An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Genomics England is to test whether sequencing babies' genomes at birth could help speed up the diagnosis of about 200 rare genetic diseases, and ensure faster access to treatment. The study, which will sequence the genomes of 100,000 babies over the next two years, will explore the cost-effectiveness of the approach, as well as how willing new parents are to accept it. Although researchers will only search babies' genomes for genetic conditions that surface during early childhood, and for which an effective treatment already exists, their sequences will be held on file. This could open the door to further tests that could identify untreatable adult onset conditions, or other genetically determined traits, in the future.

The study aims to recruit 100,000 newborn children to undergo voluntary whole genome sequencing over the next two years, to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of the technology – including whether it could save the NHS money by preventing serious illness. It will also explore how researchers might access an anonymized version of this database to study people as they grow older, and whether a person's genome might be used throughout their lives to inform future healthcare decisions. For instance, if someone develops cancer when they are older, there may be an opportunity to use their stored genetic information to help diagnose and treat them. Dr Richard Scott, chief medical officer at Genomics England, said: "At the moment, the average time to diagnosis in a rare disease is about five years. This can be an extraordinary ordeal for families, and it also puts pressure on the health system. The question this program is responding to is: 'is there a way that we can get ahead of this?'"

"The bottom line here is about us taking a cautious approach, and developing a view jointly nationally about what the right approach is, and what the right safeguards are," he added.

The US seized dozens of internet domains and charged six people in a sting intended to bring down a network of cyberattack-for-hire services, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday. Bloomberg reports: In all, the US obtained a court order to seize 48 websites, and six people were criminally charged in relation to the takedowns, according to federal prosecutors. The FBI was in the process of seizing the websites, officials said Wednesday. The websites were used to launch, or attempt to launch, millions of so-called DDoS attacks around the world, the DOJ said in a statement. Short for distributed-denial-of- service, DDoS attacks direct huge amounts of junk internet traffic at a website or computer network to knock it offline.

DDoS-for-hire services often refer to themselves as "stresser" or "booter" tools that purport to offer a way for individuals to test the resilience of websites and services they operate, according to cybersecurity experts. In reality, the services are often used for harassment, extortion and criminal mischief, they say. The sites seized by the FBI include royalstresser, securityteam and dragonstresser, among others.

A new patent granted to Apple suggests the company could use satellite communications for more than just getting help in an emergency. 9to5Mac reports: Emergency SOS via Satellite was one of the headline features of September's Apple event -- so much so that the Far Out event name referenced it. The service launched in the US and Canada last month, and was yesterday extended to the UK, France, Germany, and Ireland. More countries will follow. A patent granted on the same day the service expanded to more countries suggests that Apple satellite plans may extend beyond text, and beyond emergency use.

Patently Apple spotted it: "Satellite communications data conveyed by transceivers #28 and antenna radiators #30 may include media data (e.g., streaming video, television data, satellite radio data, etc.), voice data (e.g., telephone voice data), internet data, and/or any other desired data." Apple has currently committed $450M to support the satellite communications feature, a reasonably sizeable amount of money even by Apple standards for a service that will be of use to a tiny fraction of iPhone owners. But if it's the start of something more, then the investment could look rather modest.

U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday said they have charged eight individuals in a securities fraud scheme, alleging they reaped about $114 million from by using Twitter and Discord to manipulate stocks. Reuters reports: The eight men allegedly purported to be successful traders on the social media platforms and then engaged in a so-called "pump and dump" scheme by hyping particular stocks to their followers with the intent to dump them once prices had risen, according to prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it has filed related civil charges against the defendants in the scheme, claiming that seven of the defendants used Twitter and Discord to boost stocks. It said the eighth was charged with aiding and abetting the scheme with his podcast. The individuals charged were Texas residents Edward Constantinescu, Perry Matlock, John Rybarczyk and Dan Knight, along with California residents Gary Deel and Tom Cooperman, Stefan Hrvatin of Miami and Mitchell Hennessey of Hoboken, New Jersey.

