Apple announced on Friday that it's once again updated its rules about how Dutch dating apps can use third-party payment systems, after the company had "productive conversations with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM)." From a report: The updated rules give developers more flexibility about which payment systems they use, change the language users see when they go to pay, and remove other restrictions that the previous rules put in place. While the rules aren't wide-reaching (again, they only apply to Dutch dating apps), they do show what Apple's willing to do to comply with government regulation -- which it could be facing a lot more of as the EU and US gear up to fight tech monopolies, and potentially even force the company to ditch the iPhone's Lightning port.

In December the ACM announced a ruling that Apple had to let dating apps use payment services besides the one built into iOS, after the regulator received a complaint from Match Group, the company behind dating services like Tinder, Match.com, and OkCupid. Since then, Apple has proposed a variety of solutions for complying with the order, which the regulator has said aren't good enough. In May, the ACM said that Apple's most recent rules, the ones prior to the Friday update, were improvements over its past ideas, but that they still didn't comply with Dutch and European laws. There's been increasing pressure for Apple to comply: even while the company works on changes, it's been racking up tens of millions of Euros in fines.

The UK is facing an exodus of star scientists, with at least 16 recipients of prestigious European grants making plans to move their labs abroad as the UK remains frozen out of the EU's flagship science programme. From a report: Britain's participation in Horizon Europe has been caught in the crosshairs of the dispute over Brexit in Northern Ireland, meaning that 143 UK-based recipients of European Research Council fellowships this week faced a deadline of either relinquishing their grant or transferring it to an institute in an eligible country. The UK government has promised to underwrite the funding, totalling about 250m pound ($307m), but a growing number of scientists appear likely to reject the offer and instead relocate, along with entire teams of researchers.

The ERC said 16 academics had recently informed it that they intend to move their lab abroad or are in negotiations about doing so. These researchers, and some others, have been given an extension before their grants are terminated. Moritz Treeck, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is due to receive $2.1m over five years from the ERC to study the malaria pathogen, is among those contemplating a move. He said a major downside of the UK offer was the lack of flexibility about moving the funding internationally.

In 2019, Ars Technica reported on a new advanced ignition system from Transient Plasma Systems that replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle's engine with an ignition module that uses very short duration pulses of plasma to ignite the fuel/air mixture within the cylinder. Now, about three years later, the system is "almost ready for production after validation testing has confirmed its potential to increase fuel efficiency by up to 20 percent when fitted to an existing engine." From the report: TPS's plasma ignition system is designed to drop into existing cars with very little modification. An ignition module replaces the regular spark plugs, and there's a power module to control it, but otherwise the only other modifications are in software, as the engine requires remapping to take advantage of the new technology. "A lot of the OEMs we've been working with are freezing their engine designs, they're saying, 'No more new engine block, we might change some parts out, but we're freezing the design.' So it has to basically just drop into the holes that already exist, which this technology does," [said Dan Singleton, founder and CEO of TPS]. [...]

The final stage of testing for TPS's system is to prove its durability, but Singleton expects this won't be a problem. "The technology uses all solid-state, high-voltage switches -- these are switches that are used in applications where they're run for millions and millions of shots. If you just did an analysis of the parts, you would say no problem, right? The testing that still needs to be done is, once you've put it into a package where it's going to go to altitude and extreme heat, extreme cold, you just have to do some design validation and tweaking," he said. [...]

As for when we might see the first cars fitted with plasma ignition on the road, Singleton was optimistic. "We are currently in discussions with a couple of Tier 1s and OEMs that are interested in acquiring the technology or working with us to take this to market. The most aggressive timeline that one of those companies has told us is that they could get it to market in 18 months from the start of a deal. That's aggressive. And typically it takes longer in automotive to do testing, but if they say they can do it, this is their world, not mine. So 18 months, I would say, from the start of a partnership," Singleton said. Why develop a new internal combustion engine technology when we're going all in on electric vehicles? Here's what Singleton told Ars: "[W]e do think that the future is going to be EVs. But the question is, what do we do while we're ramping up? And I think if you look at the data, it's pretty compelling that the best thing you can do is to start getting CO2 emissions down now. So that's really where we see this fitting in is if you put this technology to market immediately. That's what our data shows is that there's immediate, meaningful CO2 reductions."

