ArsTechnica
Spotify seizes the day after Apple is forced to allow external payments
After a federal court issued a scathing order Wednesday night that found Apple in "willful violation" of an injunction meant to allow iOS apps to provide alternate payment options, app developers are capitalizing on the moment. Spotify may be the quickest of them all.
Less than 24 hours after District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple had sought to thwart a 2021 injunction and engaged in an "obvious cover-up" around its actions, Spotify announced in a blog post that it had submitted an updated app to Apple. The updated app can show specific plan prices, link out to Spotify's website for plan changes and purchases that avoid Apple's 30 percent commission on in-app purchases, and display promotional offers, all of which were disallowed under Apple's prior App Store rules.
Spotify's post adds that Apple's newly court-enforced policy "opens the door to other seamless buying opportunities that will directly benefit creators (think easy-to-purchase audiobooks)." Spotify posted on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning that the updated app was approved by Apple. Apple made substantial modifications to its App Review Guidelines on Friday and emailed registered developers regarding the changes.
Epic Games Store completely eliminates revenue fees for smaller developers
It has been over six years since Epic started undercutting Steam's 30 percent revenue share for developers, asking for just 12 percent of sales on its then-new Epic Games Store. Now, Epic is going even further by reducing those fees to zero for a game's first $1 million in annual sales.
The newly announced fee structure will go into effect in June, Epic said, and will apply to a developer's revenue on a "per app" basis. After the first $1 million in annual sales, apps will be charged the usual 12 percent fee for listing on the Epic Games Store.
This isn't the first time Epic has offered a financial break to smaller developers. Back in 2011, the company eschewed royalty payments for the first $50,000 in sales for projects made with the newly free Unreal Development Kit. By 2020, that royalty-free grace period for Unreal Engine projects was increased to cover the first $1 million in lifetime sales for a project.
Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit
In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.
We know this because Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April, speaking on the future of AI and US competitiveness. Among the topics raised then was the need for more electricity—both renewable and non-renewable—to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Schmidt noted that an average nuclear power plant in the United States generates 1 gigawatt of power.
"People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."
Intel says it’s rolling out laptop GPU drivers with 10% to 25% better performance
Intel's oddball Core Ultra 200V laptop chips—codenamed Lunar Lake—will apparently be a one-off experiment, not to be replicated in future Intel laptop chips. They're Intel's only processors with memory integrated onto the CPU package; the only ones with a neural processing unit that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ performance requirements; and the only ones with Intel's best-performing integrated GPUs, the Intel Arc 130V and 140V.
Today, Intel announced some updates to its graphics driver that specifically benefit those integrated GPUs, welcome news for anyone who bought one and is trying to get by with it as an entry-level gaming system. Intel says that version 32.0.101.6734 of its graphics driver can speed up average frame rates in some games by around 10 percent, and can speed up "1 percent low FPS" (that is, for any given frames per second measurement, whatever your frame rate is the slowest 1 percent of the time) by as much as 25 percent. This should, in theory, make games run better in general and ease some of the stuttering you notice when your game's performance dips down to that 1 percent level.
Intel's performance numbers for its new GPU drivers on a laptop running at the "common default power level" of 17 W. Credit: IntelIntel's performance comparisons were made using an MSI Claw 7 AI+ using an Arc 140V GPU, and they compare the performance of driver version 32.0.101.6732 (released April 2) to version 32.0.101.6734 (released April 8). The two additional driver packages Intel has released since then will contain the improvements, too.
OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT a sycophantic mess
ChatGPT users have become frustrated with the AI model's tone, and OpenAI is taking action. After widespread mockery of the robot's relentlessly positive and complimentary output recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirms the company will roll back the latest update to GPT-4o. So get ready for a more reserved and less sycophantic chatbot, at least for now.
GPT-4o is not a new model—OpenAI released it almost a year ago, and it remains the default when you access ChatGPT, but the company occasionally releases revised versions of existing models. As people interact with the chatbot, OpenAI gathers data on the responses people like more. Then, engineers revise the production model using a technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
Recently, however, that reinforcement learning went off the rails. The AI went from generally positive to the world's biggest suck-up. Users could present ChatGPT with completely terrible ideas or misguided claims, and it might respond, "Wow, you're a genius," and "This is on a whole different level."
