Adriana Retyte took her own life after viewing ‘high-risk’ material on the video-sharing platform TikTok
A 14-year-old schoolgirl’s death after TikTok served her suicide content has prompted renewed calls for UK watchdogs to crack down on “toxic” social media feeds.
Adriana Retyte, a pupil at Langley school in Norfolk, took her own life after she viewed videos and images related to suicide on the video-sharing platform, according to a coroner who last week found her access to the material on TikTok “may have played a significant part in her decision to take her life”.
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© Photograph: The Good Brigade/Getty Images
© Photograph: The Good Brigade/Getty Images
© Photograph: The Good Brigade/Getty Images
Environmental change is being measured in forests cleared, crops stressed and species pushed from their habitats. But the response is also being shaped by decisions about money, land and technology, and by people trying to protect both livelihoods and the places they depend on.
Brazil’s latest figures offer one of the clearest signs of progress: forest clearing in the Amazon fell to 3,335 square kilometers in the year ending July 31, 2026, 42% below the previous year and the lowest level since records began in 1988. The Cerrado also saw a decline. The drop comes ahead of a presidential run-off in which the rainforest’s future is a key issue. Whether the reduction lasts remains uncertain.
Elsewhere, the costs of adapting to environmental pressures are immediate. Drought has left England’s pumpkins smaller than usual, with growers warning the crop could be the worst on record. In Southern California, wildfires have damaged or destroyed six homes, while a firefighter suffered heat exhaustion. And in the UK, proposals to cut hundreds of millions of pounds from the heat pump grant scheme could affect support for households switching from gas, oil or LPG boilers.
These stories sit alongside questions about what governments choose to prioritize. US voters in battleground states want candidates to discuss climate change, but candidates have largely stayed quiet. In Britain, Chancellor John Healey has made a growth case for Heathrow’s proposed third runway, while the prime minister has not backed the project. The government is studying consultation responses. The choices are practical as well as political: how to cut emissions, where to direct public funds and whose concerns shape decisions.
On the ground, communities are building their own responses. In Sergipe, women shellfish gatherers are resisting mangrove degradation and fighting for access to the areas where they work. In coastal Indonesia, Wisye Sahambangung leads a women’s group restoring mangroves and creating economic opportunities. Their work connects habitat protection with income and access to natural resources.
Other reports show how easily conservation efforts can create new pressures. Researchers found fewer wild pollinators in areas with higher concentrations of honeybees, which were observed bumping into or chasing other pollinators from flowers. The finding complicates the idea that more beekeeping automatically helps pollinators. In western states, efforts to reduce wolf numbers raise questions about the animals’ social lives and their role in nature. Meanwhile, countries are falling short of pledged funding and ocean-protection goals ahead of the UN biodiversity conference, COP17.
Technology and spectacle bring their own questions. Starlink’s reported restrictions in Ukraine have prompted US senators to seek an investigation into who imposed them, while the service remains important to Ukraine’s wartime operations. At a different scale, Belfast Harbour is to test zero-emission transport and energy systems with £15m in funding.
The Exmoor Dark Skies Festival, with about 80 events planned, offers another way people encounter the natural world: through walks, astronomy sessions and moonlit swims. The weeks ahead will show whether policy commitments match the scale of environmental pressures, and whether local efforts can endure with the resources and access they need.
The post California Wildfires Damage Homes, Exmoor Dark Skies Festival Marks a Decade — Today’s Environmental Briefing for Sat, Oct 17 2026 first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors
“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.
It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.
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© Photograph: MASTER/Getty Images
© Photograph: MASTER/Getty Images
© Photograph: MASTER/Getty Images
Microsoft’s October 2026 Patch Tuesday is the year’s largest release, with 1,408 CVEs requiring customer action, 72 of them rated critical. September, the previous high, carried 963. One CVE is already exploited: CVE-2026-96951, a Windows Shell flaw that bypasses Mark of the Web. Two were publicly disclosed before release, in the .NET Framework and the MessagePack-CSharp library. Separately, on 25 September Microsoft reported attacks against CVE-2026-65660, a SharePoint Server flaw fixed in August. Readiness recommends a Patch Now scheduling for Windows, Office, Exchange and the developer tooling, and a standard release schedule for SQL Server. The Readiness team has published an infographic summarising deployment risk by product family.
On 14 October, Microsoft added a known issue to this month’s Windows 11 updates, KB5127648 for versions 24H2, 25H2 and 26H2, and KB5127646 for 26H1. Non-admin users might be unable to open Remote Desktop connections to devices that have Administrator protection enabled, with error 0xC000000D. The issue started with September’s non-security preview update. The Windows 11 security baselines enable Administrator protection by default, so test remote access to managed hosts before broad deployment. Microsoft’s mitigation is to turn off Administrator protection temporarily through your policy management tool, and a fix will follow in a future update.
Two issues remain open:
And three are now closed:
Between the September and October releases, from 9 September to 12 October, Microsoft’s Security Update Guide notifications covered 111 entries for Microsoft’s own products, not counting Chromium republications for Edge. Of those 111, 90 are true revisions rather than new entries. September’s window had one.
Microsoft has published no mitigations and no workarounds in the October release.
These support milestones passed with this release on 13 October, as scheduled:
The next milestones fall on 10 November 2026, the date of November’s Patch Tuesday. .NET 8 and .NET 9 reach the end of support, as do PowerShell 7.4 and 7.5. Windows 11 Enterprise and Education 23H2, and IoT Enterprise 23H2, reach the end of updates, and Microsoft says November’s update “will be the last update available for these editions”.
Microsoft also starts or tightens several enforcement changes with this release:
Microsoft’s test guidance for this release runs to 496 Windows entries, 41 of them flagged as high risk, against 466 and 55 in September. Printing, scanning and font rendering account for 31 of the 41. The Readiness team recommends these testing priorities:
Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families, as defined by Microsoft, with the following groupings.
For the third month in a row, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release lists no browser CVEs. Edge security fixes arrived between releases instead. Between 9 September and 12 October, Microsoft published 414 CVEs for Microsoft Edge in the Security Update Guide: 409 republished from Chromium and five specific to Edge. None carries an exploited flag, and no Edge release in that period reported an exploit in the wild.
Windows takes 1,122 CVEs this month, 42 of them critical. Elevation of privilege accounts for 617 entries, information disclosure for 200 and remote code execution for 179. Of the 42 critical entries, 31 are remote code execution, nine are elevation of privilege and two are spoofing.
Add this Windows update to your Patch Now schedule. Every client needs the fix for the exploited Shell flaw, and DHCP servers and Hyper-V hosts need the critical server-side fixes.
