An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2023 Internet Crime Report (PDF), which recorded a 22% increase in reported losses compared to 2022, amounting to a record of $12.5 billion. The number of relevant complaints submitted to the FBI in 2023 reached 880,000, 10% higher than the previous year, with the age group topping the report being people over 60, which shows how vulnerable older adults are to cybercrime. Both figures continue a worrying trend seen by the agency since 2019, where complaints and losses rise yearly. For 2023, the types of crimes that increased were tech support scams and extortion, whereas phishing, personal data breach, and non-payment/non-delivery scams slightly waned.

Epic Games, in a blog post: We recently announced that Apple approved our Epic Games Sweden AB developer account. We intended to use that account to bring the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to iOS devices in Europe thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). To our surprise, Apple has terminated that account and now we cannot develop the Epic Games Store for iOS. This is a serious violation of the DMA and shows Apple has no intention of allowing true competition on iOS devices.

The DMA requires Apple to allow third-party app stores, like the Epic Games Store. Article 6(4) of the DMA says: "The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper."

In terminating Epic's developer account, Apple is taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store. They are undermining our ability to be a viable competitor and they are showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices. If Apple maintains its power to kick a third party marketplace off iOS at its sole discretion, no reasonable developer would be willing to utilize a third party app store, because they could be permanently separated from their audience at any time. Apple said one of the reasons it terminated Epic's developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because the Fortnite-maker publicly criticized its proposed DMA compliance plan, Epic said.

Piracy was traditionally seen as something that predominantly young males were interested in. This is a largely outdated representation of reality, as girls and women began to catch up a long time ago. In some countries, including Indonesia, more women pirate music, movies, and TV-shows than their male counterparts. TorrentFreak reports: [N]ew findings published by researchers from Northumbria University Newcastle, which include gender, are worth highlighting. The survey data, looking at piracy trends in Thailand and Indonesia, was released by Marketing professor Dr. Xuemei Bian and Ms. Humaira Farid. The results were presented to WIPO's Advisory Committee on Enforcement recently and the associated presentation (PDF) was published online. Through an online survey and in-person interviews, the research aims to map consumer attitudes and behaviors in Indonesia and Thailand, particularly in connection with online copyright infringement.

One of the overall conclusions is that piracy remains a common activity in both Asian countries. Pirates are present in all age groups but and music, movies en TV-shows tend to be in highest demand and younger people. Those under 40, are more likely to pirate than their older counterparts. These findings are not out of the ordinary and the same trends are visible in other countries too. Interestingly, however, some notable differences between the two countries appear when gender is added to the mix. The tables below show that women are more likely to pirate than men in Indonesia. This is true for all content categories, except for software, where men are slightly in the lead. In Thailand, however, men are more likely to pirate across all categories. The researchers do not attempt to explain these differences. However, they show once again that 'dated' gender stereotypes don't always match with reality. And when they have little explanatory value, one can question whether gender is even relevant in a piracy context.

Looking at other differences between Thai and Indonesian consumers there are some other notable findings. For example, in Indonesia, 64% of the respondents say they're aware of the availability of pirated movies and TV-shows on YouTube, compared to 'just' 32% in Thailand. Indonesian consumers are also more familiar with music piracy sites and pirate much more frequently than Thai consumers, as the table below shows. Finally, the researchers also looked at various attitudes toward piracy. This shows that Thai pirates would be most likely to stop if legal services were more convenient, while Indonesian pirates see cheaper legal services as the largest discouraging factor.

An upcoming April release of Copilot for OneDrive will be able to find, summarize, and extract information from a wide range of files, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, HTML pages and PDF files. "Users can ask Copilot to tailor summaries to their liking, such as only including key points or highlights from a specific section," reports The Verge. From the report: The chatbot will also be able to respond to natural language prompts and answer highly specific questions about the contents of a user's files. Some examples given by Microsoft included asking Copilot to tabulate a week's worth of beverage sales and throw the data in a table view by day. Or, asking it to list the pros and cons of a project, or display the most recent or relevant files. Users can even ask Copilot for advice on how to make their documents better. Copilot on OneDrive will also be able to create outlines, tables, and lists for users, based on existing files. A few examples given were:

