Netflix said that user engagement with games on the service tripled in 2023. Engadget: "[Despite] games still being small, and certainly not yet material relative to our film and series business, we're pleased with this progress," the company said in its earnings report on Tuesday. As an example, the company pointed to the addition of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy to the service last year, although it isn't clear how much the trilogy, which only arrived on Netflix on December 14, helped drive engagement in the final two weeks of the year. Netflix said that Grand Theft Auto has become its "most successful launch to date" in terms of installs and engagement. It didn't say how many people had downloaded the trilogy since it was released on the platform, however. Some customers had signed up for Netflix just to play the Grand Theft Auto games, the company said.

Netflix has acquired the exclusive rights to Raw as well as other programming from World Wrestling Entertainment, marking the streaming service's first big move into live events. From a report: Raw will air on Netflix in the US, Canada, Latin America and other international markets beginning in January 2025, after the expiration of the WWE's domestic deal with Comcast. The company will also become the exclusive home outside the US for all WWE shows and specials, including Smackdown and NXT, as well as pay-per-view live events like Wrestlemania, SummerSlam and Royal Rumble. The pay-per-view events will be included at no additional cost for Netflix customers.

After attracting more than 200 million customers by offering films and TV shows on-demand, Netflix has now committed to offering three hours of live wrestling a week starting next year. The company hopes the deal will bring in millions of loyal WWE viewers and provide a boost for its fledgling advertising-supported plan. Netflix has been dabbling in live events for the last year, airing a live comedy special, as well as a golf match, but this is the first long-term rights deal. The WWE is the latest major live event to shift from cable TV to streaming. Ultimate Fighting Championship, which like WWE is owned by TKO Group Holdings, offers many of its matches on ESPN+, while the National Football League sold Amazon the rights to Thursday Night Football. A playoff game on Comcast's Peacock just delivered the largest streaming audience for any professional sports event in the US. The deal 10-year deal is valued at more than $5 billion, CNBC reported.

AT&T, Google and Vodafone are investing a total of $206.5 million in AST SpaceMobile, a satellite manufacturer that plans to be the first space-based network to connect standard mobile phones at broadband speeds. Fierce Wireless reports: AST SpaceMobile claims it invented the space-based direct-to-device market, with a patented design facilitating broadband connectivity directly to standard, unmodified cellular devices. In a press release, AST SpaceMobile said the investment from the likes of AT&T, Google and Vodafone underscores confidence in the company's technology and leadership position in the emerging space-based cellular D2D market. There's the potential to offer connectivity to 5.5 billion cellular devices when they're out of coverage.

Bolstering the case for AST SpaceMobile, Vodafone and AT&T placed purchase orders -- for an undisclosed amount -- for network equipment to support their planned commercial services. In addition, Google and AST SpaceMobile agreed to collaborate on product development, testing and implementation plans for SpaceMobile network connectivity on Android and related devices. AST SpaceMobile boasts agreements and understandings with more than 40 mobile network operators globally. However, it's far from alone in the D2D space. Apple/Globalstar, T-Mobile/SpaceX, Bullitt and Lynk Global are among the others.

AI can't replace the majority of jobs right now in cost-effective ways, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study that sought to address fears about AI replacing humans in a swath of industries. From a report: In one of the first in-depth probes of the viability of AI displacing labor, researchers modeled the cost attractiveness of automating various tasks in the US, concentrating on jobs where computer vision was employed -- for instance, teachers and property appraisers. They found only 23% of workers, measured in terms of dollar wages, could be effectively supplanted. In other cases, because AI-assisted visual recognition is expensive to install and operate, humans did the job more economically. [...] The cost-benefit ratio of computer vision is most favorable in segments like retail, transportation and warehousing, all areas where Walmart and Amazon are prominent. It's also feasible in the health-care context, MIT's paper said. A more aggressive AI rollout, especially via AI-as-a-service subscription offerings, could scale up other uses and make them more viable, the authors said.

One man living in Virginia oversaw "the laundering of some $7 million in fraudulently obtained gift cards" from Walmart in an international operation which over five years scammed hundreds of victims into sending the numbers over the phone, reports a new ProPublica investigation. (Citing court evidence that emerged after his arrested in 2021). Earlier that year, he complained to an associate that more and more people were competing to resell cards in China, eating into his profits. So many scammers were flocking to Walmart that he and his team regularly encountered them at self-checkout counters.... "We ran into quite a few at the store, and we even started chatting."
It was apparently so common that federal prosecutors started calling it "The Walmart scheme." And while the store is supposed to watch for customers who appear to be acting on a scammer's instructions, "Too often, Walmart has failed." America's largest retailer has long been a facilitator of fraud on a mass scale, a ProPublica investigation has found. For roughly a decade, Walmart has resisted tougher enforcement while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on employee training, according to more than 50 interviews, internal documents supplied by former industry executives, court filings and other public records...More than $1 billion in fraud losses were routed through the company's financial systems between 2013 and 2022, according to filings by the Federal Trade Commission and court cases analyzed by ProPublica. That has helped fuel a boom in financial chicanery. Americans, many of them elderly, were swindled out of $27 billion between 2013 and 2022, according to the FTC...

