As the world's largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. Google has now made changes in accordance with the European Union's wishes, but it claims the result is a massive reduction in search quality.

If you don't live in Europe and perform a search for, say, hotels, Google will helpfully provide myriad sponsored links, booking recommendations, and price-comparison tools in its results. The problem is that this content isn't organic—Google includes links and offers contingent on its business interests. To get to the regular search results for these types of lucrative searches, you have to scroll way down the page. Companies that partner with Google can get more exposure, but the European Commission says this creates an unlevel playing field.

"To comply with DMA requirements, we're making significant changes to Search in Europe," Google's Nick Fox told Reuters. "These changes ​degrade the user experience for ​Europeans, boosting online intermediaries ⁠at the expense of local businesses and removing helpful features people rely on every day."

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© Aurich Lawson

As the world's largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. Google has now made changes in accordance with the European Union's wishes, but it claims the result is a massive reduction in search quality.

If you don't live in Europe and perform a search for, say, hotels, Google will helpfully provide myriad sponsored links, booking recommendations, and price-comparison tools in its results. The problem is that this content isn't organic—Google includes links and offers contingent on its business interests. To get to the regular search results for these types of lucrative searches, you have to scroll way down the page. Companies that partner with Google can get more exposure, but the European Commission says this creates an unlevel playing field.

"To comply with DMA requirements, we're making significant changes to Search in Europe," Google's Nick Fox told Reuters. "These changes ​degrade the user experience for ​Europeans, boosting online intermediaries ⁠at the expense of local businesses and removing helpful features people rely on every day."

Read full article

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© Aurich Lawson

On January 23, 1961, a pair of thermonuclear bombs fell from the sky near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Neither of the weapons was dropped by a foreign adversary—they belonged to the United States, and in a remarkable series of events, they were dropped over American soil after the B-52 carrying them broke apart in midair.

The sobering circumstances that unfolded on that date were just one of several “Broken Arrow” incidents—accidents involving nuclear weapons that, in several cases, demonstrated how catastrophe could arise not from an enemy attack, but from mechanical failure, human error, and chance.

Goldsboro was neither the first nor the last nuclear weapons accident on American soil. More than six decades later, the incident remains a sobering artifact of the Cold War and a reminder of the extraordinary risks that accompanied keeping nuclear-armed aircraft continuously ready for war.

Nuclear Incident Over North Carolina

Early 1961 was a hard time for the B-52 bomber, with several crashes occurring across the United States. Most of these, and even the brief grounding of all B-52s, were minor news stories at the time. Outside the local area, sources like the New York Times gave only brief coverage of what happened in Goldsboro on January 23, 1961. However, the Goldsboro News-Argus placed a dark image of the twisted, flaming wreckage on its front page the next morning, and its ongoing coverage provided some of the only detailed records of how the public viewed the crash. What they didn’t know nearly killed them.

Part of the 4241st Strategic Wing under Strategic Air Command, the B-52G Stratofortress was armed with two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs and flying out of Goldsboro’s Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Its nighttime flight was part of Strategic Air Command’s round-the-clock alert operations. Following an aerial refueling over the Atlantic, the plane began leaking fuel. This led to a dramatic midair breakup 11 hours into the flight, so spectacular that a night watchman eight miles away reported seeing sparks coming off the stricken plane.

During the crash, centrifugal forces became so great that they pulled a lanyard connected to the release mechanism of one of the bombs. This accidental twist of physics armed the bomb as it fell toward Earth.

Nuclear Response in Goldsboro

The plane crashed only a few hundred feet from the home of the Tyndall family, who described the event as looking “like the whole world was on fire.” Homes for miles around shook from the force of the impact. In the mad dash to reach the crash site, one military police officer was involved in a car accident, adding one more bit of destruction.

The Stratofortress, with its 185-foot wingspan, was an enormous plane, and it left behind a massive debris field. The burning wreckage quickly drew not only about one hundred Air Force personnel but also the state highway patrol, local sheriffs, and the fire department. Onlookers attempted to gain access to the site but were held back by military police warning of a potential radioactivity threat. This would be the only time for decades that the military would concede that the crash posed a nuclear danger.

