Apple has updated its long-standing App Store guidelines, giving developers the option to let users make in-app purchases for iOS apps outside of its App Store. But the changes still haven't won over one of the company's longtime critics. From a report: Under the new rules, app developers can provide customers with links to third-party purchase options for their apps, but they must still pay Apple fees of either 12% or 27%. Spotify, one of Apple's biggest critics, isn't a fan of the changes. In a statement, the music streaming service slammed the new rules. "Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly," the company said in a statement. "Their latest move in the US -- imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer's website -- is outrageous and flies in the face of the court's efforts to enable greater competition and user choice." Tech columnist John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Maybe the cynics are right! Let's just concede that they are, and that Apple will only make decisions here that benefit its bottom line. My argument remains that Apple should not be pursuing this plan for complying with the anti-steering injunction by collecting commissions from web sales that initiate in-app. Whatever revenue Apple would lose to non-commissioned web sales (for non-games) is not worth the hit they are taking to the company's brand and reputationâ--âthis move reeks of greed and avariceâ--ânor the increased ire and scrutiny of regulators and legislators on the "anti-Big-Tech" hunt.

Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years, and in today's climate that's more true than ever. But instead, their stance has seemingly been "Bring it on." Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything. To win in chess all you need is to capture your opponent's king. Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the boardâ--âeven while playing in a tournament where the referees (regulators) are known to look askance at blatant poor sportsmanship (greed).

Apple's calculus should be to balance its natural desire to book large amounts of revenue from the App Store with policies that to some degree placate, rather than antagonize, regulators and legislators. No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it's never a good idea to piss off the refs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fortnite maker Epic Games is not happy about how Apple intends to comply with a district court's injunction that permitted app developers to direct users to their own websites and payment platforms -- a court order that came into effect following the Supreme Court's decision to not hear the Apple antitrust case, leaving the current ruling to stand. Though Apple had largely won the case, as the court decided it was not a monopolist, a judge ruled that app makers should be able to steer their customers to the web from links or buttons inside their apps, something that forced Apple to change its App Store rules.

But Apple's compliance doesn't give app makers the victory they had hoped, as the tech giant aims to still charge commissions on purchases made outside of apps -- a decision Epic aims to challenge in court. According to statements made by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shared on X, Apple's "bad-faith" compliance undermines the judge's order that would have allowed buttons or external links "in addition to [in-app purchases.]" The Ninth Circuit District Court had ruled on one count of out ten in favor of Epic in its decision, finding that Apple violated California's Unfair Competition law. The decision meant Apple had to remove the "anti-steering" clause from its agreement with App Store developers. This clause for years had prevented app developers from directing their customers to other ways to pay for in-app purchases or subscriptions from inside their apps, leading to confusing screens or broken features, where customers would have to figure out on their own how to make the necessary purchases from the developer's website.

Apple has announced changes to its U.S. App Store, allowing developers to link to alternative payment methods, "provided that the app also offer purchases through Apple's own In-App Purchase system," reports 9to5Mac. The change comes in light of the Supreme Court declining to hear Apple's appeal in its legal battle with Epic Games. From the report: The guideline says that developers can apply for an entitlement that allows them to include buttons or links directing users to out-of-app purchasing mechanisms: "Developers may apply for an entitlement to provide a link in their app to a website the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to purchase such items. Learn more about the entitlement. In accordance with the entitlement agreement, the link may inform users about where and how to purchase those in-app purchase items, and the fact that such items may be available for a comparatively lower price. The entitlement is limited to use only in the iOS or iPadOS App Store on the United States storefront. In all other storefronts, apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase."

According to Apple, the link to an alternative payment platform can only be displayed on "one app page the end user navigates to (not an interstitial, modal, or pop-up), in a single, dedicated location on such page, and may not persist beyond that page." Apple has provided templates that developers can use for communicating with customers about alternative in-app payment systems [...]. Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps. The commission will apply to "purchases made within seven days after a user taps on an External Purchase Link and continues from the system disclosure sheet to an external website." Apple says developers will be required to provide accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases and remit the appropriate commissions. [...] However, Apple also says that collecting this commission will be "exceedingly difficult and, in many cases, impossible." [...]

