Apple will have to redesign its phones to include a USB-C charging port in iPhones it sells into Europe by 2024 after an EU amendment made USB-C the common standard across a range of devices.

In a live press conference, the rapporteur on the issue, Maltese MP Alex Agius Saliba, said: "This is a rule which will apply to everyone. Now it's no more a Memorandum of Understanding and having all the leeway that [Apple] had during the past 10 years – basically to not abide by this MoU – which was abided by the majority of manufacturers. So yes, Apple has to abide."

The single charging solution will be implemented as part of the amended Radio Equipment Directive, nine months after the legislative proposal was first tabled in September 2021.

Under the new rules, manufacturers wishing to sell smartphones, tablets, e-readers, earbuds, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld video game consoles, and portable speakers (charged via wired cable) in the single market will have to ensure they are equipped with a USB Type-C port.

Companies have 24 months before the directive's provisions kick in, and they wouldn't apply to any devices placed in the market before autumn 2024. The smartphone move will impact Apple in particular as most of the Android handset manufacturers have already made the move to USB-C.

Laptop manufacturers have 40 months after the agreement is published in the EU Official Journal (which happens in about three weeks). Apple has already rolled out USB-C charging for its later models of MacBooks and iPads, so this part of the edict will predominantly affect other laptop manufacturers.

Speaking at today's press conference, Saliba added: "In two years' time, if Apple wants to market their products, sell their products within our internal markets, they have to abide by our rules, and their receptacle device has to be USB-C."

"This is not a common charger only for smartphones, but for a list of 15 different products. Laptops, headsets, earbuds… We have been pushing for this for more than 10 years," Saliba said.

"The raison d'être? [Fewer] chargers for our consumers... a fairer deal to our environment, because ultimately we generate 13,000 to 15,000 tonnes of electronic waste of chargers that we barely ever use. One in three chargers that is bundled with these products are never opened."

Apple has previously claimed such a move would further compound the electronic waste issue because it would mean the existing Lighting cables and chargers owned by Apple users would be trashed. Apple also said it would harm its bottom line innovation, a notion the EU Commissioner for internal markets, Thierry Breton, was quick to refute.

The former CEO of France Télécom told reporters: "I was a company director, and I always perceived (restrictions) do not stop innovation. And they will innovate, according to the rules. Particularly to protect the interests of our consumers, particularly to protect our environment, and protect our internal market."

He added: "The rule applies to all and sundry – it's not adopted against anybody. We're working for the consumers, not the companies, and we have to give them rules… We're not forcing anybody to enter the internal market, but if they want to do so, they must comply.

"We are 450 million inhabitants in Europe, we are offering our market. The message I want to get across is that rather than lobbying, they should come and see us... They wanted to interfere, they wanted to intervene. But we're here to defend the general interest."

It's another win for Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who noted a few weeks back: "USB-C could improve iPhone's transfer and charging speed in hardware designs, but the final spec details still depend on iOS support."

RSA Conference An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.

The Atlas initiative, whose contributors include Fortinet and Microsoft and other private-sector firms, involves mapping the relationships between criminal groups and their infrastructure with the end goal of helping both industry and the public sector — law enforcement and government agencies — disrupt these nefarious ecosystems.  

This kind of visibility into the connections between the gang members can help security researchers identify vulnerabilities in the criminals' supply chain to develop better mitigation strategies and security controls for their customers. 

Late last month, France's BEA-RI, or Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on industrial risks, issued its technical report on the March 10th, 2021 fire at the OVH datacenter in Strasbourg.

The French report [PDF] and summary [PDF] echo the findings of the Bas-Rhin fire service in March, 2022 that the lack of an automatic fire extinguisher system, the delay of electrical cutoff and the building design contributed to the spread of the blaze.

The BEA-RI findings also hint at a possible cause – a water leak on an inverter – while stating that the cause has not been conclusively determined.

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.

Attempting to visit the Windows Insider portal was returning the familiar "Your connection is not private" warning – as if webpages larded with scripts and trackers can truly be called "private." The problem has now been fixed, and someone's no doubt getting an earful.

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will attempt to deter visitors from accessing the webpage, but will provide a link for those who ignore the warnings and persist on clicking through to advanced options.

RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.

The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.

The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.

As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.

For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.

That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.

MEPs backed a plenary vote on Wednesday for "zero-emission road mobility by 2035" – essentially meaning no more diesel and gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.

The ambitious target means the automotive battery industry will have to service a much larger demand over the coming years, and electric carmakers stand to benefit hugely – that is, if they can source the requisite semiconductors and batteries.

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.

Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil. 

Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.

"We are beginning to roll this feature out, so it isn't available to all Insiders in the Dev Channel just yet," the software giant said.

The Register was one of the lucky ones and we have to commend Microsoft on the implementation (overdue as it is). The purpose of the functionality is to allow users to work on more than one location at a time in File Explorer via tabs in the title bar.

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