The deal announced today “did not address what would happen to low-value ‘de minimis’ ecommerce packages shipped from China to the US,” Reuters wrote. The US imposed 120 percent tariffs on those packages. According to Axios, a White House official confirmed that small packages from China are still subject to 120 percent tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that both governments want to avoid a severing of their economies but that the US still plans to impose tariffs on specific items that the White House wants to be produced in the US. Bessent said that “neither side wants a…

The spokesperson criticized “Noyb’s copycat actions” as “part of an attempt by a vocal minority of activist groups to delay AI innovation in the EU, which is ultimately harming consumers and businesses who could benefit from these cutting-edge technologies.” Noyb has requested a response from Meta by May 21, but it seems unlikely that Meta will quickly cave in this fight. In a blog post, Meta said that AI training on EU users was critical to building AI tools for Europeans that are informed by “everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use…

Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it “does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them,” so it only shows more ads to users who click ads. Meta also insisted that there’s “nothing but speculation” showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta’s resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was…

This week, Spotify rushed to remove hundreds of obviously fake podcasts found to be marketing prescription drugs in violation of Spotify’s policies and, likely, federal law. On Thursday, Business Insider (BI) reported that Spotify removed 200 podcasts advertising the sale of opioids and other drugs, but that wasn’t the end of the scandal. Today, CNN revealed that it easily uncovered dozens more fake podcasts peddling drugs. Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderator—with titles like “My Adderall Store” or “Xtrapharma.com” and episodes titled “Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana” or “Order Xanax 2…

Back in February, Elon Musk skewered the Treasury Department for lacking “basic controls” to stop payments to terrorist organizations, boasting at the Oval Office that “any company” has those controls. Fast-forward three months, and now Musk’s social media platform X is suspected of taking payments from sanctioned terrorists and providing premium features that make it easier to raise funds and spread propaganda—including through X’s chatbot, Grok. Groups seemingly benefiting from X include Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as groups from Syria, Kuwait, and Iran. Some accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, paying to boost their reach…

On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers. Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion. Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal. The disruption of both markets…

Analysts estimate it would cost tens of billions of dollars and take years for Apple to increase iPhone manufacturing in the US, where it at present makes only a very limited number of products. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that Cook had told him the US would need “robotic arms” to replicate the “scale and precision” of iPhone manufacturing in China. “He’s going to build it here,” Lutnick told CNBC. “And Americans are going to be the technicians who drive those factories. They’re not going to be the ones screwing it in.” Lutnick added that his previous…

Wilner wasn’t fully satisfied with the firm’s response that the two errors were “inadvertently included” in the brief and sought more detail. “I didn’t discover that Plaintiff’s lawyers used AI—and re-submitted the brief with considerably more made-up citations and quotations beyond the two initial errors—until I issued a later OSC [order to show cause] soliciting a more detailed explanation. The lawyers’ sworn statements and subsequent submission of the actual AI-generated ‘outline’ made clear the series of events that led to the false filings. The declarations also included profuse apologies and honest admissions of fault.” Judge: Don’t outsource research to AI…

The reconciliation bill primarily focuses on cuts to Medicaid access and increased health care fees for millions of Americans. The AI provision appears as an addition to these broader health care changes, potentially limiting debate on the technology’s policy implications. The move is already inspiring backlash. On Monday, tech safety groups and at least one Democrat criticized the proposal, reports The Hill. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the ranking member on the Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee, called the proposal a “giant gift to Big Tech,” while nonprofit groups like the Tech Oversight Project and Consumer Reports warned it would leave…

“If SpaceX had done a basic search of public filings, it would know that EchoStar extensively utilizes the 2 GHz band and that the Commission itself has confirmed the coverage, utilization, and methodology for assessing the quality of EchoStar’s 5G network based on independent drive-tests,” EchoStar told the FCC. “EchoStar’s deployment already reaches over 80 percent of the United States population with over 23,000 5G sites deployed.” There is also a pending petition filed by Vermont-based VTel Wireless, which asked the FCC to reconsider a 2024 decision to extend EchoStar construction deadlines for several spectrum bands. VTel was outbid by…

Copyright Office seemingly opposes Meta’s torrenting Also among those “general observations,” the Copyright Office wrote that “making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.” The report seemed to suggest that courts and the Copyright Office may also be aligned on AI firms’ use of pirated or illegally accessed paywalled content for AI training. Judge Chhabria only considered Meta’s torrenting in the book authors’ case to be “kind of messed up,” prioritizing the fair use…

In addition to cutting Universal Service, Simington proposed a broad streamlining of the FCC licensing process. Manual processing of license applications “consumes vast staff hours and introduces unnecessary delay into markets that thrive on speed and innovation,” he wrote. “For non-contentious licenses, automated workflows should be the default,” Simington argued. “By implementing intelligent review systems and processing software, the FCC could drastically reduce the time and labor involved in issuing standard licenses.” Moving staff, deleting rules Simington also proposed taking employees out of the FCC Media Bureau and moving them “to other offices within the FCC—such as the Space Bureau—that…

Many horses, including Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle Store, have already left the barn. But Apple is moving quickly to shut the external payments door opened by last week’s ruling that the company willfully failed to comply with court orders regarding anticompetitive behavior. In an emergency motion filing late Wednesday (PDF), Apple described US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ “extraordinary Order” as including an injunction that “permanently precludes Apple from exercising control over core aspects of its business operations, including charging for use of its property and protecting the integrity of its platform and in-app purchase mechanism.” A certificate (PDF) accompanying…

“It is not clear how AutoRIF has been modified or whether AI is involved in the RIF mandate (through AutoRIF or independently),” Kunkler wrote. “However, fears of AI-driven mass-firings of federal workers are not unfounded. Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have made no secret of their affection for the dodgy technology and their intentions to use it to make budget cuts. And, in fact, they have already tried adding AI to workforce decisions.” Automating layoffs can perpetuate bias, increase worker surveillance, and erode transparency to the point where workers don’t know why they were let go, Kunkler said. For…

Blumenthal pointed out that under a joint resolution of disapproval, the FCC is forbidden to adopt a similar rule in the future. “I have to ask, really? Are schools and teachers crying out to repeal this rule? Really? No, they are not. How does this proposal make any sense for them or for families? For the parents? For the community? It makes no sense,” Blumenthal said. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) called the Republican move “a cruel and shortsighted decision that will widen the digital divide and rob kids of the tools they need to succeed.” FCC’s new chair opposed lending…

As the case dragged on, Mashinsky and his family appeared unremorseful, victims said, even while facing threats of violence and significant public shaming. Some victims accused Mashinsky of lying to their faces and pushing them to continue depositing funds even when the end was near and he knew that the money would be lost. In victim statements sent to US District Judge John Koeltl, customers accused Mashinsky of weaponizing his family-man brand to scam many naïve investors out of their life savings. Some suicides were reported, victims said, and elderly victims were among the most vulnerable, with many becoming homeless…

One of Bush’s “points of light” Energy Star was first established under President George H.W. Bush’s administration in 1992, the year of the Earth Summit in Rio, where nations around the world first joined in a framework convention to address climate change. That international treaty, at Bush’s urging, relied on voluntary action rather than targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Back at home, the Energy Star program, too, was a way to encourage, but not force, energy savings. “It was kind of one of his thousand points of light,” Nadel said. “He didn’t want to do serious things…

