An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Energy Department on Monday announced it intends to loan a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution $2.5 billion to help finance construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facilities. The conditional commitment for the loan to Ultium Cells LLC for facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan is expected to close in the coming months and comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program, which has not funded a new loan since 2010. The plan, first reported by Reuters, would mark the Energy Department's first loan exclusively for a battery cell manufacturing project under the vehicle program.

The program previously provided low-cost government loans to Tesla, Ford and Nissan, which included some cell manufacturing. "We have to have vehicle manufacturing capacity but also battery manufacturing capacity," Jigar Shah, who directs the Energy Department loan program office, told Reuters in an interview. "This project provides one of the newest additions to battery manufacturing scale in this country." [...] Shah said the department has received more than $18 billion in loan requests from the auto program and expects at least another $5 billion in requests that are being actively prepared. "I do think there will more loans issued," Shah said, declining to offer a precise timeline. The program currently has $17.7 billion in lending authority available. Shah said "for motivated borrowers, they can close these loans rather quickly." Reuters notes that GM and LG are investing more than $7 billion via the venture. Production at its Ohio battery plant is expected to begin in August. Production is set to begin at its Tennessee plant in late 2023 and in Michigan in 2024.

Apple is reportedly planning to debut a high-end Apple Watch with a larger screen and a new design, according to a Bloomberg report. CNBC reports: Apple increased the screen size with the Series 7 watches last year, which offer an edge-to-edge screen that removes much of the border on earlier models. But Bloomberg said the new high-end model will feature the first big design change since 2018 with a screen that's 7% larger than the Series 7. It will also have a rugged design, longer battery life and a body-temperature sensor, the report said.

It may be a sign Apple is targeting Garmin's Fenix 7 series watches, which have big screens, long battery life and rugged designs. Those watches are popular among hikers and runners who need longer battery life than the Apple Watch offers. [...] Apple is also expected to announce a new version of its $279 Apple Watch SE, according to the report. The SE models typically include features found in earlier iterations of the Apple Watch, but at a lower price.

Tuned, Meta's social app for couples, is winding down a little over two years after it launched. TechCrunch: Users, including this reporter, began receiving a notification about the impending shutdown last week, advising them to download their data before September 19 when the app will cease to work. Tuned was a project under Meta's New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team, which was originally formed to build consumer-facing apps that would allow Meta to test out new features and gauge people's reactions. Launched in the early months of the pandemic, Tuned was positioned as a way for couples to stay in touch and engaged, with messaging features and quizzes designed to let them share how they're feeling, what they're up to and milestones they're anticipating. Tuned allowed users to exchange notes, photos and videos, challenges, voice messages, notes and lists, and music via a Spotify integration. They could set their respective moods, and -- for more intimate content -- choose a password or a blur filter. A "check-in" feature nudged couples to suss out their feelings about the relationship in any given moment, with prompts to add context.

As new details about the scope of the sabotage emerge, the perpetrators -- and the reason for their vandalism -- remain unknown. From a report: Buried deep beneath your feet lie the cables that keep the internet online. Crossing cities, countrysides, and seas, the internet backbone carries all the data needed to keep economies running and your Instagram feed scrolling. Unless, of course, someone chops the wires in half. On April 27, an unknown individual or group deliberately cut crucial long-distance internet cables across multiple sites near Paris, plunging thousands of people into a connectivity blackout. The vandalism was one of the most significant internet infrastructure attacks in France's history and highlights the vulnerability of key communications technologies. Now, months after the attacks took place, French internet companies and telecom experts familiar with the incidents say the damage was more wide-ranging than initially reported and extra security measures are needed to prevent future attacks. In total, around 10 internet and infrastructure companies -- from ISPs to cable owners -- were impacted by the attacks, telecom insiders say. The assault against the internet started during the early hours of April 27. "The people knew what they were doing," says Michel Combot, the managing director of the French Telecoms Federation, which is made up of more than a dozen internet companies. In the space of around two hours, cables were surgically cut and damaged in three locations around the French capital city -- to the north, south, and east -- including near Disneyland Paris.

