maintains its own copy, and sends the story to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The company also says current staffers whose articles are deprecated will be alerted at least 10 days ahead of time. What does Google have to say about this? According to the company's Public Liaison for Google Search, Danny Sullivan, Google recommends against the practice. "Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like 'old' content? That's not a thing! Our guidance doesn't encourage this," Sullivan said in a series of tweets.

If a website has an individual page with outdated content, that page "isn't likely to rank well. Removing it might mean, if you have a massive site, that we're better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn't mean we go, 'Oh, now the whole site is so much better' because of what happens with an individual page." Sullivan wrote. "Just don't assume that deleting something only because it's old will improve your site's SEO magically."

National Geographic: Research does show that heart attacks, also called myocardial infarctions, are on the rise in younger people. Common symptoms include chest pain or discomfort; pain that radiates into the jaw, neck, back or arms; shortness of breath; and feeling weak or faint. A study of more than 2,000 young adults admitted for heart attack between 2000 and 2016 in two U.S. hospitals found that 1 in 5 were 40 years old or younger -- and that the proportion of this group has been increasing by 2 percent each year for the last decade.

The study, published in 2019 in the American Journal of Medicine, also found that people ages 40 or younger who have had a heart attack are just as likely as older adults to die from another heart attack, stroke, or other reason. In fact, increases in heart disease among younger adults in 2020 and 2021 are responsible for more than 4 percent of the most recent declines in life expectancy in the U.S., according to an editorial published in March in JAMA Network. The problem isn't uniquely American. Research shows that adults in Pakistan and India, for example, are also experiencing heart attacks at younger ages.

Billionaire Tencent co-founder Pony Ma has penned a lengthy op-ed backing Chinese pledges to resuscitate the private sector, becoming the most prominent entrepreneur to endorse Beijing's promises to unshackle a giant swath of the economy. From a report: China's third-wealthiest person echoed many of the sentiments in an official policy document published Wednesday that called for the revival of private businesses, at a time the world's No. 2 economy is struggling to gain momentum. He was joined by Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun, the smartphone mogul turned EV entrepreneur, who in a separate editorial likened the policies to a manifesto for quality growth and innovation.

Ma, who rarely voices his opinions but has publicly supported important policies in the past, penned an article for state-owned CCTV in which he called private enterprise pivotal to the nation, and explicitly referenced Chinese President Xi Jinping's previous proclamations on the matter. He talked about the advent of AI and how the country needed to embrace next-generation technology. Ma's comments are notable given Tencent was among the corporations targeted by a sweeping crackdown on the private sector that began in 2020 with the scrapping of Ant Group's IPO. "We must once again embrace the opportunities presented by the coming industrial revolution," Ma wrote in his op-ed carried on CCTV's website. Using the policies as a guide, "we will look ahead with confidence and redouble our efforts."

G/O Media is the owner of top sites like Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, and the Onion. Last month they announced "modest tests" of AI-generated content on their sites — and it didn't go over well within the company, reports the Washington Post.

Soon the Deputy Editor of Gizmodo's science fiction section io9 was flagging 18 "concerns, corrections and comments" about an AI-generated story by "Gizmodo Bot" on the chronological order of Star Wars movies and TV shows. "I have never had to deal with this basic level of incompetence with any of the colleagues that I have ever worked with," James Whitbrook told the Post in an interview. "If these AI [chatbots] can't even do something as basic as put a Star Wars movie in order one after the other, I don't think you can trust it to [report] any kind of accurate information." The irony that the turmoil was happening at Gizmodo, a publication dedicated to covering technology, was undeniable... Merrill Brown, the editorial director of G/O Media, wrote that because G/O Media owns several sites that cover technology, it has a responsibility to "do all we can to develop AI initiatives relatively early in the evolution of the technology." "These features aren't replacing work currently being done by writers and editors," Brown said in announcing to staffers that the company would roll out a trial to test "our editorial and technological thinking about use of AI."

"There will be errors, and they'll be corrected as swiftly as possible," he promised... In a Slack message reviewed by The Post, Brown told disgruntled employees Thursday that the company is "eager to thoughtfully gather and act on feedback..." The note drew 16 thumbs down emoji, 11 wastebasket emoji, six clown emoji, two face palm emoji and two poop emoji, according to screenshots of the Slack conversation...

