Robert Triggs, writing for AndroidAuthority: In 2022, there's now a multifaceted argument in favor of a new approach to smartphone manufacturing. One which focuses on long-term support for both hardware and software. Core to this line of thinking is that smartphone hardware has hit a plateau. From the mid-range to flagships, hardware is now more than powerful enough to last several years without going obsolete. The days of rampant year-on-year improvements are long gone, whether you're looking at bleeding-edge performance, cameras, or battery life. This isn't to say we don't yearn for those yearly gains, but they no longer suddenly mark older models for obsolescence even if they materialize. As such, modern smartphones deserve long-term software support above and beyond semi-annual security patches.

Not to mention the increasingly compelling sustainability and right-to-repair arguments regarding raw materials and e-waste. It's increasingly hard to justify the production of throwaway electronics built to last just a handful of years. Simultaneously, sky-high prices and a squeeze in the cost of living have cast new light on the need for easier access to repair programs and spare parts. Not forgetting the popularity of refurbished handsets. Long-term support doesn't have to be an unprofitable venture for smartphone manufacturers either. Official repair channels bring in revenue over time, and it's possible to factor long-term support into the retail price of a handset. Then there's the whole avenue of hardware-as-a-service to explore.

The F.B.I. informed the Israeli government in a 2018 letter that it had purchased Pegasus, the notorious hacking tool, to collect data from mobile phones to aid ongoing investigations, the clearest documentary evidence to date that the bureau weighed using the spyware as a tool of law enforcement. The New York Times reports: The F.B.I.'s description of its intended use of Pegasus came in a letter from a top F.B.I. official to Israel's Ministry of Defense that was reviewed by The New York Times. Pegasus is produced by an Israeli firm, NSO Group, which needs to gain approval from the Israeli government before it can sell the hacking tool to a foreign government. The 2018 letter, written by an official in the F.B.I.'s operational technology division, stated that the bureau intended to use Pegasus "for the collection of data from mobile devices for the prevention and investigation of crimes and terrorism, in compliance with privacy and national security laws."

The Times revealed in January that the F.B.I. had purchased Pegasus in 2018 and, over the next two years, tested the spyware at a secret facility in New Jersey. Since the article's publication, F.B.I. officials have acknowledged that they considered deploying Pegasus but have emphasized that the bureau bought the spying tool mainly to test and evaluate it -- partly to assess how adversaries might use it. They said the bureau never used the spyware in any operation.

Oil giant Saudi Aramco on Wednesday surpassed Apple as the world's most valuable firm. CNBC reports: Aramco's market valuation was just under $2.43 trillion on Wednesday, according to FactSet, which converted its market cap to dollars. Apple, which fell more than 5% during trading in the U.S. on Wednesday, is now worth $2.37 trillion. Energy stocks and prices have been rising as investors sell off equities in several industries, including technology, on fears of a deteriorating economic environment. Apple has fallen nearly 20% since its $182.94 peak on Jan. 4. The move is mostly symbolic, but it shows how markets are shifting as the global economy grapples with rising interest rates, inflation, and supply chain problems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The anonymous message board app Yik Yak is designed in a way that it is possible to get the precise location of a user's post, and see users' unique IDs, potentially allowing someone to dox and stalk users, according to a researcher. Yik Yak is an anonymous social media network popular primarily on college campuses. It was launched in 2013. The app shut down completely in 2017, after it was accused of being a platform used to harass and cyberbully students, and even to post bomb threats. These allegations have followed the app since its very beginning. In 2014, the company blocked access to middle school and high school students because of reports of threats of violence and bullying. The app came back last year, a comeback no one was really asking for, as my colleague Gita Jackson pointed out at the time. Yik Yak does have so-called "community guardrails" to "to ensure everyone feels welcomed and stays safe." But students are still reporting the same old problems.

