India's consumers are starting to pay for apps, not just download them

Good news!

"For years, India was the world’s largest app download market but one of its toughest places to make money. That is beginning to change as Indian consumers spend more on AI, entertainment, and other premium apps.

India’s mobile app market generated a record $345 million in consumer spending during the second quarter of this year, up 35% from a year earlier, according to a new report by Sensor Tower. The app-market intelligence firm said the gains were increasingly driven by generative AI, streaming, and productivity apps rather than gaming, as Indian consumers became more willing to pay for digital subscriptions.

The record quarter builds on a broader trend of rising app monetization. India’s revenue per download has more than doubled over the past three and a half years, while quarterly app downloads have remained at around 6.3 billion since 2023. ...

attributed the change to the wider adoption of digital payments, including India’s Unified Payments Interface (a system that lets people pay directly from their bank accounts) and digital wallets, which have reduced friction for in-app purchases, alongside growing acceptance of app-based subscriptions and premium digital services. ...

India still trails more mature app markets by a wide margin. Revenue per download stands at about $4.60 in the U.S., $3.90 in South Korea, and $6.10 in Japan, compared with a small fraction of that in India. ..."

India is starting to pay for apps, not just download them | TechCrunch

India Mobile App Market in Q2 2026: IAP Hit a New High of $345 Million (Up 35%); Story TV Emerged as India’s No.1 Short Drama App, While Meesho Led Shopping App Downloads "Market Overview: India’s Mobile App Market Reached Record Revenue, Fueled by Strong Non-Gaming Growth"

Comment on Astrill VPN

Update of 4/28/2026: Yesterday, I was finally able to successfully install and run Proton VPN on my Linux laptop. Proton VPN is so much better than Astrill VPN. Most of the trouble I had with Astrill VPN have disappeared since then.

I have been using Astrill VPN for Linux here in China since end of February. It is a lousy software! So many of my usual news and other websites I can not access from behind the Great Firewall of China despite Astrill VPN!

E.g. I can not do any Google/Bing search.

I have to force kill it almost every day to restart it etc., etc.

I see this popping up several times a day! Totally annoying!

I suspect something was wrong with the Astrill VPN for Linux version that was installed on my laptop by an IT staff.

While I used Astrill VPN for over 6 weeks or so, I never saw any update for this software although I check about once a week the Software Gnome app for new updates.

Volkswagen geht volles Risiko: Gelingt der riskanteste Software-Deal der Auto-Industrie mit Rivian?

Empfehlenswert!

German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email

When it comes to software Germany is not very often mentioned in the news!

What about e.g. the operating systems on state computers?

"ZDNET's key takeaways

• Schleswig-Holstein has moved from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to Open-Xchange and Thunderbird for e-mail.
• Other EU entities have opted for open-source alternatives.
• This switch isn't just a technical change; it's a political move.

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has dumped its government email and calendar systems for open-source software. The six-month migration has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird. The transfer covered more than 40,000 mailboxes and over 100 million messages and calendar entries. ..."

German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email | ZDNET "Digital sovereignty isn't a phrase you often hear in the US, but it's a big deal in Europe. Here's why."

Viral call-recording app Neon goes dark after exposing users' phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts

What was that all about? Who records phone calls with/without permission?

"A viral app called Neon, which offers to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell that data to AI companies, has rapidly risen to the ranks of the top-five free iPhone apps since its launch last week.

The app already has thousands of users and was downloaded 75,000 times yesterday alone, according to app intelligence provider Appfigures. Neon pitches itself as a way for users to make money by providing call recordings that help train, improve, and test AI models. ..."

"Viral call-recording app Neon goes dark after exposing users' phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts: Call recording app Neon was one of the top-ranked iPhone apps, but was pulled offline after a security bug allowed any logged-in user to access the call recordings and transcripts of any other user."

Techcrunch newsletter

Viral call-recording app Neon goes dark after exposing users' phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts | TechCrunch

Windows killed the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after 40 years

Headline of the day!

"... Yes, the iconic Windows error screen is getting a makeover nearly 40 years after its debut in the first version of Windows. Now the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will become the Black Screen of Death (BSOD). ..."

