A Wednesday statement from the Commission brought news that in late July it wrote to Google to inform it of the ₩42.1 billion ($31.5 million) fine announced, and reported by The Register, in April 2023.
The Commission has also commenced monitoring activities to ensure that Google complies with requirements to allow competition with its Play store.
South Korea probed the operation of Play after a rival local Android app-mart named OneStore debuted in 2016.
OneStore had decent prospects of success because it merged app stores operated by South Korea’s top three telcos. Naver, an online portal similar in many ways to Google, also rolled its app store into OneStore.
Soon afterwards, Google told developers they were free to sell their wares in OneStore – but doing so would see them removed from the Play store.
Google also offered South Korean developers export assistance if they signed exclusivity deals in their home country.
Faced with the choice of being cut off from the larger markets Google owned, developer enthusiasm for dabbling in OneStore dwindled. Some popular games never made it into OneStore, so even though its founders had tens of millions of customers between them, the venture struggled.
Which is why Korea’s Fair Trade Commission intervened with an investigation, the fines mentioned above, and a requirement that Google revisit agreements with local developers.
Google has also been required to establish an internal monitoring system to ensure it complies with the Commission’s orders.
Commission chair Ki-Jeong Han used strong language in today’s announcement, describing his agency’s actions as “putting the brakes” on Google’s efforts to achieve global app store dominance.
“Monopolization of the app market may adversely affect the entire mobile ecosystem,” the Commissioner’s statement reads, adding “The recovery of competition in this market is very important.”
It’s also likely beneficial to South Korean companies. OneStore has tried to expand overseas, and Samsung – the world’s top smartphone vendor by unit volume – also stands to gain. It operates its own Galaxy Store that, despite its presence on hundreds of millions of handsets, enjoys trivial market share.
HP has failed to shunt aside class-action legal claims that it disables the scanners on its multifunction printers when their ink runs low. Though not for lack of trying.
On Aug. 10, a federal judge ruled that HP Inc. must face a class-action lawsuit claiming that the company designs its “all-in-one” inkjet printers to disable scanning and faxing functions whenever a single printer ink cartridge runs low. The company had sought — for the second time — to dismiss the lawsuit on technical legal grounds.
“It is well-documented that ink is not required in order to scan or to fax a document, and it is certainly possible to manufacture an all-in-one printer that scans or faxes when the device is out of ink,” the plaintiffs wrote in their complaint. “Indeed, HP designs its all-in-one printer products so they will not work without ink. Yet HP does not disclose this fact to consumers.”
The lawsuit charges that HP deliberately withholds this information from consumers to boost profits from the sale of expensive ink cartridges.
Color printers require four ink cartridges — one black and a set of three cartridges in cyan, magenta and yellow for producing colors. Some will also refuse to print if one of the color cartridges is low, even in black-and-white mode.
[…]
Worse, a significant amount of ink is never actually used to print documents because it’s consumed by printer maintenance cycles. In 2018, Consumer Reports tested hundreds of all-in-one inkjet printers and found that, when used intermittently, many models delivered less than half of their ink to printed documents. A few managed no more than 20% to 30%.
A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future. The engineer relied on the server to maintain a routing table that tracked cell phone numbers in real time as they moved from one carrier to the other. A jump of eight weeks had dire consequences because it caused numbers that had yet to be transferred to be listed as having already been moved and numbers that had already been transferred to be reported as pending.
[…]
The culprit was a little-known feature in Windows known as Secure Time Seeding. Microsoft introduced the time-keeping feature in 2016 as a way to ensure that system clocks were accurate. Windows systems with clocks set to the wrong time can cause disastrous errors when they can’t properly parse timestamps in digital certificates or they execute jobs too early, too late, or out of the prescribed order. Secure Time Seeding, Microsoft said, was a hedge against failures in the battery-powered onboard devices designed to keep accurate time even when the machine is powered down.
[…]
ometime last year, a separate engineer named Ken began seeing similar time drifts. They were limited to two or three servers and occurred every few months. Sometimes, the clock times jumped by a matter of weeks. Other times, the times changed to as late as the year 2159.
