Submission + - Apple Sues OpenAI, Accusing It of Stealing Company Secrets (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing secrets about products still in development, setting up a legal face-off between two of the world’s biggest tech companies. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the consumer tech giant said that OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence that has a new hardware business, had asked job candidates from Apple to share details about secret projects and to bring device components and prototypes to their interviews. Apple also accused an OpenAI employee of downloading internal documents from a laptop owned by the iPhone maker. OpenAI used the confidential information to approach Apple’s manufacturing partners, including asking one partner to demonstrate Apple’s technique for finishing metal on its devices, the lawsuit says. Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February to raise concerns that confidential information could be “making its way to OpenAI’s business improperly,” according to the suit. OpenAI did not respond, Apple said. “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple wrote in its lawsuit.

[...] In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees. Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said. Mr. Liu also planned to access internal documents through an Apple-owned laptop that he didn’t return when he left the company, according to the lawsuit. OpenAI had misled the manufacturing company it approached to learn about the metal finishing technique to believe it had Apple’s permission to view it, according to the lawsuit. Apple is seeking an injunction that would prevent OpenAI from possessing, using or sharing Apple’s trade secrets, as well as an order requiring OpenAI to return Apple’s intellectual property.

Submission + - Disable Autoplay and Infinite Scroll or Risk Massive Fines, EU Tells Meta (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Union is ramping up pressure on Meta to make big changes to Facebook and Instagram after the European Commission preliminarily found that features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and highly personalized content recommendations were addictive. On Thursday, the EC said its investigation indicated that “Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.” “These features fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into ‘autopilot mode,’ contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use,” the commission said.

Over the next few months, Meta will have an opportunity to dispute the claims, and it has already taken a defensive stance. Meta’s spokesperson, Ben Walters, told Reuters that Meta disagrees with the commission’s preliminary findings, which supposedly “don’t accurately take into account the significant steps we’ve taken to protect teens.” “Since this investigation began, we rolled out Teen Accounts that automatically protect teens and put parents in control—allowing them to block access to Instagram at night and cap daily screen time at just 15 minutes,” Walters said. However, the EC emphasized that Meta’s current mitigation efforts, including time management tools activated by default for teens, “failed to effectively tackle the risks stemming from its addictive design.” Additionally, parental controls were deemed “only effective if parents and guardians possess adequate technical expertise” and dedicated “effort and time to understand them effectively.” “This undermines the efficiency of such measures in addressing the inherent risks posed by Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design,” the EC said, particularly for minors.

At this stage, the EC recommended that Meta consider “disabling key addictive features such as ‘autoplay’ and ‘infinite scroll’ by default, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks,’ and adapting its recommender system to make it less engagement-oriented.” If Meta fails to make changes to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, the company risks fines up to 6 percent of its global annual turnover when the EC makes its final decision in the coming months. “Our starting point is that, based on our findings, this design is too addictive and changes need to be made,” Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s tech chief, told Reuters. “The next step is either that Meta changes its design or a non-compliance decision will follow,” she said, noting in the press release that the EU’s priority is “protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans.”

Submission + - Satya O'Nadella? Microsoft Defends its $47B Irish Pot of Gold and Low Tax Rates

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The NY Times reports on a new required EU country-by-country compliance report released by Microsoft this week, which provided a rare look into how tech giants shift profits out of the countries where they have many employees and significant sales and into low-tax havens that help them cut their tax bills by billions of dollars. Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones.

Among the sometimes absurd results, Microsoft said it had generated almost 40% of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3% of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1% of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2% of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe. For its 2025 fiscal year, Microsoft reported profit margins of 24% in Ireland, where it paid taxes at a rate of just over 14%, and $47+ billion in pretax profit on revenues of $196 billion (the entire population of Ireland is about 7 million). Microsoft employs roughly 6,600 in Ireland. In Luxembourg, Microsoft claimed profit margins of 142% and a tax rate of just 3%. The company said it had $283 million in pretax income and only 34 employees in the tiny country. But in several of Microsoft’s biggest markets — where tax rates exceed 25% — it reported tiny profit margins. In Germany, France and Italy, the company claimed single-digit profit margins, sometimes barely 5%.

The report still gave only a partial picture, because it lumped in the U.S. with other countries. Microsoft said in a blog post accompanying the report that it followed all the laws in every jurisdiction where it operated, and that the reporting standards created some inconsistencies among countries. “Microsoft is committed to a tax structure that reflects where our people work, where we invest, and where functions, assets, and risks occur,” wrote Jeff Bullwinkel, Microsoft’s top lawyer in Europe. Bullwinkel said Microsoft’s capital expenditures in data centers, its corporate work forces and its work through local partners were also key investments in local economies. “Tax is one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one,” he wrote. The IRS is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion. The company has said it disagrees with the IRS and said in a securities filing that it “will vigorously contest” the proposed tax bills.

Hey, say what you will about former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but at least he didn't try to blow smoke up the public's butt about why Ireland held such a special place in Microsoft's heart. "Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," Ballmer told journalists in 2005 while in Dublin on a tour of the company’s Irish operations. "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise."

Submission + - AP CS Exam Participation Fell in 2026 as AP Statistics Continued to Grow

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a series of Twitter/X posts, the College Board provided a high-level look at this year's AP exam participation and test scores by the nation's high school students. Both AP CS courses saw declines this year in participation to below their 2023 levels, with the Java-based AP Computer Science A exam taken by ~81,500 students in 2026 (with a 66% pass rate) — down from a peak of 98,136 in 2024 — and the 'more approachable', language-agnostic AP Computer Science Principles exam taken by 163,000 students (with a 63% pass rate) — down from a peak of 175,261 in 2024. Meanwhile, the 2026 AP Statistics exam saw an increase in test takers to a record 281,000 students (with a 62% pass rate), up from 266,791 in 2025 and 242,929 in 2023.

One wonders if some of the AP CS participation decline may represent a reaction to AI-driven job displacement fears and visible tech-sector layoffs, factors which have been blamed for depressed college-level CS enrollment. The College Board is already reacting to how AI is changing the K-12 CS narrative, announcing an AI-focused AP CS Principles Course 'modernization' effort in June, just days after tech-backed nonprofit Code.org — a College Board-endorsed AP CSP curriculum provider that bills itself as "the leading provider of K-12 AI and CS education curriculum across the globe" — announced it was rebranding itself as CodeAI, a pivot hailed by The College Board. It's probably worth mentioning that AP exam participation can be lower than AP course enrollment, since students can and do opt out of testing (e.g., students unable to pay for exams or who don't want to pay for exams they think they will fail); The College Board does not publish data on AP course-to-exam gaps.

Interestingly, the College Board identified certain exam questions that AP CS A students struggled to use Java to answer, ironically some of which a non-CS student equipped with Excel could likely easily solve. One of the Free-Response Questions (FRQ) the College Board noted students wrestled with in particular was the following: "Given a username that may contain hyphens [...] return a version with each hyphen and the character immediately preceding it removed, so that 'Amy-Marie-Lin' becomes 'AmMariLin'." Students receiving AP CS A exam scores of 1, the College Board explained, were 'typically unable' to earn any points for their attempts to solve this problem with Java (sample FRQ solutions). Meanwhile, a student who skipped AP CS A could open Excel and use a simple formula — REGEXREPLACE(A1,".-","") — to solve the problem that vexed their Java coding peers after a year-long college level CS course. Perhaps this helps explain why the UK is moving back towards a model that promotes digital literacy for all students and away from the narrow 'rigorous' CS path that the tech giants convinced the UK to adopt more than a decade ago.

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