Windows killed the Blue Screen of Death | TechCrunch

The black screen of death

olmOCR: an open-source tool to extract clean plain text from PDFs!

I guess, I will give this a try!

A new app called Explode, which focuses on disappearing messages on iMessage

A digital Houdini?  Puff, and It's Gone! Does it make noise? Can you change the sound of the explosion? 😊

"Nikita Bier, creator of popular apps like the anonymous polling app tbh (acquired by Facebook) and the anonymous compliments app Gas (acquired by Discord), has created a new app called Explode, which focuses on disappearing messages on iMessage.

Explode works as a mini app for Apple’s Messages app. It helps you send disappearing messages to other folks. Users can see the text or images once, and then it… explodes.  ..."

Creator of Gas and tbh makes an app for disappearing photos via iMessage | TechCrunch

How Barcelona became an unlikely hub for spyware startups

One more thing for Barcelona to be famous for?

"... Those are some of the reasons why in the last couple of years, Barcelona has become an unlikely hub for spyware companies, according to multiple people who work in the offensive cybersecurity industry ...

Having Barcelona become a crucial regional outpost for offensive cybersecurity companies puts the spyware problem squarely on the doorstep of Europe, which has a fractious relationship with surveillance tech, due to scandals in Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, and Poland — all involving Israeli spyware makers. ...

But why found a spyware startup in Barcelona, which just years earlier was at the center of a wide-reaching political scandal where Spanish government officials used spyware to target local politicians who pushed for independence? ...

Palm Beach Networks, and that it develops everything from the zero-day exploits used for compromising devices to the spyware implant itself ...

Barcelona is home to several other exploit and spyware makers that too are making the most of the city’s sunny, temperate weather, fresh seafood, and vibrant expat community.

Among them are Paradigm Shift, which was founded by former employees of Variston in the aftermath of the company’s collapse last year; and Epsilon, which is led by Jeremy Fetiveau, an industry veteran who used to work for a division within U.S. defense giant L3Harris that was created after the company acquired the Australian startup Azimuth.” ...

The city is said to be also home to an unnamed group of Israeli researchers who moved to Barcelona from Singapore to work on developing zero-day exploits. ..."

How Barcelona became an unlikely hub for spyware startups | TechCrunch

What goes on in the shadows of La Sagrada Familia?

A million people play this video wargame. So does the Pentagon and other militaries around the world

If only war was only a game!

"Warfare is changing at a pace unseen in almost a century, as fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East shows. For military commanders, tackling that upheaval demands fast and constant adaptation. Increasingly, that entails playing games. Militaries worldwide run battle scenarios using one family-run British company’s software, a program called Command: Professional Edition. It didn’t originate with a defense contractor or institute, as most wargames do. It is a simulation program built and marketed by gamers with almost no military background—and rooted in Tom Clancy novels. Users of all stripes have made it a surprise hit. ..."

The Wall Street Journal What's news

Command Professional Edition (company website) "Command: Professional Edition is the next generation in cross-domain modern wargaming. It enables you to simulate every military engagement from post World War II to the present day and beyond. The scale is primarily tactical/operational, although strategic scale operations are also possible."

Source

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

Food for thought!

"Several European countries are betting on open-source software for their technology. In the United States, eh, not so much. In the latest news from across the Atlantic, Switzerland has taken a major step forward with its "Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Governmental Tasks" (EMBAG). This groundbreaking legislation mandates using open-source software (OSS) in the public sector. ..."

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source | ZDNET The United States remains reluctant to work with open source, but European countries are bolder.

Multithreading software tweak doubles computer processing speed, halves energy use

Good news, but not the latest news! This could be a breakthrough!

Unfortunately, this work, published in October 2023, has not yet been cited very often, which is not a good sign or is this work overlooked? (Google Scholar: 0, Semantic Scholar: 1 citation).

I believe, multithreading is an old concept and has been widely applied since about the late 1990s.

"...  In a new study, researchers ... demonstrate a method where existing diverse components operate simultaneously to greatly improve processing speed and reduce energy consumption. ...