Microsoft released 180 Office CVEs this month, 26 of them critical, and remote code execution accounts for 107.
Add these updates to your Patch Now schedule, because 25 of the 26 critical entries affect Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio and Word.
Exchange has one critical entry this month and SQL Server has none.
Exchange goes on the Patch Now list. SQL Server goes on the Schedule list because none of its 22 entries is critical. If September’s SQL Server update is still outstanding, install it first.
Microsoft released 66 CVEs across its developer tooling this month: two critical, 63 important and one moderate. Remote code execution accounts for 18 entries and elevation of privilege for 13.
Add these updates to your Patch Now schedule, starting with the .NET updates that carry the QUIC fix.
Adobe published 11 security bulletins on 13 October, covering 175 CVEs across ColdFusion, Experience Manager, Commerce, Photoshop, Bridge, FrameMaker, Dimension, the Substance 3D tools and the Content Credentials SDK. None is rated priority 1, and Adobe is not aware of exploits for any of them. No Acrobat or Reader security update for this month. I mentioned last month that we are in for a few months of extraordinary patch releases. Harking back to 2003 (when I started work on the nascent field of Microsoft patch management), with Microsoft releasing just 51 updates, anything over a 1000, much less 1400 CVE entries would have been unimaginable. I don’t think that we are at a “patch maximum” yet — but I hope that things calm down soon.
A chain of vulnerabilities in Google’s Chrome browser could have enabled researchers to take control of one billion Windows machines worldwide — and it cost them just $40,000 in AI compute time to discover it.
Researchers at Xbow USA worked for six days on developing the exploit, which earned them a $250,000 bug bounty from Google, the first under the new 2026 rules.
They chose OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol for the task to demonstrate what’s possible with a publicly available model rather than a specialist security implementation. They used it to search Chrome’s source code, test ideas, and build proofs of concept, while they set the strategy, chose where to look, and checked its work.
They successfully chained together a vulnerability to escape first from the sandbox containing the V8 JavaScript engine and then from Chrome’s operating-system process sandbox, launching a Windows app from within a malicious web page.
Xbow presented its findings to Google, which fixed the flaws. The researchers set out all the details as to how the exploit was developed in a blog.
I remain unhappy with Apple’s passkey backup story. There’s little documentation about this, but from what I can tell:
There are no automatic versioned backups. (Syncing is not backup because it doesn’t protect you against human error, bugs, or attacks.)
Even if you have a Time Machine backup, it’s not possible to restore it to the same Mac without logging into iCloud. This could be a problem if your account is locked or compromised.
Restoring it to a different Mac is impossible because the decryption key is stored in the other Mac’s Secure Enclave. Apple is protecting you from accessing your own backup, even though the keychain is already an encrypted file, protected by the password that you set. (And the Time Machine or clone drive that it’s stored on is probably encrypted, too.)
The Passwords app can now export passkeys, but you cannot create an export file that you can import back into Passwords on another Mac. You can only export to a third-party password manager that’s installed on the same Mac (which may require a working Apple account). Even then, this does not include passkeys for Apple services; they don’t show up in the Passwords app. There are also some other restrictions around shared items and Sign In with Apple.
The above is last year’s news, but I don’t think I had written it all in one place before. The new bad news is that, as of macOS 26.4, these problems now affect regular passwords, not just passkeys. (You do have more flexibility to export passwords, though.)
Historically, you could copy the login keychain file from one Mac to another and be able to open it on the destination Mac by providing the password to that keychain. As of macOS Tahoe, this does not appear to work for Macs which use Secure Enclave.
[…]
From that, it appears that unlocking the login keychain requires more than the password because the keys it unlocks are tied to the Secure Enclave of the Mac where the keychain was created. With the decryption keys stored in the source Mac’s Secure Enclave, manually copying the keychain to another Mac and then unlocking it won’t work. The password you have for the keychain may be correct, but the actual keys needed to decrypt its contents won’t be available on the destination Mac.
According to Apple, all Apple silicon Macs, as well as some Intel Mac models, have the secure enclave processor, so the issue affects millions of Mac users.
[…]
If anything happens to your Mac, if it’s stolen or becomes inoperable, your login keychain is also lost, unrecoverable, even if you have a copy of the login keychain file! This is a stunning development that has left me bewildered and irate. WTF was Apple thinking? To my knowledge, Apple did not even publicize the change in Tahoe.
[…]
How does Migration Assistant handle the situation on Tahoe? I don’t know. I would guess that since Migration Assistant still has access to the old Mac, it simply decrypts the old login keychain and copies the login keychain entries to the new login keychain on the new Mac, rather than transferring the keychain files directly.
[…]
I recommend that you open your login keychain with the Keychain Access app (now located in
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications) and check what’s in there, the data that you’re in danger of losing. Whether you realize or it not, many apps use the login keychain. For example, Google Chrome and other Chromium browsers store passwords in the login keychain. MailMate stores email account passwords in the login keychain. The open source RSS reader Vienna stores website passwords in the login keychain. The Zoom app also uses the login keychain. My Developer ID code signing certificate is stored in the login keychain; if I’m not mistaken, I believe that Apple’s own Xcode put it there. And of course, any items that you’ve manually added to the login keychain would be lost if the keychain file could not be unlocked.
I have confirmed that a login.keychain-db copied from my Mac mini M4 Pro to a virtual machine (VM) running macOS Tahoe 26.6.2 cannot reveal any of its secrets to the Keychain Access app on the VM, as it refuses to accept the valid password. Not only that, but Keychain Access running in a VM cannot access the login.keychain-db keychain copied from another Tahoe VM, although neither has been anywhere near a Secure Enclave.
If you intend migrating manually between Macs, don’t waste time trying to copy across the login keychain, as it’s not likely to work, and its secrets will remain.
[…]
I performed test migrations between VMs, and demonstrated that Migration Assistant does copy the contents of the login keychain successfully to the destination Mac.
I think this only happens if you migrate over a network, with the old Mac acting as a server. I prefer to connect the old Mac using Target Disk Mode, but in that case Migration Assistant wouldn’t be running on the old Mac so the special sauce wouldn’t work. Likewise if I were trying to do the migration using a third-party cloning app.
- Loss of physical access to a Mac running 26.4 or later prevents access to any items stored in its login keychain.
- Hardware failure requiring logic board replacement may have the same effect on restoring the contents of its login keychain (assuming that migration from a backup doesn’t work).
- Restoring an Apple silicon Mac in DFU mode may be similar in effect.
