US District Judge Donald W. Molloy issued a preliminary injunction (pdf) blocking the ban on Thursday, as reported by Reuters. The ban had been set to take effect on January 1st. TikTok sued Montana shortly after Governor Greg Gianforte signed SB 419 in May.
The money will go towards Project Clover, TikTok’s initiative to house European user data on local servers to address concerns from regulators.
TikTok’s data center in Ireland is already up and running, but it’s already working on another in Norway, where it expects data migration to begin in late 2024. Once complete, TikTok says its Norway facility will be the “largest data centre in Europe.”
This kind of video gets me in trouble at home because I will try to emulate it for fun. Just hours of recording noises and editing them, to the exclusion of all of the reasonable, responsible things I should do instead.
Anyway, here’s someone smacking, plucking, and scraping disparate household items to get the Netflix logo sound.
The Washington Post reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee dispatched subpoena-armed US Marshals to CEOs Linda Yaccarino of X (formerly Twitter) and Jason Citron of Discord for December 6th testimony about online child sexual exploitation. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was also subpoenaed but without the use of Marshals.
Lawmakers expect Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew to testify voluntarily as Congress continues to try to child-proof the internet with regulation.
[The Washington Post]
Sure, you can find out from the Nokia Wikipedia page that the famous ringtone comes from Spanish classical guitarist Francisco Tárrega’s 1902 composition “Gran Vais.” But this TikTok from Alexandra Whittingham was a much nicer way for me to learn that fact.
Software engineer Thomas Barlow has been making TikToks showing off a small musical quartet of step motors that he made possible with an Arduino, MIDI sequences, a little coding, and some other gear. He made a video showing how (and he published code and a tutorial on GitHub).
Anyway, who knew step motors are perfect for Radiohead?
The social media giant claims it’s not valuable enough, and is only being subjected to the strict obligations that come with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) gatekeeper designation because it’s being lumped together with Chinese parent ByteDance, which has many operations outside of Europe.
The deadline to appeal is today, November 16th, and so far Apple’s been very quiet. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have not challenged.
In 2020, the share of Americans age 18-29 who could say the same was just 9 percent, according to a new poll from Pew Research. Additionally, 43 percent of TikTok users report consuming news on the platform, up from 22 percent in 2020.
TikTok’s main feed now has an “add song” button that lets you save songs to your Spotify Liked Songs playlist. Spotify says both free and paid US and UK members will get it.
If you don’t see it yet, make sure to update both apps and set Spotify as as your default streaming service in the TikTok app (Settings > Music).
Update November 14th, 2023, 11:45AM ET: TechCrunch notes you can also pick Apple Music or Amazon Music.
