Alien Ryder Flex

The rain makes me glum and I realize in my late years that the free-market advocates have let me down all this time.

NBA levies “the largest punishment in league history” to Ballmer and the Clippers for violating NBA salary rules: $30 million, plus the loss of five years of first-round draft picks, plus Ballmer himself is banned for a year.

Rhysida (Windows ransomware) blackmailing the city of Berlin with compromised systems and stolen data.

After co-signing a letter encouraging tech companies including Apple not to pass tariffs on to their customers in the form of higher prices — which Apple did not — Elizabeth Warren now admonishing Apple to give its $2.2 billion tariff refund “back” to its…

Walmart, the last big U.S. holdout against Apple Pay, now adopting Apple Pay.

As it did three-and-a-half years ago for $17 million, the Russian government once again fines Apple — this time $50 million — for defying the government’s demands to pre-install things on iPhone that Apple doesn’t want there.

For the first time, Apple’s annual sales in India pass $10 billion.

Apple sues OpenAI over massive trade secret theft; OpenAI responds with a statement that: We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.

OpenAI now says in an open letter: Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details.

Windows 10 still running on more than 1 in 6 Windows PCs, “often unpatched and insecure,” because Microsoft chooses to leave it that way in an attempt to force those users to join the Windows 11 shitshow.

Correction: I believe now that the accurate description of events is as detailed below.

Android, long hailed as surely to blow away iPhone and iPad because “open beats closed,” now well on its way to becoming as closed as iOS.

Now 1/4 of all iPhones are manufactured in India.

BitLocker, Microsoft’s full-volume encryption system that’s supposed to make it impossible for data to be obtained from a stolen Windows PC, is “completely defeat[ed]” by the YellowKey zero-day exploit released by Nightmare-Eclipse, a security researcher…

UK planning to imprison U.S. tech CEOs for up to five years if they do not somehow make it impossible for children ever to see nudity on smartphones, tablets, and desktop/laptop computers.

Jury unanimously rules against Musk in his suit against OpenAI for becoming a successful AI company after he donated $38 million to it back when it was a nonprofit.

Canada decides that streaming services (Netflix, etc.) must pay 15% of their Canadian revenue to “Canadian content” — meaning content created by Canadians, regardless of whether that content is is any way related to Canadian culture or heritage.

Apple announces that the EU will not be included in Siri AI’s impending iOS release, due to the DMA’s apparently non-negotiable requirement that Apple give rival AI companies unfettered access to, and control of, every aspect of iPhone/iPad that Apple giv…

Another idea: If the tamper is made of natural or depleted uranium (U238), then in addition to performing as a significant neutron reflector, it likely also would undergo substantial fission, provoked by the massive neutron flux from the chain-reacting pl…

I posted the following comment on Matthew Bunn’s public nuclear bomb lecture, and the post seemed to succeed, but it doesn’t appear to be viewable for anyone but the poster (me).

Meta’s employee morale now at a severe, all-time low.

Canada working on passage of a law that would require tech companies to support backdoor access to their users’ encrypted data, to which Apple publicly states: This legislation could allow the Canadian government to force companies to break encryption by…

The EC now ordering Google to allow installation of third-party AI agents in Android as a replacement for Google’s own Gemini.

France replacing Windows with Linux on government computers.

Epic’s CEO Sweeney admits: We’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded, then lays off more than 1,000 people.

Despite Apple TV occupying a very small percentage of the EU streaming device market (which is dominated by Roku, Google, Amazon, and Samsung), EU broadcasters still want it to be included in heavy, new, “antitrust” regulations being developed for streami…

High-priced Samsung refrigerators with screens suddenly showing full-screen ads, and owners aren’t pleased.

My first (if not also last) attempt at creating an album of music, using modern AI tools, but with all hand-written lyrics, song structure, style decisions, and post-production editing/engineering.

Musi’s suit over its app’s removal from the App Store dismissed, essentially on the grounds that one company (e.g.

Ten years have gone by, and still today everyone knows why Apple bought Siri.

EU countries charging U.S. tech companies a “digital tax,” so Meta just adds compensatory fees to advertising prices in the countries where this tax is levied.

Zuckerberg, whose Meta is studying the possible negative mental health effects of its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms, now publicly whining that Apple isn’t similarly studying its users’ end-to-end encrypted iMessage content — which, by the…

Doctorow’s latest idea to “de-enshittify” computing is to compel device makers like Apple to offer (in Slashdot’s words) “open firmware that break[s] monopoly lock-ins,” which in practice might be as bad as requiring that private signing keys Apple uses to

Worldwide in 2025, models of iPhone occupied seven of the ten slots for best-selling smartphone, including the top four, and represented over 77% of those phones’ combined unit sales.

CommBank asks Australian government to force Apple to give CommBank a better deal on contactless (NFC) payments.

Ireland working on a bill that will require all providers of encrypted communications to give the police a way to decrypt those messages.

Apple again named world’s most valuable brand by Brand Finance.

Utah state Senate majority leader Kirk Cullimore creates a bill to make Android the state’s official mobile OS.

James Daley of the UK bringing $2 billion suit (class-action requested) against Apple, for charging for Apple Pay instead of providing it for free.

Asus, longtime maker of Windows Mobile phones and the ZenFone line of Android phones, now exiting the smartphone business.

OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage system, continues to frustrate, annoy, and cause total disaster for Windows users, even those who choose not to use it, by quietly reactivating itself, uploading all the user’s files to the cloud, then using deceptive UI

Microsoft testing a new feature that will let IT admins remove Copilot (Microsoft’s annoying, incompetent AI agent) from employees’ Windows PCs — but will not allow consumers to do the same with their own PCs.

To improve Siri, Apple now teaming up with Google’s Gemini AI agent (but in a way that will not give Google individualized data about Apple’s users).

Indian government planning to require that all smartphone makers hand over their OS source code, and get Indian government review and approval for all major OS updates.

AliveCor’s latest suit against Apple — this time antitrust, not patent — is rejected on the grounds “that there is no antitrust duty to deal,” meaning that a company is not illegally monopolizing its own products if it chooses not to do business with anot…

Tesla sales decline another 9% from the previous year, causing it to drop out of first place for EVs, yielding to China’s BVD.

In the half-swan concept, assuming the plutonium needs to be squeezed to significantly denser than solid, then that pressure very likely also will compress the steel plate and/or concrete slab to denser than solid.

The Financial Times reports that: The UK government reportedly will “encourage” Apple and Google to prevent phones from displaying nude images except when users verify that they are adults. ...

In response to Japan’s regulator’s demands — which apply only to Apple and Google, not to Sony or Nintendo — Apple allows Japan-only alternate app stores on iOS with just a 5% markup, skirting 67-83% of Apple’s 15-30% iOS markup.

In a deal with Microsoft, LG force-installs a user-irremovable Copilot icon on its customers’ TVs, but after user complaints and bad PR decides to make the icon user-removable — LG “said there’s no ‘definitive timing’ yet” on when that will happen, and in…