Walmart has a financial incentive to avoid cracking down. It makes money each time a Walmart gift card is used and earns a fee when another brand of card is bought. And it receives one commission when a person sends a money transfer and a second when the recipient picks it up. The company's financial services business generates hundreds of millions in annual profits. (Its filings do not provide specific figures for gift cards and money transfers.) "They were concerned about the bucks. That's all," Nick Alicea, a former fraud team leader for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service who investigated Walmart for years, told ProPublica. Walmart's deficiencies have repeatedly attracted government scrutiny. In 2017, the attorneys general of New York and Pennsylvania investigated Walmart over concerns that it was "reaping the benefits" of gift card fraud. The investigation concluded a year later with Walmart promising to restrict or eliminate the use of its gift cards to purchase other gift cards...

Instead, the company let the practice continue until 2022 — even after it knew that millions of dollars were being laundered through its stores. The FTC sued Walmart in 2022, alleging it "turned a blind eye" as criminals took advantage of its money transfer service. Walmart, the FTC claimed, pocketed millions in fees while "letting fraudsters fleece its customers." Summarizing the FTC's evidence, a federal judge in the case wrote that "Walmart knew that its services were used by fraudsters" and that the company was repeatedly warned about certain stores where "twenty-five, fifty, or even seventy-five percent of money transfer activity was fraudulent." Separately, a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania is hearing evidence of possible criminal conduct in Walmart's money transfer business, according to corporate filings that did not detail the allegations.
While the FTC says Americans were swindled out of $27 billion between 2013 and 2022, Walmart responded to ProPublica's investigation by pointing out it's refunded $4 million to gift-card fraud victims, and also blocked more than $700 million in suspicious money transfers. "We have a robust anti-fraud program and other controls to help stop scammers and other criminals who may use the financial services we offer to harm our customers." The company's legal filings in the FTC case struck a different tone. Walmart is seeking to dismiss the suit, partly on the grounds that it has "no responsibility to protect against the criminal conduct of third parties." Though fraud is "deeply unfortunate," Walmart argues, such schemes are "reasonably avoidable by consumers."
Other interesting quotes from the article:

• "Walmart outlets at one point accounted for the top 20 locations for fraud nationally among chains that partnered with MoneyGram, according to internal documents."

• "In a single week in March 2017, consumers claiming they'd been duped into a money transfer filed 610 complaints about Walmart, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. CVS ranked second, with 47."

• "Site inspections routinely found that Walmart staff lacked anti-fraud training and that employees failed to ask screening questions..."

• Walmart resisted MoneyGram's attempts to fight fraud [according to the former fraud team leader for the postal inspector's office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who investigated MoneyGram and Walmart].

Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, Business Insider reported Wednesday, citing internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay, the report added. From the report: Tentatively called "Alexa Plus," the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider. The team is working towards a June 30 launch deadline, and has been testing the underlying voice technology, dubbed "Remarkable Alexa," with 15,000 external customers, these people said.

But the quality of the new Alexa's answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found. Amazon is now going through a major overhaul of Alexa's technology stack to address this issue, though the team is experiencing some discord.

Verizon is writing down the value of its business services division by $5.8 billion, a sign of the company's declining enterprise operations. From a report: The wireless carrier said in a filing Wednesday that the non-cash goodwill impairment charge was due to "secular declines, as well as continuing competitive and macroeconomic pressure." As a result of the impairment, Verizon said the balance of its business unit was $1.7 billion at the end of 2023.

The decline is tied to the telecommunications giant's legacy wireline operations, which provide fixed-line communications services for businesses, through copper or fiber wires. This segment has seen demand drop considerably as its mobile business service has surged. Verizon's wireline business revenue fell 8.1% through the third quarter and is likely to stay muted in 2024, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Uber is shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly three years after the company acquired it for $1.1 billion. Axios reports: Drizly was always a bit of an odd match for Uber, in that it didn't hire or contract its own delivery workers. Instead, Drizly provided backend tech that let local liquor stores provide their own deliveries. The bigger issue, however, might have been cybersecurity. Drizly in 2020 confirmed a hack that exposed information on around 2.5 million customers.