Ars also notes that "it's going to be many years before countries like the US stop selling new internal combustion-powered vehicles and longer still until they're no longer allowed on our roads."

The European Parliament on Wednesday threw its weight behind a proposed ban on selling new cars with combustion engines in 2035, seeking to step up the fight against climate change through the faster development of electric vehicles. The Associated Press reports: The European Union assembly voted in Strasbourg, France, to require automakers to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 100% by the middle of the next decade. The mandate would amount to a prohibition on the sale in the 27-nation bloc of new cars powered by gasoline or diesel. EU lawmakers also endorsed a 55% reduction in CO2 from automobiles in 2030 compared with 2021. The move deepens an existing obligation on the car industry to lower CO2 discharges by 37.5% on average at the end of the decade compared to last year.

Environmentalists hailed the parliament's decisions. Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based alliance, said the vote offered "a fighting chance of averting runaway climate change." But Germany's auto industry lobby group VDA criticized the vote, saying it ignored the lack of charging infrastructure in Europe. The group also said the vote was "a decision against innovation and technology" a reference to demands from the industry that synthetic fuels be exempt from the ban, which European lawmakers rejected. If approved by EU nations, the 2035 deadline will be particularly tough on German automakers, who have focused on powerful and expensive vehicles with combustion engines while falling behind foreign rivals when it comes to electric cars.

The UK government says it is not "currently considering" copying European Union plans for a common charging cable. From a report: The EU has provisionally agreed all new portable electronic devices must, by autumn 2024, use a USB Type-C charger, a move it says will benefit consumers. Critics say it will stifle innovation. Under the current post-Brexit arrangements, the regulation would apply to Northern Ireland, according to EU and UK officials. According to the a December 2021 parliamentary report, the "new requirements may also apply to devices sold in Northern Ireland under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit agreement, potentially triggering divergence of product standards with the rest of the UK." The treaty works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU's single market for goods, while the rest of the UK is outside it. A row between the UK and EU about how to reform the Northern Ireland protocol remains unresolved. A UK government spokesperson said "we are not currently considering replicating this requirement."

The European Union is working on a possible ban on the provision of cloud services to Russia as part of new sanctions against the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukraine, an EU official told Reuters on Wednesday, noting the measure was technically complex. From a report: If introduced, it is unclear how the EU ban would affect Russia, because top cloud providers in Europe are U.S. companies, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The European Union last week adopted a new package of sanctions against Russia and Belarus which included an oil embargo, restrictive measures on Russian banks and a ban on the provision of consultancy services to Moscow.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is going to force smartphone manufacturers like Apple and other electronics makers to equip their devices with a standard USB-C charging port. From a report: EU lawmakers on Tuesday agreed to a single mobile charging port for mobile phones, tablets and cameras. It means equipment makers will have to comply with the new terms by 2024. "We have a deal on the #CommonCharger!" EU commissioner Thierry Breton said via Twitter. The legislation is designed to cut waste and make life easier for consumers who would theoretically be able to use one charger for multiple devices. It could have a huge impact on Apple, as the company still uses its own Lightning connector to charge iPhones. The company has recently equipped iPads and MacBooks with USB-C ports. Apple did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. However, a spokesperson for the company said last September that the firm stands for "innovation and deeply cares about the customer experience."

Thane Gustafson is a longtime specialist on Russian energy — and even before Russia invaded Ukraine, he'd pulled together some startling predictions for his new book. The New York Review of Books looks at Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change: About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round. As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break. Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds. Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods. The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.... As burning, dying, clear-cut forests become carbon producers rather than carbon sinks, they make the problem of climate change even worse. The same is true of melting permafrost, which releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion....

[T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts...

As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate.

Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse.
"Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website.

"Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."

