Eight years ago, a coalition of retail banks in India built a mobile payments system called the UPI. The system is interoperable, allowing users to make instant peer-to-peer transactions between them -- across all participating banks -- and to merchants at zero cost. Today, it processes more than 12 billion transactions each month -- more than all card payments combined in India -- and has become the most popular way Indians transact online. Many U.S. giants have cited UPI as an example that other countries should also explore developing. We have also covered UPI several times over the years. NPCI, a quasi-regulator founded by India's central bank, oversees UPI. Four years ago, it announced plans to enforce a market share cap on each participating player. The quasi-regulator didn't want few players to become too powerful and any single participant to process more than 30% of all UPI transactions in a month. It later postponed the deadline to January 1, 2025. Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay command more than 86% of the UPI market. Now, the NPCI is reportedly planning to extend the deadline again by up to two years. The reason? TechCrunch reports: The NPCI had initially planned to enforce the market share cap in January 2021, but postponed the deadline to January 1, 2025. TechCrunch had previously reported that the regulator was moving towards extending the deadline further after concluding that there is no practical solution to address the issue. One can argue that the NPCI shouldn't be interfering with free market forces and let people decide which apps they wish to use. TechCrunch adds: However, several UPI providers admit that an incentive plan that unfairly differentiates [one of the proposed solutions by some industry players] against PhonePe and Google Pay will be a bad look for the ecosystem and could send wrong signals to the investor community. U.S.-based investors, including Accel, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Invesco, Vanguard, BlackRock and Fidelity, are among some of the most prolific investors in Indian public firms and startups. Some of the choices made by the RBI [India's central bank] and other regulators have already spooked many investors.

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Zitchas writes: The practice of having games require a connection to a publisher's server -- whether it is to check for a license or to access plug-ins and DLC -- is an increasingly common thing in computer software; and many people are concerned that at some point in the future the publisher will shut down their server, and effectively render the person who paid for the game left with something that no longer functions. This has already happened to some games and software Concerned citizens in Canada are taking the issue to their Parliament in order to push for a law that will mandate that when the server-side support for software is discontinued, companies must leave it in a functional state and remove mandatory connections to servers -- services that no longer exist. Perhaps even more importantly, the petition also asks government to pass a law prohibiting EULA's from forcing users to agree to waiving their right to this. Unfortunately, the petition is only open to citizens of Canada, so the rest of us are out of luck. Considering the potential benefits to the rest of the world if they enact legislation that does this, though, it might be worth suggesting to any of your Canadian friends to go sign the petition.

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The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing. From a report: Tornadoes tend to travel in packs these days, often with a dozen or more forming in the same region on the same day. On the worst days, hundreds can form at once. More than a dozen tornadoes were reported on both Monday and Tuesday this week across the Great Plains and the Midwest, according to the Storm Prediction Center run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two weeks ago, on the most active day in April, 105 tornadoes were reported. While outbreaks like these have always happened, they have become more common in recent decades. The total number of tornadoes in the United States each year has stayed relatively consistent over the last several decades, but they now happen in more concentrated bursts over fewer days during the year. In the 1950s through the 1970s, on average about 69 percent of tornadoes in the United States happened on days with fewer than 10 tornadoes, and about 11 percent happened on days with 20 or more tornadoes. These percentages have shifted significantly in recent decades, according to a 2019 study. The researchers found that since 2000, on average only about 49 percent of tornadoes have happened on less busy days and about 29 percent have happened on days with 20 or more tornadoes. "Now when tornadoes happen, they often happen in an outbreak environment," said Tyler Fricker, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Louisiana Monroe and one of the authors of the study. While the timing of this trend lines up with the planet's rising temperatures, scientists are hesitant to definitively attribute tornadoes' clustering behavior to human-caused climate change.

