Russia has escalated its long-running dispute with Apple by opening an antitrust case that could cost the iPhone maker nearly $50 million over its refusal to preload state-backed apps.

After years of threatening to do so, Russia has finally begun investigating Apple after it failed to preinstall state-backed apps onto devices in the country. The apps in question are Max, a state-backed messaging service, and RuStore, a domestic app store.

“The company did not comply with the FAS warning to preinstall the national messaging app and the national app store on its iOS devices (iPhone, iPad). The FAS opened a case against the company in accordance with the competition law and the already established law-enforcement practice in regard to Apple,” a statement seen by Interfax said.

If found guilty, Apple could face a 4 billion rubles fine, about $49.8 million.

Russia has been threatening some form of action for the better part of a decade. In 2019, it claimed that it would ban all devices, not just those from Apple, that failed to include select Russian-made software.

This raises the question of why Apple would be compelled to preinstall software on devices in the first place. Apple does not sell devices within the Russian market, either directly or through Authorized Apple Resellers.

The company has not done so since Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2022. All devices sold within Russia are done so through third-party sales.

Apple and Russia’s relationship

That’s not to say that Apple hasn’t complied with Russian requirements in the past. It has.

As The Moscow Times points out, Apple partially complied with Russia’s warning by allowing a Russian search engine to be preinstalled in an updated version of iOS 26.6.

In July 2024, Apple removed VPN apps from the App Store in Russia. In October 2024 and November 2024, the company similarly removed independent media apps that contained content labeled “undesirable” by Russian authorities.

In February 2023, Apple also paid a $12.12 million antitrust fine for forcing iOS users to rely on its in-app purchase system. After Apple Ireland was fined for breaking sanctions against Russia in March 2026, however, subscriptions and payments for Apple Services are no longer available in Russia.

Despite Apple’s periodic willingness to appease Russian authorities, the two continue to have a strained relationship. In September 2023, Apple warned Russian journalists of state-sponsored spyware, while Russian authorities claimed Apple was helping the United States spy on iPhone users.

OpenAI’s first-ever influencer brand trip is sparking online backlash as tensions over the use of AI continue. 

Over the weekend, OpenAI took what appears to be a handful of influencers to a luxury retreat in upstate New York for what was called “Summer Club.” There, the creators were treated to farm-to-table dinners, wellness activities like beekeeping, and classes on how to better use OpenAI products. One creator posted about making a website, while another took a photo of a brochure that said “painting workshop” on it. 

The dominance of legacy automakers is no longer a given

For decades, Toyota’s position at the top of Singapore’s car market looked almost untouchable.

The Japanese automaker built its dominance on a reputation for reliability, fuel efficiency and strong resale value, making it the default choice for generations of motorists. Even as new competitors entered the market, Toyota largely held onto its crown.

That changed when China’s BYD entered the race.

The electric vehicle (EV) maker overtook Toyota in 2025 to become Singapore’s best-selling car brand, reflecting a broader shift in consumer demand towards EVs and the growing competitiveness of Chinese automakers.

The intensifying competition is now being felt beyond the showroom floor. On Jul 30, Borneo Motors, the exclusive distributor of Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Singapore, retrenched an undisclosed number of employees as part of a restructuring exercise.

Its parent company, global automotive distributor Inchcape, said it had reviewed its Singapore operations to ensure the business remained “well-positioned to deliver for customers and brand partners,” adding that the changes were intended to streamline operations and align the organisation with future priorities.

The company did not say how many employees were affected or whether the restructuring was linked to increasing competition in the local market.

Remaining staff still have questions

Borneo Motors is unionised under the Singapore Manual and Mercantile Workers’ Union (SMMWU).

According to SMMWU secretary-general Andy Lim, the company informed the union ahead of the restructuring, with affected employees believed to have received the news on Jul 30—also their final day at work.

The union also worked with Borneo Motors to ensure the severance package was fair and complied with the existing collective agreement.

Under that agreement, the company must give the union one month’s notice before carrying out layoffs. Employees who are retrenched are entitled to two months’ notice, or payment in lieu, as well as a severance package equivalent to one month’s basic salary for every year of service, capped at 25 years.

Sales staff, meanwhile, receive S$4,000 for each completed year of service, also capped at 25 years.

After notifying the affected employees on Jul 30, Borneo Motors reportedly held a town hall later that afternoon to confirm that a restructuring had taken place.

However, employees who remained at the company told The Business Times that management had yet to clarify how the changes would affect the rest of the workforce. They were still waiting to find out whether reporting lines would change or if they would be expected to take on additional responsibilities.

For now, they believe their jobs are safe, largely because they were invited to attend the town hall. One employee also remarked that he expected to find out who had been retrenched “based on which company e-mail addresses bounce” over the coming weeks.