Facebook is in the early stages of developing a product that wouldn't rely on any anonymized personal info from users, two ad buyers from different ad agencies told Insider. From a report: "Basic ads," as Facebook engineers have been calling it, is aimed at brand advertisers that are trying to build awareness and shape perception of products. One of the buyers, who are known to Insider but spoke anonymously to preserve their relationship with Facebook, said it would be measured by basic metrics including engagement and video views. Vice reported in April that Meta was working on this product and planned to have it ready to test by January in Europe, home to the strict General Data Protection Regulation; the ad buyers said it hasn't been rolled out yet and that they're unclear when it will. It's expected to be tested in the US after an EU launch. The product would seem antithetical to the targeting tools that advertisers use Facebook for. "Their 'basic ads' does contrast one of the biggest attributes of Facebook's ad platform: the granular of targeting," the first ad buyer said. "But ads that can still deliver scale while also able to usurp data regulations like CCPA and GDPR would still get dollars invested into Facebook."

EU countries and EU lawmakers are set to agree on a common charging port for mobile phones, tablets and headphones on June 7 when they meet to discuss a proposal that has been fiercely criticised by Apple, Reuters reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From the report: The proposal for a single mobile charging port was first broached by the European Commission more than a decade ago after iPhone and Android users complained about having to use different chargers for their phones. The former is charged from a Lightning cable while Android-based devices are powered using USB-C connectors. The trilogue next Tuesday will be the second and likely the final one between EU countries and EU lawmakers on the topic, an indication of a strong push to get a deal done, the people said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Platforms such as YouTube and Uploaded could be directly liable for the copyright-infringing uploads of their users. The German Federal Court of Justice came to this conclusion based on advice from the EU's top court. Several liability lawsuits will now be sent back to the lower court to decide whether damages are indeed warranted.

The Federal Court's decision opens the door to a potential liability ruling. Whether damages are indeed warranted depends on the situation, which will require review by the lower courts. In essence, the courts will now have to decide whether the measures YouTube and Uploaded have taken in response to the reported copyright infringements are sufficient. As such, it will be among the first cases where the "upload filter" requirements of the Copyright Directive will be put to the test.

Meta Platforms accused the European Union's antitrust authority of acting like "a fishing super trawler" by netting vast amounts of "wholly irrelevant" documents in an attempt to build a case against the U.S. tech giant. From a report: The commission was "hoovering up the whole sea bed -- with the intention that it will later see what species of rare fish it finds within its vast nets," Daniel Jowell, a lawyer for Meta, told a five-judge panel of the EU General Court in Luxembourg on Wednesday in a clash that turns the tables on regulators who often express concerns over data-collection practices of Meta's Facebook social network.

Meta accused the commission of refusing to engage with the firm and ignoring its suggested alternatives to render the data requests more "proportionate" and limited to what is necessary. Instead, the commission "sailed obliviously onward," using a "mechanical application of its search terms despite being on notice of the vast number of irrelevant documents this was bound to give rise to," Jowell told the court.

Long-time Slashdot reader united_notions is trying to envision "the 'human-machine era', a time when the tech has moved out of our hands and into our ears, eyes, and brains." Real-time captioning of conversation. Highly accurate instant translation. Auto voice mimicry making it sound like you speaking the translation. Real-time AR facial augmentation making it also look like you speaking the translation. Meanwhile, super-intelligent Turing-passing chatbots that look real and can talk tirelessly about any topic, in different languages, in anyone's voice. Then, a little further into the future, brain-machine interfaces that turn your thoughts into language, saving you the effort of talking at all...

Slashdot has long reported on the development of all these technologies. They are coming.

When these are not futuristic but widespread everyday devices, what will language and interaction actually be like?

Would you trust instant auto-translation while shopping? On a date? At a hospital? How much would you interact with virtual characters? Debate with them? Learn a new language from them? Socialise with them, or more? Would you wear a device that lets you communicate without talking?

And with all this new tech, would you trust tech companies with the bountiful new data they gather?

Meanwhile, what about the people who get left behind as these shiny new gadgets spread? As always with new tech, they will be prohibitively expensive for many. And despite rapid improvements, still for some years progress will be slower for smaller languages around the world – and much slower still for sign language – despite the hype.

