Following the shutdown of an alternative app store, Apple has accused the European Commission (EC) of using “political delay tactics” as an excuse to probe and fine the company, Bloomberg reported. Apple issued the statement preemptively as commission is reportedly preparing to blame Apple for the shutdown of third-party app store Setapp due to what the developer called “still-evolving and complex business terms.”

As part of an EU ruling, Apple was forced to allow third-party marketplaces for apps once the Digital Markets Act (DMA) took effect in 2024. Apple agreed to allow such stores, but implemented fees of €0.50 per installation if the number of downloads exceeded one million, among other rules.

In April 2025, the EC found Apple to be in “non-compliance” with the DMA over rules on “steering” users to alternative payments and levied a $500 million fine. In June last year, Apple said it would change its pricing for third-party App Stores to a five percent revenue share called the Core Technology Commission (CTC).

However, Apple said that the EC has so far refused to allow those changes. In the meantime, a developer called MacPaw shut down its fledgling Setapp store, saying Apple’s terms “don’t fit Setapp’s current business model” due to the complexity. As a result, the EC will reportedly rule that Apple hasn’t addressed the key issues it raised regarding business terms, including their complexity.

“The European Commission has refused to let us implement the very changes that they requested,” Apple said in a statement to Bloomberg. “In October, we submitted a formal compliance plan and they have yet to respond. The EC is using political delay tactics to mislead the public, move the goal posts, and unfairly target an American company with burdensome investigations and onerous fines.”

In reply, the EC told Engadget that it’s in “constant” contact with Apple with the aim of finding a DMA-compliant solution. “The Commission’s main objective is that gatekeepers operate in full compliance with the DMA. The Commission is available to discuss and work with gatekeepers to achieve full compliance. In this context, the Commission has been in a constant dialogue with Apple to solve all pending issues, while also listening to developers from all over the world. We remain committed to this exchange to find a DMA compliant solution.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-accuses-europe-of-delay-tactics-following-alternative-app-store-collapse-124701591.html?src=rss

It’s been a while since rumors and reports suggested Apple is exploring a new divisive product category, and it’s been several years since the Apple car. Unfortunately, the new challenger is a wearable AI pin with cameras, mics and… zero interest from me.

According to a report from The Information, it’ll resemble a slightly thicker AirTag with an aluminum and glass exterior. The report suggests it’ll have two cameras (standard and wide-angle) for photos and video. It may also have three microphones and a (swoon) physical button. I love a physical button.

Apple

How is Apple going to pitch it? What is the non-creepy, not-nefarious selling point of a tiny listening device with cameras? As Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar puts it: Why attempt an unproven wearable? Especially when its own Watch and AirPods could already deliver a lot of what’s being rumored here. 

The Information says Apple could release its AI pin as early as 2027, but it’s reportedly only in the very early stages and could still be canceled. Even if the Vision Pro and Watch eventually happened, the Apple Car and the Apple TV never did.

— Mat Smith

TikTok finalizes deal for its US entity

A group of non-Chinese investors will own 80 percent of it.

TikTok owner ByteDance has finalized a deal for its US entity. The majority of its stake is held by a group of non-Chinese investors. The deal was closed just before the Trump administration’s latest deadline to ban the app in the US unless it was divested from ByteDance. TikTok’s new investors will own 80 percent, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, an Emirati-state owned investment firm, taking 15 percent each.  

According to TikTok’s announcement, the joint venture will protect American users’ data with Oracle’s secure US cloud environment. It will also retrain TikTok’s algorithm using US users’ data and will be responsible for content moderation in the US. The new US TikTok also promises interoperability, ensuring users still get international content and, if they’re creators, viewers.

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Bungie’s Marathon arrives on March 5

Another extraction shooter to distract.

Bungie

Bungie’s long-awaited Marathon will arrive on March 5. The 3v3 extraction shooter has a lot riding on it — but it looks pretty damn cool. You might remember Sony, Bungie’s parent company, previously committed to a September 2025 release. However, it delayed the game indefinitely last June after a mixed reception to its alpha and partially plagiarized visual assets.

It’s a very important game for both Bungie and Sony. The latter said Destiny 2 had not lived up to its expectations. It wants another hit like Helldivers 2, not another Concord.