It took seven hours to find the last survivor, one of only three from the eight-man crew aboard the Stratofortress.

After most of the wreckage was hauled away, the Air Force continued excavating the area to recover every piece of the plane and even turned to the public for help locating a lost ejector seat. These continued searches fueled a wave of rumors that the Air Force was looking for missing nuclear weapons and that the town might be evacuated. What the military called “routine” water tests did little to assuage some residents’ fears that they were in danger from whatever had come down. By late February, the Air Force was issuing official denials that anything was amiss in Goldsboro.

Soviet Propaganda

At a time of rising Cold War tensions, the USSR did not let the American crisis go to waste. Soviet propagandists employed “Moscow Molly,” a mysterious figure of the Soviet propaganda machine. Speaking in unaccented English between broadcasts of popular American music, Moscow Molly delivered messages designed to demoralize American, British, and Canadian soldiers. She would sometimes disconcert soldiers on lonely and remote bases by directing messages specifically at them, using personal information reportedly obtained by the Soviet intelligence apparatus. Several women likely played the role of Moscow Molly, but their identities have never come to light.

By January 24, just a day after the event, Moscow Molly was broadcasting over Radio Moscow that the United States hadn’t just inadvertently dropped a bomb on Goldsboro, but that it had gone off, claiming that locals were “incensed.” Soviet propagandists did not stop there, reportedly using ham radio operators to beam the broadcasts into the United States as well.

Their efforts attracted little notice in the United States. The Goldsboro Kiwanis Club drafted an official rebuttal statement to be read over the U.S.-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe, stating that “The people of Goldsboro are stronger than ever in their belief that the Air Force is a good friend and neighbor.” This statement may have been more than mere propaganda, as hundreds of people attended the funerals of the deceased airmen, demonstrating how the community rallied in the aftermath of the event.

Nuclear Secrets Revealed

The story of rumors, propaganda, and community spirit stood still for decades as the United States continually denied that there had ever been a nuclear close call on US soil. Journalist Eric Schlosser overturned that story while researching his 2013 book Command and Control. One of his Freedom of Information Act requests turned up a document with the rather lengthy title Goldsboro Revisited or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb or To Set the Record Straight. The title’s parody reference to the film Dr. Strangelove perhaps makes its content even more eerie and surreal.

Sandia Laboratories nuclear weapons safety supervisor Parker F. Jones wrote the report in 1969. In it, he revealed that one of the bombs—the weapon that separated from the aircraft and descended by parachute before becoming entangled in a tree—had come disturbingly close to detonating. The weapon incorporated multiple safety mechanisms intended to prevent an unintended nuclear detonation. When investigators examined it, they found that several steps in its arming sequence had occurred, leaving one crucial low-voltage switch preventing the sequence from proceeding further.

Each Mark 39 carried a yield of several megatons, making the weapons vastly more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Had one successfully detonated, the immediate destruction would have been catastrophic, while radioactive fallout could potentially have affected areas far beyond Goldsboro.

History often balances on the head of a pin, and this remarkable close call is just one of many such occurrences in the history of nuclear weapons.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

European Commission:

From baby-monitors to smart watches, from apps to computer programs, connectable hardware and software are omnipresent in our daily lives. Less apparent to many users is the security risk such products may present.

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying software or hardware products with digital elements. The CRA addresses the inadequate level of cybersecurity in many products, and the lack of timely security updates. It also tackles the challenges consumers and businesses currently face when trying to determining which products are cybersecure and in setting them up securely, making it easier to identify hardware and software with the proper cybersecurity features.

The CRA introduces mandatory cybersecurity requirements for manufacturers, covering the planning, design, development and maintenance of such products. These obligations must be met at every stage of the value chain. The CRA also requires manufacturers to handle vulnerabilities during the lifecycle of their products. Some products of particular relevance for cybersecurity may need to undergo a third-party assessment by a notified body before they are sold on the EU market.

Via Ron Elemans:

[…] the extremely heavy future requirements that are due on December 11, 2027.