In April, David Teather, a computer science student, analyzed what kind of data Yik Yak exposes by intercepting data sent and received by his Yik Yak app using a free and open source tool called mitmproxy and by writing "code that pretended to be the Yik Yak app to extract information from it." By doing that, he realized that Yik Yak sent the precise GPS coordinates of every post to his app, as well as a user's unique ID -- nrCi213RA3SncY6mVLZzuGUIJ2T2 for example -- which could have allowed him to track users' posts by looking at where they posted over time, opening up the possibility to de-anonymize and stalk users, according to a blog post he published this week. Teather demonstrated the flaw in a video call to Motherboard, showing a post in his area, and its GPS coordinates.

After Teather alerted Yik Yak of this flaw on April 11, the company made some changes and pushed out new versions of the app on April 28, May 9, and May 10. Teather told Yik Yak that he was planning to publish his research on May 9, according to email correspondence that he shared with Motherboard. After Yik Yak pushed the new updated apps, the privacy issues are only partially fixed, according to Teather. Teather said that as of today, on the app's latest version, Yik Yak does not expose GPS locations, and the app doesn't display a user's unique ID when intercepting data the same way he did in April. But, Teather told Motherboard that he is still able to recover both coordinates and user ID by analyzing the app's API from previous app versions. What's worse, the app now shows the distance, in feet, between a user and other users' posts, according to Teather and Zach Edwards, an independent privacy researcher who analyzed the Yik Yak app for Motherboard. "Since the distance is in feet though it should be still possible to triangulate a particular user/post by changing your location until you can figure that out," Teather told Motherboard.

Edwards added: "you can still probably dox someone by merely spoofing your own location and recording the number of feet from the person posting."

Tony Fadell, Apple's iPod creator and Nest co-founder, warns the metaverse risks creating more trolls and damaging human interaction. The BBC reports: The virtual reality-based metaverse removes the ability "to look into the other person's face," Tony Fadell said. "If you put technology between that human connection that's when the toxicity happens," he said. [...] While Mr Fadell said the technology behind the metaverse has merit: "When you're trying to make social interaction and social connection, when you can't look into the other person's face, you can't see their eyes you don't have real humanistic ways of connecting. It become disintermediated and you have the ability at that point to create more trolls, people who hide behind things and then use that to their advantage to get attention." He added: "We need to regain control of that human connection, we don't need more technology between us."

He said told The Verge that people should not be living through "small, glowing rectangles" such as their phones. "A lot of the meetings that we have today, you're looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That's not how we process things either." However, the metaverse has also prompted criticism and concerns over safety due to the ability of people to create and hide behind avatars. Mr Fadell said: "We had the same problem with text-based commenting and with blogs, we've had it with videos now we're going to have it in metaverse."

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is introducing legislation that would strip the Walt Disney Company of special copyright protections granted to the corporation by Congress, while also limiting the length of new copyrights. From a report: The "Copyright Clause Restoration Act of 2022" would cap the length of copyrights given corporations by Congress to 56 years and retroactively implement this change on companies, including Walt Disney. "The age of Republican handouts to Big Business is over. Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists. It's time to take away Disney's special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation," Hawley told Fox News Digital in an exclusive statement. According to Hawley's office, Congress has used an old law, also known as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," in order to extend copyrights to corporations for up to 120 years. Instead of issuing copyright protections to create enough monopoly protection in order to foster innovation, companies are getting handouts from Congress for a much longer period than needed.

Terraform Labs restarted the Terra blockchain following a software update to help avoid attacks against the network in the wake of the collapse of its algorithmic stablecoin and the related Luna token that had roiled cryptocurrency markets. From a report: The fix is designed to help avoid so-called governance attacks against its protocol -- a way of manipulating the fundamentals of a given blockchain by acquiring enough tokens to force a majority vote. Following the patch's release, Terra said earlier that the network would go live again once two-thirds of the voting power belonging to validators came online to finalize the update. In previous outages for blockchain networks like Solana, this process has taken several hours to complete as validators can reside across multiple time zones.

