A California judge ruled on Friday that Apple needs to give developers the option to offer alternative app payment options to consumers, restricting developers from using Apple's own Apple payment service. This means that Apple will no longer be able to collect a 30% commission on app sales. The ruling is a major black eye for Apple, but analysts say it will not hurt the company in the long run.
Stablecoins are at the heart of the biggest controversies in the crypto industry as companies and protocols keep announcing new stablecoins on an almost weekly basis. The best known stablecoin is Tether which claims to be backed by commercial paper, but also has questions about its use of Tether to prop up Bitcoin's price.
The biggest industrial plant in the world came online in southwest Iceland yesterday to suck tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide from the air. This particular operation is located to test the emerging technology, and is powered by renewable energy from geothermal power plants nearby. The company plans to keep the captured CO2 in basalt rock formations three kilometers away from the geothermal plant.
Epic Games asked Apple to reinstate its developer account in hopes of re-releasing "Fortnite" in South Korea. The tech giant is embroiled in a worldwide legal battle with Apple over App Store policy. Epic wants to release the game with both first- and third-party payment systems.
The Ukrainian Parliament has adopted a law that legalizes and regulates cryptocurrency, the fifth country in as many weeks to lay down some ground rules for the cryptocurrency market, a sign that governments around the world are realizing that bitcoin is here to stay. The new legislation spells out certain protections against fraud for those who own bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and takes a stab at defining core terminology.
Mastercard has agreed to buy blockchain analytics company CipherTrace, which sells cryptocurrency anti-money laundering services, as the payments company deepens its bet on digital assets. The deal will allow Mastercard to “differentiate its card and real-time payments infrastructure” by helping its customers to comply with regulations as they increasingly “build their own virtual asset offerings”
GPT-4 is coming but the focus will be on coding and that's where the available compute will go. The progress will come from OpenAI working on all aspects of GPT, including data, algos, and fine-tuning. The model will be a text model, but will use more compute than the previous model.
Pokémon TV is a streaming service that lets you watch hundreds of hours of "Pokémon" on-demand. The service has over 1,000 episodes in total and continues to release new content. The streaming service is currently supported on Nintendo Switch, web browsers, mobile devices, and Apple TV.
Facebook's first foray into smart glasses is here, with the Ray-Ban Stories costing $299 and letting you take first-person photos and videos on the go, similar to Bose and Amazon's speaker-equipped glasses, you'll be able to listen to media, as well as take calls.
The long awaited trailer for The Matrix: Resurrections is finally out and available to the public. The trailer features clips of Neo, Trinity, and Neil Patrick Harris as Neo's therapist. The movie is scheduled to arrive on HBO Max's ad-free plan in December.
HBO Max will launch in Europe next month on October 26th, with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Spain, and Andorra being the first six countries it'll be available in. The list of territories corresponds to the regions currently covered by HBO Europe. The company has previously said it plans to transition its European HBO-branded services to HBO Max over the course of this year.