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      Spotify seizes the day after Apple is forced to allow external payments

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May

    After a federal court issued a scathing order Wednesday night that found Apple in "willful violation" of an injunction meant to allow iOS apps to provide alternate payment options, app developers are capitalizing on the moment. Spotify may be the quickest of them all.

    Less than 24 hours after District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple had sought to thwart a 2021 injunction and engaged in an "obvious cover-up" around its actions, Spotify announced in a blog post that it had submitted an updated app to Apple. The updated app can show specific plan prices, link out to Spotify's website for plan changes and purchases that avoid Apple's 30 percent commission on in-app purchases, and display promotional offers, all of which were disallowed under Apple's prior App Store rules.

    Spotify's post adds that Apple's newly court-enforced policy "opens the door to other seamless buying opportunities that will directly benefit creators (think easy-to-purchase audiobooks)." Spotify posted on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning that the updated app was approved by Apple . Apple made substantial modifications to its App Review Guidelines on Friday and emailed registered developers regarding the changes.

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      Epic Games Store completely eliminates revenue fees for smaller developers

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May

    It has been over six years since Epic started undercutting Steam's 30 percent revenue share for developers , asking for just 12 percent of sales on its then-new Epic Games Store. Now, Epic is going even further by reducing those fees to zero for a game's first $1 million in annual sales.

    The newly announced fee structure will go into effect in June, Epic said, and will apply to a developer's revenue on a "per app" basis. After the first $1 million in annual sales, apps will be charged the usual 12 percent fee for listing on the Epic Games Store.

    This isn't the first time Epic has offered a financial break to smaller developers. Back in 2011, the company eschewed royalty payments for the first $50,000 in sales for projects made with the newly free Unreal Development Kit. By 2020, that royalty-free grace period for Unreal Engine projects was increased to cover the first $1 million in lifetime sales for a project.

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      Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May • 1 minute

    In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space , the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.

    We know this because Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April, speaking on the future of AI and US competitiveness. Among the topics raised then was the need for more electricity—both renewable and non-renewable—to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Schmidt noted that an average nuclear power plant in the United States generates 1 gigawatt of power.

    "People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

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      Grand Theft Auto VI gets pushed back to May 26, 2026

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May

    Rockstar's highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI will finally launch on May 26, 2026, Rockstar Games said in a Friday morning announcement .

    That means the game will miss the "2025" release window that the developer announced alongside the game's first trailer in late 2023 . That delay is needed, Rockstar said, so the company can use "this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve."

    "We are very sorry that this is later than you expected," Rockstar wrote in its announcement. "The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team. We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game."

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      DOGE put a college student in charge of using AI to rewrite regulations

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May

    A young man with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency’s rules and regulations.

    Christopher Sweet was introduced to HUD employees as being originally from San Francisco and, most recently, a third-year student at the University of Chicago, where he was studying economics and data science, in an email sent to staffers earlier this month.

    “I'd like to share with you that Chris Sweet has joined the HUD DOGE team with the title of special assistant, although a better title might be ‘Al computer programming quant analyst,’” Scott Langmack , a DOGE staffer and chief operating officer of an AI real estate company, wrote in an email widely shared within the agency and reviewed by WIRED. “With family roots from Brazil, Chris speaks Portuguese fluently. Please join me in welcoming Chris to HUD!”

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      Rocket Report: Starbase the city is coming soon; Alpha remains in beta

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May • 1 minute

    Welcome to Edition 7.42 of the Rocket Report! For about a decade now, we've been following the development of the Starbase facility in South Texas. Up until 2019, progress was slow, but then the Starship program kicked into high gear, and SpaceX built up a production site beneath tents. The area has come a long way since then, and as soon as this weekend, there may be a new municipality, Starbase, in Texas.

    As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

    Firefly's Alpha rocket fails again . Firefly Aerospace launched its two-stage Alpha rocket from California early Tuesday, but something went wrong about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, rendering the vehicle unable to deploy an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin, Ars reports . The booster stage jettisoned from Alpha's upper stage two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, and that's when things went awry. A bright cloud of white vapor appeared high in the sky, indicating an explosion—or something close to it.

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      “Older than Google,” this Elder Scrolls wiki has been helping gamers for 30 years

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 2 May

    If at some point over the last 20 years you’ve found yourself in an Internet argument or had a question in your head you just couldn’t seem to get rid of, chances are good that you’ve relied on an online wiki.

    And you probably used the online wiki: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. But for video games, Wikipedia provides a more general, top-down view, painting in broad strokes what a game is about, how it was made, when it was released, and how it was received by players.

    In addition, many games and franchises have their own dedicated wikis that go a step further; these wikis are often part game guide, part lore book, and part historical record.

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      Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 May

    A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces. The findings, detailed in a working paper by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen, provide an early, large-scale empirical look at AI's transformative potential.

    In "Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects," economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard focused specifically on the impact of AI chatbots across 11 occupations often considered vulnerable to automation, including accountants, software developers, and customer support specialists. Their analysis covered data from 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark.

    Despite finding widespread and often employer-encouraged adoption of these tools, the study concluded that "AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation" during the period studied. The confidence intervals in their statistical analysis ruled out average effects larger than 1 percent.

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      Phishing attacks that defeat MFA are easier than ever. So what are we to do?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 1 May

    An entire cottage industry has formed around phishing attacks that bypass some of the most common forms of multifactor authentication (MFA) and allow even non-technical users to quickly create sites that defeat the protections against account takeovers.

    MFA works by requiring an additional factor of authentication besides a password, for instance, a fingerprint, face scan, or the possession of a digital key. In theory, this prevents attackers from accessing an account even after they phish a victim’s username and password. Most often, the second form of authentication comes in the form of a one-time passcode that is sent to the user by text message or email or is generated by an authentication app that the user has already set up.

    Adversary in the middle

    As detailed on Thursday by Cisco Talos, an entire ecosystem has cropped up to help criminals defeat these forms of MFA. They employ an attack technique known as an adversary in the middle. The tools provide phishing-as-a-service toolkits that are marketed in online crime forums using names including Tycoon 2FA, Rockstar 2FA, Evilproxy, Greatness, and Mamba 2FA.

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