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An anonymous reader shares a report: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners is out with a report on how iPhone activations compare to Android in the US. The latest data shows a notable drop over the last year bringing Apple's US smartphone market share of new activations back in time six years. CIRP shared its new iPhone report on its Substack this morning. The firm notes that while it believes Apple's installed smartphone base is higher than the recent share of US smartphone activations, the latter has taken a dive. As shown below, the metric peaked at 40% for Q1 and Q2 in 2023 with Apple seeing a decline to 33% of new smartphone activations in the US as of Q1 2024, says CIRP. That means 2 out of 3 new smartphone activations in the US are Android devices. Per CIRP's data, Apple hasn't seen numbers that low since 2017.

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Watch out Intel ... Angstrom-class A16 with Super Rail backside power tech incoming

Semiconductor giant TSMC has disclosed details of a process technology called A16 that could be delivering the first 1.6nm chips for customers by 2026.…

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote to restore net neutrality on Thursday in the latest volley of a yearslong game of political ping-pong. From a report: The commission is expected to reclassify internet service providers (ISPs) -- e.g., broadband companies like AT&T and Comcast -- as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. That classification would open ISPs up to greater oversight by the FCC. The vote is widely expected to go in favor of reinstating net neutrality since FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, controls the agency's agenda. Rosenworcel moved forward with the measure after a fifth commissioner was sworn in, restoring a Democratic majority on the panel. Net neutrality proponents say that oversight can help ensure fair access to an open internet by upholding principles like no blocking or throttling of internet traffic. Opponents, including industry players, fear it could halt innovation and subject ISPs to onerous price regulations. Update FCC Votes To Restore Net Neutrality.

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App maker accuses Cupertino of defying EU rules

Spotify claims Apple rejected an update to the popular music streaming app that would have informed users about purchase methods outside of the Apple ecosystem.…

Ford's electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall. From a report: Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers. The EV unit, which Ford calls Model e, sold 10,000 vehicles in the quarter, down 20% from the number it sold a year earlier. And its revenue plunged 84% to about $100 million, which Ford attributed mostly to price cuts for EVs across the industry. That resulted in the $1.3 billion loss before interest and taxes (EBIT), and the massive per-vehicle loss in the Model e unit. A price war among EVs for about a year and a half has made profitability very difficult said Ford CFO John Lawler. He said while Ford has removed about $5,000 in cost on each Mustang Mach-E, "revenue is dropping faster than we can take out the cost." In 2023, Ford Model e reported a full-year EBIT loss of $4.7 billion on sales of 116,000 EVs, or an average of $40,525 per vehicle, just more than a third of the first quarter loss.

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Crew entirely optional

DARPA has been working on off-road autonomous vehicles for decades, and now it has a combat-scale unmanned tank to show.…

Apple has rejected Spotify's new version of its iOS app with in-app pricing information for users in the European Union, the audio streaming firm said on Thursday. Reuters: The Swedish company submitted a new version of its app to Apple with basic pricing and website information, which is a minimum requirement under the European Commission's ruling in its music streaming case, it said in a post on X on Wednesday. Spotify said the Cupertino, California based-Apple rejected its update in a response directly sent to the company. "Apple has once again defied the European Commission's decision, rejecting our update for attempting to communicate with customers about our prices unless we pay Apple a new tax. Their disregard for consumers and developers is matched only by their disdain for the law," a spokesperson for Spotify said in a statement. In March, Brussels fined Apple with 1.84 billion euros ($1.97 billion) for thwarting competition from music streaming rivals via restrictions on its App Store, marking its first ever EU antitrust penalty, following a 2019 complaint from Spotify.

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Europe's largest local authority had no way of knowing if fraud took place

Birmingham City Council, Europe's biggest local authority, has no way of knowing if financial fraud has been committed after it failed to run security and audit features in a new Oracle Fusion ERP system.…

Memory biz ditches NAND production plans to make more crucial HBM tech

The global AI infrastructure buying frenzy is still in full swing – so much so that it has pushed the world's second largest memory maker, SK hynix, into its second highest operating profit ever and an all-time high for Q1 revenues.…

The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said AI will result in "minimal" need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI's rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond. From a report: K Krithivasan, TCS chief executive, told the Financial Times that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, wider adoption of generative AI among multinational clients would overhaul the kind of customer help centres that have created mass employment in countries such as India and the Philippines. "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," he said. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point." He said chatbots would soon be able to analyse a customer's transaction history and do much of the work done by call centre agents. "That's where we are going...I don't think we are there today -- maybe a year or so down the line," he said.

