Apple said on Monday it will no longer offer its "buy now, pay later" service, Apple Pay Later, in the United States, and will instead focus on bringing installment loan offerings to Apple Pay users globally later this year. The company told 9to5Mac that the new feature will allow users to access installment loans from eligible credit and debit cards, as well as lenders, when checking out with Apple Pay. Existing Apple Pay Later users in the U.S. will still be able to manage their loans through the Wallet app. Apple Pay Later, which launched in the U.S. in March last year, allowed users to split purchases of $50 to $1,000 into four equal payments over six weeks without fees or interest. The company said the shift to a global installment loan offering will enable it to provide flexible payments to more users worldwide in collaboration with Apple Pay enabled banks and lenders.

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Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn't want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations. From a report: "We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can't be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto "foundations")," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. "Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core." The announcement comes exactly 10 years to the day after a crowdfunding campaign saw 10,000 people give more than $500,000 to launch Proton Mail. To make it happen, Yen, along with co-founder Jason Stockman and first employee Dingchao Lu, endowed the Proton Foundation with some of their shares. The Proton Foundation is now the primary shareholder of the business Proton, which Yen states will "make irrevocable our wish that Proton remains in perpetuity an organization that places people ahead of profits." Among other members of the Foundation's board is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, HTTP, and almost everything else about the web. Of particular importance is where Proton and the Proton Foundation are located: Switzerland. As Yen noted, Swiss foundations do not have shareholders and are instead obligated to act "in accordance with the purpose for which they were established." While the for-profit entity Proton AG can still do things like offer stock options to recruits and even raise its own capital on private markets, the Foundation serves as a backstop against moving too far from Proton's founding mission, Yen wrote.

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The U.S. government on Monday sued Adobe, accusing the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat of harming consumers by enrolling them in its most lucrative subscription plans without clearly disclosing important terms. From a report: In a complaint filed in the San Jose, California, federal court, the government said Adobe failed to adequately disclose hefty early termination fees, sometimes reaching hundreds of dollars, when customers sign up for "annual, paid monthly" subscription plans. The government said Adobe hides important terms in fine print and behind textboxes and hyperlinks, clearly discloses the fees only when subscribers try to cancel, and makes canceling an onerous and complicated process.

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Thousands of people catching trains in the United Kingdom likely had their faces scanned by Amazon software as part of widespread artificial intelligence trials, new documents reveal. Wired: The image recognition system was used to predict travelers' age, gender, and potential emotions -- with the suggestion that the data could be used in advertising systems in the future. During the past two years, eight train stations around the UK -- including large stations such as London's Euston and Waterloo, Manchester Piccadilly, and other smaller stations -- have tested AI surveillance technology with CCTV cameras with the aim of alerting staff to safety incidents and potentially reducing certain types of crime. The extensive trials, overseen by rail infrastructure body Network Rail, have used object recognition -- a type of machine learning that can identify items in videofeeds -- to detect people trespassing on tracks, monitor and predict platform overcrowding, identify antisocial behavior ("running, shouting, skateboarding, smoking"), and spot potential bike thieves. Separate trials have used wireless sensors to detect slippery floors, full bins, and drains that may overflow. The scope of the AI trials, elements of which have previously been reported, was revealed in a cache of documents obtained in response to a freedom of information request by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. "The rollout and normalization of AI surveillance in these public spaces, without much consultation and conversation, is quite a concerning step," says Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at the group.

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The accounting and finance professions have long adapted to technology -- from calculators and spreadsheets to cloud computing. However, the emergence of generative AI presents both new challenges and opportunities for students looking to get ahead in the world of finance. From a report: Research last year by investment bank Evercore and Visionary Future, which incubates new ventures, highlights the workforce disruption being wreaked by generative AI. Analysing 160mn US jobs, the study reveals that service sectors such as legal and financial are highly susceptible to disruption by AI, although full job replacement is unlikely. Instead, generative AI is expected to enhance productivity, the research concludes, particularly for those in high-value roles paying above $100,000 annually. But, for current students and graduates earning below this threshold, the challenge will be navigating these changes and identifying the skills that will be in demand in future. Generative AI is being swiftly integrated into finance and accounting, by automating specific tasks. Stuart Tait, chief technology officer for tax and legal at KPMG UK, describes it as a "game changer for tax," because it is capable of handling complex tasks beyond routine automation. "Gen AI for tax research and technical analysis will give an efficiency gain akin to moving from typewriters to word processors," he says. The tools can answer tax queries within minutes, with more than 95 per cent accuracy, Tait says.

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Three out of Vietnam's five active international undersea internet cables are down, state media said over the weekend, the second major round of outages in the country in just over a year. From a report: The problems with the three cables, which connect Vietnam with the United States, Europe and Asia, have "significantly affected Vietnam's internet connection with the world", reported the official Vietnam News Agency. Vietnam is connected to the global internet mainly via five undersea cables with a combined capacity of nearly 62 Tbps, according to data from FPT, one of the country's top internet service providers. It's not clear if the three cables referred to, which account for most of the bandwidth, are totally or partially down.