"Write a Gizmodo article in which you explain large language models. Make sure to give specific examples. Keep the tone light and casual." That was the prompt Gizmodo gave OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has been taking the internet by storm since it launched on Nov. 30. "We figured it would spin up a replica of our blogging style with no problem at all," reports Gizmodo. "However, that didn't happen. Instead, what we thought would be a swift and efficient process turned out to be a lengthy, laborious, and frustrating one." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Suffice it to say, multiple attempts brought less than satisfactory results. For one thing, ChatGPT kept including incorrect information in its explainer -- sometimes mixing up basic facts about the history of its own technology (factual inaccuracy has been an ongoing problem for the program). In other instances, it skimped on the details in critical areas, writing text that read more like OpenAI ad copy than a thoughtful explainer. In at least one instance, it forgot its own name, repeatedly telling me that it didn't know anything about a "ChatGPT" and thus couldn't help with my request. In general, it struggled to find a good balance of factual information, story structure, and accessible, humorous language, when putting its stories together.

In short: ChatGPT was not very good at writing a Gizmodo article -- at least not one about the machine learning tech that underpins it. After probably a dozen tries or more, the following is the best ChatGPT managed to come up with: "Large language models, also known as neural network-based language models, have gained a lot of attention in recent years for their ability to generate human-like text. These models are trained on massive amounts of text data, and use advanced machine learning algorithms to learn the patterns and structures of natural language. One of the most well-known examples of a large language model is GPT-3, developed by OpenAI. This model was trained on more than 45 terabytes of text data, and has 175 billion parameters, which are the variables that the model uses to make predictions. In machine learning, a parameter is a variable that the model uses to make predictions. These parameters are adjusted during training, allowing the model to improve its performance on the task it was trained for. In the case of large language models, such as GPT-3, the model has a large number of parameters, often in the billions, which allows it to learn the intricate patterns and structures of natural language and generate highly coherent and fluent text." ChatGPT's writing may be competently constructed and able to break down the concepts it's tackling, but it wasn't able to produce a "particularly bold or entertaining piece of writing," says Gizmodo. "In short: this article wasn't the easy lift that we thought it would be."

"After asking the chatbot to write about itself a dozen different ways, the program consistently seemed to leave something critical out of its final draft -- be that exciting prose or accurate facts."

That said, ChatGPT did manage to write an amusing poem about Slashdot. It also had a number of things to say about itself.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said in a blog post on Tuesday that he will give a grant of $1 million per year to encrypted messaging app Signal, the first in a series of grants he plans to make to support "open internet development." Reuters reports: Social media should not be "owned by a single company or group of companies," and needs to be "resilient to corporate and government influence," Dorsey wrote in a post on Revue, a newsletter service owned by Twitter. [Editor's note: The post has been moved to Pastebin since Revue is shutting down early next year.] TechCrunch adds: Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor. "I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company," he wrote. The principles he had hoped to build on -- resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation -- are not present in today's Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted. Even so, he wrote that, contrary to the insinuations accompanying the so-called Twitter Files, "there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time."

As to actual solutions, Dorsey is of course hard at work (or at least present) at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development: "There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn't about a 'decentralized Twitter.' This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet."

A new feature in Firefox version 108 that may please musicians is the improved support for the Web MIDI API. "The MIDI standard is very close to a remarkable 40 years old, and Web MIDI does just what the name implies: it allows web apps to send and receive MIDI signals to and from musical instruments," reports The Register. "In principle this will allow sequencer apps to be implemented in Javascript." From the report: Amusingly, the last time The Reg mentioned Web MIDI, it was because Apple was taking it off Safari users, allegedly because of security concerns. Firefox 108 addresses that with a new security mechanism for preventing, and optionally permitting, apps inside browser tabs to access hardware resources -- in this instance, your MIDI ports. No, this does not mean that you can listen to CANYON.MID directly within Firefox. .MID files are not the same as General MIDI. But if you are nostalgic for that for some reason, help is at hand. A full list of features and changes can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube has announced a plan to crack down on spam and abusive content in comments and livestream chats. Of course, YouTube will be doing this with bots, which will now have the power to issue timeouts to users and instantly remove comments that are deemed abusive. YouTube's post says, "We've been working on improving our automated detection systems and machine learning models to identify and remove spam. In fact, we've removed over 1.1 billion spammy comments in the first six months of 2022." It later adds, "We've improved our spambot detection to keep bots out of live chats."