President Donald Trump said he is killing a broadband grant program that was authorized by Congress, claiming that the Digital Equity Act of 2021 is racist and unconstitutional. “I have spoken with my wonderful Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and we agree that the Biden/Harris so-called ‘Digital Equity Act’ is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. No more woke handouts based on race! The Digital Equity Program is a RACIST and ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION DOLLAR giveaway. I am ending this IMMEDIATELY, and saving Taxpayers BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post yesterday. The Digital Equity Act provided $2.75 billion for three…

The Trump administration’s steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday. Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation’s most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public. In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that’s a conservative…

Login credentials belonging to an employee at both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Government Efficiency have appeared in multiple public leaks from info-stealer malware, a strong indication that devices belonging to him have been hacked in recent years. Kyle Schutt is a 30-something-year-old software engineer who, according to Dropsite News, gained access in February to a “core financial management system” belonging to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As an employee of DOGE, Schutt accessed FEMA’s proprietary software for managing both disaster and non-disaster funding grants. Under his role at CISA, he likely is privy to…

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance. Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance. In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for…

There are 15 US states in which Residential Lite is offered: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Hawaii. This territory generally overlaps with the larger territory in which the free Starlink kit is available. Some states, such as California, Texas, New York, and Massachusetts, have access to the free kit offer but not the Residential Lite plan. When attempting to order service in one of the overlap areas where both are available, an address in Maine, I was given three options. One option was to get the…

President Donald Trump is demanding the release of Tina Peters, a former election official who parroted Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy theories and is serving nine years in prison for compromising the security of election equipment. In a post on Truth Social last night, Trump wrote that “Radical Left Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser ignores Illegals committing Violent Crimes like Rape and Murder in his State and, instead, jailed Tina Peters, a 69-year-old Gold Star mother who worked to expose and document Democrat Election Fraud. Tina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished in the form of Cruel…

A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users. The verdict, reached Tuesday, comes as a major victory not just for Meta-owned WhatsApp but also for privacy- and security-rights advocates who have long criticized the practices of NSO and other exploit sellers. The jury also awarded WhatsApp $444 million in compensatory damages. Clickless exploit WhatsApp sued NSO in 2019 for an attack that targeted roughly 1,400 mobile phones belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents,…

The shuttering of Mr. Deepfakes won’t solve the problem of deepfakes, though. In 2022, the number of deepfakes skyrocketed as AI technology made the synthetic NCII appear more realistic than ever, prompting an FBI warning in 2023 to alert the public that the fake content was being increasingly used in sextortion schemes. But the immediate solutions society used to stop the spread had little impact. For example, in response to pressure to make the fake NCII harder to find, Google started downranking explicit deepfakes in search results but refused to demote platforms like Mr. Deepfakes unless Google received an unspecified…

The Trump administration filed an emergency application on Friday asking the Supreme Court to restore DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration records. A lower-court order that prohibited DOGE’s access is causing “irreparable harm to the executive branch” and thwarting DOGE’s attempts to “eliminate waste and fraud,” US Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the appeal. “The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs,” Sauer told the Supreme Court. The preliminary injunction that is currently in place halted…

Although Character Technologies argues that it’s common to update safety practices over time, Garcia’s team alleged these updates show that C.AI could have made a safer product and chose not to. Expert warns against giving AI products rights Character Technologies has also argued that C.AI is not a “product” as Florida law defines it. That has striking industry implications, according to Camille Carlton, a policy director for the Center for Humane Technology who is serving as a technical expert on the case. At the press briefing, Carlton suggested that “by invoking these First Amendment protections over speech without really specifying…

Tensions had been mounting at the company. Sales and profits were deteriorating rapidly. Musk was spending much of his time in Washington. Around that time, Tesla’s board met with Musk for an update. Board members told him he needed to spend more time on Tesla, according to people familiar with the meeting. And he needed to say so publicly. Musk didn’t push back. Musk subsequently said in an April 22 call with investors that “starting next month, I’ll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is…

“We want our government to be something that we can rely on, as opposed to something that is on the absolute bleeding edge,” says Etzioni. “We don’t need it to be bureaucratic and slow, but if corporations haven’t adopted this yet, is the government really where we want to be experimenting with the cutting edge AI?” Etzioni says that AI agents are also not great 1-1 fits for job replacements. Rather, AI is able to do certain tasks or make others more efficient, but the idea that the technology could do the jobs of 70,000 employees would not be possible.…

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the president’s authority,” Harrison said. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” statutorily forbidding “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.” In a statement explaining why “this is not about the federal budget” and promising to “vigorously defend our right to provide essential news, information and life-saving services to the American public,” NPR President…

Determined to probe this key question, Chhabria pushed authors’ attorney, David Boies, to point to specific evidence of market harms that seemed noticeably missing from the record. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama will ultimately be capable of producing,” Chhabria said. “And it’s just not obvious to me that that’s the case.” But if authors can prove fears of market harms are real, Meta might struggle to win over Chhabria, and that could set a precedent impacting copyright cases challenging AI…

In the trial, Google will paint this demand as a severe overreach, claiming that few, if any, companies would have the resources to purchase and run the products. Last year, an ad consultant estimated Google’s ad empire could be worth up to $95 billion, quite possibly too big to sell. However, Google was similarly skeptical about Chrome, and representatives from other companies have said throughout the search remedy trial that they would love to buy Google’s browser. An uphill battle After losing three antitrust cases in just a couple of years, Google will have a hard time convincing the judge…

Sweet did not respond to requests for comment regarding his work. In response to a request to clarify Sweet’s role at HUD, a spokesperson for the agency said they do not comment on individual personnel. The University of Chicago confirmed to WIRED that Sweet is “on leave from the undergraduate college.” It’s unclear how Sweet was recruited to DOGE, but a public GitHub account indicates that he was working on this issue even before he joined Musk’s demolition crew. The “CLSweet” GitHub account, which WIRED has linked to Sweet, created an application that tracks and analyzes federal government regulations “showing…

Being a model citizen and a person of taste, you probably don’t need this reminder, but some others do: Federal judges do not like it when lawyers electronically watermark every page of their legal PDFs with a gigantic image—purchased for $20 online—of a purple dragon wearing a suit and tie. Not even if your firm’s name is “Dragon Lawyers.” Federal Magistrate Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan was unamused by a recent complaint (PDF) that prominently featured the aubergine wyrm. “Each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon…

“[Paramount] Board members are cognizant that a huge settlement could be viewed as something of a payoff to the president to move the Skydance merger over the finish line, knowledgeable sources have said,” the Los Angeles Times wrote. Carr reportedly said this week that “the settlement and any discussions around that have nothing to do with the work that we’re doing at the FCC.” In a statement provided to Ars today, Paramount said the “lawsuit is completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process. We will abide by the legal process to defend our case.”…

Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a Zoom call with press Wednesday night that the company is “going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store next week.” That decision comes after a federal district court found late Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction designed to allow iOS developers to steer customers to alternate payment processors for in-app purchases. That 2021 injunction wound its way through years of appellate review until January 2024, when the Supreme Court declined to hear a final attempt by Apple to overturn…

