Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Governments are spying on Apple and Google users through push notifications, says US Senator

Summary: In a letter to the US Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden claimed that foreign officials were demanding that Google parent-company Alphabet and Apple give them data collected via smartphone push notifications.

Context: These are the sorts of notifications that apps use to tell smartphone users, for instance, that a new email has arrived or to notify them about some kind of breaking news headline, at times displaying notifications on their lock screens; these sorts of notifications almost always traverse Google- and Apple-owned servers before arriving on individual devices, which means these companies have data that can be used to surveil users on the receiving end; Senator Wyden asked the Justice Department to get rid of policies that prevented public discussion on this matter, and his request apparently allowed Apple to release its own statement in which it indicated both US and foreign agencies have requested this sort of data, and have done so in such a way that the company has been unable to tell users about it until Wyden made the topic public, and Google then released its own statement indicating it supported Wyden’s efforts to inform smartphone users about government requests related to this type of data.

—Reuters

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UN Security Council to discuss Gaza ceasefire after Guterres invokes rare rule

Summary: The US Secretary-General António Guterres has invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter for the first time since he was appointed in 2017, allowing him to bring any matter that he personally believes threatens international peace and security to the UN Security Council—and he did so in order to urge the Council to support a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

Context: This has not been well received by Israeli UN representatives, as the letter pretty clearly suggests that Israel is nudging the region into catastrophe with its invasion of the Gaza Strip; the UAE and Russia subsequently called for an emergency meeting of the Security Council for today, though while the US—a staunch ally of Israel—has been increasingly vocal about finding a path to a ceasefire and eventually, peace in the area, US representatives have thus far supported Israel’s right to defend themselves in the wake of a sneak-attack by Hamas on October 7, and it has a veto on the Council, so most analysts suspect that this will be a mostly symbolic meeting.

—Axios

Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4

Summary: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced the company’s newest large language model-based AI system, Gemini, which is apparently a huge step up for the company, allowing it to compete more directly with OpenAI’s (by many metrics) AI system-to-beat, GPT-4.

Context: This is notable because it’s one of the rare AI offerings that purports to bypass the high-end-AI-of-the-moment GPT-4 across the majority of tests the industry is using for such things right now (30 out of 32 of those tests), and because Google has a huge footprint across online and digital spaces, this model will be (and in some limited cases, has already been) deployed across a vast number of tools that are used by a huge number of people every single day, including Google search, Gmail, Google Calendar, and similar platforms, which could prove to be a big advantage for the company as it refines this and future models.

—The Verge

McDonald’s is planning to open nearly 10,000 new restaurants by 2027, more than one-third of which will be located in China (a country many Western companies have fled in recent years), marking the fastest intended expansion in the chain’s history.

—Quartz

$900,000

Cost to produce and print a ~200-page public prospectus document for Arm Holdings’ IPO in September.

This document describes all the minute details of the semiconductor company’s business activities, and though such tomes are seldom read cover-to-cover by anyone, they tend to be an expensive tradition of going public (Instacart’s prospectus was entirely digital but still cost $161,189 to produce, and Birkenstock’s tallied about the same as Arm’s).

—The Wall Street Journal

Trust Click

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