Facebook owner Meta was hit by a record $1.3 billion European Union privacy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users' data to the US after regulators said it failed to protect personal information from the prying eyes of American security services. Bloomberg News: The social network giant's continued data transfers to the US didn't address "the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms" of people whose data was being transfered across the Atlantic, according to a decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission announced on Monday. On top of the fine, which eclipses a $806 million EU privacy penalty previously doled out to Amazon, Meta was given five months to "suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US" and six months to stop "the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US" of transferred personal EU data. A data-transfers ban for Meta was widely expected and once prompted the US firm to threaten a total withdrawal from the EU. But its impact has now been muted by the transition phase given in the decision and the prospect of a new EU-US data flows agreement that could already be operational by the middle of this year.

"Google Chrome will now check for typos in your URLs and display suggested websites based on what it thinks you meant," reports the Verge.

From Google's announcement: When you type a website into the Chrome address bar, it will now detect URL typos and suggest websites based on the corrections. This increases accessibility for people with dyslexia, language learners, and anyone who makes typos by making it easier to get to previously visited websites despite spelling errors. This feature is now available on Chrome desktop and will roll out to mobile in the coming months.
It was one of several new and recently launched features Google touted as part of Thursday's Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Google also announced its Lookout app (which provides audio cues for low-vision users) can now provide descriptions of images on web pages "powered by an advanced visual language model developed by Google DeepMind." And Chrome on Android recently updated its TalkBack screen reader so tab switching now also offers a tab grid with additional features like tab groups, bulk tab actions and reordering.

Google Colab hosts free cloud-based "executable documents" that, among other things, let you write and run code in your browser (in dozens of languages, including Python).

Over 7 million people, including students, already use Colab, according to a recent post on Google's blog, "and now it's getting even better with advances in AI [with] features like code completions, natural language to code generation and even a code-assisting chatbot."

Google says it will "dramatically increase programming speed, quality, and comprehension." Our first features will focus on code generation. Natural language to code generation helps you generate larger blocks of code, writing whole functions from comments or prompts. [For example: "import data.csv as a dataframe."] The goal here is to reduce the need for writing repetitive code, so you can focus on the more interesting parts of programming and data science. Eligible users in Colab will see a new "Generate" button in their notebooks, allowing them to enter any text prompt to generate code.

For eligible paid users, as you type, you'll see autocomplete suggestions.

We're also bringing the helpfulness of a chatbot directly into Colab. Soon, you'll be able to ask questions directly in Colab like, "How do I import data from Google Sheets?" or "How do I filter a Pandas DataFrame?"

Anyone with an internet connection can access Colab, and use it free of charge... Access to these features will roll out gradually in the coming months, starting with our paid subscribers in the U.S. and then expanding into the free-of-charge tier.
It's powered by Google's "next generation" machine-learning language model PaLM 2 (announced earlier this month), which "excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog." Colab will use Codey, a family of code models built on PaLM 2... fine-tuned on a large dataset of high quality, permissively licensed code from external sources to improve performance on coding tasks. Plus, the versions of Codey being used to power Colab have been customized especially for Python and for Colab-specific uses.

Time magazine once described Lauren Weinstein as an internet-policy expert and privacy advocate. Also a long-time Slashdot reader, he now brings this cautionary blog post "to share with you an example of what Google account recovery failure means to the people involved..."

In this case it's a 90-year-old woman who "For at least the last decade... was just using the stored password to login and check her email," according to an email Weinstein received: When her ancient iPad finally died, she tried to add the gmail account to her new replacement iPad. However, she couldn't remember the password in order to login.... I don't know if you've ever attempted to contact a human being at google tech support, but it's pretty much impossible. They also don't seem to have an exception mechanism for cases like this.

