Popular Reddit App Apollo Would Need To Pay $20 Million Per Year Under New API Pricing

Popular Reddit app Apollo might not be able to operate as is in the future due to planned API pricing that Reddit is implementing. From a report: Apollo developer Christian Selig was today told that Reddit plans to charge $12,000 for 50 million API requests. Last month, Apollo made seven billion requests, which would mean Selig would need to pay $1.7 million per month or $20 million per year to Reddit to keep the app running. The average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would be priced at $2.50 per month, more than double the current subscription cost, or a sum that Selig is not able to afford. Right now, Apollo Pro is a one-time $4.99 fee that unlocks additional features, and Apollo Ultra is an even more premium tier that costs $12.99 per year.

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Millions of PC Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor

Hidden code in hundreds of models of Gigabyte motherboards invisibly and insecurely downloads programs — a feature ripe for abuse, researchers say. From a report: Hiding malicious programs in a computer’s UEFI firmware, the deep-seated code that tells a PC how to load its operating system, has become an insidious trick in the toolkit of stealthy hackers. But when a motherboard manufacturer installs its own hidden backdoor in the firmware of millions of computers — and doesn’t even put a proper lock on that hidden back entrance — they’re practically doing hackers’ work for them. Researchers at firmware-focused cybersecurity company Eclypsium revealed today that they’ve discovered a hidden mechanism in the firmware of motherboards sold by the Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte, whose components are commonly used in gaming PCs and other high-performance computers. Whenever a computer with the affected Gigabyte motherboard restarts, Eclypsium found, code within the motherboard’s firmware invisibly initiates an updater program that runs on the computer and in turn downloads and executes another piece of software.

While Eclypsium says the hidden code is meant to be an innocuous tool to keep the motherboard’s firmware updated, researchers found that it’s implemented insecurely, potentially allowing the mechanism to be hijacked and used to install malware instead of Gigabyte’s intended program. And because the updater program is triggered from the computer’s firmware, outside its operating system, it’s tough for users to remove or even discover. “If you have one of these machines, you have to worry about the fact that it’s basically grabbing something from the internet and running it without you being involved, and hasn’t done any of this securely,” says John Loucaides, who leads strategy and research at Eclypsium. “The concept of going underneath the end user and taking over their machine doesn’t sit well with most people.”

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Apple Touts $1.1 Trillion in App Store Commerce in 2022

Ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next week, the company is offering an update on its app ecosystem with the release of a new report detailing app earnings over the course of last year. From a report: In the analysis, released today, Apple says its App Store ecosystem generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022, 90% of which was commission-free — a metric it likes to tout to downplay the growing complaints about the high cost of doing business on a marketplace that generally takes a 15% to 30% commission on in-app purchases and paid downloads, with some exceptions. This $1.1 trillion breaks down as $910 billion in total billings and sales from the sale of physical goods and services, $109 billion from in-app advertising, and $104 billion for digital goods and services. The figures are a sizable increase from 2019 data, when Apple said the App Store had facilitated $519 billion in commerce, with then “just” $61 billion coming from digital goods and services.

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California Senate Passes ‘Right to Repair Act’

The California state Senate passed Sen. Susan Eggman’s (Stockton) Right to Repair Act (SB 244) on Tuesday with a 38-0, bipartisan vote. From a report: It’s the furthest a Right to Repair bill has advanced in the state. The bill would significantly expand consumers’ and independent repair shops’ access to the necessary parts, tools and service information required for repairing consumer electronics and appliances. “This is a huge victory for anyone who’s ever been faced with limited options when their phone, fridge or other household electronics break down,” said CALPIRG State Director Jenn Engstrom. “It’s due time that California fixed its laws so that we can fix our stuff. For the hundreds of advocates and repair businesses and the untold number of consumers supporting Right to Repair, we’re one huge step closer to making that happen.”

Advocates have been pushing for Right to Repair legislation in California for 5 years. Similar bills have died in the Senate Appropriations Committee the past two years after intense industry lobbying efforts against their passage. But public support for the Right to Repair in the state has grown amid a swell of national momentum. New York, Colorado and Minnesota have all passed their own Right to Repair laws in the past year.

