Month: December 2022

Four years after Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales is back and saving the multiverse with all the other incarnations of the superhero in the hotly anticipated sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.  The first trailer just dropped, and it looks like another trippy, universe-hopping fun ride—hopefully a worthy successor to one of the best films of 2018.

(Spoilers for 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse below.)

Into the Spider-Verse was the first computer-animated feature film to feature everyone's favorite web-slinging superhero—in this case, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a teenage graffiti artist of Black and Puerto Rican descent. Miles is bitten by the canonical radioactive spider while painting in an abandoned subway station and develops spider-like superpowers. He stumbles onto a plot by Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) to open portals to parallel universes where Fisk's wife and son are still alive. In Miles' universe, Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man (Chris Pine), is killed by Fisk, and Miles takes up the Spider-Man mantle.

Enlarge / A selection of male and female "Magic Avatars" generated by the Lensa AI app, including a beard cannot be contained. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

Over the past week, the smartphone app Lensa AI has become a popular topic on social media because it can generate stylized AI avatars based on selfie headshots that users upload. It's arguably the first time personalized latent diffusion avatar generation has reached a mass audience.

While Lensa AI has proven popular among people on social media who like to share their AI portraits, the press has widely focused on the app's reported tendency to sexualize depictions of women when Lensa's AI avatar feature launched.

A product of Prisma Labs, Lensa launched in 2018 as a subscription app focused on AI-powered photo editing. In late November 2022, the app grew in popularity thanks to its new "Magic Avatar" feature. Lensa reportedly utilizes the Stable Diffusion image synthesis model under the hood, and Magic Avatar appears to use a personalization training method similar to Dreambooth (whose ramifications we recently covered). All of the training takes place off-device and in the cloud.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot / Contributor | Getty Images Europe)

In September, President Joe Biden announced that TikTok would remain accessible in the US once a deal could be worked out to assuage national security concerns. At that time, Biden said it would take months for his administration to weigh all the potential risks involved in inking the deal. Among detractors of the brewing deal, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) emerged, alleging in a Washington Post op-ed that any deal that Biden arranged with the Chinese-owned social media platform “would dangerously compromise national security.”

Now, Marco and Gallagher have teamed up with Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) to introduce new bipartisan legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives, formally calling for a ban on TikTok. It’s the only way, lawmakers feel, that TikTok can truly be stopped from collecting sensitive data on Americans for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and censoring content to influence elections, sow discord, or potentially even "indoctrinate" users.

“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio said in a press release. “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”

Enlarge / iPhones running iOS 15. (credit: Apple)

As part of the barrage of operating system updates released earlier today, Apple published new iOS and iPadOS 15.7.2 updates that bring most of the iOS 16.2 security patches to the previous version of the operating system.

Both 15.7 and 15.7.1 were released after iOS 16 became available, and they served two purposes: to support newer devices whose owners didn't want to jump to iOS 16 and older devices that weren't able to run iOS 16. The iOS 15.7.2 update supports a smaller number of devices. From Apple's security updates page, emphasis ours:

Available for: iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Any iPad owner running iPadOS 15 can still download the 15.7.2 update instead of iPadOS 16, but newer iPhones will need to install iOS 16.2 to get all the latest security patches. The company did something similar last year and supported iOS 14 for a couple of months after iOS 15 came out but eventually ended iOS 14 support. (iPhones and iPads may be treated differently this year because the first version of iPadOS 16 released to the public came out a month after the first release of iOS 16.)

Enlarge / Apple HQ in Cupertino, California. (credit: Anadolu Agency | Financial Times)

Employees across Apple are working on changes to iOS that would open the iPhone to apps outside Apple's App Store, a report in Bloomberg claims. Citing people familiar with the efforts, the article claims that Apple is attempting to take action by 2024, in response to regulations from the European Union, such as the Digital Markets Act. In fact, the changes could go wide as soon as the release of iOS 17 late next year.

This would mark a dramatic shift from Apple's long-standing position that third-party app stores and sideloading apps from outside the App Store would pose security and privacy risks for iPhone owners. However, Apple is exploring ways to limit users' exposure to potentially malicious apps. For example, the company is discussing the possibility of still requiring outside apps to be "verified" by Apple, with specific security requirements.

Some version of that approach might look something like the situation on the Mac, where you can install any app you want, but you have to jump through some hoops to install something that Apple hasn't verified.

Enlarge / Surgeons performing a spinal surgery in Nice, France. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

A federal judge in California has sentenced a neurosurgeon to five years in prison for his part in a multimillion-dollar, 15-year-long fraud scheme that used bribes and kickbacks to funnel thousands of patients to a now-defunct hospital where they were overcharged for invasive spinal surgeries.

The scam left patients questioning the quality of the medical devices now implanted into their spines, as well as whether they even needed surgery to begin with.

The neurosurgeon, Lokesh Tantuwaya, 55, of San Diego, is just the latest to be convicted and sentenced in the scheme, which ran from 1997 to 2013. In that time, dozens of medical professionals, including Tantuwaya as well as other surgeons, orthopedic specialists, and chiropractors, received sizable bribes and kickbacks for referring patients to and performing procedures at the Pacific Hospital of Long Beach.