So she had to abandon hopes of viewing the google photos of her (now deceased) beloved pet, her contacts, her email subscriptions, reminders, calendar entries, etc... [I]t's difficult to know what to say to someone like this when she asks "what can we do now" and there are no options... It's tough to explain that your treasured photos can't be retrieved because you're not the sort of user that Google had in mind.
Weinstein adds "this is by no means the worst such case I've seen — not even close, unfortunately." I've been discussing these issues with Google for many years. I've suggested "ombudspeople", account escalation and appeal procedures that ordinary people could understand, and many other concepts. They've all basically hit the brick wall of Google suggesting that at their scale, nothing can be done about such "edge" cases.
Here's Google's page for providing an alternate recovery email address and phone number. Unfortunately, the 90-year-old woman's account "was created so long ago that she didn't need to provide any 'recovery' contacts at that time," according to the email, "or she may have used a landline phone number that's long been cancelled now..."

"The first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, which lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic, has been created using deep-sea mapping," reports the BBC.

Their article includes a one-minute video showing the results. "It provides a unique 3D view of the entire ship, enabling it to be seen as if the water has been drained away. " "There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship," Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC News. He said the model was "one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research — and not speculation."

The Titanic has been extensively explored since the wreck was discovered in 1985. But it's so huge that in the gloom of the deep, cameras can only ever show us tantalizing snapshots of the decaying ship — never the whole thing. The new scan captures the wreck in its entirety, revealing a complete view of the Titanic. It lies in two parts, with the bow and the stern separated by about 800m (2,600ft). A huge debris field surrounds the broken vessel.

The scan was carried out in summer 2022 by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the project. Submersibles, remotely controlled by a team on board a specialist ship, spent more than 200 hours surveying the length and breadth of the wreck. They took more than 700,000 images from every angle, creating an exact 3D reconstruction...

In the surrounding debris field, items are scattered, including ornate metalwork from the ship, statues and unopened champagne bottles. There are also personal possessions, including dozens of shoes resting on the sediment.

CNN's chief medical correspondent spoke to psychology professor Jean Twenge from San Diego State University who in 2018 published a book which, even before lockdowns, warned that teenagers were missing crucial life experiences. Its title? "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us."

From CNN's report: In her book, Twenge makes the case that Gen Z (or iGen, as she calls them) is growing up in a way that is fundamentally different from previous generations. She told me that some of the biggest behavioral changes ever recorded in human history coincided with the release of the smartphone.

Twelfth-graders now are more like eighth-graders from previous generations, waiting longer to take part in activities associated with independence and adulthood, according to Twenge. They are less likely to go out with friends, drive, go to prom or drink alcohol than Gen X 12th-graders were. They are more likely to lie on their beds and scroll through endless social media feeds. They may be physically safer, but the long-term effect on their mental and brain health is a big question mark.

Twenge told me that she "saw just a very, very sudden change, especially in mental health but also in optimism and expectations ... between millennials and iGen or Gen Z."
CNN's chief medical correspondent ultimately recommends parents talk to teenagers about how they're using social media. But the article also recommends: "don't catastrophize." In all likelihood, you'll find out your kids are on some type of screen or device more often than you would like, but — this is key — not everyone develops a problem. In other words, don't assume the worst about the impact that use of technology will have on your child's brain and development. Most people may not develop catastrophic problems, but it can be challenging to predict who is most vulnerable...

And lastly, in the words of author and science journalist Catherine Price, remember that life is what we pay attention to. Think about that for a moment; it is such a simple idea, but it is so true. I find it both deeply inspirational and empowering because it implies that we have it within our control to determine what our lives are like. The next time you go to pick up your phone, Price wants us to remember the three Ws: What for? Why now? What else?
Price also wrote a book — titled "How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life.". Here's how CNN ends their article: As Dr. Keneisha Sinclair-McBride, a clinical psychologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, pointed out, we possess something very valuable that Big Tech companies want: our time and attention. We need to be judicious about how we allocate these precious resources — not just because they are important to TikTok, Snap or Instagram but because they are priceless for us, too.

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet, a familiar name to Slashdot readers for over 23 years, has undergone a radical transformation: Freenet 2023, or "Locutus". While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer, allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others. The new Freenet is implemented in Rust and designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user.
"Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web," explains the announcement...