For example, free security updates must be provided for at least five years without changes regarding the operating system requirements—a period that resets every time someone purchases an app of a particular version.

Here’s the text of it, which was approved in 2024.

Previously:

• New EU App Store Terms to Comply With DMA
• Europe Scaling Back GDPR and AI Laws

Apple (developer, details, Hacker News, TechCrunch, The Verge, 9To5Mac):

These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution. They also reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms.

[…]

The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee.

[…]

Under the updated terms, developers can now offer Apple In-App Purchase alongside alternative payment options, which had not previously been permitted in the EU.

[…]

Apple is also expanding who is eligible to operate an alternative app marketplace or distribute apps via the web in the EU.

[…]

Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization[…]

Juli Clover:

Apple will charge a 26% fee for apps distributed through the App Store that use in-app purchase.

[…]

Apps in the App Store that use in-app alternative payment processing will pay 20%.

[…]

Apps that link to a website purchase option will pay 15%.

Apps using Web Distribution or App Marketplaces would pay the 5% CTC (and report transactions). I like that the new terms are simpler and that the fees are slightly lower, but it seems like the EU got tricked or surrendered here.

EMIRELADERO:

This is bonkers, I can’t believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers’ dealings with users.

The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple.

mjorgers:

All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?

Ben Lovejoy:

However, while Apple hopes it will be allowed to charge these lower commissions, it has admitted in a new regulatory filing that it may not be allowed to charge any commission at all on purchases made through third-party app stores and other external platforms.

Tim Hardwick:

The commission Apple earns from the App Store is shrinking in markets where it has been forced to relax its grip on in-app purchases, based on new analytics data.

Previously:

• Apple Proposes 15% External Purchase Fee
• EU App Store Tiers and Core Technology Commission
• iOS Notarization’s Human Review

Update (2026-08-20): M.G. Siegler:

Notably, this isn’t a proposal, it’s the announcement of actual changes that Apple will implement (starting October 1) after “close collaboration” with the EC. And lest we think Apple is overplaying that last aspect, that group gave a statement to Bloomberg backing up the assertion[…]

[…]

This feels like mainly a way to keep the all-important big gaming fees – which make up most of in-app payments, and as such, most App Store fees – mostly intact.

[…]

It sure looks like Apple knew this EU deal was coming down the pike and that the bloc agreeing to their terms would bolster the case that these are “fair”. The US judge still gets to decide that, and Epic has already pushed back as Apple seeks to negotiate directly. One big reason for pushing? Epic wants to ensure any changes Apple tries to negotiate be put in place for all developers.

Juli Clover:

The European Commission has since confirmed that it approves of Apple’s changes to its App Store policies, giving a statement to the Irish Independent[…]

Richard Speed:

Epic Games, a longstanding critic of Apple’s App Store practices, called the scheme “junk fees,” adding that the plan did “nothing to open up the mobile app ecosystem to competition, as required by Digital Markets Act.”

“The law makes it clear that Apple must allow developers to offer link outs to the web for purchases ‘free of charge’ and has to allow ‘effective use’ of competing stores,” the company wrote.

Rui Carmo:

This changes effectively nothing I care about and continues to be completely laughable.

Kyle Howells:

Apple still in complete control over what is allowed in any iOS app.

Fabian Pimminger:

It’s so weird to me that the regulation that is explicitly against gatekeepers still allows Apple to be the gatekeeper.

Thomas Clement:

I hope this isn’t the end of DMA. Apple taking a cut of out-of-store apps revenue makes as much sense as app developers taking a cut of iPhone revenue.

[…]

And also I still want to live in a world where anyone can write a program and run it on the devices they own and send it to friends, without having to pay $100/year of developer account and do the whole notarization thing (which considering the amount of scam in the app store we know is pretty useless in terms of security). Not everybody is a professional programmer, some people are just doing programming as a hobby, some are also young people that don’t even own a credit card yet.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I have refused to sign any of Apple’s EU DMA agreements thus far, because I think they are illegal, and they have been optional.

