Month: June 2025

The Trump phone was announced last week with a claim that the device would be made entirely in America, and people were rightly skeptical. Trump Mobile's $500 T1 Phone "is a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier," the Trump Organization said in a press release.

But with electronics supply chain experts casting doubt on the feasibility of designing and building an American-made phone in a short span of time, Trump Mobile's website doesn't currently promise an American-made phone. The website says the T1 is "designed with American values in mind," that it is "brought to life right here in the USA," and that there are "American hands behind every device."

The Trump Mobile website previously said, "Our MADE IN THE USA 'T1 Phone' is available for pre-order now." The phone was initially supposed to be available in August, but the date was changed to September, and now the website simply says it will be available "later this year."

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Bluetooth trackers have existed for quite a while, but Apple made them worthwhile when it enlisted every iPhone to support AirTags. The tracking was so reliable that Apple had to add anti-stalking features, and there are just as many Android phones out there. However, Google's version of mobile device tracking, known as Find Hub, has been comparatively spotty. Now, Google is about to offer users a choice that could fix Bluetooth tracking on Android.

According to a report from Android Authority, Google is preparing to add a new screen to the Android setup process. This change, integrated with Play Services version 25.24, has yet to roll out widely, but it will allow anyone setting up an Android phone to choose a more effective method of tracking that will bolster Google's network. This is included in the Play Services changelog as, "You can now configure Find Hub when setting up your phone, allowing the device to be located remotely."

Trackable devices like AirTags and earbuds work by broadcasting a Bluetooth LE identifier, which phones in the area can see. Our always-online smartphones then report the approximate location of that signal, and with enough reports, the owner can pinpoint the tag. Perhaps wary of the privacy implications, Google rolled out its Find Hub network (previously Find My Device) with harsh restrictions on where device finding would work.

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Critics are increasingly branding Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a failure, including lawmakers fiercely debating how much funding to allot next year to the controversial agency.

On Tuesday, Republicans and Democrats sparred over DOGE's future at a DOGE subcommittee hearing, according to NextGov, a news site for federal IT workers. On one side, Republicans sought to "lock in" and codify the "DOGE process" for supposedly reducing waste and fraud in government, and on the other, Democrats argued that DOGE has "done the opposite" of its intended mission and harmed Americans in the process.

DOGE has "led to poor services, a brain drain on our federal government, and it’s going to cost taxpayers money long term," Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) argued.

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Selling pirate IPTV subscriptions has always been illegal and after the EU’s top court confirmed as much in 2017, consuming unlicensed content is illegal too. Nevertheless, these offenses are typically treated differently.

Once identified, those who operate or sell access to illicit services are unlikely to get a free pass. Yet subscribers to those services have almost always walked away completely unscathed.

Limited Time For Success

The difference isn’t just about supply being more serious. Since fines and similar measures punish those directly responsible for those alleged lost sales reported so often, a successful outcome necessarily means getting those same people back on side and spending money.

Picking the right cases from which to harvest subscriber details is also important; a case concluded in Naples recently could hardly be more perfect.

Dismantling Italia TV

In December 2024, a popular IPTV supplier was shut down following an investigation by the Guardia di Finanza of Naples in collaboration with the Technological Fraud Unit of Rome. Alleged ringleader Cristian Fidato, 23, was reportedly responsible for sourcing the illegal content, with new clients onboarded by two colleagues, Ukraine-born Anatoliy Perrotta, 30, and 44-year-old Fiorino Della Corte.

The investigating judge found that Italia TV had around 6,000 subscribers, mostly in Campania in Southern Italy, but also in countries elsewhere in Europe, including Belgium, Switzerland, and Latvia. The IPTV platform’s servers were close to hand in Naples itself, at least until they were seized by the financial police and taken away for investigation.

Major Rightsholders’ Content

As a provider catering to mainstream demand, Italia TV offered content from the major Hollywood studios, Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, plus Sky and DAZN which offer live sports, including all-important Serie A football matches.

