The Philippines began Monday registering millions of citizens for its national identification system, hoping to promote electronic payments and make it easier for low-income earners without bank accounts to access financial services. From a report: All Philippine citizens and resident foreigners are required to register such information as name, sex, date of birth, place of birth, blood type, address and nationality. Biometric data -- fingerprints, facial photos and iris scans -- also will be stored. The country's current system, in which different agencies issue their own numbers, has been criticized as inconvenient. The new system will grant each person a unique number that can be used across agencies. The government hopes to make financial services more accessible to low-income workers who lack bank accounts as well as facilitate delivery of government services. Officials from the Philippine statistics agency will visit homes to collect the personal information, completing the process before President Rodrigo Duterte's term ends in June 2022. The system is scheduled to begin operation in the second half of 2021 for services such as visa issuances. A survey found 73% public support for the new ID system, suggesting that little concern exists over the collection of personal information by the government. Karl Kendrick Chua, acting secretary of the National Economic and Development Authority, said the ID system will accelerate growth of the digital economy. He expressed hope that the national system will spark widespread use of electronic payments. Partnerships with the private sector also appear to be on the table.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Two misleading ads for mobile games that bear little relation to the actual product have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ads, for the Homescapes and Gardenscapes games, both come from developer Playrix. They showed a game where users pull pins in a specific order to solve a puzzle -- though the actual games had totally different "core gameplay." The ASA said the ads should not be used again. Homescapes and Gardenscapes both use the same core gameplay loop: a home or garden needs to be renovated, and players earn the resources they need by playing a "match three" type game -- similar to other popular games such as Bejewelled or Candy Crush. Both Homescapes and Gardenscapes are hugely popular, with more than 100 million app installs each from the Google Play store. But the games have often used ads that show a multiple-choice type puzzle to avert a catastrophe, or, more recently, the pin-pulling puzzle type. Two Facebook ads for Homescapes and Gardenscapes, from March and April this year, were referred to the ASA for being misleading. Despite a brief warning at the bottom of the video that "not all images represent actual gameplay", the ASA sided with the seven people who complained.

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Alphabet's X lab has officially announced its latest "moonshot": a computational agriculture project the company is calling Mineral. The Verge reports: The project is focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales, with a focus on "developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics and more," according to project lead Elliott Grant. A blog post outlining the project's vision says Mineral, which now has an official name but may have launched in secret around 2017 according to Grant's LinkedIn page, will try and aim technology toward solving issues around sustainability. Those include feeding of Earth's growing population, and producing crops more efficiently by understanding growth cycles and weather patterns. The project will also hope to manage land and plant life as the effects of climate change complicate ecosystems. "Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown," explains Grant. "Over the last few years my team and I have been developing the tools of what we call computational agriculture, in which farmers, breeders, agronomists, and scientists will lean on new types of hardware, software, and sensors to collect and analyze information about the complexity of the plant world." One of the first of these tools is a new four-wheel rover-like prototype, what the Mineral team are calling a plant buggy, study crops, soil, and other environmental factors using a mix of cameras, sensors, and other onboard equipment. The team then uses the data collected and combines it with satellite imagery and weather data to create predictive models for how the plants will grow using machine learning and other AI training techniques. The Mineral team says it's already using the prototypes to study soybeans in Illinois and strawberries in California. "Over the past few years, the plant buggy has trundled through strawberry fields in California and soybean fields in Illinois, gathering high quality images of each plant and counting and classifying every berry and every bean. To date, the team has analyzed a range of crops like melons, berries, lettuce, oilseeds, oats and barley -- from sprout to harvest," reads Mineral's website. Grant says the Mineral team will collaborate with plant breeders and growers, farmers, and other agricultural experts to come up with solutions that are practical and have real-world benefits.