I still think their new terms are illegal — they don’t meet the minimum requirements of the DMA, and will not be approved by stakeholders — but they are no longer optional, so the choice now becomes accept the updated developer agreement or stop being a developer.

Update (2026-08-21): John Gruber:

This is a near-total victory for Apple.

[…]

Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for subscriptions after the first year.

Update (2026-08-24): Jesper:

The CTC is preferable to the CTF in much the same way that a fire burning down your kitchen is preferable to a fire burning down your entire house.

[…]

The Digital Markets Act was introduced to ensure that sideloading would be an available alternative, to essentially force open platforms that have been closed. Debates about the wisdom of this notwithstanding, in the biggest case, and up until recent developments in Android app marketplace governance also only case, it has failed to deliver the promises that were the entire point of the law.

Update (2026-08-25): John Gruber (Mastodon):

I’m sure some of you think I’m all wet in my argument that the point of the DMA was merely to impose ongoing bureaucratic complexity. But my view jibes with the reality of how it’s worked out.

In other words, maybe we who had high hopes were the ones who got tricked, not the EU Commission.

Update (2026-08-28): John Gruber:

I don’t recall seeing POSIWID before, but I love the concept. A friend sent this to me, with the quip that I forgot to include a link to it in my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece this week. Indeed, it encapsulates my arguments about the DMA specifically and the European Commission generally. The purpose of the DMA is what it does, not what you imagine it is intended to do.

I admit to being primed by seeing Jeff Johnson’s post, but I’m certain that my mind would anyway have immediately gone to our favorite scam promoting toll booth, the place that “gives people around the world a safe and trusted place to discover apps that meet [Apple’s] high standards for privacy, security, and content.”

Also consider which apps have to pay the toll and which ones show their own ads for free.

Thomas Claburn:

Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc’s AI Act.

[…]

The move may further amplify the appeal of open weight models and alienate Claude customers, who don’t necessarily want consumers of their AI-generated content to know its provenance.

[…]

Anthropic itself is already hedging about the utility of its marking method, noting that detected marks are not conclusive evidence that Claude produced the content and that the absence of marks cannot guarantee that AI wasn’t involved in the creation of a particular piece of content.

Anthropic (Hacker News):

Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch. Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported.

[…]

Marks will apply to output from supported Claude models across Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag, and wherever Claude is offered, worldwide. Some platforms or features may not support certain marking types.

[…]

We’ll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks, as the Code requires, and we’ll share details in forthcoming documentation.

John Gruber:

Anthropic is claiming this is for compliance with an EU law but that “Marking will apply to output from supported models wherever Claude is offered, worldwide.”

This is infuriatingly opaque. I won’t speak to the “signed provenance metadata” they say they’ll be embedding in generated files like PDFs, SVGs, PNGs, and JPEGs. That’s important but it’s complex. Plain text is simple. A string of text is just one character followed by another. I presume that Claude is going to start “embedding” invisible characters/byte sequences between visible characters? What they’re claiming to do here seems impossible, frankly, and anything they attempt to embed invisibly is going to cause immediate problems.

[…]

If the “watermark” is not comprised of invisible characters but rather visible ones, how in the world does this jibe with their claim that it’s “imperceptible”? (This Reddit thread claims that’s how it will work — “It’s a form of steganography where the model subtly biases its word choice to create a statistical pattern that can be detected later.” How in the world can that be squared with “it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”?) And any sort of semantic detection like this is going to cause false-positive problems.

Previously:

• Hiding Vulnerabilities in Source Code
• Hiding Data in Emoji
• A Vatican-Sized Flag Mystery
• Unicode and Copying and Pasting Code
• Hiding Easter Eggs in Maps
• Genius Accuses Google of Copying Its Lyrics Data
• Fingerprinting Swift Code Using Spacecrypt
• Xerox Scanners and  Photocopiers Randomly Alter Numbers

Update (2026-08-17): Anthropic provides more details:

Watermarking won’t be specific to Claude. As of August 2, the EU requires AI providers serving its market to mark AI-generated content. Other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.

