Zepto's advertising revenue jumped 151%, outpacing the company's 104% growth in operating revenue.
Can Apple's new AI glow up put to bed accusations that it's losing an all-important industry race?
OPINION The US government is reportedly weighing whether to take a financial stake in AI companies, which looks a bit like negotiating for a seat on the Titanic. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic, the marquee brands in US AI, are profitable yet. While Anthropic may be nearer to that point if its accounting survives scrutiny, OpenAI's $1.4 trillion in financial commitments over the next eight years have been interpreted as a red flag for investors. This raises (at least) two questions: Should the US government be picking winners? And should the US government be picking losers? The first question appears already to have been decided. As noted by the US Council on Foreign Relations, since January 2025, the feds have invested $20.9 billion in sixteen deals that involve direct ownership. This represents a change from more hands-off financial arrangements involving grants, loans, and tax incentives. The Department of Commerce, for example, has taken a 10 percent stake in Intel, once a symbol of American technical prowess and now a national security backstop. The Development Finance Corporation had invested in minerals, energy, and infrastructure. And the Department of Defense has undertaken at least seven similar deals. Neoliberal US notions about competition and the separation of church, state, and private industry have succumbed to the new world disorder. When economists from Harvard and Yale looked at the issue in a 2021 paper titled "The Dance Between Government and Private Investors: Public Entrepreneurial Finance around the Globe," they were cautiously optimistic. Authors Jessica Bai (Harvard), Shai Bernstein (Harvard), Abhishek Dev (Yale) and Josh Lerner (Harvard) looked at 755 entrepreneurial finance policies in 66 countries during the period from 1995 to 2019. They concluded that "government funding programs are associated with subsequent increases in innovation," as measured by "top patents." They offered some caveats, such as the observation that "government programs frequently rely on private capital markets through capital matching requirements, where private capital groups are often allowed to invest in more preferential terms than the public funds." And they also noted that economists have long recommended government investment in response to market failures – areas where private funding has chosen not to invest, presumably due to the uncertainty of returns. A recent example of that would be the US Commerce Department's decision to invest $2 billion in quantum computing in exchange for a minority controlling stake in nine technology companies. Pure-play quantum computing companies like D-Wave, Quantinuum, IonQ, and Rigetti Computing are not making a profit. But concern that quantum computing might some day do meaningful computing not possible with classical computers is enough to keep the funds flowing for now. The US government's reported interest in AI companies might be interpreted in a similar light, as a bailout for companies that have committed to spend heavily on data centers before demand has been demonstrated and pricing has stabilized. With OpenAI and Anthropic preparing to go public, the White House would do better to wait before placing its bet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is said to have pushed for federal investment last year but publicly repudiated the idea after CFO Sarah Friar suggested federal loan guarantees. If the feds were to buy into OpenAI, the deal might take the form of a public wealth fund – so the public would receive revenue from intellectual property that AI firms have captured and are reselling. US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) last week said he planned to introduce a bill called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. Funded by a one-time 50 percent tax paid in AI company stock, it would give the public a say in how AI is used and a portion of the revenue generated by AI companies (which, again, follows from the largely uncompensated capture of public content). Meanwhile, the White House last week issued an executive order directing "the national security enterprise to accelerate AI adoption to meet surging demand, adapt the best commercial and open-source technologies for mission use, assure that fielded systems are robust, steerable, controllable, and preserve clear lines of accountability under the Constitutional chain of command." And the order promises "new partnerships with willing private-sector companies to secure America’s cutting-edge AI against global threats." Buying into these companies doesn't make a lot of sense if they can deliver on their promises at a viable price. The market would ensure plenty of good options for federal procurement. But if leading AI models are priced like Claude Mythos, reported to run $25 per million input tokens and $125 per million output tokens, or about 5x Opus 4.8, there may be some concern that leading edge AI will be too costly for much of the market. Uber's $1,500 monthly token spending cap per employee AI tool suggests companies won't reward the AI industry for over-investing. If cutting-edge AI is going to be priced out of reach for most industries and if it really can accomplish things that lesser models cannot, the case for federal involvement gets stronger. It would be a shame if the feds rewarded OpenAI and its peers with taxpayer money because that would reward fiscal irresponsibility and hinder startups hoping to innovate. Worse still, it would commit funds prematurely and unnecessarily for some notional national security edge that's razor thin and is being dulled by evolving open weight models and foreign model providers. The jury is still out – there are at least 115 lawsuits against AI companies – on whether there's a broad, sustainable market for AI services outside of software development and perhaps a few other knowledge work markets. The government should wait for the courts, the public, and the market to weigh in before riding to the rescue. ®
Sequoia is just one of the top firms that sells same equity at two different prices.