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Apple's plans for AI on the iPhone could bring real-time transcription to its Voice Memos and Notes apps, according to a report from AppleInsider. The Verge: The new feature is expected to arrive with iOS 18 and will reportedly let you see a running transcription of your audio recordings in either app. While Notes currently doesn't let you record audio, a separate rumor from AppleInsider suggests Apple plans on adding this capability in iOS 18 as well. Audio transcription in either app sounds especially handy for students or journalists, who can save time transcribing a lengthy lecture or interview. It should also be helpful for anyone who just wants to take a quick look at their Voice Memos without having to listen to their recordings. As for Notes, Apple reportedly plans to go beyond transcriptions by adding AI-powered summaries.

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The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an AI voice clone. From a report: The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian. During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an "agency leader," asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. "Fortunately the attackers were not successful," Read wrote in the email. "We all need to be vigilant to the techniques that go beyond emails to take advantage of virtual meetings, AI and deepfakes."

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Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games, which players purchase for around $70 apiece. During EA's latest earnings call, Wilson said, "Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us," and that teams are looking at how to thoughtfully implement ads within game experiences. In-game advertising is not new, with the first recorded instance dating back to 1978. As the gaming industry is expected to grow to $583 billion by 2030, in-game ads are seen as a natural progression. However, player reception depends on the placement and unobtrusiveness of the ads. EA has faced backlash in the past for poorly placed ads, such as full-screen promotions for a TV show in UFC 4, which disrupted gameplay. The company has been experimenting with dynamic ads since 2006, with titles like Need for Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142 among the first to feature them.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Ministry of Finance spent nearly $50 billion on April 29 and May 1 trying to prop up the value of the currency by selling US dollars and buying yen. Who was on the other side of this trade? Data from Deutsche Bank's foreign exchange trading platform suggests: literally everyone. "Nearly all client categories saw record USD/JPY buying during the assumed intervention days," writes George Saravelos, global head of FX research at the German bank, in a note to clients on Thursday. "That absorption of USD/JPY selling from the Japanese Ministry of Finance was so broad-based continues to point to the lack of effectiveness of this policy." The Japanese yen is the weakest G10 currency in trading on Thursday, deepening its decline relative to the US dollar to nearly 10% so far this year. Very low rates in Japan increase the appeal of holding other currencies where investors can earn more interest. Strategists have warned that action from the Bank of Japan may be needed to reinforce the Ministry of Finance's attempts to guard against further yen weakness.

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The U.K. economy has emerged from recession as gross domestic product rose 0.6% in the first quarter, official figures showed Friday, beating expectations. From a report: Economists polled by Reuters had forecast growth of 0.4% on the previous three months of the year. The U.K. entered a shallow recession in the second half of 2023, as persistent inflation continued to hurt the economy. Although there is no official definition of a recession, two straight quarters of negative growth is widely considered a technical recession. The U.K.'s production sector expanded by 0.8% in the period from January to March, while construction fell by 0.9%. On a monthly basis, the economy grew by 0.4% in March, following 0.2% expansion in February. In output terms, the services sector -- crucial to the U.K. economy -- grew for the first time since the first quarter in 2023, the Office for National Statistics said. The 0.7% growth was mainly driven by the transport services industry which saw its highest quarterly growth rate since 2020.

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The U.S. FBI is working towards charging hackers from the aggressive Scattered Spider criminal gang who are largely based in the U.S. and western countries and have breached dozens of American organisations, a senior official said. From a report: The young hackers grabbed headlines last year when they broke into the systems of casino-operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment locking up the companies' systems and demanding hefty ransom payments. From health and telecom companies to financial services, they have hacked a range of organisations over two years, piling pressure on law enforcement agencies to thwart them. "We are working towards charging individuals where we can with criminal conduct, in this case, largely around the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," Brett Leatherman, the FBI's cyber deputy assistant director, told Reuters in an interview. The group was a rare alliance of hackers in Western countries with veteran cybercriminals from eastern Europe, he said on the sidelines of the RSA Conference in San Francisco Wednesday. "Often we don't see that mingling of geographical hackers working together outside the confines of like hacktivism, for example," he said. Security researchers have tracked Scattered Spider since at least 2022 and say the group is far more aggressive than other cybercrime gangs - skilled especially at hijacking the identities of IT helpdesk staff to penetrate into company networks. Caesars paid around $15 million to free its systems from the hackers.