[…]

In internal testing, we’ve seen no impact of watermarking on the content, level of creativity, or readability of Claude’s text. In the SynthID-Text paper, which introduced the technique we use, Google DeepMind tested this impact by serving a model that used watermarking to a portion of their Gemini traffic and comparing thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. They found no statistically significant differences from the unwatermarked model. And in a controlled study, human raters comparing watermarked and unwatermarked answers side-by-side saw no difference in quality.

[…]

There are limitations to the effectiveness of watermarking. Using our key, one can only answer the question “What is the likelihood this was partly written by Claude?” It doesn’t confirm whether the text was human-written, and it can’t tell whether the text was written by a different AI (even if that other AI uses watermarking, it would have a different key; it might also use a different watermarking method altogether). Detecting a watermark also doesn’t work well on small samples, where there are fewer word choices and thus less information to go on. As a passage increases in length, confidence about Claude’s involvement increases too.

Watermarking is sparser on factual passages where there are fewer choices that can be made without decreasing the accuracy of the text. […] For the same reason, code—which in very many cases has to be exact—has generally less watermarking than some other forms of text.

John Gruber (Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News):

I initially guessed “invisible characters” not because I didn’t think of the semantic word-choice technique, but because I was a fool who took Anthropic at its word in their description of what they would do.

[…]

They say “imperceptible” and “doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”. Their words. Not almost imperceptible. Not slightly changes the meaning, quality, or readability.

There seems to be a slight of hand here, where Google studied whether humans saw a difference in quality but then Anthropic claimed that there was no difference in meaning. Changing words will almost always change the meaning. Perhaps not in an important way, but a change is a change. Pretending otherwise is offensive to a writer. The response to this line of argument seems to be that LLMs already have randomness and that the marking changes will be within the level noise that’s already there. To me, this presents a pessimistic view of the capabilities of LLMs, contrary to Anthropic’s normal claims. The Google study was published in 2024 and didn’t test Claude. The models have changed a lot since then, but they are assuming that the precision hasn’t advanced enough to be affected, nor will it in the future. Or that when there is a tension between watermarking and quality they will pick the former. And perhaps you won’t be able to tell because everyone else will be watermarking, too.

But the very best description of the general idea behind the technique is an interactive essay by James Padolsey, “How AI Text Watermarking Works”.

[…]

This isn’t just about text one might generate with the intention of passing it off as their own natural work. This isn’t even about LLM proofreading of work written by hand. Anthropic is saying that all new Claude models are going to adulterate every single bit of text longer than 200 tokens (~150 words) they generate, including everything it presents to its users to read. So even in a private conversation between a user and Claude, which will never be read by anyone other than the user, Claude will begin making word choices in the name of marking its output in statistically predictable ways rather than maximizing clarity and precision.

[…]

Taken literally, compliant LLM terms of service must forbid users from rephrasing the output from models that comply with this regulation, because the word choices are the marks. But it’s not the European Union that is trying to impose their absurd, impractical, witch-hunt-fueling regulation on the entire world. That falls on Anthropic.

Complying with this, particularly with regard to text, is only going to create problems for honest users. Dishonest users attempting to pass off AI-generated text as their own writing (students, employees, whoever) will simply circumvent detection through non-compliant AI paraphrasing tools.

I don’t love that checking for a watermark requires submitting the text to the AI provider, and all you get back is an opaque result with no way to verify it.

James Padolsey (via John Gruber):

The move is Anthropic’s response to Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act, which requires providers to ensure that outputs are “marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated”.

[…]

The Act exempts standard editing, but many legitimate assistive uses require more substantial rewriting while leaving the ideas, judgment and responsibility with the human. The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum borne of the brain is treated no differently from one produced by a calculator. Likewise with spellcheckers. To make assistance suspect only once the tool becomes capable enough to compose a whole sentence is not a principled boundary. It is a moral premium placed on difficulty itself.

Anthropic has nevertheless chosen a blanket, model-level implementation that appears broader than the law’s minimum requirement. That may be convenient compliance engineering, but it discards distinctions the law expressly attempted to preserve. The result is a signal broad enough to implicate harmless and assistive use, yet fragile enough to be removed by a motivated person through substantial recomposition. It risks concentrating suspicion on ordinary and assistive users while remaining weakest against deliberate deception.