Google search’s made-up AI explanations for sayings no one ever said, explained
Last week, the phrase "You can't lick a badger twice" unexpectedly went viral on social media. The nonsense sentence—which was likely never uttered by a human before last week—had become the poster child for the newly discovered way Google search's AI Overviews makes up plausible-sounding explanations for made-up idioms (though the concept seems to predate that specific viral post by at least a few days).
Google users quickly discovered that typing any concocted phrase into the search bar with the word "meaning" attached at the end would generate an AI Overview with a purported explanation of its idiomatic meaning. Even the most nonsensical attempts at new proverbs resulted in a confident explanation from Google's AI Overview, created right there on the spot.
In the wake of the "lick a badger" post, countless users flocked to social media to share Google's AI interpretations of their own made-up idioms, often expressing horror or disbelief at Google's take on their nonsense. Those posts often highlight the overconfident way the AI Overview frames its idiomatic explanations and occasional problems with the model confabulating sources that don't exist.
FCC urges courts to ignore 5th Circuit ruling that agency can’t issue fines
The Federal Communications Commission is urging two federal appeals courts to disregard a 5th Circuit ruling that guts the agency's ability to issue financial penalties.
On April 17, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted an AT&T request to wipe out a $57 million fine for selling customer location data without consent. The conservative 5th Circuit court said the FCC "acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge," violating AT&T's Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
The ruling wasn't a major surprise. The 5th Circuit said it was guided by the Supreme Court's June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which held that "when the SEC seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial." After the Supreme Court's Jarkesy ruling, FCC Republican Nathan Simington vowed to vote against any fine imposed by the commission until its legal powers are clear.
Firefly’s rocket suffers one of the strangest launch failures we’ve ever seen
Firefly Aerospace launched its two-stage Alpha rocket from California early Tuesday, but something went wrong about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, rendering the rocket unable to deploy an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin.
The Alpha rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base about 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles at 6:37 am PDT (9:37 am EDT; 13:37 UTC), one day after Firefly called off a launch attempt due to a technical problem with ground support equipment.
Everything appeared to go well with the rocket's first-stage booster, powered by four kerosene-fueled Reaver engines, as the launcher ascended through fog and arced on a southerly trajectory over the Pacific Ocean. The booster stage jettisoned from Alpha's upper stage two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, and that's when things went awry.
Trump admin lashes out as Amazon considers displaying tariff costs on its sites
This morning, Punchbowl News reported that Amazon was considering listing the cost of tariffs as a separate line item on its site, citing "a person familiar with the plan." Amazon later acknowledged that there had been internal discussions to that effect but only for its import-focused Amazon Haul sub-store and that the company didn't plan to actually list tariff prices for any items.
"This was never approved and is not going to happen," reads Amazon's two-sentence statement.
Amazon issued such a specific and forceful on-the-record denial in part because it had drawn the ire of the Trump administration. In a press briefing early this morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked a question about the report, which the administration responded to as though Amazon had made a formal announcement about the policy.
Montana’s Republican legislators fight back after successful youth climate lawsuit
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
In the wake of a high-profile court decision that upended the state of Montana’s climate policy, Republican lawmakers in the state are pushing a suite of bills that could gut the state’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The full-court legislative press targets the state’s environmental analysis, air quality regulation, and judicial system. It stems from the Held v. Montana case in which 16 young people sued the state over its contributions to climate change, claiming its fossil fuel-centric approach to energy violated the state constitution’s guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment.” The plaintiffs won, and in December 2024, the Montana Supreme Court upheld their victory.
Google: Governments are using zero-day hacks more than ever
Last year was big for zero-day exploits, security threats that appear in the wild before vendors have a chance to develop patches. Through its sprawling network of services and research initiatives, Google is the first to spot many of these threats. In a new report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), the company reveals it detected 75 zero-day exploits in 2024, which is a bit lower than the previous year. Unsurprisingly, a sizable chunk of them was the work of state-sponsored hackers.
According to Google, zero-day exploits are becoming increasingly easy for threat actors to develop and procure, which has led to more sophisticated attacks. While end-user devices are still regularly targeted, GTIG notes that the trend over the past few years has been for these vulnerabilities to target enterprise systems and security infrastructure. There were 98 zero-days detected in 2023 versus 75 in 2024, but Google says the overall trend in enterprise threats is increasing.
That's not to say the products you use every day are safe from sneaky hacks—a slim majority of GTIG's 2024 zero-day threats still targeted users. In fact, Google says hackers were even more interested in certain platforms last year compared to the year before.
