Starting on November 1st, Disney Plus will begin restricting password sharing in Canada. The Verge reports: Disney has not provided many details on how it plans to enforce this policy — its email merely states that “we’re implementing restrictions on your ability to share your account or login credentials outside of your household.” The announcement reads more like a strong finger wag than anything else. “You may not share your subscription outside of your household,” reads the company’s updated Help Center.

A new “account sharing” section in the Canadian subscriber agreement also notes that the company may “analyze the use of your account” and that failing to comply with the agreement could lead to account limits or termination. After Netflix started cracking down on password sharing in the U.S., it resulted in the “four single largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019,” according to Variety. The streaming giant later went on to add 2.6 million U.S. subscribers in July.

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Source: Slashdot – Disney’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Has Begun

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Japan Times: From Oct. 1, a new tax regulation decades in the making will go into effect — and hundreds of thousands of workers in Japan are angry. The Qualified Invoicing System, which requires taxable businesses to issue invoices containing tax information for transactions, has generated a full-fledged movement against it. A petition on Change.org to halt the regulation has received nearly 450,000 signatures. The social movement […] has held regular demonstrations and conferences advocating against the law, alongside significant protest from the world of pop culture: Animators, filmmakers, voice actors, manga artists and V-tubers of all stripes have joined together against it.

While the law is complex, the reason it’s hated is not: It’s effectively a tax increase. While the system was created to ensure that businesses will properly pay consumption tax, for many freelancers and small businesses the result will amount to a 10% increase in taxes — a high enough jump to potentially devastate creatives who already make a living by the narrowest of margins. […] Those who have already registered as taxable businesses or sole proprietors with sales of over 10 million yen are required to register for the system. Small freelancers and tax-exempt businesses, however, will need to consider carefully what to do. “Tax compliance will be the biggest issue for freelancers,” [says Fumiko Mizoguchi, indirect tax service country leader at Deloitte]. “If freelancers agree to issue qualified invoices, they should offer the counter-suggestion that their prices will increase 10% as a result.”

Meanwhile, the protest movement is steady on the ground in Tokyo. Voiction, which has been meeting with legislators to try to halt the law, plans on continuing to fight through the rest of the year and beyond. [Voice actress Yuhko Kaida] explains that the government could still decide to allow small businesses to not file 2023’s consumption tax in March 2024, when taxes are due. “If we have the willpower, we can stop this law,” Kaida says. “Then we can reduce the damage to people’s lives.”

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Source: Slashdot – Freelancers Aren’t Happy With Japan’s New Invoice System

According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Epic games is laying off 16 percent of its current workforce, which amounts to almost 900 employees losing their jobs. Kotaku reports: A memo was shared this morning at the North Carolina company, seen by Kotaku, informing staff of the bad news. It explains that alongside 16 percent of staff being laid off, the company is also selling Bandcamp, and “spinning off” most of marketing company SuperAwesome.

“For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” says the memo, sent to staff by CEO Tim Sweeney. “I have long been optimistic we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.” It seems that Fortnite’s failure to continue growing was part of the problem. Sweeney reports that it’s “starting to grow again,” but this is driven by creator content “with significant revenue sharing.”

Despite efforts to reduce spending, Sweeney says “we still ended up far short of financial sustainability.” These layoffs, he hopes, will “stabilize our finances.” “Laid-off Epic employees will receive six months severance and health benefits,” Schreier said on X, adding that an “all-hands meeting [is] happening shortly.” Further reading: Apple Asks Supreme Court To Reverse App Store Ruling Won by Epic

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Source: Slashdot – Epic Games Cutting 16 Percent of Its Workforce

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia’s French offices were raided this week on suspicion the chipmaker engaged in anticompetitive practices. Reuters reports: The French competition authority, which disclosed the dawn raid on Wednesday, did not say what practices it was investigating or which company it had targeted, beyond saying it was in the “graphics cards sector.” The French competition authority said that its operation this week followed a broader inquiry into the cloud-computing sector. The broader inquiry revolves around concerns that cloud-computing companies could use their access to computing power to exclude smaller competitors.

This week’s operation had targeted Nvidia, which is the world’s largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics, the WSJ report added, citing people familiar with the raid. Chips originally made for computer graphics are suited for AI-related computing.

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Source: Slashdot – Nvidia’s French Offices Raided In Cloud-Computing Competition Inquiry