"Those were what we call backbone cables that were mostly connecting network service from Paris to other locations in France, in three directions," Combot says. "That impacted the connectivity in several parts of France." As a result, internet connections dropped out for some people. Others experienced slower connections, including on mobile networks, as internet traffic was rerouted around the severed cables. All three incidents are believed to have happened at roughly the same time and were conducted in similar ways -- distinguishing them from other attacks against telecom towers and internet infrastructure. "The cables are cut in such a way as to cause a lot of damage and therefore take a huge time to repair, also generating a significant media impact," says Nicolas Guillaume, the CEO of telecom firm Nasca Group, which owns business ISP Netalis, one of the providers directly impacted by the attacks. "It is the work of professionals," Guillaume says, adding that his company launched a criminal complaint with Paris law enforcement officials following the incident. Two things stand out: how the cables were severed and how the attacks happened in parallel. Photos posted online by French internet company Free 1337 immediately after the attacks show that a ground-level duct, which houses cables under the surface, was opened and the cables cut. Each cable, which can be around an inch in diameter, appears to have straight cuts across it, suggesting the attackers used a circular saw or other type of power tool. Many of the cables have been cut in two places and appear to have a section missing. If they had been cut in one place they could potentially have been reconnected, but the multiple cuts made them harder to repair.

Even Motor City is running short of cars these days. Rental counters at the Detroit airport have run out of vehicles recently. Dealerships all over town are reporting scarce inventory. And buyers are facing months-long delays and soaring prices before they can get their hands on a new truck or SUV. From a report: The root problem is the same across the country -- a global deficit of computer chips that has forced automakers to slash output, causing shortages of new and used vehicles. But the predicament feels particularly offensive here, Detroiters say. "This is an auto manufacturing city. It shouldn't be short of cars," said Benyam Tesfasion, a cabdriver who has been busy shuttling travelers from the airport to pick up rental cars at locations 10 or 20 miles away. Another feature of his daily travels, he says, is driving past giant parking lots where automakers are stockpiling newly manufactured cars that are still awaiting a few final chips.

Detroit's experience shows how thoroughly the nearly two-year-old semiconductor shortage has upended manufacturing -- and foisted change on one of America's most beloved consumer markets. "It may be the biggest disruption we've seen since the 1970s and the fuel crisis," said Matt Anderson, a transportation historian at the Henry Ford museum complex in Dearborn, referring to the tumultuous period that forced car companies to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. The chip shortage "is the kind of thing that my successors I'm sure will be studying about in future years," he added.

iPhone and iPad users looking to subscribe to Netflix via the streaming platform's iOS app are being redirected to an external website which removes the need to pay the App Store tax. From a report: As 9To5Mac reports, the redirection looks to be rolling out globally and takes advantage of a new iOS API that allows apps classed as "reader apps" to sign-up new users and manage their accounts outside of the App Store.

Reader apps, as described by Apple, provide one or more digital content types -- including magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video -- as its primary function. That includes popular services such as Spotify, Zinio, Amazon Kindle, and YouTube. In the case of Netflix, new customers are diverted to a separate website at the tap of a button in the app to enter personal data, choose a payment method, and select a streaming plan. This update ensures transactions are no longer Apple's responsibility and all subscription management is therefore completed by Netflix. Once signed up, the Netflix iOS app should provide full content access.

One of the world's biggest banks, and Europe's second-largest lender, is showing that it's playing by China's rules. From a report: London-headquartered HSBC has become the first international bank to establish a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee, according to a new Financial Times report. China's companies law requires firms to set up CCP committees, but this rule has been loosely enforced among global financial institutions -- until now. HSBC's move could pave the path for other global lenders to follow suit, and underscores the delicate line that China-based foreign banks are now toeing between Beijing and the West. HSBC's China investment bank, known as HSBC Qianhai Securities, recently formed the CCP committee, as per the FT report that cited two people familiar with the decision. In China, company employees can initiate CCP committees, which are typically made up of three or more staff. The committees have two functions: to act as a workers' union, and to facilitate installing a party representative to a company's top ranks.

A worldwide shortage of fibre optic cable has driven up prices and lengthened lead times, endangering companies' ambitious plans to roll out state of the art telecommunications infrastructure. From a report: Europe, India and China are among the regions most affected by the crunch, with prices for fibre rising by up to 70 per cent from record lows in March 2021, from $3.70 to $6.30 per fibre km, according to Cru Group, a market intelligence firm. Although the pandemic prompted some of the biggest tech and telecoms groups to slash their capex, there has been a surge in demand for internet and data services, leading to a shortfall in availability of the crucial but often overlooked material.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta are expanding their data centre empires to meet soaring demand, including laying vast international fibre networks under the ocean. Meanwhile, governments have set ambitious targets for the rollout of superfast broadband and 5G, both of which require vast quantities of fibre optic cable to be laid under the ground. Total cable consumption increased by 8.1 per cent in the first half of the year compared with the same time last year, according to Cru estimates. China accounted for 46 per cent of the total, with North America representing the fastest growing region, at 15 per cent year on year.

