Daily Archives: April 24, 2025

Study finding persistent chemical in European wines raises doubts and concerns

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A report by the Pesticides Action Network (PAN Europe) and other NGOs that uncovered high concentrations of a forever chemical in wines from across the EU – including organic – is sparking debate about the causes of contamination and restrictions on the substance. 

The report found some wines had trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) levels 100 times higher than the strictest threshold for drinking water in Europe.

TFA is part of the PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl) family of substances used in many products, including pesticides, for their water-repellent properties. Extremely persistent in the environment, they are a known threat to human health.

“This is a wake-up call,” said Helmut Burtscher-Schaden, an environmental chemist at Global 2000, one of the NGOs behind the research. “TFA is a permanent chemical and will not go away.” 

The NGOs analysed 49 wines. Comparing modern wines with older vintages, the findings suggested no detectable residues in pre-1988 wines but a sharp increase since 2010.  

“For no other agricultural product are the harvests from past decades so readily available and well-preserved,” the study said.

PAN sees a correlation between rising levels of TFA in wine and the growing use PFAS-based pesticides.

Under the spotlight

Though nearly a quarter of Austria’s vineyards are cultivated with the organic method, Austrian bottles are over-represented in the list of contaminated wines, 18 out of 49, as the NGOs started testing from the country before expanding the reach of the research.

[… Winemakers complain about the study, who would have thought…]

In response, the European executive’s officials passed the buck to member states, noting they resisted the Commission’s proposal to quit renewing certain PFAS pesticides. An eventual agreement was reached on just two substances.

More could be done to limit PFAS chemicals at the national level under the current EU legislation, Commission representatives said.

Source: Study finding persistent chemical in European wines raises doubts and concerns – Euractiv

Spacetop AR is now an expensive Windows app instead of a useless screenless laptop

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The Spacetop AR laptop made a splash when it debuted a few years ago with an intriguing pitch: What if you could have a notebook that works entirely through augmented reality glasses, without a built-in screen of its own? Unfortunately, we found the Spacetop experience to be underwhelming, and the hardware seemed like a tough sell for $1,900. Last Fall, Spacetop’s creator Sightful told CNET that it was abandoning the screen-less laptop altogether and instead focusing on building AR software for Windows PCs. Now, we have a clearer sense of what Sightful is up to.

Today, Sightful is officially launching Spacetop for Intel-powered Windows AI PCs, following a short trial launch from January. For $899 you get a pair of XREAL’s Air Ultra 2 glasses and a year of Spacetop’s software. Afterwards, you’ll have to pay $200 annually for a subscription. The software works just like the original Spacetop concept — it gives you a large 100-inch AR interface for doing all of your productivity work — except now you’re not stuck with the company’s middling keyboard and other hardware.

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Spacetop doesn’t support Intel chips without NPUs, as its AR interface requires constant AI processing. It doesn’t work AMD or Qualcomm’s AI CPUs, either.

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In a conversation with Engadget, Sightful CEO Tamir Berliner noted that the company might pay more attention to other chip platforms if it gets similar attention.

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you’ll have to get used to wearing Xreal’s large Air 2 Ultra glasses. When we demoed it at CES, we found it to be an improvement over previous Xreal frames, thanks to their sharp 1080p micro-OLED displays and wider field of view. The Air 2 Ultra are also notable for having 6DoF tracking, which allows you to move around AR objects. While sleeker than the Vision Pro, the glasses are still pretty clunky, and you’ll also have to snap in additional prescription frames if necessary.

I’ll need to see this latest iteration of Spacetop in action before making any final judgments, but it’s clearly a more viable concept as an app that can work on a variety of laptops. Nobody wants to buy bespoke hardware like the old Spacetop laptop, no matter how good of a party trick it may be.

Source: Spacetop AR is now an expensive Windows app instead of a useless screenless laptop

This looks like an excellent idea and one which I would love to get if it wasn’t tied so much to hardware and $200 per year.

