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FBI Calls Apple’s Enhanced iCloud Encryption ‘Deeply Concerning’ as Privacy Groups Hail It As a Victory for Users

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Apple yesterday announced that end-to-end encryption is coming to even more sensitive types of iCloud data, including device backups, messages, photos, and more, meeting the longstanding demand of both users and privacy groups who have rallied for the company to take the significant step forward in user privacy.


‌iCloud‌ end-to-end encryption, or what Apple calls “Advanced Data Protection,” encrypts users’ data stored in ‌iCloud‌, meaning only a trusted device can decrypt and read the data. ‌iCloud‌ data in accounts with Advanced Data Protection can only be read by a trusted device, not Apple, law enforcement, or government entities.

Following its announcements, the EFF or Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that has long-called for Apple to enable end-to-end encryption and take more steps to safeguard user privacy, put out a statement applauding the new feature and Apple’s renewed commitment to privacy.

We applaud Apple for listening to experts, child advocates, and users who want to protect their most sensitive data. Encryption is one of the most important tools we have for maintaining privacy and security online. That’s why we included the demand that Apple let users encrypt iCloud backups in the Fix It Already campaign that we launched in 2019.

Meredith Whittaker, CEO of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, said the decision by Apple to offer end-to-end encryption “is great.” “There’s been enough pressure and enough narrative work that they see the side of history forming. It’s really incredible,” Whittaker told The Washington Post.

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The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or S.T.O.P, called Advanced Data Protection “essential and overdue.” Despite the announcement, the group is “disappointed” that end-to-end encryption will require users to opt-in and is not to be enabled by default. Fox Cahn, the group’s executive director, said, “it’s good to see Apple’s privacy protections catching up with its sales pitch, but making these protections opt-in will leave most users vulnerable.”

For years, Apple has touted its privacy record while leaving its users vulnerable, particularly to police surveillance. Much of the data users store on iCloud is just a court order away from becoming a policing tool. With these changes, Apple will keep up with the privacy best practices that other companies have followed for years. But it’s disappointing that users have to opt-in to many of these new protections, leaving the vast majority at risk.

Fight for the Future, another privacy-focused advocacy group, said on Twitter that Apple’s announcement of end-to-end encryption brings the company’s marketing of being privacy-focused to reality. “Apple’s reputation as the pro-privacy tech company has long been at odds with the reality that ‌iCloud‌ backups aren’t secured by end-to-end encryption. This news means people’s personal messages, documents, and data will be secure from law enforcement, hackers, and Apple itself.” The group is now calling upon Apple to implement RCS messaging into iPhone, a move the group says is a “non-negotiable next step.”

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While privacy groups and apps applaud Apple for the expansion of end-to-end encryption in ‌iCloud‌, governments have reacted differently. In a statement to The Washington Post, the FBI, the largest intelligence agency in the world, said it’s “deeply concerned with the threat end-to-end and user-only-access encryption pose.” The bureau said that end-to-end encryption and Apple’s Advanced Data Protection make it harder for them to do their work and that they request “lawful access by design.”

“This hinders our ability to protect the American people from criminal acts ranging from cyber-attacks and violence against children to drug trafficking, organized crime, and terrorism,” the bureau said in an emailed statement. “In this age of cybersecurity and demands for ‘security by design,’ the FBI and law enforcement partners need ‘lawful access by design.'”

Former FBI official Sasha O’Connell also weighed in, telling The New York Times “it’s great to see companies prioritizing security, but we have to keep in mind that there are trade-offs, and one that is often not considered is the impact it has on decreasing law enforcement access to digital evidence.”

In January 2020, Reuters reported that Apple dropped plans to encrypt user data in ‌iCloud‌ at the behest of the FBI, which was concerned such a move would hinder investigations and its intelligence efforts. In an interview yesterday with The Wall Street Journal‘s Joanna Stern, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, labeled the report as inaccurate. “I’ve heard that rumor, but I don’t know where it came from.”

In that same interview, Federighi said Apple “deeply appreciates the work of law enforcement and supports the work of law enforcement. We view that we really have the same mission at heart which is to keep people safe.” Apple says that Advanced Data Protection will be available to all US users by the end of this year, with plans to launch globally in early 2023.

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A Space Balloon Will Host The World's Most Expensive Meal For Nearly $500k – Yahoo Movies Canada

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Space Balloon above the Earth – Instagram

An evening dining at high altitudes with unobstructed views of the heavens and Earth sounds like something only possible on “The Jetsons,”  but with space travel on the rise, this can now be a reality. SpaceVIP, a luxury space travel company, and Space Perspective, a carbon-neutral spaceflight experience company, have teamed together to offer an out-of-this-world experience for only $495,000.

Set to launch in 2025, the exclusive experience will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space balloon will travel 100,000 feet above sea level, at which passengers will be served while the sun rises above the Earth’s curvature. Taking place on Space Perspective’s Spaceship Neptune craft, the balloon will carry six lucky (and wealthy) passengers for a unique dining experience hosted by Rasmus Munk. Munk is the co-owner of Michelin-starred Alchemist Restaurant, a Copenhagen fixture known for its avant-garde dining practices and 50-course meals.

In a press release obtained by Robb Report, Munk says he hopes to create a menu that represents humankind’s shared interest in space. “I want to highlight food as a common thread in our human existence, and it will be truly meaningful to serve it while gazing down at the Earth’s curvature,” he says in the release. Although the six-hour trip won’t take place until next year, test flights are set to start in April 2024.