"Language in the Human-Machine Era" is an EU-funded research network putting together all these pieces. Watch our animations setting out future scenarios, read our open access forecast report, and contribute to our big survey!

"Russia is advancing a new law allowing it to take control of the local businesses of western companies that decide to leave in the wake of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine," reports Reuters, "raising the stakes for multinationals trying to exit." The law, which could be in place within weeks, will give Russia sweeping powers to intervene where there is a threat to local jobs or industry, making it more difficult for western companies to disentangle themselves quickly unless they are prepared to take a big financial hit. The law to seize the property of foreign investors follows an exodus of western companies, such as Starbucks, McDonald's and brewer AB InBev, and increases pressure on those still there.

It comes as the Russian economy, increasingly cut-off due to western sanctions, plunges into recession amid double-digit inflation.... The bill paves the way for Russia to appoint administrators over companies owned by foreigners in "unfriendly" countries, who want to quit Russia as the conflict with Ukraine drags down its economy. Moscow typically refers to countries as "unfriendly" if they have imposed economic sanctions on Russia, meaning any firms in the European Union or United States are at risk.

The European Commission proposed toughening its own stance on Wednesday to make breaking EU sanctions against Russia a crime, allowing EU governments to confiscate assets of companies and individuals that evade restrictions against Moscow.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece, written by Macworld's Michael Simon: Apple killed its Touch Bar on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro last year, but PC makers seem determined to prove the company wrong. First Dell introduced the XPS 13 Plus which sports a "new capacitive touch experience that allows you to switch between media and function keys easily." The laptop is available for purchase but back-ordered for weeks, and there haven't been any reviews so we don't know for sure how it will be received, but Dell's touch bar concept seems even less useful than Apple's: the buttons are static, they merely float above the actual keyboard, and they don't appear to add any functionality. Then Dell added a touch bar to the trackpad on the Latitude 9330. [...]

Now there's a new PC touch bar, this time on the Voyager a1600, Corsair's first-ever gaming laptop. Corsair hasn't named or even officially announced the new feature -- it only appeared as a sneak peek -- but the company told The Verge that the strip features "10 easy-access customizable S-key shortcut buttons." [...] Corsair's Touch Bar doesn't replace the row of function keys but it is in an odd location -- on the hinge below the display. Even in pictures, it looks incredibly uncomfortable to reach. According to renders, you can still access the Touch Bar when the laptop is closed, which seems like an accident waiting to happen (not to mention a battery drain).

But the biggest question I have is: why? No one shed a tear for the Touch Bar when it was killed. While it has its merits, it was never a proper pro-level feature and the implementation didn't evolve past the original idea. It was too skinny, lacked tactile feedback, required constant scrolling, and didn't actually save time. It looked nice, but even Apple didn't seem to know what to do with it. The MacBook Pro Touch Bar was one of Apple's most polarizing features and it never really caught on with developers. Maybe a niche use like gaming or video conferencing will have better results, but ultimately the Touch Bar, Apple's or otherwise, is a failed concept that should stay in the past.

A new website that published leaked emails from several leading proponents of Britain's exit from the European Union is tied to Russian hackers, according to a Google cybersecurity official and the former head of UK foreign intelligence. From a report: The website - titled "Very English Coop d'Etat" - says it has published private emails from former British spymaster Richard Dearlove, leading Brexit campaigner Gisela Stuart, pro-Brexit historian Robert Tombs, and other supporters of Britain's divorce from the EU, which was finalized in January 2020. The site contends that they are part of a group of hardline pro-Brexit figures secretly calling the shots in the United Kingdom. "I am well aware of a Russian operation against a Proton account which contained emails to and from me," said Dearlove, referring to the privacy-focused email service ProtonMail.

The Spanish government on Tuesday announced plans to invest $13.2 billion to build microchips in the country and "help reduce the dependence of Span and the European Union on other suppliers," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Speaking in Madrid, Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said the five-year plan is aimed at enabling Spain to cover every area in the design and production of microchips, which are now considered key to all areas of modern industry. She said the plan was among the most ambitious of the Spanish government's projects to reboot the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic and that it would have an effect on other sectors.