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Iwastheone shares a report from SciTechDaily: Using telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other organizations around the world, astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth, and has been studied in unprecedented detail. The research is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "We found that, when a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards that obstructs our view," explains Samantha Oates, also at the University of Birmingham. This happens because the energy released as the black hole eats up stellar material propels the star's debris outwards. The discovery was possible because the tidal disruption event the team studied, AT2019qiz, was found just a short time after the star was ripped apart. "Because we caught it early, we could actually see the curtain of dust and debris being drawn up as the black hole launched a powerful outflow of material with velocities up to 10 000 km/s," says Kate Alexander, NASA Einstein Fellow at Northwestern University in the US. "This unique 'peek behind the curtain' provided the first opportunity to pinpoint the origin of the obscuring material and follow in real time how it engulfs the black hole."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Working with her Stanford colleague, Michal Kosinski, [Pin Pin Tea-makorn, ]a PhD student at Stanford] scoured Google, newspaper anniversary notices and genealogy websites for photos of couples taken at the start of their marriages and many years later. From these they compiled a database of pictures from 517 couples, taken within two years of tying the knot and between 20 and 69 years later. To test whether couples' faces grew alike over time, the researchers showed volunteers a photo of a "target" person accompanied by six other faces, one being their spouse, with the other five faces selected at random. The volunteers were then asked to rank how similar each of the six faces were to the target individual. The same task was then performed by cutting-edge facial recognition software. In the original study in 1987, the late psychologist Robert Zajonc, at the University of Michigan, had volunteers rank the photos of only a dozen couples. He concluded that couples' faces became more alike as their marriages went on, with the effect being greater the happier they were. The explanation, psychologists have argued, is that sharing lives shapes people's faces, with diet, lifestyle, time outdoors, and laughter lines all having a part to play. However, writing in Scientific Reports, Tea-makorn and Kosinski describe how they found no evidence for couples looking more alike as time passed. They did, however, look more alike than random pairs of people at the start of their relationship. Tea-makorn said people may seek out similar-looking partners, just as they look for mates with matching values and personalities.

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The world's first hydrogen-powered double decker bus has been revealed in Aberdeen, a move that demonstrates the city's commitment to tackling air pollution and implementation of its Net Zero Vision. The Engineer reports: Hydrogen double deckers will now be driven around the city for several weeks during a period of final testing along with training for drivers. The UK's first hydrogen production and bus refueling station opened in Aberdeen in 2015 as part of a green transport demonstration project. The Aberdeen City Council-led project tested the economic and environmental benefits of hydrogen transport technologies and aims to drive the development of hydrogen technologies. In a statement, Aberdeen City Council Co-Leader Councillor Jenny Laing said: "We are very proud to bring the world's first hydrogen-powered double-decker buses to Aberdeen as it shows the city continues to be at the forefront of developing green technologies." "The roll out of the new double-decker buses will help to cement Aberdeen's position as an entrepreneurial and technological leader as the new buses come with even more advanced technology which pushes established hydrogen boundaries and greatly assists us in tackling air pollution in the city." First Aberdeen is to run the 15 buses along one of its most popular service routes, with the vehicles expected to be in service in November, 2020.

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At the end of September, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other: a small autonomous surveillance drone, called Ring Always Home Cam, and a palm recognition scanner, called Amazon One. "Both products aim to make security and authentication more convenient -- but for privacy-conscious consumers, they also raise red flags," reports Wired. From the report: Amazon's latest data-hungry innovations are not launching in a vacuum. The company also owns Ring, whose smart doorbells have had myriad security issues and have been widely criticized for bringing unprecedented surveillance to traditionally semi-private spaces. Meanwhile, the biometric data that Amazon Go will collect is particularly sensitive, because unlike a password you can't simply change it if a hacker steals it or it gets unintentionally exposed. Amazon has a strong record for maintaining the security of its massive cloud infrastructure, but there have been lapses across the sprawling business. The stakes are already phenomenally high; the more data the company holds the more risk it takes on. "Amazon has a major genomics cloud platform, so maybe they hold your DNA and now they're going to have your palm as well? Plus all of these devices inside your house. And your purchase history on Prime. That's a lot of information. That's a lot of personal information," says Nina Alli, executive director of Defcon's Biohacking Village and a health care security researcher. "When you give away this data you're giving a company the ability to access and manage you, not the other way around." [...] Additionally, while companies like Apple and Samsung have brought biometric fingerprint and face scanners to the masses by making sure the data never leaves the device, Amazon One takes the opposite approach. Kumar writes that "palm images are never stored" on Amazon One itself. Instead they are encrypted and sent to a special high security area of Amazon's cloud to be converted into "palm signatures" based on the unique and distinctive features of a user's hand. Then the service compares that signature to the one on file in each user's account and returns a match or no match answer back down to the device. It makes sense that Amazon doesn't want to store databases of people's palm data locally on publicly accessible machines that could be manipulated. But the system could perhaps have been set up to generate a palm signature locally, delete the image of a person's hand, and send only the encrypted signature on for analysis. The fact that all of those palm images will be going for cloud processing creates a single point of failure. "I'm worried that people could read your palm vein pattern in other ways and construct an analog. It's only a matter of time," says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a longtime security and privacy researcher and a senior vice president at the nonprofit Internet Society. "Both the home drone and the palm payment are going to rely heavily on the cloud and on the security provided by that cloud storage. That's worrying because it means all the risks -- rogue employees, government data requests, data breach, secondary uses -- associated with data collection on the server-side could be possible. I'm much more comfortable having a biometric template stored locally rather than on a server where it might be exfiltrated." An Amazon spokesperson told WIRED, "We are confident that the cloud is highly secure. In addition, Amazon One palm data is stored separately from other personal identifiers, and is uniquely encrypted with its own keys in a secure zone in the cloud."