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Economist: What is the ideal job to outsource to AI? Today's AIs, in particular the Chatgpt-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses -- India's information-technology companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with ai and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, ai is an opportunity, not a threat. Business services are critical to India's economy. The sector employs 5m people, or less than 1% of Indian workers, but contributes 7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total exports. Simple services such as call centres account for a fifth of those foreign revenues. Three-fifths are generated by it services such as moving data to the computing cloud. The rest comes from sophisticated processes tailored for individual clients. Capital Economics, a research firm, calculates that an extreme case, in which ai wiped out the industry entirely and the resources were not reallocated, would knock nearly one percentage point off annual GDP growth over the next decade in India. In a likelier scenario of "a slow demise," the country would grow 0.3-0.4 percentage points less fast. The simplest jobs are the most vulnerable. Data from Upwork, a freelancing platform, shows that earnings for uncomplicated writing tasks like copy-editing fell by 5% between Chatgpt's launch in November 2022 and April 2023, relative to roles less affected by ai. In the year after Dall-e 2, an image-creation model, was launched in April 2022, wages for jobs like graphic design fell by 7-14%. Some companies are using AI to deal with simple customer-service requests and repetitive data-processing tasks. In April K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, predicted that "maybe a year or so down the line" chatbots could do much of the work of a call-centre employee. In time, he mused, AI could foretell gripes and alleviate them before a customer ever picks up the phone.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max are teaming up for a new bundle this summer, Netflix is focused on the WWE and celebrity boxing, Disney Plus is getting ESPN, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Max could get a price hike. A familiar refrain emerged around all this news: streaming is becoming cable TV all over again and getting crummier in the process. And it's true! When streaming first emerged, it was a beautiful alternative to piracy, which was very convenient and very illegal, and cable, which was festooned with ads and weighed down by channels you were paying for and didn't want. Streaming gave you a world of content on demand for a fraction of the cost of cable. But that experience was never sustainable. Content costs money to make, and companies are apparently obligated to "increase revenue" and "make profit." This means Netflix spending billions of dollars a year on content isn't necessarily sustainable unless it's adding new users and monetizing them through some combination of ads and increasing subscription fees for stuff that used to be free, like sharing an account or streaming in 4K.

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Apple has apologized for its tone-deaf "Crush!" ad that sparked a furious backlash with artists, musicians and other creators. AdAge reports that Apple said the video "missed the mark" and has scrapped plans to run the cutesy-turned-cringey commercial on TV. From a report: It's clear that Apple intended for the ad to serve as a metaphor for all the myriad creative tools one has when they throw down $1,000 or more for a new iPad Pro. Run during Tuesday's event, the video shows a series of musical instruments and other tools for human expression, including a guitar, drums, trumpet, amplifiers, record player, TV and much more. "All I Ever Need Is You" by Sonny & Cher soundtracks the clip. Soon, it's revealed that the objects are all sitting on an industrial crusher, which descends upon the scattered creative instruments, exploding in plumes of satisfyingly colorful smoke. But when the crusher pulls back up, we see that everything was transformed into a shiny new iPad Pro.

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The world is on the verge of a climate abyss, the UN has warned, in response to a Guardian survey that found that hundreds of the world's foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C. From a report: A series of leading climate figures have reacted to the findings, saying the deep despair voiced by the scientists must be a renewed wake-up call for urgent and radical action to stop burning fossil fuels and save millions of lives and livelihoods. Some said the 1.5C target was hanging by a thread, but it was not yet inevitable that it would be passed, if an extraordinary change in the pace of climate action could be achieved. The Guardian got the views of almost 400 senior authors of reports by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost 80% expected a rise of at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a catastrophic level of heating, while only 6% thought it would stay within the 1.5C limit. Many expressed their personal anguish at the lack of climate action. "The goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is hanging by a thread," said the official spokesperson for Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general. "The battle to keep 1.5C alive will be won or lost in the 2020s -- under the watch of political and industry leaders today. They need to realise we are on the verge of the abyss. The science is clear and so are the world's scientists: the stakes for all humanity could not be higher." Alok Sharma, the president of the Cop26 climate summit in 2021, said: "The results of the Guardian's survey should be another wake-up call for governments to stop prevaricating and inject much more urgency into delivering on the climate commitments they have already made." He said world leaders needed to get on and deliver on the pledge they made to transition away from fossil fuels at Cop28 in December.

