In a statement following the resolution of the lawsuit, an Apple spokesperson said: “Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. Privacy is a foundational part of the design process, driven by principles that include data minimization, on-device intelligence, transparency and control, and strong security protections that work together to provide users with incredible experiences and peace of mind.”
Apple’s track record is a good one
Apple has committed vast resources to creating privacy protections across its systems. Everything from Lockdown mode to tools to prevent aggressive ad targeting and device fingerprinting represents the extent of its efforts, work that touches almost every part of the company’s ecosystem.
A future looming problem, of course, is that while Apple might be keeping to its pro-privacy promise, not every third-party developer likely shares the same commitment, despite the Privacy Labelling scheme the company has in place at the App Store.
Samsung made a bunch of announcements at CES 2025, including a slew of new laptops and TVs, but as to be expected, the company will save some of the biggest news for its own event. Samsung will host its first Galaxy Unpacked event of the year on January 22, 2025 at 1 PM ET, where it will likely show off the latest in Galaxy AI and the new Galaxy devices it runs on.
The event will take place in San Jose, and like previous years, you can reserve the company’s new gear in advance (and even before it’s officially announced) for $50 off and the chance to win a $5,000 Samsung gift card. That’s on top of Samsung’s typically generous trade-in credit — this year the company says you can get up to an additional $900 credit if you trade-in an old device.
Given the timing of Unpacked, Samsung is likely to announce the Galaxy S25 series, and there’s a good chance it’ll use the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and sport an updated design, at least on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. What might be more interesting are the non-smartphone devices Samsung could show off. The company is rumored to already have a Galaxy Ring 2 in the works, and there’s a good chance Samsung’s “Project Moohan” Android XR headset could make an appearance at the event.
Engadget will have all the details of Samsung’s announcements right here, but if you want to watch the event yourself, you’ll be able to tune in on Samsung.com, Samsung’s Newsroom or the company’s YouTube channel.
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After the Department of Justice announced via a court filing that Attorney General Merrick Garland intends to release Jack Smith’s report on the Trump 1/6 case but not the classified documents case due to ongoing criminal cases involving Trump’s co-defendants, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have informed the DOJ that they want both volumes of Smith’s report.
Oversight Committee Ranking Member Gerry Connolly (D-VA) wrote to Garland:
I write to request that the Department of Justice (DOJ) immediately provide the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (the Committee) with a complete copy of Volume Two of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the mishandling of classified documents by President Donald Trump and associates for review, in camera.
On January 8, 2025, in a filing before the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, DOJ indicated that Volume Two of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report would not be made public so long as certain criminal proceedings remain pending. 1 As detailed in the filing, Volume Two of the final report relates to the Special Counsel’s investigation of the mishandling of classified documents by President Donald Trump and associates.2 Instead of a public release, DOJ outlined its intent to provide a version of Volume Two “to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees for review in camera upon their request and agreement prohibiting any public release of the Final Report’s contents.” Given the jurisdiction and role of this Committee, similar access to Volume Two must be afforded to the Committee.
…
In light of the Committee’s legislative jurisdiction over presidential records, broad investigative jurisdiction, and vested interest in this matter, I urge DOJ to make available Volume Two of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for review in camera immediately or no later than January 15, 2025.
Connolly referred to House Rule X, which designates the Oversight Committee as the principal committee for oversight in the House, as his reasoning for why his committee should have access to the report.
Again, the DOJ is not allowing the public release of any of the report’s findings because that would give immediate grounds for the ongoing criminal cases to be dismissed.
However, the letter does signal that House Oversight Democrats plan on doing their own investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, and they will use the Smith report as their roadmap, whether they can publicly disclose the report’s contents or not.
The classified documents volume of Smith’s report will likely become public, especially if it looks like Trump is going to move to have his DOJ dismiss the cases against his co-defendants. There is also the possibility that Trump pulls a Michael Cohen on his employees and has them take the fall for the theft and refusal to turn over the classified documents.
Either way, Democrats are going to get the information in Smith’s report, and it looks like Democrats will make sure that Trump’s alleged crimes aren’t going away.
What do you think about Democrats getting volume two of Jack Smith’s report? Share your opinion in the comments below.
There are many stories about January 6 that fall by the wayside. Some January 6 defendants got extensive media coverage, especially in the immediate aftermath of January 6, but this is not representative of the overall body. Most defendants have remained nameless, faceless hostages. Real Americans have been rendered as caricatures as a way of pigeonholing them and glossing over the real experiences of that complicated day.
