Thomas Claburn:
Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc’s AI Act.
[…]
The move may further amplify the appeal of open weight models and alienate Claude customers, who don’t necessarily want consumers of their AI-generated content to know its provenance.
[…]
Anthropic itself is already hedging about the utility of its marking method, noting that detected marks are not conclusive evidence that Claude produced the content and that the absence of marks cannot guarantee that AI wasn’t involved in the creation of a particular piece of content.
Anthropic (Hacker News):
Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch. Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported.
[…]
Marks will apply to output from supported Claude models across Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag, and wherever Claude is offered, worldwide. Some platforms or features may not support certain marking types.
[…]
We’ll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks, as the Code requires, and we’ll share details in forthcoming documentation.
John Gruber:
Anthropic is claiming this is for compliance with an EU law but that “Marking will apply to output from supported models wherever Claude is offered, worldwide.”
This is infuriatingly opaque. I won’t speak to the “signed provenance metadata” they say they’ll be embedding in generated files like PDFs, SVGs, PNGs, and JPEGs. That’s important but it’s complex. Plain text is simple. A string of text is just one character followed by another. I presume that Claude is going to start “embedding” invisible characters/byte sequences between visible characters? What they’re claiming to do here seems impossible, frankly, and anything they attempt to embed invisibly is going to cause immediate problems.
[…]
If the “watermark” is not comprised of invisible characters but rather visible ones, how in the world does this jibe with their claim that it’s “imperceptible”? (This Reddit thread claims that’s how it will work — “It’s a form of steganography where the model subtly biases its word choice to create a statistical pattern that can be detected later.” How in the world can that be squared with “it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”?) And any sort of semantic detection like this is going to cause false-positive problems.
Previously:
Anthropic Artificial Intelligence Claude Copyright European Union Graphics
Jay Peters:
An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening didn’t just cause issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
Xbox’s status page initially reported the outage on Sunday at about 11PM ET, and it also prevented people from logging in, launching apps, or finding games on the Xbox store. This morning, the page also noted that users “may have problems” playing their digital and disc games, which posts on social media confirmed. During that time, my colleague Richard Lawler was able to launch digital games he owned, but trying to boot up games tied to Game Pass popped up error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified.
Matt Birchler (Hacker News):
When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn’t because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain’t what it used to be.
[…]
It’s still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy. This isn’t even to mention the fact that when you pop the disc in your drive, you’re not playing from the disc. It’s installing it to your internal hard drive and is probably installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the game actually work at all.
Kyle Orland:
For years now, the testers at DoesItPlay have been documenting this trend, testing thousands of physical game releases to see which ones live up to the promise of full “plug and play” functionality without an Internet connection. Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.
Previously:
Outage Xbox
Cindy Harper (Hacker News, ArsTechnica):
Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back.
[…]
Anyone who hit “buy” on one of them will open their library that morning and find a hole where it used to be. PlayStation’s notice states it without apology: “You will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.”
The justification Sony offers runs to six words, “due to our content licensing agreements.”
You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.
Sid Shuman (via Nick Heer):
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only.
Timothy Geigner (Hacker News):
In all of our discussions about how the digital revolution has created a system in which people don’t actually own the things they think they’re buying, I get particularly frustrated by the lack of change in it all. We’ve spilled much ink complaining that this clearly anti-consumer practice needs to be done away with, where an unsuspecting public thinks they’re buying “a thing” only to learn months or years later that “the thing” they bought was actually a license to use/view/listen to another “thing”, and that license exists at the pleasure of the company that collected the money for it.
[…]
As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.
And that’s because of the purposeful obfuscation of that fact.
Kyle Orland:
Sony’s recent decision to stop producing physical PlayStation games in the near future has naturally led to a renewed focus and appreciation for physical games that can be played just by sticking a cartridge or disc in a console. But an increasing number of those “physical” games these days still require additional downloads from a centralized server to function as intended.
Previously:
Datacide Sony Sony PlayStation Video
Joshua Khane (Hacker News):
Microsoft DELETED my account AND OneDrive!!?? After ACKNOWLEDGING that I’m the owner of the account and that it was compromised???
25 fucking years of data, thousands of euros spended on games?? My son’s baby pictures? GONE!
Scott:
This is EXACTLY why cloud providers should be building (and might need to FORCED to, via consumer protection regulation) access for other online backup services into their solutions INHERENTLY. Apple… are you paying attention?
That One Guy:
Honestly they could recover it, they choose not to because they dont give a shit about their user base.
XBOX Support:
We’re sorry this happened, it’s not the experience we want anyone to have when their account is compromised. We have been working to restore access to your purchases and reached out with the next steps.
Running to the press works.
Previously:
Datacide Microsoft Microsoft OneDrive Xbox