What I don’t know yet is whether you can unlock and access any login keychain written by macOS 26.4 or later and migrated from a backup accessed directly from a different Mac. This would occur in one-Mac migration, when Migration Assistant uses a backup of a Mac not acting as a Migration server. This would only be possible if the backup also stored the additional secret required to access the login keychain, which seems unlikely.
[…]
Apple’s documentation for macOS Tahoe and the copying of keychains makes no mention of this change, in spite of its serious consequences and the change being made almost six months ago.
It there states “If you didn’t use Setup Assistant, the best way to copy your keychains to a new computer is to export and then import them using Keychain Access”. However, Keychain Access can only export some keychain items including certificates and keys, but not passwords. And to do that, the Mac must be able to unlock and access those items in the source keychain. Thus, Apple’s recommendations are out of date and will now fail.
rsUSA0 (via Jeff Johnson):
When upgrading to macos 27 Golden Gate, I erased my system through recovery to do a clean install. I planned to manually migrate data back to the computer from an external drive clone of Macintosh HD and a Time Machine backup. This has worked well in the past and eliminated system bloat.
When I manually migrated my login keychain, it opened, showed entries, but it wouldn’t accept my password to reveal any actual passwords. The window shakes like I’m using the wrong password. I’m 100% sure I’m using the correct password. I also tried every password I’ve ever used and I’m certain it’s not a password issue.
Perhaps even restoring to the same Mac failed because the clean install wiped the key stored in the Secure Enclave. [Update (2026-10-01): See update below.]
Some people who read my previous blog post misunderstood the issue, because they didn’t know that the macOS login keychain is distinct from iCloud Keychain.
[…]
In the Keychain Access app, you can see two separate default keychains, one of which is the login keychain. The other default keychain is named “iCloud” if you’ve enabled iCloud Keychain, “Local Items” if not. There’s actually a longstanding issue with this keychain analogous to the newer issue with the login keychain.
[…]
Mac users like myself who forsake iCloud Keychain face the prospect of no disaster recovery for the Local Items keychain. My habit is to manually create a new password item in the login keychain and only then supply the credentials to an app, for example, Safari AutoFill. Ironically, the login keychain change brought by macOS 26.4 sabotages my password backup procedure[…]
Today, I got my new Mac mini M6. When I started setting up the new machine, it asked me to update to macOS 27, so I followed the instructions.
[…]
After signing in to iCloud, it asked me to enter the passcode of one of my Apple devices. I entered the correct passcode and even tried the passcodes for all of my devices, but I keep getting the same message:
Verification Failed
There was an error verifying the passcode of your iPhone
I don’t like having to rely on iCloud.
Previously:
Update (2026-10-01): TN3137 has been updated for macOS 26.4:
Historically each file-based keychain was a standalone file. You could, for example, copy a keychain file from one Mac to another and still use it, as long as you knew the keychain password.
In macOS 26.4 and later that’s no longer the case. A keychain file might reference a protected entropy file. To unlock such a keychain you need both the keychain password and the protected entropy file.
[…]
These protected entropy files are stored in /var/db/SystemKeys. If you’re creating a backup product, make sure to back up that directory. Without it, the keychain files that you back up might be useless.
[…]
The /var/db/SystemKeys directory is not directly accessible, even when running as root, so you can’t copy a protected entropy file in the normal way. To access it, disable System Integrity Protection (SIP).
First things first: I don’t think turning off SIP every time you make a backup is a real solution. And I don’t understand what problem Apple is really trying to solve with protecting the entropy file; it seems like they don’t trust their own encryption. Lastly, it’s not explicitly stated, but I don’t think copying the entropy file helps with backing up passkeys.
That aside, I find the details both illuminating and confusing. This probably explains the rsUSA0 case above, where restoring to the same Mac didn’t work. The key wasn’t stored in the Secure Enclave but rather in the entropy file on the SSD, which had been wiped. This also suggests a simpler way for Migration Assistant to work; it could have special access to copy the entropy file without having to actually open the keychain.
It also seems to be saying that, if you turn off SIP and copy the entropy file, you can then access your keychain backup from another Mac. But I’m not sure how to square that with Apple’s keychain documentation:
Keychain items are encrypted using two different AES-256-GCM keys: a table key (metadata) and a per-row key (secret key). Keychain metadata (all attributes other than kSecValue) is encrypted with the metadata key to speed searches, and the secret value (kSecValueData) is encrypted with the secret key. The metadata key is protected by the Secure Enclave but is cached in the Application Processor to allow fast queries of the keychain. The secret key always requires a round trip through the Secure Enclave.
How can copying the entropy file work if the Secure Enclave is required? My guess is that the entropy file itself is encrypted (NSFileProtection) using the Secure Enclave. So accessing it on the original Mac does require going through the Secure Enclave. But when you make a backup, the entropy file gets decrypted. Maybe accessing the keychain on the second Mac causes file protection to be re-applied to the contents of /var/db/SystemKeys, so then it becomes protected by that Mac’s Secure Enclave.
Previously:
Update (2026-10-02): Dave Nanian (Mastodon):
This is obviously not a good user solution, because no one is going to boot to Recovery, turn off SIP, back up, boot back to Recovery, and turn SIP back on. Thinking they would do so is kind of crazy.
[…]
SuperDuper handles this situation. When you make a bootable copy, the required keys are copied without requiring any special steps.
SuperDuper itself can’t read the entropy file, but it uses Apple’s asr tool to make bootable backups, and that has special access. (Unfortunately, it can’t update the entropy file without making a fresh bootable backup, but in practice I don’t expect it to need updating.) I had not been bothering to make most of my backups bootable, since in most cases I just want to restore to an internal SSD, not actually boot from the backup. But I now think it makes sense to choose bootable backups as the default.
I won’t expand on my feelings any further than by saying that in my 37 years as an Apple developer, I have never come across anything so shameful.
Unfortunately, it seems like the keychain stuff was just the warm-up act.
Update (2026-10-05): Howard Oakley:
[macOS 26.4] Added the protected directory at /var/db/SystemKeys to backups of Data volumes, and protects them in backups.
So Time Machine does back up the entropy file. I missed this because I didn’t see /var/db in my backups, but it turns out that they do have /private/var/db/SystemKeys and are just missing the /var symlink.