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A recent survey by British Virgin Islands-based VPN service provider ExpressVPN asked 1,506 American adults in an exclusive (non-married) relationship to find out their password sharing habits across social media platforms. ZDNet reports on the findings: The survey showed that couples share a variety of passwords with each other, and they most commonly share within the first six months of dating. The most commonly shared passwords between couples are for video streaming (78%), mobile devices (64%), and music streaming (58%). Almost half (47%) of Americans in a relationship share social media passwords and 38% share their personal email passwords. Most services, apart from social media and mobile device accounts (which are shared most with family), are more commonly shared with a significant other than family or friends. Respondents said that sharing passwords is most indicative of trust (70%), commitment (63%), intimacy (54%), marriage-material (51%), affection (48%), and vulnerability (47%). Among those sharing video streaming services, Netflix (86%), Hulu (57%), and Amazon Prime Video (52%) are shared most with a significant other. Millennials and Generation Z are also more likely to share passwords with their significant others across all platforms, as compared to older folks. Among people who do not share passwords with anyone, the most common objection is that the same username and password combination is often used for additional accounts. Among respondents, men are more guilty than women of still secretly using an ex's login information/password post-break up. Over one in four (26%) currently use their ex's game streaming services account and online news subscriptions (26%). A quarter (25%) access their ex's photo sharing program, and food/grocery delivery sites. Almost one in four (23%) currently access social media accounts, mobile wallets, music, and video streaming services and one in five access their ex's personal email accounts. One in four 25% of respondents confess to currently tracking an ex's real-time location and 30% confess to secretly logging in to an ex's social media account at least once, with 23% admitting to still doing so currently. It is not surprising that over one in three (36%) of respondents indicate regret in sharing passwords with a significant other, either during the relationship or after a breakup -- with men feeling more regretful than women (40% vs. 32%).

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One in 10 new cars sold across Europe this year will be electric or plug-in hybrid, triple last year's sales levels after carmakers rolled out new models to meet emissions rules, according to projections from green policy group Transport & Environment. The market share of mostly electric cars will rise to 15 percent next year, the group forecasts, as carmakers across the continent race to cut their CO2 levels. The projections are based on sales data for the first half of the year, as well as expected increases as manufacturers scramble to comply with tightening restrictions in 2021. Under the rules, carmakers must reduce the average emissions from their vehicles to 95g of CO2 per km or face fines that could run into billions of euros. In the first six months of the year, average emissions fell from 122g to 111g, the largest six-month drop in more than a decade. While five percent of the cars sold this year are excluded from the calculations, a concession from the EU to help carmakers ease into the new regime, every vehicle counts towards the total from next year. [...] Several carmakers are still lagging behind the new rules, according to T&E calculations, requiring a late spurt of electric sales, or the purchase of credits from a rival that has already exceeded the rules if they are to avoid large fines. The system allows those who have generated "credits" by selling pure electric cars or plug-in hybrids to sell them to rivals that are struggling to meet the rules. The value of credits falls over time.