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Read more: 30 Healthy Snack Ideas That Won’t Ruin Your Diet

The Space Balloon Features Luxuries Beyond Food

Space Balloon with aircraft hangingSpace Balloon with aircraft hanging

Space Balloon with aircraft hanging – Instagram

While the promise of incredible dishes from a chef with two Michelin stars is certainly part of the draw, the space balloon has its own perks. Spaceship Neptune has 360-degree windows, allowing the passengers a full view of the Earth from above. The balloon is also fitted with a cocktail bar with fresh herbs, plush reclining chairs, and Wi-Fi.

Once they hit 100,000 feet above sea level, the passengers’ attentions are sure to be turned to whatever Munk is serving. Although the menu is yet to be released, his award-winning Holistic Cuisine at Alchemist shows the space experience is worth the $495,000 price tag. While Rasmus Munk has a full kitchen at his disposal at Alchemist, Spaceship Neptune has a much smaller one, so he’ll have to prepare part of the dishes before the aircraft takes off. With this barrier, Munk may have to use similar techniques that mirror the clever ways NASA astronauts cook and bake in space, using the kitchen mainly to heat and top off the dishes.

Munk’s meals must also account for the flavor changes at higher altitudes. Food tastes different on an airplane at only 42,000 feet above the ground, so it’s sure to be altered at 100,000 feet. Whatever Munk decides to make, we hope the passengers use their Wi-Fi connection to show us what we’re missing.

Read the original article on Tasting Table.

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Apple in talks to let Google's Gemini power iPhone AI features, Bloomberg News says – theSun

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Apple is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the situation.

The negotiations are about licensing Gemini for some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, the report said, adding that the terms or branding of an AI agreement or how it would be implemented have not been decided.

Alphabet shares jumped more than 6% in early U.S. trading, while Apple was up 2.5%.

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It is unlikely that any deal would be announced until June, when Apple plans to hold its annual conference of developers, and the iPhone maker also recently held talks with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI about using its model, according to the report.

Apple, Alphabet-owned Google and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

A potential deal between the firms could help Google expand the use of its AI services to more than 2 billion active Apple devices, boosting the search giant’s efforts to catch up with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

It could also help allay investor fears about the slow roll-out of AI apps by Apple, which has lost the crown of the world’s most valuable firm after a 10% decline in its shares this year.

The firms have a years-long partnership that makes Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser, and a genAI tie-up may help the Alphabet unit navigate fears that services like ChatGPT could threaten its search dominance.

But the agreement could also invite sharper scrutiny from U.S. regulators, who have sued Google on grounds that it unlawfully stifled competition by paying billions of dollars to Apple to maintain its monopoly in search.

“This strategic partnership is a missing piece in the Apple AI strategy and combines forces with Google for Gemini to power some of the AI features Apple is bringing to market,“ said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush.

“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino with clearly a major licence fee attached to this,“ he said, referring to Apple’s California headquarters.

Google in January partnered with Apple’s rival Samsung to deploy its genAI technology in the South Korean firm’s Galaxy S24 series of smartphones, as part of its efforts to boost the use of Gemini after some missteps during its roll-out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that the company was investing “significantly” in generative AI and would reveal more about its plans to put the technology to use later this year.

The Bloomberg report said Apple was planning to use its own homegrown AI models for some new capabilities in its upcoming iOS 18, but was seeking a partner to power genAI features, including functions for creating images and writing essays based on simple prompts. (Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza, Janane Venkatraman, Varun H K and Susan Fenton). – REUTERS

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PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration

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The PlayStation 5 launched in late 2020, though it feels like it arrived later due to supply issues. A Pro model will reportedly arrive four years later with a much improved GPU, AI acceleration and other enhancements.

The GPU will be the biggest upgrade on the PS5 Pro. Rumors claim up to 45% higher rasterization performance and 33.5 TFLOPs of compute power. Future SDK versions will support resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates with 4K @ 120fps and 8K @ 60fps being possible.

Ray tracing performance is set to include 2-3 times, even 4 times on some occasions. This is thanks to a massive increase from 18 BVH4 work groups to 30 BVH8. The so-called “Bounding Volume Hierarchies” help speed up ray intersection calculations (i.e. does this ray of light hit this object or not?). We will skip the technical details, but the digit after BVH means that each individual work group will be able to do more work.

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The Pro will also feature the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling and antialiasing technology (PSSR for short). This will be especially helpful for ray tracing, which sees computation demands explode as resolution goes up.

The PlayStation 5 Pro will also bring a custom machine learning architecture. An AI Accelerator will offer up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point computation. This might be the most interesting part as modern generative models can create realistic textures and speech, write out text based on a prompt and so on – what can developers do with this?

The console will also come with a modest boost to the CPU, which will have a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that goes up to 3.85GHz (from 3.5GHz), a 10% increase. By the sound of it, the PS5 Pro is very close to thermal limits, so this mode will drop GPU frequency by 1.5% (resulting in 1% performance loss).

The Pro model will have faster RAM that does 18 gigatransfers per second, a 28% increase from 448GB/s to 576GB/s. This is needed to feed the beefier GPU.

The audio subsystem will also get a boost with 35% more performance that can be spent on higher quality sound effects.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to have 1TB onboard storage and a detachable Blu-ray drive similar to the slim models. Sony might release the Pro model in Fall 2024, but there has been no official acknowledgment of the console.

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