Update (2026-10-07): Jeff Johnson:
The
-soption to thesecurity show-keychain-infois not yet documented inman security, not even on the latest version of macOS Golden Gate. Moreover, the-soption does not work on macOS Sequoia and earlier. In general, thesecurity show-keychain-infocommand reveals no information unless the specified keychain is unlocked, which makes it impossible to discover the salt of a keychain file that you can’t currently unlock. However, as long as you already have the entire contents of the /var/db/SystemKeys directory from the macOS volume on which a keychain file was created, the inability to determine the keychain file’s salt beforehand shouldn’t be much of a problem, because in practice there are typically only a few salt files, so you can simply copy them all to another macOS volume.[…]
You don’t actually have to disable SIP to add files to the /var/db/SystemKeys directory, because you can do so from another boot volume. You have to boot into recovery anyway in order to disable SIP, so you could simply edit /var/db/SystemKeys from recovery rather than disabling SIP on the non-recovery volume.
The
security unlock-keychaincommand lacks an option to specify the location of an entropy file or to provide the file data directly, so unfortunately a login keychain can’t be unlocked from the recovery volume, only from a volume where you can add files to the /var/db/SystemKeys directory.
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.
Previously:
Across the stories today, a common thread emerges: the planet is speaking in signals — some subtle, some deafening — and the question is whether our institutions can listen fast enough to act.
Start with the signals themselves. El Niño has surged to record strength weeks ahead of schedule, and its fingerprints are already visible — from Hurricane Polo’s explosive intensification in the Pacific to the climate volatility rippling through global weather systems. In the UK, an aphid outbreak wiped out 30 million lettuce heads almost overnight, a small but telling example of how shifting conditions can upend food systems in ways no one budgets for. In Malawi, an unexplained weed overgrowth has choked Chia Lagoon, stranding farmers and fishers in flooded fields nearly seven months after the rains should have drained. These aren’t isolated oddities. They’re the planet’s early warning system, written in crop yields and clogged waterways.
Then there’s the human response — uneven, but not absent. Germany’s landmark pledge to phase out fossil fuels by 2045 marks a rare moment of policy catching up to urgency, moving beyond vague “carbon neutrality” language toward something more concrete. The UK’s decision to declassify a once-suppressed intelligence report — warning that climate breakdown is a direct threat to global security — suggests governments are quietly acknowledging what scientists have said for years, even if political will lags behind. And at UN climate talks in New York, amid what The Guardian describes as a genuinely grim mood, solar power’s continued growth offered rare, tangible hope. As Al Gore noted twenty years after An Inconvenient Truth, he’s surprised by the ferocity of fossil fuel pushback — but still believes, cautiously, that the fight can be won.
Behind the numbers are real communities adapting in real time. In the Andes, villagers near Villa de Arma are turning to ancient wetland systems as glaciers they once walked across vanish into bare rock. In Guam, resident Leevin Camacho learned his family’s water contained a pesticide banned since 1987 — a stark reminder that militarization and environmental cost are often intertwined, especially in the Pacific. And in Sarawak, Indigenous communities are still reckoning with displacement from the Bakun megadam three decades later, a cautionary tale as the world races toward a “clean” energy future that doesn’t always ask who pays for it.
It’s a reminder that progress and pressure often arrive together. Endangered birds on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula won last-minute protection from a rocket launch site — a genuine conservation victory — even as a Norfolk Broads housing levy was quietly slashed, raising fears that environmental safeguards elsewhere are eroding. Meanwhile, olive ridley sea turtles nesting for the first time ever on California beaches offer something rarer: wonder. A signal, too, but one that invites curiosity rather than alarm — proof that the natural world is still capable of surprising us.
As the week unfolds, all eyes will be on whether momentum from Climate Week — bolstered even by a monster from Sesame Street reminding children it’s okay to feel both fear and courage — translates into follow-through. The data, the disasters, and the small human stories all point the same direction: the era of asking “if” is over. What remains is the harder work of “how fast,” and “for whom.”
The post Hurricane Polo Explodes in Pacific, UK Aphid Swarm Wipes Out 30 Million Lettuces, Glasgow Braces for Rubbish Pileup — Today’s Environmental Briefing for Thu, Sep 24 2026 first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
Across the stories today, a common thread emerges: the boundaries we once drew around “the environment” — between land and sea, sky and orbit, economy and ecology — keep dissolving, revealing how deeply intertwined these systems have become.
Start with the sky, in more ways than one. The US government’s confirmation that it has deployed a weapon in Earth’s orbit marks a genuine turning point, not just for defense policy but for how we think about the commons above our heads. Space has long been treated as neutral ground; now it’s becoming contested territory, raising quiet but urgent questions about debris, escalation, and what “environment” even means when it extends past the atmosphere. Meanwhile, back on solid ground, the UK’s climate advisers delivered a pointed message to Heathrow: a third runway cannot proceed unless airlines help pay for the emissions it would unleash, potentially through carbon removal costs. It’s a small but telling signal that growth and climate accounting are becoming inseparable in policy conversations — expansion is no longer a given, even for infrastructure long considered inevitable.
That tension between growth and limits runs through much of today’s coverage. A Guardian analysis found that the world’s twenty largest private equity firms back energy portfolios emitting more greenhouse gases than all but three countries on Earth — a stark reminder that climate accountability often hides behind layers of finance most people never see. In Venezuela, a US-backed push for “legitimate” mining and a new oil megadeal are drawing warnings from environmental and human rights groups who see familiar risks dressed in new language. And in Guinea-Bissau, industrial fishmeal factories are quietly hollowing out a food fish that coastal communities have relied on for generations. Behind the numbers are real communities adapting in real time — from Vietnamese fishers losing thousands of dollars per vessel to tangled plastic waste, to Dhaka residents like Yeasmin Begum, who has spent her life breathing the smoke of a landfill she never chose to live beside.
Yet alongside these pressures, the day’s coverage also points to growing momentum around resilience and repair. Ukrainians are turning to rooftop solar to keep homes running amid bombardment — a portrait of adaptation born from necessity. A Congolese NGO now co-manages a national reserve for the first time, a homegrown model of stewardship. Moon bears rescued from bile farms are stretching their limbs in Suffolk enclosures, and three wild dog brothers wandered 2,500 miles across Zambia in search of a mate, offering an unlikely note of hope for their species. Even Griffith Park’s mountain lion — photographed beneath the Hollywood sign — helped inspire the world’s largest wildlife crossing, proof that a single image can shift infrastructure decisions.
It’s a reminder that progress and pressure often arrive together. Some communities are innovating their way through crisis; others, like the land defenders now forming self-defense units amid rising violence, are simply trying to survive it. As Brazil’s upcoming election looms over the Amazon’s future, and Chief Raoni Metuktire — one of its most storied protectors — enters palliative care, the coming months may reveal whether today’s momentum toward stewardship can outpace the forces pulling the other way.