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The Xplora 4 smartwatch, made by Chinese outfit Qihoo 360 Technology Co, and marketed to children under the Xplora brand in the US and Europe, can covertly take photos and record audio when activated by an encrypted SMS message, says Norwegian security firm Mnemonic. The Register reports: This backdoor is not a bug, the finders insist, but a deliberate, hidden feature. Around 350,000 watches have been sold so far, Xplora says. Exploiting this security hole is non-trivial, we note, though it does reveal the kind of remotely accessible stuff left in the firmware of today's gizmos. "The backdoor itself is not a vulnerability," said infosec pros Harrison Sand and Erlend Leiknes in a report on Monday. "It is a feature set developed with intent, with function names that include remote snapshot, send location, and wiretap. The backdoor is activated by sending SMS commands to the watch." The researchers suggest these smartwatches could be used to capture photos covertly from its built-in camera, to track the wearer's location, and to conduct wiretapping via the built-in mic. They have not claimed any such surveillance has actually been done. The watches are marketed as a child's first phone, we're told, and thus contain a SIM card for connectivity (with an associated phone number). Parents can track the whereabouts of their offspring by using an app that finds the wearer of the watch. Xplora contends the security issue is just unused code from a prototype and has now been patched. But the company's smartwatches were among those cited by Mnemonic and Norwegian Consumer Council in 2017 for assorted security and privacy concerns. With the appropriate Android intent, an incoming encrypted SMS message received by the Qihoo SMS app could be directed through the command dispatcher in the Persistent Connection Service to trigger an application command, like a remote memory snapshot. Exploiting this backdoor requires knowing the phone number of the target device and its factory-set encryption key. This data is available to those to Qihoo and Xplora, according to the researchers, and can be pulled off the device physically using specialist tools. This basically means ordinary folks aren't going to be hacked, either by the manufacturer under orders from Beijing or opportunistic miscreants attacking gizmos in the wild, though it is an issue for persons of interest. It also highlights the kind of code left lingering in mass-market devices.

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OnePlus, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer that has turned into one of the most popular Android smartphone brands worldwide, is reportedly missing one of its cofounders. According to Android Police, citing Reddit user JonSigur, who published alleged screenshots of internal memos at OnePlus, co-founder Carl Pei has left his role at the company after nearly seven years. From the report: The messages listed the company's leadership structure, with Pei notably absent. The memos also noted Emily Dai, who was in charge (or could still be in charge) of OnePlus operations in India, was recently appointed as the head of the Nord product line globally. Pei was previously in charge of Nord, and was prominently featured in the documentary about the phone's development. We reached out to OnePlus for a statement, and a spokesperson declined to comment. That adds more credibility to the story -- if it were false, it would be extremely easy for OnePlus to outright deny it. The report notes that OnePlus' other co-founder, Pete Lau, remains the company's CEO.

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Mark Wilson writes: Microsoft has teamed up with HP to work on a fix for a problem affecting various HP Business Notebooks. The flaw not only causes a reduction in performance and battery life, but can also lead to swollen batteries. The problem lies with the HP Battery Health Manager, and the update from Microsoft and HP is rolling out to enable a new charging algorithm to help alleviate the issue. Writing about the update, Microsoft says: "Microsoft is working with HP to distribute a solution to help address a configuration setting issue within HP Battery Health Manager on select HP Business Notebooks that can affect battery life and performance. This update does not require a restart to take effect."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: Doctors at Stanford University are at the forefront of a global movement of health experts who are criticizing lockdowns to control COVID-19 and say schools and businesses should reopen, but with a focus on protecting the elderly and infirm who are most vulnerable to the virus. Called the Great Barrington Declaration after the western Massachusetts town where it was hatched this month at an economic policy think tank, their statement of purpose is the handiwork of three principal drafters who include Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. "As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies," the declaration states. "The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk." Though the arguments are not new, with more than 18,000 medical, science and public health practitioners among its more than 191,000 worldwide online signatories, it represents the largest public break among health experts from their peers' prevailing support for lockdowns since the pandemic began early this year. "Bhattacharya, who drafted the declaration with doctors Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard University medical professor, and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, has been at the center of the lockdown controversy from the start," the report notes. "In March, he co-authored a Wall Street Journal opinion column suggesting the new coronavirus may not be as deadly as many believe. The following month, he co-authored a Stanford study that indicated the virus was far more prevalent than presumed and as a result, the death rate far lower. That pre-peer-review study -- which was later revised -- drew withering criticism and even prompted Stanford to review the team's work, which Bhattacharya said he was confident would be vindicated."