The researchers’ framework, called simultaneous and heterogeneous multithreading (SHMT), moves away from traditional programming models that can only delegate a region of code exclusively to one kind of processor, leaving other resources idling and not contributing to the current function.

Instead, SHMT exploits the ... heterogeneity – of multiple components, breaking the computational function up to share it among them. In other words, it’s a type of parallel processing. ...

A set of virtual operations (VOPs) allows a CPU program to ‘offload’ a function to a virtual hardware device. During program execution, a runtime system drives SHMT’s virtual hardware, gauging the hardware resource’s ability to make scheduling decisions.

SHMT uses a quality-aware work-stealing (QAWS) scheduling policy that doesn't hog resources, but helps maintain quality control and workload balance. The runtime system divides VOPs into one or more high-level operations (HLOPs) to simultaneously use multiple hardware resources.

Then, SHMT’s runtime system allocates these HLOPs to the task queues of the target hardware. Because HLOPs are hardware-independent, the runtime system can adjust the task assignment as required. ...

They tested the SHMT concept using benchmark applications, and found that the framework with the best-performing QAWS policy knocked it out of the park, with a 1.95X boost to speed and a remarkable 51% cut in energy consumption compared to the baseline method. ...
The researchers say the implications for SHMT are huge. Yes, software apps on your existing phones, tablets, desktops and laptops could use this new software library to achieve some pretty wild performance gains. But it could also reduce the need for expensive, high-performance components, leading to cheaper and more efficient devices. ..."

From the abstract:

"The landscape of modern computers is undoubtedly heterogeneous, as all computing platforms integrate multiple types of processing units and hardware accelerators. However, the entrenched programming models focus on using only the most efficient processing units for each code region, underutilizing the processing power within heterogeneous computers.

This paper simultaneous and heterogenous multithreading (SHMT), a programming and execution model that enables opportunities for “real” parallel processing using heterogeneous processing units. In contrast to conventional models, SHMT can utilize heterogeneous types of processing units concurrently for the same code region. Furthermore, SHMT presents an abstraction and a runtime system to facilitate parallel execution. More importantly, SHMT needs to additionally address the heterogeneity in data precision that various processing units support to ensure the quality of the result.

This paper implements and evaluates SHMT on an embedded system platform with a GPU and an Edge TPU. SHMT achieves up to 1.95 × speedup and  51.0% energy reduction compared to GPU baseline."

Software tweak doubles computer processing speed, halves energy use Existing processors in PCs, smartphones and other devices can be supercharged for enormous power and efficiency gains using a new parallel processing software framework designed to eliminate bottlenecks and use multiple chips at once.

Method identified to double computer processing speeds (original news release dated 2/24/2024)

Simultaneous and Heterogenous Multithreading (open access)

Mastering Concurrent Algorithms with TLA+: A webinar offered by the Linux Foundation

Just a few moments ago, I blogged here about TLA+, then I discovered this is now being offered! What a coincidence!

Concurrency is one of those very tricky subjects in software development.

Mastering Concurrent Algorithms with TLA+ Join a Complimentary Live Webinar from The TLA+ Foundation and The Linux Foundation

TLA+ Helps Programmers Squash Bugs Before Coding with a formal specification language

Recommendable!

"Design is an essential part of the development process for many software engineers. Like an architect sketching blueprints, a programmer devises algorithms to support their code and creates models to envision how the different elements of their systems will work together. But what if programmers could test those algorithms and models to uncover design flaws before they could turn into bugs in the written code?
That’s the goal with TLA+, an open-source, high-level language for modeling software programs and hardware systems. Its underlying logic is based on the temporal logic of actions (TLA), a mathematical way to reason about the correctness of concurrent algorithms. Both TLA and TLA+ were developed by Leslie Lamport, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research who is best known for inventing LaTeX, a document-preparation system for scientific papers. Lamport also won the 2013 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his work on clarifying the behavior of distributed systems. ...

This makes TLA+ valuable for verifying that a program’s design or supporting algorithm is valid, a feature made possible by the TLA+ model checker. After creating specifications and writing models on TLA+, engineers can run everything through the model checker to find and fix design errors before they are implemented into code.