The post US Confirms Orbital Weapon, Essex Wildlife Habitat Threatened by Data Centre — Today’s Environmental Briefing for Wed, Sep 16 2026 first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday is the year’s largest release, with 963 CVEs requiring customer action, 106 rated critical. Two are already exploited: CVE-2026-81963 in the Windows Update Stack and CVE-2026-85880 in Advanced Local Procedure Call. Nothing in this release was publicly disclosed ahead of the patch. Readiness recommends a Patch Now scheduling for Windows, Office, SQL Server and the developer tooling, and standard patch release for Exchange. The Readiness team has published an infographic summarising deployment risk by product family.
Three client issues are carried in from August close with this update, covering:
And Microsoft has left open a Microsoft Defender Antivirus notification defect, confirmed on 28 August, in which devices report that Defender is turned off while it is running correctly.
The quietest revision window of recent months arrived alongside the largest release. Between the August and September Patch Tuesdays, from 12 August to 7 September, the MSRC Security Update Guide touched 324 CVEs. Of those, 307 were routine Microsoft Edge and Chromium republications requiring no customer action.
That leaves 17 entries affecting Microsoft’s own products, and only one of those is a genuine revision. CVE-2026-59133, an elevation of privilege in the High-Performance Computing Pack, moved to version 1.1, and its own revision note records the change as informational. For comparison, August’s window carried 76 revisions to Microsoft’s own products, 60 of them flagged as requiring customer action.
The Readiness team has reviewed all 963 published updates. Microsoft has published no mitigations and no workarounds anywhere in this release.
Microsoft has published no new service or enforcement deadlines for September. The lifecycle picture is different, with multiple end-of-support notices for this coming October:
A second wave follows on 10 November 2026, and it is the one most likely to catch development teams rather than infrastructure teams. .NET 8 reaches the end of its long-term support branch, PowerShell 7.4 does the same, and Windows 11 Enterprise and Education 23H2 ends servicing alongside Windows 11 IoT Enterprise 23H2.
Microsoft’s test guidance for this release runs to 466 Windows entries, 55 of them flagged as high risk, against 109 and four in August. Given the large number of updates this month (who would have thought that we would be here at 963 CVEs), the Readiness team recommends the following testing priorities:
Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families, as defined by Microsoft, with the following groupings.
Microsoft has not released any updates for their browser products for the second month in a row. September’s Security Update Guide carries no Edge-specific CVEs at all, and the 307 Chromium republications in the revision window required no customer action. The nine Edge CVEs that did appear arrived mid-cycle on 28 August and were serviced through the browser’s own update channel rather than this release.
Estates on a managed Edge channel have nothing to do here beyond confirming the channel is current. It is the one quiet corner of an otherwise heavy month.
Windows carries 726 CVEs, 77 of them critical, which is three-quarters of the entire release. Elevation of privilege dominates by volume at 406 entries, with remote code execution second at 156, information disclosure at 94 and denial of service at 47. The pattern is the reverse of the severity picture: the bulk is local elevation, while the critical-rated entries cluster in the network-facing roles.
Add this Windows update to your Patch Now schedule, with DHCP and DNS servers first and the biometric stack close behind.
Microsoft released 137 Office CVEs this month, 24 of them critical, with remote code execution the through-line at 69 entries and information disclosure close behind at 52. September breaks the recent pattern in a way that matters for deployment: this wave is not MSI-only.
Nothing in Office is exploited this month. With 24 critical-rated entries and the Click-to-Run channel carrying most of the exposure, the September Office updates belong on the Patch Now schedule regardless.
Exchange is quiet and SQL Server is not, which inverts the usual relationship between the two.
Exchange goes on the Schedule list, and SQL Server goes on the Patch Now list. That is an unusual split, and it is driven by the four critical remote code execution entries on the database estate.
Microsoft released 24 CVEs across its developer tooling this month, 23 rated important and one critical. Security feature bypasses are the main focus with eight CVE entries, with remote code execution and information disclosure at four each.
Add these to your standard release schedule, behind this month’s Windows, Office and SQL Server priorities. Keep the 10 November date for .NET 8 and PowerShell 7.4 in view while you are in the developer estate, because a patch this month does not extend either branch.
September is the largest release of the year, and this (crazy, super high) volume is the least interesting thing about it. The 963 CVEs matter less than the 55 entries Microsoft flags as high risk, and those sit in printing and fonts. Adobe shipped two Acrobat builds one digit apart and only the second is a security update (nothing to worry about here). Of the CVEs Microsoft republished, 25 are not Microsoft’s. A version number tells you very little about the work in front of you. So, given my (super-secret knowledge) of how Microsoft operates over the summer, here is my prediction for next month (October). It won’t be as big as this month – but just you wait – November is going to be big. Let’s up those numbers (or not).
The ocean has quietly absorbed billions of tons of humanity’s carbon emissions over the past two centuries, but scientists and companies racing to supercharge that natural service have long been hampered by a stubborn and costly engineering problem. Now researchers at Stony Brook University, working with the Research Foundation for the State University of New York, have unveiled a method for electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement that they say can dramatically lower the cost of ocean-based carbon dioxide removal by eliminating one of the most expensive steps in the entire process: the pretreatment of seawater before it enters an electrochemical reactor. The innovation, now available for licensing through SUNY TechConnect, promises high-quality carbon offsets at a substantially reduced cost while simultaneously helping to counteract the acidification that threatens marine ecosystems worldwide.
At the heart of the challenge is a delicate chemical balancing act. As atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves into seawater, it forms carbonic acid, which lowers the ocean’s pH and erodes the carbonate chemistry that corals, shellfish and other calcifying organisms depend upon. Ocean carbon dioxide capture exploits a simple principle: if the ocean becomes more alkaline, it can absorb more CO2 from the air and lock it away safely as bicarbonate, one of the most stable and abundant forms of inorganic carbon on Earth. This process, known as ocean alkalinity enhancement, effectively turns the surface ocean into a vast, distributed carbon sink. But adding alkalinity to seawater is not trivial, and doing it in a way that is energy-efficient, scalable and safe has become one of the central engineering puzzles of the emerging carbon removal industry.
One of the most promising approaches relies on electrochemistry, specifically a technique called bipolar membrane electrodialysis. In this system, ion-selective membranes are stacked between two end electrodes, and the arrangement allows operators to split ordinary saltwater into its constituent acid and base. When brine containing sodium chloride flows through the stack, the process generates hydrochloric acid on one side and sodium hydroxide, a strong base, on the other. The elegance of the scheme lies in its product handling: if the hydrochloric acid is kept on land, where it can be stored, neutralized or put to industrial use, and only the sodium hydroxide along with the treated seawater is returned to the ocean, the receiving waters gain a net infusion of alkalinity. That added alkalinity shifts the carbonate equilibrium, allowing the ocean to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into dissolved bicarbonate that remains stable for millennia.
