Epic Games launched its alternative app store in the European Union last week, capitalizing on new regulations opening up iOS. The store aims to offer developers lower commissions and greater payment flexibility compared to Apple's App Store. However, Apple's new terms for alternative marketplaces present significant challenges for developers. Apple imposes a 50 euro cent per user per year installation fee, a 10% commission on external sales, and a 5% fee on purchases within a year of installation. These fees apply on top of Epic's 12% commission, potentially making the alternative store less attractive for many developers, The Verge writes. While Epic can likely absorb these costs for its hit game Fortnite, smaller developers face a steeper hurdle. Some industry insiders express skepticism about the viability of the new ecosystem for most app creators. Epic plans to offer a curated selection of third-party games on its mobile store by December, but widespread adoption remains uncertain.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Blue Origin sustained failures in recent weeks of testing including a factory mishap that damaged a portion of a future New Glenn rocket, the long-awaited centerpiece of the Jeff Bezos-backed startup's push to take on SpaceX. The upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar, according to people familiar with the situation. In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded, the people said. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode. The previously unreported incidents illustrate the hurdles Blue Origin is grappling with while ramping up production of New Glenn, which is four years overdue. At the same time, new Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp has hired a slate of executives to shake the company out of a years-long R&D slump.

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Lionsgate is recalling its latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's epic "Megalopolis," which featured a littany of fabricated quotes from famous film critics. From a report: "Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for 'Megalopolis,'" a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement provided to Variety. "We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry." The trailer, released on Wednesday morning, aimed to position Coppola's latest film as a work of art that would withstand the test of time, much like his previous masterpieces "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now." The video included several quotes from critics panning Coppola's previous work -- but none of the phrases, attributed to the likes of Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, could be found in any of their reviews.

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Phoronix's Michael Larabel benchmarked AMD's latest Ryzen 9 9950X in several different Linux distros and found that the Zen 5 chip performs up to 16% faster with the Intel-optimized Clear Linux distro. Here's an excerpt from the report: The Linux distributions for this round of testing on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X included Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 40, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and a recent daily snapshot of Ubuntu 24.10 in its current development form. Intel's Clear Linux is the one most interesting for looking at on the new AMD Zen 5 hardware. While there hasn't been so much Clear Linux news in recent times, it remains the most well optimized x86_64 Linux distribution out of the box. Clear Linux makes use of compiler function multi versioning, performance-minded defaults, aggressive compiler CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS defaults, optional AVX-512 usage for more libraries, and many other patches and optimizations in the name of delivering the greatest x86_64 Linux performance. And while not Intel's focus, it works typically on AMD hardware too. [...] Using the same Ryzen 9 9950X system, all of these Linux distributions were tested in their default / out-of-the-box state. [...] When taking the geometric mean of 59 benchmarks run across all of the Linux distributions on this AMD Ryzen 9 9950X system, Intel's Clear Linux easily took the crown. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS -- which was used for all of the Ryzen 9000 series Linux testing so far on Phoronix -- was the slowest. Tapping Intel's Clear Linux netted a 16% improvement on top of the performance offered by Ubuntu 24.04 LTS! Ubuntu 24.04 with the Ryzen 9000 series was already looking great generationally, but as shown today the performance can be even better with further software optimizations. The Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is tuned out-of-the-box with a similar aim to Clear Linux also performed great. CachyOS was 7% faster than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based on the geo mean and 3% faster than upstream Arch Linux itself. For different workloads though the CachyOS advantage over Arch Linux varied from a minimal difference to quite significant advantages. From the performance of PHP and Python scripts atop Clear Linux to compiling various server and HPC minded software, Intel's Clear Linux -- and a commendable second place for CachyOS -- were showing that even greater performance can be achieved on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Even for devoted Ubuntu Linux users, these results did show some nice advantages of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS thanks to the GCC 14 compiler. Ubuntu 24.10 performance is also still subject to change since the current daily ISOs haven't yet moved past the Linux 6.8 kernel while Ubuntu 24.10 in October will be shipping with Linux 6.11.