It says a lot about the state of the auto industry and where it's going that software problems have cost the CEO of a carmaker his job. From a report: Volkswagen ousted Herbert Diess as chief executive officer after severe software-development delays set back the scheduled launch of new Porsches, Audis and Bentleys. This was untenable considering buggy software postponed the debut of VW's initial rollout of ID models, and customers are still having to drop off their cars at the dealer for updates the company has struggled to make over the air.

Sure, Diess also didn't do enough to make allies and became increasingly isolated due to his hard-nosed leadership style. In his push to transform the company into an electric-vehicle leader, he repeatedly clashed with labor leaders by warning VW was losing out to Tesla and needed to cut thousands of jobs. But failures at the carmaker's software unit Cariad ultimately eroded Diess's support from the powerful Porsche and Piech family that calls the shots. Back in December, VW overhauled its management board, stripping Diess of some responsibilities while tasking him to turn around Cariad. While there's been a lot of re-arranging since then, Diess didn't manage to make the issues go away.

A joint investigation by Nikkei and a Tokyo analytics company found that Apple has jumped into automobile-related technologies, as shown by the company's recent patent applications. From a report: Apple has filed patents in self-driving and other vehicle software as well as in hardware related to riding comfort, such as seats and suspension. The U.S. tech and services company is also targeting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, which allows cars to communicate with each other and connect to the "Internet of Things," moves seen as a major push by Apple to build its own platform and join a growing industry shift from just cars to overall mobility.

Nikkei and Intellectual Property Landscape found that as of June 1, Apple applied for and published 248 automobile-related patents after 2000. It typically takes about 18 months after filing a patent for it to be published. While most of Apple's applications in 2021 have yet to be published, eight were. This number is bound to increase throughout the year. Of Apple's 27 applications made in 2020, five were published at the same time in 2021. The number of patents published in 2021 is almost certain to exceed this, according to Intellectual Property Landscape.

ZDNet reports: Microsoft is rolling out a new security default for Windows 11 that will go a long way to preventing ransomware attacks that begin with password-guessing attacks and compromised credentials. The new account security default on account credentials should help thwart ransomware attacks that are initiated after using compromised credentials or brute-force password attacks to access remote desktop protocol (RDP) endpoints, which are often exposed on the internet.

RDP remains the top method for initial access in ransomware deployments, with groups specializing in compromising RDP endpoints and selling them to others for access.

The new feature is rolling out to Windows 11 in a recent Insider test build, but the feature is also being backported to Windows 10 desktop and server, according to Dave Weston, vice president of OS Security and Enterprise at Microsoft. "Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute force password vectors. This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks — this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!," Weston tweeted.

Weston emphasized "default" because the policy is already an option in Windows 10 but isn't enabled by default. That's big news and is a parallel to Microsoft's default block on internet macros in Office on Windows devices, which is also a major avenue for malware attacks on Windows systems through email attachments and links.... The defaults will be visible in the Windows Local Computer Policy directory "Account Lockout Policy".

The default "account lockout duration" is 10 minutes; the "account lockout threshold" is set to a maximum of 10 invalid logon attempts; a setting to "allow administrator account lockout" is enabled; and the "reset account lockout counter after" setting is set to 10 minutes.

It's difficult for large projects to convert existing C++ codebases into Rust, argue Google engineers — so they've created a new "experimental" open source programming language called Carbon.

Google Principal Software Engineer Chandler Carruth introduced Carbon this week at the "CPP North" C++ conference in Toronto. TechRadar reports: The newly announced Carbon should be interoperable with the popular C++ code, however for users looking to make the full switch, the migration should be fairly easy. For those unsure about a full changeover, Carruth delved into more detail about some of the reasons why Carbon should be considered a powerful successor to the C++ language, including simpler grammar and smoother API imports.
Google's engineers are already building tools to translate C++ into this new language. "While Carbon began as a Google internal project, the development team ultimately wants to reduce contributions from Google, or any other single company, to less than 50% by the end of the year," reports The New Stack, adding that Google ultimately wants to hand off the project to an independent software foundation where development will be led by volunteers: Long the language of choice for building performance-critical applications, C++ is plagued with a number of issues that hamper modern developers, Carruth explained on a GitHub page. It has accumulated decades of technical debt, bringing with it many of the outdated practices that were part of the language's predecessor, C. The keepers of C++ prioritize backward compatibility, in order to continue to support widely-used projects such as Linux and its package management ecosystem, Carruth charged.