Even before the raid, investigators at the Guardia di Finanza had reportedly blocked 19 sites that worked as a redirect mechanism for Italia TV, before adding another 25+ later to finish the job. Those who previously made it through became subscribers after making payments to bank accounts in Italy and beyond.

Early estimates suggested that Cristian Fidato opened around 32 accounts, sometimes under false names including “Gennaro Maddaloni”, variously claiming to be a student supported by his parents according to one report, or self-employed according to others.

Fidato allegedly claimed to have a nine-figure income but for tax purposes, nothing was reported to the state. Over four years of operations, Italia TV packages covering movies, TV shows and live sports, were available for €80 per year, generating an estimated €850,000 in revenue.

Lots of Powerful Hardware, Neatly Arranged

Around a third of the service’s subscribers (2,000) paid using cryptocurrency, which landed in dozens of wallets, all of which were identified by law enforcement. Italia TV’s interest in crypto went further than that, however.

After the raid in 2024, descriptions of the provider’s server room and reports of a possible crypto mining operation, remained just that. The usual images of servers and other hardware weren’t part of the package released to the media, but a little digging online more than makes up for their absence.

Showcasing everything from RGB-loaded gaming PCs and multi-GPU crypto mining rigs, to sundry servers and other hardware with less obvious tasks, TikTok was the platform of choice for Italia TV’s ringleader.

While in many ways typical of operations dismantled in the past, Fidato had a disturbing sideline business running in parallel.

Investigators discovered 1,600 CSAM images and videos which Fidato had been offering separately via WhatsApp groups, reportedly for the equivalent of pocket change each. Police also found an indoor area equipped with lighting and an irrigation system used for the cultivation of cannabis.

Sentenced: Four Years and Four Months in Prison

Fidato and Anatoliy Perrotta opted to have their cases handled under the abbreviated procedure. This means that the court makes a decision based purely on evidence obtained during the preliminary investigations. Less resources are expended getting a case to trial and once there, trials are wrapped up more quickly. In return, defendants typically get a one-third discount on their sentence.

At the Neapolitan Court on June 16, preliminary investigations Judge Leda Rossetti issued the following verdict:

• Cristian Fidato: 4 years and 4 months in prison. Fined €22,000.
• Anatoliy Perrotta: 1 year and four months in prison (conditional/suspended)

A third defendant who pleaded guilty at an earlier stage received a one-year prison sentence.

Whether the affected rightsholders intend to pursue Fidato and Perrotta in a civil action for damages is still unclear. The fate of subscribers, meanwhile, appears to be headed in only one direction.

Subscribers Face Administrative Fines

As promised for many months, subscribers of Italia TV are now at risk of receiving an administrative fine.

Coordinated by Deputy Prosecutor of Naples Silvio Pavia and Deputy Prosecutor Alessandro Milita, it’s being reported that an investigation carried out by the Guardia di Finanza successfully identified more than 6,000 subscribers.

A La Stampa report (paywall) claims that according to its own investigation, some fines have already been sent out with some recipients paying the amount requested. The report makes no mention of the all-important fine amount, instead citing the range expected under law; a minimum of €51.33 for a first offense up to the repeat offender maximum of €5,000.

There are no reports of unexpectedly large fines in the initial batch sent out last month to 2,282 subscribers of a different service, so it’s likely that broadly the same parameters, whatever they are, will also be applied here.

Opinion: Punishments and the Long-Term Objective

In light of Cristian Fidato’s fine of just €22,000 for running a service, the theoretical maximum of €5,000 for viewing offenses seems somewhat disproportionate. Anatoliy Perrotta’s sentence, which carries no fine at all, raises the possibility of viewers being fined more than a person directly profiting from exactly the same platform.

Nobody will relish receiving a fine in the mail, which is the entire point of sending them. However, considering the long-term goal, perceptions of fairness could come into play at some point, adding another complication to an already risky strategy of using force against former and potential customers.

To be considered a success, fines need to do just enough to turn pirates into subscribers without destroying existing goodwill; limited damage is already inevitable.

Italian football clubs and their partner broadcasters currently have no other rightsholders to hide behind, but with the authorities positioned to act as a punishment proxy, they may have already bought a little more time. But not much.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

For the past five years, we've been paying a lot of attention to Framework, the upstart PC company focused on modular, repairable, upgradeable, and customizable laptop designs.