The other anti-steering change that Apple is required to make is to allow developers to communicate with customers outside of their apps about alternative purchasing options, such as via email. Apple made this change in 2021 as part of its settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought on by small developers.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a challenge by Apple to a lower court's decision requiring changes to certain rules in its lucrative App Store, as the justices shunned the lengthy legal battle between the iPhone maker and Epic Games, maker of the popular video game "Fortnite." Reuters: The justices also turned away Epic's appeal of the lower court's ruling that Apple's App Store policies limiting how software is distributed and paid for do not violate federal antitrust laws. The justices gave no reasons for their decision to deny the appeals. In a series of posts on X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote: The Supreme Court denied both sides' appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers. Now the District Court's injunction against Apple's anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps "buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP."

As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web. These awful Apple-mandated confusion screens are over and done forever. The fight goes on. Regulators are taking action and policymakers around the world are passing new laws to end Apple's illegal and anticompetitive app store practices. The European Union's Digital Markets Act goes into effect March 7.

Sara Fischer reports via Axios: ChatGPT maker OpenAI says it's rolling out new policies and tools meant to combat misinformation and abuse ahead of 2024 elections worldwide. 2024 is one of the biggest election years in history -- with high-stakes races in over 50 countries globally. It's also the first major election cycle where generative AI tools will be widely available to voters, governments and political campaigns. In a statement published Monday, OpenAI said it will lean into verified news and image authenticity programs to ensure users get access to high-quality information throughout elections.

The company will add digital credentials set by a third-party coalition of AI firms that encode details about the origin of images created using its image generator tool, DALL-E 3. The firm says it's experimenting with a new "provenance classifier" tool that can detect AI-generated images that have been made using DALL-E. It hopes to make that tool available to its first group of testers, including journalists, researchers and other tech platforms, for feedback. OpenAI will continue integrating its ChatGPT platform with real-time news reporting globally, "including attribution and links," it said. That effort builds on a first-of-its-kind deal announced with German media giant Axel Springer last year that offers ChatGPT users summaries of select global news content from the company's outlets. In the U.S., OpenAI says it's working with the nonpartisan National Association of Secretaries of State to direct ChatGPT users to CanIVote.org for authoritative information on U.S. voting and elections.

Because generative AI technology is so new, OpenAI says it's still working to understand how effective its tools might be for political persuasion. To hedge against abuse, the firm doesn't allow people to build applications for political campaigning and lobbying, and it doesn't allow engineers to create chatbots that pretend to be real people, such as candidates. Like most tech firms, it doesn't allow users to build applications for its ChatGPT platform that deter people from participating in the democratic process.

Long-time Slashdot readers necro81 writes: The popular vision of Neptune is azure blue. This comes mostly from the publicly released images from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989 — humanity's only visit to this icy giant at the edge of the solar system. But it turns out that view is a bit distorted — the result of color-enhancing choices made by NASA at the time. A new report from Oxford depicts Neptune's blue color as more muted, with a touch of green, not much different than Uranus. The truer-to-life view comes from re-analyzing the Voyager data, combined with ground-based observations going back decades. (Add'l links here, here, and here.)

This is nothing new: most publicity images released by space agencies — of planets, nebulae, or the surface of Mars — have undergone some color-enhancement for visual effect. (They'll also release "true-color" images, which try to best mimic what the human eye would see.) Many images — such as those from the infrared-seeing JWST — need wholesale coloration of their otherwise invisible wavelengths. The new report is a good reminder, though, to remember that scientific cameras are pretty much always black and white; color images come from combining filters in various ways.
Also thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the story.