For $800 a month you could live in a tiny bunk bed-style pod with 13 other roommates in the Bay Area. From a report: Eight-month-old startup Brownstone Shared Housing has come under the spotlight this week after an Insider profile on the company revealed what it looks like inside the Palo Alto home with 14 tenants each living in a "pod." While the $800-a-month rent may seem steep for a stacked bunk bed pod, the average rental rate for a studio apartment near Stanford University, where the pod-home sits, is currently around $2,400. Co-founder Christina Lennox has lived in a pod herself for the past year. "The wood kind of allows for relaxation, rather than like going inside of this futuristic-looking plastic object," Lennox told Insider. "It has, like, definitely a different feel -- I would say that it's more calming and soothing for people."

Twitter is shaking up its top leadership. The first move came as consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour announced on Twitter that current CEO Parag Agrawal "asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction." From a report: Bruce Falck, the general manager of revenue and head of product for its business side, confirmed in a (now deleted) tweet that he was also fired by Agrawal. Now Jay Sullivan, who we spoke to in March about Twitter's plans to add 100 million daily users, will take over as both the head of product and interim head of revenue. These moves are occurring at the same time Elon Musk moves forward with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, although he hasn't taken ownership of the company yet. In a memo to employees obtained by The Verge, Agrawal wrote, "At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the decision was made to invest aggressively to deliver big growth in audience and revenue, and as a company we did not hit intermediate milestones that enable confidence in these goals."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google today announced the launch of AlloyDB, a new fully-managed PostgreSQL-compatible database service that the company claims to be twice as fast for transactional workloads as AWS's comparable Aurora PostgreSQL (and four times faster than standard PostgreSQL for the same workloads and up to 100 times faster for analytical queries). [...] AlloyDB is the standard PostgreSQL database at its core, though the team did modify the kernel to allow it to use Google's infrastructure to its fullest, all while allowing the team to stay up to date with new versions as they launch.

Andi Gutmans, who joined Google as its GM and VP of Engineering for its database products in 2020 after a long stint at AWS, told me that one of the reasons the company is launching this new product is that while Google has done well in helping enterprise customers move their MySQL and PostgreSQL servers to the cloud with the help of services like CloudSQL, the company didn't necessarily have the right offerings for those customers who wanted to move their legacy databases (Gutmans didn't explicitly say so, but I think you can safely insert 'Oracle' here) to an open-source service.

"There are different reasons for that," he told me. "First, they are actually using more than one cloud provider, so they want to have the flexibility to run everywhere. There are a lot of unfriendly licensing gimmicks, traditionally. Customers really, really hate that and, I would say, whereas probably two to three years ago, customers were just complaining about it, what I notice now is customers are really willing to invest resources to just get off these legacy databases. They are sick of being strapped and locked in." Add to that Postgres' rise to becoming somewhat of a de facto standard for relational open-source databases (and MySQL's decline) and it becomes clear why Google decided that it wanted to be able to offer a dedicated high-performance PostgreSQL service. The report also says Google spent a lot of effort on making Postgres perform better for customers that want to use their relational database for analytics use cases.

"The changes the team made to the Postgres kernel, for example, now allow it to scale the system linearly to over 64 virtual cores while on the analytical side, the team built a custom machine learning-based caching service to learn a customer's access patterns and then convert Postgres' row format into an in-memory columnar format that can be analyzed significantly faster."

A three-person panel of federal appeals court judges is letting a Texas law aimed at punishing social media companies for alleged anti-conservative bias go into effect for now. From a report: In a ruling late Wednesday, the panel stayed a district court injunction that had paused the law while the judges consider an appeal of the lower court's move. The decision, which was supported by two unnamed judges and was not immediately published with the court's reasoning, comes after a Monday hearing in which the jurists appeared to struggle with basic tech concepts, including whether Twitter counts as a website.

