Tech News

"Nvidia dethroned Apple as the world's most valuable company on Friday..." reports Reuters, "powered by insatiable demand for its specialized artificial intelligence chips." Nvidia's stock market value briefly touched $3.53 trillion, slightly above Apple's $3.52 trillion, LSEG data showed... In June, Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company before it was overtaken by Microsoft and Apple. The tech trio's market capitalizations have been neck-and-neck for several months. [Friday] Microsoft's market value stood at $3.18 trillion, with its stock up 0.8%... Nvidia's shares hit a record high on Tuesday, building on a rally from last week when TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, posted a forecast-beating 54% jump in quarterly profit driven by soaring demand for chips used in AI. The article points out that by the end of the day Friday, Nvidia's valuation had dropped to $3.47 trillion, while Apple had risen to $3.52 trillion...

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"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful. "It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything." SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage. "Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages. A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree. Their research was published this week in the journal Nature. And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said. Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture. "Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

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NoWayNoShapeNoForm writes: OpenVault believes that data caps on broadband are not a problem because most people do not exceed their existing data caps. OpenVault contends that people that do exceed their broadband data caps are simply being forgetful — leaving a streaming device on 24x7, or deploying unsecure WiFi access points, or reselling their service within an apartment building. Yes, there may be some ISPs that have older networks that they have not upgraded. Or maybe they are unable to increase network capacity in "the middle mile" of their networks, but the Covid pandemic certainly encouraged many ISPs to upgrade their networks and capacity while many ISPs that had broadband data caps ended that feature. Perhaps the biggest problem, according to OpenVault, is that most broadband users do not really have any idea how much bandwidth they "consume" every month. If Internet access is a service that people want to treat as a "utility", then you have to ask, Would they keep the water running after finishing their shower? In the article Ookla's VP of Smart Communities adds that "Scrolling through social media feeds for hours can 'push' hundreds of videos to the user, many of which may be of no interest — they just start running." So the main driver for usage-based billing wasn't to increase revenue, OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau tells the site, but to "balance the network a little more..." (Though he then also adds that sometimes a subscriber could also be reselling broadband service in their apartment building, "And that's not even legal.") "If one or two customers on a given node is causing issues for 300 others, where those 300 are not getting the service that they paid for, then that's a problem right?" he said. Having said that, the article also points out that "Many major fiber providers, like AT&T, Frontier, Google Fiber and Verizon Fios, don't have data caps at all."

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"The world's largest renewable energy and transmission project has received key approval from government officials," reports New Atlas. Solar power from Australia will be carried 2,672 miles (4,300 kilometers) to Singapore over undersea cables in what's being called "the Australia-Asia Power Link project." Reuters reports that SunCable "aims to produce 6 gigawatts of electricity at a vast solar farm in Northern Australia and ship about a third of that to Singapore via undersea cable." More from New Atlas: [The project] will start by constructing a mammoth solar farm in Australia's Northern Territory to transmit around-the-clock clean power to [the Australian city] Darwin, and also export "reliable, cost-competitive renewable energy" to Singapore... with a clean energy generation capacity of up to 10 gigawatts, plus utility scale onsite storage. [The recently-obtained environmental approval] also green lights an 800-km (~500-mile) overhead transmission line between the solar precinct and Murrumujuk near Darwin... If all of the dominoes line up perfectly, supply of the first clean electricity is estimated to start in the early 2030s. An overview graphic on the project page shows that the eventual end game for the Powell Creek development appears to be the generation of up to 20 GW of peak solar power and have some 36-42 GWh of battery storage on site. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters:

Apple convinced a federal jury on Friday that early versions of health monitoring tech company Masimo’s smartwatches infringe two of its design patents as part of a broader intellectual property dispute between the companies. The jury, in Delaware, agreed with Apple that previous iterations of Masimo’s W1 and Freedom watches and chargers willfully violated Apple’s patent rights in smartwatch designs.

But the jury awarded the tech giant, which is worth about $3.5 trillion, just $250 in damages — the statutory minimum for infringement in the United States. Apple’s attorneys told the court the “ultimate purpose” of its lawsuit was not money, but to win an injunction against sales of Masimo’s smartwatches after an infringement ruling.

On that front, jury also determined that Masimo’s current watches did not infringe Apple patents covering inventions that the tech giant had accused Masimo of copying.

