Yesterday, Apple announced that it will be supporting RCS Universal Profile 3.0 in future software updates. While this does have one large benefit of bringing end-to-end encryption to iPhone users using RCS, it has a number of other benefits that arent yet being mentioned.iOS 18 uses a dated version of RCSWhen Apple introduced RCS messaging to iPhone as part of iOS 18, it supported version 2.4. This still introduced a number of quality of life improvements for texting Android users, such as higher quality images, read receipts, and more but it still missed out on a lot.The GSMA announced RCS version 2.7 in June 2024, which standardized a number of noteworthy feature improvements for RCS. This includes the ability to reply and react to messages (including with custom reactions), as well as the ability for message senders to edit, recall, and delete messages. Custom reactions are an existing or generated image, so itd theoretically be possible for iPhone users to share Genmojis over RCS.However, since this RCS upgrade was announced after Apple implemented RCS in iOS 18, iPhone users do not get to benefit from these upgrades.iOS 19 will support RCS 3.0In a statement yesterday, Apple shared that it plans to support end-to-end encryption in a future software update, meaning that the company would be supporting RCS Universal Profile 3.0.As a result, Apple will be taking the leap from RCS version 2.4 to RCS version 3.0, bringing along all of the great upgrades introduced in version 2.7, as well as the now confirmed end-to-end-encryption upgrade.Apple hasnt provided a specific timeline for supporting RCS version 3.0, other than the fact that itd be in a future software update, likely sometime in the iOS 19 lifecycle. Heres Apples statement on the matter:End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA. We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.My favorite Apple accessories on Amazon:Follow Michael:X/Twitter,Bluesky,InstagramAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

You may be pretty happy with the Instagram feed you've curated for yourself. But a recent episode on the app has served as a rude reminder to users that they aren't in control of the mysterious algorithms they depend on for a quick screentime fix.Kelly Takasu, a 36-year-old mom in Los Angeles, is one of those users. After she looked up videos about breastfeeding, Instagram took that innocent query as license to show her the weirdest AI slop imaginable."I noticed one day I had a Reels suggestion: an older woman who had a bunch of babies around her. I must have looked at it for too long," she told the Washington Post.And then followed more abominations: an AI-generated video of an older woman breastfeeding baby human-panda hybrids, and the piece de resistance, a video of women giving birth to other animal-human chimeras.It was a pretty extreme departure from Takasu's typical feed filled with parenting tips and cooking videos. At the very least, maybe she can take solace in the fact that she was far from alone.In late February, Meta apologized for an "error" that led to many Instagram feeds being flooded with extreme content and gore, including shootings, deadly accidents, and videos of real-life murders. Outraged users took to social media, saying they felt borderline traumatized by being forced to see the graphic content.Courtney, the parent of a 17-year-old boy in Virginia, recalled how it affected her son."He saw assassinations almost like terrorism. He saw a woman give birth, he saw just dead bodies, that kind of stuff," Courtney told WaPo. "I feel like it was an attack of some sort on their minds. They're still very impressionable."The intrusion underscores the blackbox nature of the algorithms controlling users' feeds, and the never ending battle of policing extreme content on the internet. In Meta's case, some graphic videos are flagged with a "Sensitive Content" screen, which blurs the footage and provides a warning before giving you an option to bypass it. Still, that means that a lot of shocking content is allowed to run rampant on Instagram, under this pretty thin form of moderation.It's worth mentioning that Meta recently loosened its content moderation policies, in a move that was widely criticized as essentially allowing hate speech and misinformation to go unpunished on its apps. The company has insisted, however, that the wave of disturbing content was unrelated to these changes, 404 Mediareported.Nonetheless, the shock-fest is also clear symptomof the deluge of AI slop inundating social media platforms with images that are uncanny, bizarre, or extracted from an alternate reality. Because of their provocative nature, the AI images garner tons of engagement with relatively little effort, and can be churned out at a rate that no human moderation efforts could ever have any hope of keeping up with.Share This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismCancerWith the help of mRNA technology proven effective during the COVID pandemic, researchers are now closer than ever to creating viable cancer vaccines.In an interview withWired, Lennard Lee, an oncologist with the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) working on mRNA cancer vaccines, says he believes the groundbreaking research may prove to be a "silver lining" in the brutal COVID-19 pandemic.Before COVID, as Lee told the magazine, "cancer vaccines werent a proper field of research.""Pretty much every clinical trial had failed," the NHS oncologist said. "With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible."As with mRNA COVID vaccines, the logistics of these potential new cancer inoculations work by "giving the body instructions" to fight troublesome cells, as Lee detailed, ultimately providing the immune system with a how-to manual on fighting cancer."Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward," he told Wired. "Same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient."Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach taken with the widespread usage of mRNA COVID jabs, however, these new cancer vaccines will be personalized for each individual cancer patient."In the current trials," Lee elucidated, "we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine thats bespoke to that patients cancer.""That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else," he recounted to the magazine. "Its like science fiction."According to Lee, breakthrough cancer vaccine innovation came on the heels of the UK's rapid infrastructure-building during the COVID pandemic, which saw the country "open and deliver clinical trials" much faster than anyone would have expected.As COVID began winding down in 2022, Lee and his colleagues set up the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, a post-pandemic pet project that segued mRNA research into the arena of oncology.Not long after,"the dominoes started falling very quickly" as that project and others around the world rapidly progressed towards cancer vaccines. OneNHS trial seeking to stop skin cancer from coming back was completed a year early something that's "completely unheard of," Lee said.The NHS oncologisttoldWired thatthe results from that trial should come out by the end of this year or the beginning of 2026. If it was successful, Lee toldWired, he and his team "will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine an impressive feat indeed, especially this soon after the technology was deployed at scale during the pandemic.More on the cancer vax: Groundbreaking Ovarian Cancer Vaccine at an "Exciting" Moment, Lead Scientist SaysShare This Article

Join Cortes 23 and shape the future of digital insurance. We're revolutionizing the life insurance industry through our innovative instant-decision platformcombining advanced analytics, real-time data integration, and deep insurance expertise. Be part of a dynamic team that's redefining how insurers deliver seamless, real-time underwriting experiences without compromising rigorous risk management standards.Compensation range: $65,000 - $85,000 USDYou areAn experienced software engineer with expertise in building both front and back-end services. You excel at building robust and scalable systems, and writing clean and maintainable code!Joining our team means collaborating with a small but growing group of skilled software engineers. You'll play a key role in shaping the evolution of our systems while fostering a culture of innovation, quality, and support.What you'll do...Collaborate closely with the CTO to implement features and improvements.Take shared ownership of our front and back-end systems, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability.Build and maintain a high-quality code base using Typescript, NextJS, Pulumi (with SST) and the event-driven architecture.Actively participate in engineering team discussions, explaining your solutions clearly while remaining open to feedback and suggestions.What you already have...Hard skills:3+ years experience as a software engineer.JavaScript knowledge: Understanding of common APIs and how to use them effectively.TypeScript knowledge, including: built-in and custom utility types and advanced types (e.g., map-types).React knowledge: Hooks, React principles, and best practices.Relational databases: Experience designing, querying, and optimizing databases like MySQL.Serverless experience: Practical knowledge designing, building, and optimizing serverless applications, including familiarity with event-driven architectures and infrastructure-as-code tools (experience with SST is a plus).AWS: Hands-on experience with AWS services such as S3, Lambda, and CloudWatch.Soft skills:The ability to explain your solutions clearly and respectfully - a clear and concise communicator!Passionate about your work!Reliable and hold yourself and your work to a high standard.Know the difference between simple and easy.Willingness to write documentation.Interview ProcessCall ScreenCoding Problem InterviewTake-Home AssignmentDeep-Dive InterviewInterviews with key members of our teamWhat youll get from usRemote forever!Casual work environmentOpportunity to work with a growing and international teamIn-person team meet-ups with our entire global team twice per year!