Perplexity, a startup going after Google's dominant position in web search, has won backing from Jeff Bezos and venture capitalists betting that artificial intelligence will upend the way people find information online. From a report: Started less than two years ago, Perplexity has fewer than 40 employees and is based out of a San Francisco co-working space. The company's product, which it calls an answer engine, is used by about 10 million people monthly. Those ingredients were enough to persuade Institutional Venture Partners, Bezos and other tech executives to invest $74 million in the company, the largest sum raised by an internet search startup in recent years. The investment valued Perplexity at $520 million, including the new money, said Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas.

Amazon.com, the e-commerce company chaired by Bezos, has committed to investing billions in Anthropic, the AI startup behind the chatbot Claude. The path to competing with Google is littered with carcasses, and Microsoft itself has struggled for years to dislodge the company's roughly 90% market share in online search. Others, including tech giants, are incorporating AI into their search engines. Perplexity's founders said their advantage is using advances in AI to provide direct answers, instead of website links, in response to search queries, without some of the limitations felt by larger companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Facebook recently rolled out a new "Link History" setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. Users can opt-out, but Link History is turned on by default, and the data is used for targeted ads. The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers "with your browsing activity saved in one place," rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you'll "never lose a link again," Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that "When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies."

Facebook promises to delete the Link History it's created for you within 90 days if you turn the setting off. According to a Facebook help page, Link History isn't available everywhere. The company says it's rolling out globally "over time." This is a privacy improvement in some ways, but the setting raises more questions than it answers. Meta has always kept track of the links you click on, and this is the first time users have had any visibility or control over this corner of the company's internet spying apparatus. In other words, Meta is just asking users for permission for a category of tracking that it's been using for over a decade. Beyond that, there are a number of ways this setting might give users an illusion of privacy that Meta isn't offering. "The Link History doesn't mention anything about the invasive ways Facebook monitors what you're doing once you visit a webpage," notes Gizmodo's Thomas Germain. "It seems the setting only affects Meta's record of the fact that you clicked a link in the first place. Furthermore, Meta links everything you do on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other products. Unlike several of Facebook's other privacy settings, Link History doesn't say that it affects any of Meta's other apps, leaving you with the data harvesting status quo on other parts of Mark Zuckerberg's empire."

"Link History also creates a confusing new regime that establishes privacy settings that don't apply if you access Facebook outside of the Facebook app. If you log in to Facebook on a computer or a mobile browser instead, Link History doesn't protect you. In fact, you can't see the Link History page at all if you're looking at Facebook on your laptop."

The source code for Grand Theft Auto 5 was reportedly leaked on Christmas Eve, a little over a year after the Lapsus$ threat actors hacked Rockstar games and stole corporate data. From a report: Links to download the source code were shared on numerous channels, including Discord, a dark web website, and a Telegram channel that the hackers previously used to leak stolen Rockstar data. In a post to a Grand Theft Auto leak channel on Telegram, the channel owner known as 'Phil' posted links to the stolen source code, sharing a screenshot of one of the folders.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In recent years, tools such as Figma, TLDraw, Apple's Freeform and Arc browser's Easel functionality have tried to sell the idea of using an "infinite canvas" for capturing and sharing ideas. French startup Kosmik is building on that general concept with a knowledge-capturing tool that doesn't require the user to switch between different windows or apps to capture information. Kosmik was founded in 2018 by Paul Rony and Christophe Van Deputte. Prior to that, Rony worked at a video production company as a junior director, and he wanted a single whiteboard-type canvas instead of file and folders where he could put videos, PDFs, websites, notes and drawings. And that's when he started to build Kosmic, Rony told TechCrunch, drawing on a prior background in computing history and philosophy.

"It took us almost three years to make a working product to include baseline features like data encryption, offline-first mode and build a spatial canvas-based UI," Rony explained. "We have built all of this on IPFS, so when two people collaborate everything is peer-to-peer rather than relying on a server-based architecture." Kosmik offers an infinite canvas interface where you can insert text, images, videos, PDFs and links, which can be opened and previewed in a side panel. It also features a built-in browser, saving users from having to switch windows when they need to find a relevant website link. Additionally, the platform sports a PDF reader, which lets the user extract elements such as images and text.