Not sharing Johnson’s optimism, Goldman wrote that “there is no ‘preferred’ or ‘ideal’ way to do online age authentication.” Even a perfect system that accurately authenticates age every time would be flawed, he suggested. “Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of ‘dangerous in one way’ to ‘dangerous in a different way,'” he wrote, concluding that “every solution has serious privacy, accuracy, or security problems.” Kids at “grave risk” from uninformed laws As a “burgeoning” age verification industry swells, Goldman wants to see more earnest efforts from lawmakers to “develop a wider and more thoughtful toolkit of online child safety…

“The Fifth Circuit concluded that the FCC’s enforcement proceeding leading to a monetary forfeiture order violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment rights. This Court shouldn’t follow that decision,” the FCC told the 2nd Circuit last week. FCC loss has wide implications Carr’s FCC argued that the agency’s “monetary forfeiture order proceedings pose no Seventh Amendment problem because Section 504(a) [of the Communications Act] affords carriers the opportunity to demand a de novo jury trial in federal district court before the government can recover any penalty. Verizon elected to forgo that opportunity and instead sought direct appellate review.” The FCC put forth the…

Elon Musk’s companies could avoid over $2.3 billion in potential fines and other liabilities thanks to Musk’s unusual government position as the head of DOGE, said a memo yesterday from the Democratic staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The estimate is said to include potential liability from federal investigations, litigation, and other regulatory actions. “Since his appointment, Mr. Musk has taken a chainsaw to the federal government with no apparent regard for the law or for the people who depend on the programs and agencies he so blithely destroys… Mr. Musk’s position may allow him to evade oversight,…

While the tech law is expected to achieve the rare feat of getting through Congress at what experts told Ars was a record pace, both supporters and critics also expect that the law will just as promptly be challenged in courts. Supporters have suggested that any litigation exposing flaws could result in amendments. They’re simultaneously bracing for that backlash, while preparing for the win ahead of the vote tonight and hoping that the law can survive any subsequent legal attacks mostly intact. Experts disagree on encryption threats In a press conference hosted by the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, Slade…

Donald Trump has started signaling that he’s ready to slash tariffs on Chinese imports, but economists have warned that the US softening its stance now likely cedes power to China, which perhaps benefits from dragging out trade talks. On Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he is willing to reduce 145 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports. A senior White House official told The Wall Street Journal that the tariffs may come “down to between roughly 50 percent and 65 percent.” Or perhaps the US may use a tiered approach, charging a 35 percent tax on goods that don’t threaten national security,…

Russian military personnel are being targeted with recently discovered Android malware that steals their contacts and tracks their location. The malware is hidden inside a modified app for Alpine Quest mapping software, which is used by, among others, hunters, athletes, and Russian personnel stationed in the war zone in Ukraine. The app displays various topographical maps for use online and offline. The trojanized Alpine Quest app is being pushed on a dedicated Telegram channel and in unofficial Android app repositories. The chief selling point of the trojanized app is that it provides a free version of Alpine Quest Pro, which…

The report of a criminal antitrust investigation follows a report in December that US authorities were investigating whether to ban TP-Link wireless routers, which were targeted in high-profile attacks linked to the Chinese government. TP-Link was founded in China in 1996 but said it relocated its headquarters to the US in October 2024. TP-Link was split into two entities, one based in the US and one based in China, Bloomberg wrote, but the “US-based entity being scrutinized by Justice and Commerce Department officials still has substantial operations in mainland China.” Another Bloomberg article earlier this month described how TP-Link still…

xAI’s submission claimed that each of the 15 turbines “is equipped with Solar’s Dry Low Emission (DLE)/SoLoNOx control technology” and other systems to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds. For those reasons, xAI expects to be granted permits, the submission suggests. However, even before xAI’s construction began, Shelby County was already in violation of the eight-hour ozone standard that protects public health, which means that xAI may need to implement additional controls. The health department’s hearing will be the first time the public will have a chance to push for better accountability. Seemingly hoping to…

The FBI is offering $10 million for information about the China-state hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon and its intrusion last year into sensitive networks belonging to multiple US telecommunications companies. Salt Typhoon is one of a half-dozen or more hacking groups that work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. Intelligence agencies and private security companies have concluded the group has been behind a string of espionage attacks designed to collect vital information, in part for use in any military conflicts that may arise in the future. A broad and significant cyber campaign The agency on Thursday published…

A lawyer representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell in a defamation case admitted using artificial intelligence in a brief that has nearly 30 defective citations, including misquotes and citations to fictional cases, a federal judge said. “[T]he Court identified nearly thirty defective citations in the Opposition. These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for…

Trump pushes for industry involvement It seems clear that Trump’s executive order was a reaction to China’s announcement about AI education reforms last week, as Reuters reported. Elsewhere, Singapore and Estonia have laid out their AI education initiatives, Forbes reported, indicating that AI education is increasingly considered critical to any nation’s success. Trump’s vision for the US requires training teachers and students about what AI is and what it can do. He offers no new appropriations to fund the initiative; instead, he directs a new AI Education Task Force to find existing funding to cover both research into how to…

Comcast executives apparently realized something that customers have known and complained about for years: The Internet provider’s prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently. This might not have mattered much to cable executives as long as the total number of subscribers met their targets. But after reporting a net loss of 183,000 residential broadband customers in Q1 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh said the company isn’t “winning in the marketplace” during an earnings call today. The Q1 2025 customer loss was over three times larger than the net loss in Q1 2024. While customers often have few viable options…

On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times. The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician (a person or organization skilled in administrating psychological tests), ACS Ventures, created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance. Another 48 questions came from a first-year law student exam, while Kaplan Exam Services developed the…

The first event is scheduled for Thursday and will be hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology. The events will be open to the public and livestreamed when possible, and feature various speakers on free speech, media, and telecommunications issues. With Democrat Geoffrey Starks planning to leave the commission soon, Republicans will gain a 2–1 majority, and Gomez is set to be the only Democrat on the FCC for at least a while. Carr is meanwhile pursuing news distortion investigations into CBS and ABC, and he has threatened Comcast with a similar probe into its subsidiary NBC. Gomez’s press…

The suit also claims that the funding hold, made in retaliation for Harvard’s letter announcing its refusal to accept these conditions, punishes Harvard for exercising free speech. Separately, the lawsuit focuses on Title VI, part of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits the government from funding organizations that engage in racial discrimination. It’s Harvard’s alleged tolerance for antisemitism that would enable the government to put a hold on these funds. But the suit spells out the requirements for cutting funding—hearings, a 30-day waiting period, notification of Congress—that the law requires before funding can be cut. And, quite obviously, the government…

Besides the five-year price guarantee, there’s at least one more notable pricing detail. T-Mobile’s previous plans had “taxes and fees included,” meaning the advertised price was inclusive of taxes and fees. With the new Experience plans, taxes and fees will be in addition to the advertised price. This will make the plans cost more initially than customers might expect, and it gives T-Mobile wiggle room to raise prices during the five years of the price guarantee since it could increase any fees that are tacked onto the new plans. The fine print in today’s press release describes taxes and fees…

