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The iPhone’s next major software update will roll out later this year, featuring plenty of AI infusion—Apple Intelligence—plus other quality-of-life improvements across the platform.

At WWDC 2024, Apple announced that iOS 18 would finally let you place app icons wherever you want on the Home screen, freeing them from the stringent rail it was on before.

The iOS 18 developer beta shows that the color accents pick up based on your wallpaper and system theme.

Still, even though Apple quietly announced RCS support this week during its developer conference, Google doesn’t get its victory lap.

On the plus side, messages between iPhones and their green bubbles will be able to share features like high-resolution photos and Tapback animations later this year.

In Android 7, the Quick Settings in the notification shade added editable tiles, which were eventually opened up to third-party app developers.

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Tourists are to be banned from parts of Japan’s famous geisha district in Kyoto following complaints of “overtourism”.

“Kyoto is not a theme park,” said the local council amid discontent about over-zealous visitors with cameras hoping to snap a glimpse of the famous geishas.

Geishas are professional entertainers who are trained in various traditional arts including dance and music and are an iconic part of Japanese culture.

Visitors crowd the narrow, quaint streets of the area called Gion in Japan’s ancient capital city, often following tour guides who show people around and lecture for long hours, according to local district official Isokazu Ota.

The district’s public streets will remain open to tourists, so the area and the rest of Kyoto will still be teeming with visitors, both from Japan and around the world.

Complaints about “overtourism” began years ago, but cooled somewhat when the COVID-19 pandemic brought numbers of visitors down.

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Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.

The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.

This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an “ad privacy” feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.

That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.

Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."

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After yesterday brought with it the first look at X-Men ‘97 in action we also got to learn a bit more about one of its more fascination inclusions on the X-Team: the full-time return to the animated fold for shapeshifting mutant Morph.

He was introduced as a minor character in the comics as Kevin Syndey, aka Changeling—with that codename tweaked to Morph for TV due to an alleged copyright concern with DC Comics, which used the Changeling codename for Teen Titan’s Beast Boy—and was brought into the world of animated X-Men, where he skyrocketed to popularity by, well, immediately dying.

Morph has undergone some pretty radical changes in the decades between The Animated Series and ‘97, adopting the pale, hairless, and blankly-featured visage that the character was given when an alternate version of the character inspired by the cartoon series was integrated into comics continuity with the Age of Apocalypse storyline, and then through another alternate riff in the multiversal teambook Exiles.

The mutant allegory has been a stand-in for a large variety of minority causes since the inception of the X-Men, from political thought, to racial discrimination to, yes, issues of gender identity and queerness.

Some of these allegories work better than others—race has always been a fraught lens for the mutant metaphor in particular, especially as more and more non-white mutants have stepped into the spotlight, perhaps best emphasized in the infamous moment in the 1982 storyline “God Loves, Man Kills,” where Kitty Pryde uses a racial slur to draw equivalence to being called a “mutie.” But the connection between mutantkind and queerness has always been particularly potent, and a topic the franchise has engaged with for generations and generations of storytelling in ways big and small.

Star Wars faced a similar dilemma in introducing the first trans-identifying Jedi in the alien bond-pair Terec and Ceret in its High Republic comics.

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The companies believe their research, published on their websites, documents for the first time how hackers with ties to foreign governments are using generative artificial intelligence in their attacks.

to generate exotic attacks, as some in the tech industry feared, the hackers have used it in mundane ways, like drafting emails, translating documents and debugging computer code, the companies said.

They shared threat information to document how five hacking groups with ties to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran used OpenAI’s technology.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, tech experts, the press and government officials have worried that adversaries might weaponize the more powerful tools, looking for new and creative ways to exploit vulnerabilities.

He said that OpenAI limited where customers could sign up for accounts, but that sophisticated culprits could evade detection through various techniques, like masking their location.

The emails included “one pretending to come from an international development agency and another attempting to lure prominent feminists to an attacker-built website on feminism,” the company said.

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Apple and Google have long been criticized for selling devices that are deemed harder to repair than others.

Worse, PIRG believes that the two companies are failing to make laptops easier to take apart and fix.

The “Failing the Fix (2024)” report released this week [PDF] is largely based on the repairability index scores required of laptops and some other electronics sold in France.

For laptops, that criteria includes providing updates and the ability to reset software and firmware.

PIRG also docked companies for participating in trade groups that fight against right-to-repair legislation and if OEMs failed to “easily provide full information on how they calculated their products."

PIRG’s report doesn’t factor in software support timelines, but even if it did, Chromebooks’ repairability score wouldn’t increase notably since the move only brought them to “industry norms,” Lucas Gutterman, Designed to Last campaign director for the US PIRG Education Fund, told me.

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Experts say the temple, dedicated to Hinduism’s most revered deity Lord Ram, will cement Modi’s legacy — enduring but also contentious — as one of India’s most consequential leaders, who has sought to transform the country from a secular democracy into an avowedly Hindu nation.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist party is expected to once again exploit religion for political gain in the upcoming national elections in April or May and secure power for a third consecutive term.

Made into a national event by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the temple’s opening in Ayodhya — a small city in northern India that has been a historical flashpoint — is expected to resonate deeply with Hindu voters.

In the early 1990s, then a little-known local leader in his native Gujarat state, Modi also helped organize public agitation that aimed to shore up support for the construction of what is now Ram Temple at the former Babri Mosque site.

The dispute ended in 2019 when, in a controversial decision, India’s Supreme Court called the mosque’s destruction “an egregious violation of the rule of law,” but granted the site to Hindus.

Rebuilding the temple at the disputed site has been part of BJP’s election strategy for decades, but it was Modi — rising to power in 2014 on a wave of Hindu revivalism — who finally oversaw that promise after attending its groundbreaking ceremony in 2020.

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The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.

Developing…

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Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed… Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!

Mozilla Bug 1752398 to “ship the Wayland backend to release” has been closed this evening!

After the ticket was open for the past two years, it’s now deemed ready to hopefully ship enabled for Firefox 121!

This patch drops the “early beta or earlier” check to let Wayland support be enabled by default when running on recent GTK versions (GTK 3.24.30 threshold).

Firefox 121 is due for release around 19 December and if all continues to hold, it will finally ship with the Wayland back-end enabled by default as another big step forward.

With KDE Plasma 6.0 using Wayland by default, XWayland rootful mode improving, and other (X)Wayland progress, 2024 could very well be the year of Wayland shining in the Linux desktop limelight.

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The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials.

Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.

“It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements,” said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette.

In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making.

“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars.

“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.

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Belarus’s western neighbours have increased security since Minsk granted shelter to fighters from Russia’s Wagner mercenary group.

The Lithuanian government said the crossings at Tverecius and Sumskas will be closed, and traffic will be diverted to Medininkai, the largest of its six checkpoints.

Poland has also sharply restricted access from Belarus, and on Tuesday, Latvia ordered reinforcements to its border.

Latvian PM Krisjanis Karin said Belarus needed to know his country was serious about securing its borders for the good of its own people, and the rest of Europe.

Poland announced last week it was sending 10,000 extra troops to its border with Belarus following an alleged incursion by Belarusian military helicopters.

Concerns have been rising among the neighbours of Belarus - a close ally of Russia - since June, when a mutiny by Wagner challenged President Vladimir Putin’s authority.

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