$250 is just enough for Apple to buy one of its own 40mm Apple Watch SE models. (No sales tax in Delaware.) That’s about all Apple got out of this. This victory doesn’t change the ITC import ban that prevents Apple from enabling the blood oxygen sensor on watches sold in the U.S. after December 2023. It might have, if Apple had been able to win a verdict holding that Masimo’s current watches also infringe patents held by Apple. Florian Mueller, writing at IP Fray:

In order to understand the reason why Apple sued over a product practically no one buys, one has to understand the indirect ramifications for Masimo’s U.S. import ban on Apple Watches with a pulse oximetry feature. Only the indirect implications matter in this case. The short version is that if Masimo couldn’t have continued to sell its own smartwatch, they’d have lost a legally required basis for preventing Apple from selling smartwatches.

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SC World reports: Several major end-to-end encrypted cloud storage services contain cryptographic flaws that could lead to loss of confidentiality, file tampering, file injection and more, researchers from ETH Zurich said in a paper published this month. The five cloud services studied offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE), intended to ensure files can not be read or edited by anyone other than the uploader, meaning not even the cloud storage provider can access the files. However, ETH Zurich researchers Jonas Hofmann and Kien Tuong Truong, who presented their findings at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) last week, found serious flaws in four out of the five services that could effectively bypass the security benefits provided by E2EE by enabling an attacker who managed to compromise a cloud server to access, tamper with or inject files. The E2EE cloud storage services studied were Sync, pCloud, Seafile, Icedrive and Tresorit, which have a collective total of about 22 million users. Tresorit had the fewest vulnerabilities, which could enable some metadata tampering and use of non-authentic keys when sharing files. The other four services were found to have more severe flaws posing a greater risk to file confidentiality and integrity. BleepingComputer reports that Sync is "fast-tracking fixes," while Seafile "promised to patch the protocol downgrade problem on a future upgrade." And SC World does note that all 10 of the tested exploits "would require the attacker to have already gained control of a server with the ability to read, modify and inject data. "The authors wrote that they consider this to be a realistic threat model for E2EE services, as these services are meant to protect files even if such a compromise was to occur." Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After safely splashing down on Earth as part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission Friday, a NASA astronaut experienced a medical issue," NASA reported Friday. But today there's an update: After an overnight stay at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola in Florida, the NASA astronaut was released and returned to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday. The crew member is in good health and will resume normal post-flight reconditioning with other crew members. As part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission [SpaceX's eighth crew-rotation mission to the ISS], the astronaut was one of four crewmates who safely splashed down aboard their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft near Pensacola on October 25. The crew members completed a 235-day mission, 232 days of which were spent aboard the International Space Station conducting scientific research. To protect the crew member's medical privacy, specific details on the individual's condition and identity will not be shared.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader samleecole writes: Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant. An investigation into tracking tool Locate X shows in the starkest terms yet how it and others — based on smartphone location data sold to various U.S. government law enforcement agencies, including state entities — could be used to monitor abortion clinic patients. This comes as more states contemplate stricter or outright bans on abortion...