Earlier this week, Lea Goldman, the deputy editorial director at G/O Media, notified employees on Slack that the company had "commenced limited testing" of AI-generated stories on four of its sites, including A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo and The Takeout, according to messages The Post viewed... Employees quickly messaged back with concern and skepticism. "None of our job descriptions include editing or reviewing AI-produced content," one employee said. "If you wanted an article on the order of the Star Wars movies you ... could've just asked," said another. "AI is a solution looking for a problem," a worker said. "We have talented writers who know what we're doing. So effectively all you're doing is wasting everyone's time."
The Post spotted four AI-generated stories on the company's sites, including io9, Deadspin, and its food site The Takeout.

At least two of those four stories had to be corrected after publication.

Mark Zuckerberg is in hot water in China-- again. From a report: An influential social media account affiliated with the official Beijing Daily on Wednesday raked the Meta Platforms founder over the coals for his previous criticisms of Chinese censorship and alleged intellectual property theft. The lengthy editorial emerged after the Wall Street Journal reported Meta was in talks with Tencent Holdings about helping sell the Quest VR headset in China, despite a block on its mainstay social media services from Facebook to Instagram.

Zuckerberg "dropped a rock on his own foot," the Beijing Daily said in a WeChat post that garnered more than 100,000 views. "You smashed the wok, and now you want to enjoy a Chinese meal?" Zuckerberg's relationship with China has run hot and cold. The Meta CEO was famously pictured jogging through a smog-filled Beijing and greeting then internet-czar Lu Wei at the height of a campaign to court officials in the world's largest internet arena.

Futurism reports: G/O Media, a major online media company that runs publications including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, Jezebel, [the Onion], and Deadspin, has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites... In an email to staff, G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown argued that the news shouldn't come as a surprise since "everyone in the media business" has been considering AI.

The trial will include "producing just a handful of stories for most of our sites that are basically built around lists and data," Brown wrote. "These features aren't replacing work currently being done by writers and editors, and we hope that over time if we get these forms of content right and produced at scale, AI will, via search and promotion, help us grow our audience..."

Unions representing G/O Media and The Onion staff issued a statement, writing that "we are appalled by this news. The hard work of journalists cannot be replaced by unreliable AI programs notorious for creating falsehoods and plagiarizing the work of real writers." Gizmodo and Kotaku staff, in particular, were outraged at the news. "AI content will not replace my work — but it will devalue it, place undue burden on editors, destroy the credibility of my outlet, and further frustrate our audience," Gizmodo journalist Lin Codega tweeted in response to the news. "AI in any form, only undermines our mission, demoralizes our reporters, and degrades our audience's trust."

"The Washington Post reports that all remaining editorial staffers have been laid off at National Geographic, as the iconic magazine continues to spiral downward," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "The famous yellow-bordered print issues of our youth is also an endangered species, as National Geographic also announced that print issues will no longer be sold on newsstands." From the report: Like one of the endangered species whose impending extinction it has chronicled, National Geographic magazine has been on a relentlessly downward path, struggling for vibrancy in an increasingly unforgiving ecosystem. On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers.

The cutback -- the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. -- involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine's small audio department. The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine's editorial operations.

ArsTechnica says: Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site was shutting down. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that. But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now.

A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing. Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were being acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.

Renowned scientific journal Nature has announced in an editorial that it will not publish images or video created using generative AI tools. From a report: The ban comes amid the publication's concerns over research integrity, consent, privacy, and intellectual property protection as generative AI tools increasingly permeate the world of science and art. Founded in November 1869, Nature publishes peer-reviewed research from various academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It is one of the world's most cited and most influential scientific journals. Nature says its recent decision on AI artwork followed months of intense discussions and consultations prompted by the rising popularity and advancing capabilities of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney.

With Maximum PC and MacLife's abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century -- and was quite a run. Harry McCracken writes: The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you -- assuming there is a newsstand near you. They're the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only. But I'm not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I'm writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.

It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn't paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.) Still, I'm declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG's PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.

Today a warning was published from the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. "Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a 'doom loop' that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral...." Despite our housing crisis, it was years into the COVID pandemic before our leaders meaningfully questioned the logic of reserving some of the most prized real estate on Earth for fickle suburbanites and their cars. Downtown, after all, was San Francisco's golden goose. Companies in downtown offices accounted for 70% of San Francisco's pre-pandemic jobs and generated nearly 80% of its economic output, according to city economist Ted Egan. And so we wasted generous federal COVID emergency funds trying to bludgeon, cajole and pray for office workers to return downtown instead of planning for change. We're now staring down the consequences for that lack of vision.

