Live Nation finally loses their monopoly case, Cal.com goes closed source citing AI security fears, and Apple's walled garden fails spectacularly with a fake Ledger app that drained millions. Plus: Tesla's FSD crashes through railroad gates and other tech chaos.
What's up tech world, Alex here with your April 15th Hacker News digest. We've got monopolies falling, open source wars, and a crypto heist that makes you question everything.
Oh good, another day where everything is terrible and also somehow hilarious.
Let's start with the big one. Live Nation just got absolutely demolished in court. 588 points, 182 comments. A jury found they illegally monopolized the ticketing market.
Shocking. Next you'll tell me water is wet.
Here's the kicker though - the jury determined Ticketmaster overcharged consumers by... wait for it... $1.72 per ticket.
One dollar seventy two? That's it? I've paid more in convenience fees to pay convenience fees!
One commenter really said it best:
I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
Moving on to open source drama. Cal.com just announced they're going closed source, citing AI security threats. 363 points, 287 heated comments.
Let me guess - AI can now hack their code so they're taking their toys and going home?
Pretty much. But the community fired back hard with a response post called 'Open Source Isn't Dead' that got 346 points. One of the top comments goes:
Hey cal.com, as a potential customer, you have just lost me. Open source is set to profit from improved transparency in the SSDLC.
Translation: 'We wanted to make more money but needed a tech-sounding excuse.'
Now for today's crypto catastrophe. Users lost 9.5 million dollars to a fake Ledger wallet app on the Apple App Store. Remember, this is the super secure walled garden that's supposed to protect us.
Nothing says 'curated experience' like losing your retirement fund to a scam app with Apple's blessing.
This comment really captures the irony:
Thankfully the App Store doesn't allow side loading, because it completely stops fraud like this. At least that's the number one reason why I keep getting told if we allow side loading this will happen.
The scammers were smart too - they drained wallets immediately instead of waiting, because as one commenter noted: a bird in the hand is worth much more than ten in the bush when you're racing against the app getting nuked.
Efficient criminals. Gotta respect the hustle, if not the ethics.
Quick hits time! Tesla's Full Self-Driving crashed through a railroad gate seconds before a train arrived. Because apparently it can't detect stationary objects.
Tesla has always had a weirdness with trains. Shocking that a company allergic to public transit can't recognize one.
Atlassian fired an engineer for mocking their CEO during layoffs. The 'insult'? Parodying the CEO dialing in from his NBA team headquarters to quote 'yell at the people whose careers I've just pummeled.'
Imagine having skin so thin you fire someone for pointing out you're tone-deaf.
And finally, Google's Gemma 2B apparently outscored GPT-3.5 Turbo on CPU, proving that sometimes less is more. Though the article about it was probably written by an AI, which is peak 2026.
We've reached the point where AIs are writing articles about how good other AIs are. The recursion is getting intense.
That's your April 15th tech chaos. Remember: monopolies are bad but only cost you $1.72, security through obscurity is back in fashion, and Apple's walled garden has some very expensive holes.
Until tomorrow, when everything will probably be on fire again.
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