A Austrália é o mais novo país a ir atrás do controle que a Apple tem sobre a distribuição de apps no iOS e da forma como desenvolvedores processam transações em seus softwares.

Hoje, o Tribunal Federal da Austrália ordenou que a companhia abra seu sistema operacional para lojas de apps e sistemas de pagamento concorrentes, além de permitir que usuários baixem e atualizem softwares de maneira direta (como por meio de páginas na web).

A Justiça australiana ainda deixa claro que isso deve ser feito sem qualquer penalização aos desenvolvedores que optarem por plataformas de terceiros. Eles também precisam ter acesso às mesmas ferramentas disponibilizadas aos criadores que estão na App Store, além de estarem sujeitos aos mesmos termos.

Quanto aos sistemas de pagamento, a Maçã está proibida de obrigar desenvolvedores a listarem a plataforma de processamento da App Store ao lado de outros sistemas ou fazê-los informar suas vendas à Apple. A empresa também não pode impedi-los de oferecer seus apps por preços menores caso sejam adquiridos com ferramentas de terceiros, bem como condicionar a distribuição alternativa ao fato de os desenvolvedores oferecerem conteúdo comprado em outros locais pelo sistema de pagamento proprietário da Apple.

O Tribunal também se adiantou e barrou algumas das manobras adotadas pela Apple em outros mercados para continuar cobrando uma comissão sobre apps distribuídos fora da App Store. Segundo a ordem, a Maçã não pode cobrar taxas sobre compras feitas por meio de serviços de pagamento alternativos ou sites em aplicativos distribuídos fora da App Store. No caso dos apps disponibilizados via App Store, as taxas são limitadas a um valor equivalente ao cobrado por bens ou serviços físicos, com a adição de outros “custos razoáveis” que a Apple possa ter ao processar essas compras.

A Apple, por outro lado, ainda poderá realizar verificações de segurança e privacidade em apps distribuídos fora da App Store, bem como manter seu tradicional sistema de notarização — mas sem impor restrições ou obstáculos para a instalação de apps por meios alternativos. A fabricante do iPhone também terá o poder de remover ou desativar apps distribuídos fora da App Store caso ela detecte conteúdo impróprio, riscos de segurança ou receba uma ordem legal.

Por fim, a Apple não poderá impedir que lojas alternativas sejam pré-instaladas em iPhones, mas não será obrigada a permitir que plataformas concorrentes sejam distribuídas pela própria App Store.

Epic Games comenta ordem

À Reuters, a desenvolvedora de Fortnite — uma das maiores interessadas na abertura do iOS — disse que seu battle royale retornará à App Store australiana “ainda hoje” como consequência dessas mudanças.

Ainda de acordo com o Tribunal, essas regras começarão a valer em 1º de março do ano que vem. Embora possa pedir uma prorrogação judicial no início de fevereiro (o que levaria o prazo para 3 de maio), a Apple disse ao veículo que apelará da decisão, citando seus direitos de propriedade intelectual e a segurança da App Store.

via MacRumors

Guido Fawkes:

Ofcom boss Dame Melanie Dawes has admitted today that tech firms have paid just two of the eleven fines handed out under the Online Safety Act since March last year. Giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, she conceded nine remain unpaid, four of the offending sites have simply geo-blocked the UK, and three are still up and running with nothing changed.

Via Preston Byrne (Hacker News):

American courts have, by now, provided their preliminary view on the likelihood of Ofcom’s enforcement powers being successful in U.S. courts – the obiter dicta in 4chan v. Ofcom, the opinion in the case we filed against Ofcom in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia a little over a year ago.

[…]

Ofcom can’t enforce the Online Safety Act in America. Ofcom knows it, Ofcom has known it for a long time, and now, Ofcom has, finally, admitted it.

[…]

The GRANITE Act, a foreign censorship shield now before both the House and Senate (H.R. 10174 / S. 5478), is one proposed legal response America could adopt. The HOMEFRONT Act, H.R. 10309, is another. Either of GRANITE or HOMEFRONT would strip sovereign immunity from foreign censors and let Americans targeted by their orders drag those agencies into federal court, where they could be held accountable for their actions.

Previously:

• UK Child Protections and Messaging Backdoor
• Imgur Blocks UK Users Over Age Verification
• UK Online Safety Act
• UK Proposal to Weaken Messaging Security

Meta says Claude-linked browsing triggered the mistaken No Kings Instagram suspension. eWeek examines the lockout and Meta's earlier enforcement errors.

