I'd say "governments" instead of "countries", given that it is only those in power who see an enemy in everyone allowing conversations they cannot read and/or manipulate. Whether this means "Telegram has no backdoors", I would not be certain of that, as Telegram is still a centralized, for-profit service, the owner of which may just sell the data to whoever pays the most, without the users being able to notice.

They probably did not contribute a positive return on investment for the next quarterly budget, and probably had not laid out a business plan yet how to make a profit margin at least as high as Google's advertisement and data broker business. Also, somebody noticed that robots and AI agents contain no folded proteins, so their work was of no future relevance anyway. Such disappointment!

The phrase "vetted researchers at credible institutions" rings all kinds of alarm clocks.
If a government wants transparency about some commercial activity, there are many examples of existing specific reporting or auditing obligations that have been created over centuries. And making data resulting from such reporting/auditing public, via some sort of "freedom of information" act, is also just fine.
But having some "vetted researchers" appointed who decide what they want to look for and what they want to find sounds like the opposite of a dependable, democratically legitimated setting of rules for commercial operations.

... blocks, which will just make the response claim "no no, this is not really author X style", while the generated text will likely not much different than before such part of the system prompt existed.

If "AI" is used "successfully" to make a large part of previously well-off humans unemployed, then it will not matter whether Apple invested into "AI" or not, because their former customer base will have no money to buy their products. Apple is not prepared for a future where humans as customers do not matter anymore - unlike some of the companies now gambling Trillions on data-centers.

... have a look at this entertaining video showing comparisons of such pictures with the reality of products sold with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (Corridor Crew).

Given that Space-X no longer accepts reservations for future Falcon 9 flights, they kind of met that latter goal... the same way how many companies meet the goal of "their current product being their best product" by discontinuing previous products.

I guess they mean some insurers are willing to (financially) insure an installation of their device now that they got certified.
But yes, such does not mean at all their devices can be operated at a profit - it is still possible that the amount of maintenance required makes the energy harvested too expensive for the market.

I have a good idea how that conversation between Microslop and LG went:
"MS: Hey, by suddenly showing Ads you exposed the back-door we built for our vendor's club! Don't do that!"
"LG: Sorry, our bad, our marketing department didn't know the back-door was only meant for spying on the users and sending their data to our servers. We promise to not be caught next time!"
"MS: All good. But don't forget the the user's data is ours to sell, so only looking, no selling, understood?"

I wonder who was interested enough in finding that vessel to finance the search after so many years. Would be easier to understand for something like MH370, where there's a lot of mystery around the cause, but I understand the cause of the crash for this PanAm flight was already well known.

The fear of being attacked by sharks is pretty irrational. Scuba divers who want to see sharks need to invest a lot of time and effort to get to see some at all, as they are neither abundant nor generally eager to come near to humans in the water. Drowning inside a sinking aircraft most certainly is not a better option than floating outside of it, for whatever period of time the coldness of the water makes this survivable.

Well, it is a status symbol, symbolizing a pitiful status.

Corporations installing backdoors on their customers computers has been going on for decades, and apparently they pay enough lobbying money to never be significantly punished for such crimes. Remember Sony doing this since at least 2005?

Yes, and "the vendor's choice", in the case of Microslop, will be to require an "always online" system that will not run the game you "bought" unless their servers are in the mood to respond and allow it.

It seems odd to me to think of a browser like Firefox as a memory or CPU frugal option to do anything - so far my experience was the opposite.
Also, adding yet another large piece of attack surface by introducing PDF merging features sounds like something one should rather avoid in a software exposed to the Internet.