Reminder that most people on January 6 were entirely peaceful and were outraged over seeing American citizens hit with tear gas and flash bang grenades. January 6 was instigated by a handful of agitators in the crowds and malicious/incompetent officers failing to do their jobs… pic.twitter.com/1gV9oKZSI8
— Tim Hale – Criminally Funny J6er (@LouisofMonmouth) July 17, 2024
Michael Curzio was one of the first January 6 defendants and one of the handful actually arrested inside the Capitol building on January 6. He was apprehended in the middle of trying to record excessive police force inside the Capitol Visitor Center, only feet away from me. Curzio was taken through the Capitol and into underground tunnels in Washington, D.C., to a police station, where he was processed, given a citation and a notice to appear, and released on his recognizance.
Despite being ticketed for misdemeanors, he would be rearrested later on in his home state of Florida. He was raided on the road, threatened by an officer with having his face shot off, and all over misdemeanors. Curzio was denied bail by a Magistrate Judge, despite having nonviolent charges, and forced to experience “diesel therapy,” shuffled around the country by the US Marshals. It was in Oklahoma that he was housed in the general population in a maximum security prison before linking up with a group of January 6 defendants, including myself. Michael Curzio, myself, Jeffrey Sabol, and Patrick McCaughey III would begin the tradition among January 6 hostages of singing the national anthem together while still being moved by the Marshals before boarding “Con Air.”
Michael Curzio and I arrived in the DC jail, or the “DC Gulag,” on February 3, 2021. Like the rest of us, Curzio was denied bond and again again by his District Judge. Judge Carl Nichols, ironically considered one of the fairest judges after his rulings on 18 USC 1512 (agreed with by a majority of SCOTUS), yet forced Curzio to stay housed in solitary confinement with myself and others in the C2B wing of the DC jail’s Central Treatment Facility (the “Patriot Pod”).
“Metal Mike” Curzio is a metal musician and talented vocalist. Curzio became a staple of life inside the DC jail. While locked down most of the day, every day, he entertained the inmates by singing loud enough to fill the entire wing of the jail, including his song “LockDown.”
For the majority of his time in DC, he was in the cell next to mine. I was in Cell #16 (or 1/6 as it was called), and Mike was in Cell #15. I had the pleasure of watching him create several songs while incarcerated, including “Patriot Anthem.” He has since made professionally recorded versions of his classic songs. Whether his own songs like “Pursuit and Destroy” or song covers like Disturbed’s “Stupify,” Metal Mike kept dozens of political prisoners entertained while locked in solitary.
Michael became a member of the custodian team early on, joining the sole detail member at the time, Cleveland Grover Meredith. He cleaned the pod, served meals, relayed messages, etc. This role allowed Curzio more time out of his jail cell which was the only way he could reach his family by phone.
Curzio ended up taking a misdemeanor plea deal upon learning of his father’s stage 4 cancer. Initially, Judge Nichols refused to allow him to plead guilty, stalling to allow the DOJ to find felonious behavior to form a basis for a felony indictment.
I synced @MetalMikeCurzio‘s cell phone footage from the Senate Wing Door hallway with CCTV. Sure enough, at the end of the hallway you hear a protestor tell another man “It’s that way. That’s why they’re not letting us go *that* way.” Capitol PD were only blocking some hallways. pic.twitter.com/j7vzhV8Xns
— Tim Hale – Criminally Funny J6er (@LouisofMonmouth) January 2, 2025
They found nothing because, as CCTV shows, he spent his time peacefully walking through the Capitol building after it had been opened up from the inside. Not only had Curzio not harmed or threatened an officer, he repeatedly encouraged law enforcement, fist-bumped and shook hands with Capitol Police, etc.