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How to find an affordable GPU during the great RAMageddon

It sucks out there.

If you’re thinking about getting a new graphics card this year, your window for doing so at a typical retail price has closed. What do you do if you want to upgrade to a new graphics card this year? If you’re sitting on an older GPU, the best advice we can give is to stick with your current hardware. On the other hand, if your current GPU is not up to running the games you want to play, consider buying a card with at least 12GB of VRAM. Then, well, read on for more tips and our top recommendations.

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The biggest stories you might have missed

• One year of access to Monarch Money’s budgeting app is down to $50 right now 

• Fable will let you be a heartless landlord this fall 

• Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images — including 23,000 of children — over 11 days 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-apple-might-be-making-its-own-airtag-sized-ai-wearable-121500060.html?src=rss

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between ‘active’ sitting, like playing cards or reading, and ‘passive’ sitting, like watching TV. […] “Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific type of activity,” explains public health researcher Paul Gardiner from the University of Queensland in Australia. “Most people spend many hours sitting each day, so the type of sitting really matters … These findings show that small everyday choices — like reading instead of watching television — may help keep your brain healthier as you age.”

Across numerous studies, Gardiner and colleagues found that active sitting activities, like reading, playing card games, and using a computer, showed “overwhelmingly positive associations with cognitive health, enhancing cognitive functions such as executive function, situational memory, and working memory.” Meanwhile, passive sitting was most consistently associated with negative cognitive outcomes, including increased risk of dementia. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

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Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. “You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led the study. From a recent IEEE Spectrum article: To quantify the effect, Evans and collaborators from the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology trained a natural language processing model to identify AI-augmented research across six natural science disciplines. Their dataset included 41.3 million English-language papers published between 1980 and 2025 in biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, materials science, and geology. They excluded fields such as computer science and mathematics that focus on developing AI methods themselves. The researchers traced the careers of individual scientists, examined how their papers accumulated attention, and zoomed out to consider how entire fields clustered or dispersed intellectually over time. They compared roughly 311,000 papers that incorporated AI in some way — through the use of neural networks or large language models, for example — with millions of others that did not.

The results revealed a striking trade-off. Scientists who adopt AI gain productivity and visibility: On average, they publish three times as many papers, receive nearly five times as many citations, and become team leaders a year or two earlier than those who do not. But when those papers are mapped in a high-dimensional “knowledge space,” AI-heavy research occupies a smaller intellectual footprint, clusters more tightly around popular, data-rich problems, and generates weaker networks of follow-on engagement between studies. The pattern held across decades of AI development, spanning early machine learning, the rise of deep learning, and the current wave of generative AI. “If anything,” Evans notes, “it’s intensifying.” […] Aside from recent publishing distortions, Evans’s analysis suggests that AI is largely automating the most tractable parts of science rather than expanding its frontiers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems — a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the new law is designed primarily to foster growth in the domestic AI sector, while also introducing baseline safeguards to address potential risks posed by increasingly powerful AI technologies. Officials described the inclusion of legal safety obligations for frontier AI as a world-first legislative step.

The act lays the groundwork for a national-level AI policy framework. It establishes a central decision-making body — the Presidential Council on National Artificial Intelligence Strategy — and creates a legal foundation for an AI Safety Institute that will oversee safety and trust-related assessments. The law also outlines wide-ranging support measures, including research and development, data infrastructure, talent training, startup assistance, and help with overseas expansion.

To reduce the initial burden on businesses, the government plans to implement a grace period of at least one year. During this time, it will not carry out fact-finding investigations or impose administrative sanctions. Instead, the focus will be on consultations and education. A dedicated AI Act support desk will help companies determine whether their systems fall within the law’s scope and how to respond accordingly. Officials noted that the grace period may be extended depending on how international standards and market conditions evolve. The law applies to three areas only: high-impact AI, safety obligations for high-performance AI and transparency requirements for generative AI.