The language was first used in the industry to model [computer] hardware, particularly at Intel. “It was initially appealing to hardware engineers because [they] were used to the idea of describing things precisely above the circuit level,” says Lamport. ...
Some of today’s tech giants have integrated TLA+ into their development processes. Amazon, for instance, has used TLA+ to test its cloud-computing services, as well as search for hard-to-find yet fundamental algorithm flaws in its distributed systems and optimize performance without sacrificing correctness. Microsoft has applied a similar approach to its Azure cloud-computing platform. Engineers at Oracle have, with the help of TLA+, ensured that their distributed-systems designs are correct."

TLA+ Helps Programmers Squash Bugs Before Coding - IEEE Spectrum The language from LaTeX’s inventor is already used by Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle

Google's AlphaDev discovers sorting algorithms that can revolutionize computing foundations

Good news! Exciting! Sorting algorithms may sound mundane, but they are ubiquitous "workhorses" and very important millions of times a day!

Very nice! Google makes this new algorithm available to the public for free!

"Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepMind has achieved a remarkable feat in computer science through its latest AI system, AlphaDev. This specialized version of AlphaZero has made a significant breakthrough by uncovering faster sorting and hashing algorithms, which are essential processes utilized trillions of times daily by developers worldwide for data sorting, storage and retrieval.

In a paper published today in the science journal Nature, DeepMind asserts that AlphaDev’s newly discovered algorithm achieves a 70% increase in efficiency for sorting short sequences of elements and approximately 1.7% for sequences surpassing 250,000 elements, as compared to the algorithms in the C++ library. ...
The company also announced its intention to make the new algorithms available through the LLVM libc++ standard sorting library, aiming to empower millions of developers and companies in diverse industries. Significantly, this update represents the first revision to this section of the sorting library in over a decade and the initial inclusion of an algorithm developed through reinforcement learning. ..."

P.S. I am afraid the VentureBeat news article cited the wrong Nature article as it seems to unrelated to the subject!

Deepmind's AlphaDev discovers sorting algorithms that can revolutionize computing foundations | VentureBeat

Robust and data-efficient generalization of self-supervised machine learning for diagnostic imaging (no public access)

Python 3.12: A Game-Changer in Performance and Efficiency

Recommendable! A nice and short overview on the primary programming language on which machine learning & AI runs. 

Expect more improvements to this language and its very large ecosystem in the near future!

Python 3.12: A Game-Changer in Performance and Efficiency | by AI Tutor | Feb, 2023 | Python in Plain English

Credits: Pycoder's Weekly

Microsoft wants generative AI to be a copilot for enterprise applications like Dynamics and Power

Good news! AI & machine learning is spreading like wildfire! 😊 The competition is heating up!

Microsoft wants generative AI to be a copilot for enterprise applications | VentureBeat Microsoft is doubling down on its generative AI efforts, announcing today that it is integrating the technology into its Microsoft Dynamics and Power platforms. The goal is to enable enterprise applications with the power of generative AI.

Ransomware decryption tool: Victims of MegaCortex can now unlock their files for free

Good news! Bravo! Next time don't despair! 😊

Ransomware decryption tool: Victims of MegaCortex can now unlock their files for free | ZDNET Joint venture by cybersecurity researchers and law enforcement agencies provides a free decryption tool for ransomware that has hit victims around the world.

Google Researchers Open-Source the TensorFlow GNN (TF-GNN) Python Library for Graph Neural Networks in TensorFlow

Good news! Graph Neural Networks have become a serious research subject in recent years.

Google Researchers Open-Source the TensorFlow GNN (TF-GNN): A Scalable Python Library for Graph Neural Networks in TensorFlow - MarkTechPost

Automate checking for flaws in Python with Thoth

Recommendable! I did not read the whole, long article, but this seems to be the way to go to make Python more robust and secure.

Taking a bite out of the complexity of software development!

Automate checking for flaws in Python with Thoth | Opensource.com Project Thoth pulls together many open source tools to automate program builds with security checks as part of the resolution process.