Update (2026-08-20): See also:

• Supplementary Information for the SynthID-Text paper
• Jason Anthony Guy
• Daniel Jalkut (Mastodon)
• John Gruber (Mastodon)
• Greg Titus
• Allie

Without getting into the weeds, I still think Anthropic’s claim of their being no change in the meaning, quality, or readability is not accurate, using the plain meanings of those terms. If you read the papers, there are ways of ensuring that the frequencies of individual tokens or sequences of them are not affected in aggregate. But this is a different claim, and Anthropic does not specify which tradeoffs they’ve chosen there. I’m willing to grant that they can make the effect very small.

At this point, I think the most interesting question is, what will be the effects of these watermarks?

Steve Troughton-Smith:

AI watermarking is security theater. There is absolutely nothing to prevent people from removing any possible watermark in text, images, video or other data. There is no way to prevent false positives, or false negatives, in detectors, either. It’s all superficial nonsense.

I find it interesting to be able to test a particular passage of text, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Even without watermark removal, a negative for a given model doesn’t tell you whether another model was used. And I’m uncomfortable with convicting someone based on a watermark given that false positives are possible and independent verification is not.

I asked Gemini about the benefits, and it said:

Regulatory Compliance and Policy

• Legal adherence: Helps major tech platforms satisfy emerging mandates requiring automated systems to label machine-generated media.
• Ecosystem tracking: Gives platforms and enterprises a high-level telemetry signal to monitor the spread of synthetic content across public channels.

Triage and Risk Mitigation

• Mass moderation: Assists automated filters in flagging bulk, unvetted bot content or spam networks where statistical trends matter more than single-file perfection.
• Provenance auditing: Provides an extra layer of metadata for digital media archives, helping investigators spot obvious clusters of AI-generated assets.

In other words, it’s not so much about individual pieces of content.

Update (2026-08-24): John Gruber:

Also, more and more, I do think this has little to do with the EU regulation and everything to do with Anthropic and Google wanting to watermark the text that Claude and Gemini generate for their own purposes, to identify text to avoid training future models on to avoid model collapse/AI inbreeding.

See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.

This MacVoices Live! starts out with the introduction of the new Foreshadowing Tech series, mark the end of the British Tech Network after 18 years, and examine Apple-related privacy, politics, and search issues. Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Jeff Gamet, Guy Serle, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, Marty Jencius, and Jim Rea discuss Canada’s encryption proposal and Apple’s response, the Towson Apple Store closure, DuckDuckGo’s surge after Google search changes, and Meta’s AI pendant ambitions. 

💾

Romanian army divers used explosives to destroy two Russian-made drones found floating in the Black Sea near Romania’s largest natural gas project, according to the NATO member country’s defense minister.

Defense Minister Radu Miruță posted a Facebook video supposedly showing one of the drones being blown up in the water by explosive ordnance disposal divers of the Romanian army on August 11, as reported by Reuters and other news outlets. The drones were first spotted in the water by a ship working in the vicinity of the Neptun Deep—an offshore gas project under development in the Black Sea that will make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union.

A Romanian Coast Guard ship that responded with army soldiers aboard found two drifting Gerbera-type drones of Russian design along with other debris. Miruță also disclosed that Romania had reached out to “Ukrainian partners who confirmed that the systems do not belong to them.”

Read full article

Comments

© Romanian Ministry of Defense

Juli Clover:

Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs.

Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple’s EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan.

[…]

Apple proposed a solution that would let an iPhone share and import items from the pasteboard to a paired accessory, like a Windows PC. Apple plans to use a solution similar to the Accessory Notifications option it added for third-party wearables in the EU in iOS 26.5. Users would need to give a paired device one-time permission to paste content from an iPhone.

[…]

Apple says introducing cross-device copy and paste is a significant engineering effort, with work expected to be complete by fall 2027.

I wonder whether Apple will restrict this to the EU.