“Despite TSMC’s best efforts to comply with all relevant export control and sanctions laws and regulations, there is no assurance that its business activities will not be found incompliant with export control laws and regulations,” TSMC said. Further, “if TSMC or TSMC’s business partners fail to obtain appropriate import, export or re-export licenses or permits or are found to have violated applicable export control or sanctions laws, TSMC may also be adversely affected, through reputational harm as well as other negative consequences, including government investigations and penalties resulting from relevant legal proceedings,” TSMC warned. Trump’s tariffs may end TSMC’s “tariff-proof”…

“Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer,” Ullyot forecasted. According to NPR—which has been the target of Trump threats to rescind funding—four of Hegseth’s senior advisors abruptly quit after The Times report was published. “They have all released public statements suggesting infighting within the department of defense,” NPR reported. But Trump and Hegseth are presenting a united front against the public backlash. Trump confirmed that he considers any discussion of Hegseth’s chats a “waste of time,” The New York Times reported. And on Sunday, Hegseth told reporters gathered for a…

However, it is clear that these groups are sharing their concerns with lawmakers. Last week, SEMI, a global industry group, was holding talks in Washington, DC, with chipmakers and lawmakers, in a blog noting they were advocating “for policy changes vital to the semiconductor industry’s continued growth and innovation.” In their blog, SEMI urged that the Trump administration should not rush their investigation and impose tariffs arbitrarily, without giving SEMI and other industry groups a chance to continue educating officials “on the nuances and critical importance of the complete semiconductor supply chain.” “Traditionally, such investigations have been conducted over a…

NLRB denies breach Berulis’ disclosure said that several days before receiving this threat, he had been instructed to drop his investigation and not report his concerns to US security officials. Bakaj’s letter to senators and the Office of Special Counsel requested “that both law enforcement agencies and Congress initiate an immediate investigation into the cybersecurity breach and data exfiltration at NLRB and any other agencies where DOGE has accessed internal systems.” An NLRB spokesperson denied that there was any breach. “Tim Bearese, the NLRB’s acting press secretary, denied that the agency granted DOGE access to its systems and said DOGE…

The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week. Even further, the tariffs are confusing, poorly communicated, and complex. Today, if you want to import something from China, you need to add the original import duty, plus a 20 percent “fentanyl tariff,” plus a 34 percent “reciprocal tariff,” and an additional 25 percent “Venezuelan oil” tariff, should it be determined that China is buying Venezuelan oil. The problem is, there is no list of countries that are importing Venezuelan oil provided by the White House,…

Ultimately, Brinkema found that Google’s anticompetitive acts substantially harmed “Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.” For Google, the ruling likely hits hard, despite a couple of notable wins. For one, Brinkema ruled that the DOJ did not prove Google has a monopoly in a third market “for open-web display advertiser ad networks.” Additionally, Google will not face sanctions for deleting chat histories that could have influenced her decision in the case. “Chat deletions occurred when employees discussed substantive topics at issue in this litigation and continued after the federal government began…

SentinelOne updated that post yesterday with copies of the email sent by Krebs and an email from Weingarten to staff. Weingarten’s email praised Krebs’ work “in service of democratic institutions and critical infrastructure.” “I know he’ll take on this next chapter with the same clarity, conviction, and humility that defined his time here, and he carries our full respect with him as his journey continues,” Weingarten wrote. Krebs-led CISA debunked election fraud claims After Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Krebs and CISA drew Trump’s wrath by actively debunking claims of election fraud made by Trump and his…

It’s unclear how high prices on Temu and Shein could go, but neither company is willing to wait before overhauling their price models. In Shein’s announcement, the fashion retailer only explained that it “will be making price adjustments starting April 25, 2025,” due to operating expenses going up. And Temu issued a nearly identical statement, AP News reported. US shoppers are already decreasing retail spending, CNN noted last month, while many reports documented rushes to buy big-ticket items like laptops or smartphones before tariffs kicked in. Analysts fear that retail spending will continue decreasing, potentially hurting the US economy the…

Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of killing Rachel Morin earlier this week. The White House has attempted to link this murder to Abrego Garcia’s deportation, but they are entirely separate cases. Carr’s fight against media Carr’s post yesterday, combined with his recent actions to enforce the news distortion policy, suggest that he is likely to open a proceeding if a formal complaint is lodged against any NBC stations. Carr showed he is willing to investigate news distortion complaints into ordinary editorial decisions when he revived complaints against CBS and ABC that were thrown out under the previous administration. Carr has focused…

If Meta can convince the court that the FTC’s market definition is wrong and that TikTok is Meta’s biggest rival, then Meta’s market share drops below monopolist standards, “undercutting” the FTC’s case, Big Tech on Trial reported. But are Facebook and Instagram substitutes for TikTok? Although Meta paints the picture that TikTok users naturally gravitated to Instagram during the TikTok outage, it’s clear that Meta advertised heavily to move them in that direction. There was even a conspiracy theory that Meta had bought TikTok in the hours before TikTok went down, Wired reported, as users noticed Meta banners encouraging them…

After X (formerly Twitter) announced it would be killing its “Support” account, disgruntled users quickly roasted the social media platform for providing “essentially non-existent” support. “We’ll soon be closing this account to streamline how users can contact us for help,” X’s Support account posted, explaining that now, paid “subscribers can get support via @Premium, and everyone can get help through our Help Center.” On X, the Support account was one of the few paths that users had to publicly seek support for help requests the platform seemed to be ignoring. For suspended users, it was viewed as a lifeline. Replies…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Intuit’s lobbying against Direct File and told the AP that Trump and Musk “are going after Direct File because it stops giant tax prep companies from ripping taxpayers off for services that should be free. Americans want a free and easy way to file their taxes—Trump and Musk want to take that away.” Intuit’s TurboTax offers free filing for simple returns, but has faced lawsuits alleging that its ads misled consumers who had to pay. In 2022, Intuit agreed to pay $141 million in restitution to millions of consumers and stop a specific ad campaign…

Securus also wants the FCC to lift a ban on “ancillary” charges that drive up the prices paid by prisoners and their families. Carr generally supported that 2024 order but expressed some concerns about the rate structure chosen by the FCC. Scalpel or chainsaw? Decisions to eliminate rules can be challenged in court. TechFreedom, a libertarian-leaning think tank, supported the goals of “Delete, Delete, Delete” but cautioned the FCC to move deliberately so that its actions don’t get overturned by judges. “The FCC should be wary of overreach, as it may not survive appellate scrutiny under the Major Questions Doctrine,”…

We also contacted the CPB and NPR today and will update this article if they provide any comments. Markey: “Outrageous and reckless… cultural sabotage” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) blasted the Trump plan, calling it “an outrageous and reckless attack on one of our most trusted civic institutions… From ‘PBS NewsHour’ to ‘Sesame Street,’ public television has set the gold standard for programming that empowers viewers, particularly young minds. Cutting off this lifeline is not budget discipline, it’s cultural sabotage.” Citing an anonymous source, Bloomberg reported that the White House “plans to send the package to Congress when lawmakers return from…

Still, for Meta, the stakes are high, as the FTC could pursue a breakup of the company, including requiring Meta to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram. Losing Instagram would hit Meta’s revenue hard, as Instagram is supposed to bring in more than half of its US ad revenue in 2025, eMarketer forecasted last December. The trial is expected to last eight weeks, but much of the most-anticipated testimony will come early. Facebook’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, as well as Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, are expected to testify this week. All unsealed emails and exhibits will eventually be…