The tool is useful for designers, architects, consultants, and students to build boards of information for different projects. The tool is useful for them as they don't need to open up a bunch of Chrome tabs and put details into a document, which is not a very visual medium for various media types. Some retail investors are using the app to monitor stock prices and consultants are using them for their project boards. Available via the web, Mac, and Windows, Kosmik ships with a basic free tier, though this has a limit of 50MB of files and 5GB of storage with 500 canvas "elements." For more storage and unlimited elements, the company offers a $5.99 monthly subscription, with plans in place to eventually offer a "pay-once" model for those who only want to use the software on a single device.

"The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitizing and then throwing away about 100 million paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save 4.5 million pounds a year," reports Robert Booth via The Guardian. Leading historians are calling these plans "sheer vandalism" and "insane." From the report: Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as "bananas" and "a seriously bad idea." The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of "famous people" -- likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales -- but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept. It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.

Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitized documents unavailable to users since late October. "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals," says Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive of the Society of Genealogists. "In any digitization projects mistakes get made. We don't know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A bill that mandates tech giants pay news outlets for their content has come into effect in Canada amid an ongoing dispute with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta over the law. Some have hailed it as a game-changer that sets out a permanent framework that will see a steady drip of funds from wealthy tech companies to Canada's struggling journalism industry. But it has also been met with resistance by Google and Meta -- the only two companies big enough to be encompassed by the law. In response, over the summer, Meta blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadians. Google looked set to follow, but after months of talks, the federal government was able to negotiate a deal with the search giant as the company has agreed to pay Canadian news outlets $75 million annually.

No such agreement appears to be on the horizon with Meta, which has called the law "fundamentally flawed." If Meta is refusing to budge, so is the government. "We will continue to push Meta, that makes billions of dollars in profits, even though it is refusing to invest in the journalistic rigor and stability of the media," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Friday. According to a study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, the views of Canadian news on Facebook dropped 90% after the company blocked access to news on the platform. Local news outlets have been hit particularly hard.

"The loss of journalism on Meta platforms represents a significant decline in the resiliency of the Canadian media ecosystem," said Taylor Owen, a researcher at McGill and the co-author of the study. He believes it also hurts Meta's brand in the long run, pointing to the fact that the Canada's federal government, as well as that of British Columbia, other municipalities and a handful of large Canadian corporations, have all pulled their advertising off Facebook and Instagram in retaliation.

Firefox 121 has arrived with Wayland support to be used by default on modern Linux desktops. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: Some Linux distributions and package builds have been using the native Wayland path for a while but now it's great to see the upstream builds make this default change as we get ready to embark on the 2024 Linux desktop. With my testing of Firefox 121 on Wayland, it's been working out well. X.Org/X11 support remains in place for those not using a Wayland-based desktop environment.

Firefox 121 also adds Voice Control command support on macOS, adds an option to always force-underline links within websites, Firefox now includes a floating button to help in creation within PDFs, various CSS feature additions, and other developer enhancements. Firefox 121 also now supports tail call elimination in WebAssembly for enhancing support for functional languages. You can download Firefox 121 via archive.mozilla.org.

Amazon, which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean. From a report: The technology will enable a satellite to deliver data to a cruise ship, say, even if the spacecraft isn't in range of an Amazon ground station connected to the internet. Instead, the laser will pass the request on to another satellite that has a clear view of a ground station.

The two prototype satellites successfully tested the technology, which is officially called optical inter-satellite links, Amazon said on Thursday. "If you're going to serve maritime customers, air customers, you have got to be able to get data up to your satellites," said Rajeev Badyal, who leads Amazon's Project Kuiper internet-from-space initiative. "And in the middle of the ocean, it's difficult if not impossible" to install ground stations.

OpenAI has struck a deal with Politico parent company Axel Springer, allowing ChatGPT to summarize news stories from Politico and Business Insider. CNBC reports: Once the OpenAI-Axel Springer deal goes into effect, when a user asks ChatGPT a question, it will respond with summaries of news articles from media outlets such as Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt. The chatbot will also include articles that would otherwise be limited to subscribers of those outlets, according to a release, and the answers will include "attribution and links to the full articles for transparency." The partnership follows a deal that OpenAI struck with the Associated Press in July, allowing it to license the AP's news archive for training data.

