Anthony Ha: A federal jury in California ruled Friday that Apple must pay medical device maker Masimo $634 million for infringing a patent on blood oxygen-monitoring technology.Reuters reports the jury found that the Apple Watch’s workout mode and heart rate notification features violated Masimo’s patent. Eric Slivka: “Over the past six years (Masimo has) sued […]

Apple Newsroom, last week:

Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID acceptance will roll out first in beta at TSA checkpoints at more than 250 airports in the U.S. for in-person identity verification during domestic travel, with additional Digital ID acceptance use cases to come in the future.

Digital ID gives more people a way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet even if they do not have a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID. Digital ID is not a replacement for a physical passport, and cannot be used for international travel and border crossing in lieu of a U.S. passport.

I set this up over the weekend and it was about as easy and seamless as you could hope. More information from Apple here, and an overview of the feature, as implemented by Apple and Google (for Android) from The New York Times here (gift link).

Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:

Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately, no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.

There’s a nearly identical support document for the native Messenger app for Windows too. They’re not even replacing them with web-app wrappers, like they just did with the Windows WhatsApp client. Just telling users to use the website.

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Jay Yagnik, VP of AI innovation and research, on Google’s The Keyword blog:

Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is designed from the ground up around core security and privacy principles:

• One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs on one seamless Google stack powered by our own custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). World-class privacy and security is integrated into this architecture with Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE). This design enables Google AI features to use our most capable and intelligent Gemini models in the cloud, with our high standards for privacy and the same in-house computing infrastructure you already rely on for Gmail and Search.
• No access: Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to the hardware-secured sealed cloud environment, allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space. This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.

Sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which raises the question of whether this Google project is related to the Gurman scoop that Apple and Google are on the cusp of a deal for a white-label version of Google Gemini to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers to power the next-generation versions of Siri and Apple Intelligence.

I strongly suspect this is something Google has been working on for a while. Apple, I think it’s fair to say, places a higher priority on privacy than does Google, but Google does value privacy. But perhaps the deal with Apple accelerated the project within Google.