Despite a US trade court ruling that Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs are illegal, Apple investors have unexpectedly failed to react to the news, likely assuming there is more chaos to come.Apple's Stocks app showing the current share price at time of writingThe new court ruling came as the stock market has faced unprecedented volatility following Trump's April 2, 2025, launch of "reciprocal" tariffs. Those April 2 tariffs were ultimately followed by a 25% tariff levied by Trump ostensibly to punish Tim Cook for not attending an event.Apple stocks are currently fluctuating, although trending downwards after a very slight surge overnight. At time of writing, the shares were at $201.58, up barely a half-percent on the day. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

May 30, 2025Ravie LakshmananCryptocurrency / Cybercrime The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has levied sanctions against a Philippines-based company named Funnull Technology Inc. and its administrator Liu Lizhi for providing infrastructure to conduct romance baiting scams that led to massive cryptocurrency losses. The Treasury accused the Taguig-headquartered company of enabling thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams that caused Americans to lose billions of dollars annually. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses," the agency said in a press release. The average loss is estimated to be over $150,000 per individual. Funnull, also called Fang Neng CDN (funnull[.]io, funnull[.]com, funnull[.]app, and funnull[.]buzz), was first attracted the attention of the cybersecurity community in June 2024 after it was implicated in the supply chain attack of widely-used Polyfill[.]io JavaScript library. Last year, an analysis by Silent Push revealed that the infrastructure associated with Funnull has been used to promote investment scams, fake trading applications, and suspect gambling networks. The infrastructure has been codenamed Triad Nexus. Then earlier this February, the cybersecurity company attributed Funnull to a practice dubbed infrastructure laundering wherein the company rented IP addresses from mainstream hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to host criminal websites. Highlighting this aspect, the Treasury said Funnull enables virtual currency investment scams by acquiring IP addresses in bulk from major cloud services companies across the world and selling them to cybercriminals to host scam platforms and other malicious web content. "Funnull generates domain names for websites on its purchased IP addresses using domain generation algorithms (DGAs) – programs that generate large numbers of similar but unique names for websites – and provides web design templates to cybercriminals," the agency pointed out. "These services not only make it easier for cybercriminals to impersonate trusted brands when creating scam websites but also allow them to quickly change to different domain names and IP addresses when legitimate providers attempt to take the websites down." The Treasury also accused Funnull of purchasing Polyfill[.]io with the intent to redirect visitors of legitimate websites to scam websites and online gambling sites, some of which it said are linked to Chinese criminal money laundering operations. Furthermore, the department alleged that its administrator Liu, a Chinese national, was in possession of spreadsheets and other documents that contained information about the company's employees, their performance, and their work progress. The tasks assigned to them included assigning domain names to criminal actors for virtual currency investment fraud, phishing scams, and online gambling sites. In a standalone flash alert, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said it identified 548 unique Funnull Canonical Names (CNAME) linked to over 332,000 unique domains since January 2025. "Between October 2023 and April 2025, multiple patterns of IP address activity were observed from several domains using Funnull infrastructure," the FBI said. "During this time frame, hundreds of domains using Funnull infrastructure simultaneously migrated from one IP address to another either on the same exact day or within the same timeframe." Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE    

It's December of 2015, and the Green Bay Packers are up against the wall. They've lost their last three games, and their early-season momentum is feared dead in the water.The Detroit Lions, a longtime rival, only need to stop one last play on the 39-yard line to keep their two-point lead and take home the win.The snap comes, and Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers scrambles down the field while his faithful receivers scutter for the endzone. From 61 yards, the quarterback makes his final throw, a pass that meets a leaping Richard Rodgers to give Green Bay the touchdown, winning the game and ultimately saving the season.It's safe to say Tesla is in a similar spot: the losses are mounting, the future looks dim, and the team is down to their last pass. Sadly, Elon Musk is no Rodgers.Ten years after the "Miracle in Motown," the electric vehicle company's stock has plummeted by 25 percent