“It has exponentially grown to be more and more servers that are affected by this,” Ken wrote in an email. “In total, we have around 20 servers (VMs) that have experienced this, out of 5,000. So it’s not a huge amount, but it is considerable, especially considering the damage this does. It usually happens to database servers. When a database server jumps in time, it wreaks havoc, and the backup won’t run, either, as long as the server has such a huge offset in time. For our customers, this is crucial.”
Simen and Ken, who both asked to be identified only by their first names because they weren’t authorized by their employers to speak on the record, soon found that engineers and administrators had been reporting the same time resets since 2016.
[…]
“At this point, we are not completely sure why secure time seeding is doing this,” Ken wrote in an email. “Being so seemingly random, it’s difficult to [understand]. Microsoft hasn’t really been helpful in trying to track this, either. I’ve sent over logs and information, but they haven’t really followed this up. They seem more interested in closing the case.”
The logs Ken sent looked like the ones shown in the two screenshots below. They captured the system events that occurred immediately before and after the STS changed the times. The selected line in the first image shows the bounds of what STS calculates as the correct time based on data from SSL handshakes and the heuristics used to corroborate it.
Screenshot of a system event log as STS causes a system clock to jump to a date four months later than the current time.
Ken
Screenshot of a system event log when STS resets the system date to a few weeks later than the current date.
Ken
The “Projected Secure Time” entry immediately above the selected line shows that Windows estimates the current date to be October 20, 2023, more than four months later than the time shown in the system clock. STS then changes the system clock to match the incorrectly projected secure time, as shown in the “Target system time.”
The second image shows a similar scenario in which STS changes the date from June 10, 2023, to July 5, 2023.
[…]
As the creator and lead developer of the Metasploit exploit framework, a penetration tester, and a chief security officer, Moore has a deep background in security. He speculated that it might be possible for malicious actors to exploit STS to breach Windows systems that don’t have STS turned off. One possible exploit would work with an attack technique known as Server Side Request Forgery.
Microsoft’s repeated refusal to engage with customers experiencing these problems means that for the foreseeable future, Windows will by default continue to automatically reset system clocks based on values that remote third parties include in SSL handshakes. Further, it means that it will be incumbent on individual admins to manually turn off STS when it causes problems.
That, in turn, is likely to keep fueling criticism that the feature as it has existed for the past seven years does more harm than good.
STS “is more like malware than an actual feature,” Simen wrote. “I’m amazed that the developers didn’t see it, that QA didn’t see it, and that they even wrote about it publicly without anyone raising a red flag. And that nobody at Microsoft has acted when being made aware of it.”
Third-party merchants on Amazon who ship their own packages will see an additional fee for each product sold starting on Oct. 1st. Sellers could previously choose to ship their products without contributing to Amazon, but the new feemeans members of Amazon’s Seller Fulfilled Prime program will be required to pay the company 2% on each product sold.
The new surcharge is in addition to other payments Amazon receives from merchants starting with the selling plan which costs $0.99 for each product sold or $39.99 per month for an unlimited number of sales. The company also charges a referral fee for each item sold, with most ranging between 8% and 15% depending on the product category.
Since the program launched in 2015, merchants could independently ship their products without paying a fee to Amazon but the new shipping charge may add pressure to switch to the company’s in-house service. As it stands, sellers can already incur other additional charges including fees for stocking inventory, rental book service, high-volume listings, and a refund administration fee, although Amazon does not list the costs on its website.
This is a problem where Amazon is using it’s position to create a logistics monopoly and putting other logistics firms out of business. Amazon should stick to being a marketplace and this should be enforced by government.
Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song. The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).” […] To collect the data for the study, the researchers recorded from the brains of 29 epilepsy patients at Albany Medical Center in New York State from 2009 to 2015. As part of their epilepsy treatment, the patients had a net of nail-like electrodes implanted in their brains. This created a rare opportunity for the neuroscientists to record from their brain activity while they listened to music. The team chose the Pink Floyd song partly because older patients liked it. “If they said, ‘I can’t listen to this garbage,'” then the data would have been terrible, Dr. Schalk said. Plus, the song features 41 seconds of lyrics and two-and-a-half minutes of moody instrumentals, a combination that was useful for teasing out how the brain processes words versus melody.
Robert Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the leader of the team, asked one of his postdoctoral fellows, Ludovic Bellier, to try to use the data set to reconstruct the music “because he was in a band,” Dr. Knight said. The lab had already done similar work reconstructing words. By analyzing data from every patient, Dr. Bellier identified what parts of the brain lit up during the song and what frequencies these areas were reacting to. Much like how the resolution of an image depends on its number of pixels, the quality of an audio recording depends on the number of frequencies it can represent. To legibly reconstruct “Another Brick in the Wall,” the researchers used 128 frequency bands. That meant training 128 computer models, which collectively brought the song into focus. The researchers then ran the output from four individual brains through the model. The resulting recreations were all recognizably the Pink Floyd song but had noticeable differences. Patient electrode placement probably explains most of the variance, the researchers said, but personal characteristics, like whether a person was a musician, also matter.
The data captured fine-grained patterns from individual clusters of brain cells. But the approach was also limited: Scientists could see brain activity only where doctors had placed electrodes to search for seizures. That’s part of why the recreated songs sound like they are being played underwater. […] The researchers also found a spot in the brain’s temporal lobe that reacted when volunteers heard the 16th notes of the song’s guitar groove. They proposed that this particular area might be involved in our perception of rhythm. The findings offer a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can’t speak. Over the past few years, scientists have made major breakthroughs in extracting words from the electrical signals produced by the brains of people with muscle paralysis when they attempt to speak.
On Tuesday, Snapchat’s My AI in-app chatbot posted its own Story to the app that appeared to be a photo of a wall and ceiling. It then stopped responding to users’ messages, which some Snapchat users founddisconcerting. TechCrunch reports: Though the incident made for some great tweets (er, posts), we regret to inform you that My AI did not develop self-awareness and a desire to express itself through Snapchat Stories. Instead, the situation arose because of a technical outage, just as the bot explained. Snap confirmed the issue, which was quickly addressed last night, was just a glitch. (And My AI wasn’t snapping photos of your room, by the way). “My AI experienced a temporary outage that’s now resolved,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
However, the incident does raise the question as to whether or not Snap was considering adding new functionality to My AI that would allow the AI chatbot to post to Stories. Currently, the AI bot sends text messages and can even Snap you back with images — weird as they may be. But does it do Stories? Not yet, apparently. “At this time, My AI does not have Stories feature,” a Snap spokesperson told us, leaving us to wonder if that may be something Snap has in the works.
Tesla has added a new Standard Range trim for both its aging Model S and Model X luxury cars this week, effectively slashing the barrier to entry for the automaker’s flagship sedan and SUV by a staggering $10,000 each. The Model S SR now comes in at $78,490, and the Model X SR at $88,490—both before the automaker’s mandatory $1,390 destination and $250 order fees.
As the name suggests, the $10,000 trade-off is how far the vehicle can travel on a charge. Model S gets an 85-mile reduction to 320 miles (down from 405 miles) and Model X shaves off 79 miles from its range, resulting in 269 miles to a charge (down from 348 miles). There’s just one catch that might rankle new SR owners: all Model S and X vehicles reportedly use the same gross capacity battery pack regardless of trim. In other words, the Standard Range variants have been software locked at a lower usable capacity to justify the price difference.
Software locking a battery pack at a lower usable capacity is an old trick Tesla pulled from its sleeve that was previously used to limit early Model S cars to 60 kWh, down from 75 kWh. With these new configurations, the EV maker has also slowed the zero to 60 MPH sprint from 3.1 to 3.7 seconds in the Model S and from 3.8 to 4.4 seconds in the Model X.