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Wells Fargo's co-branded credit card partnership with fintech startup Bilt Technologies is causing the bank to lose up as much as $10 million monthly, according to a WSJ report. The bank agreed to a co-branded program with the fintech startup that most other big banks -- including JPMorgan Chase -- passed on, incorrectly modeled key assumptions and sees no path to profitability. The card, which allows users to pay rent without fees while earning rewards, has attracted many young customers. From the report: There is a reason why credit cards hadn't gained traction in the rent sector until Bilt came along. Most landlords didn't accept them because they refuse to pay card fees that get pocketed by the banks issuing them and often run between 2% and 3%. Bilt structured the card so landlords won't incur the fees. Wells instead eats much of that. About six months after the credit card was launched, Wells began paying Bilt a fee of about 0.80% of each rent transaction, even though the bank isn't collecting interchange fees from landlords. It appears that the problem for Wells Fargo is that Bilt customers are savvy. They are making the rent payments, but not carrying balances or doing any other transactions through the card.

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YouTube is piloting a new feature called "Notes" that allows viewers to add context and information under videos. The move comes as YouTube aims to minimize the spread of misinformation on its platform, particularly during the pivotal 2024 U.S. election year. The feature, similar to Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter), will initially be available on mobile in the U.S. in English.

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An artificial intelligence candidate is on the ballot for the United Kingdom's general election next month. From a report: "AI Steve," represented by Sussex businessman Steve Endacott, will appear on the ballot alongside non-AI candidates running to represent constituents in the Brighton Pavilion area of Brighton and Hove, a city on England's southern coast. "AI Steve is the AI co-pilot," Endacott said in an interview. "I'm the real politician going into Parliament, but I'm controlled by my co-pilot." Endacott is the chairman of Neural Voice, a company that creates personalized voice assistants for businesses in the form of an AI avatar. Neural Voice's technology is behind AI Steve, one of the seven characters the company created to showcase its technology. He said the idea is to use AI to create a politician who is always around to talk with constituents and who can take their views into consideration. People can ask AI Steve questions or share their opinions on Endacott's policies on its website, during which a large language model will give answers in voice and text based on a database of information about his party's policies. If he doesn't have a policy for a particular issue raised, the AI will conduct some internet research before engaging the voter and pushing them to suggest a policy.

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Avian influenza outbreaks on US dairy farms have raised concerns about milk safety, leading some to consider alternatives like engineered milk proteins. Startups like Remilk and Alpine Bio are using yeast and soybeans to produce key milk proteins, aiming to replace dairy cows and reduce environmental impact. However, competing with subsidized dairy industries and their efficient use of cow byproducts remains a challenge for these biotech ventures, MIT Technology Review reports. The story adds: Everyone agrees that cow's milk will be difficult to displace. It holds a special place in the human psyche, and we owe civilization itself, in part, to domesticated animals. In fact, they've left their mark in our genes, with many of us carrying DNA mutations that make cow's milk easier to digest. But that's why it might be time for the next technological step, says Alpine's CEO Magi Richani. "We raise 60 billion animals for food every year, and that is insane. We took it too far, and we need options," she says. "We need options that are better for the environment, that overcome the use of antibiotics, and that overcome the disease risk." It's not clear yet whether the bird flu outbreak on dairy farms is a big danger to humans. But making milk without cows would definitely cut the risk that an animal virus will cause a new pandemic. As Richani says: "Soybeans don't transmit diseases to humans."

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Mozilla has reinstated certain add-ons for Firefox that earlier this week had been banned in Russia by the Kremlin. From a report: The browser extensions, which are hosted on the Mozilla store, were made unavailable in the Land of Putin on or around June 8 after a request by the Russian government and its internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor. Among those extensions were three pieces of code that were explicitly designed to circumvent state censorship -- including a VPN and Censor Tracker, a multi-purpose add-on that allowed users to see what websites shared user data, and a tool to access Tor websites. The day the ban went into effect, Roskomsvoboda -- the developer of Censor Tracker -- took to the official Mozilla forums and asked why his extension was suddenly banned in Russia with no warning.

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The iconic recycling symbol, invented 20 years before Earth Day 1990, has become omnipresent on products, often misleading consumers about what can be recycled, according to experts cited in a story explored by Grist. The chasing arrows logo, which promises rebirth for discarded materials, is frequently plastered on items that are not recyclable, particularly plastic products. Confusion over recycling rules has led to contamination at recycling facilities, driving up costs for cities. Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets recycled, with much of the rest ending up in landfills or incinerators. Environmental groups have called plastic recycling a "false solution." The trouble began in the 1970s when corporations, facing pressure to address litter, embraced recycling as a way to shift responsibility for waste onto individuals and local governments. The plastics industry introduced a resin code system in 1988, surrounding numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the impression that all plastics could be recycled. Despite industry efforts to promote recycling, experts say fulfilling the "urgent need to recycle" has proven difficult and unprofitable. The result is a lack of markets for most recycled plastics, with only 9 percent of all plastics ever produced having been recycled.