What it didn't say, however, was that the company had been aware of the security flaw for two years without fixing it. That information was discovered by the Federal Trade Commission, after Uber's acquisition of Drizly, and led to an FTC order that restricted the types of customer information that Drizly could collect and retain. "After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we've decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything -- from food to groceries to alcohol -- all on a single app," said Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber's SVP of delivery. "We're grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer."

With the pre-release of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown started, Ubisoft has chosen this week to rebrand its Ubisoft+ subscription services, and introduce a PC version of the "Classics" tier at a lower price. And a big part of this, says the publisher's director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, is getting players "comfortable" with not owning their games. Kotaku: It's hard to keep up with how often Ubisoft has rebranded its online portals for its games, with Uplay, Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club, and now Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics, all names used over the last decade or so. It's also seemed faintly bewildering why there's a demand for any of them, given Ubisoft released only five non-mobile games last year.

However, a demand there apparently is, says Tremblay in an interview with GI.biz. He claims the company's subscription service had its biggest ever month October 2023, and that the service has had "millions" of subscribers, and "over half a billion hours" played. [...] What's more chilling about all this, however, is when Tremblay moves on to how Ubisoft wishes to see a "consumer shift," similar to that of the market for CDs and DVDs, where people have moved over to Spotify and Netflix, instead of buying physical media to keep on their own shelves. Given that most people, while being a part of the problem (hello), also think of this as a problem, it's so weird to see it phrased as if some faulty thinking in the company's audience.

He said: "One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect... you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."

quonset writes: When self-checkout at stores was rolled out, many people, including on /., cheered. No longer would they have to wait behind the senior citizen who couldn't remember the PIN for their debit card. No longer would they have to wait in long lines trying to ignore the idle chitchat from fellow shoppers. From now on it would be a breeze to get in and get out without human interaction. Except that hasn't happened.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free? While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth.

"It hasn't delivered anything that it promises," says Christopher Andrews, associate professor and chair of sociology at Drew University, US, and author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. "Stores saw this as the next frontier If they could get the consumer to think that [self-checkout] was a preferable way to shop, then they could cut labour costs. But they're finding that people need help doing it, or that they'll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they're not saving money, they're losing money."

SonicSpike shares a report from Forbes: X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, announced it would begin rolling out a peer-to-peer payment service similar to Venmo or PayPal this year -- a feature the social media site's billionaire owner Elon Musk has long pushed as part of his plan to develop an "everything app." X officially announced the new feature in a blog post, touting the new service designed to enhance "user utility and new opportunities for commerce." The company did not give a timeframe on when the new service would be available, but Musk previously told Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood it could launch as early as "mid-2024."

According to the company, the new payment service will "showcas[e] the power of living more of your life in one place," as owner Elon Musk continues to promote X as a future "everything app" capable of handling social media, video and other original content on the same site. X Payments has registered to do business in at least 32 states, according to public records, and has acquired a money transmitter license needed to process payments in 10, TechCrunch reported in December.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek.com: A Dutch engineer recruited by the country's intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines.

De Volkskrant's investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai. Van Sabben was allegedly recruited in 2005 -- a couple of years before the Stuxnet malware was triggered -- after American and Israeli intelligence agencies asked their Dutch counterpart for help. However, the Dutch agency reportedly did not inform its country's government and it was not aware of the full extent of the operation. Van Sabben was described as perfect for the job as he had a technical background, he was doing business in Iran and was married to an Iranian woman.

It's believed that the Stuxnet malware was planted on a water pump that the Dutch national installed in the nuclear complex in Natanz, which he had infiltrated. It's unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack. [...] Michael Hayden, who at the time was the chief of the CIA, did agree to talk to De Volkskrant, but could not confirm whether Stuxnet was indeed delivered via water pumps due to it still being classified information. One interesting piece of information that has come to light in De Volkskrant's investigation is that Hayden reportedly told one of the newspaper's sources that it cost between $1 and $2 billion to develop Stuxnet.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The cost of switching between cloud-computing providers has long drawn complaints, with the services derided as "roach motels" that let businesses check in but not out. Now Google is taking steps to change that. Effective immediately, the company is eliminating fees levied on customers who want to leave its cloud for a rival service -- a policy shift that may pressure competitors Amazon and Microsoft to do the same.

