Innehållsförteckning för #627 från AppleMagazine

Testifying in the biggest U.S. antitrust case in a quarter century, Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended his company’s practice of paying Apple and other tech companies to make Google the default search engine on their devices, saying the intent was to make the user experience “seamless and easy.’’ The Department of Justice contends that Google — a company whose very name is synonymous with scouring the internet — pays off tech companies to lock out rival search engines to smother competition and innovation. According to court documents the government entered into the record last week, the payments came to more than $26 billion in 2021, a year in which operating expenses for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, were nearly $68 billion. Google contends that it dominates the market because its search…

As the United States injects hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy through its signature climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, criticism is growing louder about where, how and whether new development should be allowed. As opposition grows, once-routine regulatory processes are taking several years, if they are completed at all. Some communities are concerned about landscape changes, some property values and others wildlife preservation. Layered on top of these debates is misinformation, which sows doubt and mistrust among developers and communities. A new class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a glimpse into a novel way of resolving these types of conflicts. MIT is offering a first-of-its-kind course that trains students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Supervised by a professional mediator,…

Chatbots like ChatGPT wowed the world with their ability to write speeches, plan vacations or hold a conversation as good as or arguably even better than humans do, thanks to cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems. Now, frontier AI has become the latest buzzword as concerns grow that the emerging technology has capabilities that could endanger humanity. Everyone from the British government to top researchers and even major AI companies themselves are raising the alarm about frontier AI’s as-yet-unknown dangers and calling for safeguards to protect people from its existential threats. The debate comes to a head Wednesday, when British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosts a two-day summit focused on frontier AI. It’s reportedly expected to draw a group of about 100 officials from 28 countries, including U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris,…

It’s the kind of problem nonprofit leaders dream about: What do you do when you get an unexpectedly large donation? Summer Science Program, a nonprofit with an annual budget of about $2 million, sent about 200 high school juniors to six-week intensive research courses at universities this year. It has also puzzled over what do to with a surprise bequest of an estimated $200 million — about 100 times its annual budget. Summer Science Program learned last year that one of its alumni, Franklin Antonio, a co-founder of chipmaker Qualcomm, had granted the organization 20% of his estate, said CEO Frank Steslow. “The estate is still being assessed and appraised and there is not a final valuation, but it is well north of $960 million at this point,” Steslow said.…

Apple’s new entry-level Apple Pencil with a USB-C port for charging is now available to order. At $79, the new Apple Pencil is the company’s most affordable, and it comes with features like tilt sensitivity and the ability to attach magnetically to the side of an iPad. To charge the new Apple Pencil, you can slide the cap on the end to reveal the USB-C port. However, the lower price means this third-generation Apple Pencil doesn’t have some nice features available on the company’s other Apple Pencils, such as pressure sensitivity (found on both the first- and second-generation models) or the ability to pair and charge wirelessly when magnetically attached to an iPad (which you can do with the second-generation model). You can see a full list of what features…

At its Scary Fast virtual event, Apple lifted the lid on its next-generation M3 family of chips, crafted to continue its reign as the number one player in computing. From awe-inspiring graphical enhancements to unprecedented CPU and Neural Engine speeds, the M3 chips aim to set an industry standard, with refreshed MacBook Pros and iMacs ready and waiting. INCREDIBLE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE What’s undoubtedly the pièce de résistance of the M3 family is the all-new GPU architecture on the M3 chip. Signifying the most substantial graphical leap for Apple, it brings several firsts to the table. Dynamic Caching, for instance, is set to revolutionise how memory is utilised. Traditional GPUs, which allocate memory statically, often suffer from wasted resources. The Dynamic Caching system, however, utilises memory in real-time, drastically increasing average…

President Joe Biden this week signed an ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence that seeks to balance the needs of cutting-edge technology companies with national security and consumer rights, creating an early set of guardrails that could be fortified by legislation and global agreements. Before signing the order, Biden said AI is driving change at “warp speed” and carries tremendous potential as well as perils. “AI is all around us,” Biden said. “To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology.” The order is an initial step that is meant to ensure that AI is trustworthy and helpful, rather than deceptive and destructive. The order — which will likely need to be augmented by congressional action — seeks to steer how AI is…

A nonpartisan business group that advocates for clean energy estimates that 403,000 jobs will be created by the 210 major energy projects announced since the Inflation Reduction Act took effect in mid-2022. At least $86 billion in investments have been announced, with the biggest job gains in expected in the electric vehicles, battery storage and solar energy sectors, said the report issued this week by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2). The IRA, signed August 2022, contains $500 billion in new federal spending to lower healthcare costs, increase tax revenues and address climate change by offering incentives so clean tech companies innovate and manufacture in the U.S. “We’re in the biggest economic revolution we’ve seen in generations thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy policies,” said E2 executive director Bob…

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit owned by General Motors, is suspending driverless operations nationwide days after regulators in California found that its driverless cars posed a danger to public safety. The California Department of Motor Vehicles this week revoked the license for Cruise, which recently began transporting passengers throughout San Francisco. Cruise is also being investigated by U.S. regulators after receiving reports of potential risks to pedestrians and passengers. “We have decided to proactively pause driverless operations across all of our fleets while we take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust,” Cruise wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The choice to suspend its driverless services isn’t related to any…

U.S. regulators sued SolarWinds, a Texas-based technology company whose software was breached in a massive 2020 Russian cyberespionage campaign, for fraud for failing to disclose security deficiencies ahead of the stunning hack. The company’s top security executive was also named in the complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking unspecified civil penalties, reimbursement of “ill-gotten gains” and the executive’s removal. Detected in December 2020, the SolarWinds hack penetrated U.S. government agencies including the Justice and Homeland Security departments, and more than 100 private companies and think tanks. It was a rude wakeup call on the perils of neglecting cybersecurity. In the 68-page complaint filed in New York federal court, the SEC says SolarWinds and its then vice president of security, Tim Brown, defrauded investors and customers “through misstatements,…

Microsoft added a Copilot chatbot to its Bing search engine earlier this year in February. Now, the tech giant has started rolling out an update for the Windows 11 PC operating system which brings a new version of this chatbot (in preview) integrated into the software. The latest Windows 11 2023 update, also known as 23H2, will add the Copilot chatbot to the world’s most widely used PC operating system. Meanwhile, the company is also set to start selling the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI add-on software for corporate workers who use its productivity apps on November 1. The latest update to Windows includes several new features, in addition to Copilot. These include an auto-compose feature in Clipchamp, more languages for Windows Narrator, instant games, the ability to copy text from…

The wife of a man who nearly died of an opioid overdose comes bursting into the office of the sleazy doctor who prescribed it, wrongly, in exchange for personal gain. She slugs the doctor, in her agony. The scene comes deep into the new Netflix film “Pain Hustlers,” and it feels bracingly real and tragic. If only the rest of the movie, the latest in a string of opioid-themed films, felt the same. Instead, despite a high-powered cast featuring a reliably solid Emily Blunt, an expertly lowlife Chris Evans and the gifted Catherine O’Hara, the film tries too hard to be something it isn’t, or shouldn’t be: slick and breezy and too clever for its own good, filled with mockumentary interviews, wild montages, and other tricks used to more disciplined…