The Trump administration has been using federal research funding as a cudgel. The government has blocked billions of dollars in research funds and threatened to put a hold on even more in order to compel universities to adopt what it presents as essential reforms. In the case of Columbia University, that includes changes in the leadership of individual academic departments. On Friday, the government sent a list of demands that it presented as necessary to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.” On Monday, Harvard responded that accepting these demands would “allow itself to be taken over by the…

DOGE has already slashed and burned modernization projects at other agencies, replacing them with smaller teams and tighter timelines. At the Social Security Administration, DOGE representatives are planning to move all of the agency’s data off of legacy programming languages like COBOL and into something like Java, WIRED reported last week. Last Friday, DOGE suddenly placed around 50 IRS technologists on administrative leave. On Thursday, even more technologists were cut, including the director of cybersecurity architecture and implementation, deputy chief information security officer, and acting director of security risk management. IRS’s chief technology officer, Kaschit Pandya, is one of the…

Later today, a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, will testify to Congress that Meta executives “repeatedly” sought to “undermine US national security and betray American values” in “secret” efforts to “win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China.” In her prepared remarks, which will be delivered at a Senate subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism hearing this afternoon, Wynn-Williams accused Meta of working “hand in glove” with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That partnership allegedly included efforts to “construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics” as well as provide the CCP…

OpenAI also alleges that this is when Musk began intensifying his attacks on OpenAI while attempting to poach its top talent and demanding access to OpenAI’s confidential, sensitive information as a former donor and director—”without ever disclosing he was building a competitor in secret.” And the attacks have only grown more intense since then, said OpenAI, claiming that Musk planted stories in the media, wielded his influence on X, requested government probes into OpenAI, and filed multiple legal claims, including seeking an injunction to halt OpenAI’s business. “Most explosively,” OpenAI alleged that Musk pushed attorneys general of California and Delaware…

Shares in the US tech giant were one of Wall Street’s biggest casualties in the days immediately after Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs. About $700 billion was wiped off Apple’s market value in the space of a few days. Earlier this week, Trump said he would consider excluding US companies from his tariffs, but added that such decisions would be made “instinctively.” Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the exemptions mirrored exceptions for smartphones and consumer electronics issued by Trump during his trade wars in 2018 and 2019. “We’ll have to wait and…

After declaring the FTC to be under White House control, Trump fired both Democratic members despite a US law and Supreme Court precedent stating that the president cannot fire commissioners without good cause. House Commerce Committee leaders said the all-Republican FTC will end the “partisan mismanagement” allegedly seen under the Biden-era FTC and then-Chair Lina Khan. “In the last administration, the FTC abandoned its rich bipartisan tradition and historical mission, in favor of a radical agenda and partisan mismanagement,” said a statement issued by Reps. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky) and Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.). “The Commission needs to return to protecting Americans…

During Trump’s last term, Cook raised a successful “charm offensive” that secured tariff exemptions without caving to Trump’s demand to build iPhones in the US, CNBC reported, and he’s likely betting that Apple’s recent $500 billion commitment will lead to similar outcomes, even if Apple never delivers a US-made iPhone. Back in 2017, Trump announced that Apple partner Foxconn would be building three “big beautiful plants” in the US and claimed that they would be Apple plants, CNBC reported. But the pandemic disrupted construction, and most of those plans were abandoned, with one facility only briefly serving to make face…

Jassy said Amazon is “doing everything we can to try and keep prices the way they’ve been for customers, as low as possible.” Amazon has already “done some strategic forward inventory buys to get as many items as make sense for customers at lower prices,” and may renegotiate some deals, he said. Seller: “You can’t rely on the US market” Reuters spoke to five Chinese sellers, writing that “three said they would look to raise prices for their exports to the US, while two planned to leave the market entirely.” Dave Fong sells products “from schoolbags to Bluetooth speakers” and…

Google has long been on the lookout for ways to break Microsoft’s stranglehold on US government office software, and the current drive to cut costs may be it. Google and the federal government have announced an agreement that makes Google Workspace available to all agencies at a significant discount, trimming 71 percent from the service’s subscription price tag. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the government has engaged in a campaign of unbridled staffing reductions and program cancellations, all with the alleged aim of reducing federal spending. It would appear Google recognized this opportunity, negotiating with the General…

On Wednesday, Donald Trump, once again, took to Truth Social to abruptly shift US trade policy, announcing a 90-day pause “substantially” lowering reciprocal tariffs against all countries except China to 10 percent. Because China retaliated—raising tariffs on US imports to 84 percent on Wednesday—Trump increased tariffs on China imports to 125 percent “effective immediately.” That likely will not be received well by China, which advised the Trump administration to cancel all China tariffs Wednesday, NPR reported. “The US’s practice of escalating tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake,” the Chinese finance ministry said, calling for Trump…

Free speech concerns The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been speaking out against the bill, saying “it could be easily manipulated to take down lawful content that powerful people simply don’t like.” The EFF pointed to Trump’s comments in an address to a joint session of Congress last month, in which he suggested he would use the bill for his own ends. “Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody,” Trump…

A US appeals court ruled yesterday that DOGE can access personal data held by the US Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), overturning an order issued by a lower-court judge. The US government has “met its burden of a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal,” said yesterday’s ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges granted the Trump administration’s motion to stay the lower-court ruling pending appeal. “The Supreme Court has told us that, unlike a private party,…

Instead, it appears that X decided to sue Twitch after discovering that Twitch was among advertisers who directly referenced the WFA’s brand safety guidelines in its own community guidelines and terms of service. X likely saw this as evidence that Twitch was allegedly conspiring with the WFA to restrict then-Twitter’s ad revenue, since X alleged that Twitch reduced ad purchases to “only a de minimis amount outside the United States, after November 2022,” X’s complaint said. “The Advertiser Defendants and other GARM-member advertisers acted in parallel to discontinue their purchases of advertising from Twitter, in a marked departure from their…

We contacted the White House today and will update this article if it provides any comment. Waltz: “It said one person and then a different phone number” Waltz recently told Fox News, “I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it said one person and then a different phone number… if you have somebody else’s contact, and then somehow it gets sucked in, it gets sucked in.” Goldberg later told NBC News that “this isn’t The Matrix. Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones. I don’t know what he’s talking about there.” Waltz has also denied…

Last week, Politico reported that some top Republicans are pushing to reassert Congress’ power over tariffs as the trade war escalates. They’ve introduced a bill that would force Trump to give Congress 48 hours’ notice before imposing tariffs and to get congressional approval 60 days before tariffs could kick in. That could help companies avoid experiencing whiplash but wouldn’t necessarily change the trade policy. And lawmakers may entertain the bill, since the CTA warned that Republicans may lose voters if they don’t intervene. “Make no mistake: American consumers, families, and workers will feel real pain, and elected policymakers in Washington…

According to data from Emarketer, X’s revenue will increase to $2.3 billion this year compared with $1.9 billion a year ago. However, global sales in 2022, when the group was known as Twitter and taken over by Musk, were $4.1 billion. Total US ad spend on X was down by 2 percent in the first two months of 2025 compared with a year ago, according to data from market intelligence group Sensor Tower, despite the recent return of groups such as Hulu and Unilever. American Express also rejoined the platform this year but its ad spend is down by about…

