Though less well-known than groups like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, Brass Typhoon, or APT 41, is an infamous, longtime espionage actor that foreshadowed recent telecom hacks.

Eric Slesinger made a career shift from the spy agency to venture capital, championing military start-ups as Europe beefed up its defenses amid an uncertain relationship with the United States.

Macworld In the tariff saga’s latest baffling twist, President Trump claimed Sunday that the exemption announced Friday for imported electronics simply does not exist. In a lengthy post to Truth Social (via HuffPost), the president insisted that “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook'” and that “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday.” This is confusing because U.S. Customs and Border Protection absolutely did publish a list of exempted products on that day. Trump’s rationale for denying exemptions exists is that “These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket.’ The Fake News knows this, but refuses to report it.” However, the claim made by media outlets this weekend was no more and no less than the simple and factual statement that a wide range of electronics, including nearly all of Apple’s products, were being made exempt from the latest round of reciprocal tariffs. Macworld noted at the time that the so-called “fentanyl” tariffs appeared to remain in effect, but this does not change the fact that official sources had indicated that other far larger 125 percent tariffs on China imports no longer applied. We also noted that any exemptions could well be temporary and that the entire saga has been unpredictable. If the White House intends to apply a different “bucket” of tariffs to imported electronics in the future, that too does not contradict or refute the overall media coverage of the exemptions. And the government made no such indication in its announcement of the Reciprocal Tariff Exclusion. Macworld takes no pleasure in contradicting the president in this way and would be happy to never cover tariffs again. Sadly, because Apple manufactures so many iPhones in China, the tariffs stand to impact the company’s customers through price rises. We will continue to note future changes in policy and their likely effect on Apple’s operations.

Microsoft has now added support for hotpatching in Windows 11 Enterprise 24H2 on x64 systems (AMD/Intel), Bleeping Computer reports. The support means that some security updates can be installed without restarting the computers. Instead, security updates are downloaded in the background and installed by patching in-memory code into running processors. Hotpatch updates will be released quarterly. “With hotpatch updates, you can quickly take action to help protect your organization against cyberattacks, while minimizing user disruption. You start by creating a quality update policy with hotpatch activation in Windows Autopatch through the Microsoft Intune console,” Microsoft writes. Windows should be able to determine on its own whether a system is compatible with hotpatch updates.

The iPhone Fold is rumored to get two high-resolution screens, with Apple also reportedly installing an under-screen camera for the bigger display.A render of what the iPhone Fold could look like - Image Credit: AppleInsiderThe iPhone Fold has been long in development, with Apple keen to make the display as perfect as possible for the release. If a leaker is to be believed, the end result could be an iPhone with a very large screen.According to Weibo leaker "Digital Chat Station," the iPhone Fold will have two displays. The main one is the internal screen, which is claimed to measure 7.76 inches diagonally. Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Following our previous visit to CRÈME, we are keeping our Meet Your Next Employer series in New York City this week to explore the work of Joseph Vance Architects. Located in Chelsea, the firm has built a portfolio over thirty years focused on high-end, custom residential projects both new-build and renovated. “The homes we design are well balanced, focus on bringing in natural light, use warm materials, and are executed with a rarefied attention to detail,” the firm says about its approach. Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring for an Intermediate Architect/Designer to join their New York City team. For candidates interested in applying for a position or anybody interested in learning more about the firm’s output, we have rounded up four townhouses in the city by Joseph Vance Architects that exemplify the firm’s ethos. Brooklyn Townhouse. Image credit: Mikiko KikuyamaBrooklyn Townhouse, New York, NY Joseph Vance Architects’ renovation of a brick townhouse in Cobble H...

Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Preregistration is now open — click here to receive program updates. To design a building is typically to design for function, and a structure is often a solution. Yet, every now and then, we come across a building that has wriggled free of purpose altogether. It is too small to occupy, odd to ignore, or deliberate to be dismissed as a work of art. Commonly, these forms are follies. Follies first emerged in 18th-century Europe, mostly in gardens owned by wealthy people with elaborate titles and questionable taste. Built to look like crumbling towers, classical temples, or pastoral ruins, follies had no real use other than to decorate the landscape or give guests something to walk towards. They were expensive jokes, architectural one-liners, and metaphors that were often expressions of grief or ego. Never utility. The name stuck because it fit, to design and build a folly was indeed a folly of an undertaking. Today, they’re back. Or at least something like them is. Architects and artists are once again building structures that don’t do much in the traditional sense. Some are installations, some are pavilions. You’ll find them tucked into sculpture parks, floating on lakes, hidden in woodland, or standing stubbornly in public squares. Occasionally, they offer shelter or act as decoration. A few endeavor to educate. Many are content to simply be objects. But each one earns its place through character rather than purpose by provoking, surprising, or simply refusing to explain itself to the likes of you and me. This collection gathers recent projects that pick up where the folly left off. Each asks the same question in its own way: What if architecture didn’t need a reason to make sense and was just an idea made oddly, beautifully visible? IKAL By Cabrera Arqs / Enrique Cabrera Arquitecto, Chicxulub Pueblo, Mexico Photos by Enrique Cabrera IKAL doesn’t house much, but it holds a mood. This circular structure, cast in chukum and open to the stars, sits contentedly in the Yucatán landscape. A simple cosmic observatory without a telescope. From above, it resembles a crater or a sacred mark; from within, it’s more chapel than much else. There’s no signage and no explanation. But a slice of sky and a feeling that something larger might be at play is all it needs. Whether it’s architecture or ritual theatre is beside the point. As a folly, it’s perfect: form without function, but heavy with meaning. Folly Kometenplein By bureau SLA, Hoofddorp, Netherlands Photos by Thijs Wolzak It looks like it might unfold, fly away or implode — but for now, it sits cheerfully in a Dutch square, waiting for a food truck or a passing stranger to give it something to do. This bright triangular structure, part pavilion, part transformer, can be opened or closed depending on its mood (or at least on its configuration). There’s a bar counter six meters in the air that descends when needed. Two sides shift, others stay still. It’s temporary, moveable and slightly absurd. A modern folly, then, with decent hydraulics. Katenara By Building Simplexity Laboratory (BSL), The University of Hong Kong, Taichung, Taiwan If you were to sketch a catenary curve on a napkin and then build it using nothing but glulam, tension cables and parametric software, you’d end up somewhere near Katenara. Suspended in a forest park, this pavilion is part shelter, part algorithm, a timber swoop that demonstrates how low-tech and high-design can intersect. It’s not particularly useful — though it does keep rain off your head — but as an elegant experiment in form-making, it’s a reminder that architectural play need not require a brief, only curiosity. Songyi Theater By Kong Xiangwei Studio, Shandong, China Photos by Archi Translator In a pine forest earmarked for clearing, a handful of silver ‘trees’ now rise instead. Songyi Theater is as much a stage as a sculpture garden. It’s highly theatrical, enchantingly reflective, and intentionally ambiguous. Its mirrored trunks catch the sun while its sinuous seating curls through the undergrowth. Visitors wander, perform, or do nothing at all. It invites pause more than applause. The designer reportedly worked on-site without drawings, shaping the folly through direct conversation with the land. Which is possibly the most poetic kind of indulgence. Living Knitwork Pavilion By Wicaksono & Co, Nevada Photos by Irmandy Wicaksono Built for Burning Man (folly heaven) and powered by solar panels and theremin-like sensors, Living Knitwork is half spacecraft, half soft sculpture. Woven from conductive yarns and shaped like a techno-dodecahedron, it hums quietly when you get too close, lights up when you move, and tells stories through embedded textiles. No one asked for an interactive knitted folly with real-time spatial audio, but here it is anyway. Part shade structure, part glowing oddity, wholly unnecessary and utterly captivating. Louis Vuitton – Pavilion Nomad By MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY, Milan, Italy Photos by naaro It landed at Milan Design Week like a metallic squid. Nomad is a traveling pavilion, made from thousands of riveted aluminium parts that shimmer like mercury and weigh next to nothing. Its rounded geometry hides the precise engineering; its globular form contains no straight lines, only curves and voids. It references the palazzo that surrounds it but belongs to nowhere in particular. It’s light, portable, unplaceable and all the better for it. Architecture that goes wherever it pleases? That’s a folly in motion. Flourish Bamboo Dome By Studio A-light, Taiwan Photos by Fixer Photographic Studio There are flowers, misting systems, and suspended planters, but the real flourish in Flourish is structural. This bamboo dome in rural Taiwan reimagines the idea of a greenhouse, becoming a floating spring spiral, using heat-treated Makino bamboo to create soaring arches and delicate curves. It’s anchored with floral islands and clad in agricultural mesh, yet it feels closer to a cathedral than a farm shed. As a folly, it’s unusually practical, but its exuberance, scale and sheer agricultural theatre make it a worthy outlier. Concrete Pavilion By LIN Architecture, China Photos by Chen Zhitong and Zhuo Hongduo This concrete object looks like it might once have been useful. Maybe a chapel? A pumping station? A monument? No one seems entirely sure, which only adds to its charm. LIN Architecture’s composition of angled roofs, fractured windows, skewed platforms and half-arches creates a building that feels both ancient and improvised, maybe even otherworldly. The interior is fragmented, lit by unexpected slits and skylights. It’s too serious to be a playground and too strange to be symbolic. It doesn’t explain itself, and that, of course, is entirely the point. Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Preregistration is now open — click here to receive program updates. The post Gloriously Unnecessary: The Return of the Architectural Folly appeared first on Journal.