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Disney is restructuring its media and entertainment divisions, as streaming becomes the most important facet of the company's business. From a report: On Monday, the company revealed that in order to further accelerate its direct-to-consumer strategy, it would be centralizing its media businesses into a single organization that will be responsible for content distribution, ad sales and Disney+. The move by Disney comes as the global coronavirus pandemic has crippled its theatrical business and ushered more customers towards its streaming options. As of August, Disney has 100 million paid subscribers across its streaming offerings, more than half of which are subscribers to Disney+. "I would not characterize it as a response to Covid," CEO Bob Chapek told CNBC's Julia Boorstin on CNBC's "Closing Bell" Monday. "I would say Covid accelerated the rate at which we made this transition, but this transition was going to happen anyway."

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sandbagger writes: A government-backed advert that encouraged people working in the arts to reskill by turning to a career in cybersecurity has been scrapped after the culture secretary described it as "crass." On Monday morning Oliver Dowden distanced himself from the Cyber First campaign, which resurfaced on the same day his department was celebrating awarding $338 million in funding to struggling venues and organisations. Dowden tweeted that the ad campaign, which is backed by the government and promotes retraining in tech, did not come from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), while reiterating that he wanted to "save jobs in the arts." The advert depicts a ballet dancer tying her shoes, with the caption "Fatima's next job could be in tech," which critics said was in bad taste considering thousands of jobs are being lost in the culture sector. The campaign promises to equip people "with the essential cyber skills needed to set you on a rewarding career path."

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Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7% from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis. From a report by the research firm: This is the highest growth the market has seen in the past 10 years. After a weak Q1, the recovery in Q2 continued into Q3 this year, and it even grew on top of a strong market the previous year. Global notebook shipments touched 64 million units (almost as much as the record high of Q4 2011 when notebook shipments were 64.6 million) as demand continued to surge due to second waves of COVID-19 in many countries and companies continued to invest in longer-term transitions to remote working. Shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations grew 28.3% year-on-year. This contrasted with desktop and desktop workstations, which saw shipments shrink by 26.0%. Lenovo regained top spot in the PC market in Q3 with growth of 11.4% and shipments surpassed the 19 million mark. HP posted a similarly impressive growth of 11.9% to secure second place with 18.7 million units shipped. Dell, in third, suffered a small decline of 0.5% in shipments from a year ago. Apple and Acer rounded out the top five rankings, posting stellar growth of 13.2% and 15.0% respectively.

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A recently released tool is letting anyone exploit an unusual Mac vulnerability to bypass Apple's trusted T2 security chip and gain deep system access. The flaw is one researchers have also been using for more than a year to jailbreak older models of iPhones. But the fact that the T2 chip is vulnerable in the same way creates a new host of potential threats. Worst of all, while Apple may be able to slow down potential hackers, the flaw is ultimately unfixable in every Mac that has a T2 inside. From a report: In general, the jailbreak community haven't paid as much attention to macOS and OS X as it has iOS, because they don't have the same restrictions and walled gardens that are built into Apple's mobile ecosystem. But the T2 chip, launched in 2017, created some limitations and mysteries. Apple added the chip as a trusted mechanism for securing high-value features like encrypted data storage, Touch ID, and Activation Lock, which works with Apple's "Find My" services. But the T2 also contains a vulnerability, known as Checkm8, that jailbreakers have already been exploiting in Apple's A5 through A11 (2011 to 2017) mobile chipsets. Now Checkra1n, the same group that developed the tool for iOS, has released support for T2 bypass. On Macs, the jailbreak allows researchers to probe the T2 chip and explore its security features. It can even be used to run Linux on the T2 or play Doom on a MacBook Pro's Touch Bar. The jailbreak could also be weaponized by malicious hackers, though, to disable macOS security features like System Integrity Protection and Secure Boot and install malware. Combined with another T2 vulnerability that was publicly disclosed in July by the Chinese security research and jailbreaking group Pangu Team, the jailbreak could also potentially be used to obtain FileVault encryption keys and to decrypt user data. The vulnerability is unpatchable, because the flaw is in low-level, unchangeable code for hardware. "The T2 is meant to be this little secure black box in Macs -- a computer inside your computer, handling things like Lost Mode enforcement, integrity checking, and other privileged duties," says Will Strafach, a longtime iOS researcher and creator of the Guardian Firewall app for iOS. "So the significance is that this chip was supposed to be harder to compromise -- but now it's been done."