Ryan Coonerty, frontrunner for Santa Cruz Mayor, could be headed to a November runoff against Ami Chen Mills. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local file)
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Last county update: 6/8/2026 4:00:00 PM
Santa Cruz City Council, Mayor (vote for 1)CandidateTotalAmi Chen Mills2,945 (19.73%)Ryan Coonerty7,291 (48.85%)Joy Schendledecker1,737 (11.64%)Gillian Greensite1,702 (11.40%)Chris Krohn1,165 (7.81%)Write In86 (0.58%)
SANTA CRUZ >> Ryan Coonerty, the frontrunner in the race for Santa Cruz Mayor, dipped below the 50% margin required to win the election outright in the latest vote tallies posted Monday afternoon. If Coonerty doesn’t secure a majority of votes he’ll face off against the next highest vote getter, likely Ami Chen Mills, in the November general election.
Coonerty had 48.85% of the vote as of 4 p.m. June 8, Ami Chen Mills had 19.73%, and three other candidates for Santa Cruz Mayor each had fewer than 12% of votes.
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In the race for District 4 Santa Cruz County Supervisor, Tony Nuñez maintained a slim majority with 50.54% of votes in updated counts. Incumbent Supervisor Felipe Hernandez dropped to 30.92% of the vote and Elias Gonzales gained a couple of percentage points to 17.82%.
In the races for Santa Cruz City Council, incumbents Renee Golder and Scott Newsome maintained their majorities.
Thousands of ballots remain to be processed in Santa Cruz County, and final results are expected by July 2. The next update to vote tallies is expected at 4 p.m. June 9.
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The post Santa Cruz Mayor race could head to November runoff as Coonerty loses majority in latest count appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.
Don’t you wish you lived in a world where you didn’t have to know anything about Vice President JD Vance—the most juiceless man alive—having sex? Or at least a world where it wasn’t acceptable for a vice president to publicly boast that he made his wife have a fourth child? In an excerpt from his book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” published in the Wall Street Journal…
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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump thinks yelling on social media will solve his Middle East mess It’s too bad angry posts do less than nothing. Republicans scream fraud after D-list nut loses votes in LA mayor race Two Democrats received the most votes in a heavily Democratic city? RIGGED!
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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump’s next thing to ruin: The NBA finals…
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Republicans continue to undermine confidence in elections, and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is no exception. When faced with mild pushback from a NewsNation host over President Donald Trump’s incessant election-fraud lies, Johnson quickly unraveled. “I mean, there was so much evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election,” Johnson insisted. “But all you have to do is say…
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At its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple offered a vision of how to integrate AI with its products that stands out for its sobriety, responsibility, and plausibility. In contrast to the job-killing, security-breaking, human-replacing hype promulgated by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, company execs dialed down their usual superlative-laden effusiveness to convey how AI tools can actually help software developers, as well as those using Apple products. Capabilities like Safari's Notify Me – website change notification – and the browser's low-code extension creation service called Describe an Extension look like solid uses for machine learning technology. Part of Cupertino's more modest marketing may be attributable to the crow that the company has eaten as a result of underperforming AI. But it also fits with the lack of sizzle in the company's three areas of focus: platform improvements, child safety enhancements, and Apple Intelligence. Platform improvements like 30 percent faster app launches, Photos loading that occurs 70 percent faster, and a more efficient CPU Scheduler aren't exactly the sorts of features that marketing departments know what to do with, even if they deliver noticeable user experience improvements. And Child Safety, while welcomed by some and politically expedient at this moment in time, is fundamentally about limiting the use of Apple products rather than expanding it. That leaves Apple Intelligence, which has underdelivered since its introduction in 2024. "Rebuilt from the ground up, Apple is trying to make AI feel native, useful, and invisible across the devices people already use every day," said Francisco Jeronimo, IDC VP of client devices, in an email to The Register. "This matters because the winning AI experience for consumers will not be the loudest or most technically complex. It will be the one that understands context, respects privacy, works reliably across apps, and reduces friction without forcing users to change behaviour." Much of the developer keynote focused on improvements to Siri, now rebranded Siri AI, which will reach the general public when the v27 of Apple's various platforms drop this fall. Apple developers can now access better