Techmeme
January 26, 2024, 10:15 PM

Top News

Damien Geradin / The Platform Law Blog:
Apple's changes for iOS app distribution in the EU fail to offer fair and reasonable commissions and show its disdain for both the DMA and app developers  —  Yesterday, Apple made an important announcement regarding changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union in response to the Digital Markets Act ("DMA").
Spotify:
Spotify says Apple is “forcing developers to stay with the status quo” and calls on the EU to “reject this blatant disregard” of the EU's established principles  —  For almost five years - 1,782 days - we have been asking the European Commission to take action against Apple.
Chris Kerr / Game Developer:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Mozilla criticizes Apple's plans to restrict BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps, forcing “Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations”  —  Apple's new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS.
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
A look at the browser-related iOS changes in the EU, including letting users set their default out of the 12 most popular browsers in their country's App Store  —  The raft of iOS changes Apple dropped in the European Union yesterday, as it prepares for enforcement of the bloc's Digital Markets Act …
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Fossil Group plans to leave the smartwatch business, and says the company will continue to keep its existing Wear OS watches updated “for the next few years”  —  Fossil Group has decided to call it quits on smartwatches.  —  The company announced this afternoon that it would leave …
Bloomberg:
Source: ElevenLabs banned a creator's account after researchers said the company's tech was used to make an audio deepfake used in a fake Biden robocall  —  Company's technology used to create fake Biden recording, researchers say  —  The creator of an audio deepfake of US President Joe Biden urging people …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
iOS 17.4 code shows that Apple may be testing two versions of its Ajax LLM for Siri and Messages, comparing their responses to results from OpenAI's ChatGPT  —  Apple is widely expected to unveil major new artificial intelligence features with iOS 18 in June.
More: AppleInsider, AppleInsider, The Verge, and Wccftech
Threads: @marcsloveX: @cullendForums: r/apple and Slashdot
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Google is testing an ARM64 version of Chrome for Arm-based Windows devices  —  Google appears to be readying a version of its popular Chrome browser for Windows on Arm.  X (formerly Twitter) user Pedro Justo spotted a native version of the browser for Windows 11 Arm-powered devices …
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Microsoft details the techniques that the Russian hacking group Midnight Blizzard used to breach the email accounts of its executives and other organizations  —  Microsoft confirmed that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service hacking group, which hacked into its executives' email accounts in November 2023 …
Tripp Mickle / New York Times:
Some Beeper users lost access to iMessage on their Mac and were told by Apple that the company had revoked access due to irregular activity  —  Beeper Mini customers were using their Mac computers to connect to iPhone messaging on their Android phones.  Now, they say Apple has blocked the messaging service on their Macs.
Tom Dotan / Wall Street Journal:
Source: Salesforce plans to lay off ~700 employees, or ~1% of its staff, after cutting 10% of its workforce in January 2023; the company has 1,000 open jobs  —  The layoffs, which will affect around 1% of its workforce, follow a 10% reduction last year  —  Salesforce is laying off around …
Financial Times:
Sources: xAI is in talks to raise up to $6B from family offices in Hong Kong, Middle Eastern funds, and Japanese and South Korean investors at a $20B valuation  —  Tesla chief targets $20bn valuation in bid to take on OpenAI  —  Elon Musk's xAI is in talks to raise up to $6bn …
Jon Porter / The Verge:
A review of Honor's Magic V2 foldable, launching in the UK and Europe for £1,700 and €2,000: thin and durable but a dated OS and processor, and software issues  —  It's thin and light enough to feel like a regular smartphone when folded.  That's impressive.  I just wish Honor's software were as svelte.

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More News

Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

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