The move follows intensifying scrutiny of cloud services by regulators and lawmakers around the world. UK antitrust authorities launched a probe that is looking at such penalties, and the fees emerged as a key issue when the US Federal Trade Commission asked for public comments on a variety of cloud concerns. Google Vice President Amit Zavery, who helps oversee the cloud business, said switching fees only represent about 2% of the total costs of migrating to a new provider -- and don't deter many clients from moving their data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Broadcom is tossing the majority of VMware's Cloud Services Providers as part of its shakeup of the virtualization titan's partner programs, say sources, leaving customers unclear who their IT supplier will be. The $61 billion purchase of VMware by Broadcom in November was swiftly followed by news of how it planned to reorganize the business into several Broadcom divisions. A month later we revealed that Broadcom intended to discontinue VMware's channel program, and that some solution providers/ resellers would be transitioned to its own scheme, but on an invitation-only basis, from February. However, while Broadcom informed one part of VMware's channel of this change, a second notice was also sent to Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), informing them that their program is going to be terminated at the end of April. This program allows service providers such as smaller cloud operators to sell a VMware-based cloud service.

In the letter, seen by The Register, Broadcom tells its cloud provider partners: "Effective April 30, 2024, the ability to transact as a VMware Cloud Services Provider, under the VMware Partner Connect Program, will come to an end. However, we want to emphasize that you may have the opportunity to join the Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner Program. This invite-only program has simpler requirements and offers expanded benefits, and we will begin inviting partners to join in early 2024." One service provider told us their company had been left in the dark since that letter was received, and Broadcom has given them no indication of whether they will be invited to join its partner program or not, or what their customers are supposed to do if the company loses the right to operate a VMware cloud service. "I don't know how many smaller providers are affected by this but it must be a very large number," the source told us. "The VCSP program was the only way for MSPs and service providers to offer a multi-tenant VMware-based cloud service."

Chatter among some in the industry is that Broadcom is only interested in keeping the largest and most profitable customers, and the company simply doesn't care about the smaller users and the providers that service them. Unconfirmed fears that are only ten percent of Vmware's biggest CSPs will be invited to the new master program. "This all sounds very much like Broadcom taking an aggressive approach to its route to market and focusing on those partners that can deliver growth and significant revenue," said Omdia chief analyst Roy Illsley. "I suspect the intention is to ensure that VMware consists of only profitable products and they are sold in a more cohesive way with the rest of Broadcom. So I expect to see some news on this continuing to come out for most of 2024 as the company puts this plan into action. I would not rule out disposals of some assets in a drive to streamline the portfolio to those that fit with Broadcom's strategy." "How can they just cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice, and zero details?" said one service provider. "They sent the notices out the Friday before the holidays, with no follow-up, which makes the situation even more egregious. What are we supposed to tell our customers? It's mind-boggling."

As General Motors prepares to roll out electric versions of its Buicks, "hundreds of Buick dealerships nationwide" are "turning their backs on the storied brand," reports the Boston Globe.

"The move to electric Buicks is one reason so many dealers are giving up their Buick franchises, according to auto industry watchers." They say that smaller, low-volume Buick dealers either can't or won't make the big investments needed to begin selling EVs, especially as sales growth in the sector has cooled and unsold electrics are piling up on dealer lots. "I think there are dealers who are just not confident in the electric vehicle transition and they don't want to have to commit to the investment," said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at online car retailer iSeeCars.com...

Buick has announced its intention to migrate to an all-electric line of cars by the end of the decade. The brand's first EV is set to go on sale this year. But getting ready to sell EVs is a costly proposition. Dealers must purchase new equipment to service the cars and must pay for worker retraining. GM estimates that the upfront cost to dealers will range between $200,000 and $400,000. "If you're in a market where you're not selling a lot of Buicks, investing a lot to sell electric Buicks may not make a good business case," said Mark Schirmer, spokesperson for Cox Automotive, an Atlanta-based automotive marketing company.
While 854,000 Buicks were sold in 1980, just 103,000 were sold in 2022 — down from 207,000 in 2019, according to the article. So in 2022 GM bought out 44 percent of its dealerships (which they say accounted for just 20% of all U.S. Buick sales), with the majority of them still selling other GM brands like Chevrolet and GMC.

But the article also includes some perspective from Robert O'Koniewski, executive vice president of the Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association. "The only reason GM has kept the Buick alive is that it's popular in China." That's Buick's biggest market by far, thanks to a 50-50 joint venture it launched in 1997 with government-owned SAIC Motor, China's biggest carmaker. The partnership sold 653,000 Chinese Buicks in 2022.

But that's a big decline from the 926,000 sold in 2020. Brauer said that Chinese consumers are pulling away from the US brand in favor of Chinese companies like BYD, which passed Tesla in the fourth quarter of 2023 to become the world's largest maker of electric vehicles.

