Apple updated its low-end MacBook Pro with the Apple M5 back in October of last year , but the higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch Pros stuck with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. This morning Apple circled back around and updated the rest of the lineup , adding the M5 Pro and M5 Max to the higher-end machines and bumping the base storage—the M5 Pro now comes with 1TB of storage by default, while M5 Max chips come with 2TB of storage by default. The internal storage is said to be "up to 2x faster" than the previous-generation Pros. Apple is also bumping the base storage for the M5 MacBook Pro from 512GB to 1TB.

Unlike Apple's other announcements this week, though, these upgrades also come with increases to their starting prices; the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro now starts at $2,199 instead of $1,999, and the 16-inch model with an M5 Pro starts at $2,699 instead of $2,499. The M5 MacBook Pro now starts at $1,699, up from $1,599. Granted, you're getting double the storage you used to get in those old base models, but you no longer have the option to pay less if you don't need 1TB of space.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max look like fairly major updates from the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Both use an 18-core CPU with six higher-performing cores and 12 lower-performing cores, but Apple is changing how it talks about each kind of core. The high-performance cores are now called "super cores," a change that Apple says will retroactively apply to the high-performance cores in the basic Apple M5; M5 has four of them, and M5 Pro and M5 Max have six of them.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio—Protestors stood in the snow outside the offices of Ohio’s utility regulator in January to say they were fed up with rising electricity rates.

Even a few years ago, the scene would have been hard to imagine, considering the complexity of utility costs and the obscurity of state regulatory agencies. But rate hikes in Ohio and across the country have provoked frustrated consumers to demand answers.

“It’s just getting harder and harder now to live,” said Steve Van Kuiken, a United Church of Christ pastor in Columbus who is part of a community group opposing rate increases. “The working class is really getting squeezed, and everything’s going up.”

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The Moon has received a lot of attention in recent months, particularly the surface of Earth's cold and dusty companion.

This has largely been driven by a decision from SpaceX founder Elon Musk to pivot, at least in the near term, from Mars to lunar surface activities and the potential for using material there to build large satellites. But there has been a notable shift from NASA, too, which has started talking a lot more about building up elements of a base on the surface rather than an orbiting space station known as the Gateway.

In short, the world's most successful space company and the largest space agency have both increased their lunar ambitions, suggesting a greater frequency of missions to the Moon in the coming years.

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The medical journal The Lancet did not pull any punches in a scathing editorial on Robert F. Kennedy Jr , calling the anti-vaccine activist's first year as US Health Secretary "a failure by most measures, especially his own."

The Lancet is one of the world's oldest academic medical journals still in publication and one of the most cited sources of peer-reviewed medical research. But it is also well-known for publishing an infamous study by prominent anti-vaccine activist and disgraced ex-physician Andrew Wakefield, which falsely claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism. The Lancet retracted the study more than a decade later .

Kennedy is among the prominent anti-vaccine activists who continue to embrace the thoroughly debunked claim, along with other dangerous conspiracy theories. The Lancet assailed Kennedy for spreading misinformation as the country's top health official and politicizing health policy at the expense of vulnerable Americans, including children.

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Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

The finding, from a recently published research paper , is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

I know what you posted last year

The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.

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It's been nearly 20 years since Google revealed Android, which the company described as the first "truly open" mobile operating system, setting Google-powered phones apart from the iPhone's aggressively managed experience. Over time, though, Android has become more aligned with Apple's approach. For the moment, users still have the final say in what software runs on their increasingly locked-down smartphones. Later this year, though, Google plans to seriously curtail that freedom in the name of security.

In the coming weeks, Google will officially debut Android developer verification , which will require app makers outside the Play Store to register with their real names and pay a fee to Google. Failure to do so will block their apps from installation (sometimes called sideloading) on virtually all Android devices. Google says this is a necessary evolution of the platform's security model, but upending the status quo could push developers away from Android and risk the privacy of those that remain.

This might make your phone a little safer, sure, but it won't stop people from getting scammed. At the same time, it could rob the Android ecosystem of what made it special in the first place.

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Soon after South Korean police posted a press release boasting about seizing $5.6 million worth of cryptocurrency from 124 wealthy tax evaders, cops realized that they had mistakenly posted images that made it possible for a thief to quickly steal most of the seized assets.

Eventually, the press release was removed, but not before it was grabbed by local media outlets and tech publications covering the theft.

Bleeping Computer shared a screenshot of the retracted images, which showed a handwritten note next to a Ledger device that's used as a so-called "cold wallet" to store crypto out of reach of online threats. Clearly legible in the photo, the note contained a complete mnemonic recovery phrase that anyone can use as a master key to move assets off the cold wallet to a new wallet without any additional PIN or permissions required.

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Charter Communications, operator of the Spectrum cable brand, has obtained Federal Communications Commission permission to buy Cox and surpass Comcast as the country's largest home Internet service provider.

Charter has 29.7 million residential and business Internet customers compared to Comcast's 31.26 million . Buying Cox will give Charter another 5.9 million Internet customers . The FCC approved the deal on Friday, but the companies still need Justice Department approval and sign-offs from states including California and New York.

Opponents of Charter's $34.5 billion acquisition told the FCC that eliminating Cox as an independent entity will make it easier for Charter and Comcast to raise prices. But the FCC dismissed those concerns on the grounds that Charter and Cox don't compete directly against each other in the vast majority of their territories.

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PALO, Iowa—There are two restaurants in Palo, not counting the chicken wings and pizza sold at the only gas station in town.

All three establishments, including the gas station, stand on the same half-mile stretch of First Street, an artery that divides the marshy floodplain of the Cedar River to the east from hundreds of acres of cornfields on the west.

During historic flooding in 2008, the Cedar River surged 10 feet above its previous record, cresting at 31 feet and wiping out homes and businesses well outside the floodplain.

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