The San Francisco metropolitan area's economic recovery from the pandemic ranked 24th out of the 25 largest regions in the U.S., besting only Baltimore, according to a report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. In the first quarter of 2023, San Francisco's office vacancy rate shot up to a record-high 29.4% — the biggest three-year increase of any U.S. city. The trend isn't likely to end anytime soon: In January, nearly 30% of San Francisco job openings were for hybrid or fully remote work, the highest share of the nation's 50 largest cities. Amid lower property, business and real estate transfer taxes, the city is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years. Transit ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. In January, downtown San Francisco BART stations had just 30% of the rider exits they did in 2019, according to a report from Egan's office. Many Bay Area transit agencies, including Muni, are rapidly approaching a fiscal cliff.

San Francisco isn't dead; as of March, it was home to an estimated 173 of the country's 655 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Tourism is beginning to rebound. And new census data shows that San Francisco's population loss is slowing, a sign its pandemic exodus may be coming to an end. But the city can't afford to wait idly for things to reach equilibrium again. It needs to evolve — quickly. Especially downtown. That means rebuilding the neighborhood's fabric, which won't be cheap or easy. Office-to-housing conversions are notoriously tricky and expensive. Demolishing non-historic commercial buildings that no longer serve a purpose in the post-pandemic world is all but banned. And, unlike New York after 9/11, San Francisco is a city that can't seem to stop getting in its own way.
So what's the solution? The CEO of the Bay Area Council suggests public-private partnerships that "could help shift downtown San Francisco's focus from tech — with employees now accustomed to working from home — to research and development, biotech, medical research and manufacturing, which all require in-person workers."

And last week San Francisco's mayor proposed more than 100 changes to streamline the permitting process for small businesses, and on Monday helped introduce legislation making it easier to convert office buildings to housing, expand pop-up business opportunities, and fill some empty storefronts. This follows a February executive order to speed housing construction. The editorial points out that "About 40% of office buildings in downtown San Francisco evaluated in a study would be good candidates for housing due to their physical characteristics and location and could be converted into approximately 11,200 units, according to research from SPUR and the Urban Land Institute San Francisco."

But without some action, the editorial's headline argues that "Downtown San Francisco is at risk of collapsing — and taking much of the Bay Area with it."

Photography and camera gear review site DPReview, writing in a blog post: After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year. The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content. Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we're grateful for the communities that formed around the site. Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you'll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.

The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears. From a report: The BBC seems to be the first UK media organisation to issue the guidance - and only the second in the world after Denmark's public service broadcaster. The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. [...] The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing.

In an email to staff on Sunday, it said: "The decision is based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security. If the device is a BBC corporate device, and you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted from the BBC corporate mobile device." Staff with the app on a personal phone that they also use for work have been asked to contact the corporation's Information Security team for further discussions, while it reviews concerns around TikTok. Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of journalism industry trade publication the Press Gazette, said it would be interesting to see what other media organizations decide to do. He told the BBC: "I suspect everyone's chief technical officer will be looking at this very closely. Until now, news organizations have been very keen to use TikTok, because it's been one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for news publishers over the last year, and it's been a good source of audience and traffic. So most of the talk in the news media has been around encouraging TikTok rather than banning it."

"Crypto firms should do their work within the bounds of the law, or they shouldn't do it at all," says the head of America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates US. investment markets.

In an editorial published in The Hill, SEC chair Gary Gensler warns that instead cryptocurrency has many "trusted" intermediaries that are in fact non-compliant with U.S. securities law. Today, crypto is dominated by a handful of trading, lending, staking, and other financial intermediaries. The investing public is trusting these entities to be responsible with investors' assets. According to some data, the three largest crypto trading platforms purportedly account for almost three quarters of all trading volume. Crypto entrepreneurs might claim, in their own marketing materials, that they're transparent and regulated. But make no mistake: Very few, if any, are actually registered with the SEC and fully compliant with the federal securities laws.