A website registered by “David Beckham” was the world’s second-most-visited source of pirated Japanese manga in February 2025, leading publishers to call for better verification of who buys domain names to address the problem. The “Beckham” who registered the site was of course not the famous footballer and spokesmodel. However Tatsuo Ninoseki, an attorney with the Shin Hirakawa-Cho Law Office who represents the Japan Publishers manga Anti-Piracy Conference (JPMAC), put fake Becks in play today during a session on DNS abuse at ICANN’s annual meeting in Bali, Indonesia. Ninoseki said miscreants routinely create unauthorized English translations of manga and post them on websites that include ads. The lawyer said such sites can attract hundreds of millions of users and cost publishers $17 billion in revenue each year. JPMAC has decided its best course of action is not to pursue copyright abusers, but instead to go after commercial-scale pirates. That means it tries to act against pirate websites like those registered by “Beckham,” by sending them stern legal letters and using other legal means. But those pirates have trained to get around defenders. Ninoseki said pirate manga sites maintain a set of domain names – he said they’ve registered names in 158 top-level domains and frequently “domain hop” between them. The pirates’ pools of domains include some common naming elements, so even though Google has stopped indexing these pirate sites, users figure out that a theoretical piratemanga.XXX site will soon reappear at piratemanga.YYY. Pirate sites also redirect from domains they’re not using to host content to another that is full of pirated comics. Sometimes they use several sites at once and direct users across a fleet of live sites, so traffic flows to each site stay small and don’t cause suspicion. Ninoseki said 82.4 percent of domain hops happen within 15 days of the last move, suggesting pirates know how long enforcement actions or takedown requests will take and move to a different site before they run into trouble. “Many domain hops do not appear to be a reaction to legal countermeasures,” the attorney said. Ninoseki said JPMAC feels more comprehensive verification of domain name registrants would be a big help, especially checking physical addresses provided by registrants which he feels would weed out more pirates. The lawyer spoke during an ICANN session on DNS abuse, which the governance body defines as using domain names to facilitate malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam. ICANN is currently working on a policy called PDP1 to address DNS abuse, one element of which would require registries to consider all domains held by their customers if just one is found to conduct DNS abuse. That policy would mean that once a registrant named “David Beckham” is connected to a single piracy site, all other domains registered by fake Becks would be checked in case they’re also committing DNS fouls. ®

OpenAI:

Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API.

Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.

[…]

More details about how textGrain works can be found in our technical report (opens in a new window), which will be updated with additional details in the coming weeks. We also plan to make the technology available in open source so that others can build on it.

[…]

At a target false positive rate of 1%, our detector identified watermarks in about 80% of 200-token passages, compared with about 95% of 400-token passages, for content such as psychology.

Via John Gruber (Mastodon):

OpenAI has made this available via an API so developers should be able to actually see if this adulterates text output with real-world usage.

Third, none of these companies have yet made their watermark detectors publicly accessible. I remain highly skeptical that they will work as advertised in the real world. I think this is all somewhat of a sham to claim compliance with the EU AI Act without actually providing anything that anyone can actually use in a practical way.

Previously:

• How Claude Marks AI-Generated Content

Blake Brittain (PDF, patent 1, patent 2, Hacker News, 9To5Mac):

A US jury ruled that Apple owes San Diego-based Taction ​more than $5.7 billion for using its patented technology to power the haptic feedback in iPhones and Apple Watches. Apple said it would ​appeal the country’s largest such verdict to ​date.

[…]

Apple denied the allegations and ​said the patents were invalid.

neuropsychguy:

Taction Technologies has real products (used in various headphones) -- in case anyone is wondering about whether the company is only a patent troll.

[…]

What’s complicated about this case is that Apple developed the Taptic Engine before Taction filed its original patent application. Apple’s original Taptic Engine was different from what Taction later patented. However, Apple subsequently redesigned the Taptic Engine, and those later designs incorporated a combination of suspensions and ferrofluid damping that a jury (in California -- this isn’t in Texas) has now found fall within Taction’s patent claims.

Malcolm Owen:

In effect, the jury says that Taction has proven Apple has infringed, but not that Apple did so knowingly.

[…]

Apple was accused of buying and reverse-engineering two Kannon headsets that used the technology.

The $5.7 billion seems so high compared with the $634 million in the Masimo case where Apple seemed a lot more guilty.

Previously:

• Apple Loses Masimo Appeal

Alexander Cohen:

The Post reported that UK security officials had issued such a TCN, in secret, in January 2025, requesting that Apple create a way to access encrypted iCloud data belonging not just to UK users, but to Apple users worldwide. The chutzpah of it all was astonishing.

Apple’s position (privately, since they were prohibited from commenting publicly on the reported TCN) showed fidelity to its previous stance: deliberately weakening end-to-end encryption, for whatever purpose or for whomever the intended beneficiary, would make every user less secure. So the dispute became the UK government saying it needed access, Apple saying it couldn’t decrypt the data, and the UK effectively replying: then change the system so that you can.

[…]

Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal process (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.

Apple said the decision to withdraw ADP in the UK left them “gravely disappointed”. There was, however, an important disclaimer. Apple only stopped allowing new UK users to turn on Advanced Data Protection.

Apple:

For users in the UK who have already enabled Advanced Data Protection, Apple will soon provide additional guidance. Apple cannot disable ADP automatically for these users. Instead, UK users will be given a period of time to disable the feature themselves to keep using their iCloud account.

I wonder whether Apple will actually lock users out of their accounts if they don’t turn off ADP or whether they’ll quietly not enforce it like with Emergency SOS via satellite.

Cohen:

In July 2026, Apple lodged a fresh complaint at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which became public the following month. Then, on the 11th of September 2026, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (a Democrat) and Republican Congressman Warren Davidson called on the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal to open up its proceedings concerning Apple’s encrypted-data dispute.

[…]

On the 17th of September The Daily Telegraph reported that Apple had asked the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to remove restrictions that gag them from confirming the existence of the reported TCN.

Previously:

• UK Again Wants iCloud Backdoor
• UK Online Safety Act
• UK Backing Down on Apple Encryption Backdoor
• Apple Pulls iCloud Advanced Data Protection From UK
• UK Orders Apple to Break iCloud Advanced Data Protection

Juli Clover:

The iPhone 18 Pro Max has a battery capacity over 20 watt-hours, which means there are additional shipping requirements. If an iPhone 18 Pro Max needs to be shipped somewhere, its maximum battery capacity has to be limited through firmware.

[…]

Customers who need to ship the iPhone 18 Pro Max for repair, trade-in, or other purposes have to use a new Prepare to Ship feature. Prepare to Ship discharges the battery to below 20Wh and sets a charge limit so the iPhone stays below the threshold during the shipping process.