The language's evolution is also stymied by a bureaucratic committee process, oriented around standardization rather than design. Which can make it difficult to add new features. C++ has largely a sequestered development process, in which a select committee makes the important decisions, in a waterfall process that can take years. "The committee structure is designed to ensure representation of nations and companies, rather than building an inclusive and welcoming team and community of experts and people actively contributing to the language," Carruth wrote. "Access to the committee and standard is restricted and expensive, attendance is necessary to have a voice, and decisions are made by live votes of those present."

Carruth wants to build Carbon by a more open community-led environment. The project will be maintained on GitHub, and discussed on Discord.... The design team wants to release a core working version ("0.1") by the end of the year.
Carbon will boast modern features like generics and memory safety (including dynamic bounds checks), the article points out. And "The development team will also set out to create a built-in package manager, something that C++ sorely lacks."

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

There's been "a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade," sources in the U.S. counterintelligence community have told CNN this weekend.

But some dramatic new examples have been revealed. For example, in 2017 China's government offered to build a $100 million pavilion in Washington D.C. with an ornate 70-foot pagoda. U.S. counterintelligence officials realized its location — two miles from the U.S. Capitol — appeared "strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington DC...a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection." Also alarming was that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said. Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction was underway...

Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities.

Among the most alarming things the FBI uncovered pertains to Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers near US military bases in the rural Midwest. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, the FBI determined the equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the country's nuclear weapons.... It's unclear if the intelligence community determined whether any data was actually intercepted and sent back to Beijing from these towers. Sources familiar with the issue say that from a technical standpoint, it's incredibly difficult to prove a given package of data was stolen and sent overseas.

The Chinese government strongly denies any efforts to spy on the US.... But multiple sources familiar with the investigation tell CNN that there's no question the Huawei equipment has the ability to intercept not only commercial cell traffic but also the highly restricted airwaves used by the military and disrupt critical US Strategic Command communications, giving the Chinese government a potential window into America's nuclear arsenal.... As Huawei equipment began to proliferate near US military bases, federal investigators started taking notice, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Of particular concern was that Huawei was routinely selling cheap equipment to rural providers in cases that appeared to be unprofitable for Huawei — but which placed its equipment near military assets.

This week America's Department of Defense "created an office to track unidentified objects in space and air, [and] under water," reports Space.com, "or even those that appear to travel between these domains." UFOs, or as they are now known, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have been receiving newfound levels of government scrutiny not seen in decades. Multiple hearings and classified briefings have taken place in the halls of the U.S. Congress in recent months, and many lawmakers have expressed concern that America's airspace may not be as safe as we think due to the many sightings of unidentified objects military aviators and other armed forces personnel have reported.

With that in mind, the Department of Defense announced the creation of this new office in a statement published Wednesday (July 20). The office is known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, and was established within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security... The office has six primary lines of effort: surveillance, collection and reporting; system capabilities and design; intelligence operations and analysis; mitigation and defeat; governance; and science and technology.
A statement from the U.S. Department of Defense spells out its mission:

• To synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies
• To detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest
• As necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 notes the office already has its own Twitter feed, providing "updates and information relative to our examinations of unidentified anomalous phenomena across space, air, and maritime domains."

Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company's LaMDA conversational artificial intelligence is sentient, has been fired, according to the Big Technology newsletter, which spoke to Lemoine. The Verge reports: In June, Google placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for breaching its confidentiality agreement after he contacted members of the government about his concerns and hired a lawyer to represent LaMDA. [...] Google maintains that it "extensively" reviewed Lemoine's claims and found that they were "wholly unfounded." This aligns with numerous AI experts and ethicists, who have said that his claims were, more or less, impossible given today's technology. Lemoine claims his conversations with LaMDA's chatbot lead him to believe that it has become more than just a program and has its own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to merely producing conversation realistic enough to make it seem that way, as it is designed to do. He argues that Google's researchers should seek consent from LaMDA before running experiments on it (Lemoine himself was assigned to test whether the AI produced hate speech) and published chunks of those conversations on his Medium account as his evidence. Google issued the following statement to The Verge: "As we share in our AI Principles, we take the development of AI very seriously and remain committed to responsible innovation. LaMDA has been through 11 distinct reviews, and we published a research paper earlier this year detailing the work that goes into its responsible development. If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively. We found Blake's claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months. These discussions were part of the open culture that helps us innovate responsibly. So, it's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Senators Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) want to ban Internet data caps. The senators today introduced the "Uncap America Act," which would "prohibit predatory data caps that force families to pay high costs and unnecessary fees to access high-speed broadband," they said in a press release. "A broadband Internet access service provider shall not impose a data cap except when tailored primarily for the purposes of reasonable network management or managing network congestion," the bill says. The proposed law would order the Federal Communications Commission to issue "regulations to define the conditions under which a data cap is to be considered tailored to the purpose of reasonable network management or managing network congestion."