in just six months, thanks to horrid global sales, a portfolio many investors see as crusty and dated, and perhaps above all, the alienating behavior of its own chief executive.Mere months into Musk's disastrous stint as federal spending czar, the prediction that "Tesla will soon collapse" is no longer a fringe opinion held by forum dwellers, but a serious charge levied by political commentators, stock gurus, and former Tesla executives alike.Fortunately for any foolhardy shareholders keeping the faith, Elon Musk has promised to rollout Tesla's autonomous robotaxi service in Austin, a product some analysts predicted could soon make up 90 percent of Tesla's profits.Unfortunately for those investors, Musk has given Tesla a self-imposed deadline of June 12th to make it all happen — meaning we're two weeks away from seeing whether or not the rubber hits the road. So where is the company at on its self-driving cabs?Well, the self-driving vehicles about to land in Austin streets are blowing past school buses into child crash dummies, if that's any indication.According to a FuelArc analysis of a school bus test, Tesla's latest iteration of "full self-driving" software failed to detect flashing red school bus stop signs (and in turn failed to stop at the parked bus), detected child-sized pedestrians but failed to react, and made no attempt to brake or evade the adolescent crash dummies as the car drew closer.FuelArc notes that school bus recognition only hit self-driving Teslas in December of 2024. Keep in mind, these vehicles have been on public roads, albeit with drivers behind the wheel, since October of 2015 — just months before Rodger's now-infamous Hail Mary.It's obvious that the robotaxi is nowhere near ready, which is probably why Tesla is scrambling to hire remote operators to drive its vehicles ahead of the looming June deadline.This ought to be the "Miracle in Motown" moment for Telsa – but the quarterback doesn't even have the ball, and the receivers are nowhere to be found.More on Tesla: Self-Driving Tesla Suddenly Swerves Off the Road and CrashesShare This Article

President Donald Trump has disrupted global trade and roiled markets in an effort to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Some of his top tech allies, however, have backed ventures that replace human workers with robots.Elon Musk, a top donor and adviser to Trump, has touted humanoid robots as a future growth area for electric-carmaker Tesla. "You can produce any product,” Musk said of the robots’ potential capacity during a February interview with Dubai's World Governments Summit.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who Trump last month called “terrific,” has invested in several advanced robotics firms.Bezos last year poured funds into Figure, a humanoid robot company that says its initial rollout will focus on manufacturers and warehouses, among other business applications. “We believe humanoids will revolutionize a variety of industries,” the company says on its website.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – both of whom joined Trump on his recent trip to the Middle East – helmed their respective companies as each invested in Figure. OpenAI ended its partnership with Figure last year.“Trump is talking about bringing back the jobs, and he’s not understanding the tension between that goal and automation, which the tech bros have enthusiasm for,” Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told ABC News. “There’s a fundamental conflict between those goals.”MORE: Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in the US. Will it ever happen?Musk did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment made through Musk-owned firm SpaceX. Neither Bezos, Huang nor Altman responded to ABC News’ request.Speaking at a conference in April, Huang said the onset of artificial intelligence would fuel "new types of factories," which in turn would create jobs in construction and steelmaking, as well as in trades such as plumbing and electricity.Even more, Huang said, AI is set to trigger a surge in productivity at companies that adopt the new technology, allowing them to add employees as the firms increase output and revenue."New jobs will be created, some jobs will be lost, every job will be changed," Huang said. "Remember, it's not AI that's going to take your job. It's not AI that's going to destroy your company. It's the company and the person who uses AI that's going to take your job. And so that's something to internalize."Even after a rollback of some levies, consumers face the highest overall average effective tariff rate since 1934, the Yale Budget Lab found earlier this month.A key reason for the tariffs, White House officials say: Reshoring factories and rejuvenating employment in the manufacturing industry.