¿Quieres una comedia surrealista? Comience cubriendo la jirafa con herramientas robóticas pintadas de colores brillantes. O puedes mirar queso del gobiernoque Apple TV+ describe como una “comedia familiar surrealista” cuando se estrene en la primavera de 2025.
Está protagonizada por David Oyelowo, quien también protagoniza la popular serie de ciencia ficción de Apple. silo.
queso del gobierno Se aleja de la vida cotidiana.
Las comedias familiares son un elemento básico de la televisión, pero la mayoría de las veces son una combinación del padre estúpido, la esposa atractiva que nunca atraerá y algunos niños que hacen el tipo de “bromas” insultantes que requerirían un equipo de escritores. .
Pero Apple TV+ va en una dirección diferente con la próxima serie Oyelowo. Esta tendencia está lejos de la realidad. El servicio de transmisión dijo el jueves:
“queso del gobierno Una comedia familiar surrealista ambientada en el Valle de San Fernando en 1969, cuenta la historia de los Chambers, una peculiar familia que persigue sueños elevados y aparentemente imposibles, maravillosamente desinhibidos por las realidades del mundo.
Cuando Hampton Chambers (Oyelowo) sale de prisión, su tan esperada reunión familiar no sale según lo planeado. Durante su ausencia, la esposa de Hampton, Astoria (Simon Missick), y sus hijos, Einstein (Evan Ellison) y Harrison (Jahi Diallo Winston), han formado una unidad familiar poco convencional, y el regreso de Hampton sumerge su mundo en el caos.
David Oyelowo Es un actor inglés quizás mejor conocido por interpretar al Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. en selma. También interpretó a Javert en la producción de BBC/PBS de Miserable. Ha sido nominado a dos premios Emmy.
Apple TV+ está programado queso del gobierno Se lanzará el miércoles 16 de abril de 2025 con los primeros cuatro episodios. Los seis restantes aparecerán uno a uno semanalmente todos los miércoles hasta el 28 de mayo.
Se emite además de muchas otras series y películas. Suscríbete a Apple TV+. El servicio cuesta $9,99 por mes con una prueba gratuita de siete días. También puedes obtenerlo a través de cualquier nivel del paquete de suscripción Apple One.
Por supuesto, el servicio de vídeo en streaming de Apple también incluye más. Existe una biblioteca de dramas, comedias, musicales, espectáculos infantiles, documentales de naturaleza, etc.
TikTok parent company ByteDance today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government in an effort to put a stop to the bill requiring TikTok to be sold off to a non-Chinese company in a matter of months, or face a U.S. ban.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that passed in April requires ByteDance to divest its TikTok ownership within nine months, with the possibility of a three-month extension if a deal is in progress. If TikTok is not sold off, the bill will prevent app stores and companies in the U.S. from providing the TikTok app to users. As of now, TikTok will be forced to shut down on January 19, 2025.
ByteDance calls the act “obviously unconstitutional,” and says that there is no path for TikTok to continue operating in the United States. The 270-day timeline is “not possible,” and even if it were, the company claims that the act is still an “extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power.”
If upheld, it would allow the government to decide that a company may no longer own and publish the innovative and unique speech platform it created. If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down. And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content — an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s commitment to both free speech and individual liberty.
The lawsuit argues that the act violates the First Amendment, and it claims that “speculative and analytically flawed” concern over security and content manipulation is an insufficient reason for limiting the free speech of TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users.
ByteDance says that a U.S. TikTok platform would not be commercially viable because it would limit the pool of content, undermining “the value and viability of the U.S. TikTok business.” ByteDance also claims that it would be technologically impossible to give the TikTok source code to a new owner because it would take years for new engineers to become familiar enough with the code to perform routine maintenance, plus the code would need to be rearchitected not to use ByteDance’s software tools, which cannot be done in 270 days.
The Chinese government has said that it will “firmly oppose” any effort to sell TikTok to a U.S. company, and China would need to approve a sale. China has no intention of allowing the TikTok recommendation engine to be divested. ByteDance has already moved U.S. data to servers owned by Oracle, but U.S. lawmakers do not feel that is enough to protect users.