As part of the agreement, Axel Springer will provide content from its media brands as training data for OpenAI's large language models, such as GPT-4, the AI model that helps power ChatGPT. The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 publishers, released research in October suggesting that data sets used to train popular AI models rely "significantly" more on publisher content, outweighing it by a factor ranging from over five to almost 100, compared to generic web content.

Internet propagandists aligned with Russia have duped at least seven Western celebrities, including Elijah Wood and Priscilla Presley, into recording short videos to support its online information war against Ukraine, according to new security research by Microsoft. From a report: The celebrities look like they were asked to offer words of encouragement -- apparently via the Cameo app -- to someone named "Vladimir" who appears to be struggling with substance abuse, Microsoft said. Instead, these messages were edited, sometimes dressed up with emojis, links and the logos of media outlets and then shared online by the Russia-aligned trolls, the company said.

The point was to give the appearance that the celebrities were confirming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was suffering from drug and alcohol problems, false claims that Russia has pushed in the past, according to Microsoft. Russia has denied engaging in disinformation campaigns. In one of the videos, a crudely edited message by Wood to someone named Vladimir references drugs and alcohol, saying: "I just want to make sure that you're getting help." Wood's video first surfaced in July, but since then Microsoft researchers have observed six other similar celebrity videos misused in the same way, including clips by "Breaking Bad" actor Dean Norris, John C. McGinley of "Scrubs," and Kate Flannery of "The Office," the company said.

AI coding assistants are here to stay -- but just how big a difference they make is still unclear. From a report: Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO: "You've got a lot of tabs open, you're planning a vacation, maybe you're reading the news. At last you copy the text you need and go back to your code, but it's 20 minutes later and you lost the flow." The key idea behind Copilot and other programs like it, sometimes called code assistants, is to put the information that programmers need right next to the code they are writing.

The tool tracks the code and comments (descriptions or notes written in natural language) in the file that a programmer is working on, as well as other files that it links to or that have been edited in the same project, and sends all this text to the large language model behind Copilot as a prompt. (GitHub co-developed Copilot's model, called Codex, with OpenAI. It is a large language model fine-tuned on code.) Copilot then predicts what the programmer is trying to do and suggests code to do it. This round trip between code and Codex happens multiple times a second, the prompt updating as the programmer types. At any moment, the programmer can accept what Copilot suggests by hitting the tab key, or ignore it and carry on typing. The tab button seems to get hit a lot. A study of almost a million Copilot users published by GitHub and the consulting firm Keystone Strategy in June -- a year after the tool's general release -- found that programmers accepted on average around 30% of its suggestions, according to GitHub's user data.

[...] Copilot has changed the basic skills of coding. As with ChatGPT or image makers like Stable Diffusion, the tool's output is often not exactly what's wanted -- but it can be close. "Maybe it's correct, maybe it's not -- but it's a good start," says Arghavan Moradi Dakhel, a researcher at Polytechnique Montreal in Canada who studies the use of machine-learning tools in software development. Programming becomes prompting: rather than coming up with code from scratch, the work involves tweaking half-formed code and nudging a large language model to produce something more on point.

The United States and China are pursuing parallel scientific tracks. To solve crises on multiple fronts, the two roads need to become one, Nature's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the post: It's no secret that research collaborations between China and the United States -- among other Western countries -- are on a downward trajectory. Early indicators of a possible downturn have been confirmed by more sources. A report from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, published in August, for instance, stated that the number of research articles co-authored by scientists in the two countries had fallen in 2021, the first annual drop since 1993. Meanwhile, data from Nature Index show that China-based scientists' propensity to collaborate internationally has been waning, when looking at the authorship of papers in the Index's natural-science journals.