When YouTube removes a message, the company says it will warn the poster that the message has been removed. The company adds, "If a user continues to leave multiple abusive comments, they may receive a timeout and be temporarily unable to comment for up to 24 hours." [...] It does not appear that YouTube is involving channel owners in any of these moderation decisions. Note that the post says YouTube will warn the poster (not the channel owner) of automated content removal and that if users disagree with the automated comment removal, they can "submit feedback" to YouTube. The "submit feedback" link on many Google products is a black hole suggestion box and not any kind of comment moderation queue, so it sounds like there will be no one that responds to a moderation dispute. YouTube says this automatic content moderation will only delete comments that violate the community guidelines—a list of pretty basic content bans—so hopefully it will stick to that.

Users of the popular MetaMask Web3 wallet will soon be able to buy the second-most-popular cryptocurrency, Ether, via PayPal. From a report: Similar to PayPal's checkout feature at online stores like Etsy and eBay, the integration with ConsenSys's MetaMask will let users buy and transfer Ether by logging in into MetaMask, tapping the "buy" button, and logging into PayPal before making a purchase.

The company said in a statement that select U.S.-based MetaMask customers will be able to use PayPal to buy Ether as of Wednesday, and that the feature will be rolled out to all U.S. users in the coming weeks. A crypto wallet like MetaMask is often the starting point for interacting with Web3 applications like play-to-earn games and some metaverse platforms. Adding PayPal to MetaMask could broaden the customer base for some of these applications by removing the complexity from buying crypto.

The U.S. National Security Agency is warning that Chinese government-backed hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in two widely used Citrix networking products to gain access to targeted networks. From a report: The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-27518, affects Citrix ADC, an application delivery controller, and Citrix Gateway, a remote access tool, and are both popular in enterprise networks. The critical-rated vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely run malicious code on vulnerable devices -- no passwords needed. Citrix also says the flaw is being actively exploited by threat actors. "We are aware of a small number of targeted attacks in the wild using this vulnerability," Peter Lefkowitz, chief security and trust officer at Citrix, said in a blog post. "Limited exploits of this vulnerability have been reported." Citrix hasn't specified which industries the targeted organizations are in or how many have been compromised.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On December 6, Indonesia's parliament passed a criminal code that drew wide criticism for criminalizing premarital sex and cohabitation outside marriage, among other practices. But the code, known as KUHP, also heavily extends the government's reach over online speech -- not just in traditional media outlets, but on social media platforms.

The bill sets out new or strengthened controls on a wide array of actions, from spreading fake news and Marxist-Leninist ideology to insulting the president. These provisions come on the heels of new regulations on tech companies, aimed at enforcing "takedowns" of content targeted by the Indonesian government. Rest of World spoke to activists, online publishers, and social media users, who feared that by the time the bill goes into full effect in 2025, critical commentary would come with harsh consequences -- or that the threat of repercussion would prevent the expression of anything remotely critical at all.

The Z-Wave Alliance, the Standards Development Organization (SDO) dedicated to advancing the smart home and Z-Wave technology, today announced the completion of the Z-Wave Source Code project, which has been published and made available on GitHub to Alliance members. From a report: The Z-Wave Source Code Project opens development of Z-Wave and enables members to contribute code to shape the future of the protocol under the supervision of the new OS Work Group (OSWG). The goal of the project is to provide a rich development environment that contains the relevant source code and sample applications to those seeking to play a direct role in the advancement of the Z-Wave standard. The quality and interoperability of products utilizing Z-Wave Source Code will also be enforced by a new mandatory Silicon & Stack Certification program. Full Z-Wave certification will continue to test and certify for Z-Wave S2 security, network connectivity, range, battery life, and interoperability including backwards and forwards compatibility.

"The Z-Wave Alliance is deeply committed to the global smart home market," said Mitch Klein, Executive Director of the Z-Wave Alliance. "This year the smart home conversations have focused largely on Matter. Shiny and new, and with big brands supporting the initiative, Matter is bringing a lot of attention to the smart home. This makes it easy to overlook Z-Wave as the most established, trusted, and secure smart home protocol, that also happens to have the largest certified interoperable ecosystem in the market. We firmly expect that Z-Wave will play a key role in connecting devices and delivering the experience users really want."

