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      Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?

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      This year, when Apple announced iOS 18, the latest version of its mobile operating system, most of the attention went to its slate of new artificial intelligence features.But a lesser-noticed change in iOS 18 — a tweak to an obscure feature that allows users to share their contact lists with various apps — may wind up being more important.That’s because “contact sync,” as the feature is known by some developers, has played a critical role in the growth of many social and messaging apps for the past two decades. It’s how apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat were able to find their footing, by quickly connecting millions of iPhone users to people they already knew, and suggesting other users for them to follow. That early momentum helped kick-start their viral growth, propelling them to the top of the App Store charts.Now, some developers are worried that they may struggle to get new apps off the ground. Nikita Bier, a start-up founder and advisor who has created and sold several viral apps aimed at young people, has called the iOS 18 changes “the end of the world,” and said they could render new friend-based social apps “dead on arrival.”That might be a little melodramatic. I recently spent some time talking to Mr. Bier and other app developers and digging into the changes. I also heard from Apple about why they believe the changes are good for users’ privacy, and from some of Apple’s rivals, who see it as an underhanded move intended to hurt competitors. And I came away with mixed feelings.On one hand, I’m sympathetic to the uphill battle faced by any developer trying to build a new social app today. The contact sharing changes in iOS 18 will undoubtedly make it harder for some fledgling apps to break through. And in a world where it’s harder for smaller apps to succeed, incumbents like Facebook and Instagram — which already have network effects, and don’t have to ask existing users for permission to keep collecting their contacts — obviously stand to benefit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Google Defended Itself in the Ad Tech Antitrust Trial

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      The tech giant, which wrapped up its arguments in the federal monopoly trial, simply says it has the best product.Over the past week, Google has called more than a dozen witnesses to defend itself against claims by the Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general that it has a monopoly in advertising software that places ads on web pages, part of a second major federal antitrust trial against the tech giant.Google’s lawyers wrapped up their arguments in the case on Friday, and the government will now offer a rebuttal. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is presiding over the nonjury trial, is expected to deliver a ruling by the end of the year, after both sides summarize their cases in writing and deliver closing arguments.The government last week concluded its main arguments in the case, U.S. et al. v. Google, which was filed last year and accuses Google of building a monopoly over the technology that places ads on websites around the internet.The company’s defense has centered on how its actions were justified and how it helped publishers, advertisers and competition. Here are Google’s main arguments.How Google claims its actions were justifiedThe Justice Department and a group of states have accused the tech company of abusing control of its ad technology and violating antitrust law, in part through its 2008 acquisition of the advertising software company DoubleClick. Google has pushed up ad prices and harmed publishers by taking a big cut of each sale, the government argued.But Google’s lawyers countered that the ad tech industry was intensely competitive. They also accused the Justice Department of ignoring rivals like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon to make its case sound more compelling.Visa, Google, JetBlue: A Guide to a New Era of Antitrust ActionBelow are 15 major cases brought by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission since late 2020, as President Biden’s top antitrust enforcers have promised to sue monopolies and block big mergers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Online Scammers Posed as Brad Pitt to Get Cash, Spanish Police Say

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      The authorities in Spain said they had arrested five people who posed as the famous American actor online and swindled two women out of more than $350,000.The Spanish authorities have announced the arrests of five people accused of swindling two women out of over $350,000 by posing as Brad Pitt online.The arrests — three made last November and two in July — were announced in a statement released on Monday by Spain’s Interior Ministry, detailing a complex scheme that it attributed to a “criminal organization.”The statement said the accused had contacted the women through an online fan page dedicated to Mr. Pitt and posed as the Oscar-winning American actor. The authorities said the accused had gone on to exchange instant messages and emails with their victims, who thought they were corresponding directly with Mr. Pitt.Those behind the plot “managed to make these women believe they had become so close to the well-known American actor that they believed they had a romantic relationship with him,” the statement said. Then, according to the authorities, the Pitt posers asked for money.One woman, who lives near Bilbao in the north of Spain, sent 150,000 euros (about $168,000) in a series of money transfers. The other, in Granada, sent €175,000.About €85,000 has been recovered as part of the investigation, the statement said. The suspects, whose names have not been released, face charges including fraud and money laundering, according to the Spanish police.Matthew Hiltzik, a publicist for Mr. Pitt, said on Wednesday that he had not been aware of the case, and noted that his client does not have any authorized social media accounts.“It’s awful that scammers take advantage of fans’ strong connection with celebrities,” Mr. Hiltzik wrote in a WhatsApp message. “But this is an important reminder to not respond to unsolicited online outreach, especially from actors who have no social media presence.”Online frauds and cybercrimes represent a growing threat. In the European Union, millions of people were attacked and exploited online in 2023, according to the Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment, a report from the bloc’s law enforcement agency.Jürgen Stock, the secretary general of Interpol, said in March, “We are facing an epidemic in the growth of financial fraud.” More

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      How Meta Distanced Itself From Politics

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      In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections.Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Math Help AI Chatbots Stop Making Stuff Up?