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this month in an interview with Fox News that Trump's vision for ushering in a "golden age" for America involved enticing manufacturers to open factories and build in the United States."We're going to have huge jobs in manufacturing. You've heard the president talk about trillions and trillions of factories being built in America," he said in the interview on May 11.In response to ABC News' request for comment, White House Spokesperson Kush Desai said "the importance of President Trump’s push to reinvigorate American industry goes beyond creating good-paying jobs for everyday Americans.""Supply chain shocks of critical pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and semiconductors during the COVID era prove that America cannot rely on foreign imports. The Trump administration remains committed to reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security with a multifaceted approach of tariffs, tax cuts, rapid deregulation, and domestic energy production," Desai added.The share of U.S. workers in manufacturing has plummeted for decades. Roughly 8% of U.S. workers currently hold positions in manufacturing, which marks a steep decline from about a quarter of all employees as recently as 1970.Researchers attribute such decline to overlapping trends, including the offshoring of manufacturing to low-wage markets overseas and the adoption of labor-saving technology throughout the sector.Long before current advances, automation significantly increased productivity in U.S. factories, meaning the same number of workers could produce many more goods, researchers at Ball State University found in 2015. As a result, they said, manufacturing employment stagnated for decades even as output climbed.Popular Reads“Automation is something we’ve seen for a long time,” Philipp Kircher, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, told ABC News.CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool via AFP via Getty Images, FILESome of Trump’s tech allies have backed firms that seek to further automate manufacturing, touting a new wave of artificial-intelligence equipped robots as a replacement for some workers and salve for labor shortages.Robotics outfit Vicarious boasts $250 million in investments from a set of backers that includes Bezos, Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – all of whom flanked Trump during his inauguration.On a webpage displaying photos of robots for use in warehouse settings, Vicarious tells potential clients that the products can “reduce both your costs and person-hour needs.”In 2022, Vicarious was acquired by Alphabet-backed robotics software firm Intrinsic. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also sat alongside tech leaders at Trump’s inauguration.Alphabet did not respond to ABC News' request for comment. Meta declined to comment.Yong Suk Lee, a professor of economics and technology at the University of Notre Dame, described the views on automation among Trump’s tech allies and some of his trade advisers as “opposed.”The tech position, Lee said, would likely win out, even if some firms do open plants in the U.S.“If you want to reshore, are you going to pay the same wages as Vietnam? Probably not,” Lee said. “Companies are faced with higher labor costs. In that case, they’ll probably automate.”Discordant views among some tech leaders and White House officials surfaced in April, when Musk sharply criticized tariff-advocate Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro, Musk said, is “truly a moron.”In an interview with CNBC, Navarro responded, saying Musk "isn't a car manufacturer — he's a car assembler.”MORE: Target CEO says tariffs risk 'massive' costs, but price hikes a 'last resort'To be sure, analysts said, automation in manufacturing would likely continue regardless of support from Trump’s tech allies, since producers are locked in a competition to lower costs and increase output. The precise outlook for manufacturing employment is unclear, they added, since additional technology may add jobs for those maintaining and optimizing the machinery.“Whether it’s the companies that currently support the U.S. president or not, somebody would be doing this innovation, maybe slightly slower,” Kircher said.Even at current employment levels, a labor shortage bedevils U.S. manufacturers. Roughly one of every five U.S. factories that failed to produce at full capacity cited a shortage of workers, Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, found in a January study analyzing government data.Agility Robots, an Amazon-backed firm building humanoid robots, identifies the current push for rejuvenated U.S. manufacturing as an opportunity for greater adoption of technology.“Manufacturing companies are seeing a massive reshoring movement spanning various industries,” Agility Robots says on its website. “Adding a humanoid robot to your manufacturing facility is a great way to stay on the leading edge of automation.”In response to ABC News' request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to previous remarks about robotics made by a company executive."Our goal is to ensure these systems improve safety and productivity. Technology should be used to help us retain and grow our talent through skill development and reimagining how we make our workplace better, both in productivity and safety. If we do this well, we’re certain to always innovate for our customers," Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, said in a September blog post.Amazon has "created more U.S. jobs in the last decade than any other company," Amazon said this month.