Previously:

• iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5
• Apple Appeals EU Digital Markets Act Interoperability Rules
• DMA Compliance: Default Maps App in EU
• Meta’s iOS Interoperability Requests
• DMA Compliance: Interoperability Requests

Apple has agreed to acquire PlasmaSolve, a Czech materials science company specializing in plasma simulation software, according to a regulatory notice published today on the European Commission’s website, as spotted by MacRumors

Earlier this year, Apple informed the European Union that it would acquire the entire issued share capital of PlasmaSolve s.r.o. through a subsidiary and hire certain employees from the firm. PlasmaSolve develops solutions, including plasma simulation software, to design and optimize plasma-based manufacturing processes.

Founded in 2016, the company has focused on creating simulation tools to help manufacturers work with various plasma-related technologies. Its website remains active and details grant funding it has received for its research over the years.

PlasmaSolve’s primary product is MatSight, a suite of applications designed to help manufacturers simulate the results of vapor deposition processes for metals. Apple has used this technology for years across multiple products, including various iPhone models, to apply a durable thin film to casings that helps minimize scratching and other damage.

No financial terms or further details about the deal’s timeline were disclosed in the regulatory filing.

MacDailyNews Take: The acquisition underscores Apple’s continued investment in advanced materials and manufacturing processes that improve the durability and quality of its devices.

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The post Apple acquires Czech materials science firm PlasmaSolve appeared first on MacDailyNews.

The country’s iconic carmakers are struggling with tariffs, the growth of electric vehicles and intense competition from Chinese companies.

Companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look real

From apparently conspiring to steal elections to abusing staff or performing embarrassing dance moves, the last few years have seen plenty of fake content made about politicians intended to malign its targets and mislead the public.

Now EU rules aim to stem the flood of this deceptive content: starting from Sunday, artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look authentic must be labelled.

Continue reading...

© Illustration: web

© Illustration: web

© Illustration: web

The Guardian journalist who targeted the Free Speech Union with a story stuffed with misinformation, Aisha Down, is a "Senior Tarbell Fellow". Charlotte Gill investigates what that means.

The post The Guardian Journalist Who Targeted the Free Speech Union is a “Senior Tarbell Fellow”. What Does That Mean? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

U.S. President Donald Trump today said on Truth Social that his administration plans to launch an investigation into fines the European Union has levied against tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta for violating antitrust and Digital Markets Act rules.



Trump called the European Union's conduct "illegal and highly unethical," vowing to get the penalties reversed and planning to institute a "substantial tariff."

The European Union is at it again and, as usual, taking direct aim at GREAT American Companies! After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 Billion Dollars, Meta, 3 Billion Dollars, Amazon 2.5 Billion Dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 Billion Dollars, without explanation. This brings the Google total to over 18 Billion Dollars! This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it's not going to continue during the Trump Administration. The United States of America is not a "PIGGYBANK" for Europe, nor will we allow it to be! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that we will immediately initiate a 301 Investigation into the practice of "ROBBING" American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer. The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about. The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.

Apple was fined $570 million in 2025, ‌Meta‌ was fined $840 million in 2024 and $200 million in 2025, and Google was fined $1 billion this week after a $4.5 billion Android fine was upheld earlier this month.

Trump previously threatened European tariffs if the EU did not stop targeting U.S. companies, and the Office of the United States Trade Representative has also threatened to implement fees and restrictions on European services and companies.

Trump has focused heavily on tariffs during his second term, affecting U.S. companies and consumers. A 10 percent blanket tariff Trump enacted earlier this year expired today. The Trump administration implemented new tariffs to replace them, accusing 60 countries of failing to "impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor." The tariffs will affect goods from the UK, China, and the European Union, among others.
This article, "Trump Vows to Reverse EU Fines Against Apple and Other Tech Companies, Threatens Tariffs" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Dr. Tsimerman won one of four Fields Medals, an award for top mathematicians under 40, for his work on the André-Oort conjecture, but is now changing his focus to artificial intelligence.

The young mathematician won a prestigious Fields Medal for her work on the so-called Kakeya conjecture.

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