And in the comments below, Ian points out that "When the new Freenet is up and running, I think it will be the first system of any kind that could host something like Wikipedia, not just the data but the wiki CMS system it's built on. An editable wikipedia, entirely decentralized and very scalable...

"We've already had interest from everyone from video game developers who want to build a decentralized MMORPG, to political advocacy groups across the political spectrum. Plenty of people value freedom."

Wired reports on "hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites." They describe one worker at Cyprus-based vDesk as "expected to lure people into paying, message by message, for conversations with fictional characters." WIRED spoke to dozens of people working in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in the creation of virtual profiles... Often recruited into "customer support" or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online... Freelancers working in the industry say they make a fraction of the money users are paying. Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or 2 euro an hour.
WIRED shares stories from a "freelance customer support representative" in Ireland and a "freelance remote translator" in Mexico who both ended up doing the same kind of work. (And ironically, both reported they ended up talking to people they knew in real-life...) For the worker in Mexico, "his chat history had all of his personal details: his name, city, job, past marriages. His kids' names and ages. For nearly two years, he had been talking to a virtual. He says he's in love with her."

The portals "usually include lengthy terms and conditions," the article points out, with most saying something like "we may use system profiles at our discretion to communicate with users to enhance our users' entertainment experience..." Once she got over the realization — on her first day working for the company — that translating really meant "flirting through fake profiles," she couldn't help but be impressed by how detailed the virtuals are. "The fakes don't seem like obviously unattainable women, they are eerily convincing and hyper-specific," she says... The sites collect detailed information about users, building profiles that help the freelancers maintain the fiction. These contain their living arrangements, details about their family and marital status ("single after two failed marriages," one read), and other personal details. "It will add their kids' names and ages, when they tell us them," Alice says, "if they have been to therapy recently, what they have been feeling — anything which can be used by the virtual to keep a sense of real connection..."

If the user asks to move off to a free messaging app, the freelancers must write through the virtuals "I prefer to stay in here until I know you better" or "I feel safer on this app until we are better acquainted," and so on...

One morning, Alice opened her chat to a new message:

"Please stop talking to my husband, he is spending money we do not have to talk to you," read the chat line.
The workers don't even know the source of their profile pictures, Wired points out. "A reverse-image search on some of the images seen by WIRED show that at least some are grabbed from pornography sites."

"Driving an electric vehicle in Texas is soon to become more expensive," reports Gizmodo: Governor Greg Abbott signed a law (SB 505) on May 13 instituting new fees for registering and owning EVs in the state. Under the bill, electric car owners will have to pay $400 upon registering their vehicle. Then, every subsequent year, EV drivers will have to shell out an additional $200. Both of those fees are on top of the cost of the standard annual registration renewal fees, which are $50.75 each year for most passenger cars and trucks.

At least 32 states currently have special electric vehicle registration fees, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. These range from $50 in places like Colorado, Hawaii, and South Dakota to $274 (starting in 2028) in a recently passed piece of Tennessee legislation...

Like many other states that have instituted EV fees, the reasoning behind the Lone Star State's new law is that electric car drivers don't buy gas. Taxes at the fuel pump are the primary way that most states, Texas included, amass funds for road construction, maintenance, and other driving-related infrastructure.
The bill's author told a local news station that "with the growing use of EVs, the revenue from the fuel tax is decreasing, which diminishes our ability to fund road improvements for all drivers."

But Gizmodo notes that Texas's gas tax "is among the lowest in the country, at just $0.20 per gallon." (And the average car uses less than 500 gallons a year, according to the American Petroleum Institute.)

An anonymous reader shared ths report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Asus router users around the world took to the Internet to report that their devices suddenly froze up for no apparent reason and then, upon rebooting repeatedly, stopped working every few minutes as device memory became exhausted.

Two days later, the Taiwan-based hardware maker has finally answered the calls for help. The mass outage, the company said, was the result of "an error in the configuration of our server settings file." After fixing the glitch, most users needed to only reboot their devices. In the event that didn't fix the problem, the company's support team advised users to save their current configuration settings and perform a factory reset. The company also apologized...