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PV Magazine reports: Researchers in Australia and China have developed an innovative technology enabling direct lithium extraction from difficult-to-process sources like saltwater, which they say represents a substantial portion of the world's lithium potential. Until now, up to 75% of the world's lithium-rich saltwater sources have remained untapped because of technical limitations, but given predictions that global lithium supply could fall short of demand as early as 2025, the researchers believe they have a game-changing solution. Their technology is a type of nanofiltration system that uses ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, or EDTA, as a chelating agent to selectively separate lithium from other minerals, especially magnesium, which is often present in brines and difficult to remove. "With some predicting global lithium supply could fall short of demand as early as 2025, the innovative technology sets a new standard in lithium processing," writes SciTechDaily: The work, co-led by Dr Zhikao Li, from the Monash Suzhou Research Institute and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Professor Xiwang Zhang from the University of Queensland, promises to meet the surging demand for lithium and paves the way for more sustainable and efficient extraction practices... "Our technology achieves 90 percent lithium recovery, nearly double the performance of traditional methods, while dramatically reducing the time required for extraction from years to mere weeks," Dr. Li said. The technology also turns leftover magnesium into a valuable, high-quality product that can be sold, reducing waste and its impact on the environment. Beyond its advanced efficiency, the EALNF system brings innovation to address major environmental concerns associated with lithium extraction. Unlike conventional methods that deplete vital water resources in arid regions, the technology produces freshwater as a by-product. Dr Li said the system was flexible and ready for large-scale use, meaning it can quickly expand from testing to full industrial operations. "This breakthrough is crucial for avoiding a future lithium shortage, making it possible to access lithium from hard-to-reach sources and helping power the shift to clean energy." "Our scalable process minimizes environmental impact while maximizing resource utilization," according to the researchers' article in Nature Sustainability, "thereby catalysing the shift toward a more sustainable future." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2004 Alaa Abd El Fattah answered questions from Slashdot's readers about organizing the first-ever Linux installfest in Egypt. In 2014 he was arrested for organizing poltical protests without requesting authorization, according to Wikipedia, and then released on bail — but then sentenced to five years in prison upon retrial. He was released in late March of 2019, but then re-arrested again in September by the National Security Agency, convicted of "spreading fake news" and jailed for five years... Wikipedia describes Abd El-Fattah as an "Egyptian-British blogger, software developer and a political activist" who has been "active in developing Arabic-language versions of software and platforms." But this week an EFF blog post noticed that his released date had recently passed — and yet he was still in prison: It's been 28 days since September 29, the day that should have seen British-Egyptian blogger, coder, and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah walk free. Egyptian authorities refused to release him at the end of his sentence, in contradiction of the country's own Criminal Procedure Code, which requires that time served in pretrial detention count toward a prison sentence. [Human Rights Watch says Egyptian authorities are refusing to count more than two years of pretrial detention toward his time served. Amnesty International has also called for his release.] In the days since, Alaa's family has been able to secure meetings with high-level British officials, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy, but as of yet, the Egyptian government still has not released Alaa... Alaa deserves to finally return to his family, now in the UK, and to be reunited with his son, Khaled, who is now a teenager. We urge EFF supporters in the UK to write to their MP to place pressure on the UK's Labour government to use their power to push for Alaa's release. Last month the EFF wrote:: Over 20 years ago Alaa began using his technical skills to connect coders and technologists in the Middle East to build online communities where people could share opinions and speak freely and privately. The role he played in using technology to amplify the messages of his fellow Egyptians — as well as his own participation in the uprising in Tahrir Square — made him a prominent global voice during the Arab Spring, and a target for the country's successive repressive regimes, which have used antiterrorism laws to silence critics by throwing them in jail and depriving them of due process and other basic human rights. Alaa is a symbol for the principle of free speech in a region of the world where speaking out for justice and human rights is dangerous and using the power of technology to build community is criminalized...