A typical ATT  pop-up asks a user whether to allow an app “to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites,” and says that “your data will be used to deliver personalized ads to you.” Agency: “Double consent” too cumbersome The agency said there is an “asymmetry” in which user consent for Apple’s own data collection is obtained with a single pop-up, but other publishers are “required to obtain double consent from users for tracking on third-party sites and applications.” The press release notes that “while advertising tracking only needs to be refused once, the user must always confirm…

A SpaceX and X engineer, Christopher Stanley—currently serving as a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General’s office at the Department of Justice (DOJ)—was reportedly caught bragging about hacking and distributing pirated e-books, bootleg software, and game cheats. The boasts appeared on archived versions of websites, of which several, once flagged, were quickly deleted, Reuters reported. Stanley was assigned to the DOJ by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While Musk claims that DOGE operates transparently, not much is known about who the staffers are or what their government roles entail. It remains unclear what Stanley does at DOJ,…

On LinkedIn, her mother, Dorota Mani—who has been working with the governor’s office on a commission to protect kids from online harms—thanked lawmakers like Murphy and former New Jersey Assemblyman Herb Conaway, who sponsored the law, for “standing with us.” “When used maliciously, deepfake technology can dismantle lives, distort reality, and exploit the most vulnerable among us,” Conaway said. “I’m proud to have sponsored this legislation when I was still in the Assembly, as it will help us keep pace with advancing technology. This is about drawing a clear line between innovation and harm. It’s time we take a firm…

European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday. The European Commission determined last year that Elon Musk’s social network violated the Digital Services Act. Regulators are now in the process of determining what punishment to impose. “The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes,” the NYT report said, attributing the information to “four people with knowledge of the plans.” The penalty is expected to be issued this summer and would be the first one under the new EU…

“Taken as true, these facts give rise to a plausible inference that defendants at a minimum had reason to investigate and uncover end-user infringement,” Stein wrote. To Stein, the fact that OpenAI maintains an “ongoing relationship” with users by providing outputs that respond to users’ prompts also supports contributory infringement claims, despite OpenAI’s argument that ChatGPT’s “substantial noninfringing uses” are exonerative. OpenAI defeated some claims For OpenAI, Stein’s ruling likely disappoints, although Stein did drop some of NYT’s claims. Likely upsetting to news publishers, that included a “free-riding” claim that ChatGPT unfairly profits off time-sensitive “hot news” items, including the…

The expert sample is not representative of the AI field, as Bender points out to Ars that AI is not a “thing” or even “a coherent set of technologies,” and an expert in one area doesn’t necessarily understand other areas. But still, Pew noted the key takeaway and conducted in-depth interviews to find out more about why men and women are or are not excited about AI. “I think, broadly, some of the things that excite me are things like applications that can save people a lot of time from repetitive and mundane tasks,” one male expert respondent said, describing…

Rumors claim Trump consulted chatbots On social media, rumors swirled that the Trump administration got these supposedly fake numbers from chatbots. On Bluesky, tech entrepreneur Amy Hoy joined others posting screenshots from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, each showing that the chatbots arrived at similar calculations as the Trump administration. Some of the chatbots also warned against the oversimplified math in outputs. ChatGPT acknowledged that the easy method “ignores the intricate dynamics of international trade.” Gemini cautioned that it could only offer a “highly simplified conceptual approach” that ignored the “vast real-world complexities and consequences” of implementing such a trade…

National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and a senior aide used personal Gmail accounts for government communications, according to a Washington Post report published yesterday. Waltz has been at the center of controversy for weeks because he inadvertently invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed a plan for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. Yesterday’s report of Gmail use and another recent report on additional Signal chats raise more questions about the security of sensitive government communications in the Trump administration. A senior Waltz aide used Gmail “for highly technical conversations with…

Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow. Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or “verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos.” Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, “many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement,” the agency said…

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he’s keeping an eye on 23andMe’s bankruptcy proceeding and the company’s planned sale because of privacy concerns related to genetic testing data. 23andMe and its future owner must uphold the company’s privacy promises, Ferguson said in a letter sent yesterday to representatives of the US Trustee Program, a Justice Department division that oversees administration of bankruptcy proceedings. “As Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, I write to express the FTC’s interests and concerns relating to the potential sale or transfer of millions of American consumers’ sensitive personal information,” Ferguson wrote. He continued: As…

Nearly half of US states sued the federal government and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today in a bid to halt the termination of $11 billion in public health grants. The lawsuit was filed by 23 states and the District of Columbia. “The grant terminations, which came with no warning or legally valid explanation, have quickly caused chaos for state health agencies that continue to rely on these critical funds for a wide range of urgent public health needs such as infectious disease management, fortifying emergency preparedness, providing mental health and substance abuse services, and…

A loss in the investors’ and SEC’s suits could force Musk to disgorge any ill-gotten gains from the alleged scheme, estimated at $150 million, as well as potential civil penalties. The SEC and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. Investors’ lawyers declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. SEC purge may slow down probes Under the Biden administration, the SEC alleged that “Musk’s violation resulted in substantial economic harm to investors selling Twitter common stock.” For the lead plaintiffs in the investors’ suit, the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System, the scheme allegedly robbed…

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained access “to a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies,” despite “objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information” and lead to cyberattacks, The New York Times reported today. The system at the Interior Department gives DOGE “visibility into sensitive employee information, such as Social Security numbers, and the ability to more easily hire and fire workers,” the NYT wrote, citing people familiar with the matter. DOGE workers had been trying to get access to the Federal…

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s pledge to spend an extra $100 billion on advanced manufacturing plants in the US will do little to help the country restore its global lead in chipmaking, according to Pat Gelsinger, who was forced out as chief executive of Intel late last year. His comments come less than a month after the White House hailed the investment from TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, as an important milestone in efforts to bring production of the most advanced semiconductors back on to US soil. “If you don’t have R&D in the US, you will not have semiconductor…

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why. Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at…

The EU is set to impose minimal fines on Apple and Facebook-owner Meta next week under its Digital Markets Act, as Brussels seeks to avoid escalating tensions with US President Donald Trump. According to people familiar with the decisions, the iPhone maker is expected to be fined and ordered to revise its App Store rules, following an investigation into whether they prevent app developers from sending consumers to offers outside its platform. Regulators will also close another investigation into Apple, which was focused on the company’s design of its web browser choice screen without any further sanctions. Meta will also…

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper’s accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.) As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained…

Elon Musk today said he has merged X and xAI in a deal that values the social network formerly known as Twitter at $33 billion. Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. xAI acquired X “in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt),” Musk wrote on X today. X and xAI were already collaborating, as xAI’s Grok is trained on X posts. Grok is made available to X users, with paying subscribers getting higher usage limits and more features. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk wrote.…

The Federal Communications Commission’s news distortion investigation into CBS drew a public rebuke from a bipartisan group of five former FCC commissioners, including two former chairmen. The group criticizing current Chairman Brendan Carr includes Republican Alfred Sikes, the FCC chair from 1989 to 1993, and Democrat Tom Wheeler, the FCC chair from 2013 to 2017. They were joined by Republican Rachelle Chong, Democrat Ervin Duggan, and Democrat Gloria Tristani, all former commissioners. “These comments are submitted to emphasize the unprecedented nature of this news distortion proceeding, and to express our strong concern that the Federal Communications Commission may be seeking…