Trump backs down a bit on auto industry tariffs—but only a bit
President Donald Trump is set to ease up slightly on the automotive industry this week. After being warned that his trade war will result in hiked prices and fewer vehicles being built, government officials over the past two days have signaled that Trump will sign an executive order today that will mitigate some of the pain the 25 percent import tariffs will inflict.
Trump's approach to tariffs has been nothing if not inconsistent. In this case, the White House is not dropping the 25 percent tariff on all imported vehicles, but the other tariffs imposed by the Trump administration—like the 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum that went into effect in February—won't stack up on top.
The potential for multiple tariffs to have an additive effect on prices could have seen new car prices soar in the coming weeks; now, they are likely to just rise a lot instead. According to The Wall Street Journal, the move will be retroactive, and automakers who have (for example) paid aluminum or steel tariffs on top of the car import tariff can seek a refund for the former.
Physics of the perfect cacio e pepe sauce
Nobody does pasta quite like the Italians, as anyone who has tasted an authentic "pasta alla cacio e pepe" can attest. It's a simple dish: just tonnarelli pasta, pecorino cheese, and pepper. But its simplicity is deceptive. Cacio e pepe ("cheese and pepper") is notoriously challenging to make because it's so easy for the sauce to form unappetizing clumps with a texture more akin to stringy mozzarella rather than being smooth and creamy.
A team of Italian physicists has come to the rescue with a foolproof recipe based on their many scientific experiments, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids. The trick: using corn starch for the cheese and pepper sauce instead of relying on however much starch leaches into the boiling water as the pasta is cooked.
"A true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for cacio e pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience," the authors wrote. "For everyone else, this guide offers a practical way to master the dish. Preparing cacio e pepe successfully depends on getting the balance just right, particularly the ratio of starch to cheese. The concentration of starch plays a crucial role in keeping the sauce creamy and smooth, without clumps or separation."
Trump’s National Climate Assessment: No funding and all authors cut loose
As part of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, Congress mandated that every four years, the government must produce a National Climate Assessment. This document is intended to provide an overview of the changing state of our knowledge about the process itself and its impact on our environment. Past versions have been comprehensive and involved the work of hundreds of scientists, all coordinated by the US's Global Change Research Program.
It's not clear what the next report will look like. Two weeks after cutting funding for the organization that coordinates the report's production, the Trump administration has apparently informed all the authors working on it that their services are no longer needed.
The National Climate Assessment has typically been like a somewhat smaller-scale version of the IPCC reports, with a greater focus on impacts in the US. It is a very detailed look at the state of climate science, the impacts warming is having on the US, and our efforts to limit warming and deal with those impacts. Various agencies and local governments have used it to help plan for the expected impacts of our warming climate.
A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink
The first 27 operational satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network lifted off from Florida's Space Coast on Monday evening, the opening salvo in a challenge to SpaceX's dominant Starlink global Internet service.
Amazon's Project Kuiper, costing up to $20 billion, will beam high-speed, low-latency broadband signals to consumers around the world. Monday's milestone launch kicks off a test campaign in low-Earth orbit to verify the functionality and performance of Amazon's satellites. In a statement earlier this month, Amazon said it planned to begin providing service to customers later this year.
These initial services are likely to have limited reach. Amazon needs more than 80 launches to complete the first-generation Kuiper network, and this will probably take several years.
The BYD Dolphin review: Here’s what we’re missing out on in America
China's BYD doesn't mess around. It began life as a battery company that eventually realized it could branch out into electrified cars. And so it did. Today, BYD is outselling rival giants and has cars on the road almost everywhere, except the US. Its eyes are firmly set on conquering the electric vehicle sector, but it will sell you a hybrid if you're not quite ready to take on life with a battery EV full-time.
Being a thoroughly modern car company, BYD will sell you cars in various shapes and sizes and across a wide price range, though the bigger you go, the higher the price tag becomes. With popular sentiment starting to turn against this second gilded age, the super-lux stuff won't suit everyone. That's where BYD's smallest car, the Dolphin, comes into play.
Small is, of course, a relative term. An original Issigonis Mini it is not, but it makes a Range Rover Evoque look big. It's tall, but it's narrow enough that it will fit in a European parking space with room to open the doors. You won't miss it in a parking lot, either.