Asus still hasn't provided details about the configuration error. Various users have offered explanations online that appear to be correct. "On the 16th, Asus pushed a corrupted definition file for ASD, a built-in security daemon present in a wide range of their routers," one person wrote. "As routers automatically updated and fetched the corrupted definition file, they started running out of filesystem space and memory and crashing."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.

Meta's new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its "in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads," Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post... But the MTIA chip is seemingly a long ways away: it's not set to come out until 2025, TechCrunch reports.
Meta has been working on "a massive project to upgrade its AI infrastructure in the past year," Reuters reports, "after executives realized it lacked the hardware and software to support demand from product teams building AI-powered features."

As a result, the company scrapped plans for a large-scale rollout of an in-house inference chip and started work on a more ambitious chip capable of performing training and inference, Reuters reported...

Meta said it has an AI-powered system to help its engineers create computer code, similar to tools offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
TechCrunch calls these announcements "an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft."

Meta's VP of Infrastructure told TechCrunch "This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale." Over the past decade or so, Meta has spent billions of dollars recruiting top data scientists and building new kinds of AI, including AI that now powers the discovery engines, moderation filters and ad recommenders found throughout its apps and services. But the company has struggled to turn many of its more ambitious AI research innovations into products, particularly on the generative AI front. Until 2022, Meta largely ran its AI workloads using a combination of CPUs — which tend to be less efficient for those sorts of tasks than GPUs — and a custom chip designed for accelerating AI algorithms...

The MTIA is an ASIC, a kind of chip that combines different circuits on one board, allowing it to be programmed to carry out one or many tasks in parallel... Custom AI chips are increasingly the name of the game among the Big Tech players. Google created a processor, the TPU (short for "tensor processing unit"), to train large generative AI systems like PaLM-2 and Imagen. Amazon offers proprietary chips to AWS customers both for training (Trainium) and inferencing (Inferentia). And Microsoft, reportedly, is working with AMD to develop an in-house AI chip called Athena.

Meta says that it created the first generation of the MTIA — MTIA v1 — in 2020, built on a 7-nanometer process. It can scale beyond its internal 128 MB of memory to up to 128 GB, and in a Meta-designed benchmark test — which, of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt — Meta claims that the MTIA handled "low-complexity" and "medium-complexity" AI models more efficiently than a GPU. Work remains to be done in the memory and networking areas of the chip, Meta says, which present bottlenecks as the size of AI models grow, requiring workloads to be split up across several chips. (Not coincidentally, Meta recently acquired an Oslo-based team building AI networking tech at British chip unicorn Graphcore.) And for now, the MTIA's focus is strictly on inference — not training — for "recommendation workloads" across Meta's app family...

If there's a common thread in today's hardware announcements, it's that Meta's attempting desperately to pick up the pace where it concerns AI, specifically generative AI... In part, Meta's feeling increasing pressure from investors concerned that the company's not moving fast enough to capture the (potentially large) market for generative AI. It has no answer — yet — to chatbots like Bard, Bing Chat or ChatGPT. Nor has it made much progress on image generation, another key segment that's seen explosive growth.

If the predictions are right, the total addressable market for generative AI software could be $150 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts that it'll raise GDP by 7%. Even a small slice of that could erase the billions Meta's lost in investments in "metaverse" technologies like augmented reality headsets, meetings software and VR playgrounds like Horizon Worlds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google will pay Washington state $39.9 million to resolve a lawsuit accusing the Alphabet unit of misleading consumers about its location tracking practices, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Thursday. The settlement resolves claims that Google deceived people into believing they controlled how the search and advertising company collected and used their personal data. In reality, the state said Google was able to collect and profit from that data even if consumers disabled its tracking technology on their smartphones and computers, invading consumers' privacy.