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) don’t have to turn over information related to their government cost-cutting operations, at least for now, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. A federal judge previously ruled that 14 states suing the federal government can serve written discovery requests on Musk and DOGE. Musk, DOGE, and President Trump turned to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an attempt to block that order. A three-judge panel at the appeals court granted an emergency motion for a stay in an order issued yesterday, putting the lower-court ruling…

Two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission who were fired by President Trump sued him today, saying their removals are “in direct violation of a century of federal law and Supreme Court precedent.” “Plaintiffs bring this action to vindicate their right to serve the remainder of their respective terms, to defend the integrity of the Commission, and to continue their work for the American people,” said the lawsuit filed by Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Trump last week sent Slaughter and Bedoya notices that said, “I am writing to…

The Scholars Program has provided funding for around 3,500 students to support their studies in scientific fields. With these lawsuits, “there are students who are currently enrolled, students who will be enrolled, who see themselves being attacked,” said Matt Hartings, an associate professor of chemistry at American University. The potential loss of these programs, Harpalani added, could have a detrimental effect on scientific research: If underrepresented scientists no longer have the resources to continue in their careers, the field might lose important role models and new ways of thinking. Mindiola shared a similar sentiment. “I think what makes science move…

White House didn’t want texts released Prior to running its follow-up article, The Atlantic asked Trump administration officials if they objected to publishing the full texts. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic]—yes,…

Apple has suffered a blow in its efforts to salvage its lucrative search placement deal with Google. A new ruling from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirms that Apple cannot participate in Google’s upcoming antitrust hearing, which could leave a multibillion-dollar hole in Apple’s balance sheet. The judges in the case say Apple simply waited too long to get involved. Just a few years ago, a high-stakes court case involving Apple and Google would have found the companies on opposing sides, but not today. Apple’s and Google’s interests are strongly aligned here, to the tune of $20 billion. Google…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation yesterday launched a task force “to try to nail the criminals setting fire to Tesla vehicles and charging stations,” and is looking into an anarchist blog that has been “calling for more” attacks, The New York Post reported. “The bureau has received reports of 48 instances so far this month related to Tesla vehicles, dealerships and charging stations and is investigating at least seven of them in conjunction with local law enforcement, The Post has learned,” the article said. “The agency’s newly formed 10-person task force will deploy ATF personnel—special agents and intelligence analysts from…

A new report says that when the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk less than a week before President Trump’s inauguration, only one member—the current chairman—voted against filing the lawsuit. The vote behind closed doors was 4–1, with three Democrats and Republican Hester Peirce joining to support the lawsuit over Musk’s late disclosure of a Twitter stock purchase in early 2022, Reuters reported today. The one dissent reportedly came from Republican Mark Uyeda, who was subsequently named acting SEC chairman by Trump. Uyeda also asked SEC enforcement staff “to declare that a case they wanted to bring against Elon…

Using Signal in this way may have violated US law, Goldberg wrote. “Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story,” he wrote. Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing such information, and Waltz’s use of a feature that makes messages disappear after a set period of time “raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law,” the article said. Adding a reporter to the…

Moutier told Ars that chatbots encouraging suicidal ideation don’t just present risks for people with acute issues. They could put people with no perceived mental health issues at risk, and warning signs can be hard to detect. For parents, more awareness is needed about the dangers of chatbots potentially reinforcing negative thoughts, an education role that Moutier said AFSP increasingly seeks to fill. She recommends that parents talk to kids about chatbots and pay close attention to “the basics” to note any changes in sleep, energy, behavior, or school performance. And “if they start to just even hint at things…

Giulio Coppi, a senior humanitarian officer at the nonprofit Access Now who has researched the use of blockchain in humanitarian work, says that blockchain technologies, while sometimes effective, offer no obvious advantages over other tools organizations could use, such as an existing payments system or another database tool. “There’s no proven advantage that it’s cheaper or better,” he says. “The way it’s been presented is this tech solutionist approach that has been proven over and over again to not have any substantial impact in reality.” There have been, however, some successful instances of using blockchain technology in the humanitarian sector.…

Every Tesla Cybertruck ever sold is being recalled so Tesla can fix an exterior panel that could potentially come unglued and detach while driving. If the “panel separates from the vehicle while in drive, it could create a road hazard for following motorists and increase their risk of injury or a collision,” Tesla explained in a safety recall report submitted Tuesday to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Tesla initially became aware of the issue in January and launched a study of the problem as more complaints came in, the report said. By March, social media complaints were getting…

The lawsuit was filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. “Never before has a group of unelected, unappointed, and unvetted individuals—contradictorily described as White House employees, employees of either existing or putative agencies (multiple and many), and undefined ‘advisors’—sought or gained access to such sensitive information from across the federal government,” the lawsuit said. A temporary restraining order preserves the status quo until a preliminary injunction hearing can be held, although the legal standards for granting a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction are essentially the…

Spotted by TorrentFreak, AGCOM Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio took to LinkedIn to celebrate the ruling, as well as the existence of the Italian Piracy Shield. “The Judge confirmed the value of AGCOM’s investigations, once again giving legitimacy to a system for the protection of copyright that is unique in the world,” said Capitanio. Capitanio went on to complain that Google has routinely ignored AGCOM’s listing of pirate sites, which are supposed to be blocked in 30 minutes or less under the law. He noted the violation was so clear-cut that the order was issued without giving Google a chance to respond,…

Several states consider price requirements While the California proposal will face opposition from ISPs and is not guaranteed to become law, the amended bill has higher speed requirements for the $15 plan than the existing New York law that inspired it. The New York law lets ISPs comply either by offering $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds. The New York law doesn’t specify minimum upload speeds. AT&T stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York entirely instead of complying with the law. But AT&T wouldn’t be able to…

The police claimed that “the fraudulent Facebook pages posted comments on Village of Orland Park social media sites while also soliciting friend requests from Orland Park Police employees and other citizens, portraying the likeness of Deputy Chief of Police Brian West”—and said that this was both Disorderly Conduct and False Personation, both misdemeanors. West got permission from his boss to launch a criminal investigation, which soon turned into search warrants that surfaced a name: retired Orland Park sergeant Ken Kovac, who had left the department in 2019 after two decades of service. Kovac was charged, and he surrendered himself at…

In July 2024, AT&T became the first carrier to apply for a technology transition discontinuance “under the Adequate Replacement Test relying on the applicant’s own replacement service,” the order said. “AT&T indicated in this application that it was relying on a totality of the circumstances showing to establish the adequacy of its replacement service, but also committed to the performance testing methodology and parameters established in the 2016 Technology Transitions Order Technical Appendix.” This “delay[ed] the filing of its discontinuance application for several months,” the FCC said. Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said the FCC…

Currently, ChatGPT does not repeat these horrible false claims about Holmen in outputs. A more recent update apparently fixed the issue, as “ChatGPT now also searches the Internet for information about people, when it is asked who they are,” Noyb said. But because OpenAI had previously argued that it cannot correct information—it can only block information—the fake child murderer story is likely still included in ChatGPT’s internal data. And unless Holmen can correct it, that’s a violation of the GDPR, Noyb claims. “While the damage done may be more limited if false personal data is not shared, the GDPR applies…