U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) are introducing a bill to crack down on money laundering and financing of terrorists and rogue nations [PDF] via cryptocurrency. From a report: If it becomes law, the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act will bring know-your-customer (KYC) rules to crypto participants such as wallet providers and miners and prohibit financial institutions from transacting with digital asset mixers, which are tools designed to obscure the origin of funds. The act would also allow the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to implement a proposed rule requiring institutions to report certain transactions involving unhosted wallets -- wallets where the user has complete control over the contents rather than relying on an exchange or other third party.

The literary magazine Bookforum has announced that its current issue would be its last [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], dealing a significant blow to literary journalism, which has been vastly diminished in recent years. The New York Times: "We are so proud of the contribution Bookforum has made to the literary community," the magazine said on Twitter after announcing its closure, "and are immensely grateful to the advertisers, subscribers and booksellers who made our mission possible over the years." Bookforum was one of the few remaining publications devoted to books, running a mix of reviews, essays and interviews. Among the articles it published over the years were interviews with writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Marlon James, and essays on Philip Roth and George Saunders.

So called "little" magazines -- independent and noncommercial journals, often with readership in the low four figures -- are experiencing a renaissance, with the recent launching of many new publications such as The Drift and Forever Magazine. At the same time, national legacy journals funded by corporations are struggling to stay afloat in an era of consolidation. Astra Magazine, an international magazine of literature published by Astra Publishing House, ceased publication earlier this year after two issues, while The Washington Post Magazine announced that its final issue will run at the end of December. (The Post's books section, Book World, has recently made a comeback, however.) Bookforum and its sister publication, Artforum, were acquired by Penske Media Corporation last week. Penske did not respond to questions about the decision to shutter Bookforum. David Velasco, the editor of Artforum, said that magazine would continue operations. Bookforum's website will continue to offer access to the archives for the near future, according to Kate Koza, who is the associate publisher at Artforum and Bookforum, and will stay on at Artforum.

Microsoft aims to secure internet access for 100 million more people in Africa by 2025, teaming up with a satellite provider and setting the stage for longer-term cloud adoption, its President Brad Smith said. From a report: The software maker has long pushed to bring more people online, playing the role of facilitator among telecoms and electricity providers, governments and non-profits. Since 2017, it helped widen connectivity for 50 million people, including nearly 10 million in Africa, under its so-called Airband initiative.

Now, Microsoft is tapping satellite technology for the program for the first time, aiming to reach remote areas that have had little connectivity. In news pegged to the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, Microsoft said Wednesday it is working with Viasat to expand access in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other countries globally. Smith said the effort was "building a new market for access to the internet, for the use of the cloud, for the power of AI, the ability to harness data. All of these things connect with our business."

couchslug writes: Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent. Google money removes need to compete from a management POV as they'll get paid either way but they're still leaving money on the table.

What should Mozilla do to help Firefox regain its lost market share? Not so long ago Internet Explorer was only used to download Firefox when geeks reloaded Windows machines for others. Today, Edge, however pathetic, still outranks Firefox. Were FF not arguably the best available browser for Linux, share would be even less.

Were you the king for a day what would you do to make Firefox great again? If you dropped or deprecated Firefox what shooed you off? This is not about Firefox being good or bad but about regaining casually discarded market share.

Tether said it is winding down its practice of lending out its own stablecoins to customers by next year, addressing a broad risk to the wider crypto world. From a report: In a blog post published on its website Tuesday, the company said it would reduce secured loans issued and denominated in tether to zero throughout 2023. The growth in Tether's secured-loan program was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month. With about $66 billion tether in circulation, tether is the market's largest stablecoin, a digital asset that is supposed to have a fixed value pegged to the U.S. dollar. The appeal of tether is that, unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that experience volatile price swings, one coin could be sold or redeemed for $1.

Tether isn't a household name, but it is a cornerstone to the crypto ecosystem. Traders often use tether as an easier way to buy crypto than through bank accounts or wire transfers. Stablecoin issuers take pains to demonstrate that they have ample funds available for redemptions. Cash and other safe financial instruments easily convertible into dollars make up the vast majority of the assets Tether lists in quarterly financial reports, but the company's secured-loan program has been growing. Tether can't be certain the loans will be paid back, that it could sell the loans to a buyer for dollars in a pinch or that the collateral it holds will be adequate. That could make it difficult for Tether to cover a large volume of redemptions in a crisis.

