Monday’s top tech news: Twitter’s third-party client ban seems like no accident

A judge has ordered a group of laid-off Twitter employees to drop their class action lawsuit against the company, which accuses Twitter of not following through on its promised severance pay package, as reported earlier by Bloomberg and Reuters. In a ruling on Friday, US District Judge James Donato states that the workers must make their case in private arbitration instead, citing the employment contract they signed with Twitter.

According to the ruling, Twitter’s contract “expressly” states that arbitration isn’t mandatory, and also provides an option for employees to opt out of the procedure. The judge says employees failed to opt out of arbitration, which would’ve given them a chance to settle things in court. Twitter’s contract also contained a class action waiver, the ruling notes.

Netflix streaming is getting into its angsty teenage years, as today marks 16 years since it launched its streaming services. It’s easy to forget what things were like before the age of streaming, but a decade-and-a-half ago, if you had a Netflix subscription, that meant paying a monthly subscription for a rotation of DVDs mailed to your door.

But while things are vastly different today, and Netflix has grown into a juggernaut in the entertainment world, the chatter even then was all about Netflix’s competition — though, in this case, instead of Amazon, Apple, and Warner Discovery: it was Blockbuster.

Casing the joint is an essential part of any heist movie. The protag­onists arrive on the scene, dressed suitably incognito, and do their best to blend in while keeping one eye on their target: a historic painting with emotional significance for the hero, perhaps, or a jewel of unrivaled clarity and brilliance, too tempting not to steal. These were the sorts of treasure floating through my mind as I sat in a pub on a dull October afternoon, reconnoitering a much more mundane target: a wrought iron signpost.

The signpost, standing on the other side of the street and quite unaware it was under careful surveillance, couldn’t lay claim to much historic significance or monetary value. In fact, it wasn’t of much interest to anyone unless they happened to be passing through the town of Thaxted in south­east England and wanted to know how many meters it was to the historic windmill. What made this signpost noteworthy was that it had come to the attention of a vigilante group known as Active Resistance to Metrication, or ARM. Their motivation? To stop the adoption of metric units in the UK and preserve the country’s traditional imperial measures. Their method? Waging a guerrilla war against metric road signs and signposts: unscrewing them in the dead of night, stowing them in hedgerows, or amending them using paints and stickers.

After Ubisoft canceled three unannounced projects last week alongside yet another delay for Skull and Bones, questions are inevitably being asked about the publisher’s other development-hell project: Beyond Good & Evil 2. The good news is that work on the game is still under way. The bad news is that its actual release date is just as unclear as ever.

“Beyond Good and Evil 2’s development is under way and the team is hard at work to deliver on its ambitious promise,” a Ubisoft spokesperson tells Eurogamer. For those keeping track, that means it’s been almost 15 years since Ubisoft released its first trailer for the game, which is longer than it took to get gaming’s other development-hell classic Duke Nukem Forever out the door. The original Beyond Good & Evil was released in 2003.

Have you ever wanted to be woken from a dreamy slumber by the sound of your partner screaming at you to get out of bed, or perhaps your parents nagging you to get up for school? Well, Google has just the app update for you. The latest Android Clock app on Pixel devices now lets you record your own alarm and timer sounds. Ideal if you want to be woken slowly to the calming sounds of whales or something a lot more chaotic.

XDA-developers reports that Google has made it easier to set custom audio as your alarm sounds with the latest Clock app. While you could set custom audio recordings before, you’d have to copy the files over using a file manager app and then add them using the alarm sound settings. Now you don’t have to do all of that work because there’s a new option to record sounds right inside the Clock app.

A trio of artists have launched a lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney, creators of AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt, which recently created its own AI art generator, DreamUp.

The artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of “millions of artists” by training their AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web “with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists.”

Tweetbot is down again. The Twitter client briefly became available in the midst of an outage that locked users out of major third-party Twitter clients.

While users could sign in to Tweetbot and browse through tweets, some said they couldn’t post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message stating they’ve reached a “data limit.” But now users say they can’t sign in at all.

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 could come with a much less visible crease thanks to a potential design change. According to a report on the Korean site Naver, Samsung could adopt a “droplet”-style hinge that allows the display to form a teardrop shape when closed, making for a much gentler curve that leaves less of a crease (via SamMobile).

While Samsung has certainly made improvements to the crease over the years, it’s still pretty noticeable on its fourth-gen foldables. Both the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 use a “U”-shaped hinge design that puts the display at a sharper angle when closed. This creates a more prominent crease and also puts more stress on the display.

The following is a free preview from last week’s Command Line, my new weekly newsletter about the tech industry’s inside conversation:

Elon Musk has said he will find a new CEO for Twitter after users voted for him to leave. But who would, in his own words, be “foolish enough to take the job”?

It’s been a few days since pretty much every major third-party Twitter client broke, and developers say they still haven’t heard anything from the company about what’s going on. The issues seemed to begin on Thursday evening, with some users reporting that they were getting errors related to authentication.

The silence from the company has been pretty much complete. “Still no official/unofficial info from inside Twitter,” said Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad in a Mastodon post. “We’re in the dark just as much as you are,” read a Friday blog post from Iconfactory, the company behind Twitterific.