- Using the /sales-enablement.docx as reference, create an outline of a sales pitch to a new customer.
- For these selected resumes, create a table with names, current title, years of experience, educational qualifications, and current location.
- Create a list of frequently asked questions about project Moonshot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: For 20 years, a loosely organized group of Wikipedia editors toiled away curating a collection of 15,000 articles on a single subject: the roads and highways of the United States. Despite minor disagreements, the US Roads Project mostly worked in harmony, but recently, a long-simmering debate over the website's rules drove this community to the brink. Efforts at compromise fell apart. There was a schism, and in the fall of 2023, the editors packed up their articles and moved over to a website dedicated to roads and roads alone. It's called AARoads, a promised land where the editors hope, at last, that they can find peace. "Roads are a background piece. People drive on them every day, but they don't give them much attention," said editor Michael Gronseth, who goes by Imzadi1979 on Wikipedia, where he dedicated his work to Michigan highways, specifically. But a road has so much to offer if you look beyond the asphalt. It's the nexus of history, geography, travel, and government, a seemingly perfect subject for the hyper-fixations of Wikipedia. "But there was a shift about a year ago," Gronseth said. "More editors started telling us that what we're doing isn't important enough, and we should go work on more significant topics." [...]

The Roads Project had a number of adversaries, but the chief rival is a group known as the New Page Patrol, or the NPP for short. The NPP has a singular mission. When a new page goes up on Wikipedia, it gets reviewed by the NPP. The Patrol has special editing privileges and if a new article doesn't meet the website's standards, the NPP takes it down. "There's a faction of people who feel that basically anything is valid to be published on Wikipedia. They say, 'Hey, just throw it out there! Anything goes.' That's not where I come down." said Bil Zeleny, a former member of the NPP who goes by onel5969 on Wikipedia, a reference to the unusual spelling of his first name. At his peak, Zeleny said he was reviewing upwards of 100,000 articles a year, and he rejected a lot of articles about roads during his time. After years of frustration, Zeleny felt he was seeing too many new road articles that weren't following the rules -- entire articles that cited nothing other than Google Maps, he said. Enough was enough. Zeleny decided it was time to bring the subject to the council.

Zeleny brought up the problem on the NPP discussion forum, sparking months of heated debate. Eventually, the issue became so serious that some editors proposed an official policy change on the use of maps as a source. Rule changes require a process called "Request for Comment," where everyone is invited to share their thoughts on the issue. Over the course of a month, Wikipedia users had written more than 56,000 words on the subject. For reference, that's about twice as long as Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea. In the end, the roads project was successful. The vote was decisive, and Wikipedia updated its "No Original Research" policy to clarify that it's ok to cite maps and other visual sources. But this, ultimately, was a victory with no winners. "Some of us felt attacked," Gronseth said. On the US Roads Project's Discord channel, a different debate was brewing. The website didn't feel safe anymore. What would happen at the next request for comment? The community decided it was time to fork. "We don't want our articles deleted. It didn't feel like we had a choice," he said.

The Wikipedia platform is designed for interoperability. If you want to start your own Wiki, you can split off and take your Wikipedia work with you, a process known as "forking." [...] Over the course of several months, the US Roads Project did the same. Leaving Wikipedia was painful, but the fight that drove the roads editors away was just as difficult for people on the other side. Some editors embroiled in the roads fights deleted their accounts, though none of these ex-Wikipedian's responded to Gizmodo's requests for comment. Bil Zeleny was among the casualties. After almost six years of hard work on the New Post Patrol, he reached the breaking point. The controversy had pushed him too far, and Zeleny resigned from the NPP. [...] AARoads actually predates Wikipedia, tracing its origins all the way back to the prehistoric internet days of the year 2000, complete with articles, maps, forums, and a collection of over 10,000 photos of highway signs and markers. When the US Roads Project needed a new home, AARoads was happy to oblige. It's a beautiful resource. It even has backlinks to relevant non-roads articles on the regular Wikipedia. But for some, it isn't home. "There are members who disagree with me, but my ultimate goal is to fork back," said Gronseth. "We made our articles license-compatible, so they can be exported back to Wikipedia someday if that becomes an option. I don't want to stay separate. I want to be part of the Wikipedia community. But we don't know where things will land, and for now, we've struck out on our own."

