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.
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.
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. ®
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Login
