To help reduce the potential for malware, Android 14 will begin fully blocking the installation of apps that target outdated versions of Android.

For years now, the guidelines for the Google Play Store have ensured that Android developers keep their apps updated to use the latest features and safety measures of the Android platform. Just this month, the guidelines were updated, requiring newly listed Play Store apps to target Android 12 at a minimum.

Up to this point, these minimum API level requirements have only applied to apps that are intended for the Google Play Store. Should a developer wish to create an app for an older version, they can do so and simply ask their users to sideload the APK file manually. Similarly, if an Android app hasn’t been updated since the guidelines changed, the Play Store will continue serving the app to those who have installed it once before.

According to a newly posted code change, Android 14 is set to make API requirements stricter, entirely blocking the installation of outdated apps. This change would block users from sideloading specific APK files and also block app stores from installing those same apps.

Initially, Android 14 devices will only block apps that target especially old Android versions. Over time though, the plan is to increase the threshold to Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), with Google having a mechanism to “progressively ramp [it] up.” That said, it will likely still be up to each device maker to decide the threshold for outdated apps or whether to enable it at all.

You are observing step 1, intended to kill tens of thousands of older apps, because Google want to clear the field and prepare to next step.

We'll soon see that APK installation will become almost impossible.

Worms, grasshoppers and crickets in the future should play an important role in providing society with food, said the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg (Germany) Winfried Kretschmann. The German newspaper Badische Zeitung writes about this on January 24.

Kretschmann believes that eating insects will be absolutely essential. “This will play an important role in ensuring the nutrition of humanity in the future,” the politician believes. It's a "smart way" to get protein that makes ecological sense, he says.

The politician believes that the first step should be the production of animal feed from insects. However, Kretschmann warns that in Europe, the path to eating insects will have to overcome high cultural barriers that should not be underestimated.

Kretschmann said that he himself had already tasted insects, he could not remember exactly which insects he ate. The politician noted that he did not remember much taste, but he was not bad.

Badische Zeitung reminds that from January 24, it is allowed to eat crickets in Germany. A new EU law will soon come into force that will allow crickets to be frozen, dried or used as a powder. Grain beetle larvae will also be allowed to be eaten. Locust and flour beetle larvae can already be eaten.

Tech billionaire Bill Gates has warned Australia to prepare for the next pandemic, which could be man-made and far more brutal.

Mr Gates told the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney on Monday that political leaders need to settle their differences and work together to prepare for the next virus.

He called for greater global cooperation, citing the Covid-19 pandemic as an example of how countries could improve their response if they worked together.

Tech billionaire Bill Gates has warned Australia to be prepared for the next pandemic, saying it will be man-made

He called for greater global cooperation, citing the Covid-19 pandemic as an example of how countries could improve their response if they worked together

“Compare the economic cost of preparing for the next to the cost of this, over $10 trillion in economic loss,” he said.

“With the pandemic, we were foolish not to have the tools, the practice and the global capacity to be on standby as we do with fire or earthquakes.”

https://canadatoday.news/ca/bill-gates-is-warning-australia-to-prepare-for-the-next-pandemic-which-could-be-man-made-and-far-more-brutal-than-covid-240853/

Directly desktop discrete graphics cards were sold 31.5% less than in the third quarter of 2021. NVIDIA was able to increase its share in the segment from 79% to 86% in a year, AMD fell from 21% to 10%, and Intel, acting as a newcomer, occupied 4% of the market in the third quarter of the outgoing year, which is not bad for a “debutant”. However, we should not forget that in the middle of the last decade of the last century, Intel Corporation was already selling its own discrete graphics solutions, so the current expansion was the first stage for it to return to the market. According to Jeon Peddie Research, for the entire GPU market, the third quarter was the most disastrous since the 2009 crisis.

A new feature has been discovered in the Google Chrome codebase that will cause the browser to automatically block downloads from insecure HTTP resources. Previously, this was considered the norm, but now most sites have enabled HTTPS encryption to protect user data.

Earlier in the Chrome settings, a checkbox "Always use secure connections" appeared, the selection of which causes the browser to start trying to connect to sites with HTTPS. Legacy HTTP-only resources are marked as "insecure" in the address bar. Now the user will see a warning every time they try to download data via HTTP. Most often, Chrome will also report the blocking of the corresponding content, but after studying the warning, the user will be able to remove this blocking and still download the necessary file.

The updated feature will probably not make it in time for the stable Chrome 111 release, which is expected in March 2023, but it could very well debut with a preview version of the browser later this year.

I wrote about this long ago.

As soon as they'll do it - they'll have ideal tool to destroy any site their AI bots won't like for any reason - they'll just revoke certificate. As far as I know most of Russian internet sites and many Chinese will be banned such way. And will require manual install of root certificates and most probably also special patching or option turnoff.

https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/48519/1/S2200946_en.pdf