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Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving.CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted fresh attention on Friday night, after she posted about it on Bluesky. Some users reacted with alarm to the companys plans, which they saw as a reversal of Blueskys previous insistence that it wont sell user data to advertisers and wont train AI on user posts.Oh, hell no! the user Sketchette wrote. The beauty of this platform was the NOT sharing of information. Especially gen AI. Dont you cave now.Graber replied that generative AI companies are already scraping public data from across the web, including from Bluesky, since everything on Bluesky is public like a website is public. So she said Bluesky is trying to create a new standard to govern that scraping, similar to the robots.txt file that websites use to communicate their permissions to web crawlers.Debates about AI training and copyright have dragged robots.txt into the spotlight, among other things highlighting the fact that its not legally enforceable. Bluesky frames its proposed standard as one that would have a similar mechanism and expectations, providing a machine-readable format, which good actors are expected to abide, and does carry ethical weight, but is not legally enforceable.Under the proposal, users of the Bluesky app, or other apps that use the underlying ATProtocol, could go into their settings and allow or disallow the usage of their Bluesky data across four categories: generative AI, protocol bridging (i.e., connecting different social ecosystems), bulk datasets, and web archiving (such as the Internet Archives Wayback Machine).If a user indicates that they dont want their data used to train generative AI, the proposal says, Companies and research teams building AI training sets are expected to respect this intent when they see it, either when scraping websites, or doing bulk transfers using the protocol itself.Molly White, who writes the Citation Needed newsletter and Web3 is Going Just Great blog, described this as a good proposal, and said it was weird to see people flaming BlueSky for it, since its not so much welcoming in AI scraping but rather trying to add a consent signal to allow users to communicate preferences for the scraping that is already happening.I think the weakness with this and [Creative Commons] similar proposal for preference signals is that they rely on scrapers to respect these signals out of some desire to be good actors, White continued. Weve already seen some of these companies blow right past robots.txt or pirate material to scrape.

Welcome back to Week in Review! Im Karyne Levy, TechCrunchs deputy managing editor, and Ill be writing this newsletter from here on out. Thrilled to be here!This week were checking out everything at SXSW; Waymos expansion into Silicon Valley; Intels new CEO; TikToks new suitor; and why DeepSeek isnt taking VC money. Lets get to it!Environmental impact: The FBI, the EPA, the EPA inspector general, and the Treasury Department requested that Citibank freeze accounts of several nonprofits and state government agencies. The accounts were frozen in February, but the new documents make public details that had previously been unknown until they were revealed in court filings this week.SXSW comes to an end: TechCrunch was all over SXSW in Austin this week, riding in Waymo taxis, learning Mark Cubans thoughts on AI (its a tool, not a panacea), and deciphering the T-shirt that Blueskys CEO wore (turns out she was taking a swipe at Mark Zuckerberg).Intels new chief: Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its next CEO. Tan, a Malaysia-born, longtime tech investor, formerly served as CEO of Cadence Design Systems and said that Intel will be an engineering-focused company under his leadership. And hell have his work cut out for him.This is TechCrunchs Week in Review, where we recap the weeks biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.NewsImage Credits:Kirsten KorosecA new era: Rad Power Bikes has a new CEO just a few days after its previous CEO stepped down. Kathi Lentzsch, who has spent years helping turn around underperforming companies in both the consumer and B2B spaces, will take over the e-bike company as it continues to shift away from direct-to-consumer in favor of a retail-based approach.Backdoor policies: Last month it was revealed that the U.K. government secretly ordered Apple to create a backdoor, allowing authorities to access the cloud-stored data of all Apple customers. U.S. lawmakers are asking the head of the U.K.s surveillance court to hold an open hearing for Apples possible challenge to the alleged secret U.K. government legal demand.Food for thought: Bryan Johnson the investor and founder behind the Dont Die movement wants to start foodome sequencing. His goal is to test as much food as possible, creating a public database where people can donate money to have certain foods and brands tested for toxins.No parking: Waymos 300 driverless vehicles in San Francisco are racking up parking tickets. The cars 589 parking violations totaled $65,065 in fines last year.Open Sesame: AI company Sesame has released the base model used for Maya, its super-realistic voice assistant. The model is open source, too, which means it can be used commercially.Tick tock, TikTok: TikToks deadline to finalize its sale to a U.S. company is just around the corner, and now another suitor is showing interest Oracle. Sources told The Information that ByteDance, TikToks parent company, is favoring Oracle over other companies.Little techs hero: Y Combinator sent a letter to the White House this week, urging the government to support Europes Digital Markets Act, which aims to bust up Big Techs market power. Its unclear how the White House will respond.Caviar dreams: Trumps family has been looking into investing in Binance U.S. This comes just a couple of years after Binances U.S. arm plead guilty to violating anti-money laundering regulations.That was easy: Im not opposed to AI, especially when it helps me be more efficient. Take, for example, a new feature that rolled out this week to Gmail. We can now add events to a Google Calendar directly from an email. Thats cool!Got him: The co-founder of Garantex, a Russian cryptocurrency exchange, was arrested in India. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Aleksej Besciokov of personally approving transactions on Garantex linked to North Korean-government hackers and other cybercriminals.Pokmon sold: Niantic, the company behind the viral sensation Pokmon GO, is selling its gaming division to Scopely for $3.5 billion. Niantic said it will now focus on building real-world 3D maps through a new stand-alone entity called Niantic Spatial.DeepSeek, deep pockets? Though it has tons of interest, Chinese AI company DeepSeek isnt taking VC money yet. Charles Rollet runs through a few reasons why.New day, new deal: OpenAI has signed a five-year, $11.9 billion agreement with the GPU-heavy cloud service provider CoreWeave. But the amount of money isnt the only reason why this deal is eye-popping. Before this deal, CoreWeaves biggest customer was Microsoft.Waymo One: Waymo is expanding its early rider program across Silicon Valley, now offering robotaxi rides to people in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, and parts of Sunnyvale. The new territories add to the 55 square miles of coverage already offered in the San Francisco Bay Area.Cool, cool: Fact-checking at Meta is getting an overhaul. Starting Tuesday, the company will begin releasing its version of Community Notes for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users in the United States.Weve got questions: Three years after its launch, exactly how Lockdown Mode works is still a mystery. Theres no explanation for why it takes some of the actions it takes, and some of its notifications are super confusing.AnalysisImage Credits:Moor Studio / Getty ImagesThe writings on the wall: OpenAIs new creative writing AI is impressive but feels like that one kid in high school fiction club who tries way too hard to sound deep. While the AI can churn out clever metafiction, critics say its writing lacks real emotion and originality, making it more of a showoff than a true storyteller.

Recommended By Rachel Wolf Fox News Published March 15, 2025 12:43pm EDT close Elon Musk says he will bring the stranded astronauts back home DOGE leader Elon Musk opens up about his work in space on 'Kudlow.' Join Fox News for access to this content You have reached your maximum number of articles. Log in or create an account FREE of charge to continue reading. By entering your email and pushing continue, you are agreeing to Fox News' Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which includes our Notice of Financial Incentive. Please enter a valid email address. Elon Musk has confirmed that SpaceXs Starship will head to Mars at the end of 2026. The ship will be carrying Optimus, Teslas humanoid robot. The tech billionaire said that if all goes well, humans could be on the red planet by 2029, although he admitted that 2031 is more likely. NASAs Perseverance Mars rover used its dual-camera Mastcam-Z imager to capture this image of "Santa Cruz," a hill within Jezero Crater, on April 29, 2021, the 68th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)SPACEX LAUNCH SCRUBBED HOURS AFTER HEGSETH SHARES MESSAGE TO RESCUE MISSION CREWThe X account for Optimus replied to Musks announcement with just two words: "Hold on.""Starship is the worlds most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, capable of carrying up to 150 metric tonnes fully reusable and 250 metric tonnes expendable," SpaceX writes on its website. In US tons, that is up to 165 tons of fully reusable and up to 275 tons expendable.Musk has long talked about his dream of sending men to Mars, and recently he was spotted in the White House wearing an "Occupy Mars" shirt. Billionaire Elon Musk spoke to podcaster Joe Rogan about the future of the X platform under either future President Kamala Harris or future President Donald Trump. (The Joe Rogan experience.)FORMER ASTRONAUT CELEBRATES SPACEXS IMPRESSIVE TECHNOLOGICAL TOUR DE FORCE"I cant think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars," a quote from Musk reads on SpaceXs webpage on its mission of "making humanity multiplanetary."Musks announcement of a mission to Mars comes during an exciting week for SpaceX. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Friday, March 14, 2025. (SpaceX/NASA)On Friday, SpaceX and NASA launched a crew headed for the International Space Station (ISS) with astronauts who will replace Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been stuck in space for nine months.Test pilots Wilmore and Williams launched into space aboard Boeings Starliner on June 5, 2024, and were scheduled to return to Earth on June 13, 2024. However, thruster failures and helium leaks led NASA and Boeing to leave the astronauts aboard the ISS rather than have them make the risky journey home. Rachel Wolf is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital and FOX Business.