This electrochemical pathway has attracted serious commercial interest precisely because it produces what carbon markets call negative emissions, meaning carbon dioxide is durably removed from the atmosphere rather than merely avoided. Companies pursuing net-zero targets increasingly rely on such carbon removal credits to offset their residual emissions, and ocean alkalinity enhancement is widely regarded as one of the largest-capacity avenues available, given the sheer scale of the world’s oceans. Yet the technology has been held back by a deceptively mundane problem: what flows into the reactor matters just as much as what flows out.
Seawater, and many other brine streams that might feed these systems, contains divalent cations, most notably calcium and magnesium ions, alongside the sodium and chloride that the process is designed to split. When these divalent ions encounter the high-pH conditions created at the base-producing side of a bipolar membrane stack, they precipitate as solid calcium and magnesium compounds that coat the membranes in a crust known as scale. The consequences are cascading. Scaled membranes lose their ion-selective efficiency, forcing the system to push harder and consume more electricity to achieve the same output. Over time, the deposits shorten membrane lifetime, increasing maintenance frequency and replacement costs. The conventional answer has been water softening pretreatment, in which the incoming seawater is stripped of calcium and magnesium before it ever reaches the electrodialysis unit. While effective, such pretreatment adds significant capital and operating expense, undermining the economic case for the entire carbon removal operation and eroding the value proposition of the resulting carbon credits.
The Stony Brook researchers behind the new method have essentially designed around this bottleneck. Their technology enables electrochemical enhancement of ocean alkalinity without any pretreatment of the incoming seawater at all. By rethinking how the electrochemical system handles brine streams laden with divalent cations, the researchers have created a process that tolerates raw seawater directly, sidestepping the water softening infrastructure that previous designs demanded. According to the announcement from the Research Foundation for SUNY, the result is a system that produces negative emission carbon offsets of very high quality at a substantially reduced cost, simply because the most expensive upstream step has been engineered out of existence. The advantages claimed for the approach are straightforward and commercially significant: it is cheaper, more energy efficient, and requires no expensive water softening pretreatment.
The implications ripple across both the carbon markets and the broader climate technology landscape. Carbon offset buyers, including corporations striving to meet net-zero commitments, place a premium on removal credits that are durable, verifiable and cost-competitive. Ocean alkalinity enhancement already offers exceptional permanence, since bicarbonate dissolved in seawater represents one of the most long-lived forms of carbon storage known. By cutting costs at the front end, the Stony Brook method could help push the price of these high-quality ocean-based offsets toward levels that make them viable at gigatonne scale, a threshold that analysts consider essential if carbon removal is to play a meaningful role in stabilizing the global climate. Cheaper alkalinity generation also strengthens the second major application of the technology: mitigating ocean acidification directly, without necessarily framing it as a carbon market product at all.
Ocean acidification itself is a mounting crisis. Since the industrial revolution, the average surface ocean pH has dropped measurably as the sea has absorbed roughly a quarter to a third of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The consequences have been documented across coral reefs, oyster hatcheries, pteropods and other calcifying organisms whose shells and skeletons become harder to build in increasingly acidic waters. A technology that adds alkalinity to coastal waters and open ocean regions simultaneously addresses this chemical stress and harvests the carbon removal benefit, a dual function that distinguishes ocean alkalinity enhancement from many other carbon removal approaches. In regions where fisheries, aquaculture and reef ecosystems are economically vital, localized deployment of alkalinity-enhancing electrochemical systems could offer both environmental resilience and revenue through carbon credit sales.
The scientific pedigree of the work reflects the growing maturity of the carbon removal field. Stony Brook University, a flagship research institution within the SUNY system, has become an active hub for climate and energy innovation, and the new method is protected under intellectual property identified in the licensing announcement. The Research Foundation for the State University of New York, the nation’s largest research foundation supporting the nation’s largest public university system, is actively seeking development partners, commercial partners and licensees to translate the laboratory advance into deployed systems. The foundation describes a broad portfolio of SUNY-led research spanning artificial intelligence for the public good, quantum technologies, next-generation semiconductors, biotechnology and medicine, and energy and climate solutions, with system-wide research expenditures approaching 1.5 billion dollars in fiscal year 2025.
For the carbon removal industry, the timing of the announcement is notable. As voluntary and compliance carbon markets mature, buyers are demanding higher fidelity in the offsets they purchase, favoring durable removal over avoidance-based credits. Electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement, with its well-understood chemistry and measurable inputs and outputs, is well positioned to meet rigorous monitoring, reporting and verification standards. The obstacle has always been cost, and the pretreatment bottleneck has been a substantial contributor. If the Stony Brook design performs as described at industrial scale, it could remove one of the largest cost wedges standing between laboratory demonstration and commercial deployment, accelerating a technology class that many climate analysts view as indispensable to achieving deep decarbonization.
The broader lesson of the advance may be as important as the technology itself. In the race to scale carbon removal, progress often comes not from exotic new chemistry but from eliminating the hidden costs and fragilities that make promising concepts uneconomic in practice. Water softening pretreatment is exactly the kind of unglamorous engineering detail that determines whether a climate technology remains a paper exercise or becomes infrastructure. By designing a bipolar membrane electrodialysis system that thrives on untreated seawater, the Stony Brook researchers have addressed one of those decisive details. The ocean, meanwhile, stands ready. Every unit of alkalinity added is an invitation for the sea to take up more carbon dioxide and, in doing so, to heal a little of the acidification that a warming world has inflicted upon it. What remains now is the work of scaling, partnering and commercializing, and the SUNY licensing announcement signals that the researchers and their institution intend to see this chemistry leave the laboratory and reach the sea.
Article Title: Method for electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement
Article References: Method for electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement. Research Foundation for the State University of New York, via EurekAlert! News by Subject: Tech & Engineering. Available at: SUNY TechConnect (https://suny.technologypublisher.com/) Original publication
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: Not provided
Keywords: ocean alkalinity enhancement, carbon dioxide removal, bipolar membrane electrodialysis, ocean acidification mitigation, carbon offsets, Stony Brook University, negative emissions, seawater pretreatment, net-zero goals, electrochemistry, Research Foundation for SUNY
On Alaska’s remote North Slope, researchers are picking their way across spongy tussock grasses toward Galbraith Creek, a rushing meltwater stream fed by the snowy peaks of the Brooks Range. There, they carefully string up mist nets to catch white-crowned sparrows that have just completed their long migration from warmer latitudes. The birds have only a brief window to stake out territory, find mates, and raise chicks—all fueled by the explosive burst of insects that emerges each summer across the tundra.