Microsoft has once again been caught allowing its legitimate digital certificates to sign malware in the wild, a lapse that allows the malicious files to pass strict security checks designed to prevent them from running on the Windows operating system. ArsTechnica: Multiple threat actors were involved in the misuse of Microsoft's digital imprimatur, which they used to give Windows and endpoint security applications the impression malicious system drivers had been certified as safe by Microsoft. That has led to speculation that there may be one or more malicious organizations selling malicious driver-signing as a service. In all, researchers have identified at least nine separate developer entities that abused the certificates in recent months.

The abuse was independently discovered by four third-party security companies, which then privately reported it to Microsoft. On Tuesday, during Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday, the company confirmed the findings and said it has determined the abuse came from several developer accounts and that no network breach has been detected. The software maker has now suspended the developer accounts and implemented blocking detections to prevent Windows from trusting the certificates used to sign the compromised certificates. "Microsoft recommends that all customers install the latest Windows updates and ensure their anti-virus and endpoint detection products are up to date with the latest signatures and are enabled to prevent these attacks," company officials wrote.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In mid-2020, FTX's chief engineer made a secret change to the cryptocurrency exchange's software. He tweaked the code to exempt Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, from a feature on the trading platform that would have automatically sold off Alameda's assets if it was losing too much borrowed money. In a note explaining the change, the engineer, Nishad Singh, emphasized that FTX should never sell Alameda's positions. "Be extra careful not to liquidate," Singh wrote in the comment in the platform's code, which it showed he helped author. Reuters reviewed the code base, which has not been previously reported.

The exemption allowed Alameda to keep borrowing funds from FTX irrespective of the value of the collateral securing those loans. That tweak in the code got the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged Bankman-Fried with fraud on Tuesday. The SEC said the tweak meant Alameda had a "virtually unlimited line of credit." Furthermore, the billions of dollars that FTX secretly lent to Alameda over the next two years didn't come from its own reserves, but rather were other FTX customers' deposits, the SEC said.

The auto-liquidation exemption written into FTX code allowed Alameda to continually increase its line of credit until it "grew to tens of billions of dollars and effectively became limitless," the SEC complaint said. It was one of two ways that Bankman-Fried diverted customer funds to Alameda. The other was a mechanism whereby FTX customers deposited over $8 billion in traditional currency into bank accounts secretly controlled by Alameda. These deposits were reflected in an internal account on FTX that was not tied to Alameda, which concealed its liability, the complaint said.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked the Biden administration to weigh in on song-lyric website Genius' attempt to revive a lawsuit over Google's alleged theft of its work. From a report: The justices are considering whether to hear ML Genius Holdings LLC's bid to overturn a U.S. appeals court's ruling that its case against Google LLC was preempted by federal copyright law. The Supreme Court often asks for the solicitor general's input on cases in which the U.S. government may have an interest.

Genius, formerly known as Rap Genius, keeps a database of song lyrics and annotations maintained by volunteers. It sued Google and its partner LyricFind in New York state court in 2019 for allegedly posting its lyric transcriptions at the top of Google search results without permission. Genius argued Google violated its terms of service by stealing its work and reposting it on Google webpages, decreasing traffic to Genius' site. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March affirmed a decision to dismiss the case, finding Genius' breach-of-contract claims were based on copyright concerns and should have been brought under copyright law.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: On Dec. 10, 2022, the relatively new cybercrime forum Breached featured a bombshell new sales thread: The user database for InfraGard, including names and contact information for tens of thousands of InfraGard members. The FBI's InfraGard program is supposed to be a vetted Who's Who of key people in private sector roles involving both cyber and physical security at companies that manage most of the nation's critical infrastructures -- including drinking water and power utilities, communications and financial services firms, transportation and manufacturing companies, healthcare providers, and nuclear energy firms. "InfraGard connects critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders with the FBI to provide education, networking, and information-sharing on security threats and risks," the FBI's InfraGard fact sheet reads.

