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• Apple charges 15-30% extra for in-app purchases and subscription fees like YouTube Premium
• This has become known as the ‘Apple tax’
• Third-party developers have been protesting this, mainly Fortnite founder Epic Games

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Apple’s App Store is a one-stop shop for all your needs. It’s made subscribing to third-party services a lot easier, and you can manage your memberships all from one place right there on your iPhone. That said, subscribing to platforms through Apple comes with a small but pricey catch.

If you’ve subscribed to the best streaming services such as YouTube Premium through the App Store, you might not know that this could cost you a lot more than if you were to sign up through YouTube itself — and it’s all down to App Store fees.

The emerging artificial intelligence (AI) hubs of Mumbai and Chennai in India and Singapore are said to be among Asia’s leading cloud and AI ecosystems, and to tap into this highly dynamic market and strengthen its connectivity offerings, global communications technology player Tata Communications has made strategic investments in subsea cable infrastructure in the region via its acquisition of “significant” fibre capacity.

The company believes the India-Singapore subsea route is set to become one of the world’s most critical digital corridors in future, representing a high-capacity, low-latency pathway that will underpin critical enterprise, cloud and hyperscaler traffic between India, Southeast Asia and global markets.

Through these investments Tata Communications says it’s enhancing the Tata Global Network (TGN) as part of a general aim of addressing the growing bandwidth and AI-driven data demands of enterprises across Asia and further extension globally.

By enhancing capacity on its TGN network, Tata Communications says it’s furthering its ability to deliver diverse, agile and high-performance connectivity to customers.

Specifically, the company will be integrating a subsea cable system between Mumbai and Singapore; investing as a consortium member in a new subsea cable system, connecting Chennai to Singapore with expected ready for service (RFS) in the fourth quarter of 2029.

Together, these investments are seen as being able to meet the growing needs of the datacentre ecosystem offering enterprises a scalable, reliable and future-ready connectivity between India and Singapore.

The cable systems will further connect with Tata Communications India Terrestrial fibre network for onward connectivity to other parts of the country and to more than 100 datacentres nationwide.

Combined with the global TGN Subsea network, the overall network is seen as enhancing the capabilities of the full suite of IZO connectivity offerings such as IZO DC Dynamic Connectivity and IZO multi-cloud providing self-healing, always-on and self-provisioning capabilities across datacentres and cloud ecosystems. Tata notes that customers will be able to activate and integrate these capacities with agility into their networks on demand.

“As global demand for digital and AI-driven services continues to accelerate, these investments reinforce our commitment to building future-ready digital infrastructure at scale,” said Genius Wong, Tata Communications’ departing executive vice-president of core and next-gen connectivity services and chief technology officer.

“By combining subsea capacity enhancement with both short-term and long-term strategic investments, we are strengthening the reliability, scalability and performance of connectivity solutions for our customers across one of the world’s busiest digital corridors,” she said. “These enhancements align with Tata Communications’ long-term strategy to expand its global subsea network footprint, provide business outcome solutions to customers and reinforce India’s position as a Digital Hub.”

The backbone of the portfolio is the Tata Communications Network Fabric subsea fibre network, which comprises more than 500,000km of subsea optical fibre and in excess of 200,000km of terrestrial fibre. To enhance further enterprise connectivity across Asia and beyond, in 2025, Tata Communications has integrated the new Tata Global Network – Intra-Asia 2 (TGN IA2) submarine cable.

The latter is said to improve latency for faster performance, enhancing reliability through greater redundancy and increasing network diversity through interconnection with TGN IA.

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• Conversation focus is being limited to three hours a month for some Meta glasses users
• For a longer 15 hours a month limit you’ll need to pay for Meta One Premium
• The feature is handled on device, so it’s unclear why it has been paywalled

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The Meta Ray-Bans and other AI glasses can perform a slew of useful tasks thanks to their wearable hardware and digital assistant — but Meta has just announced that one of those features will be getting serious limitations as it introduces a paid subscription plan that will unlock more usage time.

Conversation focus was showcased at Meta Connect last year, and is essentially an audio mixer for your real-life conversations. When you switch the feature on — using the voice command “Hey Meta, start conversation focus” — the specs’ microphones will pick up the voice of the person you’re looking at, the AI will separate their voice from the background noise, and then your glasses’ speakers will play what they’re saying to you to amplify their speech and make it stand out.

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• Researchers found “VPN Go” extensions for Chrome and Firefox secretly harvesting copied text
• The clipboard theft was not there at launch and arrived through a later update
• Anything copied while the extension was active should now be treated as exposed

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Security researchers at Socket found two browser extensions distributed under the “VPN Go: Free VPN” branding, one listed on the Chrome Web Store and one on Firefox Add-ons, to secretly harvest copied text.