From every bird captured, scientists collect blood, feather, and fecal samples to track what the sparrows are eating and how their diets shift as the short Arctic summer progresses. This detailed data collection is part of a groundbreaking research effort seeking to understand something far bigger than individual birds: whether an entire ecosystem—spanning streams, tundra, insects, and wildlife—can adapt fast enough, together, to survive rapid climate change.
Unlike traditional studies that examine how single species adjust to warming conditions, this project treats the Arctic as an interconnected web where the timing of ice melt, insect emergence, plant growth, and animal migration must all stay in sync. As the region warms at a pace several times faster than the global average, that synchronization is increasingly at risk. If insects hatch earlier but sparrows arrive on their usual schedule, birds could miss their crucial food window—a mismatch that could ripple through the entire food chain.
Scientists hope their findings will reveal whether coordinated, ecosystem-wide adaptation is possible, offering a preview of how fragile Arctic systems—and the species that depend on them—might fare as the climate crisis accelerates.
The post Can a Whole Arctic Ecosystem Evolve Fast Enough to Survive Climate Change? first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
A landmark scientific review has revealed that Victoria’s koala population is in significantly worse condition than previously believed, with numbers roughly half of earlier estimates and the animals suffering from chronic poor health. The Victorian government sat on these findings for more than a year before making them public.
The comprehensive study, conducted by the state’s Arthur Rylah Institute in partnership with researchers from major universities, was completed in June 2025 but was withheld from public release for over 12 months. The delay has raised questions about transparency in how the government handles critical wildlife data, particularly for a species considered an icon of Australian biodiversity.
The findings paint a troubling picture of koala welfare across the state, pointing to systemic health issues affecting the marsupials rather than isolated incidents. Combined with the sharp downward revision in population numbers, the report suggests previous conservation strategies may have been built on overly optimistic assumptions about how many koalas remain and how well they’re faring.
Conservationists and wildlife advocates are likely to press the government for immediate action following the report’s release, including questions about habitat loss, disease prevalence, and the adequacy of current protection measures. The revelation adds to mounting concerns about the long-term survival of koala populations in parts of Australia, where habitat destruction, bushfires, and disease have already taken a significant toll on the species in recent years.
The post Victoria’s Koala Population Half Previous Estimates, Report Reveals Chronic Poor Health first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
When wars are tallied, the count usually stops at human lives lost, homes flattened and towns wiped from the map. Rarely does anyone ask what happens to the natural world buried beneath the rubble. Yet across southern Lebanon, the same explosive force leveling villages is also tearing apart ancient limestone habitats that have sheltered colonies of the Syrian rock hyrax for centuries.
This small, furry mammal—related distantly to elephants despite its rabbit-like appearance—relies on the region’s rocky outcrops and crevices to survive. These fragile limestone formations, shaped over thousands of years, offer shelter, breeding grounds and protection from predators. Repeated large-scale detonations are shattering this delicate architecture, destroying dens and fracturing the interconnected terrain the hyrax depends on to move safely between colonies.
Environmental monitors working in the border region have spent months documenting this destruction, cataloging damage not just to human settlements but to forests, wildlife corridors and entire ecosystems caught in the crossfire. Their findings paint a sobering picture: the war’s environmental toll extends far beyond visible wreckage, reaching into the foundations of biodiversity that took millennia to establish.
The rock hyrax’s plight serves as a stark symbol of a broader, often overlooked crisis. While attention understandably centers on human suffering, the long-term ecological scars—vanished habitats, disrupted species, degraded landscapes—may persist long after the guns fall silent, complicating recovery for both nature and the communities that depend on it.
The post A Small Furry Survivor Exposes the Hidden Ecological Cost of War in Lebanon first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
Across the stories today, a common thread emerges: the gap between what protects us on paper and what protects us in practice. Again and again, communities are discovering that designations, promises, and permits only matter when someone is willing to enforce them — and that when systems fail, it’s ordinary people, and often the most vulnerable, who absorb the shock.
Nowhere is that clearer than in Jackson, Mississippi, where a federal appeals court ruled this week that the Constitution guarantees no right to clean water. For residents who have lived through years of contaminated taps and boil-water notices, the decision lands as a gut-punch reminder that legal frameworks haven’t caught up to environmental reality. A similar tension runs through the Guardian’s reporting on datacenter wastewater in Wyoming, where testing turned up a rare, potentially hazardous bacterium, and on English golf clubs, where one in twelve have quietly broken water extraction rules amid growing drought stress. Behind the numbers are real communities adapting in real time — often without knowing what’s actually flowing through their pipes or being pulled from their aquifers.
That same gap between promise and delivery surfaces in the UK’s datacentre boom, which new analysis suggests will produce only a quarter of the jobs once advertised, even as it strains the national grid. It echoes in Georgia, where a once-booming EV manufacturing corridor is hitting turbulence under shifting federal policy — a reminder that industrial transitions built on incentives can be as fragile as the politics that fund them.
Yet the day’s coverage also points to growing momentum around care, restoration, and reckoning. Hurricane Lowell’s damage across Hawaii’s western islands — toppled trees, flooded roads, thousands without power — sits alongside quieter stories of renewal: Gloucestershire’s proposal to reintroduce beavers as a defense against drought and flooding, Douglas Head’s new conservation status on the Isle of Man, and Coventry’s investment in Longford Nature Park. These are small, deliberate acts of stewardship, the kind Wendell Berry spent his life advocating for. His death last week, at 92, feels newly resonant this week — a farmer-poet who insisted that loving a place well was itself a form of environmental action, long before it became policy language.
Farther afield, the human cost of extraction runs deep. In Peru and Brazil, mercury from illegal gold mining is showing up in children’s blood and in fish that families have eaten for generations, forcing painful dietary changes in communities that did little to cause the contamination. In Indonesia, El Niño-fueled fires are pushing orangutans out of burning forests, while in Uttarakhand, India, women — who gather firewood and fodder — are bearing the brunt of increasingly long fire seasons. In Colombia, the Wiwa community’s decision to relocate their village down the mountain is less retreat than adaptation, a recognition that sacred land is changing faster than tradition can hold still.