An image showing the counterfeit Apple chargers looking to cross the U.S. border / Image credits - ABC13 The Port of Houston witnessed a massive shipment of Apple accessories, which the U.S. Customs and Border Protection believed to be a suspicious entry of goods into the country. Sure enough, a new report states that upon further inspection, it was revealed that these were counterfeit chargers and cables in the thousands, with an estimated street value of more than $7 million. With the recent tariffs announcement, which enforces levies on goods arriving from overseas markets, sellers will attempt to cross such shipments without being detected. Given that the trade wars between China and the U.S. show no signs of concluding, such illegal entries will likely pick up in pace. Value of seized Apple chargers and cables was an estimated $7.3 million, with sellers attempting to evade tax payments and pocket a decent profit from these sales As reported by ABC13, with the details spotted by AppleInsider, a shipment of around 373,000 fake Apple chargers and cables was hauled by the authorities, with the agency stating that such products are typically in their crosshairs because counterfeiters try to avoid tax payments as much as possible. When confirming with Apple representatives, it was concluded that these were not authentic accessories. The bust involved 7,460 cartons, and customs agents mentioned that the products featured the Apple trademark. The authorities have warned customers to only make purchases from legitimate sources and pay attention to the prices. While the efforts of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection must be commended, these incidents will increase in number. Such counterfeit accessories might not just be limited to Apple, though we assume that these products will be arriving in a higher number compared to others because the California-based giant’s devices sell in droves in the United States. Smugglers will definitely resort to more creative measures when bringing in fake chargers and cables into the country, but the best practice to be observed by customers is to avoid purchasing from unauthorized sources. News Source: ABC13 Deal of the Day

FromSoftware's Elden Ring Nightreign launches next week. Ahead of the much-hyped debut, IGN interviewed Game Director Junya Ishizaki to dive deeper into the multiplayer spin-off game. One of the main criticisms levied at Elden Ring Nightreign so far is that, according to FromSoftware, it is tailored either for playing solo or with a party of three players. Ishizaki-san admitted that duo groups have been overlooked during the development phase, but added that it is being looked and proper support may be added after launch. The simple answer is that this is simply something that was overlooked during development as just a two-player option, so we're very sorry about that. As we said before, we set out to make this a multiplayer co-op game for three players, balanced for three players, so that was the main focus and it's at the core of Nightreign. Of course, I myself as a player understand that and often want times where I'm just playing myself, so this is something that we considered from the start. And so we did put a lot of effort into creating this experience that was playable for solo players in as much as the rules and new systems allowed. So in putting all our efforts into that aspect, we kind of overlooked and neglected the duos aspect, but this is something that we are looking at and considering for post-launch support as well. There's also no PvP whatsoever in Elden Ring Nightreign, unlike Elden Ring itself. Ishizaki said that it was never even considered: From the start, PVP was not something that we very actively considered for Nightreign. We wanted it to be a co-op multiplayer experience at its core and we found that as we developed these character actions and these unique abilities for each character, balancing them and tweaking them around PVP as well proved to be very… Not only very difficult, but took away from those ideas and that scope that we'd established for each of these characters. So we really wanted the focus to be on PVE and on co-op, and so we knew where our priorities were. So no, we didn't consider PVP in Nightreign. Elden Ring Nightreign is launching on May 30 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. Check out our latest preview here. Products mentioned Elden Ring Nightreign USD 39.99 Buy from Amazon Deal of the Day