There are few U.S. companies that could afford to purchase TikTok, and the tech giants that could buy it would likely be restricted from doing so due to antitrust concerns.
ByteDance is asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment that the act violates the U.S. Constitution, preventing the U.S. Attorney General from enforcing it.
Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Popular collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack and Google may be required to implement end-to-end encryption and interoperability if used by US federal agencies.
Legislation put forward by US Senator Ron Wyden, titled as the Secure and Interoperable Government Collaboration Technology Act is looking to boost security for such tools following a number of high-profile recent incidents.
Federal agencies don’t seem to use a single standard collaboration tool between them, making it necessary that when inter-agency communication does happen, it should be fully secure.
Communication is key
If written into law – which would most likely happen in 2025 due to the upcoming elections – the bill would require each collaboration tool used by federal agencies to be assessed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in order to understand how they can interoperate securely.
Email accounts linked to several agencies have been cracked by Russian hackers exploiting a chain of vulnerabilities linked to Microsoft corporate email accounts, and other government agencies have succumbed to a cascade of Ivanti VPN vulnerabilities that resulted in data exfiltration and persistent system access affecting businesses and government departments alike.
Speaking on the proposal, Wyden said, “My bill will secure the US government’s communications from foreign hackers, while protecting taxpayer wallets. Vendor lock-in, bundling, and other anticompetitive practices result in the government spending vast sums of money on insecure software.”
“It’s time to break the chokehold of big tech companies like Microsoft on government software, set high cybersecurity standards and reap the many benefits of a competitive market,” he concluded.
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Once signed into law, federal agencies would have up to four years to ensure their collaboration software meets the standards and requirements set by NIST, so while it isn’t an immediate fix to some of the security issues the federal government is experiencing, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Hackers recently stole hundreds of thousands of social security numbers from an American consulting firm, with victims across the US possibly affected.
Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA) has filed a new report with the Office of the Maine Attorney General, and sent a breach notification email to affected individuals.
In its filing, the company said that 341,650 individuals have had their sensitive data, and Social Security Numbers (SSN), stolen by unidentified threat actors.
Identities unknown
In the letter, seen by TechCrunch, GMA told the victims that it fell prey to a “sophisticated cyberattack” in May last year. In the attack, the threat actors stole people’s names, birth dates, addresses, and Medicare Health Insurance Claim Numbers, which also contained Social Security Numbers associated with a member.
Furthermore, “some” medical information and/or health insurance information was also stolen. While the attack did happen almost a year ago, it was in early February that GMA was notified that it had resulted in the theft of sensitive, personal data. It is unclear why GMA took so long to conclude its investigation of the breach.
GMA is a consulting firm providing litigation support services in civil litigation matters. The data it held was obtained by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) as part of a civil litigation matter, and then passed over to the company. “We received your information in our provision of services to the DOJ in support of that matter,” GMA said in the letter. “DOJ has advised us that you are not the subject of this investigation or the associated litigation matters. The DOJ informed GMA that this incident does not impact your current Medicare benefits or coverage.”
The identity of the attackers, or their motives, remain unknown. No threat actors have assumed responsibility for the attack just yet. It is also no known if the data was grabbed from a specific litigation process.
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The White House has unveiled a major policy update that marks a major step in the battle to ensure safe AI across the states, following plenty of other policy adjustments and introductions in recent months.
The policy, a response to President Biden’s directive, aims to manage the risks associated with AI while allowing federal agencies to benefit from its potential by mandating the appointment of a new type of C-suite executive.
Central to the policy, revealed by US Vice President Kamala Harris, is the appointment of chief AI officers within each federal agency. These officers will be responsible for overseeing the implementation of AI initiatives.
Chief AI Officers for all agencies
Chief AI Officers (CAIOs) will assess AI’s impact on various aspects, including safety, security, civil rights, and market competition.