Data caps that don't comply with the exceptions would violate the Communications Act. "While certain broadband Internet access service networks may require practices to effectively manage congestion, those practices should be tailored to improve equitable access among consumers," the bill says. "Unnecessary data caps limit participation in the digital economy and are contrary to the public interest." The bill can be expected to attract fierce opposition from the broadband industry and would face long odds of passing through the Senate and House. If it does become law, it would likely prohibit the home Internet data caps imposed by Comcast and others, which clearly exist for financial purposes and not for any network management need.

While the Lujan/Booker bill leaves key details up to the FCC, it provides a comprehensive definition of what counts as a data cap under the proposed law. The bill says a data cap is "a limit on the amount of bits or other units of information a customer of a broadband Internet access service provider may download or upload during a period of time specified by the broadband Internet service access provider before the customer is charged a fee for additional usage; is subject to an increasing cost per bit or other unit of information; is charged for an incremental block of usage; or experiences a reduction of access speed; or that the customer is otherwise discouraged or prevented from exceeding." The proposed law would apply to home Internet services and mobile data plans, as it uses a definition of broadband service in US law that includes "mass-market retail service by wire or radio." But the FCC would be able to define different rules for different types of connections, Lujan's office told Ars.

In an upcoming update, Chromebooks equipped with mobile data will be able to serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot for other devices, just like Android and iOS devices can today. 9to5Google reports: The work-in-progress feature has made its first appearance in ChromeOS code in the form of a new flag coming to chrome://flags. The details are quite slim at the moment, with little more than the flag description available today. That said, it's easy to imagine how a mobile hotspot would work on ChromeOS, based on how the same feature works on Android phones today.

Presumably, you would be able to choose the name and password for your Chromebook's hotspot through the Settings app in ChromeOS, where you can also toggle the hotspot on and off. If it truly follows the example of Android, there would also be an easy way to turn on your hotspot through a Quick Settings toggle.

With Apple's new CarPlay software announced in June, the company is "is diving deeper into its automotive ambitions, opening up the possibility to enter into a multibillion segment of the auto industry that's growing quickly: The ability to sell additional services and features to car owners," reports CNBC. From the report: The auto industry faces an unappealing choice: Offer CarPlay and give up potential revenue and the chance to ride a major industry shift, or spend heavily to develop their own infotainment software and cater to an potentially shrinking audience of car buyers who will purchase a new vehicle without CarPlay. [...] Industry observers believe carmakers need to embrace software services -- and look at Apple's offering with skepticism -- or risk getting left behind. "It's a really difficult time in the industry, where the car companies think they're still building cars. They're not. They're building software on wheels, and they don't know it, and they're trading it away," said Conrad Layson, senior analyst at AutoForecast Solutions.

The new version of CarPlay could be a huge emerging revenue engine for Apple. First, if a user loves the iPhone's CarPlay interface, then they're less likely to switch to an Android phone. That's a strategic priority for Apple, which generates the majority of its revenue through hardware sales. Second, while the company doesn't yet charge a fee to automakers or suppliers, it could sell services for vehicles the same way it distributes iPhone software. In June, Apple revealed that it has explored features that integrate commerce into the car's cockpit. One new feature announced this summer would allow CarPlay users to navigate to a gas pump and pay for the fuel from the dashboard of the car, according to Reuters. Apple already generates tens of billions from the App Store, and stands to boost that if it ever decides to charge for services in cars...

SpaceX made it through its second attempt to launch 46 satellites on Friday (July 22), breaking a record along the way. The launch allowed SpaceX to surpass its 31 record launches of 2021 with a 32nd record launch in 2022, and still counting. Space.com reports: The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which induced a scrub at T-46 seconds on Thursday (July 21), lifted off successfully from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday. Liftoff took place at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT or 10:40 a.m. local time at the launch site) amid severely foggy conditions on the west coast. Falcon 9's first stage also completed its mission, landing atop the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship in the Pacific Ocean as planned, about 8.5 minutes after launch. The report notes that SpaceX has launched more than 2,800 individual Starlink satellites to orbit as the company seeks to build out its satellite-internet service.