Wow, @MetalMikeCurzio, what kind of scumbag has peaceful conversations with Capitol Police inside the Capitol, thanks them for their service, and pats them on the back? You deserved that half a year in solitary, you January 6 insurrectionist! pic.twitter.com/W9A5LOXIEo
— Tim Hale – Criminally Funny J6er (@LouisofMonmouth) January 4, 2025
The worst Curzio did was attempt to record Police attacking protestors in the Capitol Visitor Center. I was there myself and witnessed this. I myself was even chastised in Court for attempting to help a man off the ground I thought the Capitol Police had injured. Even then, CCTV and personal cell phone video shows that we spent about 10 minutes talking to the Capitol Police peacefully inside the Capitol Visitor Center before being led out of the building-
Remember when January 6 defendant Katelyn Bartow gave a speech in the Capitol Visitor Center which ended the hostility between protestors and Capitol Police and then both sides spoke to eachother like responsible citizens and hugged it out but Katelyn was charged anyway? Weird.… pic.twitter.com/twAYuMDARo
— Tim Hale – Criminally Funny J6er (@LouisofMonmouth) January 11, 2024
This chapter of January 6 was suppressed because it hurt the narrative that people who went inside the Capitol were a violent mob. Contrary to what a rational person would expect, the “insurrection” was less violent inside the Capitol building than outside.
When Judge Nichols realized he couldn’t hold Michael Curzio longer for a felony charge that wasn’t coming he finally accepted a guilty plea. Almost unheard of, even for January 6 defendants, Nichols forced Curzio to serve the maxed out sentence for his misdemeanor charge of 6 months. Curzio was sentenced at 2 days short of 6 months. Nichols refused to give Curzio time served, making him served the remaining 2 days in the DC Gulag, in one of the most petty rulings delivered by the handful of judges to handle January 6 cases.
Mike has since rebuilt his life. I had the pleasure of reconnecting with him, after 3 years of my own incarceration, and recorded the first of many interviews I’ll be releasing with the original inmates of the DC Gulag. This is January 6 Unfiltered with Michael Curzio:
It doesn’t stop there. Now that my conviction has been overturned in court, and my supervised release conditions are gone, I can speak freely with the patriots I languished with behind bars in the DC Gulag. With each day, more and more signed on to tell their story. What really happened on January 6, how they were smeared by the feds and media, and what they suffered through while locked up.
My phone has been on fire today as I reconnected with many of the men I was incarcerated with after January 6. And I’m now prepared to unveil a project that has been simmering in my head some time.
For 3 years after January 6, as I and other J6 political prisoners languished… pic.twitter.com/mForP3n8Ky
— Tim Hale – Criminally Funny J6er (@LouisofMonmouth) December 26, 2024
These interviews, along with hundreds of pages of primary documents, will form the basis for a multi-volume history series, Artifice and Betrayal: The History of the DC Gulag. Now that their voices have been restored, the defendants will be the ones to write the authoritative history of January 6 and the lawfare that followed, not the prosecutors and media. To learn more about “Metal Mike” Curzio in the meantime you can find him HERE.
Michael Curzio was misrepresented as a white supremacist, denied due process, and held in solitary confinement. He lost everything. Now he’s free, employed, with a roof over his head and a loving wife in his life. Metal Mike is proof that there is a future for those persecuted over January 6. To those hostages of the Biden regime who’ve suffered greatly – there are new beginnings over the horizon.
Childhood trauma, addiction, poverty, homophobia, religious extremism and disability are just some of the hard-hitting themes in filmmaker Adam Elliot’s new dark and humorous film “Memoir of a Snail”. The Oscar winner speaks to Eve Jackson about this whimsical and tear-jerking Australian stop-motion film about separated twins, which won the Cristal award for best feature at Annecy, the world’s top animation festival. The feature also took the top prize at the London Film Festival last year and was nominated for a Golden Globe. Adam is also sharing his creative process in an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia at ACMI.
What does Russia think of Donald Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland? Well, on the face of things, it is alarmed.
“The Arctic is a zone of our national interests, our strategic interests,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, sounding protective, when asked about the US president-elect’s recent remarks.
His language echoes that frequently used by Russian President Vladimir Putin, when discussing NATO’s historical expansion eastward. “Zone of strategic influence” generally means “back off”.
Image: Dmitry Peskov speaking to Sky News last year
The Kremlin’s concern is no surprise, given the Arctic’s economic and geopolitical significance to Moscow.
At more than 15,000 miles, Russia has the longest Arctic coastline and the region’s vast reserves of oil and gas make it crucial to the country’s energy supply.
Climate change has amplified its importance further, with melting ice making the Northern Sea Route, which hugs Russia’s Arctic coastline, increasingly viable.
The route offers a seasonal shortcut between Europe to Asia, which is of huge attraction to major trading powers like China, and it’s why Russia has pledged to invest $30bn on the route over the next decade.