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Twitter value keeps falling under Musk, now worth a third of what he paid

Elon Musk's Twitter profile displayed on a phone screen in front of a Twitter logo and a fake stock graph with an arrow pointing down.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Twitter’s value has reportedly dropped to about $15 billion, slightly more than one-third of the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid for it in late October 2022. The $15 billion valuation is based on Fidelity’s latest analysis of its stake in the company.

“Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund’s stake in Twitter was valued at $6.6 million as of April 28, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released Sunday,” The Wall Street Journal wrote today. “That is down from about $19.7 million at the end of October, shortly after Musk’s takeover, and the third time Fidelity has marked down the value of its Twitter stake, public disclosures show.”

Fidelity’s new calculation “puts Twitter’s overall valuation at about $15 billion, or roughly a third of the deal price,” the WSJ wrote. Twitter is identified in the Fidelity filing as X Holdings, the Musk-owned holding company that owns X Corp., which merged with Twitter. Fidelity’s new valuation of Twitter was previously reported by Bloomberg.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

A Snap-based, containerized Ubuntu desktop could be offered in 2024

Snap apps laid out in a grid

Enlarge / Some of the many Snap apps available in Ubuntu’s Snap Store, the place where users can find apps and Linux enthusiasts can find deep-seated disagreement. (credit: Canonical)

Ubuntu Core has existed since 2014, providing a fully containerized, immutable Linux distribution aimed at Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing applications.

That kind of system, based on Ubuntu distributor Canonical’s own Snap package format, could be available for desktop users with the next Ubuntu Long Term Support release, according to an Ubuntu mobile engineer. Pointing to a comment in one of his prior posts, Ubuntu blogger Joey Sneddon suggests that an optional “All-Snap Ubuntu Desktop” will be available with Ubuntu 24.04 in April 2024.

It’s important to note that a Snap-based Ubuntu would seemingly be an alternate option, not the primary desktop offered. DEB-based Ubuntu would almost certainly remain the mainstream release.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

The Original Chromecast Hits End of Life After a Decade of Service

Rest now, little Chromecast. Google has announced the decade-old Chromecast 1 is finally hitting end of life. From a report: A message on Google’s Chromecast firmware support page announced the wind-down of support, saying, “Support for Chromecast (1st gen) has ended, which means these devices no longer receive software or security updates, and Google does not provide technical support for them. Users may notice a degradation in performance.” The 1st-gen Chromecast launched in 2013 for $35.

The original Chromecast was wildly successful and sold 10 million units in 2014 alone. For years, the device was mentioned in Google earnings calls as the highlight of the company’s hardware efforts, and it was essentially the company’s first successful piece of hardware. The Chromecast made it easy to beam Internet videos to your TV at a time when that was otherwise pretty complicated.

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Amazon’s Kill List: 37 Projects That Are No More

Amid slowing sales growth, CEO Andy Jassy is culling projects concocted during the Jeff Bezos era. From a report: When Jeff Bezos ran the show, Amazon.com encouraged employees to pitch product ideas — then take them from concept to reality with minimal bureaucratic second-guessing. The spaghetti-against-the-wall approach didn’t always generate strong sellers — the Fire Phone is one famous misfire — but the company was growing sufficiently quickly to risk some failures and move on with few regrets.

Then in 2021 Andy Jassy became chief executive officer, and over the past couple of years Amazon has made more waves for killing products than launching them. The breadth of the cuts — which range from a kids videoconferencing device to a telehealth service and handful of e-commerce subsidiaries — speaks to both the boundless ambitions of the company during the late Bezos years and the depth of the current retrenchment as Amazon adjusts to a steep slowdown in growth that has precipitated the axing of 27,000 corporate jobs.

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India Cuts Periodic Table and Evolution From School Textbooks

In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy. Nature: The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15-16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability.

Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students. Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11-18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists.”

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Popular Torrent Site RARBG Shuts Down

RARBG, one of the world’s largest torrent sites, has said “farewell” to millions of users. From a report: The site, which was a prominent and stable source of new movie and TV show releases, cited a variety of reasons behind its decision to cease operations. The surprise shutdown marks the end of an era.

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