Stack Overflow has launched an API that will require all AI models trained on its coding question-and-answer content to attribute sources linking back to its posts. And it will cost money to use the site's content. From a report: "All products based on models that consume public Stack Overflow data are required to provide attribution back to the highest relevance posts that influenced the summary given by the model," it confirmed in a statement. The Overflow API is designed to act as a knowledge database to help developers build more accurate and helpful code-generation models. Google announced it was using the service to access relevant information from Stack Overflow via the API and integrate the data with its latest Gemini models, and for its cloud storage console.

Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports via The Guardian: NSO Group, the maker of one the world's most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company's ongoing litigation. The decision by Judge Phyllis Hamilton is a major legal victory for WhatsApp, the Meta-owned communication app which has been embroiled in a lawsuit against NSO since 2019, when it alleged that the Israeli company's spyware had been used against 1,400 WhatsApp users over a two-week period.

NSO's Pegasus code, and code for other surveillance products it sells, is seen as a closely and highly sought state secret. NSO is closely regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, which must review and approve the sale of all licences to foreign governments. In reaching her decision, Hamilton considered a plea by NSO to excuse it of all its discovery obligations in the case due to "various US and Israeli restrictions."

Ultimately, however, she sided with WhatsApp in ordering the company to produce"all relevant spyware" for a period of one year before and after the two weeks in which WhatsApp users were allegedly attacked: from 29 April 2018 to 10 May 2020. NSO must also give WhatsApp information "concerning the full functionality of the relevant spyware." Hamilton did, however, decide in NSO's favor on a different matter: the company will not be forced at this time to divulge the names of its clients or information regarding its server architecture.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The FBI and partners from 10 other countries are urging owners of Ubiquiti EdgeRouters to check their gear for signs they've been hacked and are being used to conceal ongoing malicious operations by Russian state hackers. The Ubiquiti EdgeRouters make an ideal hideout for hackers. The inexpensive gear, used in homes and small offices, runs a version of Linux that can host malware that surreptitiously runs behind the scenes. The hackers then use the routers to conduct their malicious activities. Rather than using infrastructure and IP addresses that are known to be hostile, the connections come from benign-appearing devices hosted by addresses with trustworthy reputations, allowing them to receive a green light from security defenses.

"In summary, with root access to compromised Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, APT28 actors have unfettered access to Linux-based operating systems to install tooling and to obfuscate their identity while conducting malicious campaigns," FBI officials wrote in an advisory Tuesday. APT28 -- one of the names used to track a group backed by the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate known as GRU -- has been doing just for at least the past four years, the FBI has alleged. Earlier this month, the FBI revealed that it had quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses. The operation, which received prior court authorization, went on to add firewall rules that would prevent APT28 -- also tracked under names including Sofacy Group, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, and Sednit -- from being able to regain control of the devices.

On Tuesday, FBI officials noted that the operation only removed the malware used by APT28 and temporarily blocked the group using its infrastructure from reinfecting them. The move did nothing to patch any vulnerabilities in the routers or to remove weak or default credentials hackers could exploit to once again use the devices to surreptitiously host their malware. "The US Department of Justice, including the FBI, and international partners recently disrupted a GRU botnet consisting of such routers," they warned. "However, owners of relevant devices should take the remedial actions described below to ensure the long-term success of the disruption effort and to identify and remediate any similar compromises."

Those actions include:

- Perform a hardware factory reset to remove all malicious files
- Upgrade to the latest firmware version
- Change any default usernames and passwords
- Implement firewall rules to restrict outside access to remote management services

Switzerland is advocating for a United Nations expert group to explore the merits of solar geoengineering. The proposal seeks to ensure multilateral oversight of solar radiation modification (SRM) research, amidst concerns over its potential implications for food supply, biodiversity, and global inequalities. The Guardian reports: The Swiss proposal, submitted to the United Nations environment assembly that begins next week in Nairobi, focuses on solar radiation modification (SRM). This is a technique that aims to mimic the effect of a large volcanic eruption by filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide particles that reflect part of the sun's heat and light back into space. Supporters of the proposal, including the United Nations environment program (UNEP), argue that research is necessary to ensure multilateral oversight of emerging planet-altering technologies, which might otherwise be developed and tested in isolation by powerful governments or billionaire individuals.

Critics, however, argue that such a discussion would threaten the current de-facto ban on geoengineering, and lead down a "slippery slope" towards legitimization, mainstreaming and eventual deployment. Felix Wertli, the Swiss ambassador for the environment, said his country's goal in submitting the proposal was to ensure all governments and relevant stakeholders "are informed about SRM technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects." He said the intention was not to promote or enable solar geoengineering but to inform governments, especially those in developing countries, about what is happening.