Keep clear Federal regulators clear SpaceX for Starship test flight as soon as next week "The FAA is expanding the size of hazard areas both in the US and other countries." Stephen Clark – May 22, 2025 2:51 pm | 0 The Starship for SpaceX's next test flight, known as Ship 35, on the move between the production site at Starbase (in background) and the Massey's test facility for a static fire test. Credit: SpaceX The Starship for SpaceX's next test flight, known as Ship 35, on the move between the production site at Starbase (in background) and the Massey's test facility for a static fire test. Credit: SpaceX Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year. The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program. In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements." SpaceX has not confirmed a target launch date for the next launch of Starship, but warning notices for pilots and mariners to steer clear of hazard areas in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the flight might happen as soon as the evening of Tuesday, May 27. The rocket will lift off from Starbase, Texas, SpaceX's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. This will be the third flight of SpaceX's upgraded Block 2, or Version 2, Starship rocket. The first two flights of Starship Block 2—in January and March—did not go well. On both occasions, the rocket's upper stage shut down its engines prematurely and the vehicle lost control, breaking apart in the upper atmosphere and spreading debris near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Debris from Starship falls back into the atmosphere after Starship Flight 8 in this view over Hog Cay, Bahamas. Credit: GeneDoctorB via X Investigators determined the cause of the January failure was a series of fuel leaks and fires in the ship's aft compartment. The leaks were most likely triggered by vibrations that were more intense than anticipated, SpaceX said before Starship's most recent flight in March. SpaceX has not announced the cause of the March failure, although the circumstances were similar to the mishap in January. "The FAA conducted a comprehensive safety review of the SpaceX Starship Flight 8 mishap and determined that the company has satisfactorily addressed the causes of the mishap, and therefore, the Starship vehicle can return to flight," the agency said. "The FAA will verify SpaceX implements all corrective actions." Flight safety The flight profile for the next Starship launch will largely be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to accomplish on the ill-fated tests earlier this year. If all goes according to plan, the rocket's upper stage, or ship, will travel halfway around the world from Starbase, reaching an altitude of more than 100 miles before reentering the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. A little more than an hour after liftoff, the ship will aim for a controlled splashdown in the ocean northwest of Australia. Apart from overcoming the problems that afflicted the last two launches, one of the most important objectives for this flight is to test the performance of Starship's heat shield. Starship Block 2 includes improved heat shield materials that could do better at protecting the ship from the super-heated temperatures of reentry and, ultimately, make it easier to reuse the vehicle. The problems on the last two Starship test flights prevented the rocket from reaching the point where its heat shield could be tested. Starship Block 2 also features redesigned flaps to better control the vehicle during its descent through the atmosphere. This version of Starship also has larger propellant tanks and reconfigured fuel feed lines for the ship's six Raptor engines. The FAA's approval for Starship Flight 9 comes with some stipulations. The agency is expanding the size of hazard areas in the United States and in other countries based on an updated "flight safety analysis" from SpaceX and because SpaceX will reuse a previously flown first-stage booster—called Super Heavy—for the first time. The aircraft hazard area for Starship Flight 9 extends approximately 1,600 nautical miles to the east from Starbase, Texas. Credit: Federal Aviation Administration This flight-safety analysis takes into account the outcomes of previous flights, including accidents, population exposure risk, the probability of vehicle failure, and debris propagation and behavior, among other considerations. "The FAA uses this and other data to determine and implement measures to mitigate public risk," the agency said. All of this culminated in the FAA's "return to flight determination," which the agency says is based on public safety. The FAA's primary concern with commercial space activity is ensuring rocket launches don't endanger third parties. The agency also requires that SpaceX maintain at least $500 million in liability insurance to cover claims resulting from the launch and flight of Starship Flight 9, the same requirement the FAA levied for previous Starship test flights. For the next launch, the FAA will establish an aircraft hazard area covering approximately 1,600 nautical miles extending eastward from Starbase, Texas, and through the Straits of Florida, including the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. This is an extension of the 885-nautical mile hazard area the FAA established for the test flight in March. In order to minimize disruption to commercial and private air traffic, the FAA is requiring the launch window for Starship Flight 9 to be scheduled during "non-peak transit periods." The size of FAA-mandated airspace closures can expand or shrink based on the reliability of the launch vehicle. The failures of Starship earlier this year raised the probability of vehicle failure in the flight-safety analysis for Starship Flight 9, according to the FAA. The expanded hazard area will force the closure of more than 70 established air