versions of these releases. But beyond the claim that Siri is now fit for purpose, the presenting Apple execs managed to highlight the company's substantive advantages in terms of privacy, integration, and cost. And they made a good pitch for developing AI applications on Apple platforms, and for using the Swift programming language to do so. "Today, many AI providers talk about privacy, but by default, most of them retain your personal interactions, leaving the onus on you to defend your privacy," explained Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of software engineering. "Like using temporary chats, deleting conversations, or even turning off entire features. At Apple, we believe privacy in AI is non-negotiable." While Apple has overpromised on privacy in the past – describing privacy as a human right and then treating it as a government-granted perk – the company's AI privacy story, centered around Private Cloud Compute, has been compelling enough to prompt Google to copy it. Anyone developing applications with AI tools should be thinking about data security and data privacy. Cloud-based AI models can easily capture sensitive data. Apple is offering developers the ability to use its Foundation Models framework – based on Google's Gemini model family and newly multimodal – on-device or in Private Cloud Compute, while also allowing integration with cloud-based model providers and custom models where necessary. What's more, it is doing so in a way that respects the reality of software development – not all developers can risk wiring their app to a costly AI API (e.g. Claude or Codex) that might produce AI bills above and beyond app revenue. So Apple is making the Foundation Model framework available on Private Cloud Compute with no cloud API cost for devs who have yet to make it big. "Developers with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running in Private Cloud Compute with no cloud API costs," said Joshua Shaffer, senior director of software at Apple, during Apple's Platforms State of the Union presentation. "It's access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. Because getting started, exploring ideas shouldn't be held back by infrastructure costs." Or by infrastructure barriers. One of Apple's advantages is its control of both hardware and software. And the company is making use of its technology stack to solve the context problem. AI models perform better when they have access to contextual information. Because that information is commonly siloed by application boundaries, permissions, and other sorts of controls, developers may not be able to provide AI services with enough useful information. Apple has announced both enhancements to existing technologies and new ones to help make contextual information more accessible to AI models and to improve AI-oriented development. For example, Spotlight, Apple's on-device search indexing service, has been rewritten to suck less – it has a long history of spotty service, requiring users to remove their storage device and re-add it to trigger re-indexing. What's more, Spotlight has been integrated with Siri in hopes that it will make the service more effective at finding files and surfacing relevant data in apps to inform AI queries. Apple's Xcode 27 sports various improvements, though the most notable change arrived in February, when Xcode 26.3 added support for Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex. That list has now been expanded to include Google's Gemini and agent customization. The IDE's integration with AI coding agents is a meaningful improvement because Xcode can be rather daunting and complicated for those who aren't veteran Apple platform developers. Being able to ask an AI agent to identify some small configuration stumbling block is a welcome change. The App Intents framework has been extended to help developers make better use of Siri AI capabilities through personal context understanding, access to app actions, and onscreen activities. There's also a new Core AI framework, "a modern, memory-safe Swift API that lets you load, specialize, and run AI models entirely on-device, keeping user data private and your apps responsive, with zero server dependencies and zero token costs," as Apple puts it. If frontier model leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI continue to raise prices, Apple's local model story is likely to look more and more compelling. ®
Gregory Bovino, former Border Patrol commander-at-large who was the face of President Donald Trump’s disastrous “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota, apparently believes that he can be president. According to NewsNation, Bovino has launched an exploratory committee ahead of the 2028 presidential election. “NewsNation is reporting I’m exploring a run for President in 2028.
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Quick Take
- According to Xbox’s own chief strategy officer, Xbox Game Pass lost “millions of subscribers” following a major price hike in 2025.
I’m not gonna be the first to say it, but s**t is expensive, guys. It’s pretty bad. Prices keep going up and most of the time we have to just eat it. What am I gonna do, not drive to work? If you want to watch The Great British Bake Off, Netflix has you over a barrel. But consumers still have some power, and they will prioritize what they have to. This is how Xbox Game Pass can shed a reported “millions” of subscribers following a drastic price increase.