Both present themselves as free VPN tools with working proxy features. Underneath, Socket says, both also run a clipboard stealer that continuously watches copied text and sends it to infrastructure controlled by the attacker.

Finland has hunkered down on its strengths in health, quantum and maths to nurture an industrial recovery that has been wanting since the decline of national champion Nokia in the smartphone era.

A research project intended to create the world’s first national health artificial intelligence (AI) system and to use it to predict the risk of each and every person in the country developing any one of 200 diseases was among six that the national trade and investment agency funded in June to stimulate industrial growth. Four of the six concerned biotech, an area where Finland’s national data and legal systems are claimed by those involved to be uniquely well formed.

Two aspire directly to the long-term development of the quantum technology industry that emerged from Finnish scientific leadership, centred at the Aalto University Low Temperature Laboratory, in ultra-low-temperature physics, cryogenic engineering, superconducting quantum circuits and nano-electronics.

Finland’s world-leading position in the field of inverse mathematics and computation, which tackles the fiendishly difficult problem of calculating causes from observed effects, produced a project to do advanced medical imaging on cheap, inferior scanners.

Business Finland picked from among nearly 200 proposals those that were most likely to achieve strategic aims it set last year to accord with a government policy to stimulate an industrial recovery that diversified its economy away from ICT where it had long been heavily concentrated, and therefore vulnerable.

Finland’s R&D spending, at its height in the late 2000s, was greater as a share of GDP than any other country in the world but Israel, according to OECD data. That came largely from private investment in the ICT sector, and mostly from Nokia, which accounted for over 40% of all Finnish R&D. Its spending fell dramatically after Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2013, as the country’s innovation ecosystem weakened and a “long economic stagnation” set in. Nokia still dominates.

“We have academic strengths. We want to build them into industrial strengths to create more variety in Finnish industry,” said Karin Wikman, chief innovation adviser of Business Finland, who worked on the Rise to Challenge fund. It awarded shares of €30m to six projects that had the boldest of visions and that promised to stimulate the broadest industrial growth, she said.

The agency granted funding to the health AI project FINe-Health Foundry because it built on Finnish strengths in health data and the urgency of its mission to cut costs and increase capacity in a health system becoming overburdened by an ageing population, said Wikman. It maps to priority sectors the government set for its industrial recovery strategy in November.

Model of health

The FINe-Health team intends to create what its claims will be the world’s first national health AI model, made possible by Finland’s centralised health records system. It emerged from FinRegistry, a project that collated 19 national health data sources for all 5.6 million people in Finland. This included everything from prescriptions, health conditions, lab reports, health clinic visits, socio-economic data, and family connections, so that medical computing researchers can use it to train machine learning models. It will incorporate also a genomic database that has records of around a tenth of Finns.

The result will be a foundation AI model more advanced than the machine learning models that have thus far been trained on isolated cohorts – subsets of patient records – for specific clinical aims, such as predicting mortality, said professor Arto Klami, who is working on FINe-Health at the University of Helsinki.

This would not have been possible in most countries of the world, he said, because health records systems tend to be fragmented, protected by local hospitals and clinics and not available country-wide.

FINe-Health will spend three years building and training the model on national health data, and working with clinicians and planners to map their workflows and identify ways an AI might help them, said Klami. It will build prototypes to test how well the AI meets those needs. Then it aims to encourage health tech firms to develop full applications.

“The foundation model in isolation, sitting in some secure computing environment, does nothing,” said Klami. “We see societal benefit only at the point it is available, where there is a real need, a clinical workflow or practice we want to improve. It’s going to be a complicated puzzle, getting all the pieces together, and much of it can’t be done by a university research project. It involves lots of public and private actors.”

The system’s first likely use would be in population-level analysis that planners and policymakers could use to do such things as predict disease, identify vulnerable groups and allocate budgets. The FINe-Health team intend it to help doctors make decisions. That would be difficult, said Klami, because it raises ethical questions that go beyond FINe-Health’s technological remit to develop and prove the technology.

Current health AI systems are limited by the fundamental technology by which foundation models mostly learn to derive correlations from data, said professor Samuel Kaski, founding director of the ELLIS Institute Finland, which is running the project. FINe-Health, attempting to create a model that can be used in clinical decisions, must be able to do cause-and-effect reasoning as well.

How to train models to capture causality and make valid inferences from it was one of the fundamental research challenges in machine learning, he said, adding: “While partial solutions have been proposed, this is far from being a solved problem.

“We are not the only people working on this, but our project intends to make a contribution which is especially needed in healthcare, where it is absolutely crucial that decisions on treatments of patients, for instance, are made based on the disease mechanisms instead of spurious correlations.”

FINe-Health will attempt to establish a model of human-AI teamwork and decision making as well. Contributions from health practitioners will be vital, said Kaski.