The decision is a win for conservative critics of the current interpretation of tech law, which underlies the operations of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Two tech trade groups that count the Big Tech companies as members had sued Texas over the law. Until this week, industry observers widely expected the court to uphold a block on the law, which allows for lawsuits against social media services if they "censor" users. A different federal court also paused a similar Florida law, finding that it sought to punish private companies for their views and treatment of content in violation of the First Amendment. In court, Texas argued that it is merely trying to force platforms to carry all content the way phone companies are expected to carry all calls.

Google has signed deals to pay more than 300 publishers in Germany, France and four other EU countries for their news and will roll out a tool to make it easier for others to sign up too, the company told Reuters. From the report: The move to be announced publicly later on Wednesday followed the adoption of landmark EU copyright rules three years ago that require Google and other online platforms to pay musicians, performers, authors, news publishers and journalists for using their work. News publishers, among Google's fiercest critics, have long urged governments to ensure online platforms pay fair remuneration for their content. Australia last year made such payments mandatory while Canada introduced similar legislation last month. The blog did not say how much publishers were being paid. Two-thirds of this group are German publishers including Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "So far, we have agreements which cover more than 300 national, local and specialist news publications in Germany, Hungary, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Ireland, with many more discussions ongoing," Sulina Connal, director for news and publishing partnerships, said in blog post. "We are now announcing the launch of a new tool to make offers to thousands more news publishers, starting in Germany and Hungary, and rolling out to other EU countries over the coming months," Connal said in the blogpost.

Google is expanding end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to include group texts in the Messages app. The feature will be available as an open beta later this year. Engadget reports: Google hasn't revealed more details about E2EE in group chats, but it will surely be similar to how the option works in one-on-one conversations. Everyone in the group will need to have RCS chat functions switched on to use the feature. You'll be able to tell if a message you're about to share with the group is encrypted if there's a lock icon on the send button. The Messages app now has more than 500 million monthly active users with RCS. So, there's already a large number of people who'd be able to take advantage of E2EE in group chats.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows' Sound Recorder app has gone through a few iterations since its initial release in Windows 3.0 back in 1990, when it launched as a simple app that could only record 60 seconds of audio at a time. But the app vanished altogether in Windows 10, replaced by a totally new app called Voice Recorder, which can record and trim basic sound recordings and save them as m4a files. Sound Recorder is now making a comeback, and Microsoft is currently testing a revamped version for Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. The company announced the redesign in a blog post summarizing Windows 11's updates to built-in Windows apps.

The new Sound Recorder uses a two-column layout similar to Voice Recorder's, with playback and trimming controls to the right and a list of all the files you've recorded on the left. But it adds some old Sound Recorder features that disappeared from the app years ago, when it was boiled down to almost nothing in Windows Vista. The app has a waveform visualizer that appears during recording and playback, and you can once again choose to save or open files in multiple formats (including the default m4a, as well as mp3, wma, FLAC, and WAV). The new Sound Recorder can also adjust audio playback speed from 0.25x to 4 and set markers so you can easily jump from place to place within a large audio recording.

Nvidia is publishing their Linux GPU kernel modules as open-source and will be maintaining it moving forward. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. [...] This isn't limited to just Tegra or so but spans not only their desktop graphics but is already production-ready for data center GPU usage.

At its I/O developer conference, Google today launched Google Wallet, a new Android and Wear OS app that will allow users to store things like credit cards, loyalty cards, digital IDs, transit passes, concert tickets, vaccination cards and more. TechCrunch reports: That's pretty straightforward, but from here on out, it gets a bit confusing. [...] [Back in 2018, Google Wallet was folded into Google Pay.] Currently, Google Pay is available in 42 markets, Google says. Because in 39 of those markets, Google Pay is still primarily a wallet, those users will simply see the Google Pay app update to the new Google Wallet app. But in the U.S. and Singapore, Google Pay will remain the payments-focused app while the Wallet app will exist in parallel to focus on storing your digital cards. Meanwhile, in India, Google says that "people will continue to use their Google Pay app they are familiar with today."

