India ponders why just three per cent of its broadband services are wired

Apple’s software supremo Craig Federighi on Wednesday condemned the security of macOS in an astonishing attempt to defend the walled garden that is the iOS App Store.

It’s the latest twist in the ongoing Epic v Apple bench trial in which Cupertino is accused of illegally monopolizing app distribution and payments for iPhones and iPads. Federighi took the stand to argue that because Apple does not control the availability of software on macOS to the extent that it controls what applications are available from its iOS Store, Macs suffer as a consequence. He said the level of malware on Macs is unacceptable, and criticized the security protections in the desktop operating system.

The point, apparently, being that Apple needs to maintain and gatekeep its one and only iOS app store so that iPhone owners don’t suffer like Mac users. And yes, that one and only app store needs to set standards and rules. One such rule is that Apple takes a cut of app purchases and in-app purchases, which is what Epic is suing over: it wants to handle payments without Apple’s involvement, and if that involves distributing its iOS apps itself, so be it. iOS, unless jailbroken, generally speaking only accepts applications from Apple’s official store, though.

Cisco has detailed a bug that causes 43 models in its Firepower security appliance range to stop passing traffic and perhaps also prevent logins to the devices’ management console.

A field notice dated May 18 explains that “due to a flaw in solid-state drive (SSD) firmware, the SSD that is internal to the FPR9300 Supervisor module and FPR4100 Series security appliances will no longer respond after approximately 3.2 years of cumulative operation.

“After the first unresponsive event occurs, every subsequent power-cycle allows the SSD to operate for approximately six weeks of cumulative operation before the SSD will no longer respond again.”

ISP Frontier Communications was sued on Wednesday by the US Federal Trade Commission and law enforcement agencies six states for allegedly misrepresenting the speed of its internet service and for billing customers for service it didn’t provide.

The FTC filed its complaint [PDF] with the support of Attorneys General from Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, along with the district attorneys’ offices of Los Angeles County and Riverside County, representing California.

The complaint, filed in a federal district court in central California, accuses Frontier of misrepresentation and unfair billing under the FTC Act and of violating various state fraud and business practice statutes.

Twitter said its AI-powered image-cropping algorithm is slightly biased in favor of White people and women after all, and has taken steps to ditch its reliance on the machine-learning code.

The algorithm was used to automatically decide which portion of a photo shared on the social network was best for the screen viewing it. You can upload pictures in all sorts of sizes and aspect ratios; at some point the images have to be displayed, and Twitter used a trained system to decide which parts of the media to show. The option to view the whole image was available – the algorithm was used to create a preview of the media.

Specifically, the software relied on a saliency algorithm designed to keep the most interesting and relevant parts of the image in the preview crop. For example, a snap taken of people at the beach should focus on their faces rather than the sky or sand.

Most of the volunteer staff of Freenode, an internet relay chat (IRC) network dating back to 1995, have resigned in protest over what they describe as a hostile takeover of the chat service.

And many have launched an alternative service, Libera Chat.

Freenode, which has focused on serving as a real-time communication channel for free and open source software projects, currently has about 76,000 users and 42,000 chat rooms.

Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon 778G 5G system-on-chip for next generation mid-to-high-end smartphones at its annual 5G Summit, which kicked off on Wednesday.

The component is expected to feature in upcoming Android-based handsets from Chinese manufacturers like Honor, iQOO, OPPO, Realme, and Xiaomi, as well as Motorola. The first shipments are expected by this summer.

“Snapdragon 778G was developed to address the growing demand by global OEMs for more platform options in the high-tier,” Kedar Kondap, veep of product management at Qualy, said in a canned statement. “Snapdragon 778G brings many of the latest premium technologies and features into the high-tier to help make next generation experiences more broadly accessible.”

Apple is seeking to dismiss one of the fundamental claims in its long-running legal spat with Epic Games.

On Tuesday night, over two weeks after its bench trial commenced, the company filed a motion [PDF] to dismiss one claim that it violated the Sherman antitrust law, arguing Epic has failed to demonstrate iOS met the threshold for an “essential facility.”

The term “essential facility” typically refers to physical infrastructure – such as roads, bridges, or power conduits. These are things that cannot typically be replicated easily, and are necessary for the delivery of something.

The sound of rumbling rubber could be heard today as Salesforce threw an engineer responsible for a change that knocked it offline under a passing bus.

“We’re not blaming one employee,” said Chief Availability Officer Darryn Dieken after spending the first half hour of a Wednesday briefing on the outage doing pretty much that very thing.

To recap, on May 11 around 2100 UTC, a configuration change was applied to Salesforce’s Domain Name System (DNS) servers that resulted in folks unable to access the software-as-a-service titan’s products. For about five hours, clients could not reliably log in, and things got so bad that even the status page was unavailable.

AWS has introduced App Runner, with immediate general availability, for quick deployment of container-based applications.

The off-prem titan already offers multiple ways to run containerised applications on its cloud. There is the full-featured EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service); the ECS (Elastic Container Service), the homegrown non-Kubernetes solution; containers up to 10GB can be deployed on Lambda serverless; or there is Fargate, which is a serverless option for either EKS or ECS. Why yet another option?

The focus with App Runner is to further simplify the developer experience, perhaps with an eye on what Google has achieved with its Cloud Run service, complete with an option for one-button deploy from GitHub.

A statutory public inquiry will be held into the Post Office Horizon scandal, the UK government said today – and MPs want to know why Fujitsu has largely been out of the limelight in the case so far.

The existing inquiry, chaired by retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, has no legal powers to force witnesses to give evidence, raising fears it would not be able to scrutinise people such as ex-Post Office CEO Paula Vennells if they decided not to co-operate.

Junior business minister Paul Scully told the House of Commons today: “I will convert the inquiry into a statutory footing [sic] on the first of June 2021.”

Google has flicked “publish” on its Android 12 beta, with the bleeding-edge OS winging its way to enrolled devices.

With the version number, Google has taken an axe to the core Android experience, emphasising personalisation while cribbing some privacy-centric features from Apple.

The stock Android experience has remained largely unchanged since the introduction of Android 5.0 Lollipop in 2015, save for the occasional tweak. Lollipop brought Google’s Material Design, which conglomerated a set of design guidelines, reusable components, and icons into a single monolithic package.