Paramount Skydance is accusing Netflix of maintaining a campaign against its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).

In a June 5 letter (PDF) addressed to Jared A. Hughes, acting section chief of the Media, Entertainment, and Communications Section of the US Department of Justice's (DOJ's) Antitrust Division, and A. Maya Kahn, a trial attorney for the Antitrust Division, and first reported on by Politico today, Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim accused Netflix of trying to influence stakeholders about the merger. The letter reads:

Indeed, Netflix’s panic-level response and scorched-earth campaign to try and poison regulators and other stakeholders against the Transaction shows just how seriously Netflix takes Paramount as a scaled competitor.

The letter from Delrahim, a former assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, is a response to a letter that The International Brotherhood of Teamsters sent to the DOJ in March. The teamsters' letter argued that Paramount and WBD's merger would threaten film and TV workers. The union, which has 1.3 million members, asked the DOJ to block the merger "unless substantial and enforceable safeguards are put in place to increase domestic production and protect jobs," per an announcement from the group.

Read full article

Comments

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

Read full article

Comments

A drone boat picked up two US Army pilots from waters near the Strait of Hormuz after their helicopter gunship went down, US military officials said. The incident apparently represents the first time the US military has used a drone for such a rescue mission at sea.

The two crew members from the US Army AH-64 Apache were “rescued by American forces” at 7:33 pm US Eastern Time after their helicopter went down off the coast of Oman on June 8, according to a US Central Command press release. That press release mentioned support from US Navy units including the US 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59, which is charged with integrating uncrewed aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles, alongside AI, into 5th Fleet maritime operations.

Anonymous US military officials initially told CBS News that the Apache air crew was rescued by an uncrewed surface drone operated by Task Force 59 from the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The officials also described the incident as the first time the military had used a drone to rescue people from the water.

Read full article

Comments

As Apple announced last year, this year's macOS release will end support for Intel Macs. The macOS 27 Golden Gate release will require a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip inside, including the original M1 that launched in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini back in late 2020.

Intel Macs running macOS 26 Tahoe can expect security and Safari patches for about two more years after the release of macOS 27 Golden Gate. Macs running macOS 15 Sequoia will receive one more year of updates. Apple Silicon Macs will still be able to run Intel Mac apps via the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer in macOS 27, but future releases will begin to limit the technology (Apple has said it will mainly be used to support older games that still use Intel code).

This change has been a long time coming, and every new macOS release has left a longer and longer list of Intel Macs behind. But many Mac owners who purchased late-model Intel machines in 2019 and 2020 could still run the latest version of the operating system, and third-party utilities like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher helped more adventurous Mac owners use their unsupported hardware a bit longer.

Read full article

Comments

If you're using older iPhone or iPad hardware and you're hoping to keep running Apple's latest operating systems, this year's releases bring mostly good news. The iOS 27 update will run on all iPhones that can run iOS 26, all the way back to the iPhone 11 and second-generation iPhone SE. The iPadOS 27 update is slightly less generous, dropping support for the 3rd-generation iPad Air, 8th-generation iPad, and 5th-generation iPad mini (all of these devices used an older A12 Bionic chip; supported devices now use an A13 or better).

Apple says owners of older devices should see performance improvements in iOS 27, thanks in part to an updated CPU scheduler. This scheduler was apparently already included with newer iPhones but has been ported back to older devices with this release.

But many of the new features Apple mentioned require support for Apple Intelligence, which remains confined to newer devices with at least 8GB of RAM. Apple Intelligence still requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, an iPhone 16 or newer, or an iPhone Air. On the iPad, support requires an iPad Air or iPad Pro with an M1 or newer.

Read full article

Comments