"As Microsoft stock rises and Apple's falls over analysts expectation of slowing iPhone demand, the two firms are once more within $100 billion of each other — the smallest gap in over two years..." writes the blog Apple Insider: In August 2020, Apple became the first publicly-traded US company to reach a $2 trillion market cap, and Microsoft became the second one in June 2021. Later in October 2021, Microsoft took over the top spot, and for a time was move valuable than Apple by $100 billion. While the values of the two firms have continually changed, Microsoft is now worth just $100 billion less than Apple, according to MarketWatch. Microsoft is valued at $2.73 trillion, while Apple — fallen from its recent $3 trillion high — is currently at $2.83 trillion.

MarketWatch notes that Microsoft's stock rose 57% in 2023, compared to Apple's which rose 48%. Microsoft shares have also reportedly seen what are described as slimmer losses at the start of 2024. Apple, on the other hand, has seen its shares take a considerable drop in recent days. The first hit was taken following a claim by Barclays that iPhone demand is weakening and that the iPhone 16 range will not offer any compelling new features to tempt upgraders.

The analyst view that Apple is dependent on iPhone sales is part of why Microsoft is doing better. Analysts see Microsoft has being less attached to any hardware, and more attached to subscription software such as Office 365, and so therefore less attached to any falling demand for phones or computers. And, Microsoft has launched an AI tool in Copilot, while Apple has not unveiled any similar ChatGPT-style app or service.

"For the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox," writes TechCrunch, citing startup investments like Mastodon's client Mammoth and the Fakespot browser extension that helps identify fake reviews. But Mozilla has also launched Mozilla.ai (added a bunch of new AI-focused members to its board).

In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them." "Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers — and even more so for most consumers — to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant."
While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months." Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source — at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...."

With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source — and especially the Linux movement — which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft...

Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope."
And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you.

"I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company's strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter. The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company's devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active. Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple's payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.

The Justice Department is closing in on what would be the most consequential federal antitrust lawsuit challenging Apple, which is the most valuable tech company in the world. If the lawsuit is filed, American regulators will have sued four of the biggest tech companies for monopolistic business practices in less than five years. The Justice Department is currently facing off against Google in two antitrust cases, focused on its search and ad tech businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon and Meta for stifling competition. The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products. Rivals have said that they have been denied access to key Apple features, like the Siri virtual assistant, prompting them to argue the practices are anticompetitive.

Little noticed, days before the holiday break, Boeing petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration for an exemption from key safety standards for the 737 MAX 7 -- the still-uncertified smallest member of its newest jet family. Seattle Times: Since August, earlier models of the MAX currently flying passengers in the U.S. have had to limit use of the jet's engine anti-ice system after Boeing discovered a defect in the system with potentially catastrophic consequences. The flaw could cause the inlet at the front end of the pod surrounding the engine -- known as a nacelle -- to break and fall off.

In an August Airworthiness Directive, the FAA stated that debris from such a breakup could penetrate the fuselage, putting passengers seated at windows behind the wings in danger, and could damage the wing or tail of the plane, "which could result in loss of control of the airplane." Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, the union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots, said the flaw in the engine anti-ice system has "given us great concern." He said the pilot procedure the FAA approved as an interim solution -- urging pilots to make sure to turn off the system when icing conditions dissipate to avoid overheating that within five minutes could seriously damage the structure of the nacelle -- is inadequate given the serious potential danger.

"You get our attention when you say people might get killed," Tajer said. "We're not interested in seeing exemptions and accommodations that depend on human memory. ... There's just got to be a better way." In its petition to the FAA, Boeing argues the breakup of the engine nacelle is "extremely improbable" and that an exemption will not reduce safety. "The 737 MAX has been in service since 2017 and has accumulated over 6.5 million flight hours. In that time, there have been no reported cases of parts departing aircraft due to overheating of the engine nacelle inlet structure," the filing states.

Netflix has said it plans to be in gaming for years to come. Now the company is trying to figure out how to make money from it, a potential shift in strategy for the streamer. From a report: Executives at the streaming giant have had discussions in recent months about how to generate revenue from its games, according to people familiar with the discussions. Netflix games are currently free for all subscribers, part of a strategy to keep users coming back to the streaming service when their favorite shows are between seasons as well as to attract new fans.

Some of the ideas that have been discussed include in-app purchases, charging for more sophisticated games it is developing or giving subscribers to its newer ad-supported tier access to games with ads in them, the people said. Such moves would mark a pivot for Netflix, which has resisted putting ads or in-app purchases in its games. [...] Netflix encourages open debate internally on its strategy, which is a key pillar of its culture, and such discussions don't mean the company will decide to monetize games.