EC fines Meta, Apple €700M for DMA compliance failures

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Meta and Apple have earned the dubious honor of being the first companies fined for non-compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which experts say could inflame tensions between US President Donald Trump and the European bloc.

Apple was penalised to the tune of €500 million ($570 million) for violating anti-steering rules and Meta by €200 million ($228 million) for its “consent or pay” ad model, the EU said in a press release.

The fines are a pittance for both firms, whose most recent quarterly earnings statements from January saw Apple report $36.33 billion in net income, and Meta $20.83 billion.

Apple’s penalty related to anti-steering violations – for which it’s already paid a €1.8 billion penalty to the EU – saw it found guilty of not allowing app developers to direct users outside Apple’s own in-app payment system for cheaper alternatives. The European Commission also ordered Apple to “remove the technical and commercial restrictions on steering” while simultaneously closing an investigation into Apple’s user choice obligations, finding that “early and proactive” moves by Cupertino to address compliance shortcomings resolved the issue.

Meta, on the other hand, was fined for the pay-or-consent model whereby it offered a paid, ad-free version of its services as the only alternative to allowing the company to harvest user data. The strategy earned it considerable ire in Europe for exactly the reason the EU began investigating it last year: That it still ingested data even if users paid and that it wasn’t clear about how personal data was being collected or used.

“The Commission found that this model is not compliant with the DMA,” the EC said, because it gave users no choice to opt into a service that used less of their data, nor did it allow users to freely consent to having their data combined.

That fine only applies to the period between March and November 2024 when the consent-or-pay model was active, however. The EU said that a new advertising model introduced in November of last year resolved many of its concerns, which European Privacy advocate Max Schrems says will likely still be an issue.

“Meta has moved to a system with a ‘pay,’ a ‘consent’ and a ‘less ads’ option,” Schrems explained in a statement emailed to The Register. Schrems said the “less ads” option is nothing but a distraction.

“It has massive usability limitations – nothing any user seriously wants,” Schrems said. “Meta has simply created a ‘fake choice’, pretending that it would overcome the illegal ‘pay or okay’ approach.”

Alongside the fines, the EU also said that it was removing Facebook Marketplace’s designation as a DMA gatekeeper, as it had too few commercial users to qualify as “an important gateway for business users to reach end users.”

[… followed by stuff about how Americans don’t like the fines in usual snowflakey Trump style crying tantrums]

Source: EC fines Meta, Apple €700M for DMA compliance failures • The Register

Blue Shield of California Exposed the Data of 4.7 Million People to Google for targeted advertising

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Blue Shield of California shared the protected health information of 4.7 million individuals with Google over a nearly three-year period, a data breach that impacts the majority of its nearly 6 million members, according to reporting from Bleeping Computer.

This isn’t the only large data breach to affect a healthcare organization the last year alone. Community Health Center records were hacked in October 2024, compromising more than a million individuals’ data, along with an attack on lab testing company Lab Services Cooperative, which affected records of 1.6 million Planned Parenthood patients. UnitedHealth Group suffered a breach in February 2024, resulting in the leak of more than 100 million people’s data.

What happened with Blue Shield of California?

According to an April 9 notice posted on Blue Shield of California’s website, the company allowed certain data, including protected health information, to be shared with Google Ads through Google Analytics, which may have allowed Google to serve targeted ads back to members. While not discovered until Feb. 11, 2025, the leak occurred for several years, from April 2021 to January 2024, when the connection between Google Analytics and Google Ads was severed on Blue Shield websites.

The following Blue Shield member information may have been compromised:

  • Insurance plan name, type, and group number
  • City and zip code
  • Gender
  • Family size
  • Blue Shield assigned identifiers for online accounts
  • Medical claim service date and provider
  • Patient name
  • Patient financial responsibility
  • “Find a Doctor” search criteria and results

According to the notice, no additional personal data—Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and banking and credit card information—were disclosed. Blue Shield also states that no bad actor was involved, nor have they confirmed that the information has been used maliciously.

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Source: Blue Shield of California Exposed the Data of 4.7 Million People to Google | Lifehacker