Nature reported last month that China's decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. There are many good reasons for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which could sorely do with greater research funding and capacity building. But this is also creating parallel scientific systems -- one centred on North America and Europe, and the other on China. The biggest challenges faced by humanity, from combating climate change to ending poverty, are embodied in a globally agreed set of targets, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions. It's a scenario that the research community must be more aware of and work to avoid. Nature Index offers some reasons as to why collaboration between China and the West is declining. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic took their toll, limiting collaborations and barring new ones from being forged. Geopolitical tensions have led many Western governments to restrict their research partnerships with China, on national-security grounds, and vice versa.

A series of arrests that began in late August and continued into last week has sparked concerns that a relatively rare 'Scene' crackdown targeting the top of the so-called 'Piracy Pyramid' may be underway in the Nordic region. TorrentFreak reports: In a statement last week, Denmark's National Unit for Special Crime (NSK) announced that as part of a long-running investigation, a man was arrested on November 22 and then charged with copyright infringement offenses. NSK said its officers searched the home of a 47-year-old man in South Zealand (Sydsjaelland) and seized IT equipment in connection with illegal file-sharing and "copyright infringement of a particularly serious nature." "The case is about an organized network that has illegally shared extremely large quantities of films and TV series via file sharing services," said NSK Police Commissioner Anders-Emil Nohr Kelbaek. While noting that NSK had no further information to offer at this time, Kelbaek said he was pleased that NSK had arrested another suspect believed to have played a 'significant role' in the unnamed network.

Last week's arrest was only the latest in a series of arrests carried out as part of the same long-running NSK investigation into the illegal distribution of movies and TV shows. In late August, NSK arrested four people on suspicion of sharing "extremely large quantities" of movies and TV shows. NSK raided addresses in South-West Jutland, North Zealand and Bornholmand. A 43-year old was arrested at the last location, but it's claimed he lives elsewhere. In common with last week's arrest, all were charged on suspicion of "particularly serious" copyright infringement offenses. In an almost identical statement to that issued last week, Commissioner Anders-Emil Nohr Kelbaek said the case was about "an organized network that shares extremely large amounts of data, presumably in the form of films and series."

TorrentFreak sources report concerns that last week's arrest may be linked to Scene groups. Terminology used by NSK doesn't instantly rule that out and does seem to suggest something potentially more significant than other arrests over the past few years. According to NSK, the August arrests took place on August 28, 2023. Using information in Scene release databases we looked for Danish Scene groups and/or groups that were releasing Denmark-focused content before that date but then made no releases afterward; while that wouldn't provide conclusive proof that a group had been targeted, the method has proven useful in the past. While activity late August suggests nothing especially out of the ordinary, activity since the arrest last week stands in contrast. TF is informed that some groups may have gone dark simply out of an abundance of caution. It's also possible that the groups have nothing to release. Furthermore, there are many other global groups with no obvious links to Danish content or Denmark that also stopped releasing on November 21. The reasons for this are unknown but holidays in the United States may play a role.

"At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth," reports the New York Times magazine, "including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris."

The article notes a threat assessment from U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch: What's most concerning isn't the swarm of satellites but the types. "We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles," Lerch said — for example, a Russian "nesting doll" satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia's, is launching unmanned "space planes" into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites.

An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and "ASAT" antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch's assessment, space looked less like a grand "new ocean" for exploration — phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration — and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.
One interesting detail from the article. "[I]f a requirement to 'blind and deafen' an enemy's satellites were to arise from U.S. Space Command, the Space Force could help fulfill the order. The means would most likely not be "kinetic" — some form of physical or explosive contact — but electronic, a weapon of code-related stealth, or perhaps a kind of debilitating high-energy burst."

And Space Force's highest-ranking officer, General Chance Saltzman, describes the kind of new military calculations made, for example, when Ukraine moved its communications to Starlink satellites: "The Russians are trying to interrupt it," he said, "and they're not having very good success." And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits... [W]hile small satellites in a large configuration could potentially be a more expensive investment than two or three megasatellites, the shift could be worthwhile. If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman remarked, it will hesitate to cross "a threshold of violence." No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.