Tech

Apple and Google hold an “effective duopoly” with their mobile platforms and may be forced to open them up to more competition, a UK watchdog has said.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced proposals to give the US tech giants “strategic market status” for their mobile platforms, which could enforce changes that will benefit consumers, businesses and app developers.

An earlier market study by the CMA published in 2021 found that Apple and Google dominated mobile ecosystems across operating systems, app stores and web browsers.

It said this meant the two companies were in a position to effectively set the rules on how mobile browsers worked on their devices.

Around 90% to 100% of UK mobile devices run on Apple or Google’s mobile platforms, according to the CMA.

Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the regulator, said: “Apple and Google’s mobile platforms are both critical to the UK economy – playing an important role in all our lives, from banking and shopping to entertainment and education.

Microsoft has admitted that it can't protect EU data from U.S. snooping.

In sworn testimony before a French Senate inquiry into the role of public procurement in promoting digital sovereignty, Anton Carniaux, Microsoft France's director of public and legal affairs, was asked whether he could guarantee that French citizen data would never be transmitted to U.S. authorities without explicit French authorization. And, he replied, "No, I cannot guarantee it."

From Tom Scott's newsletter:

A lovely video from the design rules company: they launched a Kickstarter project, "Metroboard", and they visited Shenzen for a week to see the factories where it's being made. This video is ten minutes long, and the narration is calm and gentle, but the whole thing feels like it's going at breakneck speed: there is so much involved, and so much craft being shown. Thanks to Sebastian for sending this over!

Meta is hosting ads on Facebook, Instagram and Threads from pro-Israel entities that are raising money for military equipment including drones and tactical gear for Israeli Defense Force battalions, seemingly a violation of the company’s stated advertising policies, new research shows.

“We are the sniper team of Unit Shaked, stationed in Gaza, and we urgently need shooting tripods to complete our mission in Jabalia,” one ad on Facebook read, first published on 11 June and still active on 17 July.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, is due to challenge the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) in the High Court of Justice in London on July 22 and 23. It wants to challenge the categorization regulations that would classify Wikipedia as a Category 1 service, which was designed for large, commercial social media platforms in mind, not volunteer, non-profit encyclopedias.

Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the bosses of big media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the web, that they faced a grave new online threat. “I said, ‘What, is it the North Koreans?’,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘No. It’s AI’.”

Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web. As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that “content” publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic.

As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

Archive : https://archive.ph/nhrYS

LibreOffice has been on the offensive lately, taking the time to call out Microsoft and its practices whenever it can. Now, it is at it again, accusing Microsoft of "intentionally" using "unnecessarily complex" file formats to achieve user lock-in with its Microsoft 365 (Office) documents.

For those who don't know, XML is a markup language that programs like Microsoft 365 and LibreOffice use to structure and define documents.

As LibreOffice puts it:

An XML schema comprises the structure, data types and rules of an XML document and is described in an XML Schema Definition (XSD) file. This tells the PC what to expect and checks that the data follows the rules. In theory, XML and XSD together form the basis of the concept of interoperability.

The two office suites take very different paths here. LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open standard meant to be controlled by no single company. This format gives us files like .odt for text and .ods for spreadsheets.

Microsoft, on the other hand, created its own Office Open XML (OOXML) to support every feature in its own software, giving us the familiar .docx and .xlsx. What's interesting is that both formats are really just ZIP archives. The easiest way to verify this is to take a .docx file, rename it to .zip, and decompress it. This will show you the guts of a Microsoft 365 document.

As LibreOffice notes, XML is supposed to function as "a bridge," but Microsoft is weaponizing its own schema by making it so "complex that it becomes a barrier rather than a bridge." LibreOffice compares it to a railway system where the tracks are public, but one company's control system is so convoluted that no one else can build a compatible train, making it almost impossible for others to compete. Passengers don't realise they are being held hostage by these technical hurdles.

While some creators are happy to see the growing capabilities of generative AI products like ChatGPT and Gemini, others are opposed to using AI tech, afraid that the AI could replace them. The movie industry is the best example of that. There’s concern that AI might take over jobs or alter performances, especially now that it’s more sophisticated than ever.

Products like Google’s Veo 3 can create lifelike video sequences that include dialogue and sound. With enough money and time, you could use such tools to make a full movie without hiring real actors or a production team.

Veo 3 isn’t the only advanced AI video generation tool out there, but it’s a good example of what’s possible today. And Google’s AI tech has already been used in at least one movie. Google said so a few months ago.

Fast-forward to mid-July, and Netflix confirmed that it used unnamed generative AI tools to create special effects for a widely acclaimed new TV show that became a monster hit earlier this year. The revelation came during Netflix’s quarterly earnings report, where the streamer reported a 16% rise in revenue for the June quarter.

Back in 1999, Wall Street lost its collective mind over the internet. Companies with no revenue were suddenly worth billions, “eyeballs” were treated as currency, and market analysts predicted a frictionless future where everything would be digital. Then the bubble burst. Between March 2000 and October 2002, an estimated five trillion dollars in market value vanished into thin air.

Today, it is happening again. This time, the magic word is not “.com.” It is “AI.” < According to Torsten Slok, the influential chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a major global investment firm, the current AI driven market bubble is even more stretched than the dot com frenzy of the late 1990s. And he has the data to prove it.

“The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s,” Slok wrote in a recent research note that was widely shared across social media and financial circles.

Supporting Windows 10 PCs is about to get very expensive, but upgrading to Windows 11 poses significant hardware and software challenges for many organizations. What terror awaits when 1,000 applets IT never knew about crash after the upgrade?