A consent decree filed on Wednesday in King County Superior Court requires Google to be more transparent about its tracking practices, and provide a more detailed "Location Technologies" webpage describing them. "Today's resolution holds one of the most powerful corporations accountable for its unethical and unlawful tactics," Ferguson said in a statement. Google, based in Mountain View, California, denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. "In November, Google agreed to pay $391.5 million to resolve similar allegations by 40 U.S. states," notes Reuters. "Some states including Washington chose to sue Google on their own about its tracking practices."

Australia's stock market operator, ASX Ltd, has announced that it will no longer pursue the rebuilding of its software platform using blockchain technology. The decision comes after an external review found that the project would require significant rework, and ASX stated that it will explore more conventional technology options to achieve its business goals. Reuters reports: ASX frustrated market participants in November by "pausing" a rebuild of its all-in-one trading, settlement and clearing software based on the decentralized computing concept, after an external review found it had to be largely reworked after seven years of development. The company has since said it is considering options for another attempt at the rebuild of the 30-year-old software, but at a meeting with participants this week it said it would not involve blockchain or related "distributed ledger technology" (DLT).

Asked if the next attempt would "go down the more conventional route, that is without the focus on DLT (or) blockchain," exchange project director Tim Whiteley told the meeting that "while we continue to explore all the options, certainly we will need to use a more conventional technology than in the original solution in order to achieve the business outcomes." The statement signals the end of what was to be one of the world's most prominent use cases of the concept that promises to accelerate online transactions by processing them securely in multiple locations.

Until now, ASX has said it may resurrect the project using blockchain-based technology developed by New York-based contractor Digital Asset. It has said it will announce a new strategy for the project by year-end. Whiteley told the meeting ASX was on track to decide a new strategy by year-end. It sent a request for information to potential software vendors and "issued an RFP to a number of vendors who responded more positively ... for more detailed feedback," he said, using the acronym for a request for proposal. Market participants had told ASX they did not want a risky, single-date changeover to new software, and "that feedback has been taken into the implementation planning," Whiteley said.

Lia Haberman via her ICYMI Substack newsletter appears to have obtained a leaked marketing slide detailing the features of Intagram's rumored text-based Twitter competitor. The new app, codenamed P92, Project 92 or Barcelona, could arrive as soon as late June. The Verge reports: In the app, you'll see a feed, and you can make text posts up to 500 characters long with attached links, photos, and videos. The app looks pretty much like if you mixed Instagram and Twitter together, based on two screenshots included in the leaked marketing slide. And Meta will apparently have some good moderation controls from the start, "equipping you with settings to control who can reply to you and mention your account," the slide says. Any accounts you've blocked on Instagram will apparently carry over.

Perhaps most significantly, though, the new Instagram text app will have an element of decentralization as well. "Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon," Instagram's slide says. "Users on these other apps will be able to search for, follow and interact with your profile and content if you're public, or if you're private and approve them as followers." (Presumably that compatibility will come through ActivityPub, which Meta has been exploring alongside other tech companies.)

Apple is reportedly expanding its involvement in the mass production of micro-LED displays to reduce its reliance on Samsung and gain more control over the supply chain. Nikkei Asia reports: Apple has spent heavily on the development of micro-LED displays over the past decade and once production starts, it intends to perform the critical "mass transfer" step of the manufacturing process itself, according to sources involved in the project. The mass transfer step involves moving at least tens of thousands of tiny micro-LED chips onto substrates. This process will be carried out at Apple's secretive R&D facilities in the Longtan District in the northern Taiwanese city of Taoyuan, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the project.