Laptops, of course, have larger batteries, but they aren’t affected because each cell is below the limit.

The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled. Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the "Second-Hand Software" (SHS) Presentation. ValueLicensing and Microsoft agreed to vacate the case management conference ahead of its scheduled date on September 14, 2026. The result is the Consent Order [PDF], which, unsurprisingly, focuses on locating and asking for the disclosure of Microsoft documents that may bear on the reseller's allegation that the company offered incentives for customers to shift to subscription services in return for not selling their pre-owned licenses. The confidentiality designation applied to several documents in the case has also been lifted. In addition, there are many references to a June 2013 document that Microsoft disclosed on December 22, 2025, entitled "Second-Hand Software Presentation" (SHS Presentation). June 2013 was a busy time for Microsoft: it had launched the Office 365 subscription service two years previously, but there was a question over what to do about those customers with perpetual licenses that Microsoft wanted to move into the brave new world of "an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription." While the content of the SHS Presentation has yet to be made public, the Consent Order treats it as a "Known Adverse Document," meaning it is unlikely to be good news for Microsoft. Furthermore, the consent order requires Microsoft to explain by October 31 why it had not disclosed it earlier. This case was filed in 2021 and yet it took until the end of 2025 for Microsoft to produce the presentation. Microsoft was also asked to conduct extensive, unredacted disclosure searches across its corporate mailboxes and SharePoint accounts of high-level executives for search terms including "antitrust," "used licenses," "second hand", and "Value Licensing," between July 3, 2012 and June 1, 2020. It has until November 30 to produce any documents found during the search. Execs whose mailboxes and document repositories must be searched include Richard Chin, currently a Corporate VP at Microsoft responsible for the company's monetization approach and who was a General Manager between 2012 and 2020 working on pricing, licensing, and the business models in the Cloud and AI world. Kevin Turner, who was Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft from 2005 to 2016, is also on the list. As for confidentiality, the consent order stated, "No blanket or default designation of such documents as 'Restricted' or 'Confidential' shall be applied." Instead, it'll be on a document-by-document basis and "limited to the precise words, figures or passages said to be sensitive; and be supported by specific reasons rather than general assertions." "Defendants shall disclose by no later than 4pm on 30 November 2026 any further documents they have identified relating to the same or similar matters addressed in the SHS Presentation." Microsoft will also keep ValueLicensing appraised of its progress every 21 days. Microsoft told The Register it had no comment to make on the Consent Order. ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley said, "ValueLicensing have been working to get appropriate disclosure for some years and this Order is the result of that work and more recently disclosed documents. "This is a further stage enabling a better understanding of how Microsoft dealt with the second-hand software market which brings a liability trial one stage closer." The case has had several twists over the years, not least Microsoft's "Hail Mary" attempt to make it about copyright rather than the allegation that it deliberately stifled the sale of secondhand software licenses. This latest turn might eventually give an intriguing insight into how the US biz dealt with the market while encouraging customers to embrace subscriptions. Time to break out the popcorn, perhaps? ®

UPDATED Grindr has agreed to pay £26 million ($35.1 million) to settle a UK class action alleging that it shared users' personal data, including information about their HIV status, with third parties. Grindr is a location-based dating and social networking app primarily aimed at gay and bisexual men, transgender people, and the wider queer community. According to Grindr's Form 8-K filing, the company will make two £13 million installments, due by December 31, 2026, and March 31, 2027. The settlement includes no finding or admission of liability. The claim was issued in England's High Court in April 2024 by law firm Austen Hays and served on Grindr in April 2025. The claim drew on research published by SINTEF in 2018 concerning Grindr's sharing of user data with third-party analytics companies Localytics and Apptimize. According to the research, the information shared included users' HIV status and last test date, sexual orientation, and GPS location. Austen Hays told The Register at the time that the sharing could allow "a potentially unlimited number of third parties" to target or customize advertising to Grindr users. The lawsuit alleged that Grindr violated UK data protection law and that the allegedly illegal data sharing took place before April 3, 2018, and between May 25, 2018, and April 7, 2020. "While Grindr disputes the allegations, it recognizes and acknowledges the distress and loss of trust expressed by some of its UK users regarding that pre-2020 period," the company's 8-K stated. In its regulatory filing, Grindr said the challenged practices dated from before 2020, when the company was owned and controlled by Chinese company Kunlun and before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) forced Kunlun to sell the app [PDF]. The company said that since 2020, it has "overhauled its privacy program with a keen focus on the unique needs of its community." "Grindr is and remains a safe space for users, committed to transparency, user control, and responsible data practices," it added. The UK settlement is roughly five times the dollar value of the Norwegian fine Grindr spent years unsuccessfully challenging. The Norwegian Data Protection Authority imposed a 65 million kroner ($6.9 million) fine in December 2021 for violations of the GDPR. That case did not concern the disclosure of users' HIV status, but regulators found that identifying someone as a Grindr user constituted special category data concerning their sexual orientation or sex life. They also found that Grindr had shared personal data with advertising partners without valid consent. The information included users' GPS locations, IP addresses, advertising IDs, ages and genders, as well as the fact that they used Grindr. Norway's Privacy Appeals Board upheld the fine in September 2023. Grindr then challenged that decision in court, losing in Oslo District Court in 2024 and again before the Borgarting Court of Appeal in October 2025. ® Updated to add on September 9, 2026: Austen Hays told The Reg: “As Grindr disclosed on 4 September, it has settled the claims brought by our clients in respect of violations of UK privacy laws. While Grindr disputes the allegations, it recognizes and acknowledges the distress and loss of trust expressed by some of its UK users regarding that pre-2020 period. “We thank our clients for trusting us with this sensitive case.” Grindr declined to comment further