[…]
Whether Tesla will let owners to “unlock” the remainder of the car’s battery as an over-the-air purchase later on is currently unclear. Tesla previously allowed owners of early Model S 60D vehicles to pay $4,500 to access an additional 15 kWh of usable battery (it later reduced the price to $2,000), whereas Model X owners have paid as much as $9,000 for the same privilege in the past.
BMW and Mercedes are also locking features that you already paid for – because you own the hardware of the car – behind paywalls. It’s something that really these companies shouldn’t be allowed to get away with.
The U.S. Air Force says it has picked aviation startup JetZero to design and build a full-size demonstrator aircraft with a blended wing body, or BWB, configuration. The goal is for the aircraft, which has already received the informal moniker XBW-1, to be flying by 2027.
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall made the announcement about JetZero‘s selection at an event today hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association. The service hopes this initiative will offer a pathway to future aerial refueling tankers and cargo aircraft that are significantly more fuel efficient than existing types with more traditional planforms. They can also possess even heavier lifting abilities with large amounts of internal volume, among other advantages. In this way, it could help inform requirements for the Next-Generation Air Refueling System (NGAS) and Next-Generation Airlift (NGAL) programs, which the Air Force is still in the process of refining.
“Blended wing body aircraft have the potential to significantly reduce fuel demand and increase global reach,” Secretary Kendall said in a statement in a separate press release. “Moving forces and cargo quickly, efficiently, and over long distance[s] is a critical capability to enable national security strategy.”
A rendering that JetZero previously released showing its BWB concept. JetZero
The service’s Office of Energy, Installations, and Environment, is leading this initiative in cooperation with the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). DIU is tasked with “accelerating the adoption of leading commercial technology throughout the military,” according to its website. Secretary Kendall said that NASA has also made important contributions to the effort.
“As outlined in the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, the Department of Defense plans to invest $235 million over the next four years to fast-track the development of this transformational dual-use technology, with additional private investment expected,” according to the Air Force’s press release. Additional funding will come from other streams, as well.
The Air Force and DIU have been considering bids for more than a year and by last month had reportedly narrowed the field down to just two competitors. JetZero is the only company to have previously publicly confirmed it was proposing a design, which it calls the Z-5, for the new BWB initiative. The company has partnered with Northrop Grumman on this project. Scaled Composites, a wholly-owned Northrop Grumman subsidiary that is well known for its bleeding-edge aerospace design and rapid prototyping capabilities, will specifically be supporting this work.
A rendering of JetZero’s BWB concept configured as a tanker, with F-35A Joint Strike Fighters flying in formation and receiving fuel. JetZero
A formal request for information issued last year outlined the main goals of the BWB project as centering on a design that would be at least 30 percent more aerodynamically efficient than a Boeing 767 or an Airbus A330. These two commercial airliners are notably the basis for the Boeing KC-46A Pegasus tanker (which has a secondary cargo-carrying capability), dozens of which are in Air Force service now, and the Airbus A330 Multi-Role Tanker Transport (MRTT).
A US Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tanker. USAF
The hope is that the BWB design, combined with unspecified advanced engine technology, could lead to substantially increased fuel efficiency. This, in turn, could allow future Air Force tankers and cargo aircraft based on the core design concept to fly further while carrying similar or even potentially greater payloads than are possible with the service’s current fleets.
“Several military transport configurations are possible with the BWB,” the Air Force’s press release notes. “Together, these aircraft types account for approximately 60% of the Air Force’s total annual jet fuel consumption.”
“We see benefits in both air refueling at range where you can get much more productivity—much more fuel delivered—as well as cargo,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Operational Energy had also said during a presentation at the Global Air and Space Chiefs Conference in London in July.
[…]
A rendering of a past BWB design concept from Boeing. Boeing
[…]
Looking at the latest rendering, one thing that has immediately stood out to us is the potential signature management benefits of the design. Beyond having no vertical tail and the general blended body planform, which can already offer radar cross-section advantages, the top-mounted engines positioned at the rear of the fuselage are shielded from most aspects below. This could have major beneficial impacts on the aircraft’s infrared signature, as well as how it appears on radar under many circumstances.
