Apple is tweaking how it applies a new fee that can apply to iOS developers in the European Union as it continues to configure its approach to the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA): Developers of free apps will be able to avoid the fee entirely under changes it announced Thursday, which apply from today, while other developers earning under a certain revenue threshold will get longer before they have to pay Apple the fee. From a report: The so-called "core technology fee" remains opt in for iOS developers in the region, as Apple continues to offer its standard business terms, but those wanting to take up new entitlements the DMA has required Apple to offer -- such as allowing sideloading of apps, third party app stores, and support for alternative payment tech than Apple's own -- must agree to the set of business terms that include the CTF (as Apple calls it).

The fee remains under scrutiny in the region where the Commission, which enforces the DMA on Apple and other gatekeepers -- and opened its first investigations including on Apple in March -- is actively exploring whether the mechanism is enabling the iPhone maker to avoid its obligations to open up the App Store to competition, such as from third party app stores. But so far the EU hasn't prevented Apple from charging a fee.

Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, died Tuesday morning after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection. Seattle Times: Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle. He died after two weeks in critical condition, his aunt Carol Parsons said. Dean had given a deposition in a Spirit shareholder lawsuit and also filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration alleging "serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line" at Spirit.

Spirit fired Dean in April 2023, and he had filed a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging his termination was in retaliation for raising concerns related to aviation safety. Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was airlifted from Wichita to a hospital in Oklahoma City, Parsons said. There he was put on an ECMO machine, which circulates and oxygenates a patient's blood outside the body, taking over heart and lung function when a patient's organs don't work on their own.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft said on Thursday it will invest $2.2 billion over the next four years in Malaysia to expand cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) services in the company's latest push to promote its generative AI technology in Asia. The investment, the largest in Microsoft's 32-year history in Malaysia, will include building cloud and AI infrastructure, creating AI-skilling opportunities for 200,000 people, and supporting the country's developers, the company said.

Microsoft will also work with the Malaysian government to establish a national AI Centre of Excellence and enhance the nation's cybersecurity capabilities, the company said in a statement. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who met Nadella on Thursday, said the investment supported Malaysia's efforts in developing its AI capabilities. Microsoft is trying to expand its support for the development of AI globally. Nadella this week announced a $1.7 billion investment in neighboring Indonesia and said Microsoft would open its first regional data centre in Thailand. "We want to make sure we have world class infrastructure right here in the country so that every organization and start-up can benefit," Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said during a visit to Kuala Lumpur.

A new battery from Energizer comes with "color alert technology" to alert parents if their child has swallowed one. When the coin lithium battery comes into contact with saliva, it activates a blue dye "so parents and caregivers know that medical attention could be required," reports the New York Times. The battery also features more secure packaging and a nontoxic bitter coating. From the report: The new coin lithium battery features more secure packaging, a nontoxic bitter coating to discourage swallowing and "color alert technology" that activates a blue dye when the battery comes into contact with moisture, like saliva, so parents and caregivers know that medical attention could be required. The new battery was announced in a video last week by Energizer and Trista Hamsmith, whose 18-month-old daughter died after swallowing a button battery from a remote control. Ms. Hamsmith founded a nonprofit organization focused on children's safety, successfully advocated for legislation, known as Reese's Law, that requires a secure compartment of the batteries in products that use them as well as stronger warning labels on all packaging, and is now working to make the batteries themselves safer.

Ingested coin or button batteries result in thousands of emergency hospital visits each year, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which notes that "the consequences of a child swallowing a battery can be immediate, devastating and deadly." "A button cell battery can burn through a child's throat or esophagus in as little as two hours if swallowed," according to the agency. Secure packaging and bitter coatings for batteries have long existed, but "the massive breakthrough here is the color alert technology, which helps give caretakers that indicator that something has happened," Jeff Roth, the global category leader for batteries at Energizer, said in an interview on Wednesday. "The most significant part about this is getting help early in the process," he said. "That's really what the color alert technology allows the family to do."

According to CNBC, Google is laying off at least 200 employees from its "Core" teams and moving some roles to India and Mexico. From the report: The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company's flagship products and for protecting users' online safety, according to Google's website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles. At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company's offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced news of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows. "We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities," Husain wrote in the email. [...] "Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated," Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes "are in service of our broader goals" as a company. The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company's developer tools, an area Google is streamlining as it incorporates more artificial intelligence into the products.

