Month: March 2024
Which of the Top Women’s Seeds Will Avoid an Upset in the Sweet 16?
The third-seeded Oregon State knocked off Notre Dame, a No. 2 seed, while the overall No. 1 seed South Carolina looks to continue its run.
The third-seeded Oregon State knocked off Notre Dame, a No. 2 seed, while the overall No. 1 seed South Carolina looks to continue its run.
Who Will Round Out the Men’s Elite Eight?
Follow along for live updates and analysis as the remaining teams battle to continue in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Follow along for live updates and analysis as the remaining teams battle to continue in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Canonical announces Snap Store crackdown after crypto scam apps overload
All incoming Snaps will be manually reviewed, and their developers doxxed, Canonical says
Going forward, all newly registered apps on the Snap Store will be manually reviewed by the Canonical engineering teams – and furthermore, the developers of these apps will have to accept a background check and will be doxxed if they want their apps to be available on the repository.
The news was confirmed by Holly Hall, product lead at Canonical, the company that offers commercial support and services for Ubuntu and related projects.
The Snap Store is an app repository holding containerized Snap apps for Ubuntu’s Linux distribution. Apparently, this store was under a constant barrage of malicious apps, mostly fake cryptocurrency wallets. With a few people suffering major financial distress as a result of falling prey to these apps, Canonical decided for a radical move of manually reviewing any incoming apps.
Misleading and too flexible
According to Ars Technica, a former Canonical and Ubuntu staffer Alan Pope recently described an incident in which a person lost 9 bitcoins (more than $600,000 right now). They were looking for the Exodus Wallet, a known and popular cryptocurrency wallet, available for different platforms. They found one on the Snap Store but unfortunately, it was a fake.
As soon as they entered their 12-word recovery phrase into the wallet, the funds were transferred to a different address and thus gone forever. While the cryptocurrency industry is marred with fraudsters, and inherently risky, there are things Canonical could do to limit the risk, Pope argues. For example, writing, packaging, and uploading the Snap to Ubuntu’s store results in an app that is “immediately searchable and available for anyone, almost anywhere to download, install and run. No humans in the loop.”
What’s more, Ubuntu’s App Center, where desktop users can browse the Snap Store, tagged the app as “Safe”. This “safe” checkmark was referring to an entirely different thing, but it’s easy to see how some people might have been misled, Pope added.
As a result, engineering teams will now review apps and reach out to publishers. Anyone whose name is “suspected as being malicious or is crypto-wallet-related” will be rejected. Canonical is said to be drafting a policy on creating and publishing crypto wallets.
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When Will Apple Release the iOS 17.5 Beta?
With iOS software releases, it is typical for Apple to be constantly iterating. When a new version of iOS comes out, a new iOS beta almost always follows the day after. iOS 17.4 was released on Tuesday, March 5, and no iOS 17.5 beta followed as is typical. So when might Apple provide the first iOS 17.5 beta?
It’s now been more than three weeks since the launch of iOS 17.4, and pauses like this are unusual, but not unheard of. Sometimes there are droughts because of major features, or holidays, and in this case, it could be both.
Apple is still navigating the app ecosystem changes that were introduced in iOS 17.4, and there are tweaks coming. Apple planned to allow third-party apps to be downloaded only from alternative app marketplaces, but now alternative apps will be provided directly from websites too. The option to download an app from a website has not been introduced as of yet, and it is an unexpected change, so it likely requires some behind the scenes work. There are also other potential changes that Apple must make in the EU as the European Commission investigates its compliance, another factor that may be eating up resources.
This weekend marks the Easter holiday, and holidays can sometimes cause betas to be pushed back too.
When considering these factors, it makes some sense that we haven’t yet had an iOS 17.5 beta. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said on Thursday that Apple’s “beta 1 development finishes next week,” which suggests that we could see a beta release next week or the week after.
Here are the wait times between .4 public releases and .5 first developer betas from prior years:
iOS 13 – 7 days
iOS 14 – 6 days
iOS 15 – 22 days
iOS 16 – 1 day
If iOS 17.5 is released on April 2, it will be 28 days between the prior release and the beta software, and if it comes a week after that, it will have been 35 days.
After the beta does go out, we’ll likely see a release sometime during the month of May. Prior .5 public releases have happened on May 18, May 16, April 26, and May 20.Related Roundups: iOS 17, iPadOS 17Related Forums: iOS 17, iPadOS 17This article, “When Will Apple Release the iOS 17.5 Beta?” first appeared on MacRumors.comDiscuss this article in our forums
With iOS software releases, it is typical for Apple to be constantly iterating. When a new version of iOS comes out, a new iOS beta almost always follows the day after. iOS 17.4 was released on Tuesday, March 5, and no iOS 17.5 beta followed as is typical. So when might Apple provide the first iOS 17.5 beta?
It’s now been more than three weeks since the launch of iOS 17.4, and pauses like this are unusual, but not unheard of. Sometimes there are droughts because of major features, or holidays, and in this case, it could be both.
Apple is still navigating the app ecosystem changes that were introduced in iOS 17.4, and there are tweaks coming. Apple planned to allow third-party apps to be downloaded only from alternative app marketplaces, but now alternative apps will be provided directly from websites too. The option to download an app from a website has not been introduced as of yet, and it is an unexpected change, so it likely requires some behind the scenes work. There are also other potential changes that Apple must make in the EU as the European Commission investigates its compliance, another factor that may be eating up resources.
This weekend marks the Easter holiday, and holidays can sometimes cause betas to be pushed back too.
When considering these factors, it makes some sense that we haven’t yet had an iOS 17.5 beta. Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman said on Thursday that Apple’s “beta 1 development finishes next week,” which suggests that we could see a beta release next week or the week after.
Here are the wait times between .4 public releases and .5 first developer betas from prior years:
iOS 13 – 7 days
iOS 14 – 6 days
iOS 15 – 22 days
iOS 16 – 1 day
If iOS 17.5 is released on April 2, it will be 28 days between the prior release and the beta software, and if it comes a week after that, it will have been 35 days.
After the beta does go out, we’ll likely see a release sometime during the month of May. Prior .5 public releases have happened on May 18, May 16, April 26, and May 20.
This article, “When Will Apple Release the iOS 17.5 Beta?” first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums
NYC’s government chatbot is lying about city laws and regulations
You can be evicted for not paying rent, despite what the “MyCity” chatbot says.
Enlarge / Has a government employee checked all those zeroes and ones floating above the skyline? (credit: Getty Images)
If you follow generative AI news at all, you’re probably familiar with LLM chatbots’ tendency to “confabulate” incorrect information while presenting that information as authoritatively true. That tendency seems poised to cause some serious problems now that a chatbot run by the New York City government is making up incorrect answers to some important questions of local law and municipal policy.
NYC’s “MyCity” ChatBot launched as a “pilot” program last October. The announcement touted the ChatBot as a way for business owners to “save … time and money by instantly providing them with actionable and trusted information from more than 2,000 NYC Business webpages and articles on topics such as compliance with codes and regulations, available business incentives, and best practices to avoid violations and fines.”
But a new report from The Markup and local nonprofit news site The City found the MyCity chatbot giving dangerously wrong information about some pretty basic city policies. To cite just one example, the bot said that NYC buildings “are not required to accept Section 8 vouchers,” when an NYC government info page says clearly that Section 8 housing subsidies are one of many lawful sources of income that landlords are required to accept without discrimination. The Markup also received incorrect information in response to chatbot queries regarding worker pay and work hour regulations, as well as industry-specific information like funeral home pricing.