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Google security crew reveal ‘the four Ds’ to be on the watch for

It may come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that experts say, in revealing the most prevalent and likely tactics to meddle with elections this year, that state-sponsored cybercriminals pose the biggest threat.…

Revenues up, but is the AI hype bubble is threatening to burst?

Meta's shares tumbled after company boss Mark Zuckerberg said the quiet bit out loud: it will take a while before AI bets start paying back the huge financial investments it is making.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it's been in more than century. There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age. The birth rate fell among most age groups between 2022 and 2023, the new report shows. The teen birth rate reached another record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, which is 79% lower than it was at the most recent peak from 1991. However, the rate of decline was slower than it's been for the past decade and a half. Meanwhile, births continued to shift to older mothers. Older age groups saw smaller decreases in birth rates, and the birth rate was highest among women ages 30 to 34 -- with about 95 births for every 1,000 women in this group in 2023. Women 40 and older were the only group to see an increase in birth rate, although -- at less than 13 births for every 1,000 women -- it remained lower than any other age group.

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Struggling French tech giant posts disappointing Q1 results

Crisis-hit tech giant Atos is pushing back the deadline for its refinancing proposals after posting a slim operating profit of €48 million ($51 million) for calendar Q1.…

What do we say to the God of Death? Not today

Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) has woken up again, having survived three lunar nights.…

The software redemption

Teaching prisoners how to design and program websites turns out to improve their sense of self-worth and provides them with digital literacy skills that help them stay out of prison.…

The Thermonator can be yours for just $9,420

Picture Boston Dynamics' nightmare fuel robot dog Spot. Now imagine it 1,000 percent more terrifying.…

An international team of scientists used 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera to create the most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life. The research has been published in the journal Nature. Phys.Org reports: The major milestone for plant science, led by [Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew] and involving 138 organizations internationally, was built on 15 times more data than any comparable studies of the flowering plant tree of life. Among the species sequenced for this study, more than 800 have never had their DNA sequenced before. The sheer amount of data unlocked by this research, which would take a single computer 18 years to process, is a huge stride towards building a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants -- a massive undertaking by Kew's Tree of Life Initiative. The flowering plant tree of life, much like our own family tree, enables us to understand how different species are related to each other. The tree of life is uncovered by comparing DNA sequences between different species to identify changes (mutations) that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record. Our understanding of the tree of life is improving rapidly in tandem with advances in DNA sequencing technology. For this study, new genomic techniques were developed to magnetically capture hundreds of genes and hundreds of thousands of letters of genetic code from every sample, orders of magnitude more than earlier methods. A key advantage of the team's approach is that it enables a wide diversity of plant material, old and new, to be sequenced, even when the DNA is badly damaged. The vast treasure troves of dried plant material in the world's herbarium collections, which comprise nearly 400 million scientific specimens of plants, can now be studied genetically. [...] Across all 9,506 species sequenced, more than 3,400 came from material sourced from 163 herbaria in 48 countries. Additional material from plant collections around the world (e.g., DNA banks, seeds, living collections) have been vital for filling key knowledge gaps to shed new light on the history of flowering plant evolution. The team also benefited from publicly available data for more than 1,900 species, highlighting value of the open science approach to future genomic research. Flowering plants alone account for about 90% of all known plant life on land and are found virtually everywhere on the planet -- from the steamiest tropics to the rocky outcrops of the Antarctic Peninsula. [...] Utilizing 200 fossils, the authors scaled their tree of life to time, revealing how flowering plants evolved across geological time. They found that early flowering plants did indeed explode in diversity, giving rise to more than 80% of the major lineages that exist today shortly after their origin. However, this trend then declined to a steadier rate for the next 100 million years until another surge in diversification about 40 million years ago, coinciding with a global decline in temperatures. These new insights would have fascinated Darwin and will surely help today's scientists grappling with the challenges of understanding how and why species diversify. A list of "remarkable species" included in the flowering plant tree of life is embedded below the article. Looking ahead, the study's authors believe this data will aid future attempts to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Tech giants confident everything's in order

UK regulators want to hear from "interested third parties" on whether Microsoft and Amazon's investments in AI startups is impeding competition.…

'Software companies try to extend their reach and their usage, but this can't be by locking in users,' says process mining lead

BMW's process mining leader has called for greater openness among enterprise application and software vendors to avoid data lock-in.…