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In a blog post on Wednesday, Neuralink said its second human recipient is using the brain chip to play Counter-Strike 2 and develop 3D designs in CAD software. "Alex" was given the brain chip last month to help restore his autonomy after a spinal cord injury. PCMag reports: Like the first Neuralink patient, Noland Arbaugh, Alex has also been using the brain chip to play his favorite computer games, such as Counter-Strike 2. Before, Alex had to use a mouth-operated controller, called a QuadStick, to play the first-person shooter. But even then, the controller limited him to only moving or aiming his weapon at a single time, never simultaneously like a normal Counter-Strike player. In other words, Alex had to essentially switch back and forth between the mouse and keyboard functions while playing the game. But thanks to Neuralink, he can now aim with the implant, and simultaneously move while using the QuadStick. [...] In the blog post, Neuralink also addressed a problem the company faced when placing the chip in Arbaugh, the first patient. Despite a successful surgery, about 85% of the thread-based electrodes attached to his brain later became displaced, undermining the full potential of the chip to read neural signals. Although Arbaugh can still use his implant effectively, Neuralink wanted to avoid a repeat with Alex. In response, the company developed several "mitigations," which include reducing the chance of an air pocket forming during surgery and placing the implant deeper into the brain tissue. "Promisingly, we have observed no thread retraction in our second participant," the company said of Alex. Whether Alex's implant outperforms the brain chip in Arbaugh was left unclear. In the meantime, Neuralink says it's working on ways to enhance the controls on the technology "to deliver full mouse and video game controller functionality." "Additionally, we plan to enable the Link [brain chip] to interact with the physical world, allowing users to feed themselves and move more independently by controlling a robotic arm or their wheelchair," the company said. You can watch Alex playing Counter-Strike 2 on YouTube.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. oilfield services firm Halliburton on Wednesday was hit by a cyberattack, according to a person familiar with the matter. Halliburton said it was aware of an issue affecting certain systems at the company and was working to determine the cause and impact of the problem. The company was also working with "leading external experts" to fix the issue, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The attack appeared to impact business operations at the company's north Houston campus, as well as some global connectivity networks, the person said, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the record. The company has asked some staff not to connect to internal networks, the person said. Houston, Texas-based Halliburton is one of the largest oilfield services firms in the world, providing drilling services and equipment to major energy producers around the globe. It had nearly 48,000 employees and operated in more than 70 countries at the end of last year.

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A sophisticated extortion campaign has targeted 110,000 domains by exploiting misconfigured AWS environment files, security firm Cyble reports. The attackers scanned for exposed .env files containing cloud access keys and other sensitive data. Organizations that failed to secure their AWS environments found their S3-stored data replaced with ransom notes. The attackers used a series of API calls to verify data, enumerate IAM users, and locate S3 buckets. Though initial access lacked admin privileges, they created new IAM roles to escalate permissions. Cyble researchers noted the attackers' use of AWS Lambda functions for automated scanning operations.

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The old Sonos app won't be making a return to replace the buggy new version. According to Sonos CEO Patrick Spence, rereleasing the old app would make things worse now that updated software has already been sent out to the company's speakers and cloud infrastructure. The Verge reports: In a Reddit AMA response posted Tuesday, Sonos CEO Spence says that he was hopeful "until very recently" that the company could rerelease the app, confirming a report from The Verge that the company was considering doing so. [...] Since the new app was released on May 7th, Spence has issued a formal apology and announced in August that the company would be delaying the launch of two products "until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and our partners expect from Sonos." "The trick of course is that Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too," writes Spence in the Reddit AMA. "In the months since the new mobile app launched we've been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what you remember. After doing extensive testing we've reluctantly concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse, not better. I'm sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing to me."

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