The project was directed at boosting the EU's weak position in microchip production, which Calvino said represented some 10% of the world total. She said this led to a great dependence on a small number of major producers such as Taiwan, the United States, South Korea, Japan and China. Calvino added that "the war in Ukraine makes it a priority to reinforce strategic autonomy in energy, technology, food production as well as cyber security."

All new buildings in the EU would be fitted with solar panels on their roofs under plans to turbocharge a drive for renewable energy to replace the continent's need for Russian oil and gas. From a report: The European Commission wants half the bloc's energy to come from renewable sources by 2030, more than double the current figure. The total cost of achieving this would reach hundreds of billions of euros but be offset by an annual $88.6bn saving on imported fuel, according to a copy of the plan seen by the Financial Times and dubbed RepowerEU. One proposal is to "introduce an obligation to have rooftop solar installations for all new buildings and all existing buildings of energy performance class D and above [the most energy-intensive]." The original EU plan to cut carbon emissions by 55 per cent of their 1990 level by 2030 called for a target of 40 per cent renewables. But the war in Ukraine has spurred Brussels to seek energy independence from Russia, which accounts for 40 per cent of the region's gas and about 20 per cent of its oil supplies. Householders will pay an average of $326 extra a year under the plans.

"The developer of the open source email client FairEmail pulled all of his applications from Google Play and announced that he would stop development," reports gHacks. The announcement comes shortly after the developer received an email from Google stating that they believed the app was spyware. From the report: FairEmail was a popular email client for Google's Android operating system that was free to use. It was privacy-friendly, had no limitations in regards to email accounts that users could set up in the app, supported unified inbox, conversation threading, two-way synchronizing, support for OpenPGP, and a lot more. Marcel Bokhorst, the developer of the application, announced major changes to the project yesterday on XDA Developers.

Earlier that week, Bokhorst received a policy violation email from Google stating that Google believed that the FairEmail application was spyware. The full statement has not been published, but Bokhorst believes that Google might have misinterpreted the use of favicons in the app. He resubmitted a new version of the application that had the use of favicons removed. The appeal he received as a response "resulted in a standard answer". While the content of the answer is unclear, it appears to have been a generic answer that Google Play Store developers have been frustrated with for a long time. Bokhorst decided to pull the application and all of his other applications from the Google Play Store. The apps won't be maintained and supported anymore according to the info.

Other factors played a role in Bokhorst's decision, including the discrepancy between answering thousands of support questions per month and the application's revenue, and the inability to do something against unfair reviews in the Google Play Store. He considered keeping the applications on GitHub, but this would result in an 98% loss of audience. Google also recently forced Total Commander's developer to remove the ability to install APKs from the File Manager.

If you're looking for an alternative email client, gHacks recommends the open-source app K-9 Mail.

Microsoft is relaxing business terms for its cloud computing service in an attempt to appease complaints from rivals and avoid a full antitrust probe in Brussels. Financial Times: The move follows concerns from rival cloud providers that Microsoft is using anti-competitive practices to draw customers to its Azure cloud computing platform and away from competitors. On Wednesday, Microsoft president Brad Smith said the tech giant was taking steps that were "very broad but not exhaustive" as he sought to address concerns from regulators and competitors. Smith said the changes being introduced were "grounded in feedback" he had received from multiple cloud providers across Europe.

In a blog post, he wrote: "Some of the most compelling feedback for me personally came from a CEO who said that he felt that he 'was a victim of friendly fire in Microsoft's competition with Amazon.' It was hard to hear this -- but he was right." [...] Under the new terms, customers will not be forced to buy an additional licence if they have already purchased Microsoft's cloud services. These new rules only apply if the services are moved to a European cloud provider and not to US rivals such as AWS and Google's cloud services. Smith said that in its fight against AWS, which dominates the cloud market, Microsoft had overlooked the effects some of its business terms were having on its cloud provider clients.