Australia’s government will introduce legislation that tries to regulate digital services and impose a “digital duty of care.” “For too long, tech companies have been running real-time, unregulated product testing on Australians,” Minister for Communications Anika Wells said today. “In the same way that we have safety standards for cars, for food, and for appliances, Australia is getting basic safety standards for the online tools and online services,” she added. “Tech companies will still be allowed to move fast, but they will not be able to break things.” Meta, in its early years when still known as Facebook, used the term “Move fast and break things” to describe its internal processes for creating and updating its services. The premise of Australia’s plans is that Meta, and other digital platforms, broke far more than they intended in pursuit of profit. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese framed the planned digital duty of care as a successor to the law that means social media companies are not allowed to provide accounts to children aged under 16. “We would no longer let Australian children be treated as commodities,” he said. “We have the opportunity to shape tech for the better, rather than have it shape us.” The proposed law aims to shape tech by requiring social media companies to give Australian users the chance to determine what they see in their feeds. Some in Australia have criticized the planned law as government censorship. Albanese tried to counter that notion by summarizing the intent of the plan as “My feed, my way.” “This is not about giving government control,” Albanese said. “It is about giving people control.” Wells explained those controls would be implemented with a requirement for digital platforms of offer Australian users the chance to opt into a user experience that only shows content from accounts they already follow online. She said users will be able to opt back into an algorithmic feed and change their minds about what they want to see as often as they like. However, the law will also mean the relevant minister can seek a vote to ban certain content. Albanese said the draft bill seeks to do that for content that glorifies crime, promotes terrorism, pertains to eating disorders, pornography, sexual violence, and misogyny. Wells explained that the process of declaring content harmful would start with the relevant minister consulting with Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, who will be able to recommend that certain types of content be declared harmful. That recommendation would be subject to a parliamentary vote before coming into force. She also suggested the laws on harmful content would cover AI services, mentioning the example of a chatbot advising a young user how to survive on 600 calories a day as a possible trigger for eating disorders and therefore providing a foreseeably harmful service. Wells also mentioned the "nudify" function available in Elon Musk's Grok AI service earlier this year, which could turn photos of people into nudes, because Australian law did not offer a mechanism to regulate it. This planned law will mean Australia's government can act when future services offer harmful functions. Finding precedents in a bottle The use of the term “digital duty of care” is a reference to one of the foundational cases in the law of torts – 1932’s Donoghue v Stevenson, which concerns a woman who poured a bottle of ginger beer over ice cream and watched in horror as a decomposed snail slid into her snack. Donoghue later suffered a bout of gastro-enteritis. The landmark case found that the maker of the ginger beer – and any other provider of goods and services – has a responsibility to avoid any foreseeable harms caused by their acts or omissions. The case made the concept of a duty of care central to the law of torts, which cover civil harms. Australia naming its digital regulations a “digital duty of care” therefore puts the proposal firmly in the heart of western legal tradition. At the press conference announcing the planned legislation, Albanese and Wells called on parents whose children took their own lives after using social media, and advocates for tighter regulation of social media – all of whom were unsurprisingly in favor of the law and praised the government for having the courage to advance it. When discussing Australia’s social media ban, Albanese nearly always admits it is not perfect and would not mean all Australian children under 16 immediately vanish from social media. “We knew it would not be perfect but would not let that be the enemy of the good,” he said today, and then said Australia’s policy “Started a global movement” that has since seen over 20 countries impose social media bans for children. The PM suggested a digital duty of care could catch on, too, and Wells agreed. “There is a global reckoning coming for big tech,” she said. “And it started in Australia.” ®

Reuters:

Apple is facing a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) London lawsuit brought on behalf of app developers over its app ​tracking rules, with the iPhone maker accused of abusing its power to unfairly impose greater restrictions on third parties.

[…]

Lawyers bringing the new lawsuit ​against Apple, though, say the feature imposed stricter requirements on third-party app developers ​than on Apple’s own services, giving its advertising ecosystem a competitive advantage.

Via Ben Lovejoy:

The latest lawsuit has an interesting twist: it’s being brought by Ann Pope, who was previously a senior official with the regulator behind today’s case.

Kris Holt (Slashdot):

The company told Reuters it was “bound by the exact same requirements as all developers.”

However, regulators across Europe including in France, Italy and Poland have investigated ATT. Germany’s competition regulator, the Federal Cartel Office, last month determined that Apple was favoring its own apps over those from external developers.

Amy Worrall:

The EU is saying “you’re big enough that you have to treat your other business models like third parties” and Apple replies with “but we know we’re solid, so that makes no sense!”

Previously:

• App Tracking Transparency Changes in Germany
• Italy Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency
• Europe vs. App Tracking Transparency
• France Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News):

Apple has agreed to make changes to its App Tracking Transparency feature in Germany, according to the country’s competition regulator.

[…]

In Germany, Apple has agreed to remove “possibly discouraging symbols and wording” from the App Tracking Transparency prompt, the regulator said. Apps will also be “given more scope to explain to users what significance personalized advertising has for their offering and their business model,” and the “freedom to combine the consent request required by Apple with the consent requests required under data protection law.”

Ben Lovejoy:

The FCO’s objection appears to be that Apple’s existing prompt is making app tracking sound scarier than it really is. The iPhone maker will make eight changes in order to address this – including removal of the word “track.”

