iPhone users will have to opt-in to tracking starting with iOS 14. Advertisers are “crying foul,” reports the Washington Post:

[W]ith Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company’s latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month… “This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” Facebook said in a blog post.

Some in the advertising industry see the moves as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple’s access to the data becomes more valuable. “I think there’s probably 30 percent truth in that they’re doing it for privacy reasons and it’s 70 percent that they’re doing it because it’s what’s good for Apple,” said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. “It’s a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem,” he said. “They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist…?”

Apple says that when customers open apps, they’ll be asked whether they’d like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an “ID for Advertisers,” or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier… With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50% drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple…

“There’s been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They’re saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we’re going to do,” said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers.

“Personally, I don’t see the problem here,” argues Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy.

The Post notes that Apple runs its own advertising business based on data gathered from its users — but Apple’s director of privacy engineering “doesn’t consider this data gathering ‘tracking’…because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they’re not using Facebook.”

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Source: Slashdot – Are Apple’s Privacy Changes Hypocritical, Unfair to Facebook and Advertising Companies?

An anonymous reader writes:

The fact that Apple is moving away from Intel to ARM has been making a lot of headlines recently — but that’s not the only new place where ARM CPUs have been making a splash.

ARM has also been turning heads in High Performance Computing (HPC), and an ARM-based system is now the world’s most powerful supercomputer (Fugaku). AWS recently made their 2nd generation ARM Graviton chips available which allows everyone to test HPC workloads on ARM silicon. A company called The Numerical Algorithms Group recently published a small benchmark study that compared weather simulations on Intel, AMD and ARM instances on AWS and reported that although the ARM silicon is slowest, it is also the cheapest for this benchmark.
The benchmark test concludes the ARM processor provides “a very cost-efficient solution…and performance is competitive to other, more traditional HPC processors.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ARM Not Just For Macs: Might Make Weather Forecasting Cheaper Too

“Cloudflare, an internet service that is supposed to keep websites up and running, was down itself Sunday, taking dozens of websites and online services along with it,” reports CNN:

Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Feedly, Discord, and dozens of other services reported connectivity problems Sunday morning. Cloudflare said the problem was with a third-party “transit provider,” and its service was becoming increasingly stable over the course of the day… CenturyLink, formerly known as Level 3, confirmed there was an IP outage impacting Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and that all services had been restored as of 11:15 AM ET…

DownDetector, which displays reports of internet and service outages, showed that reports of internet connectivity came in across the United States and Europe Sunday morning.

Anyone experiencing any connectivity issues this morning?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Major Internet Outage: Dozens of Sites are Down