The first meteor shower of the year peaks on the night of January 23. Heres everything you need to know to watch it and the many other showers that will appear in 2025.

Joel Kaplan, who was a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, replaces Nick Clegg, who was a former deputy prime minister of Britain, as Metas head of policy.

After nearly two decades of fighting, the battle over regulations that treat broadband providers like utilities came to an end on Thursday.

MacworldThe Photos app overhaul in iOS 18 has been met with mixed approval. We have a set of tips for how to improve iOS 18 Photos by customizing the interface and layout, but the internet seems to have caught on to a new Enhanced Visual Search feature and is worried about the privacy implications.Starting in iOS 16, a feature called Visual Look Up will identify common objects, landmarks, plants, animals, and even icons and labels in your photos. When you look at an image in your Photos library, the info button (i) will get a little sparkle on it if Visual Lookup can provide further info. It might even change from the letter (i) to an icon of an animal or leaf. The feature got better in iOS 17, and is improved even more in iOS 18.But theres only so much your iPhone can do on-device. There just no way to match any of your infinite photo variety to the thousands of popular landmarks and points of interest in the worldthe database would fill up all your iPhone storage and then some.So to make Visual Look Up better at identifying common landmarks and points of interest, Apple will use the cloud to match places in your photos to a big points-of-interest database it maintains. This, of course, requires your photo (or at least, specific markers and data from them) leaving your iPhone. Heres what the privacy implications are and how to disable this feature if you want to.Enhanced Visual Search privacyIn Apples legal disclaimers about Photos & Privacy, it says:Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos.Note that this is just about matching places, not faces of people or pets (or other animals and plants), which all still happens on-device.Just what does all that technical jargon mean? Well, homomorphic encryption means encryption that allows operations to be done on the data while its still in its encrypted state. In other words, your image is encrypted and then Apple matches the data to its database of landmarks and points of interest without ever decrypting it into a visually recognizable image.Differential Privacy is a means of protecting individual data when its used in group analysis. You might have your anonymized data as part of a bunch of data sets, and nobody can identify you when looking at just one of them, but if you combine data from multiple sets together you can pinpoint an individual person. Differential Privacy is a way to use several mathematical methods to protect users from this.And an OHTTP relay is an Oblivious HTTP Relay. Its a trusted internet relay that takes encrypted requests and forwards them along to a specific location (in this case, to Apples photo analyzing servers) without sending along any identifying information like IP addresses, device IDs, and so on. In other words, it separates the what of a request from the who of the request. So Apple has no way of knowing from which one of its users any individual photo has come, nor would any hacker who got access to Apples Enhanced Visual Lookup server.In other words, Apple is going to great lengths to have no ability to know what your photos are or where they came from. This protects your privacy, but it also protects Apple from liability or surveillance requests from government entities.How to disable Enhanced Visual SearchIf youre still worried about privacy in Photos, even with all that encryption and obscuring identifiable information, you can disable Enhanced Visual Search easily enough. Visual Look Up will still work, it just wont be as good at identifying things like landmarks or points of interest in your photos. On iPhone or iPad:Open SettingsScroll to the bottom and tap on Apps.Select Photos.Youll find the toggle for Enhanced Visual Search at the bottom of the Photos settings. Tap once to turn it off.FoundryOn Mac, youll find it in the settings of the Photos app itself:Open PhotosIn the Photos menu, select Settings (or type Command-comma)Select the General tabYoull find a checkbox for Enhanced Visual Search at the bottom of the General tab. Click once to turn it off.Foundry

OpenAI has failed to release the tool to opt-out or customize data collection the company promised to make available by 2025,according to Techcrunch.OpenAI is one of several generative AI (genAI) companies that have faced criticism for training their AI models on copyrighted material without permission from the owners. The companies have instead argued that the AI training should be classified as fair use (known as the concept of fair use in US law).In May 2024, Open AI said a Media Manager tool would be able to identify copyrighted text, images, audio and video to reflect creators preferences across multiple sources. According to Techcrunch, however, the tool has never been further prioritized internally at the company.OpenAI has so far not commented on the delay of Media Manager, or given any update on when the tool might be released.

The Competition Commission of India is reportedly set to announce its finding that Apple has committed antitrust violations with the App Store, and has informed the company.India's CCI will say it's found anticompetitive practices with Apple's App StoreA group called "Together We Fight Society" (TWFS) complained to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) in 2021 about Apple's App Store rules and fees. In July 2024, the CCI made a preliminary conclusion that Apple had abused its position of power over digital services and products.As part of that 2024 announcement, however, Apple said that the CCI had disclosed privileged and sensitive information, such as sales numbers. The CCI's 142-page report was not made public, but still it was circulated to some parties, including the TWFS. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A legal ruling has disfavored Zaha Hadid Architectsin their attempt to extract themselves from a licensing agreement with the Zaha Hadid Foundation that dictates the annual payment of royalty fees equal to 6% of the firm's annual net income.According to the first reports from British outlet The Times, "[Patrik] Schumacher said the agreement was only intended to provide Hadid with an income during her lifetime to regularise a 'rather haphazard system of Dame Zaha claiming remuneration and expenses on an ad hoc basis' which could lead to press scrutiny."The London-based practice, which is unable to exit the agreement, reported a turnover worth close to $86 million in 2023. Zaha Hadid Architects has paid a total of 21.4 million (appx. $26.5 million USD) to the foundation through the agreement since 2018.