"The Google Pay app will be a companion app to the Wallet," said Arnold Goldberg, the VP and GM of Payments at Google, who joined the company earlier this year after a long stint at PayPal. "Think of [the Google Pay app] as this higher value app that will be a place for you to make payments and manage money, whereas the wallet will really be this container for you to store your payment assets and your non-payment assets." Goldberg noted that Google decided to go this route because of the rapid digitization we've been seeing during the last two years of the pandemic.

Alphabet's Google, which failed to find a consumer audience for its internet-connected glasses about a decade ago, on Wednesday presented a prototype of augmented reality glasses aimed at the general public. Bloomberg: In a brief demonstration at its annual I/O developer conference, the company showed glasses using an AR version of Google Translate. The company didn't say when the glasses would be ready for consumers, but Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai indicated Google has a "long way to go" before releasing them. "It's important we design in a way that's built for the real world and doesn't take away from it," Pichai said.

Google announced several new gadgets during its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, including its long-awaited Pixel Watch, a new budget Pixel 6a phone and headphones. It also teased its flagship Pixel 7 phone, which is coming this fall. From a report: The Google Pixel Watch offers features similar to the Apple Watch's and sports a refined and sleek look that could appeal to customers who use Android instead of the iPhone, which it doesn't work with. It will integrate Fitbit's technology, allowing it to pull on years of research and development from the fitness startup it acquired last year. The Fitbit tech will let users track their sleep, heart rate and workouts. The watch runs Google's Wear OS software that lets users do things such as check messages and download music. Users can also get directions with Google Maps or connect it with their smart home devices, so they can, for example, change their thermostat temperature or make sure the lights are turned off.

Google will release its latest budget Pixel phone this summer. The Pixel 6a has mostly the same design as the Pixel 6, but will be slightly smaller and cost $449. Google promised an all-day battery that can last up to 72 hours when in the Extreme Battery Saver mode, which it said is a first for Pixel phones. It also uses Google Tensor, so the budget phone will have the same power as the more expensive Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. [...] Google teased the new Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro flagship phones. They'll use the next generation of the Google Tensor chip and will ship with Android 13. The company didn't provide pricing, but the Pixel 6 had been targeted at the midrange market with a $599 starting price, while the 6 Pro started at $899.

Offering a sneak preview of the Pixel 7 wasn't enough, so Google's really leaning in. Today at I/O, the company announced that it's returning to the tablet business with a new device set for, get this, a 2023 launch. From a report: "Normally we wouldn't tease a new product before it's ready," said Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh, "but there's so much amazing energy around tablets in the developer community that we wanted to bring you all into the loop." The Pixel Tablet is going to be something of a spiritual successor to 2018's Pixel Slate, which the company quietly discontinued last year. Like the Pixel Book, the hardware was nice, but in a world full of super cheap Chromebooks, Google never really nailed the "why."

Alphabet's Google unveiled a series of planned upgrades to its search and maps services revealing the company's augmented reality ambitions -- and its appeal to a generation of internet users drifting away from the company. From a report: The new features include ways for people to search for nearby items using images and identify physical objects with their smartphone cameras. On Google Maps, the company promised a way for people to explore detailed 3D digital models of landmarks and neighborhoods before setting foot in person. Google shared the plans on Wednesday for the first day of its annual I/O developer conference held near its Mountain View, California headquarters.

Google is working to keep its products relevant and growing as users' needs evolve beyond text. "Search should be something that you can do anywhere, in any way you want, using any of your senses," Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president and product chief, said in an interview. Google's core search advertising business has continued to grow steadily during the pandemic, despite recent middling financial results. Yet the I/O announcements underscored nascent threats Google sees to its flagship services. People in emerging markets are more likely to search with voice features than typing, which has driven Google to invest more in its voice assistant feature.