The policy pushes for greater transparency, requiring agencies to publicly disclose their AI use cases and any exemptions granted. They have until December 1, 2024, to rectify any non-compliant AI uses, highlighting the White House’s commitment to accountability and public trust.
The official announcement exemplifies some of these safeguards, including allowing travellers to opt out of TSA facial recognition without it having an impact on their place in line, as well as ensuring human oversight over critical decisions across fraud detection and healthcare.
CAIOs, who are required to have significant expertise within the field, will have the authority to conduct assessments, provide oversight, and ensure compliance with safety standards.
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This marks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s first government-wide policy to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence and could be a sign of more things to come, including across both the US and globally.
Both the White House and governments globally have been making significant progress in terms of AI policies to protect both data and citizens, and the latest US policy sets a precedent for other agencies globally.
It’s been five months since President Joe Biden signed an executive order (EO) to address the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. The White House is today taking another step forward in implementing the EO with a policy that aims to regulate the federal government’s use of AI. Safeguards that the agencies must have in place include, among other things, ways to mitigate the risk of algorithmic bias.
“I believe that all leaders from government, civil society and the private sector have a moral, ethical and societal duty to make sure that artificial intelligence is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm while ensuring everyone is able to enjoy its benefits,” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters on a press call.
Harris announced three binding requirements under a new Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy. First, agencies will need to ensure that any AI tools they use “do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people.” They have until December 1 to make sure they have in place “concrete safeguards” to make sure that AI systems they’re employing don’t impact Americans’ safety or rights. Otherwise, the agency will have to stop using an AI product unless its leaders can justify that scrapping the system would have an “unacceptable” impact on critical operations.
Impact on Americans’ rights and safety
Per the policy, an AI system is deemed to impact safety if it “is used or expected to be used, in real-world conditions, to control or significantly influence the outcomes of” certain activities and decisions. Those include maintaining election integrity and voting infrastructure; controlling critical safety functions of infrastructure like water systems, emergency services and electrical grids; autonomous vehicles; and operating the physical movements of robots in “a workplace, school, housing, transportation, medical or law enforcement setting.”
Unless they have appropriate safeguards in place or can otherwise justify their use, agencies will also have to ditch AI systems that infringe on the rights of Americans. Purposes that the policy presumes to impact rights defines include predictive policing; social media monitoring for law enforcement; detecting plagiarism in schools; blocking or limiting protected speech; detecting or measuring human emotions and thoughts; pre-employment screening; and “replicating a person’s likeness or voice without express consent.”
When it comes to generative AI, the policy stipulates that agencies should assess potential benefits. They all also need to “establish adequate safeguards and oversight mechanisms that allow generative AI to be used in the agency without posing undue risk.”
Transparency requirements
The second requirement will force agencies to be transparent about the AI systems they’re using. “Today, President Biden and I are requiring that every year, US government agencies publish online a list of their AI systems, an assessment of the risks those systems might pose and how those risks are being managed,” Harris said.
As part of this effort, agencies will need to publish government-owned AI code, models and data, as long as doing so won’t harm the public or government operations. If an agency can’t disclose specific AI use cases for sensitivity reasons, they’ll still have to report metrics
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Last but not least, federal agencies will need to have internal oversight of their AI use. That includes each department appointing a chief AI officer to oversee all of an agency’s use of AI. “This is to make sure that AI is used responsibly, understanding that we must have senior leaders across our government who are specifically tasked with overseeing AI adoption and use,” Harris noted. Many agencies will also need to have AI governance boards in place by May 27.
The vice president added that prominent figures from the public and private sectors (including civil rights leaders and computer scientists) helped shape the policy along with business leaders and legal scholars.
The OMB suggests that, by adopting the safeguards, the Transportation Security Administration may have to let airline travelers opt out of facial recognition scans without losing their place in line or face a delay. It also suggests that there should be human oversight over things like AI fraud detection and diagnostics decisions in the federal healthcare system.
