Technology

The £785M ($979M) antitrust lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than 1,500 British developers, and alleges that Apple’s monopolistic control of the market for iPhone apps allowed the company to charge ‘abusive’ levels of commission on app sales …

• Smaller web browsers are thriving in the EU thanks to the DMA's choice screens.

• Some lesser-known browsers have seen as much as a 250% increase since the DMA was implemented in March.

• The US has yet to implement similar policies, but users in that market could still benefit from ripple effects caused by the EU's DMA.

AT&T announced on Saturday it is investigating a data breach involving the personal information of more than 70 million current and former customers leaked on the dark web.

According to information about the breach on the company's website, 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders have been impacted. An AT&T press release said the breach occurred about two weeks ago, and that the incident has not yet had a "material impact" on its operations.

AT&T said the information included in the compromised data set varies from person to person. It could include social security numbers, full names, email and mailing addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, as well as AT&T account numbers and passcodes.

The company has so far not identified the source of the leak, at least publicly.

Outside of my Switch and Kindle my phone is all I have. It's a $1300 super device and I find it does more than enough. A magic reactangle with the answers to all life's problems. The ultimate minimalist device.

Any of you mobile only? What has your experience been?

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10035107

New cyberattack campaign, DEEP#GOSU, uses PowerShell & VBScript to target Windows systems.

Huh, though the #ElonMusk clock is broken, this is one of the times of the day it’s still correct:

Elon Musk accused Sam Altman and OpenAI of pursuing profit over bettering humanity in a new breach of contract lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court yesterday, Feb. 29.

Musk helped Altman found OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 (Musk left the board of directors in 2018 and no longer has a stake). Central to the lawsuit is OpenAI’s “founding agreement,” which, per the lawsuit, stated the lab would build artificial general intelligence (AGI) “for the benefit of humanity,” not to “maximize shareholder profits,” and that the technology would be “open-source” and not kept “secret for propriety commercial reasons.”

Musk’s new lawsuit alleges that OpenAI has reversed course on this agreement, particularly through its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft. It further calls out the secrecy shrouding the tech behind OpenAI’s flagship Chat GPT-4 language model and major changes to the company’s board following Altman’s tumultuous hiring and re-firing last year.

“These events of 2023 constitute flagrant breaches of the Founding Agreement, which Defendants have essentially turned on its head,” the suit reads. “To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”

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[archive link]

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1958803

The article argues that some federal government intervention earlier during WWII jump-started the tech innovations we saw from the 1950s to 1970s.

It also talks about how the Internet seems to be the only really new game-changing innovation since the 80s and seeks to explain why this is the case.

Among other things, of course, such as the nature of "tech clusters" such as Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10961870

To Stop AI Killing Us All, First Regulate Deepfakes, Says Researcher Connor Leahy::AI researcher Connor Leahy says regulating deepfakes is the first step to avert AI wiping out humanity

• Substack's founder says it will not remove white supremacist and Nazi blogs from the platform.
• Some of these blogs have paying subscribers, which means Substack likely profits.
• The heart of the issue is not the free speech; it's the money.

https://archive.ph/5UZb7

The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.

A federal court on Thursday blocked Montana’s effort to ban TikTok from the state, ruling that the law violated users’ First Amendment rights to speak and to access information online, and the company’s First Amendment rights to select and curate users’ content.

“Ultimately, if Montana’s interest in consumer protection and protecting minors is to be carried out through legislation, the method sought to achieve those ends here was not narrowly tailored,” the court wrote.

The court’s decision this week joins a growing list of cases in which judges have halted state laws that unconstitutionally burden internet users’ First Amendment rights in the name of consumer privacy or child protection.

Network neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly, without discrimination in favor of particular apps, sites or services

The FCC will meet on October 19th to vote on proposing Title II reclassification that would support accompanying net neutrality protections

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/778297

Another tech review.

Honestly, I'm in a "retail therapy" sort-of mood.

Your thoughts?

Video duration: 9:28

Pretty good read

Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.

The final days of Apollo may be upon us, but the ramifications of Reddit’s disdain for its users are here to stay. Look no further than App Store reviews to see the results. As TechCrunch reports, data from Sensor Tower shows how Reddit is sealing its fate as a 1-star reviewed app.

The data shared with TechCrunch shows that nearly 91% of Reddit’s U.S. iOS reviews carried a 1-star rating during the initial phase of the protest between June 12–14, compared to about 53% in the previous two months until May.

There has been some ratings improvement lately as the 1-star reviews of the Reddit U.S. iOS app dropped to about 86% between June 15–26, Sensor Tower’s data shows.

That’s presumably because the App Store doesn’t offer 0-star ratings. It’s also telling that Reddit leadership thought nuking third-party apps made sense when its own app saw more than half of its reviews rank it as low as possible.

Reddit app reviews in the App Store have also become a place for users to voice their frustration with the self-sabotaging company.

The data shared by Sensor Tower also indicates the top three most mentioned terms in all of the Reddit U.S. iOS reviews included keywords “apollo”, “third party” and “3rd party,” suggesting users were bombing review ratings in light of the new API move.

Either users are pissed or they’re hosting a lot of birthday parties for the god of truth.

At any rate, there’s been virtually no good news on the Reddit front since the awesome Apollo client was forced to announce its end date. The best Reddit app is closing up shop on June 30 to avoid owing tens of millions of dollars to Reddit before ever seeing its own revenue.