Unity has appointed Matthew Bromberg, former CEO of Zynga, as its new CEO, president and board member. "Filling a role that has been temporarily filled by former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, Bromberg will formally join Unity as CEO on May 15," reports VentureBeat. "Whitehurst will serve as executive chair of the Unity board, and Roelof Botha will transition from chairman to lead independent board member." From the report: Bromberg fills a slot vacated by John Riccitiello, who resigned last fall after a pricing debacle that left game developers extremely angry at Unity. They calmed down after Unity walked back major parts of the price increase. It's an important time for Unity as it is about to ship Unity 6, the latest version of its game engine, in competition with Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5.4. Whitehurst will also return to Silver Lake, one of Unity's two largest shareholders, where he had previously been a senior advisor and will now join as a managing director leading both operating and investment team initiatives.

Bromberg brings over 20 years of experience across the gaming industry, having previously served as Chief Operating Officer of leading mobile game developer and publisher Zynga, where he played a key role in the company's turnaround, and was responsible for Zynga's game studios globally, while also overseeing product development and design, technology, data, and analytics. Bromberg also held multiple leadership roles at Electronic Arts, where he helped scale the company's mobile division and led teams on four continents that built popular games across all major genres.

The US could lose out on valuable AI and tech talent if some of its immigration policies are not modernized, Google says in a letter sent to the Department of Labor. From a report: Google says policies like Schedule A, a list of occupations the government "pre-certified" as not having enough American workers, have to be more flexible and move faster to meet demand in technologies like AI and cybersecurity. The company says the government must update Schedule A to include AI and cybersecurity and do so more regularly.

"There's wide recognition that there is a global shortage of talent in AI, but the fact remains that the US is one of the harder places to bring talent from abroad, and we risk losing out on some of the most highly sought-after people in the world," Karan Bhatia, head of government affairs and public policy at Google, tells The Verge. He noted that the occupations in Schedule A have not been updated in 20 years.

Companies can apply for permanent residencies, colloquially known as green cards, for employees. The Department of Labor requires companies to get a permanent labor certification (PERM) proving there is a shortage of workers in that role. That process may take time, so the government "pre-certified" some jobs through Schedule A. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists Schedule A occupations as physical therapists, professional nurses, or "immigrants of exceptional ability in the sciences or arts." While the wait time for a green card isn't reduced, Google says Schedule A cuts down the processing time by about a year.

The massive volumes of debt piling up around the globe forced the president of the World Economic Forum to reach back more than 200 years for a comparable period. Fortune: In an interview Sunday with CNBC at a WEF conference in Saudi Arabia, Borge Brende warned overall debt is approaching the world's total economic output. "We haven't seen this kind of debt since the Napoleonic Wars," he said. "We're getting close to 100% of global GDP in debt."

According to the International Monetary Fund last year, global public debt hit $91 trillion, or 92% of GDP, by the end of 2022. That was actually a dip from pandemic-era debt levels but remained in line with a decades-long trend higher. Data on global debt during the Napoleonic Wars, which took place in the early 1800s, is harder to come by. But for comparison, some estimates put British government debt at more than 200% of GDP by 1815.

Brende also told CNBC that governments need to take fiscal measures to reduce their debts without triggering a recession. For now, global growth is about 3.2% annually, which isn't bad, but it's also below the 4% trend growth the world had seen for decades, he said earlier in the interview. That risks a repeat of the 1970s, when growth was low for a decade, Brende added. But the world can avoid such an outcome if it continues to trade and doesn't engage in more trade wars. "Trade was the engine of growth for decades," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The ransomware gang that hacked into U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare used a set of stolen credentials to remotely access the company's systems that weren't protected by multifactor authentication (MFA), according to the chief executive of its parent company, UnitedHealth Group (UHG). UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty provided the written testimony ahead of a House subcommittee hearing on Wednesday into the February ransomware attack that caused months of disruption across the U.S. healthcare system. This is the first time the health insurance giant has given an assessment of how hackers broke into Change Healthcare's systems, during which massive amounts of health data were exfiltrated from its systems. UnitedHealth said last week that the hackers stole health data on a "substantial proportion of people in America."

According to Witty's testimony, the criminal hackers "used compromised credentials to remotely access a Change Healthcare Citrix portal." Organizations like Change use Citrix software to let employees access their work computers remotely on their internal networks. Witty did not elaborate on how the credentials were stolen. However, Witty did say the portal "did not have multifactor authentication," which is a basic security feature that prevents the misuse of stolen passwords by requiring a second code sent to an employee's trusted device, such as their phone. It's not known why Change did not set up multifactor authentication on this system, but this will likely become a focus for investigators trying to understand potential deficiencies in the insurer's systems. "Once the threat actor gained access, they moved laterally within the systems in more sophisticated ways and exfiltrated data," said Witty. Witty said the hackers deployed ransomware nine days later on February 21, prompting the health giant to shut down its network to contain the breach. Last week, the medical firm admitted that it paid the ransomware hackers roughly $22 million via bitcoin.

