Apple and Google remove Fortnite from their app stores after Epic challenges their in-app purchase rules
Significant changes planned for Australian copyright law
Intel details 11th-gen Tiger Lake CPUs & all new “Xe” GPU architecture
Creators of the pixel, Russell Kirsch and the compiler, Frances Allen passed away this week
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The cold war between developers and Apple has kicked up a notch with Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, adding the ability to pay Epic directly for in-game purchases within the game on iOS devices. This obviously violates the App Store rules, so Apple kicked Fortnite off the App Store. Then Epic sued Apple, accusing them of "violating US antitrust law and claims the company wields anti-competitive monopoly power over the distribution of iOS apps". Epic's actions were clearly designed to provoke Apple into facing the issue head on, as the lawsuit was filed immediately and Epic even had a cheesy piss-take of the 1984 Mac ad lined up. Google wasn't left out of this party either, with the same series of events taking place on the Play Store, plus a lawsuit.
Australia is getting some copyright reform! From the article, "proposed copyright reforms are focused on five main measures: Introducing a limited liability scheme for use of orphan works; a new fair dealing exception for non-commercial quotation; amendments to library and archives exceptions; amendments to education exceptions; and streamlining the government's statutory licensing scheme". The main change is the orphan works stuff - if you can't find out who owns the copyright to material after reasonable efforts to do so, you can use it without the spectre of getting your arse sued into oblivion. Unfortunately, Australia won't be getting any "fair use" exemptions like other countries, just "fair dealings" where the copyright owner still has to be involved but they gotta not be dicks about using their stuff.
Overnight Intel held an online Architecture Day to explain the technical details of some upcoming products. We learned more about Tiger Lake CPUs, which are Intel's first using a 10nm fabrication process. These 11th-gen CPUs will be out early September and filter down to shipping laptops in time for Christmas. Intel also revealed more information about Xe, it's range of discrete and integrated GPUs. The mobile variant built-in to Tiger Lake CPUs apparently performs 35% faster in gaming benchmarks than the GPUs built in to AMD's Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs. Dedicated Xe-based graphics cards designed to compete with Nvidia's Geforce and AMD Radeon cards won't be out until 2021. Unfortunately for Intel, AMD has Zen 3 CPUs due by the end of 2020 and Nvidia's Ampere GPUs are set to be announced in a few weeks.
Two technology pioneers died this week. Frances Allen passed on Wednesday, who back in the 60s at IBM, was one of the key inventors of the software compiler for which she won the Turing Award for in 2006. Without her work the job of developing software would be way more complicated. On Tuesday we lost Russell Kirsch, who worked at the US National Bureau of Standards and created the first digital image scanner, inventing "pixels" along the way in the 1950s. The scanned photograph of his son is a milestone, marking the creation of the first digitised photo. Almost all digital imagery can be traced back to Kirsch's work. It's sad seeing these computing legends leave us as time does its thing. It makes the oral histories groups like the Computer History Museum conduct even more vital.
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