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Razer has unveiled its fall lineup of gaming products for its base of hardcore gamers, including new laptops and an ergonomic gaming chair. The company unveiled the gear at its first annual RazerCon weekend-long event, a virtual festival filmed at the company's Las Vegas store. The event includes concerts with artists such as Deadmau5, DragonForce and Friends, Sabaton, and Speaker Honey. From a report: More than a million people were watching at the outset of RazerCon as Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan took the stage. He noted that Razer donated more than a million masks during the pandemic and that fans donated 75,000. He said Razer also created a $15 million COVID-19 relief fund and the company is supporting green product design with its products and packaging. Tan also announced a partnership with Conservation International to fund the protection of trees worldwide. Razer announced the latest version of its Razer Blade Stealth 13 laptop with an "ultrabook" design. It has an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor running at up to 4.7GHz (base performance of 2.8GHz), a full HD OLED touch display option, and THX Spatial Audio. It also has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics chip (the same as the prior model with 4GB GDDR6 memory, which gives it 10% faster graphics performance) and is 2.7 times better at content creation than the previous version. The display has an option for operating at a 120-hertz refresh rate. Razer marketing manager Eugene Kuo said in a press briefing that the laptop is the company's first to combine the OLED screen with the faster refresh rate. The laptop runs at 28 watts and can produce darker images and contrast ratios. Razer acquired THX, which was founded by filmmaker George Lucas, and is now adding the THX Spatial Audio technology to its peripherals and computers. For gaming, Razer claims the spatial audio offers a competitive edge, as you can hear which direction enemies are coming from. The Razer Blade Stealth 13 will be available this month at $1,800 on Razer.com, as well as through select retailers this fall.

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Project xCloud, the Microsoft game-streaming service that comes packed as a bonus in certain Xbox Game Pass subscription plans, may finally have a path to working on Apple's range of iOS devices -- well after a public row between the tech giants that put the possibility into question. From a report: The news comes from a report by Business Insider, which claimed that an internal Microsoft meeting on Wednesday included a vote of confidence from Xbox chief Phil Spencer. "We absolutely will end up on iOS," Spencer reportedly said about getting its streamed Project xCloud game content onto iOS devices in "2021." Previously, Apple shot down existing versions of both Project xCloud (which has since been rolled into the "Xbox Game Pass" app) and Google Stadia as iOS apps. Their public statements hinged on "reviewing" the games included in the subscription against App Store guidelines, though the issue could also stem from in-app purchases within both Xbox and Stadia's offerings. Eventually, Apple offered a revised stance on such apps, but this onerous "approval for every separate game" proposal comes with its own headaches, as opposed to a clear path toward a simple subscription service (as you'll find in popular iOS media apps like Netflix and Amazon Video).

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EU regulators are drawing up a "hit list" of up to 20 large internet companies, likely to include Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Apple, that will be subject to new and far more stringent rules aimed at curbing their market power. From a report: Under the plans, large platforms that find themselves on the list will have to comply with tougher regulation than smaller competitors, according to people familiar with the discussions, including new rules that will force them to share data with rivals and an obligation to be more transparent on how they gather information. The list will be compiled based on a number of criteria, including market share of revenues and number of users, meaning the likes of Facebook and Google are likely to be included. Those deemed to be so powerful that rivals cannot trade without using their platforms could also be added. The move to gain new powers is part of a growing effort in Brussels to force big technology companies to change their business practices without a full investigation or any finding that they have broken existing laws. It follows complaints that the current regulatory regime has resulted in weak and belated action, which has done little to foster competition. The number of companies and the precise criteria for the list is still being discussed, but it is the latest indication of how serious the EU is about coming up with powers to limit the power of platforms seen as "too big to care."

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