Meanwhile, UnitedHealth said the total costs associated with the ransomware attack amounted to $872 million. "The remediation efforts spent on the attack are ongoing, so the total costs related to business disruption and repairs are likely to exceed $1 billion over time, potentially including the reported $22 million payment made [to the hackers]," notes The Register.

Walmart isn't making enough money off its new health centers, so it decided to close up shop. From a report: The retail giant announced today that it'll shutter all 51 health centers it opened up across five states since 2019. Walmart is also getting rid of its virtual care program after acquiring telehealth provider MeMD in 2021. "We determined there is not a sustainable business model for us to continue," Walmart said in an announcement today.

"This is a difficult decision, and like others, the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs create a lack of profitability that make the care business unsustainable for us at this time," Walmart said today. It's an about-face from last year when Walmart said it planned to double its number of health clinics and expand into two new states in 2024.

theodp writes: Reports of the death of Bill Gates' influence at Microsoft have been greatly exaggerated: "Publicly, [Bill] Gates has been almost entirely out of the picture at Microsoft since 2021, following allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female employees. In fact, Business Insider has learned, Gates has been quietly orchestrating much of Microsoft's AI revolution from behind the scenes. Current and former executives say Gates remains intimately involved in the company's operations -- advising on strategy, reviewing products, recruiting high-level executives, and nurturing Microsoft's crucial relationship with Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI.

In early 2023, when Microsoft debuted a version of its search engine Bing turbocharged by the same technology as ChatGPT, throwing down the gauntlet against competitors like Google, Gates, executives said, was pivotal in setting the plan in motion. While Nadella might be the public face of the company's AI success [...] Gates has been the man behind the curtain."[...] "Today, Gates remains close with Altman, who visits his home a few times a year, and OpenAI seeks his counsel on developments. There's a 'tight coupling' between Gates and OpenAI, a person familiar with the relationship said. 'Sam and Bill are good friends. OpenAI takes his opinion and consult overall seriously.' OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed OpenAI continues to meet with Gates."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants in the first half of the 2030s, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels. "There is a technical agreement, we will seal the final political deal on Tuesday," said Italian energy minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, who is chairing the G7 ministerial meeting in Turin. On Tuesday the ministers will issue a final communique detailing the G7 commitments to decarbonize their economies. Pichetto said the ministers were also pondering potential restrictions to Russian imports of liquefied natural gas to Europe which the European Commission is due to propose in the short-term.

The agreement on coal marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit to phase out fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting. Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through a handful of coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028. In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year. "This is another nail in the coffin for coal," said Dave Jones, Ember's Global Insights program director. "The journey to phase out coal power has been long: it's been over seven years since the UK, France, Italy, and Canada committed to phase out coal power, so it's good to see the United States and especially Japan at last be more explicit on their intentions."

"The problem is that whilst coal power has already been falling, gas power has not. G7 nations already promised to 'fully or predominantly' decarbonize their power sectors by 2035, and that would mean phasing out not only coal by 2035 but also gas. Coal might be the dirtiest, but all fossil fuels need to be ultimately phased out."

Further reading: Countries Consider Pact To Reduce Plastic Production By 40% in 15 Years

Crypto company Tether announced Monday that it has invested $200 million to acquire a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech via its venture capital division Tether Evo. [The firm is not related to the asset management giant BlackRock.] CoinDesk reports: Blackrock Neurotech develops medical devices that are powered by brain signals and aims to help people impacted by paralysis and neurological disorders. The investment will fund the roll-out and commercialization of the medical devices and also for research and development purposes, the press release said. Tether is the company behind USDT, the largest stablecoin with a market cap of $110 billion. Recently, Tether established four divisions to expand beyond stablecoin issuance. "Tether has long believed in nurturing emerging technologies that have transformative capabilities, and the Brain-Computer-Interfaces of Blackrock Neurotech have the potential to open new realms of communication, rehabilitation, and cognitive enhancement," Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: WeWork has a new plan to get out of bankruptcy -- and it doesn't involve Adam Neumann, who wants to acquire the flexible office provider he created. WeWork announced Monday that it has raised $450 million in equity funding, which it could use to emerge from Chapter 11. The company also said it has a plan in place to "eliminate all of its $4 billion of outstanding, prepetition debt obligations." A vote on the plan -- which has support from the owners of most of WeWork's debt -- is scheduled for May 30, according to Bloomberg.

The majority of the funding -- $337 million, to be exact -- would come from Cupar Grimmond, and SoftBank would still own a stake in the company, according to the outlet. But Neumann, who has recently expressed interest in purchasing WeWork for more than $500 million, doesn't plan to go down without a fight. "After misleading the court for weeks, WeWork finally admitted it is trying to sell the company to a group led by Yardi for far less than we are continuing to propose," Susheel Kirpalani, an attorney for Neumann's new real estate startup Flow Global, told Business Insider in a statement, adding, "so we anticipate there will be robust objections to confirming this plan."

Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference in May, Google has decided to lay off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others. "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers." TechCrunch reports: The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we're told. [...] Though Google didn't detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.

On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn't eliminate its Python team; it replaced that team with another group based in Munich -- at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters in a post on Mastodon last Thursday.

Millions of Americans pay for Netflix, doling out anywhere from $6.99 to $22.99 a month. It's a common belief that you can get out of recurring charges like this by canceling your credit card. Netflix won't be able to find you, and your account will just go away, right? You wouldn't be crazy for believing it, but it's a myth that canceling a credit card will definitely stop your recurring charges. From a report: Nearly 46% of Americans opened a new credit card last year, according to Forbes, which means millions of Americans also canceled old ones. When you switch cards, Netflix doesn't just stop your service -- they just start charging your new card. Granted, it might be easier to just cancel your Netflix subscription directly. There's a largely hidden service that enables Netflix and most other subscription services to keep throwing charges at you indefinitely.

"Banks may automatically update credit or debit card numbers when a new card is issued. This update allows your card to continue to be charged, even if it's expired," Netflix says in its help center. Most major card providers offer a feature that enables this, including Visa. In 2003, Visa U.S.A. started offering a new software product to merchants called Visa Account Updater (VAU), according to a 2003 American Banker article. The service works with a network of banks to create a virtual tracking service of Americans' financial profiles. Whenever someone renews, or switches a credit card within their bank, the institution automatically update the VAU. This system lets Netflix and countless other corporations charge whatever card you have on file.

As of today, Walmart is able to sell physical goods directly to users inside Roblox. Digiday adds: The introduction of real-life e-commerce could be a watershed moment for the company's ambitions to become an all-encompassing destination for virtual life. Walmart's Roblox e-commerce experience launches later today, with users inside the pre-existing Walmart Discovered able to have real-life items shipped directly to their doorsteps. Users entering the experience will be greeted with a new storefront showcasing virtual twins of select physical items sold at real-life Walmart stores.

After trying out the virtual items on their avatars, players will be able to load an e-commerce experience that takes the form of a browser window inside Roblox imitating the experience of shopping on Walmart's website -- essentially a virtual laptop set up inside Roblox to access Walmart.com. The commerce feature within Walmart Discovered will be gated specifically to users aged 13 or older in the United States only. "There is a traditional sort of checkout flow where you put your name, your address and your credit card information, and that's all powered by a Walmart API that handles all of the information super securely -- it's very safe," said Walmart director of brand experiences and strategic partnerships Justin Breton. "And once you hit checkout, you'll get your confirmation email from Walmart. All of that is handled by us on the back end, the user will then get their item in the mail, but the virtual twin is granted immediately back on Roblox."

Amazon says its deliveries are getting even faster, announcing that it delivered over 2 billion items the same or next day to Prime members during the first three months of 2024, breaking its record for 2023. From a report: The company says it delivered almost 60 percent of Prime orders the same or next day in 60 of the biggest metropolitan areas in the US.

The United Kingdom has become the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted. From a report: The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 (PSTI) introduces new minimum-security standards for manufacturers, and demands that these companies are open with consumers about how long their products will receive security updates for.

Manufacturing and design practices mean many IoT products introduce additional risks to the home and business networks they're connected to. In one often-cited case described by cybersecurity company Darktrace, hackers were allegedly able to steal data from a casino's otherwise well-protected computer network after breaking in through an internet-connected temperature sensor in a fish tank. Under the PSTI, weak or easily guessable default passwords such as "admin" or "12345" are explicitly banned, and manufacturers are also required to publish contact details so users can report bugs.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world's biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India into one of the most important sources of clean energy anywhere on the planet is so overwhelming that the man in charge can't keep up. "I don't even do the math any more," Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview last week.

Adani is executive director of Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL). He's also the nephew of Gautam Adani, Asia's second richest man, whose $100 billion fortune stems from the Adani Group, India's biggest coal importer and a leading miner of the dirty fuel. Founded in 1988, the conglomerate has businesses in fields ranging from ports and thermal power plants to media and cements. Its clean energy unit AGEL is building the sprawling solar and wind power plant in the western Indian state of Gujarat at a cost of about $20 billion.

It will be the world's biggest renewable park when it is finished in about five years, and should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes... [T]he park will cover more than 200 square miles and be the planet's largest power plant regardless of the energy source, AGEL said.
CNN adds that the company "plans to invest $100 billion into energy transition over the next decade, with 70% of the investments ear-marked for clean energy."