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It was originally created back in 2005 by Sun Microsystems for its proprietary Solaris Unix systems, "for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time," explains Wikipedia. "DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes," explains its Wikipedia entry. But this week, Gentoo announced: The real, mythical DTrace comes to Gentoo! Need to dynamically trace your kernel or userspace programs, with rainbows, ponies, and unicorns — and all entirely safely and in production?! Gentoo is now ready for that! Just emerge dev-debug/dtrace and you're all set. All required kernel options are already enabled in the newest stable Gentoo distribution kernel... Documentation? Sure, there's lots of it. You can start with our DTrace wiki page, the DTrace for Linux page on GitHub, or the original documentation for Illumos. Enjoy! Thanks to Heraklit (Slashdot reader #29,346) for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitwarden describes itself as an "open source password manager for business." But it also made a change its build requirement which led to an issue on the project's GitHub page titled "Desktop version 2024.10.0 is no longer free software." In the week that followed Bitwarden's official account on X.com promised a fix was coming. "It seems a packaging bug was misunderstood as something more, and the team plans to resolve it. Bitwarden remains committed to the open source licensing model in place for years, along with retaining a fully featured free version for individual users." And Thursday Bitwarden followed through with new changes to address the concerns. The Register reports the whole episode started because of a new build requirement added in a pull request a couple of weeks ago titled "Introduce SDK client." This SDK is required to compile the software from source — either the Bitwarden server or any of its client applications... [But the changed license had warned "You may not use this SDK to develop applications for use with software other than Bitwarden (including non-compatible implementations of Bitwarden) or to develop another SDK."] Phoronix picks up the story: The issue of this effectively not making the Bitwarden client free software was raised in this GitHub issue... Bitwarden founder and CTO Kyle Spearrin has commented on the ticket... "Being able to build the app as you are trying to do here is an issue we plan to resolve and is merely a bug." The ticket was subsequently locked and limited to collaborators. And Thursday it was Bitwarden founder and CTO Kyle Spearrin who again re-appeared in the Issue — first thanking the user who had highlighted the concerns. "We have made some adjustments to how the SDK code is organized and packaged to allow you to build and run the app with only GPL/OSI licenses included." The sdk-internal package references in the clients now come from a new sdk-internal repository, which follows the licensing model we have historically used for all of our clients (see LICENSE_FAQ.md for more info). The sdk-internal reference only uses GPL licenses at this time. If the reference were to include Bitwarden License code in the future, we will provide a way to produce multiple build variants of the client, similar to what we do with web vault client builds. The original sdk repository will be renamed to sdk-secrets, and retains its existing Bitwarden SDK License structure for our Secrets Manager business products. The sdk-secrets repository and packages will no longer be referenced from the client apps, since that code is not used there.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Delta Air Lines on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court after a global outage in July caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than $500 million. Delta's lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called the faulty software update from CrowdStrike "catastrophic" and said the firm "forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash." [...] Delta, which has purchased CrowdStrike products since 2022, said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights, impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days. "If CrowdStrike had tested the faulty update on even one computer before deployment, the computer would have crashed," Delta's lawsuit says. "Because the faulty update could not be removed remotely, CrowdStrike crippled Delta's business and created immense delays for Delta customers." Delta said that as part of its IT-planning and infrastructure, it has invested billions of dollars "in licensing and building some of the best technology solutions in the airline industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes writes: NASA is working on plans to send another, much larger helicopter to Mars than Ingenuity. The "Chopper" craft would land itself after "screaming into" the planet's atmosphere at speed, before covering several kilometers a day while carrying scientific equipment. It would probably be the most graceful arrival on the red planet of any lander yet.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Boeing is weighing the sale of its space division. "The plans, which are reportedly at an early stage, could involve Boeing offloading the Starliner spacecraft and its projects supporting the International Space Station," reports The Verge. From the report: Boeing is facing a series of predicaments, including a fraud charge over 737 Max plane crashes and Starliner issues that left two astronauts at the ISS for months. Just this week, a Boeing-made satellite for Intelsat stopped working and fell apart suddenly after suffering an "anomaly." "We're better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well," Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said during an earnings call this week. "Clearly, our core of commercial airplanes and defense systems are going to stay with the Boeing Company for the long run. But there's probably some things on the fringe there that we can be more efficient with or that distract us from our main goal here." However, sources tell the WSJ that Boeing will likely continue to oversee the Space Launch System, which will eventually help bring NASA astronauts back to the Moon. It's also reportedly expected to hang onto its commercial and military satellite businesses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ahead of the debut of Apple's private AI cloud next week, dubbed Private Cloud Compute, the technology giant says it will pay security researchers up to $1 million to find vulnerabilities that can compromise the security of its private AI cloud. In a post on Apple's security blog, the company said it would pay up to the maximum $1 million bounty to anyone who reports exploits capable of remotely running malicious code on its Private Cloud Compute servers. Apple said it would also award researchers up to $250,000 for privately reporting exploits capable of extracting users' sensitive information or the prompts that customers submit to the company's private cloud. Apple said it would "consider any security issue that has a significant impact" outside of a published category, including up to $150,000 for exploits capable of accessing sensitive user information from a privileged network position. "We award maximum amounts for vulnerabilities that compromise user data and inference request data outside the [private cloud compute] trust boundary," Apple said. You can learn more about Apple's Private Cloud Computer service in their blog post. Its source code and documentation is available here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew R. Chow, reporting for Time:

Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro.

Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple’s mixed-reality headsets.

The details of this particular use case are largely about ergonomics, and the advantage Vision Pro provides seems profound:

In laparoscopic surgery, doctors send a tiny camera through a small incision in a patient’s body, and the camera’s view is projected onto a monitor. Doctors must then operate on a patient while looking up at the screen, a tricky feat of hand-eye coordination, while processing other visual variables in a pressurized environment. “I’m usually turning around and stopping the operation to see a CT scan; looking to see what happened with the endoscopy [another small camera that provides a closer look at organs]; looking at the monitor for the heart rate,” Horgan says.