This (reported by Kotaku) comes via Xbox’s own chief strategy officer during an interview at Summer Games Fest, as relayed by none other than Geoff Keighley. As Kotaku noted, the actual number of subscribers Game Pass had prior to the 2025 price increases was not known. The belief is somewhere around 35 million users. Xbox had raised the price on its Ultimate tier subscription in October of 2025 by 50 percent. The loss of “millions” of subscribers might explain why in April of this year, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma lowered the increase by 25%.
Microsoft
Right now, Xbox Game Pass has three tiers for console users as well as a separate PC-only tier. The Ultimate pass, the highest tier which saw the major price increase, is currently $22.99 per month. That includes, per the Xbox website, 500+ games. Compare that with PlayStation Plus Premium tier, which currently has a price of $19.99 per month. These seem like minor differences, but if you’re already paying for a million different services and the prices all keep going up, it’s not surprising that given a huge increase, a number of them deem Xbox one to cut.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
The post Xbox Game Pass Lost ‘Millions of Subscribers’ with Price Hike appeared first on Nerdist.
Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman's identify verification company, is reportedly struggling to generate revenue and will downsize its staff.
The vibe of Apple's 2026 WWDC keynote felt like a spouse proudly listing all the honey-do-list items tackled. One subtle example: the many AI demos of someone standing, phone in hand.
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Quick Take
- Critical Role’s Travis Willingham is joining Final Fantasy VII Revelation as the new voice of Sephiroth.
- The game also released a new trailer.
- Travis Willingham apparently teased his new role back in 2024.
In the upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, fans of the Square Enix franchise will soon hear Critical Role’s Travis Willingham playing the English version of Sephiroth. He replaces Tyler Hoechlin, the last actor to play the Man of Steel (before David Corenswet) in Superman and Lois. This is the third and final installment in the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. It turns out, Willingham even teased his landing the role while posing with a Sephiroth cosplayer back in 2024 at Florida Supercon. This particular cosplayer and Instagram user, cosplay valkyrie, guessed Willingham was admitting his involvement with that convention photo. And Willingham just confirmed to her via social media that she was indeed right.
Critical Role/Square Enix
Willingham will surely bring a lot of his sizable voice acting experience when playing Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII Revelation. His anime and video game resume is rather extensive, and includes everything from Sonic the Hedgehog to Street Fighter. He’s also been the voice of Thor in several Marvel projects over the years. But his most loyal fanbase comes from his involvement with Critical Role, which he co-founded, and remains chief executive officer of. And we’re sure the legion of Critical Role fans are happy he’s playing Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII.
Having said that, we’re sure some fans will find themselves unhappy to hear Hoechlin won’t play the part this time. Especially as the trilogy is just coming to an end. After all, Tyler Hoechlin played Sephiroth in Remake and Rebirth, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy Reunion, and Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier. Apparently, other acting commitments led to his not returning for the finale, clearing the way for Willingham to take on Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII Revelation.
There’s not a firm release date yet for Final Fantasy VII Revelation. But Square Enix has revealed that it will come out simultaneously on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC sometime in Spring 2027. We can’t wait to see what Travis Willingham will do as Sephiroth.
The post CRITICAL ROLE’s Travis Willingham Joins FINAL FANTASY VII REVELATION as Sephiroth appeared first on Nerdist.
