Category: News and Views

Apple Won Its Case With Epic Games. Why It Wasn’t Worth It | Inc.com

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On Friday, Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rodgers issued a highly anticipated decision in the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. With one major exception, the judge found in Apple’s favor, declaring that the company isn’t a monopoly, and ordering Epic Games–the maker of Fortnite–to pay Apple 30 percent of the revenue it generated when it implemented its own in-app payment (IAP) system in August of 2020.

Still, Judge Gonzales Rodgers had harsh words for Apple, especially about the company’s anti-steering provisions, which prohibit developers from pointing customers to other ways to pay for subscriptions or transactions. She issued an injunction that bars Apple from:

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Apple secures first states to support digital driver’s licenses, but privacy questions linger | TechCrunch

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Apple’s plan to digitize your wallet is slowly taking shape. What started with boarding passes and venue tickets later became credit cards, subway tickets, and student IDs. Next on Apple’s list to digitize are driver’s licenses and state IDs, which it plans to support in its iOS 15 update expected out later this year.

But to get there it needs help from state governments, since it’s the states that issue driver’s licenses and other forms of state identification, and every state issues IDs differently. Apple said today it has so far secured two states, Arizona and Georgia, to bring digital driver’s license and state IDs.

Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow, but a timeline for rolling out wasn’t given.

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Facebook Quietly Makes a Big Admission | WIRED

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BACK IN FEBRUARY, Facebook announced a little experiment. It would reduce the amount of political content shown to a subset of users in a few countries, including the US, and then ask them about the experience. “Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person’s appetite for it at the top of their News Feed,” Aastha Gupta, a product management director, explained in a blog post.

On Tuesday morning, the company provided an update. The survey results are in, and they suggest that users appreciate seeing political stuff less often in their feeds. Now Facebook intends to repeat the experiment in more countries and is teasing “further expansions in the coming months.” Depoliticizing people’s feeds makes sense for a company that is perpetually in hot water for its alleged impact on politics. The move, after all, was first announced just a month after Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, an episode that some people, including elected officials, sought to blame Facebook for. The change could end up having major ripple effects for political groups and media organizations that have gotten used to relying on Facebook for distribution.

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Cars have been guzzling leaded gasoline for 99 years. Not any more | CNN

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Nearly a century of leaded gasoline use on roads around the world has come to an end, the UN Environment Programme announced Monday, after Algerian service stations stopped selling the fuel last month.

Leaded gasoline — which contains the compound tetraethyllead and is linked to serious health problems — was first patented for use in 1922, allowing cars to use higher compression ratios, making them more powerful. By the 1970s, it was present in almost all gasoline worldwide.

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Afghanistan: US orders civilian jets to join evacuation | BBC News

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Commercial planes will be used to help with the evacuation of people from Afghanistan, the US says.

Eighteen aircraft will transfer people to third countries from safe sites outside Afghanistan, the Pentagon said.

Many thousands of Afghans are crowded outside Kabul airport, desperate to flee the country after the Taliban swept to power on 15 August.

President Joe Biden said on Sunday that the US had evacuated nearly 28,000 people in the past week.

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Ample raises $160M to scale its battery swapping service | TechCrunch

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San Francisco-based Ample has raised a $160 million Series C to scale its battery swapping service, the largest round yet for the 8-year-old startup that wants to completely rethink how we use electric vehicles.

Ample’s approach is relatively straightforward: Cars equipped with the company’s modular battery pack can drive into one of Ample’s automated charging pod locations and swap out their depleted batteries for ones that are fully charged. The swapped-out batteries are then recharged in the pod and ready to be reinserted into another vehicle.

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The T-Mobile Data Breach Is One You Can’t Ignore | WIRED

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NOT ALL DATA breaches are created equal. None of them are good, but they do come in varying degrees of bad. And given how regularly they happen, it’s understandable that you may have become inured to the news. Still, a T-Mobile breach that hackers claim involved the data of 100 million people deserves your attention, especially if you’re a customer of the “un-carrier.”

As first reported by Motherboard on Sunday, someone on the dark web claims to have obtained the data of 100 million from T-Mobile’s servers and is selling a portion of it on an underground forum for 6 bitcoin, about $280,000. The trove includes not only names, phone numbers, and physical addresses but also more sensitive data like social security numbers, driver’s license information, and IMEI numbers, unique identifiers tied to each mobile device. Motherboard confirmed that samples of the data “contained accurate information on T-Mobile customers.”

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T-Mobile is investigating a reported data breach. It sounds real bad. | Mashable

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T-Mobile customers may want to brace for some bad news.

The mobile service provider is investigating a reported data breach that may have exposed the private info of more than 100 million people. The would-be perpetrator is apparently trying to sell off a portion of the data, Vice noted in a Sunday report.

The site spoke with the anonymous author of a forum post offering up roughly one-third of the T-Mobile USA customer data in exchange for 6 bitcoins (worth a bit less than $280,000 as of Aug. 15). While it could all be BS, Vice was able to look at samples of the data and confirm that the seller has “accurate information on T-Mobile customers.”

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The new $2.6 million Lamborghini Countach is a hybrid – CNN

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Lamborghini has unveiled a brand new $2.6 million supercar with a very familiar name: the Countach.

The original Lamborghini Countach, unveiled as a concept car at the Geneva Motor Show in 1971, made the Italian automaker world famous. The new Countach, unveiled at an event during Monterey Car Week in California Friday, celebrates the 50th anniversary of that debut.

In many regards, the new Countach is a direct descendent of the original. It has a V12 engine, directly behind the two seats. And, like every Lamborghini sports car since the Countach, it’s shaped like a low-profile wedge.

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