routes across the Gulf of Mexico and now includes the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The FAA anticipates this will affect more than 175 flights, almost all of them on international connecting routes. For airline passengers traveling through this region, this will mean an average flight delay of approximately 40 minutes, and potentially up to two hours, the FAA said. If SpaceX can reel off a series of successful Starship flights, the hazard areas will likely shrink in size. This will be important as SpaceX ramps up the Starship launch cadence. The FAA recently approved SpaceX to increase its Starship flight rate from five per year to 25 per year. The agency said it is in "close contact and collaboration" with other nations with territory along or near Starship's flight path, including the United Kingdom, Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba. Status report Meanwhile, SpaceX's hardware for Starship Flight 9 appears to be moving closer to launch. Engineers test-fired the Super Heavy booster, which SpaceX previously launched and recovered in January, last month on the launch pad in South Texas. On May 12, SpaceX fired the ship's six Raptor engines for 60 seconds on a test stand near Starbase. After the test-firing, ground crews rolled the ship back to the Starship production site a few miles away, only to return the vehicle to the test stand Wednesday for unspecified testing. SpaceX is expected to roll the ship back to the production site again before the end of the week. The final steps before launch will involve separately transporting the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from the production site to the launch pad. There, SpaceX will stack the ship on top of the booster. Once the two pieces are stacked together, the rocket will stand 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. If SpaceX moves forward with a launch attempt next Tuesday evening, the long-range outlook from the National Weather Service calls for a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 0 Comments

Fortnite finally back on Apple devices in US and Europe Victory Royale. Image credit: Epic News by Ed Nightingale Deputy News Editor Published on May 21, 2025 Fortnite is finally back on iOS devices in the US and Europe, after a five-year legal battle between Epic and Apple. Despite a "peace proposal" being offered by Epic at the start of the month, Apple later blocked the return of Fortnite in the US. When Epic returned to the judge of the legal case to review its Fortnite submission, the judge responded Apple is "fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing" and warned the official who is "personally responsible for ensuring compliance" would have to return for a hearing (thanks TheVerge). The two companies have since filed a joint notice stating they have "resolved all issues". Fortnite Galactic Battle Cinematic TrailerWatch on YouTube As such, Fortnite has now returned to iOS devices, with Epic boss Tim Sweeney writing on social media "we back fam". To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Though Fortnite had already returned to iOS devices in the European Union, Apple's block of the game in the US delayed a regular update to the game, forcing all versions to be taken down. Of course, the UK is no longer in the EU, meaning Fortnite is not yet available here on iOS. It's expected in the second half of this year. Back in 2020, Epic added a direct in-game payment option in Fortnite to circumvent Apple and Google's official in-app purchase options, from which those companies take a 30 percent cut. In retaliation, Apple pulled Fortnite from its App Store, sparking the five-year feud. A verdict was finally reached earlier this month, when the US District Court of Northern California found Apple in "wilful violation" of the court's previous injunction designed to prohibit the company's "anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing". That injunction meant Apple had to allow purchases for apps from outside websites, to which it agreed but levied a 27 percent fee. The court stated this move "strains credulity" and that Apple's goal "was to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchase opportunities and maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream". The court verdict added: "In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court's Injunction." Sweeney wrote on social media "Game over for the Apple Tax" and stated Fortnite would return to the iOS App store. Now, it finally has. Writing on social media last night, Sweeney said: "Thanks to everyone who supported the effort to open up mobile competition and #FreeFortnite from the very beginning. And thanks to all of the folks who initially sided with Apple then later came around to the winning side, supporting app developer rights and consumer rights." Fortnite has immediately risen to the top free game on iOS in the US. Epic has this week been in hot water due to the addition of AI Darth Vader to Fortnite, which was quickly used to spout bad language. A hot fix has since been issued, but actors' union SAG-AFTRA has filed an unfair labour practice charge in retaliation for the use of AI.