There's another likely North Korean-linked scam hitting developers and their employers, while snarfing up credentials and cryptocurrency - and this one doesn't even involve embedding IT workers at high-profile tech giants. A previously unseen phishing crew, suspected to have DPRK ties, sent more than 250 emails to people working in almost 100 organizations, mostly based in the US, over six weeks in April and May. According to security sleuths, it is yet another digital-heist attempt designed to steal cryptocurrency wallets and developers’ credentials. Proofpoint threat researchers spotted this campaign and tracked the digital thievery as UNK_DeadDrop. Like earlier phishing expeditions from the Norks, including the Contagious Interview campaign, this one uses developer recruitment or code review lures to target victims, primarily in technology, education, business services, and financial services, and ultimately steal credentials and cryptocurrency. In another common tactic seen with DPRK-linked credential-stealing activities, the lures attempt to send victims to attacker-controlled GitHub repositories hosting malicious scripts that execute cross-platform malware across macOS, Linux, and Windows machines. “However, there are several differences between the activity sets, such as the shift in social engineering from arranging fake interviews to unsolicited job offer or code review approaches as well as the move from delivery platforms such as LinkedIn to email,” researchers Saher Naumaan and Carlos Rubio said in a Monday blog, citing other differences between UNK_DeadDrop and Contagious Interview. “Based on the use of email for initial access, the high volume of emails, industrialization and scale of repository creation, a new self-contained payload, and distinct infrastructure from previous Proofpoint observations of Contagious Interview campaigns, Proofpoint Threat Research continues to track UNK_DeadDrop activity as an independent cluster,” the researchers wrote. Full-stack engineer wanted The attacks begin with an email that looks like it originated from a real company, with job offers for developer roles including “Full-Stack Engineer” or “Agent Lead Developer” positions. Proofpoint caught the crooks spoofing a handful of companies to send these emails from attacker-owned sender domains including: Ondo Finance: a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Empower Pharmacy: a pharmaceutical company NXLog: a log collection and centralization tool OnePlan: a strategic portfolio and work management platform Hypen Connect: a Web3 and AI Talent Agency Valon: a mortgage service provider Nourish: a telehealth company The emails contain links to GitHub repos disguised as coding assignments or cryptocurrency-related projects - part of the phony job application process. All of the emails instructed the target to clone the repository and open it in a code editor like VS Code or Cursor. Proofpoint’s report lists all 10 repositories, all focused on four themes - cryptocurrency platforms, exploit archives, Foundry testing, and AI payments - and all hosted by different GitHub accounts, so be sure to check out the vendor’s list. In May, the attackers switched tactics and began sending victims requests for peer reviews on open-source projects, with a potential job offer based on the fixes. These emails purported to come from cryptocurrency trading or prediction companies, including Pulsynk and Trixauvex. Another UNK_DeadDrop campaign in late May targeted finance and technology companies, requesting recipients to test an ERC-4626 vault in Foundry, a toolkit for Ethereum and smart contract development. In all of these instances, when the victim opens what they believe to be a legit repository folder in an integrated development environment, a pre-configured task silently executes and triggers a platform-specific loader that decodes embedded payloads on whatever system the developer uses, working across Linux, macOS, and Windows machines. The loader installs a malicious VS Code extension (VSIX) masquerading as a legitimate Google service. Every time the user opens the code editor on macOS or Linux, the VSIX extension activates, and relaunches the infection-chain if it’s not already running. The persistence mechanism doesn’t work on Windows machines, however. After installing VSIX, the infection chain looks different, depending on what platform the target uses. The Linux and macOS attacks use a native Go binary that connects to the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure as a persistent remote access trojan (RAT). The Windows chain, however, runs a Node.js pipeline inside the editor's Electron process. Both use the same C2 infrastructure and exfiltration endpoints. Linux, macOS backdoors The Linux and macOS binaries are based on the open-source Overlord C2 framework - this is a legitimate red-team tool that automates covert infrastructure setup and management, and orchestrates post-exploitation activities. This, of course, also makes it a very handy tool for attackers. For this campaign, the North Koreans added three custom modules: browserlogin (Chrome and Firefox credential theft), companywallet (crypto-wallet stealer and exfiltration), and cleanup (anti-forensic removal of workspace artifacts). On macOS, Overlord first collects wallet extension data, browser profile artifacts, and standalone wallet directories, compressing them into a ZIP and uploading them to the C2 server. Five minutes later, the malware moves on to credential theft, using a second embedded Mach-O binary that displays a fake system dialogue and prompts the user to enter their password. The Overlord process validates the credentials, and assuming they are legit, the malware modifies keychain access-control lists across Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, Yandex, and other Chromium-based web browsers, before extracting Safe Storage keys and sending all of the stolen goods - collected credentials, Safe Storage keys, and keychain data - to the attacker-controlled server. The backdoor also re-launches