The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are jointly investigating Apple’s communications about the software update that slowed down older models of the iPhone, Bloomberg is reporting.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the government has reportedly requested details on the company’s communications about the software update.

The Bloomberg report indicates the two agencies are in very early stages of their investigation.

We’ve reached out to Apple, the SEC and the DOJ for comment and will update when we hear back.

For background, Apple got into a lot of trouble with customers who noticed that the performance of their older model phones was degrading over time. Apple was pushed to disclose that it had issued a software update that privileged power management over performance in older devices that had degraded batteries.

There was, unsurprisingly, some pushback, and Apple was forced to apologize for the way it handled the update.

The U.S. isn’t the only country where people are pressing Apple for more information. Consumer advocacy groups around the world — from Europe to Asia — are pressing for an investigation into the slowdown.

The relatively open nature of Android has made it a target for malware authors and other bad actors of all stripes who often try to get their wares onto your phone through both the official Google Play Store, third-party app stores and any other way they can think of. For most users, though, the main Android app store is Google’s own Play Store and as the company announced today, the company removed 700,000 potentially harmful or deceiving apps from its store last year. That’s up 70 percent from 2016.

This means your chance of installing a malicious app — be that one that tries to damage your phone or steal your information, or an app that is simply trying to deceive you into thinking it’s Spotify when it’s just a bad copycat — from the official Play Store is getting smaller by the day. Indeed, as Google VP and Head of Security for Google Play Dave Kleidermacher tells me, the chance of installing a malicious app is now 0.00006 percent (and Google sees about 8 billion installs per month across the world). The vast majority of these malicious apps (99 percent), never made it into the store and was outright rejected by Google’s algorithms and security teams.

Kleidermacher also notes that you are 10x more likely to install a harmful app from a non-Play source than Google’s official store.

With Google Play Protect now running on over 2 billion devices, it’s probably the most widely used malware scanner in the world.

The number of removed apps speaks to the increasing number of attempts by developers to sneak harmful app onto your phone, but also to Google’s efforts in using machine learning and other techniques to find these apps before they ever appear in the store. Google long used static analysis techniques to find potentially malicious code in new apps, but with the addition of machine learning in the last few years, the company is now able to find a far wider range of apps. Kleidermacher described the addition of these machine learning techniques as a “breakthrough in our ability to detect badness.”

As Google Play product manager Andrew Ahn also told me, there are some clear patterns in how malicious and deceiving developers try to sneak their apps into the store. They often try to make their apps look like existing popular apps, for example, to trick users into installing them. Google took down more than 250,000 of these apps in the last year.

As for other trends, Kleidermacher noted that Google is seeing more apps that try to run cryptominers on phones, but for the most part, these trends come and go. A few years ago, apps were trying to trick you into installing other apps, for example, while that isn’t really an issue anymore today. As Google finds and shuts down one category, though, another pops up sooner or later.

Google is quite aware that it can’t detect every single malicious app before it hits the store, though. “We have this fantastic technology and it work 99.99994 percent of the time,” he said. “But it’s never perfect.” Some forms of abuse are almost impossible for Google to detect, after all, especially now that a lot of the code for apps runs on backend systems that Google has no control over. If an app asks you to sign up but then sells your credentials on the black market, there was nothing on the phone that could’ve prevented that. To combat this, Google wants to teach users how to make better security decisions, though it’s also using Google’s Safe Browsing tools to detect if an app connects to a known bad site.

In the end, though, there’ll always be some apps that slips through the net. The good thing is that, for the most part, these apps don’t typically find a lot of users.

The Boring Company is getting decently well-capitalized on the back of sales of its flamethrower (yes, flamethrower). The no-doubt overpriced piece of knack, which can be make yourself at home using likely around $30 in parts, is selling for $500 and has already netted Elon Musk’s digging venture $7.5 million.

That’s after just over a day of being on sale, and not counting the revenue from fire extinguisher sales (those sell for just $30, which is itself also overpriced). All told, Musk says he’s sold 15,000 of the flamethrowers thus far, with only a total of 20,000 available in total during the sale.