The buzz in Silicon Valley around AI agents has many asking: What’s real and what’s hype? Box’s cofounder and CEO, Aaron Levie, helps decipher between fact and fiction, breaking down the fast-paced evolution of agents and their impact on the future of enterprise AI. Plus, Levie unpacks how AI is really being adopted in the workplace and what it takes to legitimately build an AI-first organization. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I talked with Marc Benioff at Salesforce several months ago about his embrace of AI agents, but the use of his agents hasn’t quite taken off the way he hoped. I know you launched Box AI Studio to help organizations build their own custom AI agents. I’m curious how that’s going. So far, it’s either at or exceeding our expectations on all the use cases that customers are coming up with. So we’re pretty blown away about what we’re starting to see. We’re still very early days to be clear, but the rate of adoption is going fairly exponential, and the imagination that customers now have on this is blowing us away.  I’ve rarely been in a customer conversation, either one-on-one or at a dinner, where I’m not hearing about a new idea that the customer has for Box AI that we did not already have on a whiteboard. And what’s exciting—and this is counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of folks outside of AI—you initially sort of see AI in sci-fi and sometimes in news headlines, The New York Times or whatever, as like, “Okay, it’s going after jobs. It’s going to replace these types of work.” From my anecdotes, I’ve had at least 100 interactions with customers in the first quarter of this year, the vast majority, 80%, I’m guessing, the bulk of the time of AI use case kind of conversation was spent on things that the company didn’t do before AI. So it wasn’t, “Hey, I want to take this type of work, and I want AI to go replace it.” There’s a type of work that we never get around to in our company. I want AI to go and do that, because finally, it’s affordable for me to deploy AI agents at the kind of work that we could not fund before. It’s opening up people’s imagination to, “Hey, I’m like sitting on 50,000 customer contracts. What if I could have an AI agent go around all those customer contracts, and figure out which customers have the highest propensity to buy this next product from me?” And this is not something that they would have people ever do. So it’s not replacing anybody’s job. They never said, “Oh, let’s have 50 people go read all the contracts again.” It just never happened. But now, if it only costs them $5,000 for an AI agent to go do that, they would do that all day long. And then guess what? When they get those insights, they’re probably going to now have more work for the humans in their business to go and do as a result of this, that hopefully, if it’s effective, drives more growth in their business—which then causes even more productivity, and then ultimately hiring and growth. And so it’s not kind of everybody’s first instinct, but most of the use cases that we’re hearing about are things where, “Because it is now affordable to deploy AI at a problem, I’m actually expanding the set of things my company can go do, and then the work that we can now execute on.” And that’s not only very, I think, exciting, but I think it’s going to be the default case for most AI adoption in the enterprise. In some of the conversations that I have, it feels almost like some of the businesses and leaders, they don’t really know what they’re looking for from AI. And hearing you, it sounds a little bit like you have to think about your mindset on it a little differently to open up and find those things that are most valuable to you. Yes. Yeah, every business is going to be different because some of the upside is a virtue of your business model. What are the core parts of your business model that, as a result of access to information, can change or be modified or improved? If I am a law firm, I could either reduce my cost, because now AI is going to do more of the, let’s say, paralegal work, or I could expand my service offerings, because now, all of a sudden, my team can venture into more domains because they can take their expertise and use AI to augment that. The default assumption is, “Oh, no, it’s going to go after the hours of a law firm.” But once this technology hits an individual business, they can actually decide to expand their customer base. They can go after, previously, customers that would’ve been unprofitable for them to serve. So these industries are not as static and zero-sum. The software industry . . . on one hand, everybody says, “Okay, if AI can do coding, then will we hire fewer engineers?” And in general, my argument is that we’ll probably hire as many—if not more—engineers if AI can get really good at coding, because what will happen is the productivity rate of our engineer goes up, which means that we can then ascribe a higher degree of value per engineer in the company. So your ROI is even better on each of those positions? Exactly. And take something like sales. If we can make a sales rep able to sell 5% more, because we give them better data, and they can prepare for a customer meeting that much better, or they can understand exactly the best pitch because they have access to all of Box’s data and they can ask it questions, I’m not going to