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Meta has confirmed that it will pause plans to start training its AI systems using data from its users in the European Union and U.K. From a report: The move follows pushback from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta's lead regulator in the EU, which is acting on behalf of several data protection authorities across the bloc. The U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) also requested that Meta pause its plans until it could satisfy concerns it had raised. "The DPC welcomes the decision by Meta to pause its plans to train its large language model using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram across the EU/EEA," the DPC said in a statement Friday. "This decision followed intensive engagement between the DPC and Meta. The DPC, in cooperation with its fellow EU data protection authorities, will continue to engage with Meta on this issue." While Meta is already tapping user-generated content to train its AI in markets such as the U.S., Europe's stringent GDPR regulations has created obstacles for Meta -- and other companies -- looking to improve their AI systems, including large language models with user-generated training material. However, Meta last month began notifying users of an upcoming change to its privacy policy, one that it said will give it the right to use public content on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI, including content from comments, interactions with companies, status updates, photos and their associated captions. The company argued that it needed to do this to reflect "the diverse languages, geography and cultural references of the people in Europe."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group. The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to "steer" users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation. The charges would be the first brought against a tech company under the Digital Markets Act, landmark legislation designed to force powerful "online gatekeepers" to open up their businesses to competition in the EU. The commission, the EU's executive arm, said in March it was investigating Apple, as well as Alphabet and Meta, under powers granted by the DMA. An announcement over the charges against Apple was expected in the coming weeks, said two people with knowledge of the case.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Itâ(TM)s been a rocky couple of months for Sonos -- so much so that CEO Patrick Spence now has a canned autoreply for customers emailing him to vent about the redesigned app. But as the company works to right the ship, restore trust, and get the new Sonos Ace headphones off to a strong start, it finds itself in the middle of yet another controversy. As highlighted by repair technician and consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, Sonos has made a significant change to its privacy policy, at least in the United States, with the removal of one key line. The updated policy no longer contains a sentence that previously said, "Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers." That pledge is still present in other countries, but it's nowhere to be found in the updated US policy, which went into effect earlier this month.

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Visa's and Mastercard's proposed $30 billion antitrust settlement to limit credit and debit card fees for merchants is in peril, after a New York judge signaled she was preparing to reject the accord. From a report: U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie in Brooklyn told lawyers for the card networks and objectors at a hearing on Thursday that she will "likely not approve the settlement," according to court records. She plans to write an opinion explaining her decision and reasoning. Both card networks said they were disappointed. Mastercard called the settlement a "fair resolution" that gave businesses more flexibility in managing card transactions, and Visa called it an "appropriate resolution" to the nearly 19-year-old case.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: City building simulations are not real life. They can be helpful teaching tools, but they abstract away many of the real issues in changing communities. And yet, sometimes a game like Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) will present an issue that's just too timely and relevant to ignore. Such is the case with "Economy 2.0," a big update to the beleaguered yet continually in-development game, due to arrive within the next week or so. The first and most important thing it tackles is the persistent issue of "High Rent," something that's bothering the in-game citizens ("cims" among fans), C:S2 players, and nearly every human living in the United States and many other places. C:S2 has solutions to high rent, at least for their virtual citizens. They removed the "virtual landlord" that takes in rent, so now a building's upkeep is evenly split among renters. There's a new formula for calculating rent, one that evokes a kind of elegant mathematical certainty none of us will ever see: "Rent = (LandValue + (ZoneType * Building Level)) * LotSize * SpaceMultiplier"

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An anonymous reader shares a report: After five years of pioneering research into the abuse of social platforms, the Stanford Internet Observatory is winding down. Its founding director, Alex Stamos, left his position in November. Renee DiResta, its research director, left last week after her contract was not renewed. One other staff member's contract expired this month, while others have been told to look for jobs elsewhere, sources say. Some members of the eight-person team might find other jobs at Stanford, and it's possible that the university will retain the Stanford Internet Observatory branding, according to sources familiar with the matter. But the lab will not conduct research into the 2024 election or other elections in the future.

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A group of London hospitals struggling to contain the fallout from a cyberattack against a critical supplier had known for years about weaknesses that left them vulnerable to hacks, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing internal documents. From the report: The Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, which runs five major hospitals in the London area, has failed to meet the UK health service's data security standards in recent years and acknowledged as recently as April that 'cybersecurity remained a high risk" to its operations, according to publicly available documents that outline board of directors' meetings. In January, the board of directors raised questions about the security of digital links between hospital computer systems and those of third-party companies. Hackers last week brought down the trust's pathology services provider, Synnovis, with severe knock-on effects at hospitals. Doctors have, among other things, been forced to delay medical operations, postpone blood tests and resort to handwritten records. The attack has disrupted blood services so drastically that medical facilities are asking the public for donations, and one hospital is calling on its own staff to contribute. The April report proposed an audit to identify where improvements could be made. It's not clear if improvements took place before the hack on June 3, or whether the vulnerabilities identified in the board of directors' reports -- which include dated IT systems and hardware devices -- had any bearing on the ransomware infection at Synnovis.

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