It’s a reminder that progress and pressure often arrive together — a new spaceport investment in Shetland, a badger vaccination program under scientific scrutiny, a push for a Natural History GCSE to reconnect children with the outdoors. Each represents a small bet on the future, even as larger systems strain under climate and economic pressure.
As the week unfolds, watch whether the Jackson ruling prompts congressional attention, whether Britain’s Green Party succeeds in forcing transparency around ecosystem collapse risks, and whether Gloucestershire’s beavers get their chance to prove that sometimes the oldest solutions are still the best ones.
The post Hurricane Lowell Floods Western Hawaii, New Forest Wildfire Threatens Woodland — Today’s Environmental Briefing for Wed, Sep 9 2026 first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
App Tracking Transparency is at the center of a new UK lawsuit seeking approximately $2.7 billion (£2 billion), putting one of the most recognizable iPhone privacy features under fresh legal pressure. The claim follows earlier challenges to the tracking system in France, but this action seeks compensation for developers who say Apple imposed unfair restrictions on their businesses while favoring its own advertising services.
Filed on September 3 at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, the case represents another dispute over the rules behind the familiar permission prompt. Apple rejects the allegations and maintains that it follows the same App Tracking Transparency requirements as other developers.
The amount being sought is not a fine or an awarded payment. It is the claimants’ estimate of losses, which Apple disputes.
The action was brought by ATT Collective Action Limited, whose director, Ann Pope, previously led antitrust enforcement at the UK Competition and Markets Authority. Law firm Hausfeld is representing the proposed class.
According to Hausfeld’s announcement of the claim, developers argue that Apple introduced the framework unfairly, without adequate consultation, and applied more burdensome requirements to outside businesses than to its own services.
The complaint focuses partly on consent. It alleges that third-party developers must obtain permission under data-protection law and then secure an additional approval through the iOS tracking prompt. Apple’s advertising services, the claimants argue, operate under a less demanding process.
Developers also contend that the introduction left them insufficient time to adapt business models dependent on advertising.
These are allegations about how the system was designed and introduced—not established findings in this UK case. The claimants’ stated position is that privacy protections should remain compatible with fair treatment of businesses.
For someone using an iPhone, App Tracking Transparency offers a direct choice about a practice that previously could be difficult to see.
An app may want to connect information about your activity with information gathered through other companies’ apps or websites. That connection can help advertisers build a profile, target advertisements, or measure whether an advertising campaign led to a purchase.
Under Apple’s explanation of the tracking rules, apps must request permission before carrying out the tracking covered by the framework. Choosing “Ask App Not to Track” blocks access to the system advertising identifier and prohibits using other identifying information to perform that tracking instead.
The feature arrived with iOS 14.5 in 2021. It does not remove advertisements, make an app anonymous, or serve as a universal switch for every kind of data collection.
That boundary matters. A retailer remembering purchases made within its own service is not automatically doing the same thing as an advertising company linking activity across unrelated businesses.
The disagreement concerns whether those distinctions, and the consent processes built around them, give Apple an unfair commercial advantage.
Apple has responded directly to the lawsuit, defending the feature as a way to give people control over tracking across other companies’ services.
In a statement reported by AFP, a spokesperson said: “Apple is bound by the exact same requirements as all developers under ATT.”
The company also pointed to support for the feature from customers and privacy advocates.
That response challenges the foundation of the developers’ case. Apple presents App Tracking Transparency as a rule based on the type of data activity involved. The claimants argue that its practical operation places competing advertising businesses at a disadvantage.
Resolving that disagreement requires more than comparing the appearance of two permission screens. The underlying data uses, consent requirements, and commercial effects all matter.
Advertising can support both sides of an app business. A developer may sell advertising space inside a free app while also buying advertisements elsewhere to attract new users.
A change to tracking can therefore affect how much an app earns and how confidently its developer can measure spending on promotion.
Consider a small game studio. It needs to know whether an advertising campaign brings in players who keep using the game. If measurement becomes less precise, deciding where to spend the next marketing dollar becomes harder. Separately, advertisers may value the game’s available ad space differently when less information is available for targeting.
That explains the commercial concern without proving the legal claim. Losing revenue after a privacy change does not, by itself, establish that the change was unlawful.
There is also a consumer interest that cannot be reduced to advertising performance. Someone choosing not to be tracked is expressing a preference about personal information, not making a promise to preserve a developer’s previous income.
The difficult question is whether that preference can be protected through a system that treats competing businesses fairly.
The UK action arrives after a separate French competition investigation found problems with the implementation of App Tracking Transparency.
In its March 2025 decision, France’s Autorité de la concurrence distinguished between the legitimate objective of protecting privacy and the way Apple pursued it.
The authority criticized multiple consent requests and differences in treatment between Apple and outside publishers. It also highlighted the position of smaller businesses that lack the extensive first-party data available to large platforms.
Importantly, the French authority did not argue that people should lose the ability to refuse tracking. It said adjustments to the framework could address competition concerns while retaining privacy protections.
That distinction leaves room for changes to wording, consent flows, or implementation without automatically requiring the removal of the feature. The French decision, however, does not determine liability or compensation in the separate UK proceedings.
The official claim website describes a proposed action for UK-based app developers affected since April 2021. It estimates losses across the group rather than offering a fixed payment to everyone who owns an iPhone.
The proposed scope includes developers earning advertising revenue from third-party iOS apps and developers spending money to attract users to those apps. Whether compensation becomes available depends on the proceedings and their outcome.
For U.S. readers, the filing does not announce a change to domestic iPhone settings or create a consumer refund program. There is no reason to grant an app tracking permission simply because its developer objects to the framework.
Businesses following the case should also distinguish registering interest from receiving compensation. The claim website currently invites affected organizations to provide their details; it is not distributing a settlement.
The post App Tracking Transparency: Apple Faces $2.7 Billion UK Lawsuit appeared first on AppleMagazine.
Relocation coincides with proposed laws that opponents say would entrench power of US tech billionaires in country
Dozens of protesters converged on Peter Thiel’s mansion in Buenos Aires this week after a congressional session raised questions about the billionaire’s presence in the country.
In white masks, they held signs saying “Peter Thief” and “No to the Peter Thiel law” in front of the wrought-iron gates of the $12m (£8.9m) residence, which Thiel bought in April as he moved his family to Argentina.
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© Microchip and Dreamstime_Christopher_Ewing_1592074
Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds.
The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentially leading to severe injury or death. Since the first screwworm cases were detected in South Texas in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” the USDA said on August 10 in social media posts on platforms like X and Facebook.
The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. But the actual number in use "varies depending on availability and need," a USDA spokesperson told Ars.
© US Department of Agriculture
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