A spokesperson for the Taskforce for Responsible Retrenchment and Employment Facilitation said it is working with both Borneo Motors and SMMWU to support affected employees. The company has also committed to providing a retrenchment package that aligns with the Tripartite Advisory on Managing Excess Manpower and Responsible Retrenchment.

The retrenchment also follows a series of leadership changes at Inchcape Singapore in recent months.

Managing director Ng Khee Siong left the company on Jul 21, after the earlier departures of its finance and marketing directors.

While Inchcape has not linked the executive exits to the restructuring, the changes come as the automotive distributor navigates an increasingly competitive market. Inchcape Singapore is one of the country’s largest multi-brand automotive franchise groups, alongside Cycle & Carriage and Wearnes Automotive.

A market transformed

Toyota is also facing what is arguably its biggest competitive challenge in Singapore in decades, with Chinese carmakers rapidly gaining market share both here and across the region.

Reliability and resale value were long the deciding factors for local buyers, in a market long dominated by internal combustion engine vehicles.

But the rise of EVs has rewritten the rules.

Chinese manufacturers such as BYD entered the market with competitively priced electric models and increasingly sophisticated technology. As Singapore accelerates its push towards cleaner transport, more buyers have begun switching to EVs.

The shift is already evident in the numbers. In the first half of 2026, one in four new cars registered in Singapore was a BYD, cementing the Chinese automaker’s position as the country’s dominant EV brand.

The company’s ambitions also extend well beyond Singapore. In Jun, BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu said the automaker aims to overtake Toyota as the world’s largest carmaker, underscoring how Chinese brands are no longer content with leading the EV market alone but are increasingly challenging established global automotive giants.

Competition is only intensifying, and the dominance of legacy automakers like Toyota is no longer a given.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

Featured Image Credit: Toyota Singapore via Facebook

An old laptop that had served for more than six years suddenly shut down mid-game and refused to power on again. Its owner, the LEGO builder known as Koenkun Bricks, recovered the hard drives without trouble and found them intact. Rather than scrap the machine, he decided the screen still had a future as a second monitor for his desk. The plan was simple on paper: free the LCD panel, give it a proper controller so it could accept a standard HDMI signal, and enclose everything in LEGO so the whole unit could tilt, rise, and spin as needed.

Opening the laptop proved to be a much bigger hassle than expected. There were no good service manuals available for that model, and Koenkun had never taken electronics apart before, so he was in unfamiliar ground. That being stated, he proceeded with caution, slowly detaching the display from the hinges, cables, and metal frame until it sat free on the workbench. Of course, a controller board was required to translate the laptop’s internal display signal into a format that a standard computer could understand. Now, after looking all over for a board that exactly matched the panel’s model number but running into long shipping delays, the builder ended up adding a universal one to his shopping basket, which costs roughly €20 or $20. When he had everything connected in and turned on, the screen lit up right immediately.

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Moving white dots began to drift over the display, which the builder eventually traced back to the universal board itself. Ideally, a model-specific controller would have resolved those issues, but even the general unit demonstrated that the panel was alive and functional. The next step was to figure out how to mount that panel inside a LEGO frame, which was another issue waiting to be solved. After attempting to match the factory screw holes to LEGO bars and discovering the holes were too small, the builder took a new look at the problem. The existing plastic bezels around the panel would suffice if he could discover a way to press a LEGO structure against them from the outside. He tried a few basic frames, but they were all a catastrophe because one was too wide, another had gaps along the borders, and a third felt too shaky. L-shaped panel components ultimately provided him with the appropriate balance of strength and a clean, gap-free edge, though he had to go back through some older versions and disassemble the entire thing to get enough of them.

Now, each of the four sides of the laptop bezel measured slightly differently in thickness. So, to compensate, he piled tile after tile until everything was in order, and then he had some of those triangular tiles with the corners cut out nestle up into the L-panels so everything would sit flush. Beams and additional panels formed a top border, leaving spaces for the circuit boards that protruded, and the bottom edge gained some depth so those boards and the controller could sit without stressing them. Green brackets were used to hold specific pieces of metal in place, and he even incorporated a few Technic beams into the LEGO structure where the future stand would be attached.

With the basic shell securely fastened, the controller board finally had a place to call home. The frame had to be disassembled once more, so in went the bricks with studs on their sides, which will hold metal standoffs that keep the board firmly in place. Technic bushings in bright yellow do the job of locking everything into place, and a simple little cover on top keeps dust out. The smaller button board, however, told a different story. He was confident it would fit onto LEGO bars, but no such luck. Some smart usage of antenna pieces kept it solid in the end, but they needed to be reinforced so they didn’t flex and shift when you pressed the buttons. Meanwhile, a little portion of the bottom bezel was replaced with a flat screen to allow for the HDMI and power cables to depart without being tangled.

