Kalakshar US

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has officially designated Google with strategic market status (SMS) under the new digital markets competition regime. Specifically, it found that Google holds “substantial and entrenched market power and a position of strategic significance” when it comes to general search and search advertising services. The digital markets competition regime came into force on January 1, 2025 and will enable the agency to “promote competition in fast-moving digital markets, while protecting UK consumers and businesses from unfair or harmful practices by the very largest technology firms.”

So what does getting the “strategic market status” designation mean, exactly? As the CMA clarifies, it doesn’t automatically mean Google did something wrong, but it does allow the agency to launch interventions that ensure general search services in the UK are “open to effective competition” and that businesses relying on Google are being treated fairly. The company is expecting to face new rules and regulations on how Search works in the near future. UK’s CMA launched an investigation on Google’s standing in the search industry on January 14 to confirm its status. 

“We have found that Google maintains a strategic position in the search and search advertising sector – with more than 90% of searches in the UK taking place on its platform,” said Will Hayter, Executive Director for Digital Markets at the CMA. To be clear, the designation applies to the company’s AI Overviews and AI Mode features, as well, but not to its Gemini AI assistant, at least for now. 

The CMA said it’s expecting to start consulting on possible interventions later this year. In an announcement of its own, Google said that “many of the ideas for interventions that have been raised in this process would inhibit UK innovation and growth, potentially slowing product launches at a time of profound AI-based innovation.” The company believes that some of those ideas would “pose direct harm to businesses” and could lead to higher prices for consumers. 

“The UK enjoys access to the latest products and services before other countries because it has so far avoided costly restrictions on popular services, such as Search. Retaining this position means avoiding unduly onerous regulations and learning from the negative results seen in other jurisdictions, which have cost businesses an estimated €114 billion,” Google wrote. By “other jurisdictions,” Google means the European Union, whose similar Digital Markets Act law designated the company as a gatekeeper in 2023. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-uks-antitrust-regulator-will-keep-a-closer-eye-on-google-search-130021994.html?src=rss 

Control: Ultimate Edition will be available on the iPhone, the iPad and the Apple Vision Pro in early 2026, its developer Remedy has announced. The developer says you can either “tap into the action with touch controls,” which presumably includes hand tracking and gestures on the mixed reality headset, or use controllers to play the game. Remedy first made it available for the Apple ecosystem when it released Ultimate Edition for Mac back in February this year. 

Remedy originally released Control in 2019 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows computers. In the action-adventure game, you take on the role of Jesse Faden, the new director of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) who’s also searching for her kidnapped brother Dylan. The game is set in the Oldest House, the headquarters of the clandestine US agency that studies and contains paranatural phenomena. 

Ultimate Edition is the definitive version of the title and bundles the base game with the Foundation and AWE (Altered World Events) expansions. While both are continuations of the main game, AWE is a crossover between Control and Alan Wake, an older title by Remedy about a crime author whose wife disappears during a trip to a small mountain town. Remedy hasn’t announced a specific release date or price for the game yet, but it’s currently listed for $40 on the Apple Store for Mac computers. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/remedys-control-is-coming-to-iphone-ipad-and-vision-pro-early-next-year-120100226.html?src=rss 

China’s antitrust regulator has opened an investigation into Qualcomm’s acquisition of Israeli connected-vehicle chip company Autotalks. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) alleges that Qualcomm is suspected of violating China’s anti-monopoly laws by not disclosing certain details of the deal.

Qualcomm had initially agreed to acquire the fabless chip company in 2023 to expand its Snapdragon portfolio into more automotive applications. Autotalks creates chips, sensors and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication tech centered in part on safety for vehicles. It has been a few months since the acquisition was finalized, with the new probe coming amid trade negotiations between the United States and China.

The deal was previously investigated by both the US Federal Trade Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, with Qualcomm temporarily abandoning the acquisition in early 2024. The exact process of how the deal was reopened is not clear, as the acquisition was only announced once it had been finalized and received regulatory approval

Last month, SAMR said that NVIDIA’s $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox also ran afoul of national regulations. The regulators also said the deal violated conditional terms outlined by regulators on initial approval. The Financial Times reported that China’s regulators held on to that decision for months, purportedly to gain leverage in trade discussions with the US.

The bulk of these investigations have come while the US and China are engaged in negotiations around a TikTok deal, tariffs, trade and more. Today China drastically expanded its export controls for rare earth minerals, targeting defense and semiconductor companies outside the country.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/chinese-regulators-are-investigating-qualcomms-acquisition-of-autotalks-121540269.html?src=rss 

After years of trying, a dedicated team has managed to download and archive a fully playable version of the long-lost canceled mobile game, Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home. The story of its search and recovery has been detailed in a new video by YouTuber The Golden Bolt, who helped kick off the search himself back in 2019. 