The executive director of the UNEP, Inger Andersen, stressed the importance of "a global conversation on SRM" in her opening address to delegates at a preliminary gathering in Nairobi. She and her colleagues emphasized the move was a precautionary one rather than an endorsement of the technology.

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.
The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."

An anonymous reader shared this report from PCWorld: The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, better known as SPEC, has invalidated over 2600 of its own results testing Xeon processors in the 2022 and 2023 version of its popular industrial SPEC CPU 2017 test. After investigating, SPEC found that Intel had used compilers that were, quote, "performing a compilation that specifically improves the performance of the 523.xalancbmk_r / 623.xalancbmk_s benchmarks using a priori knowledge of the SPEC code and dataset to perform a transformation that has narrow applicability."

In layman's terms, SPEC is accusing Intel of optimizing the compiler specifically for its benchmark, which means the results weren't indicative of how end users could expect to see performance in the real world. Intel's custom compiler might have been inflating the relevant results of the SPEC test by up to 9%...

Slightly newer versions of the compilers used in the latest industrial Xeon processors, the 5th-gen Emerald Rapids series, do not use these allegedly performance-enhancing APIs. I'll point out that both the Xeon processors and the SPEC 2017 test are some high-level hardware meant for "big iron" industrial and educational applications, and aren't especially relevant for the consumer market we typically cover.
More info at ServeTheHome, Phoronix, and Tom's Hardware.

Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. From a report: You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and all you need is an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM. I've been briefly testing out Chat with RTX over the past day, and although the app is a little rough around the edges, I can already see this being a valuable part of data research for journalists or anyone who needs to analyze a collection of documents. Chat with RTX can handle YouTube videos, so you simply input a URL, and it lets you search transcripts for specific mentions or summarize an entire video.

Amazon Prime Video has cut Dolby Vision and Atmos support from their ad tier subscription. "That's on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th," reports The Verge. "Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well." The Verge reports: That's the word from 4KFilme, which discovered that their smart TVs from Sony, LG, and Samsung were now displaying content in HDR10 with Dolby Digital 5.1 as opposed to the higher fidelity options they'd enjoyed previously. Amazon spokesperson Katie Barker confirms to The Verge that it's a deliberate move: "Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos capabilities are only available on the ad free option, on relevant titles."

While price hikes are no longer remotely unusual in the streaming video space, where Netflix now charges $22.99 a month for its 4K tier, it's a bit harder to compare Amazon's prices to Netflix. Prime Video is also available as an $8.99-per-month standalone subscription; if you subscribe that way and add $2.99 per month, it's more like a 28 percent price hike. If you prefer ads, Prime Video's $8.99-per-month is a dollar less than Disney Plus with ads at $9.99 per month, though Netflix currently offers its 1080p service with ads at $6.99 per month.

Minesto, a marine energy tech developer based in Sweden, has deployed their new Dragon 12 tidal energy harvester to the Faroe Islands. Operating like an underwater kite, the Dragon 12 "uses lift generated by tidal flows to fly patterns faster than the currents, harvesting renewable energy," reports New Atlas. From the report: Where devices like Orbital's O2 tidal turbine more or less just sit there in the water harvesting energy from tidal currents, Minesto's Dragon series are anchored to the sea bed, and fly around like kites, treating the currents like wind. Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs -- and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting.

These are by no means small kites -- the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether. As with any renewable energy project, the key figure here is LCoE (levelized cost of energy) -- so what's it gonna cost? Well, back in 2017, Minesto projected about US$108/MWh once its first hundred megawatts of capacity are installed -- with costs falling thereafter as low as $54/MWh.

The Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more effective in some places than others -- and Denmark's Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the chilly North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to about 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands funnel tidal currents through a number of slim channels. This accelerates the water significantly, and thus increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon has been deployed, and on Friday, it was connected to the local power grid to begin delivering energy. You can watch a video of the Dragon 12 on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down its Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23, Meta announced the release of its Facebook Graph API v19.0, which included the news that the company would be deprecating its existing Facebook Groups API. The latter, which is used by developers and businesses to schedule posts to Facebook Groups, will be removed within 90 days, Meta said. This includes all the Permissions and Reviewable Features associated with the API, it also noted.