Displays are one of the most expensive components in all of Apple's devices. Since the American company first introduced OLED displays on its iPhone in 2017, its reliance on Samsung Display for the screens has only grown. To reduce that dependence and gain price-bargaining power, Apple tried to bring in other suppliers, namely LG Display and China's display champion BOE Technology, but they lag the South Korean leader in terms of technology and quality stability, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

"Apple has spent at least $1 billion on the R&D and samples for micro-LED technologies in the past nearly 10 years," said one of the people who has been directly involved in the project for years. "It wants to secure more control over the next-gen display technologies for its future products." For the project, Apple is partnering with suppliers like ams-Osram for micro-LED components, LG Display for the substrates -- also called backplates -- and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for 12-inch wafers. In addition to designing the driver integrated circuits for the micro-LED screens, Apple even designed some of the production equipment itself to better control the mass transfer process, according to two of the people with direct knowledge of the matter. "It doesn't mean that Apple will always do the mass transfer on its own. But it shows how determined Apple is to allocate resources to have more control over [these] next-gen display technologies in its own hands," one of the sources said.

"Apple's ultimate plan is to introduce the technologies on its iPhone, which is its key revenue source and has much bigger volume, to justify the investments over the years," added one of the sources.

Apple has released (PDF) its first App Store Transparency Report, as mandated by a lawsuit settlement in 2021. In 2022, the report reveals that over 1.6 million apps were rejected, 186,195 apps were removed for violating App Store rules, and China topped the list with the most government-requested app takedowns. MacRumors reports: In 2022, there were 1,783,232 apps on the App Store, with 6,101,913 total app submissions received and 1,679,694 apps rejected for various reasons like safety, performance, design, and legal. Apple provides numbers on the specific App Store guidelines that were violated by rejected apps, with the highest number of single rule rejections (149,378) due to violations of the Design 4.0 rule and the DPLA 3.2 Fraud rule (32,009). A total of 253,466 app submissions were approved after rejection when developers worked with Apple to resolve issues, and 186,195 apps were removed from the App Store for breaking the App Store rules. The majority of apps removed from the App Store were games, followed by Utilities, Business, and Education.

Apple outlines the total number of apps removed from the App Store due to government takedowns, and China is at the top of the list. The Chinese government asked Apple to remove 1,435 apps, but 1,276 of those apps were games that were removed for not having the GRN license that China requires. Apple removed 14 apps at the request of India's government, 10 apps for Pakistan, and seven apps for Russia. In other countries including Turkiye, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Italy, Latvia, and Nigeria, fewer than two apps were removed at the government's request. Developers appealed 18,412 app removals in total, and Apple restored just 616 developer accounts. Apple says that apps that are appealed were typically pulled from the App Store for fraud or illegality, which is why the rejected appeal number is so high.

There are 36,974,015 registered developers, and in 2022, Apple terminated 428,487 developer accounts. According to Apple, developers are removed from the Apple Developer Program "for a number of reasons," but most commonly because of accounts that are connected with other terminated developer accounts. 3,338 developers appealed their App Store bans, and Apple reinstated just 159 accounts. Again, Apple says that this is because "most developer account terminations that are appealed are removed from the App Store due to fraud," so Apple rejects most of them. 282,036,628 customer accounts were terminated, but that number does incorporate all accounts created, even those made on the website by non-iPhone and iPad users. There were 656,739,889 average weekly visitors to the App Store and 747,873,877 average weekly app downloads. Customer accounts searched the App Store 373,211,396 times on average, and 1,399,741 apps appeared in the top 10 results of at least 1000 searches. You can download the report from Apple's legal site.

After leading CodeWeavers for 27 years, Jeremy White has decided to leave the company, prompting the transition to an employee ownership trust. CodeWeavers is known for its CrossOver software and contributions to the Wine project. Phoronix reports: CodeWeavers' President James Ramey is now taking on the CEO role while Director of Development Ulrich Czekalla in turn is stepping up to fill the President role. Jeremy White does continue to serve as Chairman of the Board at CodeWeavers. In addition to selling the CrossOver software, CodeWeavers' PortJump effort aides organizations in porting apps/games to macOS, Linux, or ChromeOS. CodeWeavers also engages in technical consulting services for organizations. Among CodeWeavers' clients is Valve in assisting them with their Steam Play / Proton effort. You can read more about the changes via the CodeWeavers blog.