But the opportunities are accompanied by risks.
Image: President-elect Donald Trump’s plans are being watched ‘very closely’ by the Kremlin. Pic: AP
Russia is the only non-NATO Arctic state, and the melting ice means it increasingly views its Arctic border as a vulnerability. That is why it has reopened more than 50 mothballed Soviet-era military posts there, as well as upgraded radar systems and modernised its Northern Fleet.
In such an environment, an attempt by the US to acquire more Arctic territory (even if it were from another NATO member) would be seen as a provocation. One Russian lawmaker has raised fears Greenland will become home to US strategic bombers.
Image: Donald Trump Jr this week visited Greenland. Pic: Reuters
But that’s the public response from Russia. Could the reaction be different in private? Assuming it doesn’t come to fruition, the Greenland proposal could actually have its benefits for Moscow.
For one, it has the potential to cause a rift within NATO. Instead of fighting as one, they could be fighting amongst themselves.
More importantly, perhaps, it articulates an expansionist policy, the kind which Russia is practising right now in Ukraine.
It could, therefore, help Vladimir Putin attempt to legitimise the invasion of his neighbour, arguing: “If the US wants to claim territory in the name of national security, then why can’t we?”
Mail delivery vehicles are parked outside a post office in Boys Town, Neb., in August 2020.
Nati Harnik/AP
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Nati Harnik/AP
Many businesses are closed and services are suspended on Thursday, a national day of mourning in honor of former President Jimmy Carter.
President Joe Biden declared Jan. 9 a day of observance and called for Americans to “assemble on that day in their respective places of worship” to honor Carter.
As the nation says goodbye to the 39th U.S. president during a funeral service in Washington, D.C., the United States Postal Service says it is suspending mail service on Thursday and postal offices will be closed. However, the postal service says there will be limited package deliveries so it “does not experience any negative impacts to its package delivery operations.”
Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq are also closed. The rare closure of Wall Street for a U.S. president first occurred in 1865 after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The observance by Wall Street to honor deceased presidents has continued and the most recent closure was in 2018 after the death of former President George H.W. Bush.
Many U.S. government agencies and executive departments are also closed because of an executive order signed by Biden. But some offices must remain open and certain employees must work “for reasons of national security, defense, or other public need,” according to the executive order.
The devastating wildfires that have ravaged Southern California erupted following a stark shift from wet weather to extremely dry weather — a phenomenon scientists describe as hydroclimate whiplash.
New research shows these abrupt wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet swings, which can worsen wildfires, flooding and other hazards, are growing more frequent and intense because of human-caused climate change.
“We’re in a whiplash event now, wet-to-dry, in Southern California,” said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who led the research. “The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases.”
The extreme weather shift over the last two years in Southern California is one of many such dramatic swings that scientists have documented worldwide in recent years.
Unusually wet winters in 2023 and 2024 nourished the growth of brush and grass on hillsides across the region, and then came the extremely warm and rainless weather since spring that has left desiccated vegetation throughout the Los Angeles area.
Since October, much of Southern California has baked in record-dry conditions. This extraordinary whiplash in weather has increased risks of the type of extreme wildfires that exploded in strong winds this week, Swain said.
“This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels,” Swain said.
“Climate change has already brought hotter and drier fire seasons to Southern California that increasingly extend into the winter months,” he said. “This is particularly problematic because strong offshore winds often occur in late autumn and winter in this part of the world. When such strong winds overlap with extremely dry vegetation conditions, as is the case at present, very dangerous wildfire conditions can develop.”
As fossil fuel burning and rising levels of greenhouse gases push temperatures higher, Swain and other scientists project that extreme weather swings will continue to become more frequent and volatile, with precipitation increasingly concentrated in shorter, intense bursts, interspersed with more severe dry spells.
In their study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the researchers examined global weather records and found that hydroclimate whiplash events have already grown 31% to 66% since the mid-1900s, and will likely more than double in a scenario in which the world reaches 3 degrees C, or 5.4 degrees F, of warming.
The researchers said human-caused climate change is driving the increase, and it’s occurring because with each additional degree of warming, the atmosphere is able to absorb and release more water. Swain and his colleagues likened the effect to an expanding “atmospheric sponge” capable of soaking up more water, leading to more intense floods and droughts.