Sony has announced that the PS5 console will be getting price hikes in regions across Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In a post on the PlayStation Blog, the company has confirmed that, while some regions will only see a price hike for the PS5 Digital Edition, others will also be getting higher price tags for the standard PS5 with the Blu-ray disc drive. Europe and UK will not be getting price hikes for the standard PS5. Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, will be seeing price hikes across the board. The company has also confirmed that the additional Disc Drive for PS5 will be getting a price hike across these regions as well. The PS5 Pro, on the other hand, will not be seeing any changes in its price. Sony has also stated that other regions part of its EMEA market (Europe, Middle East and Africa) might also get price hikes down the line. The company has referred to these price hikes as having been made “with a backdrop of a challenging economic environment,” that have forced it to re-evaluate some of its pricing. This price hike comes shortly after the company had also announced last week that the price of PlayStation Plus subscriptions would be going up across various regions. This includes Australia, Korea, Southeast Asia, and 15 Latin American countries. Check out the changes in pricing below. Europe: PS5 Digital Edition – €499.99 Disc Drive for PS5 – €79.99 UK: PS5 Digital Edition – £429.99 Disc Drive for PS5 – £69.99 Australia: Standard PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – AUD $829.95 PS5 Digital Edition – AUD $749.95 Disc Drive for PS5 – AUD $124.95 New Zealand: Standard PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive – NZD $949.95 PS5 Digital Edition – NZD $859.95 Disc Drive for PS5 – NZD $139.95