Ratchet & Clank: Clone Home has usually been attributed to Handheld Games, which developed a string of mobile titles in 2005 including Spider-Man 2: The Hero Returns and Ratchet & Clank: Going Mobile, the predecessor to Clone Home. Originally set to debut in 2006 for Java phones, it was quietly canceled just prior to release.

It wasn’t forgotten, though. Rumors persisted that it was a fully playable game, helping elevate it to mythical status among fans. Then, The Golden Bolt heard from one of the original developers that the game was indeed finished and may have found its way to a handful of mobile devices. His 2019 video on the subject helped kick off a new search.

The most dedicated fans researching the game were college students “Emily” and “Super Gamer Omega Clank.” The latter posted on Reddit four years ago that they found someone with the game on a Sony Ericsson W880i. It was encrypted, though, and as little as a few weeks ago, they said that their quest to extract it from that device was proving to be “hopeless.” 

Then, a breakthrough. The team managed to safely crack the phone’s encryption, extract Clone Home and archive it for anyone to download. Miraculously, it’s complete and fully playable, if a bit unpolished. Golden Bolt now believes that the game was actually developed not by Handheld Games but a company called JavaGround, which made Sony’s last few Java (J2ME) games. It may have been uploaded by accident to mobile networks like Cingular or Sprint for a brief period, then downloaded by a handful of people before being pulled. 

People who have played the game so far say it’s surprisingly good and even better than Going Mobile. It’s a wonderfully eccentric entry to the R&C canon (which now counts 17 titles), thanks to the nonsensical plot, solid mechanics, ability to play as two different Lombaxes and a gun called the “Ewezie” that turns your enemies into sheep.

So why was Clone Home canceled? It may have been due to potential litigation between Sony and Handheld Games, The Golden Bolt speculated. In any case, it’s a gem for game preservationists and an amazing reward for the years of work put in by R&C fans. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/a-long-lost-ratchet-and-clank-mobile-game-has-been-found-123008739.html?src=rss 

Apple is updating its Security Bounty program this November to offer some of the highest rewards in the industry. It has doubled its top award from $1 million to $2 million for the discovery of “exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks” and which requires no user interaction. But the maximum possible payout can exceed $5 million dollars for the discovery of more critical vulnerabilities, such as bugs in beta software and Lockdown Mode bypasses. Lockdown Mode is an upgraded security architecture in the Safari browser. 

In addition, the company is rewarding the discovery of exploit chains with one-click user interaction with up to $1 million instead of just $250,000. The reward for attacks requiring physical proximity to devices can now also go up to $1 million, up from $250,000, while the maximum reward for attacks requiring physical access to locked devices has been doubled to $500,000. Finally, researchers “who demonstrate chaining WebContent code execution with a sandbox escape can receive up to $300,000.” Apple told Wired that it has awarded over $35 million to more than 800 security researchers since it introduced and expanded the program over the past few years. Apparently, top-dollar payouts are very rare, but Apple has made multiple $500,000 payouts. 

The company said in its announcement that the only system-level iOS attacks it has observed in the wild came from mercenary spyware, which are historically associated with state actors and typically used to target specific individuals. It said its new security features like Lockdown Mode and Memory Integrity Enforcement, which combats memory corruption vulnerabilities, can make mercenary attacks more difficult to pull off. However, bad actors will continue evolving their techniques, and Apple is hoping that updating its bounty program with bigger payouts can “encourage highly advanced research on [its] most critical attack surfaces despite the increased difficulty.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-doubles-its-biggest-bug-bounty-reward-to-2-million-102844667.html?src=rss 

The Programmed Data Processor-1 (PDP-1) is perhaps most recognizable as the home of Spacewar!, one of the world’s first video games, but as the video above proves, it also works as an enormous and very slow iPod, too.

In the video, Boards of Canada’s “Olson” is playing off of paper tape that’s carefully fed and programmed into the PDP-1 by engineer and Computer History Museum docent Peter Samson. It’s the final product of Joe Lynch’s PDP-1.music project, an attempt to translate the short and atmospheric song into something the PDP-1 can reproduce. 

As Lynch writes on GitHub, the “Harmony Compiler” used to translate “Olson” to paper tape was actually created by Samson to play audio through four of computer’s lightbulbs while he was a student at MIT in the 1960s. He used it to recreate classical music, but it’ll work with ’90s electronic music in a pinch, too.

“While these bulbs were originally intended to provide program status information to the computer operator,” Lynch writes, “Peter repurposed four of these light bulbs into four square wave generators (or four 1-bit DACs, put another way), by turning the bulbs on and off at audio frequencies.” The signal from each bulb is then downmixed into stereo audio channels, transcribed via an emulator and merged into a single file that has to be manually punched into the paper tape that’s fed into the PDP-1.

It’s a laborious process for playing even the simplest of songs, but it’s worth it to hear Boards of Canada’s already nostalgic music from an even older classic computer.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/someone-programmed-a-65-year-old-computer-to-play-boards-of-canadas-olson-220857441.html?src=rss