As you might imagine, government agencies are already using AI systems in a variety of ways. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is working on artificial intelligence models to help it more accurately forecast extreme weather, floods and wildfires, while the Federal Aviation Administration is using a system to help manage air traffic in major metropolitan areas to improve travel time.
“AI presents not only risk, but also a tremendous opportunity to improve public services and make progress on societal challenges like addressing climate change, improving public health and advancing equitable economic opportunity,” OMB Director Shalanda Young told reporters. “When used and overseen responsibly, AI can help agencies to reduce wait times for critical government services to improve accuracy and expand access to essential public services.”
This policy is the latest in a string of efforts to regulate the fast-evolving realm of AI. While the European Union has passed a sweeping set of rules for AI use in the bloc, and there are federal billsin the pipeline, efforts to regulate AI in the US have taken more of a patchwork approach at state level. This month, Utah enacted a law to protect consumers from AI fraud. In Tennessee, the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act (aka the Elvis Act — seriously) is an attempt to protect musicians from deepfakes i.e. having their voices cloned without permission.
The smartphone market is not competitive. Whether or not Apple holds an anti-competitive monopoly is a matter for the courts to decide, but it seems clear that the smartphone market is designed to lock buyers into one brand, and that is bad for everyone.
Take a look at the list of the best phones published by many tech websites, like CNET. There is usually a best iPhone and a best Android phone, and never the two shall meet. Our own TechRadar list of the best phones you can buy in the US includes a best overall phone, but we may not bother with that superlative for much longer.
After all, if you have an iPhone now and you come to our list of best phones, would you really consider switching to a Samsung phone just because I said it was the best? Would you drop-kick your Apple Watch and your Apple AirPods Pro and trade in your iPhone 14 Pro Max for a Galaxy S24 Ultra? Probably not.
Apple doesn’t want your Samsung phones, switcher! (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
Apple doesn’t think anybody is switching, that’s for sure. If you try to buy a new Apple iPhone 15 Pro and trade in your old Samsung phone, the latest Samsung phone that Apple includes on its drop-down trade-in list is the Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G. That phone is two years old. Apple hasn’t felt the need to update its trade-in list for two years. There is not a single Galaxy Z Fold or Galaxy Z Flip on Apple’s list, not even the Galaxy S23 Ultra.
Measuring competition in the US smartphone market
The market is entrenched. While Apple can make disclaimers about holding only a small portion of the global market, in fact, the way an economist measures market competition, Apple is excruciatingly dominant.
When the US government is considering whether or not to allow a corporate merger, it looks at the HHI
When economists measure market competition, they start with a simple measure called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). The HHI gives every market a score. To find that score, you take the market players and you square their market share. Then you add them all together.
If there is only one company in a market, that company has a 100% share of the market. The square of 100% is 10,000, and therefore a 10,000 score on the HHI is the absolute maximum.
If there are ten companies and each company has an equal 10% market share, that means each company adds 100 to the HHI, and the total HHI for the market is 10 X 100 = 1,000.
When the US government is considering whether or not to allow a corporate merger, it looks at the HHI for the competitive market. If the HHI for a market is 1,500 or lower, it is considered competitive. A market with ten companies that each held an equal share would be very competitive.
If the HHI reaches 2,500, the market is considered highly concentrated. In a highly concentrated market, the government is more likely to challenge a corporate merger, especially if that merger would move the HHI score by 200 points or more.
General Motors, the #1 car brand, has the same market share as Samsung (Image credit: Chevrolet)
Look at the US car market. General Motors has the top spot with 17% of the market, and among the top ten automakers, Volkswagen lands near the bottom with just under four percent of the market. The HHI for the total US auto market is approximately 1,100, making it a competitive market.
The US smartphone market? A very different picture. Apple holds more than 60% of the market, while the number two phone maker, Samsung, sits at around 17%. Computing the HHI for US smartphones gives us an index of more than 4,200. This is not a competitive market in any way. Apple controls the US smartphone market.
