Apollo update transforms the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island into a home for ‘Pixel Pals’

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max may have only arrived yesterday but developers are already dreaming up fun and interesting use cases for Apple’s new Dynamic Island interface. Take Apollo creator Christian Selig, for instance. On Friday, he updated his Reddit client to implement support for “Pixel Pals.” The feature adds a Tamagotchi-like critter that does cute things on top of your phone’s Dynamic Island while you have Apollo open. You can even choose between multiple creatures, including a cat, dog, hedgehog, fox or axolotl.

If you don’t have an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max, don’t worry. You can also add the creatures to your phone as lock screen widgets – provided you have iOS 16 installed. On the subject of iPhone widgets, Google teased one that will function as a shortcut to Chrome’s Dino game.

Selig isn’t the only person doing something creative with the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, WaterMinder creator Kriss Smolka showed off Hit the Island, a game that uses the UI element for a Pong-style game. You can download it from the App Store. I can only speak for myself, but these apps make me a bit jealous I’m still rocking an iPhone 12.  

Justice Department officials want to take part in Epic v. Apple appeal

The Department of Justice has asked a US federal judge to participate in the upcoming appeals case between Epic and Apple, according to court documents seen by Reuters. The companies will return to court next month to argue over the outcome of their 2020 antitrust case.

The Justice Department filed a brief to enter the case at the start of the year. The agency said it was concerned that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had improperly interpreted US antitrust law. In 2019, reports surfaced that the DOJ was preparing to launch a probe of Apple’s business practices. A decision to uphold the company’s win over Epic could limit the DOJ’s ability to sue it for antitrust violations.

“The United States believes that its participation at oral argument would be helpful to the court, especially in explaining how the errors (in antitrust law interpretation) could significantly harm antitrust enforcement beyond the specific context of this case,” the Justice Department wrote on Friday.

The agency has asked for 10 minutes of the court’s time. Neither side is against the Justice Department’s involvement, though Apple has requested that the DOJ’s argument time count against Epic’s total time allotment or that the court extends the proceedings.

Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro are on sale ahead of launch day

If you plan to purchase Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro, you should consider buying them from Amazon. Ahead of their September 23rd release date, the retailer has priced the earbuds at $240, or $10 less than MSRP. It’s a modest discount, to be su…

EVGA is exiting the GPU market and parting ways with NVIDIA

The next time you build a gaming PC, you probably won’t be adding an EVGA GPU to your list of possible components. The company, which is best known for manufacturing NVIDIA GeForce-based video cards, is getting out of the GPU-making business. As Tom’s Hardware and Ars Technica report, company CEO Andrew Han sat down with YouTubers JayZTwoCents and Gamers Nexus in a closed-door interview to reveal EVGA’s decision. He also talked about his grievances with NVIDIA.

Han told the YouTubers that NVIDIA had stopped treating EVGA as a true partner over the years despite their history. NVIDIA had allegedly stopped informing EVGA about new product announcements and important information, such as suggested retail pricing and availability. That left add-in board partners like EVGA to find out details about the latest products on stage, the same time we all do. Further, NVIDIA’s first-party Founders Edition cards undercut the prices of their counterparts from EVGA and other partners, forcing the vendors to mark down their prices. 

EVGA, Han said, will continue selling cards based on older GeForce GPUs like the RTX 3000 series. After it runs out of stock, though, that’s it — the company has no plans to team up with NVIDIA rivals AMD or Intel. EVGA has been selling other computer components and accessories, such as power supplies and gaming mice, for a while now. But according to Gamers Nexus, 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from GeForce sales, so this decision could put the company’s very existence in jeopardy. When the YouTuber commented that this must have been a difficult decision to make, the CEO reportedly replied that this was easy and it was working with NVIDIA that was hard.

In its forums, EVGA has posted the following statement:

EVGA will not carry the next generation graphics cards. EVGA will continue to support the existing current generation products. EVGA will continue to provide the current generation products. EVGA is committed to our customers and will continue to offer sales and support on the current lineup. Also, EVGA would like to say thank you to our great community for the many years of support and enthusiasm for EVGA graphics cards.

As for NVIDIA, Bryan Del Rizzo, the director of global public relations for GeForce, told Tom’s Hardware:

We’ve had a great partnership with EVGA over the years and will continue to support them on our current generation of products. We wish Andrew and our friends at EVGA all the best.

LastPass was hacked, but it says no user data was compromised

In August, LastPass had admitted that an “unauthorized party” gained entry into its system. Any news about a password manager getting hacked can be alarming, but the company is now reassuring its users that their logins and other information weren’t compromised in the event.

In his latest update about the incident, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said that the company’s investigation with cybersecurity firm Mandiant has revealed that the bad actor had internal access to its systems for four days. They were able to steal some of the password manager’s source code and technical information, but their access was limited to the service’s development environment that isn’t connected to customers’ data and encrypted vaults. Further, Toubba pointed out that LastPass has no access to users’ master passwords, which are needed to decrypt their vaults.

The CEO said there’s no evidence that this incident “involved any access to customer data or encrypted password vaults.” They also found no evidence of unauthorized access beyond those four days and of any traces that the hacker injected the systems with malicious code. Toubba explained that the bad actor was able to infiltrate the service’s systems by compromising a developer’s endpoint. The hacker then impersonated the developer “once the developer had successfully authenticated using multi-factor authentication.” 

Back in 2015, LastPass suffered a security breach that compromised users’ email addresses, authentication hashes, password reminders and other information. A similar breach would be more devastating today, now that the service supposedly has over 33 million registered customers. While, LastPass isn’t asking users to do anything to keep their data safe this time, it’s always good practice not to reuse passwords and to switch on multi-factor authentication.