As a result, most surgeons report experiencing discomfort while performing minimal-access surgery, a 2022 study found. About one-fifth of surgeons polled said they would consider retiring early because their pain was so frequent and uncomfortable. A good mixed-reality headset, then, might allow a surgeon to look at a patient’s surgical area and, without looking up, virtual screens that show them the laparoscopy camera and a patient’s vitals.

20 percent of surgeons saying they’re considering retiring early because of the discomfort from this is a high number! And the $3,500–4,000 price for Vision Pro isn’t merely acceptable in this context, it’s a downright bargain:

Christopher Longhurst, chief clinical and innovation officer at UC San Diego Health, says that while the Vision Pro’s price tag of $3,499 might seem daunting to a regular consumer, it’s inexpensive compared to most medical equipment. “The monitors in the operating room are probably $20,000 to $30,000,” he says. “So $3,500 for a headset is like budget dust in the healthcare setting.”

Makes me wonder if these high-end professional and industrial use cases are to the Vision platform this decade what desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 80s? Years ahead of mass market appeal, but a revolutionary breakthrough for a longstanding industry. Such a clear value to those in the industry that they’re not just merely ambivalently accepting the new platform, but champing at the bit to switch to them. Something for the platform to build from until boom, there’s a tipping point where it expands into the mass market. I got into graphic design and desktop publishing my sophomore year of college, in 1992, and by that time the industries of graphic design and professional printing were entirely Macintosh-based, yet the platform (counting the LaserWriter) was only 6 or 7 years old.

But in the fall of 1984, the Macintosh was considered a flop.

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Beta testing your apps, games, and App Clips is even better with new enhancements to TestFlight. Updates include:

• Redesigned invitations. TestFlight invitations now include your beta app description to better highlight new features and content your app or game offers to prospective testers. Apps and games with an approved version that’s ready for distribution can also include their screenshots and app category in their invite. We’ve also added a way for people to leave feedback if they didn’t join your beta, so you can understand why they didn’t participate.
• Tester enrollment criteria. You can choose to set criteria, such as device type and OS versions, to more easily enroll qualified testers via a public link to provide more relevant feedback on your invite.
• Public link metrics. Find out how successful your public link is at enrolling testers for your app with new metrics. Understand how many testers viewed your invite in the TestFlight app and chose to accept it. If you’ve set criteria for the public link, you can also view how many testers didn’t meet the criteria.

To get started with TestFlight, upload your build, add test information, and invite testers.

Learn more about TestFlight

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has done the yeoman’s work of providing a full illustrated change log for iOS 18.2 beta 1. Here’s one I wasn’t expecting, but which now that I think about it, isn’t surprising:

iOS 18.2 lets users set default apps for Messaging and Calling worldwide. This is managed through a new “Defaults” menu in the Settings app, where you can set defaults for these apps in the US:

• Email
• Messaging
• Calling
• Call Filtering
• Browser App
• Passwords & Codes
• Keyboards

Clearly this wouldn’t be in iOS 18.2 anywhere in the world if the European Commission weren’t demanding it for DMA compliance, but given that Apple had to do it for the EU, why not make it worldwide? This isn’t a “We think this is a bad idea” thing from Apple’s perspective, like, say, alternative app stores. It’s a “We don’t think this is all that important an idea” thing.

DMA compliance features that Apple wouldn’t have otherwise prioritized, but isn’t outright opposed to, are likely to be made available worldwide. Features Apple is opposed to will remain exclusive to the EU. For example, in iOS 18.2 beta 1 in the EU, users can now “delete” apps like Photos and Camera. That’s a spectacularly dumb idea, so it’s only in the EU.

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Apple Developer News:

Following feedback from the European Commission and from developers, in these releases developers can develop and test EU-specific features, such as alternative browser engines, contactless apps, marketplace installations from web browsers, and marketplace apps, from anywhere in the world. Developers of apps that use alternative browser engines can now use WebKit in those same apps.

I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out how this works, but haven’t found it. If anyone can point me to the answer, let me know. It’s kind of bananas that EU-specific features couldn’t even be tested outside the EU until now.

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