“The problem is that the sponge grows exponentially, like compound interest in a bank,” Swain said. “The rate of expansion increases with each fraction of a degree of warming.”
Swain and eight co-authors said these more intense swings bring greater risks of hazardous wildfires, flash floods, landslides and disease outbreaks.
A vineyard sits under floodwaters in the San Joaquin Valley after a series of historic storms.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
California naturally experiences some of the world’s most dramatic shifts between very wet weather and dry spells. And with more warming, the scientists project the state to see these swings become even more extreme.
The scientist also cited another recent example of whiplash in California. Immediately after the severe 2020-22 drought, the state was hit by a series of major atmospheric river storms in 2023 that brought heavy rains and historic amounts of snow, leading to flooding and landslides.
Among other examples, the scientists pointed to torrential rains and flooding in East Africa in 2023, which followed a long drought that destroyed crops and displaced people.
“Increasing hydroclimate whiplash may turn out to be one of the more universal global changes on a warming Earth,” Swain said.
Adapting to these more intense extremes in California and elsewhere, the researchers said, will require changes in water management practices and infrastructure to plan for both droughts and floods rather than treating them as separate hazards. One approach, they said, is to restore natural floodplains to absorb high flows from flashier storms, reducing flood risks while also recharging groundwater.
Because increasing climate volatility is linked to various interrelated hazards, the scientists said there is “an urgent need for disaster management, emergency preparedness, and infrastructure design” to incorporate the intensifying risks of these “cascading impacts.”
The findings also underscore the importance of efforts to limit global warming, Swain said. “The less warming there is, the less of an increase in hydroclimate whiplash we’re going to see.”
AMD’s latest Ryzen AI Max chips probably wouldn’t have existed without Apple, an AMD executive has admitted, thanks to the popularity of Apple Silicon.
At CES, AMD introduced Ryzen AI Max chips, an upgraded version of its Ryzen AI architecture with up to 16 CPU cores and up to 40 AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units, and a neural processing unit with up to 50 trillion operations per second.
The chips, offering tons of performance in various ways in one focused component, has considerable echoes to the way Apple Silicon works. During the launch, AMD VP Joe Macri hinted that Apple Silicon helped with getting the product made and out the door, reportsEngadget.
An Apple Silicon thing
“Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics,, it’s gotta be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it’s bad graphics,” Macri offered.
He continued “What Apple showed was consumers don’t care what’s inside the box. They actually care about what the box looks like. They care about the screen, the keyboard, the mouse. They care about what it does.”
With Apple having a massive success on its hands with Apple Silicon, it allowed Macri to convince upper management to spend a “mind boggling” amount of resources to develop the Ryzen AI Max.
“I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I’d been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build,” Macri enthused. “A system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power.”
Inspired, but not first
While Macri was complementary about Apple Silicon’s success and how it helped convince others that Ryzen AI Max chips were a real possibility, he stops short of giving full credit to Apple.
He insists that AMD was working towards this scenario well ahead of Apple. “We were building APUs while Apple was using discrete GPUs,” he crows, referring to chips that combined a CPU with Radeon graphics.
“They [Apple] were using our discrete GPUs. So I don’t credit Apple with coming up with the idea,” he continued.
Before implementing Apple Silicon, Apple did extensively use AMD Radeon GPUs as discrete graphics options in its MacBook Pro lines.
Apple may have had an interest in creating its own APU at the time AMD was working on the concept. In July 2012, former AMD chip architect John Bruno, who previously contributed to AMD’s Trinity APU was spotted on LinkedIn as having become a “System Architect at Apple.”
At one point, Apple apparently considered using the original AMD Fusion APU in the Apple TV in 2010, before eventually using its A4 processor.
Firefighters from Clark County, Nevada, are en route to Southern California to help “The Golden State” battle the massive wildfires that have consumed much of Pacific Palisades and continue to burn uncontrollably on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
“Today, I announced that Nevada firefighting assets will deploy to Southern California to assist our neighbors in combatting one of the worst fires in recent history,” Nevada Governor, Joe Lombardo, wrote on social media. “Please pray for their safety and for the communities displaced by these awful fires.”
In addition, first responders can rely on support from UFC.
“Love this!!! Already called Joe Lombardo,” UFC CEO, Dana White, wrote on Instagram. “Much respect to all the first responders from Nevada and California. ANYTHING you need from me or UFC, we got you!”
