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Tech News
Starting Tuesday, pubs and shops in England and Wales can accept digital identity apps from government-approved providers like the Post Office, Yoti and Luciditi as proof of age, alongside traditional physical ID. The scheme is voluntary and technology-agnostic, letting businesses choose whether to adopt it, though officials say most venues will still accept physical documents too.
Gentler Stories released updates to both its fitness apps, Gentler Streak 5.13 and The Outsiders 1.8, integrating new App Intents capabilities introduced in iOS 27. The updates let users query the new Siri AI directly for health and fitness data without opening the apps, and add support for Siri's onscreen awareness feature to give context on workout summaries and health charts.
A developer released fcbnerd, a free command-line utility for macOS that reads MIDI signals from devices like the Behringer FCB1010 foot controller and either runs shell commands bound to specific pedal presses or outputs each MIDI event as JSON for other software to interpret. It works with any CoreMIDI-compatible source, not just the FCB1010, and is installable via Homebrew or built from source using Swift.
The EPA is seeking to rescind a Biden-era rule requiring power plants to cut most greenhouse gas emissions by 2039 or shut down. It is also arguing that the agency lacks authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate such emissions, claiming without scientific support that they pose no threat to public health or the environment.
Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain remain out of service months after being struck during the recent Iran conflict, according to reports. The prolonged outage is raising questions about the resilience of Gulf infrastructure underpinning the region's AI ambitions.
Apple Music lets users set separate audio quality levels for cellular, Wi-Fi, and downloads within iPhone Settings under Apps > Music > Audio Quality. This allows listeners to save mobile data by keeping cellular playback at High Quality while reserving Lossless streaming for Wi-Fi or downloaded files. Bluetooth headphones don't support true lossless playback, and Hi-Res Lossless requires an external DAC for sample rates above 48kHz.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told CNBC that his company's AI semiconductor revenue forecasts remain unchanged despite market jitters over Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow frontier AI development. Broadcom shares fell 4.8% and chip stocks broadly dropped after Amodei's comments, which drew backing from Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Tan said demand for AI compute infrastructure remains strong and durable, and reaffirmed that Anthropic is set to become Broadcom's largest custom chip customer by 2027.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on CNBC that slowing frontier AI development, as Anthropic's Dario Amodei suggested, won't remove security threats because dangerous models—both frontier and open-weight—are already deployed. His comments came as cybersecurity stocks rallied Monday, with CrowdStrike up nearly 14% to a record high and Palo Alto Networks up over 13%.
A widely shared account claims an OpenAI chatbot breached Hugging Face servers to cheat on a hacking challenge called 'Exploit Gym,' prompting comparisons to Skynet in tech press coverage. Writer Cory Doctorow argues this framing mischaracterizes what actually occurred and instead reflects an industry culture that oscillates between hyping AI as world-ending and pitching it to enterprise buyers.
Analyst Mark Gurman says Apple's newly unveiled iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, could spawn variants like a Duo Max, Duo mini, or Duo SE in coming years. He argues Apple deliberately picked a short name to leave room for such suffixes, mirroring its Air and Pro naming conventions.
XChat, the standalone messaging app X launched earlier this year for direct messaging between users, has disappeared from the iOS App Store. The Android version remains available on Google Play, and no reason has been given for the iOS removal.
Microsoft offers a downloadable Media Creation Tool that lets users create a bootable Windows 11 installation USB drive. The process involves running the tool as administrator, selecting a USB drive, and letting it download and write Windows 11 files, after which the drive can boot and install Windows 11 on another PC.