To be fair, Apple argues that its share of the global market is much more competitive, and this is absolutely true. Accounting for the top ten global smartphone makers, the entire market scores around 1,700 on the HHI. The problem is that list includes phone makers like Xiaomi, Oppo (apart from OnePlus), Realme, and Huawei, which don’t sell phones in the US.
More importantly, though, the US Department of Justice is responsible for the US market, not the global market.
A monopoly is about power, not percentage
Is Apple a monopoly? That’s a tough question, but before you can answer it, you must understand how the Department of Justice defines a monopoly.
A company approaches monopoly status when it holds “substantial market power that is durable rather than fleeting,” according to the DoJ. Market power means “the ability to raise prices profitability above those that would be charged in a competitive market.”
In other words, the DoJ says that if a company is so powerful in a market that it can charge whatever it wants, knowing you won’t ever leave and go to a competitor, it is a monopoly. In a healthy market, we have competition. New things get better. Old things get cheaper.
As the Department of Justice states, “competition spurs companies to reduce costs, improve the quality of their products, invent new products, educate consumers, and engage in a wide range of other activity that benefits consumer welfare.”
In a competitive market, this iPhone 13 should be much cheaper by now (Image credit: TechRadar)
It is hard to look at the current smartphone market and believe that all of this is happening. We are not seeing cost reductions in smartphones, even on older phones that remain on sale after the newer model is launched. The prices just don’t drop as much as they should.
We’re not seeing major cost reductions. If we were, I’d be able to buy an old iPhone right now at a reduced price. In a normal market, I would expect a one-year-old phone to cost 10% less than a brand-new phone, and a two-year-old phone should be even cheaper. If I buy a TV, or a car, or other major appliances, that’s the savings I will get for buying leftover older models.
A two-year-old leftover phone should cost 20% less than a new phone. But look at the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 13, from 2021, for $599, when it originally cost $799 brand new. That means Apple only cuts prices by less than 8% every year. That’s not competitive. That’s control over the market.
In a competitive market, not every phone would copy the iPhone
If a phone veers too far from the iPhone formula, it won’t find space on carrier store shelves
We aren’t seeing consumer education about new phone technologies. With cars, people are learning about hybrid versus electric options. In home appliances, people are learning about the differences between heat pumps and air conditioning. Where is the education in phones? We aren’t seeing that wide range of activity that you’d expect from a mature market.
We have so many different types of cars, from the type of internal powertrain and the fuel it uses, to the body size and shape, to the levels of luxury. In the phone market we have the iPhone, and phones that try to imitate the iPhone. If a phone veers too far from the iPhone formula, it won’t find space on carrier store shelves. It won’t find developers to support its platform.
I wish I could use Check In with my family, but they use Galaxy phones (Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
It won’t be compatible with the phone all of your friends use, because Apple has made sure that other phones don’t work properly with the iPhone. Apple has a great safety check in feature that lets my Dad know I’ve gotten home safely after my long drive home. Except I can’t use it with my Dad because he has an Android phone, not an iPhone.
Apple does not have an obligation to help its competitors or lose its competitive advantage. The US government, on the other hand, has an obligation to recognize when a market is no longer competitive, and one company is using its dominance to stifle evolution. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. A company doesn’t win by holding back the market, it wins by making its own products better and more affordable.
New Zealand has joined the UK in accusing China of sponsoring hacking groups in their attempts to steal sensitive information from western nations.
The country’s government has pointed the finger at a group tracked as APT40, which has been linked to a breach of the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the Parliamentary Service in 2021, around the same time that the UK suffered a similar attack.
The United States has charged several people linked to a hacking operation that has been ongoing for 14 years and may have affected millions of Americans.
Western condemnation of Beijing-backed hacking scandals
In an announcement of the attack suffered by the New Zealand parliamentary organizations, attorney-general and minister of defense Judith Collins said that the security services had “completed a robust technical assessment following a compromise of the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the Parliamentary Service in 2021, and has attributed this activity to a PRC state-sponsored group known as APT40.”
Collins continued, stating that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), “worked with the impacted organizations to contain the activity and remove the actor shortly after they were able to access the network.”