KrebsOnSecurity contacted the seller of the InfraGard database, a Breached forum member who uses the handle "USDoD" and whose avatar is the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense. USDoD said they gained access to the FBI's InfraGard system by applying for a new account using the name, Social Security Number, date of birth and other personal details of a chief executive officer at a company that was highly likely to be granted InfraGard membership. The CEO in question -- currently the head of a major U.S. financial corporation that has a direct impact on the creditworthiness of most Americans -- did not respond to requests for comment. USDoD told KrebsOnSecurity their phony application was submitted in November in the CEO's name, and that the application included a contact email address that they controlled -- but also the CEO's real mobile phone number. "When you register they said that to be approved can take at least three months," USDoD said. "I wasn't expected to be approve[d]." But USDoD said that in early December, their email address in the name of the CEO received a reply saying the application had been approved. While the FBI's InfraGard system requires multi-factor authentication by default, users can choose between receiving a one-time code via SMS or email. "If it was only the phone I will be in [a] bad situation," USDoD said. "Because I used the person['s] phone that I'm impersonating."

USDoD said the InfraGard user data was made easily available via an Application Programming Interface (API) that is built into several key components of the website that help InfraGard members connect and communicate with each other. USDoD said after their InfraGard membership was approved, they asked a friend to code a script in Python to query that API and retrieve all available InfraGard user data. "InfraGard is a social media intelligence hub for high profile persons," USDoD said. "They even got [a] forum to discuss things." USDoD acknowledged that their $50,000 asking price for the InfraGard database may be a tad high, given that it is a fairly basic list of people who are already very security-conscious. Also, only about half of the user accounts contain an email address, and most of the other database fields -- like Social Security Number and Date of Birth -- are completely empty. [...] While the data exposed by the infiltration at InfraGard may be minimal, the user data might not have been the true end game for the intruders. USDoD said they were hoping the imposter account would last long enough for them to finish sending direct messages as the CEO to other executives using the InfraGuard messaging portal.

Tim Cook has tweeted an admission that Apple uses Sony image sensors in its iPhones as part of the CEO's supplier tour of Japan. "We've been partnering with Sony for over a decade to create the world's leading camera sensors for iPhone," Cook tweeted, and thanked Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida for showing him around the Kumamoto facility. The Verge reports: Apple largely keeps tight-lipped about the specifics of the hardware components that go into each iPhone, so outright confirming that it's used Sony camera sensors for over a decade is notable. Apple's website tends to just list the specs of each iPhone's camera -- such as resolution, aperture, and field of view -- rather than the specific components used. But hardware specifics have tended to matter less in the age of computational photography.

Tim Cook's visit to Sony's facility suggests this partnership isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and a recent report in Nikkei Asia offers some clues as to what the companies are working on for future iPhones. Sony is said to have developed a new image sensor that uses a new semiconductor architecture to capture more light and reduce both over- and underexposure. The new sensor is expected to feature in Apple's next generation of iPhones, but will also ship to other smartphone manufacturers.

Tesla has launched Steam integration inside its Model S and Model X electric cars with thousands of games now playable. Electrek reports: Today, Tesla launched Steam Beta for Model S and Model X as part of its "holiday update." We reported all the details of Tesla's holiday update earlier today for most Tesla vehicles, but the Steam integration is only for the refreshed Model S and Model X produced over the last two years. That's because Tesla's two flagship vehicles are equipped with a more powerful entertainment computer designed for video games.

With the unveiling of the new Model S and Model X, Tesla announced the new gaming computer: "Up to 10 teraflops of processing power enables in-car gaming on-par with today's newest consoles via Tesla Arcade. Wireless controller compatibility allows gaming from any seat." A known chip leaker, Patrick Schur, posted a diagram of Tesla's new gaming computer powered by the AMD Navi 23 GPU. The system is integrated and connects directly to two touchscreens inside the Model S and Model X to play games, watch entertainment, and perform other functions. Musk also revealed that the new computer has more storage space to be able to handle more games on the platform at the same time, which is going to be useful to handle your Steam library. The holiday update also brings support for Apple Music, an update to Dog Mode, improvements to Tesla's "Light Show" feature, and a bunch of smaller features/updates.