Even though the display was complete, he still need a stand that could rotate, adjust height, and remain steady throughout normal operation. A V-shaped base was roughly the start, with some LEGO tires put along the bottom borders to keep everything from sliding all over the desk. However, finding a heavy-duty turntable in the parts bin proved impossible, so he devised an other solution. In the center of it all, a large central gear serves as the mechanism’s true anchor. Then there are the smaller gears, which are mounted on friction pins all around to assist distribute the weight and keep things smooth and easy to spin. He tried an early version that only relied on a single axle, and it felt a little shaky, but with the multi-gear arrangement, everything worked out fine.

If you’ve been considering Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, or any of Adobe’s other professional creative applications, and haven’t signed up before, you can save 50% on the Creative Cloud Pro plan for your first year.

This cuts the monthly cost from $69.99 to $34.99 (or from $91.99 to $45.99 in Canada) on an annual plan billed monthly. And the subscription comes with more than 20 industry-leading creative apps, alongside 4,000 monthly generative AI credits for premium features such as Text to Video.

Subscribers also gain unlimited access to standard AI tools like Generative Fill, Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock assets, tutorials, collaboration tools through Frame.io, and integrated AI models from Adobe, Google, OpenAI, and others. The promotion for new subscribers ends August 10.

Why this is a great deal

I personally wouldn’t use anything else and there’s a good reason why Adobe’s apps always come out top in our round ups of the best photo editors, best video editing software and best PDF editors.

The Pro subscription includes more than 20 applications, from industry staples like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat Pro to specialist tools such as After Effects, Audition, Lightroom, and InDesign, all designed to work seamlessly together.

Beyond the apps themselves, Creative Cloud Pro includes Adobe Firefly, 4,000 monthly generative AI credits for premium features such as Text to Video, unlimited access to standard AI tools like Generative Fill, plus Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock assets, tutorials, and collaboration features through Frame.io.

At 50% off, this is one of Adobe’s best ever offers for new subscribers in the US and Canada.

As co-founder Grace Li tells it, her company started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, with a handful of college friends trying to make their AI game engine work. The models could make functional games, but none of the games were fun — which raised the interesting question, how can you tell if a game will be fun?

There was no substitute for human judgment, they decided, and soon they were brainstorming ways to get honest human feedback at scale. The result became Design Arena, an AI tool now used by 5.3 million people around the world. As it turned out, there were lots of AI companies looking for scalable user feedback — and many of them were willing to pay for it.

“It was the missing bottleneck for a lot of these models to make improvements in the design space,” Li says. “About a week later, we closed our first major deal with a frontier lab, and the rest is kind of history.”

On Monday, the company behind Design Arena — dubbed Intelligence — announced a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction (Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal), A*, Valkyrie, and others.

For non-enterprise users, using Design Arena is a lot like using a sophisticated model router. There’s a ChatGPT-style window for prompts, with separate dropdowns for websites, images, and a dozen other visual formats. Once you put in the request, format, and style, you’ll be presented with a series of “A vs. B” choices until you’ve ranked the handful of outputs from best to worst.

It’s a useful service, but the real value of the platform comes from the enterprise side, where participating models can treat it as a source of endless instant feedback for their media-generating models. The users tend to be indifferent to which models they’re ranking — as Li puts it, they just want the best output they can get — so their rankings can give critical input to what users really want.

For frontier labs, that’s a service worth paying for, Li says, adding the site is currently generating $60 million in ARR, solidifying its position as a key source of human-led evaluation data for the AI industry.

Crucially, users have to log in to get their output, so Intelligence can also track how those tastes change across different continents and over time. (Li notes that web dashboards in Asia tend to have a more maximalist design style.) These measures are an important complement to automated benchmarks, which can operate at a greater scale but are often subject to being gamed or otherwise manipulated, as the Hugging Face breach demonstrated in dramatic fashion last week.

That’s not to say that crowdsourced human feedback will be an automatic winning market. Less than a year after launching, Yupp shuttered its doors earlier this year after raising $33 million from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon. It too nabbed some frontier models as customers and had, it said, over 1.3 million users, but still couldn’t build a sustainable long-term business.

Even so, other startups based on human evaluation seem to be thriving. LM Arena, which takes a similar approach to text-based responses, raised $150 million in a Series A in January, just four months after formally launching its paid product.

Telegram was removed from the App Store briefly Monday after CSAM was posted by a user. The app was restored after the content was removed.

Telegram is known widely as a secure alternative to Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage. Its cross-platform availability and options for end-to-end encryption have made it attractive to privacy and security-conscious users.

Reports began showing up across social media of Telegram disappearing from the Apple App Store around 9:30 p.m. EST on Monday night. Users searching the App Store or opening a direct link to the app showed that it was no longer available.