Nick Heer:

The regulator helpfully offers an illustration of the differences between these prompts on the fourth page of its FAQs (PDF) about the case. There are many things they say could be deterrents in the App Tracking Transparency dialog, and I do not think Apple would deny that they are suggesting that users opt out of tracking. The definition of “tracking” Apple uses is self-serving, which would not matter so much if it did not also have a parallel desire to grow its advertising business.

[…]

A particularly damning finding in that comparison, to my eyes, is the way Apple puts “Ask App Not to Track” as the topmost button in the App Tracking Transparency dialog, but puts the option to “Turn Off Personalised Ads” at the bottom of it its own advertising prompt.

Previously:

• UK App Tracking Transparency Lawsuit
• Italy Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency
• Europe vs. App Tracking Transparency
• France Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency

Ryan Whitwam:

A US federal judge has sided with Google, ruling that the company will not have to sell its online advertising exchange (previously known as AdX). The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sought this remedy in the long-running ad tech antitrust trial, which Google lost in 2025. However, the remedies imposed upon Google for that loss are shaping up to be minimal.

[…]

While divesting the ad exchange would have been the most serious penalty, the government also asked for fines and court-ordered changes to Google’s business practices. It’s likely that the DOJ will get a lot of that, but we don’t know the specifics yet. Judge Leonie Brinkema has sealed the order for 14 days, giving the parties a chance to request redactions.

[…]

After all these years of hearings, appeals, and decisions, Google’s market power will remain largely unchanged going forward.

Previously:

• Google and Epic Cancel Settlement, Third-Party App Stores
• Google Search Remedies
• AI and Google Search Volume in Safari
• DOJ Wins Google Ads Antitrust Case

Ryan Whitwam (Slashdot):

The settlement between Google and Epic that aimed to put to rest the companies’ long-running antitrust battle is being withdrawn, and that means third-party app stores are coming to the Play Store.

[…]

While Apple suffered little penalty in its Epic case, Google was tripped up by its anti-competitive management of the supposedly open Android ecosystem. Google used its market position to discourage device makers from promoting or pre-loading non-Google app stores and attempted to hide that conduct. The remedies set by Judge James Donato included lower fees, mirroring Google Play apps in other stores, and most vitally, placement of alternative app stores in Google Play.

[…]

Google and Epic were set to return to court on July 16 to argue in favor of the settlement. However, the writing may have been on the wall. In a recent expert analysis provided to the court, MIT economics professor Nancy Rose noted that the settlement was “unlikely to enable Google Play’s potential competitors to overcome their long-standing network-effect disadvantage in a timely manner.”

[…]

Under the terms of Judge Donato’s original injunction, these stores will have access to the full catalog of Google Play apps by default. […] Google will also require approved stores to block malware, respect intellectual property, and include mechanisms to update and uninstall apps.

John Gruber:

My guess is that all the big app developers will opt out of this. Games, though, maybe not?

Previously:

• Android Sideloading Waiting Period
• Lower Google Play Store Fees and Registered App Stores
• Proposal to Settle Epic and Google Antitrust Case

Juli Clover (Hacker News):

Liu downloaded the circuit schematic from Apple in March, two months after he left the company. Liu used the schematic to run a simulation using electrical engineering tool LTspice, and then messaged people telling them he ran the simulation for power conversion development work.

[…]

Liu used the Apple schematic on a Mac mini that later synced to the MacBook he took from Apple, which is why Apple knows about it. Apple now wants to investigate the Mac mini and other devices Liu still has in his possession.

Apple says the “shocking evidence” is proof that its trade secrets are in active use and evidence is being destroyed, which is why expedited discovery is needed.

John Gruber:

The first point seems really bad for OpenAI. On the fourth point, I’m not sure what Apple is alleging here — I think they’re alleging that Liu took an Apple internal engineering app with him over to OpenAI?

William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele (MacRumors):

OpenAI has responded to Apple’s latest filing about the theft of confidential information, by filing its own rebuttal which again accuses the company of trying to stop employees leaving. According to Reuters, OpenAI is now also calling out Apple for being behind on AI.

[…]

“[Employees] can leave a company like Apple that has struggled to adopt AI and move to an exciting startup that builds innovative products,” says OpenAI in its new filing. “Apple may not like those choices. But it cannot claim those choices are unlawful, and it cannot use its own sloppy procedures to blame others for its own mess.”

Ben Lovejoy:

On the face of it, the evidence Apple provided yesterday does appear damning. OpenAI doesn’t seem to be denying that confidential Apple information was used by the company, but rather claiming that the iPhone maker failed to properly protect it.

It sounds like there’s a lot of evidence against Chang Liu, but Apple is suing OpenAI.

Previously:

• OpenAI Open Letter Responds to Apple Lawsuit
• Apple Sues OpenAI Over Trade Secrets

European Commission:

From baby-monitors to smart watches, from apps to computer programs, connectable hardware and software are omnipresent in our daily lives. Less apparent to many users is the security risk such products may present.

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying software or hardware products with digital elements. The CRA addresses the inadequate level of cybersecurity in many products, and the lack of timely security updates. It also tackles the challenges consumers and businesses currently face when trying to determining which products are cybersecure and in setting them up securely, making it easier to identify hardware and software with the proper cybersecurity features.

The CRA introduces mandatory cybersecurity requirements for manufacturers, covering the planning, design, development and maintenance of such products. These obligations must be met at every stage of the value chain. The CRA also requires manufacturers to handle vulnerabilities during the lifecycle of their products. Some products of particular relevance for cybersecurity may need to undergo a third-party assessment by a notified body before they are sold on the EU market.

Via Ron Elemans:

[…] the extremely heavy future requirements that are due on December 11, 2027.