A close-up of the rear end of the latest rendering of JetZero’s blended wing body design concept. USAF
JetZero has previously highlighted how the engine configuration directs sound waves upward, which the company says will reduce its noise signature while in flight, at least as perceived below. This has been touted as beneficial for commercial applications, where noise pollution could be a major issue, but could be useful for versions configured for military roles, as well. A quieter military transport aircraft, for instance, would be advantageous for covert or clandestine missions.
A screen capture from a part of JetZero’s website discussing the noise signature benefits of its blended wing body design. JetZero
The latest rendering for JetZero’s concept also shows passenger windows and doors along the side of the forward fuselage, highlighting its potential use for transporting personnel, as well as cargo. The company is already pitching the core design as a potential high-efficiency mid-market commercial airliner with a 230 to 250-passenger capacity and significant range in addition to military roles.
A close up of the front end of JetZero’s blended wing body design concept from the latest rendering showing the passenger windows and doors along the side. USAF
[…]
A blended wing body concept from the late 1980s credited to McDonnell-Douglas’ engineer Robert Liebeck. Liebeck is among those now working for JetZero. NASA via AviationWeek
“You’re looking at something with roughly a 50% greater efficiency here, right? So,… first order you’re talking about doubling the ranges or possibly doubling the payloads,” Tom Jones, Northrop Grumman Vice President and president of the company’s aeronautics sector, who was also present at today’s event, added. “Additionally, the folded wing type of design gives you a smaller spot factor so you can fit… more aircraft at potentially a remote location. And the aircraft is also capable of some degree of short takeoff [and] landing type things…”
A screen capture from a JetZero promotional video showing project fuel savings for its blended wing body design depending on configuration compared to aircraft with more traditional designs. JetZero capture
“Having a lifting body is a great way to get off the ground quicker,” JetZero’s O’Leary also noted with regard to shorter takeoff and landing capabilities.
These performance improvements could have a number of significant operational benefits for the Air Force when it comes to future tanker and cargo aircraft.
Being able to operate from “shorter runways, [across] longer distances, [with] better efficiency to carry the same payload and get it to places” are all of interest to the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Albert Miller, the Director of Strategy, Plans, Requirements, and Programs at Air Mobility Command, explained.
[…]
Maj. Gen. Miller also stressed that the BWB demonstrator would not necessarily directly meet the Air Force’s demands for future tankers or airlifters. He did add that the design would definitely help inform those requirements and could still be a solution to the operational issues he had highlighted in regard to a future major conflict in the Pacific region.
[…]
A rendering of JetZero’s blended wing body design concept configured as a tanker refueling a notional future stealthy combat jet. Stealthy drones are also seen flying in formation with the crewed aircraft. JetZero
“Why now? Because there’s no time to wait,” Dr. Ravi Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, who also happens to be a retired Air Force officer who flew C-17A Globemaster III cargo planes, said at today’s event. “And all of you have recognized that we’ve entered a new era of great power competition in which the PRC [People’s Republic of China] has come to be known as our pacing challenge.”
[…]
“We’re in a race for technological superiority with what we call a pacing challenge, a formidable opponent [China], and that requires us to find new ways, new methods, and new processes to get the kind of advantage that we’ve become used to and need to preserve,” Secretary Kendall had said in his opening remarks. “And that competitive advantage can be found in the ability to develop and field superior technology to meet our warfighter requirements and to do so faster than our adversaries. Today, that spirit of innovation continues with the Blended Wing Body Program and the demonstration project.”
Kendall added that the potential benefits for the commercial aviation sector offered valuable opportunities for further partnerships.
A rendering of a JetZero blended wing body airliner at a civilian airport. JetZero
[…]
As the project now gets truly underway, more information about the BWB initiative from the government and industry sides will likely emerge. From what we have seen and heard already, the program could have significant impacts on future military and commercial aviation developments.