Chances are, we’re very near the total sell-out of the stock, so if you really want to own this potential piece of transportation history, you’d better act fast. Or you could continue living your life, and ignore this particular circus show in favor of paying attention to what will hopefully be the main act: Actually building a network of interconnected underground hyperloops.

The DoJ and the SEC are aiming to determine whether Apple violated security laws “concerning its disclosures” when it launched an iOS 10.2.1 update that throttled some older iPhones with degraded batteries in order to prevent unexpected device shutdowns.

According to Bloomberg‘s sources, the government recently requested information from Apple and the investigation is in the early stages.

Apple in iOS 10.2.1 introduced a new power management feature to address complaints of unexpected shutdowns in iPhone 6 and 6s iPhones. The shutdowns were caused by batteries below optimal health drawing too much power.

At the time, Apple did not make it clear that to solve the issue, it was throttling the iPhone’s processor at times of peak usage to limit power draw, and that lack of information has led to the company’s current predicament.

The full details behind the power management feature implemented in iOS 10.2.1 were not explained until benchmark testing revealed older iPhones with degraded batteries were being deliberately slowed down, and without an adequate explanation from Apple, customers were outraged and dozens of lawsuits were filed.

Apple has since apologized and made reparations in the form of a new no-questions-asked discounted battery replacement program available to customers who have an iPhone 6 and newer, and the company is planning to introduce much more detailed battery information in an upcoming iOS 11.3 update. iOS 11.3 will let customers know when their iPhones are being throttled due to battery degradation, and it will also allow them to opt out of the power management features.

Despite these efforts, Apple is still facing the aforementioned lawsuits and in addition to the U.S. investigation, the company will need to deal with inquiries in other countries including China, Italy, South Korea, France, Brazil, and more.

Mammoth Media has raised a $13 million Series A funding to create what it calls “entertainment experiences for the mobile-first generation.”

Mammoth is not the first startup to pitch itself as reinventing entertainment for smartphones, but for the most part, that message has come from gaming companies. Co-founder and CEO Benoit Vatere said he wanted to take the mobile-centric approach beyond gaming and social media.

Rather than “mixing social and media,” Vatere said the focus at Mammoth is “content and content alone.” That doesn’t mean excluding social entirely. For example, Mammoth made the Wishbone app, where users can vote on things “Who’s cuter?”, but Vatere said Wishbone is more like America’s Funniest Home Videos than it is a social networking app — the focus is on creating shareable content, not on talking to your friends.

Mammoth also created Yarn, one of the apps delivering fiction in a text message format. The company says that the average Yarn subscriber (pricing starts at $2.99 per week) spends 50 minutes reading in the first week. According to App Annie, Yarn been the number one books app in a number of countries, including the United States.

The app recently launched Hack’d, a horror series featuring Musical.ly star Kristen Hancher. Vatere said we can expect to see more series starring social media influencers — after seeing reaction videos to Yarn content, his team thought, “Why not, instead of having them react to the story, have them in the story itself?”

Besides subscriptions, Yarn also makes money from sponsorships — it’s a partnership with Skype, resulting in three stories that “highlight Skype’s communication features.”

And Vatere plans to launch new apps. The idea is to continue experimenting with new formats, which means some of the apps probably won’t take off, but he’s hoping to launch “one very successful experience” each year. This also requires a sustainable and repeatable model for building audiences.

“Virality is key to helping growth, but virality cannot sustain a business,” Vatere said. “You have to be able to do user acquisition properly … You need to understand how much you can afford per user.
We have the engine that tells us that.”

The funding was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Science Inc., the venture studio where Mammoth was incubated. Greylock’s Josh Elman wrote that he’ll be joining the Mammoth board, and he noted that this is his first investment in Los Angeles.

“I’m #longLA and I believe there will be many more great companies that bridge technology and entertainment and LA will be a great place for those companies to grow and prosper,” Elman said.