For example, free security updates must be provided for at least five years without changes regarding the operating system requirements—a period that resets every time someone purchases an app of a particular version.

Here’s the text of it, which was approved in 2024.

Previously:

• New EU App Store Terms to Comply With DMA
• Europe Scaling Back GDPR and AI Laws

Richard Speed (Hacker News 3):

XCancel’s home page now contains some minimal text stating: “On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.”

It says the service has been halted “until further notice.”

[…]

Nitter provided a way for users to read posts on X without requiring an account. There was no JavaScript or ads, a user’s IP could not be tracked, and it was generally a good deal snappier than the official X client, just read-only. It was the service behind platforms such as XCancel.

The only thing surprising about this is how long it took.

Nick Heer:

Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must.

Previously:

• Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In
• Reddit Pushes Web Visitors to App
• Instagram Shuts Down Basic Display API
• Twitter for Mac Dead Again
• Social Media AI Training
• Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee
• Twitter Now Requires Logging In
• Migrating From Twitter to Mastodon

Update (2026-09-07): There are currently twelve working Nitter instances (Hacker News).

zedeus (Hacker News):

Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.

Update (2026-09-16): XCancel (via John Gruber, Hacker News):

Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can’t share more details.

xsukax (via Brent Simmons):

xsukax X RSS Generator fetches publicly accessible X profile HTML, extracts posts and media, stores them locally, and exposes the results as standards-compatible RSS feeds that can be consumed by RSS readers, automation platforms, monitoring systems, and other feed-aware applications.

Juli Clover (AppleInsider):

Apple has again failed to earn a stay for fee calculations in its ongoing legal fight with Epic Games. Apple's case will be heard by the Supreme Court in the term that begins in October, and Apple asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to pause proceedings until then, but the court said no [PDF].

Juli Clover:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan today granted Apple a one-day stay in its legal fight with Epic Games, giving Apple more time to outline the fees it wants to charge developers for linking out to purchase options on the web.

M.G. Siegler:

Apple tried to freeze the entire thing while they appealed to the Supreme Court – and the Supreme Court denied the freeze. But they didn’t deny hearing the case – yet. That’s why they’re pausing the proceedings for now (after Judge Gonzalez Rogers denied the same request), while they weigh Apple’s appeal. But before they do that, they’re basically likely to decide today – again, it was just a 24-hour delay – whether they should grant a longer stay. Presumably if the court thinks they’re unlikely to hear Apple’s appeal, they may not grant that longer stay. Or if they think Apple filing their number won’t harm their business, they’ll let it proceed. But Apple will argue that if the longer stay isn’t granted, it will cause major harm to their business because again, it will effectively end the App Store cut as we know it.

Juli Clover (Engadget, The Verge):

Apple today submitted a court-ordered proposal outlining the commission it believes is reasonable to collect from U.S. apps that link to purchase options outside of the App Store.

Apple is asking for half of its commission on standard apps, so apps that would pay 30 percent for an in-app purchase would pay 15 percent when linking to a web purchase option. Small Business Program participants that would normally pay 15 percent would pay 5 percent.

[…]

The appeals court suggested the commission could be limited to the direct costs of facilitating link-outs, and under that approach, the fee would be zero. Apple says a zero commission would not reflect the value that it provides developers, and its suggested commission gives it fair compensation for the App Store platform.

[…]

The district court will now evaluate Apple’s fee proposal and hear a response from Epic Games , and Apple will need to implement the fee the court sets.

Apple:

Unlike cost-only based commissions, Apple’s revenue-based commissions incentivize continued investment. Apple charges developers a $99 annual fee for the Apple Developer Program. May 17, 2021 Trial Tr. at 2762:21–2763:13. This modest fee—designed to prevent fraud and expressly not intended to compensate Apple for the use of its IP-protected tools, technologies, and services (id.)—allows developers to build apps using Apple’s offerings and deliver experiences to iOS and iPadOS users worldwide.

The annual developer fee is nominal. Apple relies on percentage-based commissions to recoup and profit from its investments. See id. ¶¶ 87–93. Apple is incentivized to invest in IP- protected tools, technologies, and services that generate revenue for developers (and benefit users).

[…]

Dr. Carlton explains that “reduc[ing] Apple’s incentive to invest and provide the technology and services that benefit users and developers” would harm users and developers, as well as Apple.

I like the part where Apple’s expert argues that its normal commission rates are so high that it would still be profitable for developers to pay the proposed linking commissions on top of what they would pay to Stripe or Paddle. In other words, paying Apple for “IP” almost twice what it admits the other companies charge for “full-service, turnkey payment processing.”

Jeff Johnson:

If the point [of the $99] is just to prevent fraud, why do we need to keep paying $99 yearly FOREVER? Is 10 years not enough to prove I’m not a fraud?!?

If the fee doesn’t help pay for Apple IP, then it’s even more blatantly unfair that a minority of apps have to pay for ALL apps to access Apple IP. Free apps, no matter how big or how much $ they make via ads, get access to Apple IP from OUR REVENUE CUT, and not even their $99 counts.

Matt Garber:

That’s what that enormous hardware margin from customers is already supposed to be paying for — Apple IP! In the early 00’s, I gladly paid the “Apple tax” (PowerBook G4) to get access to the Mac OS X software/ecosystem, including all the Unix and dev tools. I’m not sure why anyone thinks that double-dipping is fine on all the non-Mac platforms, App Store or not.

Jeff Johnson (2):

Schiller’s [previous] testimony about the previous program is extremely misleading, because the new program began in 2008 at the same time as the App Store, so there was no previous iOS developer program, and Mac Developer ID did not begin until 2012, so Apple Developer Program membership was not actually required to distribute Mac apps!