Meta explained that a major use case for the API was a feature that allowed developers to privately reply in Facebook Groups. For example, a small business that wanted to send a single message to a person who posted on their Facebook Group or who had commented in the group could be messaged through the API. However, Meta said that another change in the new v19.0 API would enable this feature, without the need for the Groups API. But developers told TechCrunch that the shutdown of the API would cause problems for companies that offer solutions to customers who want to schedule and automate their social media posts. [...]

What's more, developers tell us that Meta's motivation behind the API's shutdown is unclear. On the one hand, it could be that Facebook Groups don't generate ad revenue and the shutdown of the API will leave developers without a workaround. But Meta hasn't clarified if that's the case. Instead, Meta's blog post only mentioned one use case that would be addressed through the new v.19.0 API. [...] On Meta's forum for developers, one developer says they're "pretty shocked" by the company's announcement, noting their app relies on the Groups API and will essentially no longer work when the shutdown occurs. Others are frustrated that Meta hasn't clearly explained if posting on Groups will be done with a Page Access token going forward, as the way the announcement is worded it seems that part is only relevant for those posting private replies, not posting to the group as a whole. [...] the whole thing could just be some messaging mistake -- like Meta perhaps forgot to include the part where it was going to note what its new solution would be. There is concern, however, that Meta is deprioritizing developers' interests having recently shut down its developer bug portal as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Europe's aviation safety body is working with the airline industry to counter a danger posed by interference with GPS signals -- now seen as a growing threat to the safety of air travel. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) held a recent workshop on incidents where people spoofed and jammed satellite navigation systems, and concluded these pose a "significant challenge" to safety. Mitigating the risks posed by such actions will require measures to be enacted in the short term as well as medium and long term timescales, the two bodies said. They want to start by sharing information about the incidents and any potential remedies.

In Europe, this information sharing will occur through the European Occurrence Reporting scheme and EASA's Data4Safety program. Given the global nature of the problem, a broader solution would be better, but this would have to be pursued at a later date, EASA said. Inevitably, another of the measures involves retaining traditional navigation aids to ensure there is a conventional backup for GNSS navigation, while a third calls for guidance from aircraft manufacturers to airlines and other aircraft operators to ensure they know how to manage jamming and spoofing situations. As a further measure, EASA said it will inform all relevant stakeholders, which includes airlines, air navigation service providers, airports and the air industry, about recorded incidents.

Interference with global navigation systems can take one of two forms: jamming requires nothing more than transmitting a radio signal strong enough to drown out those from GPS satellites, while spoofing is more insidious and involves transmitting fake signals that fool the receiver into calculating its position incorrectly. According to EASA, jamming and spoofing incidents have increasingly threatened the integrity of location services across Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years. [...] The IATA said that coordinated action is needed, including sharing of safety data and a commitment from nations to retain traditional navigation systems as backup.

Netflix is on everything. It's on your phone, computer, and game console, going all the way back to the Nintendo Wii. Hell, you can get your Netflix fix on a Peloton. One place where Netflix won't be is Apple's upcoming Vision Pro VR headset. Why isn't Netflix planning an app for what is Apple's big $3,500 gamble on the future of augmented reality? According to co-CEO Greg Peters, it's because the company doesn't know if anybody's actually going to use it. Gizmodo: More specifically, he called the device "subscale," adding that he didn't know if it would be "relevant to most of our members." That was in an interview with business analyst Ben Thompson, where Peters implied his company is being far more selective, at least when it comes to Apple's $3,500 "spatial computer."

"We have to be careful about making sure that we're not investing in places that are not really yielding a return, and I would say we'll see where things go with Vision Pro," the Netflix co-CEO said. The interview dropped barely a day after Peters got done extolling how the company gained more than 13 million new subscribers in the last three months of 2023 while also mentioning potentially increasing subscription prices. Other common apps like Spotify and YouTube also don't plan to have a Vision Pro-specific app at launch, instead directing people to log on through their Safari browser. Peters added that they still want to work with Apple, and "sometimes we find a great space of overlap. We can move very, very quickly. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer." The investment Netflix is talking about is not unchecking a box to enable the iPad app on the Vision Pro.

