Apple has tightened its App Store guidelines to ban apps that use AI to create offensive content and, specifically, apps that masquerade as regular apps during review and then turn into nudify apps or surface those features prominently. Apple said apps with hidden or undocumented features are prohibited, including bait and switch apps that misrepresent their purpose during review and reveal harmful capabilities such as nudification only after approval, and that it will remove apps adding features absent from the reviewed version. The change follows a July order from San Francisco’s city attorney that Apple and Google clean up nudification apps, and an April Tech Transparency Project report that both stores hosted multiple such apps, some rated suitable for minors. Apple said its review blocked over 150,000 apps and removed 193,000 developer accounts for fraud and abuse last year.
ICANN has begun testing authentication that would let law enforcement make urgent requests for non public WHOIS data, limited to imminent threats to life, serious bodily injury, critical infrastructure or child exploitation. The preferred approach uses SAML single sign on into ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service, already being tested with the FBI and Interpol. Registrars would have 24 hours to consider a request, or up to 72 hours for complex queries, and could deny requests that miss the urgency threshold. Registrars Namecheap and Verisign voiced support in the session at ICANN’s annual meeting in Bali; policy on acceptable use is still to be set by other ICANN groups.
Samsung’s Pyeongtaek complex in South Korea, about the size of New York’s Central Park, shows the physical scale of the AI memory race, MIT Technology Review reported from the site. Three fabs run around the clock, a fourth is coming online, and construction of a fifth, halted in the 2024 memory downturn, has restarted on AI demand, which Samsung expects to surge through 2028. The build out is Samsung’s attempt to reclaim ground in high bandwidth memory, where domestic rival SK Hynix pulled ahead supplying Nvidia accelerators, while TSMC dominates foundry manufacturing.
Separately, and not duplicated here: Microsoft’s withdrawal from the Nscale Loughton project, covered on this site on October 18, was reported in fuller detail by The Register on October 19, including the original plan for 23,040 Nvidia GB300 processors in a 50 megawatt facility and grid capacity not expected until the 2030s. No new decision was reported, so the existing file stands.