So far, Framework has done a solid job of offering a steady stream of hardware upgrades for its systems, particularly the original Framework Laptop 13. But the company's track record on software support—including BIOS updates and driver updates with performance improvements, bug fixes, and important security updates—has been more of a mixed bag.

As of our piece in April 2024, multiple iterations of the Laptop 13 board had gone years without a BIOS update or updated driver package. The first iteration of the laptop still only had "beta" support for Windows 11, which had been out for 2.5 years by then, and the company was also struggling to provide Linux support and promised functional upgrades for other models.

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On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.

The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining "all the books in the world." The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google's legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.

While destructive scanning is a common practice among smaller-scale operations, Anthropic's approach was somewhat unusual due to its massive scale. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appear to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves.

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Ubuntu users could see up to a 20 percent boost in graphics performance on Intel-based systems under a change that will turn off security mitigations for blunting a class of attacks known as Spectre.

Spectre, you may recall, came to public notice in 2018. Spectre attacks are based on the observation that performance enhancements built into modern CPUs open a side channel that can leak secrets a CPU is processing. The performance enhancement, known as speculative execution, predicts future instructions a CPU might receive and then performs the corresponding tasks before they are even called. If the instructions never come, the CPU discards the work it performed. When the prediction is correct, the CPU has already completed the task.

By using code that forces a CPU to execute carefully selected instructions, Spectre attacks can extract confidential data that the CPU would have accessed had it carried out the ghost instructions. Over the past seven years, researchers have uncovered multiple attack variants based on the architectural flaws, which are unfixable. CPU manufacturers have responded by creating patches in both micro code and binary code that restrict speculative execution operations in certain scenarios. These restrictions, of course, usually degrade CPU performance.

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Nearly a decade ago, Ars testing found that Valve's "Steam Machines"-era version of SteamOS performed significantly worse than Windows when SteamOS' Linux game ports were tested on the same hardware as their Windows counterparts. Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11. The performance advantage is yet another way that Valve's upstart OS is differentiating itself from the "default" Windows installation used by most PC gamers for decades now.

While users have been able to install Windows on the Steam Deck since its 2022 launch, Valve doesn't offer official "Windows on Deck" support for this alternative hardware use case. Lenovo's Legion Go S, on the other hand, is the first gaming portable explicitly designed to work with either Windows 11 (in hardware first released in January) or SteamOS (in hardware first released in May, alongside a new version of SteamOS designed for non-Valve AMD hardware).

To test the performance impact of this operating system choice, we started with the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S (provided by Lenovo) and tested five high-end 3D games released in the last five years using built-in benchmarking tools and two different graphics/resolution tiers. We then installed Windows 11 on the handheld, downloaded updated drivers from Lenovo's support site, and re-ran the benchmarks on the same games downloaded through Steam for Windows.

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On Thursday, we encourage you to join us for a live chat with Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and researcher at Berkeley Earth. We'll talk a bit about how he got into climate science and ended up at Berkeley Earth and the role that organization plays in the world of climate science. It was launched by a physicist who was somewhat skeptical of the work being done by climate scientists, but it has evolved into one of the key groups that does the math needed to track the planet's temperatures.

For the past couple of years, those temperatures have seen a remarkable rise to record highs, at one point setting a yearlong string where every month set a record for the warmest instance of that month on record. The rise leaves us at risk of exceeding key climate targets much earlier than expected and has left the climate science community scrambling to explain the intensity of the heat. So we plan to ask Zeke a bit about what scientists are thinking about the dramatic nature of these changes, attempts to explore the relationship between temperatures, and things like tipping points and individual weather events.

And all that leads to the key question: What does this tell us about where our climate is likely to go over the rest of this century?

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Das Mercedes Concept AMG GT XX zeigt, wohin die Reise bei AMG geht - weg vom V8, hin zu drei Elektromotoren mit extremer Power und Ladeleistung. (Mercedes Benz, Elektroauto)