Apple's longest-running product is an increasingly small part of the company's business. And yet, it's never been more successful. Jason Snell, writing for The Verge: Twenty years ago, on the Mac's 20th anniversary, I asked Steve Jobs if the Mac would still be relevant to Apple in the age of the iPod. He scoffed at the prospect of the Mac not being important: "of course" it would be. Yet, 10 years later, Apple's revenue was increasingly dominated by the iPhone, and the recent success of the new iPad had provided another banner product for the company. When I interviewed Apple exec Phil Schiller for the Mac's 30th anniversary, I found myself asking him about the Mac's relevance, too. He also scoffed: "Our view is, the Mac keeps going forever," he said.

Today marks 40 years since Jobs unveiled the original Macintosh at an event in Cupertino, and it once again feels right to ask what's next for the Mac. Next week, Apple will release financial results that will reinforce that Mac sales are among the best they've been in the product's history. Then, a day later, Apple will release a new device, the Vision Pro, that will join the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in an ever-expanding lineup of which the Mac is only one small part. As the Mac turns 40, it's never been more successful -- or more irrelevant to Apple's bottom line. It's undergone massive changes in the past few years that ensure its survival but also lash it to a hardware design process dominated by the iPhone. Being middle-aged can be complicated.

Mac users -- and I've been one of them for 34 of those 40 years -- have been on the defensive for most of the platform's existence. The original Mac cost $2,495 (equivalent to more than $7,300 today), and it had to compete with Apple's own Apple II series, which was more affordable and wildly successful. The Mac was far from a sure thing, even at Apple: in the years after the Mac was first introduced, Apple released multiple new Apple II models. (One even had a mouse and ran a version of the Mac's Finder file manager.) It took a long time for the Mac to emerge from the Apple II's shadow. And as revolutionary as the Mac's interface was -- it was the first popular personal computer to have a mouse-driven, menu-oriented user interface rather than a simple command line -- it also had to overcome an enormous amount of resistance for being such an outlier. Once Microsoft truly embraced the Mac's interface style with Windows, it took over the world, leaving the Mac with measly market share and diminishing prospects. Further reading:
Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules.
Greg Joswiak on the Mac's Enduring Appeal.
Mac at 40: The Eras Tour.
40 Years Later, the Original Mac is More Amazing Than Ever.
The Birth of the Mac: Rolling Stone's 1984 Feature on Steve Jobs and His Whiz Kids (March 1, 1984).

To comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Meta is rolling out changes to give users in Europe the ability to unlink their Facebook, Messenger and Instagram accounts. Neowin reports: One key choice users will have is how information is shared between Facebook and Instagram. Instagram and Facebook users will be able to choose whether or not they want information shared between the apps. Those who currently have connected Instagram and Facebook accounts can opt to keep sharing data between the apps or separate their accounts. Furthermore, Messenger is getting a standalone option. Users can continue using Messenger with their Facebook account or create a new account completely independent of Facebook. This new Messenger account will still offer core features like messaging, chat, and voice/video calls, but without Facebook.

For Facebook Marketplace, the options will be a personalized marketplace experience that taps into Facebook profiles or an anonymized experience where buyers and sellers only communicate via email instead of Messenger. For gamers, Meta offers a similar choice to Facebook Gaming. Users can keep their Facebook info linked for access to features like multiplayer, in-game purchases, and personalized recommendations. Alternatively, they can opt for a Facebook-free gaming experience. Finally, an option introduced in November 2023 remains relevant -- European users can choose to pay a subscription to Facebook and Instagram ad-free. It ensures that their information is not used for targeted advertising.

Entrepreneur Daniel Gross speculates about the wide-ranging economic, technological, geopolitical, and societal implications if advanced AI systems become extremely capable at many different tasks. He poses open-ended questions across areas like markets, real estate, energy, nations, inflation, and geopolitics regarding what the impacts could be, what trends may emerge, what historical parallels could exist, and what investments or trades might make sense in such a hypothetical future scenario. From the post: Nations: Who wins and loses?
$250b of India's GDP exports are essentially GPT-4 tokens... what happens now?
Are there any relevant analogies from history we can compare to?
What is the euclidean distance of reskilling in prior revolutions, and how does AGI compare? The typist became an EA, can the software engineer become a machinist?
Electrification and assembly lines lead to high unemployment and the New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration, a federal project that employed 8.5m Americans with a tremendous budget... does that repeat?