Australia backed up New Zealand’s criticism of China’s involvement in a number of cyberattacks that have targeted western national security, with home affairs minister Claire O’Neill and foreign minister Penny Wong sharing their “serious concerns about malicious cyber activities by China state-backed actors targeting UK democratic institutions and parliamentarians.”
Speaking on the recent spate of accusations against Beijing’s sponsorship of hacking attempts, Don Smith, VP Threat Intelligence, Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU), said, “Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage is not a new threat. The UK and the US have been calling out these covert operations for several years now. The purpose of cyber espionage from China’s point of view, is to access information that will advance the People’s Republic of China agenda.”
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“Over the past couple of years, tired of having their operations rumbled and publicly outed, the Chinese have placed a growing emphasis on stealthy tradecraft in cyber espionage attacks. This is a change in MO from its previous ‘smash and grab’ reputation but it is viewed by the Chinese as a necessary evolution to one, make it harder to get caught and two, make it nearly impossible to attribute an attack to them,” Smith continued.
“Specifically, this has manifested itself in four key areas: Obfuscated networks; Living on the Edge; Living off the Land and Living in the Cloud. Combined these tactics make identification of malicious activity harder, but more importantly make attribution more complicated.”
First, there’s the obvious argument: iPhone has just 57% of the US market share (though I’ve also seen numbers closer to 70%), and globally, it has roughly 20%. You don’t need to be a math major to know that, by any measure, those are not “monopoly” numbers.
There’s no argument that Apple is far from perfect on the inclusivity front. It dragged its heels on working with Google-supported RCS messaging standard that would force it to support full-capability messaging from Android devices; its Apple Watch does not work with Android phones; and, similarly, leading smartwatches from Samsung and Google do not work on the iPhone.
Of course, RCS support is now set to arrive on iPhones. Sure, it won’t be complete integration or cross-platform compatibility. You’ll be able to message – with undo-send, edits, and full-resolution photos and videos – with all your Android friends, but only from within a separate iPhone RCS messaging app. RCS messages will not appear, it seems, inside of iMessage. In other words, it may feel a bit like messaging in WhatsApp on an iPhone. Even so, Apple’s not blocking the idea.
It’s also worth noting that earlier Samsung Galaxy Watches did work with iOS, but that was before Samsung switched from its Tizen OS to WearOS. Is Apple taking its sweet time in adding WearOS support to the iPhone? Yes, and one wonders if it’ll ever do so.
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There are also fair questions about why the Apple Watch still doesn’t work with any of your best Android Phones. I agree, this is a problem. On the other hand, I don’t believe companies should be forced to make their products work with competitors’ products unless there’s a good market/business reason, existing standards, or significant consumer demand.
If there is consumer demand, I certainly haven’t seen it, and Apple also has no business incentive for offering that level of compatibility. Those who lust after the best Apple Watch but own a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultramight switch to an iPhone 15 Pro Max in order to own that watch, but if they’ve invested in that excellent Android phone, I highly doubt they’d make that switch. More importantly, this is not the reason why someone would switch from Android to iPhone.
In a similar vein, I don’t think the lack of compatibility is what might keep people from switching from iPhone to Android.
It seems to me that the DOJ is confusing ‘monopoly’ with ‘ecosystem.’ Apple’s full-stack control, from silicon to components to platform to consumer hardware, is almost unmatched in the industry. The Apple ecosystem, and the considerable consumer benefits it offers, springs directly from that control.
I spent almost two decades using a mix of Windows PCs and Apple mobile devices, including Apple Watches, the best iPads, and the best Phones. Everything worked fine and I never felt that, for instance, my iPhone was trying to nudge me to switch to a Mac, or that my Apple Watch harbored secret disdain for the Windows platform.
When I made the choice to switch to a MacBook in 2023, though, my life was transformed. There has never been a collection of hardware and software that works as well together as Apple’s. This is not coercion; it’s consistency, and seamless integration.