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      Chatbots like ChatGPT get stuff wrong. But researchers are building new A.I. systems that can verify their own math — and maybe more.On a recent afternoon, Tudor Achim gave a brain teaser to an A.I. bot called Aristotle.The question involved a 10-by-10 table filled with a hundred numbers. If you collected the smallest number in each row and the largest number in each column, he asked, could the largest of the small numbers ever be greater than the smallest of the large numbers?The bot correctly answered “No.” But that was not surprising. Popular chatbots like ChatGPT may give the right answer, too. The difference was that Aristotle had proven that its answer was right. The bot generated a detailed computer program that verified “No” was the correct response.Chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google can answer questions, write poetry, summarize news articles and generate images. But they also make mistakes that defy common sense. Sometimes, they make stuff up — a phenomenon called hallucination.Mr. Achim, the chief executive and co-founder of a Silicon Valley start-up called Harmonic, is part of growing effort to build a new kind of A.I. that never hallucinates. Today, this technology is focused on mathematics. But many leading researchers believe they can extend the same techniques into computer programming and other areas.Because math is a rigid discipline with formal ways of proving whether an answer is right or wrong, companies like Harmonic can build A.I. technologies that check their own answers and learn to produce reliable information.Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central A.I. lab, recently unveiled a system called AlphaProof that operates in this way. Competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the premier math competition for high schoolers, the system achieved “silver medal” performance, solving four of the competition’s six problems. It was the first time a machine had reached that level.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will A.I. Be a Bust? A Wall Street Skeptic Rings the Alarm.

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      Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs’s head of stock research, warned that building too much of what the world doesn’t need “typically ends badly.”As Jim Covello’s car barreled up highway 101 from San Jose to San Francisco this month, he counted the billboards about artificial intelligence. The nearly 40 signs he passed, including one that promoted something called Writer Enterprise AI and another for Speech AI, were fresh evidence, he thought, of an economic bubble.“Not that long ago, they were all crypto,” Mr. Covello said of the billboards. “And now they’re all A.I.”Mr. Covello, the head of stock research at Goldman Sachs, has become Wall Street’s leading A.I. skeptic. Three months ago, he jolted markets with a research paper that challenged whether businesses would see a sufficient return on what by some estimates could be $1 trillion in A.I. spending in the coming years. He said that generative artificial intelligence, which can summarize text and write software code, makes so many mistakes that it was questionable whether it would ever reliably solve complex problems.The Goldman paper landed days after a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture firm, raised similar questions in a blog post about A.I. Their skepticism marked a turning point for A.I.-related stocks, leading to a reassessment of Wall Street’s hottest trade.Goldman’s basket of A.I. stocks, which is managed by a separate arm of the firm and includes Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle, has declined 7 percent from its peak on July 10, as investors and business leaders debate whether A.I. can justify its staggering costs.The pause has come early in the A.I. arms race. The tech industry has a history of spending big to deliver technology transitions, as it did during the personal computer and internet revolutions. Those build outs spanned five years or more before there was a reckoning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MAGA Wants Transgression, and This Is What Comes With It

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      The North Carolina Republican Party is facing one of the most predictable crises in the history of party politics.Its primary voters enthusiastically supported a candidate for governor named Mark Robinson — voting for him by a more than 45-point margin over his closest rival (he won by 64.8 percent to 19.2 percent) — even though he had a remarkable record of deeply inflammatory and even unhinged statements.Last week, a comprehensive CNN report unearthed compelling evidence that Robinson had posted on a porn site called Nude Africa. I cannot possibly repeat the worst posts, but the less graphically obscene ones included statements like this: “I’m a Black Nazi,” and “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”That’s not all. “I’m not in the K.K.K.,” he also said, according to the CNN report. “They don’t let Blacks join. If I was in the K.K.K. I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” He said he’d prefer Hitler to what he sees in Washington today.No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Qualcomm Asked Rival Intel if It Would Consider Sale

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      While Intel has struggled in recent years, other chipmakers are thriving because of a boom in demand.The chipmaker Qualcomm has approached its rival Intel in recent days about the possibility of acquiring the slumping Silicon Valley giant, two people familiar with the matter said Friday, requesting anonymity because the talks were confidential.Qualcomm has not yet made an official offer for Intel, one of the people said, and the obstacles to a deal remain steep. Any deal would likely draw significant regulatory scrutiny, given the mammoth size and national security importance of both chip companies. It is unclear whether regulators would allow Qualcomm to buy Intel without taking on its struggling foundry business, and it remains equally unclear whether Qualcomm would want to take on that complex endeavor. A deal would also be costly. Intel, which has seen its shares fall nearly 40 percent over the last year, has a market capitalization of $93 billion. Qualcomm, which has seen its shares rise 55 percent, has a market value of $169 billion. Qualcomm and Intel, through spokeswomen, both declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Qualcomm’s approach. That any chip-making rival would consider trying to buy Intel would have been inconceivable a decade ago. But years of management issues and whiffs on technology transitions have weakened what was once one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.Intel missed out on selling chips for mobile phones and has failed to capitalize on the boom in artificial intelligence, a field rival Nvidia now dominates with specialized chips used in data centers. Intel’s chip manufacturing operations, once the most advanced, also lost a technology lead to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.Intel’s problems were underscored in early August, when it announced a $1.6 billion quarterly loss and plans to cut 15,000 jobs. The company, the largest planned recipient of federal financing under legislation called the CHIPS Act, on Monday announced other moves that include plans to pause the setting up of new plants in Germany and Poland.Qualcomm, based in San Diego, is a leader in cellular technology and provides chips used in flagship smartphones from companies such as Apple and Samsung Electronics. Unlike Intel, Qualcomm has never operated factories, a costly business that most chip designers avoid. So it would seem more likely to be interested in the Intel operations that design chips, as well as its broad expertise in PC software and channels for selling those systems, said Patrick Little, a former Qualcomm executive who now is chief executive of SiFive, a Silicon Valley start-up that sells rival microprocessor designs.“Those are things Qualcomm would have to mature on their own over time,” Mr. Little said. “If they worked with or somehow had a piece of Intel that could accelerate that part of their strategy.”Any effort to buy Intel would likely face a tough antitrust review and would be scrutinized closely on national security grounds, since its design and manufacturing operations are important for defense applications and overall U.S. competitiveness in semiconductors.Lauren Hirsch reported from New York and Don Clark from San Francisco. More