just bank that as 5% more profit. Because what will happen is we’re going to internally, in some planning session, we’re going to get greedy, and we’re going to say, “Wait a second, that 5% gain that we just got in sales productivity, what if we reinvested that back into the sales team to grow even faster and get that much more market share?” And so you have an entire economy of companies making those individual decisions of, “Do you bank the profit, or do you use it to go and accelerate growth?” And what we tend to know from history is that the companies that get too greedy on the profit side, you just end up leaving yourself vulnerable to being outflanked by competitors. So capitalism has a pretty convenient way of almost driving the sort of productivity gains of these types of innovations to get reinvested back into the business. You’ve been talking about running Box in an AI-first way, and encouraging other leaders to do it. Are you like Shopify and Duolingo, who’ve announced that staffers have to justify anything that’s not AI-produced? What does AI-first mean? Yeah. So for us, AI-first means that we want to use AI as a means of driving an acceleration of the customer outcome, an acceleration of decision-making, an acceleration of building new features. So just think about it as mostly a metric of speed. On one hand, you could think about AI as going after like a massive work, and you could say AI is going to remove some part of that massive work and do it instantly, so the massive work goes down, or think about work as a timeline, and not a mass. All we’re doing is trying to get through each step so that way, we can get to the next step and so on. And everything’s faster. And everything’s faster. So I want to have us use AI to move faster down the timeline, not just purely to reduce the total mass of work that we’re doing. There’s probably one pronounced difference versus, let’s say, the Duolingo memo. There’s some emerging idea, which is sort of you have to prove that AI can’t do this thing for you to get then head count, and our general instinct is actually the opposite. If you can prove that you can use AI, then that’s actually when you will get head count, because what we want is we want the dollars of the business to go back into the areas that are the increasing areas of productivity gain, because those areas will then be higher ROI for us over time.

The Supreme Court reportedly observed that the issue of regulation for cryptocurrencies in the country must be taken up in consultation with experts. According to a Bar and Bench report, a bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice NK Singh addressed the lack of crypto regulations in India. The observation was made during the hearing of a case linked to a rise in crypto frauds across multiple states. Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Aishwarya Bhati will reportedly submit the government's position on cryptocurrency by July.As per the report the bench emphasised need for both regulatory measures to govern the crypto sector and oversight.Justice Kant reportedly told the ASG that in the absence of regulations, courts have been facing practical challenges, with regard to crypto cases.For instance, the justices said were facing a difficulty in assessing if the plaintiff was the victim or victimiser in the crypto fraud case. For now, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been asked to complete the probe in this case by May 30.In November 2023, the Supreme Court rejected a petition seeking clear guidelines to oversee crypto trading in the country. That bench was headed by former Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud. At the time, the bench had deferred the petition blaming the petitioner for trying to seek bail from proceedings that were pending then.Between 2022 and 2025, India has gradually introduced layers of legislationsn to govern some parts of the crypto and Web3 sector.India has been taxing crypto gains by 30 percent since 2022. The finance ministry also levied one percent TDS on all crypto transactions in order to maintain a trail of crypto transactions, that are otherwise largely private and even anonymous.Crypto firms operating in the country have been mandated to comply with anti-money laundering rules and KYC collection guidelines. In addition, every firm offering services related to digital assets in the country have to obtain a registration from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to make their operations legal.A crypto discussion paper from the finance ministry is due for release. In February, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said that this discussion paper will bring more clarity around virtual digital assets in the nation.The discussion paper will guide the future of the country's cryptocurrency sector, Economic Affairs Secretary Ajay Seth had claimed in July 2024.Meanwhile, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman previously said that India's position on crypto is that they cannot be currencies.Former RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had also expressed concerns around cryptocurrencies during the World Economic Forum last year, but the RBI's 2024 Financial Stability Report acknowledged the global expansion of digital financial systems and highlighted blockchain's significant implications for the financial sector.