Apple had announced that they would be rolling out new products this week, in advance of a live show on March 4th, and they have, indeed. Engadget.com reports that two of the headline products bowed today are the iPhone 17e and the M4 Powered iPad Air. So  what’s new on the entry level iPhone? Well, for me, the biggest deal is Qi2 wireless charging with charging speeds up to 15 watts….that is double what the 16e has. Speaking of double, the 17e gets double the base storage as the 16e at 256 gigs. The phone is unchanged as far as its design, but it does have better scratch resistance for the screen with Ceramic Shield 2. Preorders start March 4th, and it will be available March 11th in black, white, or soft pink. The best news? The price stays at $599. 

The other hardware rolled out today by Apple is the new iPad Air, powered by Apple’s M4 chip. This is a nice boost in processing, but basically keeps it a year behind the pricier iPad Pro. As engadget.com notes, f you only use an iPad for casual tasks like watching shows, web browsing, email and so on, the M4 will be more than powerful enough. It will be more adept at handling resource-intensive tasks like video editing than previous iPad Air models too. The RAM has ben goosed up to 12 gigs from 8 on the prior model. The 11 inch iPad Air with M4 starts at $599, with the 13 inch model coming in at $799. Both have 128 gigs of storage. Like the iPhone 17e, you can preorder March 4th, with availability March 11th. Colors include blue, purple, starlight, and the venerable space gray.

After initially agreeing with Anthropic’s position that got them cancelled from all government contracts…the position that the AI couldn’t be used for mass surveillance of US citizens or to power totally automated weapons systems…Open AI, maker of ChatGPT, caved and agreed to the Pentagon’s demands. According to the verge.com, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI continued to say that the company would not cross those red lines…but the actual contract says the AI can be used for ‘any lawful use.’ That is the exact language that caused Anthropic to walk away and get blacklisted. OpenAI’s former head of policy research, Miles Brundage, said on X that “in light of what external lawyers and the Pentagon are saying, OpenAI employees’ default assumption here should unfortunately be that OpenAI caved + framed it as not caving, and screwed Anthropic while framing it as helping them.” Interestingly, over the weekend, Anthropic’s Claude was the most downloaded software by government people! 

A hacktivist group calling itself ‘Department of Peace’ has apparently hacked the Department of Homeland Security, and published online contracts between DHS and specifically ICE and around 6,000 companies. Techcrunch.com says the companies include defense contractors like L3Harris and Raytheon, as well as surveillance firm Palantir, and even Microsoft and Oracle. There was no immediate response from Homeland Security or ICE when asked to comment. The information leaked shows the name of the contractors, the amount of money they were awarded, and contact information. 

There have been rumblings for several years about AI replacing peoples’ jobs. Now, Jack Dorsey’s Block has moved to do so. Mashable.com reports that the financial firm, which owns Square and Cash App, has sent pink slips to 4,000 of its 10,000 employees. Dorsey made the announcement on X, formerly Twitter which he previously founded. Dorsey said in his post “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.” Block will give employees their salary for 20 weeks plus one week per year of tenure, six months of health care, and $5,000 in cash, among other benefits,

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.