"Video games franchises are now ripe for the picking" – why A Minecraft Movie could lead to games taking over Hollywood The Minecraft adaptation makes gaming's future on the big screen seem undeniable Image credit: Warner Bros Feature by Samuel Roberts Editorial Director Published on April 14, 2025 Box office analysts expected A Minecraft Movie to make $70 to $90 million on its opening weekend in the US – instead, it made $157 million, and has now passed half a billion worldwide following its second weekend. Not bad for a movie that was stuck in development hell for years and years, passing between different directors before landing with Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess. The success of the film clearly took some by surprise, but anyone who's tuned in to the continuous success of Minecraft is perhaps less taken aback. "Minecraft itself is a cultural juggernaut – over 300 million copies sold, and a fanbase spanning kids to adults who’ve been building pixelated empires for years," Jeff Bock, Senior Box Office Analyst at Exhibitor Relations tells GamesIndustry.biz. "That’s a massive built-in audience hyped for anything with creepers and diamond pickaxes. The film leaned into this with a star-studded cast – Jack Black as Steve and Jason Momoa which probably pulled in casual viewers who trust those names as they’ve starred in many comparable hits." "Now, even the staunchest of naysaying movie executives will be convinced." Rhys Elliott, Alinea Analytics The film's success seems significant in a year where movies based on traditional family-friendly Hollywood properties – like Snow White and Captain America: Brave New World – are faltering. Minecraft has a uniquely young-skewing audience, which is still where Hollywood tends to find a lot of box office success following the footfall challenges of the post-pandemic era. "I think the Minecraft movie only exceeded expectations for traditional movie analysts and critics who … dare I say it … have been mostly in their own bubble," says Rhys Elliott, Head of Market Analysis at Alinea Analytics. "Anybody with an interest in the games market – or who has raised a young child in the past decade – knew Minecraft would be a hit movie," Elliott says. "The number of copies of Minecraft that have been sold are roughly equal to the US population." Bock says A Minecraft Movie's success is also the result of studio Warner Bros. picking the right release window and marketing the film correctly. As an adaptation, too, it's connecting with audiences, regardless of their knowledge of Minecraft – if not critics, who dinged it with a 46% average on Rotten Tomatoes, or more seasoned film fans on the Letterboxd app, where it has a 2.8/5 user score. "Most importantly, there’s the timing – April 2025 meant spring break crowds and no major competing blockbusters. Warner Bros. marketed this hard, with trailers dropping early (September 2024) to build hype. Plus, Minecraft’s open-ended vibe let the filmmakers get creative, blending game lore with a fish-out-of-water story that didn’t alienate non-players." Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Video game adaptations breaking into the mainstream is not a new thing at this point, either in TV or film. But the unprecedented scale of the Mario and Minecraft movies' success changes the conversation around feature films more specifically. "The Mario movie was the biggest turning point for studios realising the potential of games," Elliott says. "It grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, making it not only the biggest game adaptation ever (by revenues) but also the second-biggest animated movie. The Sonic trilogy has also been huge. "The Mario movie even outperformed juggernauts like Frozen and Despicable Me. If studios weren’t paying attention to games before, they certainly were after Mario. And now Minecraft is another feather in that cap. It’s outperformed Barbie in the US box office, and it’s even tracking decently in China so far." "Now, even the staunchest of naysaying movie executives will be convinced," Elliott says. Coincidence or not, it was a sign of confidence that movie studio A24 revealed the director of the Death Stranding adaptation one day after Minecraft's opening weekend haul. While the crossover in audience demographic between the two is likely minimal, video games remain relatively untapped by Hollywood, and do offer cinemagoers the kinds of worlds they've never seen on the big screen before. And now, movie executives have more reasons than ever to put them there. The key thing, of course, is that the adaptation needs to be right. Superhero movies have arguably declined in quality over the past five years, suggesting that diminishing box office returns aren't just tied to waning interest in the subject matter. Video games adaptations are equally as susceptible if they're not good enough. "Movie and TV studios should not look to gaming as a silver bullet," Elliott says. "As Mario, Minecraft, and Pokémon are the biggest brands of all time with huge generation-spanning fan bases. Both IP licensees and licensors also need to treat the source material with respect, or risk diluting the IP in question and the reputation of the adapting studio. "Games are not an IP slot machine and their fandom should be respected. Things need to be authentic and respect the fandom. Going forward, we expect to see some poor video game adaptations from studios that are looking to jump on the trend’s hype train without planning their approach properly, which we saw with the Borderlands movie. "Such products will of course be outshined by the success stories, though, as they always are. Nobody is talking about the Borderlands movie anymore. We’ll be talking about the Mario and now Minecraft ones for years." "Don’t rock the boat, just float it. That should be the mantra for Hollywood attempting to adapt video games in the future." Jeff Bock, Exhibitor Relations Elliott suggests the magic combination is a mix of fitting the original IP, catering to die-hard fans in an authentic way, releasing at the right time and being accessible enough for new audiences to parse what's going on. It seems obvious, but a lot can go wrong in the making of a movie. Still, fulfilling those criteria has enabled Minecraft to avoid being touched by the cooler critical reception. Bock's assessment on what it takes for these movies to succeed is similar. "The numbers speak for themselves – huge fan base, and Hollywood listened – giving hardcore gamers exactly what they wanted. Don’t rock the boat, just float it. That should be the mantra for Hollywood attempting to adapt video games in the future." Elliott points out that the positive returns go both ways, too, with Alinea's sales data for PlayStation showing that Minecraft had sold more than 500,000 copies in March 2025 alone. Image credit: Alinea Analytics According to Elliott, the biggest opportunity for the industry could be one that hasn't happened yet: timing the release of a successful adaptation with a new game launch. "Candidly, I think we’re still waiting for the big success story in terms of timing." Elliott points to the lack of a 'new entry point' for the Fallout series as an example of a missed opportunity, even if it led to huge sales bumps for existing titles like Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. "Success stories, including the recent Minecraft adaptation, have proven that game franchises can captivate mainstream audiences and lead to new games sales, [but] the games industry is not fully harnessing the transmedia potential," Elliott says. "Despite soaring viewership, cultural relevance, and peaks for older games, two critical gaps persist for the games market: the lack of accessible gaming entry points for new fans and the absence of timely, revenue-driving game content tied to adaptations. "When games or updates are not released alongside adaptations, audience excitement tends to dissipate. It’s a missed opportunity." That's likely because publishers are wary about conflating a game's marketing campaign with a TV show or movie where they have less control over the creative output. If one doesn't work out, it could damage the other. But, there's also opportunity in getting both parts right at the same time. Elliott points to the Mario movie's release in April 2023 and the launch of Super Mario Wonder in October 2023 as an example of the strategy not being joined up in the most profitable way. "Could you imagine if Wonder and the Mario Movie launched on the same day? I have a feeling Wonder would have sold far more than the 15.5 million copies it had sold as of the end of December. They should have been selling that thing in the cinemas." Mojang, for its part, hosted a collaboration with the movie in Minecraft, capitalising on the audience interest, and continues to deploy major updates for the game regularly. "We still have a long way to go in terms of launches, but I think the future is bright for game-based transmedia," Elliott says. As A Minecraft Movie lurches towards a billion-dollar box office haul worldwide, Bock suggests video games are the right source material for Hollywood's future bets. "The success of video game adaptations come down to a variety of factors, but most importantly, these are vibrant myths that have massive fanbases, and, in some cases, have been creating new installments and upgrades for decades. "Video games franchises are now ripe for the picking."

The company is asking consumers to pay more for console hardware in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, EMEA, and the UK.