Tuesday Telescope: Yes, you can see stars in space, and they’re spectacular
NASA Astronaut Don Pettit returned to Earth 10 days ago, landing in Kazakhstan. During his latest mission, his third long-duration on the International Space Station, Pettit brought his brand of wonderment to the assignment.
During his time in microgravity, Pettit, an inveterate tinkerer, said he likes to spend his free time either doing experiments in microgravity he cannot do on Earth or taking images to bring the experience back home. At a news conference Monday, Pettit was asked why he took so many images—670,000!—during his most recent stay on the space station.
"When I'm looking out the window, just enjoying the view, it's like, 'Oh, wow, a meteor. Look at that. Man, there's a flash there. What's that? Oh, look at that volcano going off. Okay, where's my camera? I gotta record that.' And part of this drive for me is when your mission is over, it's photographs and memories. When you want to share the experience with people, you can share the memories through verbal communication, like we're doing now, but the photographs are just another dimension of sharing what it's like. It's an experience where most people on Earth right now can't share, and I can try to give them a glimpse through my imagery."
AI-generated code could be a disaster for the software supply chain. Here’s why.
AI-generated computer code is rife with references to non-existent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant backdoors, and carry out other nefarious actions, newly published research shows.
The study, which used 16 of the most widely used large language models to generate 576,000 code samples, found that 440,000 of the package dependencies they contained were “hallucinated,” meaning they were non-existent. Open source models hallucinated the most, with 21 percent of the dependencies linking to non-existent libraries. A dependency is an essential code component that a separate piece of code requires to work properly. Dependencies save developers the hassle of rewriting code and are an essential part of the modern software supply chain.
Package hallucination flashbacksThese non-existent dependencies represent a threat to the software supply chain by exacerbating so-called dependency confusion attacks. These attacks work by causing a software package to access the wrong component dependency, for instance by publishing a malicious package and giving it the same name as the legitimate one but with a later version stamp. Software that depends on the package will, in some cases, choose the malicious version rather than the legitimate one because the former appears to be more recent.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is widely considered to be among the best comedy films of all time, and it's certainly one of the most quotable. This absurdist masterpiece sending up Arthurian legend turns 50 (!) this year.
It was partly Python member Terry Jones' passion for the Middle Ages and Arthurian legend that inspired Holy Grail and its approach to comedy. (Jones even went on to direct a 2004 documentary, Medieval Lives.) The troupe members wrote several drafts beginning in 1973, and Jones and Terry Gilliam were co-directors—the first full-length feature for each, so filming was one long learning process. Reviews were mixed when Holy Grail was first released—much like they were for Young Frankenstein (1974), another comedic masterpiece—but audiences begged to differ. It was the top-grossing British film screened in the US in 1975. And its reputation has only grown over the ensuing decades.
The film's broad cultural influence extends beyond the entertainment industry. Holy Grail has been the subject of multiple scholarly papers examining such topics as its effectiveness at teaching Arthurian literature or geometric thought and logic, the comedic techniques employed, and why the depiction of a killer rabbit is so fitting (killer rabbits frequently appear drawn in the margins of Gothic manuscripts). My personal favorite was a 2018 tongue-in-cheek paper on whether the Black Knight could have survived long enough to make good on his threat to bite King Arthur's legs off (tl;dr: no).
Seasonal COVID shots may no longer be possible under Trump admin
Under President Trump, the Food and Drug Administration may no longer approve seasonal COVID-19 vaccines updated for the virus variants circulating that year, according to recent statements by Trump administration officials.
Since the acute phase of the pandemic, vaccine manufacturers have been subtly updating COVID-19 shots annually to precisely target the molecular signatures of the newest virus variants, which continually evolve to evade our immune responses. So far, the FDA has treated these tweaked vaccines the same way it treats seasonal flu shots, which have long been updated annually to match currently circulating strains of flu viruses.
The FDA does not consider seasonal flu shots brand-new vaccines. Rather, they're just slightly altered versions of the approved vaccines. As such, the regulator does not require companies to conduct lengthy, expensive vaccine trials to prove that each slightly changed version is safe and effective. If they did, generating annual vaccines would be virtually impossible. Each year, from late February to early March, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization direct flu shot makers on what tweaks they should make to shots for the upcoming flu season. That gives manufacturers just enough time to develop tweaks and start manufacturing massive supplies of doses in time for the start of the flu season.