itself as root, using the stolen password. The Linux malware follows a similar pattern, first scooping up wallet-related data and sending that via ZIP to the C2 server before moving on to credential theft. It, however, uses Zenity, a standard GTK dialog tool, to create a prompt and collect victim credentials. This backdoor attempts to steal passwords from GNOME Keyring by spawning Python 3 processes for each browser, and ultimately re-launches itself as root using a swiped password. Windows attacks Windows attacks run entirely as JavaScript inside the editor's Electron process, which appears as Code.exe in Task Manager. The malware first steals wallet info, targeting 35 wallet extension IDs (MetaMask, Phantom, Rabby, Keplr, and others), 18 standalone wallet applications (Exodus, Electrum, Ledger Live, Monero, Solana CLI, Bitcoin, and others), and Firefox profiles. Next, it installs Python and executes a stealer (detect_malware.py) for each browser profile that collects a ton of credentials across Chromium and Firefox browsers, steals cookies from Chrome/Edge/Brave and uses COM Elevation Moniker to access credentials across these browsers protected by App-Bound Encryption. It also attempts to read locked databases using five cascade methods, and ultimately uploads all the secrets to the same endpoint before terminating. “UNK_DeadDrop activity suggests North Korea-aligned operations targeting developers for financial gain are maturing and evolving,” Naumaan and Rubio wrote. “The shift from active social engineering over social media platforms to conduct fake interviews to large campaigns of recruitment-themed phishing emails distributing links to malicious repositories could indicate an actor industrializing and scaling operations.” ®
At a press conference outlining New York City’s plans surrounding the World Cup, which begins June 11, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about Immigration and Customs Enforcement goon Tom Homan’s threats to send “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen” to the Big Apple. Mamdani, who said he had heard similar threats from the Trump administration before, did not mince words reiterating his support…
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The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms.
Apple is turning parents into a corporate IT help desk, with rigid new monitoring and compliance tools for their children’s iPhones and iPads that will prompt for mom and dad's approval each time their kids visit a new website or want a new app. Apple's new trust and safety features for kids and teens will also automatically block nudity and gore from appearing on apps, even during live Facetime calls, while giving parents more control over the amount of time their tots spend glued to Cupertino’s OS. Apple execs stated that that kids and teens use their phones and iPads to build independence, nurture creativity, and enhance learning, without mentioning the hours of mind numbing short videos fed to tots by social media algorithms. But the new iOS has a way to limit that as well. “This year we’re taking a big step, expanding our child safety features, and empowering our child safety features with powerful and intuitive tools,” said Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering. Apple’s child account feature already blocks adult websites, but now it can control what kids can see, who they can talk to, and when they can use the device, and it gives guidance for parents while setting up the permissions. With Ask to Buy, a setup assistant prompts parents through a configuration that decides which apps kids can access. It also means parents are the gatekeepers for all apps a kid wants to download. So every time a kid sees an app their friends are using, parents can expect a call or text to add the app to the “allowed’ list. Apple also introduced what it calls Ask to Browse, so when kids navigate away from trusted sites, parents will also need to authorize those trips. Once the new iOS is available this fall, parents can control their kids’ chats and calls, with parental approval needed before any new contacts are able to communicate via the child’s phone. Additionally, Apple will scan media inside messages to check for nudity or gore and automatically blur the image. However, in the demonstration during the WWDC keynote, it appeared to also contain a permission that says “Are you sure” with an option to then unblur the image. With Time Allowances, Apple divides entertainment, games and social media into distinct categories, and offers recommendations to set a maximum daily allotment for each. In their demonstration, entertainment and games were each recommended for one hour, while social media was limited to 30 minutes. Parents will also be able to control when certain apps are available, so that if a child has their phone in school, some apps will not be accessible. The new OS will also give parents the ability to pause all phone use, allow unlimited use, and see how much time their kids have spent on which apps. Apple’s VP of Health Sumbul Ahmad Desai said the goal is to protect the time children need away from phones for school, sports, sleep, and socializing. Apple said all of its updates were designed with input from child health organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, Childnet, ConnectSafely, Family Online Safety Institute, and Common Sense Media. Along with Microsoft and Disney, Apple is a top sponsor of the non profit, Childnet. Apple also is listed along side Google, Meta, Discord, and Snap as supporters of ConnectSafely. Apple said it is working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to adapt the family media guide it created into a plan Cupertino can use. ®
Apple spent much of its WWDC keynote highlighting fixes, performance improvements, and long-requested features before unveiling its upgraded AI-powered Siri, signaling that the company wants users to see AI as just one part of a broader effort to improve its software.
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