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Indonesia will continue to block iPhone 16 sales despite Apple's planned $1 billion AirTag factory investment, as the facility does not meet local content requirements for smartphones, Industry Minister Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita said on Wednesday. Indonesia banned iPhone 16 sales last year after Apple failed to meet rules requiring 35% locally-made components in smartphones sold domestically.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks like Samsung is finally ready to roll out a paid subscription for its AI-powered smartphones, but it might not look like what we were expecting. According to ETNews, Samsung Electronics vice chair Han Jong-hee has confirmed that the company's AI Subscription Club, which launched last December for some of Samsung's home appliances in South Korea, will soon roll out to both Galaxy phones and the upcoming Ballie AI robot. "We will apply the subscription service to Galaxy smartphones starting next month," he says. "Ballie will be introduced first in Korea and the US, and we plan to supply it as a subscription in Korea."

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Steve Langasek, One of Ubuntu Linux’s Leading Lights, Has Died  The New Stack

The Lenovo Legion Go S: A New Steam For Linux Gaming  Gameranx

An anonymous reader shares a report: As music sales and streaming revenue reaches a high of $3 billion -- the highest since 2001, not accounting for significant inflation -- the UK video game market, which has grown almost continually for decades, has shrunk by 4.4%. The most significant decline was in boxed video game sales, down 35%. Data from Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA) puts the total worth of the UK video game market in 2024 at $5.7 billion, double the music market and behind TV and movies at $6.2 billion. The numbers show a shift in players' purchasing habits that has been ongoing for years, from physical games to digital downloads and in-game purchases in popular, established games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Boxed games now account for 27.7% of new game sales in the UK, according to ERA data.

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Examining disk space on Linux  Network World

Microsoft will begin enforcing storage limits on unlicensed OneDrive accounts from January 27, 2025, ending a loophole that allowed organizations to retain departed employees' data without cost. Data from accounts unlicensed for over 93 days will move to recycle bins for another 93 days before permanent deletion, unless under retention policies. Archived data retrieval will cost $0.60 per gigabyte plus $0.05 monthly per gigabyte. Organizations must either retrieve data, add licenses, or risk losing access, Microsoft has warned.

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The Japanese government published an alert on Wednesday accusing a Chinese hacking group of targeting and breaching dozens of government organizations, companies, and individuals in the country since 2019. From a report: Japan's National Police Agency and the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity attributed the years-long hacking spree to a group called MirrorFace. "The MirrorFace attack campaign is an organized cyber attack suspected to be linked to China, with the primary objective of stealing information related to Japan's national security and advanced technology," the authorities wrote in the alert, according to a machine translation. A longer version of the alert said the targets included Japan's Foreign and Defense ministries, the country's space agency, as well as politicians, journalists, private companies and tech think tanks, according to the Associated Press. In July 2024 Japan's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) wrote in a blog post that MirrorFace's "targets were initially media, political organisations, think tanks and universities, but it has shifted to manufacturers and research institutions since 2023."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry's net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action. JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December. Analysts have said the withdrawals are an attempt to head off "anti-woke" attacks from rightwing US politicians, which are expected to escalate when Trump is sworn in as the country's 47th president in just under a fortnight. Trump's vows to deregulate the energy sector, dismantle environmental rules and "drill, baby, drill," were a big part of his campaign platform and are expected to form a key part of his blueprint for governing the US, the world's biggest oil and gas producer.

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Former MoviePass CEO Theodore Farnsworth has pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges for misleading investors about the movie subscription service's "unlimited plan" and its parent company's capabilities, U.S. prosecutors said. Farnsworth falsely claimed the $9.95 monthly unlimited movie plan was sustainable and that Helios & Matheson Analytics could monetize subscriber data through artificial intelligence, knowing both statements were untrue. He faces up to 20 years in prison for MoviePass-related fraud and five years for a separate conspiracy charge involving Vinco Ventures.

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Nvidia's AI chips are advancing faster than Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry's historical performance benchmark, according to chief executive Jensen Huang. "Our systems are progressing way faster than Moore's Law," Huang told TechCrunch. Nvidia's chips have improved thousand-fold over the past decade, outpacing Moore's Law's prediction of doubled transistor density every year, Huang said. He adds: We can build the architecture, the chip, the system, the libraries, and the algorithms all at the same time. If you do that, then you can move faster than Moore's Law, because you can innovate across the entire stack. [...] Moore's Law was so important in the history of computing because it drove down computing costs. The same thing is going to happen with inference where we drive up the performance, and as a result, the cost of inference is going to be less.

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Linux 6.14 Preps UHBR For Intel Panther Lake, Lower Alchemist GPU Power Use With Whitelisted CPUs  Phoronix

OrangePi Neo gaming handheld with Manjaro Linux now due out in Q1 2025  GamingOnLinux

Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang believes "very useful" quantum computers are likely decades away, tempering expectations for the emerging technology. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it's probably on the late side," Huang said during Nvidia's analyst day. "If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."

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Windows 10 Countdown: Make the Switch to Linux for a Fresh Start  TechNewsWorld

Windows 10 Countdown: Make the Switch to Linux for a Fresh Start  LinuxInsider

An anonymous reader shares a report: Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it's finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom. News of Akamai's decision to end CDN services in China emerged in a letter it recently published and sent to customers and partners that opens by reminding them the company has a "commitment to providing world-class delivery and security solutions" -- and must therefore inform them that "Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date." Customers are offered a choice: do nothing and then be moved to an Akamai CDN located outside China, or use similar services from Chinese companies Tencent Cloud and Wangsu Science & Technology.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who get their coffee hit in the morning reap benefits that are not seen in those who have shots later in the day, according to the first major study into the health benefits of the drink at different times. Analysis of the coffee consumption of more than 40,000 adults found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease during a 10-year follow-up period than those who went without. But the benefits to heart health appeared to vanish in people who drank coffee throughout the day, the researchers found, with medical records showing no significant reduction in mortality for all-day drinkers compared with those who avoided coffee. [...] The study suggests that a morning dose of coffee is better for the heart than an evening one, but it does not explain why. One possible explanation is that drinking coffee later in the day can disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This in turn affects sleep, inflammation and blood pressure, all of which can harm heart health. In an accompanying editorial, Prof Thomas Luscher, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London, notes that many all-day drinkers sleep poorly, adding that coffee seems to suppress melatonin, a hormone that is important for inducing sleep in the brain. The effects are driven largely by caffeine, but coffee contains hundreds of other bioactive compounds that affect our physiology. The researchers say some substances in the blood that drive inflammation often peak in the morning and could be countered by anti-inflammatory compounds in a morning coffee. "This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee," they write. "Overall, we must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy," Luscher writes. "Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!" The study has been published in the European Heart Journal.

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Intel Preps Nice NPU Driver Improvements For Linux 6.14  Phoronix

FEX 2501 Brings JIT Performance Improvements, Changes Needed For Denuvo Support  Phoronix