Enforcement under the Korean law is intentionally light. It does not impose criminal penalties. Instead, it prioritizes corrective orders for noncompliance, with fines — capped at 30 million won ($20,300) — issued only if those orders are ignored. This, the government says, reflects a compliance-oriented approach rather than a punitive one. Transparency obligations for generative AI largely align with those in the EU, but Korea applies them more narrowly. Content that could be mistaken for real, such as deepfake images, video or audio, must clearly disclose its AI-generated origin. For other types of AI-generated content, invisible labeling via metadata is allowed. Personal or noncommercial use of generative AI is excluded from regulation. “This is not about boasting that we are the first in the world,” said Kim Kyeong-man, deputy minister of the office of artificial intelligence policy at the ICT ministry. “We’re approaching this from the most basic level of global consensus.”

Korea’s approach differs from the EU by defining “high-performance AI” using technical thresholds like cumulative training compute, rather than regulating based on how AI is used. As a result, Korea believes no current models meet the bar for regulation, while the EU is phasing in broader, use-based AI rules over several years.

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Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip markets, where the company’s current products are the result of decisions made years ago. The company, whose shares have risen 40% in the past month, recently launched a long-awaited laptop chip designed to reclaim its lead in personal computers just as a memory chip crunch is expected to depress sales across that industry.

Meanwhile, Intel executives said the company was caught off guard by surging demand for server central processors that accompany AI chips. Despite running its factories at capacity, Intel cannot keep up with demand for the chips, leaving profitable data center sales on the table while the new PC chip squeezes its margins.

“In the short term, I’m disappointed that we are not able “to fully meet the demand in our markets,” Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan told analysts on a conference call. The company forecast current-quarter revenue between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $12.51 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It expects adjusted earnings per share to break even in the first quarter, compared with expectations of adjusted earnings of 5 cents per share.

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A federal judge revealed a previously undisclosed ~$800 million, six-year partnership between Epic Games and Google tied to Unreal Engine services and joint marketing. It raises questions about whether the deal influenced Epic’s willingness to settle its antitrust case over Android. The Verge reports: [California District Judge James Donato] allowed Epic and Google to keep most of the details of the plan under wraps. But during the hearing, he quizzed witnesses, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and economics expert Doug Bernheim, on how it might impact settlement talks — revealing some hints in the process. “You’re going to be helping Google market Android, and they’re going to be helping you market Fortnite; that deal doesn’t exist today, right?” Donato asked Bernheim, who answered in the affirmative. He also described it as a “new business between Epic and Google.”

Sweeney’s testimony cracked the mystery a little further. He referred to the agreement as relating to the “metaverse,” a term Sweeney has used to refer to Epic’s game Fortnite. “Epic’s technology is used by many companies in the space Google is operating in to train their products, so the ability for Google to use the Unreal Engine more fullsome… sorry, I’m blowing this confidentiality,” Sweeney said. Donato then offered a hard dollar figure on one part of the deal: “An $800 million spend over six years, that’s a pretty healthy partnership,” he said. We soon learned that refers to Epic spending $800 million to purchase some sort of services from Google: “Every year we’ve decided against Google, in this year we’re deciding to use Google at market rates,” he said. Sweeney did throw cold water on the idea that Epic and Google are jointly building a single new product together, though. “This is Google and Epic each separately building product lines,” he clarified, when Judge Donato asked what the term sheet referred to with the line “Google and Epic will work together.”

Donato seemed potentially leery of the partnership, asking Bernheim whether it could constitute a “quid pro quo” that reduced Epic’s incentive to push for terms that would benefit other developers. Currently, Epic is backing a settlement that would see Google reduce its standard app store fees worldwide and allow alternative app stores to register for easy installation on Android. Sweeney disputed the notion that Epic might be getting paid off to soften its terms, when it’s the one paying out. “I don’t see anything crooked about Epic paying Google off to encourage much more robust competition than they’ve allowed in the past,” he said. “We view this as a significant transfer of value from Epic to Google.” He also says the Epic Games Store won’t get any special treatment from Android in the future under this deal. It appears that the settlement arrangement is tied to the business deal. Judge Donato suggested that Epic and Google would only make the deal if the settlement goes through. Sweeney says the specific terms of the deal have not yet been reached, but admitted that he expects them to. He told Judge Donato that yes, he considers the settlement and deal “an important part of Epic’s growth plan for the future.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.