Hyundai and Kia will pay out $200 million in a class-action lawsuit settlement, compensating roughly 9 million people for their losses after a 2022 social media trend revealed how relatively simple it was to steal certain models. From a report: As reported by Reuters, $145 million of the payout goes to the out-of-pocket expenses of those whose cars were stolen. Many Kias made between 2011-2021, and Hyundais from 2015-2021, lacked electronic engine immobilizers, which would prevent a car from starting unless an electronically matched key was present. Without the immobilizer, the car could be started by turning the ignition with other objects, such as a USB-A cable that thieves discovered was a perfect fit.

Customers whose cars were totaled are eligible for up to $6,125, while damaged vehicles and property can receive a maximum of $3,375, along with costs for raised insurance, car rental, towing, tickets, and others. Kia and Hyundai had previously pledged to provide free software upgrades to vehicles and free wheel locks (i.e. The Club), typically in coordination with regional police departments. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in February that the companies have given out 26,000 wheel locks since November 2022. A September 2022 report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) showed that immobilizers were standard on 96 percent of cars sold in the US by 2015 but only 26 percent of Kias and Hyundais. Cars with immobilizers were stolen at a rate of 1.21 per 1,000 insured vehicles, according to the IIHS; those without immobilizers had a 2.18 per 1,000 rate. Kia and Hyundai's far-too-thrifty design decisions might have been simply a balance sheet story were it not for the "Kia Challenge," a 2022 TikTok trend that detailed theft techniques and joyrides. By February 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attributed 14 crashes and eight deaths to challenge-inspired thefts.

A recent move by Google to populate the Internet with eight new top-level domains is prompting concerns that two of the additions could be a boon to online scammers who trick people into clicking on malicious links. From a report: Two weeks ago, Google added eight new TLDs to the Internet, bringing the total number of TLDs to 1,480, according to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the governing body that oversees the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources. Two of Google's new TLDs -- .zip and .mov -- have sparked scorn in some security circles. While Google marketers say the aim is to designate "tying things together or moving really fast" and "moving pictures and whatever moves you," respectively, these suffixes are already widely used to designate something altogether different. Specifically, .zip is an extension used in archive files that use a compression format known as zip. The format .mov, meanwhile, appears at the end of video files, usually when they were created in Apple's QuickTime format. Many security practitioners are warning that these two TLDs will cause confusion when they're displayed in emails, on social media, and elsewhere. The reason is that many sites and software automatically convert strings like "arstechnica.com" or "mastodon.social" into a URL that, when clicked, leads a user to the corresponding domain. The worry is that emails and social media posts that refer to a file such as setup.zip or vacation.mov will automatically turn them into clickable links -- and that scammers will seize on the ambiguity.

Nvidia has officially announced its RTX 4060 family of GPUs. This includes the RTX 4060 Ti, which will debut next week on May 24th starting at $399, and -- perhaps the biggest news -- the RTX 4060, which will be available in July for just $299, $30 less than the RTX 3060's original retail price. A 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti is also due in July for $499. From a report: Nvidia's 60-class GPUs are the most popular among PC gamers on Steam, and the launch of the RTX 4060 family marks the first time we've seen Nvidia's latest RTX 40-series cards available under the $500 price point, let alone under $300. The $399 RTX 4060 Ti will ship on May 24th with just 8GB of VRAM, while a 16GB model is due in July priced at $499. There's an ongoing debate over the value of 8GB cards in the PC gaming community right now, particularly with the arrival of more demanding games that really push the limits of GPU memory even at 1080p (if you want all the max settings enabled, that is). It's a much bigger issue at 1440p and, of course, 4K resolutions, but Nvidia appears to be positioning its RTX 4060 Ti card for the 1080p market. [...] Specs-wise, the RTX 4060 Ti will be a 22 teraflop card with AV1 encoder support and more efficient energy usage. The total graphics power is 160 watts on both the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB and 16GB models, with Nvidia claiming the average gaming power usage will be around 140 watts. The RTX 3060 Ti had a total graphics power of 200 watts, and Nvidia says it uses 197 watts during games on average, so there are some impressive power efficiency improvements here.