The lack of compliance puts investors' hard-earned assets at risk. Investors lack fundamental disclosures about the crypto assets themselves and the firms who execute their trades and custody their assets: What are firms doing with customer assets? How are they funding their promised returns? Are they putting their hands in investors' pockets? When you buy or sell a token, are you trading against the house? What are the rules to protect against manipulation and fraud? Without disclosure and other investor protections, we simply don't know.

In essence, these firms are saying, "trust us." What's more, when firms go bankrupt (as many have of late), they turn to bankruptcy courts to sort out their mess.
"[B]ased upon how crypto platforms generally operate, investment advisers cannot rely on them today as qualified custodians," the editorial concludes. Rather than comply with the relevant laws, "it has felt like some have sought a stamp of approval for noncompliant activity, rather than changing a fundamentally non-compliant business model rife with conflicts." Of course, another tool in our toolbox is rooting out noncompliance through investigations and enforcement actions. The SEC has successfully brought or settled more than 100 cases against crypto intermediaries and token issuers, including some who operated Ponzi or pyramid schemes, engaged in unlawful touting, or committed other forms of fraud....

Some have said that we should let the innovation flourish or risk it going overseas. But forsaking investor protection puts real people's life savings at risk.
"It's a basic bargain in finance: If you want to raise money from the public, disclose certain facts and figures," Gensler told Politico this week. Their article notes "crypto giants are threatening to move their businesses across the Atlantic" from America to Europe, but with Gensler responding "We lose more if investors get harmed here." Crypto lobbyists have framed Gensler's push to force their industry to comply with 90-year-old securities laws as a war against financial innovation. Whatever changes brought by crypto markets will pale compared to what could come as brokerages and financial data aggregators move to incorporate artificial intelligence into their offerings, Gensler said.

"The much more transformative technology right now of our times is predictive data analytics and everything underlying artificial intelligence," he said, adding that he looked forward to working with lawmakers on how those tools could be regulated.

Apple is launching a new music streaming service focused on classical music. TechCrunch reports: Based on its 2021 acquisition of Amsterdam-based streamer Primephonic, the new Apple Music Classical app will offer Apple Music subscribers access to more than 5 million classical music tracks, including new releases in high-quality audio, as well as hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums and other features like composer bios and deep dives on key works, Apple says.

However, while the app is being announced today, it's only available for preorder on the App Store for now. The release date will be later this month, on March 28. In addition, the app will only support iOS devices running iOS 15.4 or newer at launch. Apple Music Classical will present a simple interface for engaging with classical works. Users will be able to search by composer, work, conductor or even catalog number, to locate recordings. These can be streamed in high-quality audio of up to 192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless. And thousands of recordings will be available in Apple's immersive spatial audio, as well.

The app will also let users dive into the recordings to read editorial notes about the composers and descriptions of their key works. Famous composers will have their own high-resolution digital portraits available, which Apple commissioned from artists. These were designed with color palettes and artistic references from the relevant classical period, Apple notes, and more will be added in time. At launch, portraits will be available for Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach. The service will continue to be updated with new music over time, too. There's no additional charge for Apple Music Classical if you're an Apple Music subscriber. Android support is coming "soon."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two years ago, I wrote a reasonably prescient editorial about how the writing was on the wall for Google's cloud gaming service Stadia -- and how the company was now hoping to sell its white label streaming technology to other companies instead of building out its own Netflix of games. But it seems that, when Google killed off Stadia, it threw away that technology, too. Google executive Jack Buser has now admitted that the company is no longer offering the white label version of Stadia that allowed companies like AT&T and Capcom to let anyone try games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Control, and a demo of Resident Evil Village for free over the internet, not to mention the first game from Peloton.

"We are not offering that streaming option, because it was tied to Stadia itself," he told Axios' Stephen Totilo. "So unfortunately, when we decided to not move forward with Stadia, that sort of offering could no longer be offered as well." Google called the white label version "Immersive Stream for Games" and sometimes "Google Stream" and, to my knowledge, it was only ever used in experiments like the ones I link above. In AT&T's case, they were limited to its own internet subscribers. Maybe they weren't that successful? When we spoke to AT&T about cloud gaming following those experiments, the carrier didn't seem that bullish about serving up more games itself.

Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. The Register reports: Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city. Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they're published online.

"We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial," he said, according to The Guardian. "It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor." "There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content," Mullen admitted. "The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written."

Mullen's comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.