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The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world's atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet. From a report: The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period. The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Nino climate event, which has now waned, as well as the ongoing and increasing amounts of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. "It's really significant to see the pace of the increase over the first four months of this year, which is also a record," said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We aren't just breaking records in CO2 concentrations, but also the record in how fast it is rising." The global CO2 readings have been taken from a station perched upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii since the measurements began in 1958 under Keeling's father, Charles. The concentrations of CO2 have increased each year since, as the heat-trapping gas continues to progressively accumulate due to rampant emissions from power plants, cars, trucks and other sources, with last year hitting a new global record in annual emissions.

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create AI-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products. From a report:While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce "safe and beneficial" AI. OpenAI, which is also the developer of the DALL-E image generator, revealed it was considering letting developers and users "responsibly" create what it termed not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content through its products. OpenAI said this could include "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity." It said: "We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts ... We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behaviour in this area." The proposal was published as part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI tools. Joanne Jang, an employee at the San Francisco-based company who worked on the document, told the US news organisation NPR that OpenAI wanted to start a discussion about whether the generation of erotic text and nude images should always be banned from its products. However, she stressed that deepfakes would not be allowed.

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The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft's Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn't finished. From a report: This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way. Employees were shocked by the unexpected shuttering Tuesday of three Xbox subsidiaries and the absorption of a fourth. The closures included Tokyo-based Tango Gameworks, which last year released the critically acclaimed action game Hi-Fi Rush. Tango was in the process of pitching a sequel, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. During a town hall with ZeniMax staff on Wednesday morning, Xbox president Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance. Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company's studios had been spread too thin -- like "peanut butter on bread" -- and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said. Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arkane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall, a critical and commercial flop.

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Smart home device maker Brilliant has laid off most of its staff and is seeking a buyer after failing to secure funding, CEO Aaron Emigh told The Verge. The company has shut down its support center and halted sales of its smart light switches and controllers, which integrate with various smart home platforms. Emigh said existing devices will continue to function, but their long-term functionality remains uncertain. Founded in 2016, Brilliant aimed to simplify smart home control but struggled with high prices, interoperability issues, and slower-than-expected market growth. The company raised $60 million in funding over eight years.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: One Raspberry Pi often leads to another. Soon enough, you're running out of spots in your free RealVNC account for your tiny boards and "real" computers. Even if you go the hardened route of SSH or an X connection, you have to keep track of where they all are. All of this is not the easiest thing to tackle if you're new to single-board computers or just eager to get started. Enter Raspberry Pi Connect, a new built-in way to access a Raspberry Pi from nearly anywhere you can open a browser, whether to control yourself or provide remote assistance. On a Raspberry Pi 4, 5, or Pi 400 kit, you install Pi connect with a single terminal line, reboot the Pi, and then click a new tray icon to connect the Pi to a Raspberry Pi ID (and then enable two-factor authentication, of course). From then on, visiting connect.raspberrypi.com gives you an encrypted connection to your desktop. It's a direct connection if possible, and if not, it runs through relay servers in London, encrypting it with DTLS and keeping only the metadata needed for the service to work. The Pi will show a notification in its tray that somebody has connected, and you can manage screen sharing from there.

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Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet -- including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species -- are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. For instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting Lyme disease cases in North America. But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life. "It's a big step forward in the science," said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, who was not an author of the new analysis. "This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss." In what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease. The new analysis, which was published in Nature on Wednesday, focused on five "global change drivers" that are altering ecosystems across the planet: biodiversity change, climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of nonnative species and habitat loss or change.

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