Apple shared a statement with AppleInsider regarding the removal:

We briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after our review found content that violates our strict guidelines prohibiting child sexual abuse material. The app was subsequently restored after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user who posted it.

The app was likely pulled suddenly to ensure it couldn’t be downloaded by new users while the content was being removed. Apple has a history of taking fast action blocking app downloads when CSAM is discovered on the platform with only one notable exception.

When users were actively generating sexualized images of minors on the social media app X, it remained active throughout. It isn’t clear why swift action was taken with Telegram versus X.

Users that had Telegram already installed were not affected by the app’s removal. Telegram was restored to the App Store at around 10:10 p.m EST.

Updated August 4, 1:50 a.m EST: added Apple’s statement on why Telegram was removed.

from the everything-is-about-to-get-much-dumber dept

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that policy all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, and consumer rights abuses. But big companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and accountability, eroding quarterly revenues.

So instead we get protectionism. Or in the case of the Trump administration, protectionism run by a bunch of corrupt, incompetent clowns who gutted most of our federal regulators, then saddled them with an elaborate new policy ask that’s impossible to implement, even if the admin were competent.

Which it isn’t.

If you want a good idea of what Trump protectionism looks like in practice, I recommend this Verge piece about the Trump effort to ban Chinese drones. Spoiler: it’s not going well, and it’s trivial to trick the administration and bypass the ban without doing much, resulting in U.S. consumers losing access to lower-cost popular goods (DJI was the most popular and successful drone maker by far) under the pretense this is helping Americans and rekindling U.S. domestic electronics manufacturing.

Having unsuccessfully “blocked” Chinese drones (read: caused a bunch of annoying and pointless chaos), the Trump administration is dramatically expanding its protectionist campaign to include everything from cheap Chinese power converters (necessary for the world’s migration away from fossil fuels), to low-cost Chinese vacuum robots:

“While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.”

Great stuff. Surely this will be competently enforced by… (checks notes)… Brendan fucking Carr.

Like his bumbling and unpopular boss, Brendan Carr has always made a gigantic stink about China. If you recall, he was one of the biggest proponents of a “ban on TikTok,” which he claimed was necessary to protect national security and stop propaganda. The solution to that problem was to steal the company and offload it to Trump’s billionaire friends so they could spread propaganda and abuse privacy.

The stupidity, xenophobia, and corruption on display with the Trump “TikTok ban” is going to be adapted for AI, and the next six to twelve months of U.S. tech policy will be dumber and more chaotic than ever. Especially as the biggest U.S. AI companies — swimming in debt, facing a data center glut bubble, and a long way from profitability — look to the government to protect them from all manner of competition (foreign, on device, open source, whatever).

This may come as a surprise to you, but Trump incorporated doesn’t actually care about protecting U.S. consumers from Roomba privacy abuses, propaganda, or national security abuses. If they did, they wouldn’t be supporting Trumpism. If they did, they’d regulate data brokers and pass a modern internet privacy law that applied to every company and executive doing business in the U.S.

What they care about is stuff like trying to shovel more drone business to the president’s sons, or protecting Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk from having to compete with cheaper overseas AI models.

Being mindlessly and personally transactional, the Trump administration is also keen to erect additional troll and tribute systems if companies want to continue doing business in the U.S. The money will go to his business interests and allies, but in a bid to appeal to nationalists, it’s going to all be layered under the pretense that this is all going to magically shift robotic manufacturing back to the U.S:

“But again, the government isn’t asking these companies any questions about security — not one — to get the waiver that lets them through. The FCC only wants to know where they’re designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead.”

But they’re not going to be competent enough to make any of this happen, even if shifting the entirety of low-cost electronics manufacturing back to the U.S. was a thing you could actually accomplish. A key part of the problem is that, as we saw from Trump’s dream of having U.S.-made smartphones, the folks in charge of this effort have a child-like understanding of how everything works. And everybody else — like massive swaths of the business community, academia, and the press — are too feckless to stand up to the corrupt stupidity in any meaningful way.

The Trump administration has also gone out of its way to ensure our federal regulators no longer have the resources or legal autonomy to function. Then they’re saddling them with this massive new layer of protectionism they’d be incapable of enforcing even if they wanted to. They’re not even bright enough to understand that even base protectionism is out of their reach.

This is just racist, crony capitalism by corrupt and incompetent zealots, and it’s going to cause irreparable harm to consumer prices, product quality, product availability, hobbies, science, the shift to renewables, and everything else over the next two to three years. All propped up by a lazy press, self-serving domestic monopolists, and a whole lot of bullshit about privacy and national security by the kind of people who are a direct and obvious threat to both.

Filed Under: ai, china, competition, crony capitalism, drones, incompetent, protectionism, robots, vacuums