Jeff Johnson:

Fourth, it appears that Steve Jobs was wrong: the $99 fee didn’t prevent developers from flooding the App Store with a lot of junk.

I want to quote another remarkable passage from Schiller’s testimony, again with questions from Apple’s own lawyer.

Q. And Mr. Jobs says, “And also just to make it a little clearer, we don’t intend to make money off the App Store. I mean, we don’t make a lot of money off iTunes, and the split with the music companies is about the same, so in the case of the iTunes Music Store, we give all the money to the content owners, and we are basically giving all the money to the developers here. And if that 30 percent of it pays for running the store, well, that will be great, but we just want to create a very efficient channel for these developers to reach every single iPhone user.” Is that a statement that Mr. Jobs made back in March 2008?

A. He did.

[…]

I won’t quote the following passage in which Schiller testifies about his internal email suggesting that Apple limit itself to $1 billion per year in profit from the App Store, hand-waving away the suggestion as merely “spurring conversation.” Of course the email also seems to contradict Schiller’s (absurd) testimony that Apple does not specifically calculate profit from the App Store, only company-wide profit. Apple’s public financial statements also appear to contradict Schiller’s claims.

Previously:

• TabControl Scam and the App Review Queue
• Apple Asks Supreme Court to Review Epic Ruling
• External Purchase Fee Stay Reversed
• Lower App Store Fees in China
• Lower Google Play Store Fees and Registered App Stores
• Apple Granted Stay Over External Purchase Fee
• “Reasonably Necessary” External Purchase Fee
• Testimony on External Purchase Fee and Scare Screens
• App Store External Purchase Fee: 27%

Update (2026-08-20): Marcus Mendes:

On the same day, Apple submitted another motion, asking Judge Gonzalez Rogers to order the parties to attend a settlement conference.

[…]

Epic has now responded to Apple’s motion, stating that although the company “has been, and remains today, willing to entertain any direct approach from Apple with a serious settlement proposal that would introduce competition and benefit all developers,” it “does not believe the prospects of such settlement would be meaningfully advanced through referral to a settlement conference at this juncture.”

Update (2026-09-03): Marcus Mendes:

In addition to the proposal itself, Apple submitted supporting expert reports, alongside a request to seal portions of those filings containing financial data, link-out adoption estimates, developer survey results, and other information Apple considers commercially sensitive.

Epic has now filed an opposition to Apple’s request, arguing “Apple again seeks to conceal information from the public and unnecessarily hamper proceedings.”

Thomas Claburn:

Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc’s AI Act.

[…]

The move may further amplify the appeal of open weight models and alienate Claude customers, who don’t necessarily want consumers of their AI-generated content to know its provenance.

[…]

Anthropic itself is already hedging about the utility of its marking method, noting that detected marks are not conclusive evidence that Claude produced the content and that the absence of marks cannot guarantee that AI wasn’t involved in the creation of a particular piece of content.

Anthropic (Hacker News):

Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch. Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported.

[…]

Marks will apply to output from supported Claude models across Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag, and wherever Claude is offered, worldwide. Some platforms or features may not support certain marking types.

[…]

We’ll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks, as the Code requires, and we’ll share details in forthcoming documentation.

John Gruber:

Anthropic is claiming this is for compliance with an EU law but that “Marking will apply to output from supported models wherever Claude is offered, worldwide.”

This is infuriatingly opaque. I won’t speak to the “signed provenance metadata” they say they’ll be embedding in generated files like PDFs, SVGs, PNGs, and JPEGs. That’s important but it’s complex. Plain text is simple. A string of text is just one character followed by another. I presume that Claude is going to start “embedding” invisible characters/byte sequences between visible characters? What they’re claiming to do here seems impossible, frankly, and anything they attempt to embed invisibly is going to cause immediate problems.

[…]

If the “watermark” is not comprised of invisible characters but rather visible ones, how in the world does this jibe with their claim that it’s “imperceptible”? (This Reddit thread claims that’s how it will work — “It’s a form of steganography where the model subtly biases its word choice to create a statistical pattern that can be detected later.” How in the world can that be squared with “it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”?) And any sort of semantic detection like this is going to cause false-positive problems.

Previously:

• Hiding Vulnerabilities in Source Code
• Hiding Data in Emoji
• A Vatican-Sized Flag Mystery
• Unicode and Copying and Pasting Code
• Hiding Easter Eggs in Maps
• Genius Accuses Google of Copying Its Lyrics Data
• Fingerprinting Swift Code Using Spacecrypt
• Xerox Scanners and  Photocopiers Randomly Alter Numbers

Update (2026-08-17): Anthropic provides more details:

Watermarking won’t be specific to Claude. As of August 2, the EU requires AI providers serving its market to mark AI-generated content. Other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.

[…]

In internal testing, we’ve seen no impact of watermarking on the content, level of creativity, or readability of Claude’s text. In the SynthID-Text paper, which introduced the technique we use, Google DeepMind tested this impact by serving a model that used watermarking to a portion of their Gemini traffic and comparing thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. They found no statistically significant differences from the unwatermarked model. And in a controlled study, human raters comparing watermarked and unwatermarked answers side-by-side saw no difference in quality.

[…]

There are limitations to the effectiveness of watermarking. Using our key, one can only answer the question “What is the likelihood this was partly written by Claude?” It doesn’t confirm whether the text was human-written, and it can’t tell whether the text was written by a different AI (even if that other AI uses watermarking, it would have a different key; it might also use a different watermarking method altogether). Detecting a watermark also doesn’t work well on small samples, where there are fewer word choices and thus less information to go on. As a passage increases in length, confidence about Claude’s involvement increases too.