Herpetologists study some of the most complex, misunderstood creatures on Earth. These photos from ... [+] the 2025 edition of the World Nature Photography Awards (WNPA) offer a rare glimpse into these creatures from a perspective we rarely see in the wild.gettyNature would struggle without amphibians and reptiles. They are vital to the worlds ecosystems, acting as both predators and prey while serving as indicators of environmental health. Yet, they are among the most threatened creatures on the planet, facing habitat loss, climate change and disease at alarming rates.The World Nature Photography Awards (WNPA) were founded on the belief that freezing moments of natures beauty and fragility can shift perspectives and inspire actionultimately encouraging us to see the world differently and take steps, big or small, toward conservation.These incredible shotsthe top three in the BehaviorAmphibians and Reptiles category from WNPA 2025give us a rare opportunity to observe some fascinating creatures, and their behaviors, that might otherwise go unnoticed.A Namib Sand Gecko Shot By Marti Phillips, U.S. (Won Bronze)This little creature may look delicate, but its a desert survival specialist with some mind-blowing ... [+] adaptations. Marti Phillips, WNPA 2025This tiny creature is a Namib sand gecko (Pachydactylus rangei), a desert-dwelling marvel that stays incredibly small even into adulthood. This fascinating species is restricted entirely to the Namib sand dunes.These guys hatch smaller than a dime and rarely grow beyond 4 inches (10 cm) long, including their fat-storing taila feature they share with many other lizards. Their small size allows them to move effortlessly across the sand dunes at night, slipping into tiny holes where larger predators cant reach.Namib sand geckos translucent skinyou can faintly see their internal organs through their belliesisnt just for show. This unique trait helps it blend into its sandy surroundings. And because they live in loose sandy habitats, theyve got these really cool fully-webbed feet for walking across the sand. Essentially, these function like snow shoes would in the snow.Unlike many lizards, it lacks eyelidsinstead, it licks its own eyes clean, which may be why you see sand around its mouth in this photo. And if thats not strange enough, this tiny creature barks, squeaks and even screams when threatened.An Agama Lizard Shot By Jules Oldroyd, U.K. (Won Silver)This is an Agama lizard foraging for insects around a sleeping lion. Jules Oldroyd, WNPA 2025 The fearless reptile you see here is an Agama lizard, a heat-loving, rock-dwelling species found across Africas savannas and deserts.Agamas are bold, fast and often bask near large animals like lionssoaking up warmth and opportunistically foraging for insects drawn to their presence. This is an example of commensalism, where the lizard benefits from the lions presence, but the lion is entirely unaffected.Agamas are color-shifting reptilesmales can turn electric blue and fiery orange during mating season to signal dominance and attract mates. But their vibrant colors arent permanent; they darken in cooler temperatures and fade when stressed or submissive.Agamas are known to be explosive sprinters, especially when escaping a life-or-death situation like being chased by a predator. And if thats not wild enough, these tiny lizards engage in push-up contests to intimidate rivals and stake their claim on territoryturning simple exercise into a battle for dominance.This one may look relaxed, but make no mistakejust like the Namib sand gecko, Agamas are built for survival.A Blue-Spotted Mudskipper Shot By Georgina Steytler, Australia (Won Gold)This mid-air shot of a blue-spotted mudskipper won the reptiles and amphibians categorydespite ... [+] technically being a fish photo. Georgina Steytler, WNPA 2025This is a blue-spotted mudskipper (Boleophthalmus caeruleomaculatus), an amphibious fish (so technically neither a reptile nor an amphibian) that thrives in mangrove swamps and mudflats across Australia and New Guinea. This particular individual, the photographer confirms, was photographed on the intertidal mudflats of Roebuck Bay, Broome, Western Australia.Unlike most fish, mudskippers spend more time out of water than in it, using their muscular pectoral fins to walk, climb and even leapas seen in this incredible mid-air shot.But this isnt just a random jumpthis is a territorial display. Mudskippers are highly aggressive fighters, and males use dramatic leaps, fin flaring and head-butting battles to defend their patch of mud from rivals. The raised orange-dotted dorsal fin is a clear warning signal, telling intruders to back off.Breathing is no problem for these land lovers. Blue-spotted mudskippers, like most other mudskippers, have highly vascularized skin and a specialized buccal cavity, allowing them to absorb oxygen from the air as long as they stay moist. They also trap water in their gill chambers, enabling them to extract oxygen even while moving on land.They may be fish, but their behavior is closer to amphibians or even reptiles, making them one of the strangest evolutionary links in the animal kingdom.Photographs like this remind us that every animalwhether a wild mudskipper or a pet at homehas its own unique personality. Curious about your pets traits? Take the science-backed Pet Personality Test to discover their unique profile.