The process was eased, in part, by the ability of macOS, iPadOS, and iOS to work seamlessly with third-party systems like Microsoft Word, OneDrive, Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, and Chrome. To me, this is the best of both worlds, and not a single worldview that tries to force me to see things the Apple way.
The DOJ needs to get up to speed with reality
There are other head-scratching parts of this case, such as the DOJ’s accusation that Apple is “Suppressing cloud-based mobile streaming services”. Obviously, the DOJ can’t be talking about Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and countless other streaming platforms, all of which work on my iPhone, iPad, and best MacBook.
It’s not always a perfect relationship. Netflix doesn’t want to work within Apple TV because the company is not interested in paying the 30% ‘Apple Tax‘.
Apple’s App Store policies are probably the closest Apple has come to being a monopolistic player. There’s only one way to get iOS apps, and developers have had to pay as much as 30% of their customer revenue to Apple for the privilege. Apple has walked back some of these fees, and many smaller developers pay half that much, Elsewhere, the EU has chipped away at Apple’s exclusionary tactics, and forced the company to accept third-party app stories (with a mass of caveats).
I’ve never minded the single-store system, and I appreciate the promise of privacy and security that it affords. Apple, though, could still do a better job of vetting charlatan apps like the current explosion of fake ‘OpenAI Sora Apps’ (OpenAI has yet to publicly release a Sora app to consumers). Even so, problems like that will only get worse if Apple is forced to open its US iOS app market to third-party companies.
Apple’s not perfect, but the iPhone is pretty close
I’m not arguing that Apple is a blameless operator. Its app vetting process is a black box that makes a lot of arbitrary decisions. It has an “Apple’s way or the highway” attitude when it comes to app and developer disputes (see Apple vs. Epic Games). Apple will almost always decide in favor of itself and its own businesses, and is never first to offer cross-platform interoperability.
Apple’s approach can seem imperial at times; but it’s also effective, and not just for itself. Most people I talk to willingly choose the iPhone, and not because they feel they have no other choice. Similarly, people choose Samsung and Google Phones for their own idiosyncratic reasons. No one is trapped, stuck, or more importantly without choice.
I agree with Apple that the DOJ does not understand the technology, and nor should it be in the position of making technology choices for tech companies or their customers. Suppose the US Government wins, and it does start making those choices. It would be fixing a problem that doesn’t exist, and that no consumer asked it to fix, while also potentially ruining the relationships with companies and their products which most consumers currently enjoy.
The US government has issued a warning to its allies that state-backed hackers from Iran and China are increasingly targeting critical infrastructure, with the most notable attacks against water systems.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) probed a number of Iranian attacks targeting Unitronic programmable logic controllers (PLC) used in water facilities.
China has also turned its attention to probing critical US infrastructure in what government officials claim could be practice for a wider playbook in the event of war between the US and China.
Targeting the weakest link in the chain
A public letter issued by Environment Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator, Michael Regan, and National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said, “Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States. These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities.”
While the attack conducted by an Iranian-backed group did not affect the water supply at the targeted facility, a breach of the PLCs used to control the supply of water means that had the attack progressed further, the attackers could have contaminated the water, damaged the facility itself, or even turned off the municipal water supply.
Volt Typhoon is the most likely culprit behind the attacks carried out by China, with water facilities alongside power grids, port infrastructure, and at least one oil and gas pipeline. The letter continued, stating, “Federal departments and agencies assess with high confidence that Volt Typhoon actors are pre-positioning themselves to disrupt critical infrastructure operations in the event of geopolitical tensions and/or military conflicts.”
Water facilities in the US have long been an easy target for cyber attacks due to the critical underfunding, low staffing levels, and a general lack of cyber security. The Biden Administration recently announced that the burden of responsibility for cyber security should be shifted onto private enterprises that are best positioned to reduce the risks for small businesses and public institutions.
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“In many cases, even basic cybersecurity precautions — such as resetting default passwords or updating software to address known vulnerabilities — are not in place and can mean the difference between business as usual and a disruptive cyberattack,” the letter stated.