Watermarking is sparser on factual passages where there are fewer choices that can be made without decreasing the accuracy of the text. […] For the same reason, code—which in very many cases has to be exact—has generally less watermarking than some other forms of text.

John Gruber (Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News):

I initially guessed “invisible characters” not because I didn’t think of the semantic word-choice technique, but because I was a fool who took Anthropic at its word in their description of what they would do.

[…]

They say “imperceptible” and “doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”. Their words. Not almost imperceptible. Not slightly changes the meaning, quality, or readability.

There seems to be a slight of hand here, where Google studied whether humans saw a difference in quality but then Anthropic claimed that there was no difference in meaning. Changing words will almost always change the meaning. Perhaps not in an important way, but a change is a change. Pretending otherwise is offensive to a writer. The response to this line of argument seems to be that LLMs already have randomness and that the marking changes will be within the level noise that’s already there. To me, this presents a pessimistic view of the capabilities of LLMs, contrary to Anthropic’s normal claims. The Google study was published in 2024 and didn’t test Claude. The models have changed a lot since then, but they are assuming that the precision hasn’t advanced enough to be affected, nor will it in the future. Or that when there is a tension between watermarking and quality they will pick the former. And perhaps you won’t be able to tell because everyone else will be watermarking, too.

But the very best description of the general idea behind the technique is an interactive essay by James Padolsey, “How AI Text Watermarking Works”.

[…]

This isn’t just about text one might generate with the intention of passing it off as their own natural work. This isn’t even about LLM proofreading of work written by hand. Anthropic is saying that all new Claude models are going to adulterate every single bit of text longer than 200 tokens (~150 words) they generate, including everything it presents to its users to read. So even in a private conversation between a user and Claude, which will never be read by anyone other than the user, Claude will begin making word choices in the name of marking its output in statistically predictable ways rather than maximizing clarity and precision.

[…]

Taken literally, compliant LLM terms of service must forbid users from rephrasing the output from models that comply with this regulation, because the word choices are the marks. But it’s not the European Union that is trying to impose their absurd, impractical, witch-hunt-fueling regulation on the entire world. That falls on Anthropic.

Complying with this, particularly with regard to text, is only going to create problems for honest users. Dishonest users attempting to pass off AI-generated text as their own writing (students, employees, whoever) will simply circumvent detection through non-compliant AI paraphrasing tools.

I don’t love that checking for a watermark requires submitting the text to the AI provider, and all you get back is an opaque result with no way to verify it.

James Padolsey (via John Gruber):

The move is Anthropic’s response to Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act, which requires providers to ensure that outputs are “marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated”.

[…]

The Act exempts standard editing, but many legitimate assistive uses require more substantial rewriting while leaving the ideas, judgment and responsibility with the human. The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum borne of the brain is treated no differently from one produced by a calculator. Likewise with spellcheckers. To make assistance suspect only once the tool becomes capable enough to compose a whole sentence is not a principled boundary. It is a moral premium placed on difficulty itself.

Anthropic has nevertheless chosen a blanket, model-level implementation that appears broader than the law’s minimum requirement. That may be convenient compliance engineering, but it discards distinctions the law expressly attempted to preserve. The result is a signal broad enough to implicate harmless and assistive use, yet fragile enough to be removed by a motivated person through substantial recomposition. It risks concentrating suspicion on ordinary and assistive users while remaining weakest against deliberate deception.

Update (2026-08-20): See also:

• Supplementary Information for the SynthID-Text paper
• Jason Anthony Guy
• Daniel Jalkut (Mastodon)
• John Gruber (Mastodon)
• Greg Titus
• Allie

Without getting into the weeds, I still think Anthropic’s claim of their being no change in the meaning, quality, or readability is not accurate, using the plain meanings of those terms. If you read the papers, there are ways of ensuring that the frequencies of individual tokens or sequences of them are not affected in aggregate. But this is a different claim, and Anthropic does not specify which tradeoffs they’ve chosen there. I’m willing to grant that they can make the effect very small.

At this point, I think the most interesting question is, what will be the effects of these watermarks?

Steve Troughton-Smith:

AI watermarking is security theater. There is absolutely nothing to prevent people from removing any possible watermark in text, images, video or other data. There is no way to prevent false positives, or false negatives, in detectors, either. It’s all superficial nonsense.

I find it interesting to be able to test a particular passage of text, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Even without watermark removal, a negative for a given model doesn’t tell you whether another model was used. And I’m uncomfortable with convicting someone based on a watermark given that false positives are possible and independent verification is not.

I asked Gemini about the benefits, and it said:

Regulatory Compliance and Policy

• Legal adherence: Helps major tech platforms satisfy emerging mandates requiring automated systems to label machine-generated media.
• Ecosystem tracking: Gives platforms and enterprises a high-level telemetry signal to monitor the spread of synthetic content across public channels.

Triage and Risk Mitigation

• Mass moderation: Assists automated filters in flagging bulk, unvetted bot content or spam networks where statistical trends matter more than single-file perfection.
• Provenance auditing: Provides an extra layer of metadata for digital media archives, helping investigators spot obvious clusters of AI-generated assets.

In other words, it’s not so much about individual pieces of content.

Update (2026-08-24): John Gruber:

Also, more and more, I do think this has little to do with the EU regulation and everything to do with Anthropic and Google wanting to watermark the text that Claude and Gemini generate for their own purposes, to identify text to avoid training future models on to avoid model collapse/AI inbreeding.

See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.