For IT leaders, there is much to fear. How much of their current hardware is compatible with Windows 11? Far more critically, what about operational technology devices that manage industrial processes, on-prem legacy apps (including tons of homegrown code), and the unknown numbers of applets that IT doesn’t know about?

That “unknown” list includes inherited apps from the company’s last 50 acquisitions, as well as shadow apps that business units never bothered to report to corporate.

At the same time, there is a noticeable lack of enthusiasm among IT leaders for making the upgrade at all, given the perception that Windows 11 simply doesn’t offer much in terms of materially new or better functionality.

The decision is being forced, because Microsoft says that it will not add new capabilities or provide security patches for Windows 10 for corporate customers after October 14, 2025 — unless they enroll in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10.

Microsoft is doubling the ESU price every year: For the first year, it will be $61/device, which will rise to $122/device for the second year and then $244/device for the third year. After that, the company says it will cut off all Windows 10 support entirely. (Microsoft did not respond to a Computerworld request for an interview for this story.)

Enrolling 5,000 Windows 10 PCs in ESU for the full three years would cost a business more than $2.1 million. A large organization that wants to keep 30,000 PCs on extended Windows 10 support for three years would have to pay more than $12.8 million to do so.

This leaves IT leaders having to choose between a potentially painful upgrade to Windows 11 and having to pay a massive amount of money for continued Windows 10 support, depending on how many seats will remain on Windows 10.

WeTransfer was forced to respond this week after changes to its terms of service (TOS) triggered major backlash from users who believed the new language granted the service access to users' files to train AI.

"We don't use machine learning or any form of AI to process content shared via WeTransfer, nor do we sell content or data to any third parties," a WeTransfer spokesperson told BBC News on Tuesday.

WeTransfer clarified this after users noticed recent changes to its TOS page, which initially said the following policy would go into effect in August (via Wayback Machine on July 14, 2025).

• Google is testing AI summaries for articles in the Discover feed.
• Like AI overviews in Google Search, Discover feed summaries combine information from multiple sources instead of just referencing one.
• Google is also testing a new button to bookmark articles that can be revisited later.

A survey of IT asset managers (ITAM) and software asset managers (SAM) in organisations that use Java has revealed that the majority have experienced an Oracle Java audit in the past three years.

The survey of 500 qualified participants from six continents, conducted by Dimensional Research for the ITAM Forum and Azul, reported that 75% of respondents worked in organisations that were audited by Oracle for Java compliance. More than a quarter of the survey’s respondents spend over $500,000 a year on resolving licensing issues including audits, additional licenses and penalties for non-compliance.

In the age of artificial intelligence, water has become as critical to data centers — which power the development of the cutting-edge technology — as electricity. The facilities pump enormous amounts of cold water into pipes that run throughout the buildings to cool the computers inside so that they can perform calculations and keep internet services like social networking humming.

A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day. New data centers built to train more powerful A.I. are set to be even thirstier, requiring millions of gallons of water a day, according to water permit applications reviewed by The New York Times.

Data center companies often demand as much water as they can get, using the tax revenue they pay as leverage, said Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist and director of urban water policy at Stanford. Some projects are so large that they require the land to first be “dewatered,” which is when groundwater is pumped out of the surrounding area in preparation for construction.

Microsoft has made another adjustment to the restrictions that it plans to place on Windows 10 customers who use Microsoft 365 apps (previously called Office 365), gradually incentivizing them to move to Windows 11.

You’re probably aware that Microsoft is discontinuing support for Windows 10 users this October, has it has said repeatedly for years. But it is also turning off support for Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel, too, on the same day: Oct. 14, 2025. Apps like Word will still work, and to ensure a smooth transition Microsoft will still support Microsoft 365 apps with security updates for three years, until 2028.

What’s new? Microsoft has clarified that “security updates” do not include “feature updates” that include new features.

“Devices running Microsoft 365 Apps on Windows 10 will receive feature updates until Version 2608 is released on the following dates: August 2026 for Current Channel (including all versions for individuals and families),” Microsoft says.

Ever since Microsoft announced Windows 11 almost four years ago, there has been significant controversy on a fairly regular basis about stringent hardware requirements that need to be met in order to legitimately run the operating system. A major concern revolved around the fact that Windows 11 mandates TPM 2.0, something that is not present in older processors, rendering otherwise perfectly fine PCs obsolete.

When an average person purchased a Windows 10 PC years ago, they did not ask the retailer if the hardware also included TPM. The customer may care about Windows Hello in their potential purchase, they don't care about how it's more secure through TPM 2.0. This technology, while useful, doesn't matter to your regular home user. Most people don't utilize or even know about BitLocker encryption, in fact, they'd probably be more concerned about the performance hit that could result from disk encryption.

The common Windows 11 user assumes that the operating system's security is built-in, and as long as they have a secure password that allows them to login to their PC and use it, they should be fine.

Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.

Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.

Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.

• Car hire companies are deploying new AI-powered scanning systems to detect even minor vehicle damage, sparking customer outrage over unexpected charges.
• Hertz, a prominent car rental firm, is using UVeye's automated technology at several US airports, which compares high-resolution images taken at pickup and return to identify new damage.
• Customers report receiving substantial bills for tiny imperfections, such as small dents or scuffs, often just minutes after returning their vehicles.
• Specific cases include Kelly Rogers being charged for a 'dent' she thought was a shadow, and another customer facing a $440 bill for a one-inch scuff.
• Despite customer complaints and plans to expand the system to over 100 US airports, Hertz maintains the technology ensures customers are not charged for pre-existing damage.