The petition argues that discovery is unnecessary to assess the plaintiff states’ claims. “Plaintiffs allege a violation of the Appointments Clause and USDS’s statutory authority on the theory that USDS and Mr. Musk are directing decision-making by agency officeholders,” it said. “Those claims present pure questions of law that can be resolved—and rejected—on the basis of plaintiffs’ complaint. In particular, precedent establishes that the Appointments Clause turns on proper appointment of officeholders; it is not concerned with the de facto influence over those who hold office.” States: Discovery can confirm Musk’s role at DOGE The states’ lawsuit alleged that “President…

By contrast, then-President Joe Biden waited nine months to choose a Democratic nominee in 2021. His first nominee, Gigi Sohn, wasn’t confirmed despite Democrats having control of the Senate at the time. The Biden-era FCC didn’t gain a Democratic majority until Gomez was confirmed in September 2023. Carr would have a 2-1 majority upon Starks’ departure assuming there is no Senate vote on Trusty’s nomination before then. US law prevents either party from obtaining an FCC supermajority. “The maximum number of commissioners who may be members of the same political party shall be a number equal to the least number…

If “the Federal Communications Commission reverses their adverse regulations,” Montgomery said, “the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office will revisit the feasibility of reimplementing the inmate phone system.” One might expect this view to generate some sympathy in the MAGA-fied halls of FCC HQ. But the Commission’s two Republicans actually voted in favor of the rate control order last year. Current FCC Chair Brendan Carr even agreed that inmate phone calls in American prisons were often “excessive” and that the private operators behind these systems represented a “market failure.” He then voted for straight-up, old-school price caps. In fact, Carr went on…

Despite the UK’s apparent hard stance to defend the OSA, Trump has suggested that there’s a “very good chance” the US will make a deal with the UK to preserve an allyship that both countries will expect to be critical to maintaining tech dominance. Ofcom promises “swift action” Ofcom said that all platforms have until March 31 to send completed risk assessments and should be prepared today “to start implementing appropriate measures to remove illegal material quickly when they become aware of it, and to reduce the risk of ‘priority’ criminal content from appearing in the first place.” Those reports…

“Some states are on the 1-yard line” Republicans criticized the Biden administration for not yet distributing grant money, but the NTIA said in November that it had approved initial funding plans submitted by every state and territory. Feinman said the change in direction will delay grant distribution. “Some states are on the 1-yard line. A bunch are on the 5-yard line. More will be getting there every week,” he wrote. “These more-sweeping changes will only cause delays. The administration could fix the problems with the program via waiver and avoid slowdowns.” The program is on pause, even if the new…

Trump could possibly come for those funds, but the CHIPS Act’s claw-back provisions “are only to be triggered for ‘non-performance,'” Ezell noted—”that is, the company not doing what it promised to do.” And although “in theory,” Trump could “use rescission or impoundment measures to go after duly Congressionally appropriated and obligated funds,” Ezell suggested that seemed “unlikely.” Some of the NYT’s sources suggested that “many” industry people “also expressed confidence that their legal agreements with the Commerce Department couldn’t be changed” on the SIA call. Instead of awarding subsidies, though, Trump wants to punish chipmakers who do business outside the…

The authors, however, think that torrenting pirated works is so notoriously illegal that they now have an “open-and-shut case” of copyright infringement. “Meta’s reproduction of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Books without permission, including through peer-to-peer file sharing, is not fair use,” the authors alleged, citing a major court ruling against Napster and insisting that “Meta infringed each of their copyrights, full stop.” Chhabria may be curious to learn more about leeching, though. Last month, he admitted at a hearing that the term was foreign to him, Meta’s letter said in a footnote. “I don’t remember hearing it before,” Chhabria said. The authors…

The spokesperson noted that users can also “report” an ad if they believe it goes against Reddit’s policies. Reporting an ad also results in that advertiser being blocked from pitching to you for a year. Reddit already lets people block advertising related to alcohol, dating, gambling, “politics and activism,” “pregnancy and parenting,” “religion and spirituality,” and weight loss. However, some users have complained about this system failing. Reddit also lets users with accounts in the US and other select countries turn off personalized ads. The company made personalized ads mandatory in some geographies in September 2023. Despite these ad controls,…

An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons. The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over the unique design. Known as Polygons, the three-in-one origami measuring spoons have a flat design that can be easily folded into common teaspoon and tablespoon measurements. “Regular spoons are so 3000 BC,” a tagline on the project’s website joked. For…

Google’s position on AI regulation: Trust us, bro If there was any doubt about Google’s commitment to move fast and break things, its new policy position should put that to rest. “For too long, AI policymaking has paid disproportionate attention to the risks,” the document says. Google urges the US to invest in AI not only with money but with business-friendly legislation. The company joins the growing chorus of AI firms calling for federal legislation that clarifies how they can operate. It points to the difficulty of complying with a “patchwork” of state-level laws that impose restrictions on AI development…

Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy. In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports. “Tesla supports a robust and thorough process” to “address unfair trade practices,” but only those “which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies,” the letter said. The carmaker recommended that the USTR—in its…

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race. Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall. OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it…

Meta also confirmed that it won’t be reducing visibility of misleading posts with community notes. That’s a change from the prior system, Meta noted, which had penalties associated with fact-checking. According to Meta, X’s algorithm cannot be gamed, supposedly safeguarding “against organized campaigns” striving to manipulate notes and “influence what notes get published or what they say.” Meta claims it will rely on external research on community notes to avoid that pitfall, but as recently as last October, outside researchers had suggested that X’s Community Notes were easily sabotaged by toxic X users. “We don’t expect this process to be…

Citibank has until March 15 to provide more information on orders to freeze funding. More details on that front were shared today, however, in a court filing in a lawsuit raised by Climate United—one of eight NCIF awardees whose funding was suddenly frozen. In a motion opposing a request for a temporary restraining order forcing Citibank to unfreeze the funds, Citibank argued that it plays only an administrative role in managing accounts. According to Citibank, it cannot be liable for freezing the funds because it’s legally required to follow instructions from the EPA and the Department of Treasury, and those…

The Federal Trade Commission is moving to push back a trial set to determine if Amazon tricked customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions. At a Zoom status hearing on Wednesday, the FTC officially asked US District Judge John Chun to delay the trial. According to the FTC’s attorney, Jonathan Cohen, the agency needs two months to prepare beyond the September 22 start date, blaming recent “staffing and budgetary shortfalls” stemming from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), CNBC reported. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division, and on our case team,” Cohen said, explaining…

“X conceded that depending on what content a user follows and how long they’ve had their account, they might see advertisements placed next to extremist content,” MMFA alleged. As MMFA sees it, Musk is trying to blame the organization for ad losses spurred by his own decisions after taking over the platform—like cutting content moderation teams, de-amplifying hateful content instead of removing it, and bringing back banned users. Through the lawsuits, Musk allegedly wants to make MMFA pay “hundreds of millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue” simply because its report didn’t outline “what accounts Media Matters followed or how…

Adding to the complexity and uncertainty around Vodafone’s newly strict RTO enforcement are claims of there being limited office space for employees. Vodafone is “reducing office space at their offices in Newbury and Paddington, offshoring roles to Málaga, [Spain], Romania, India, and other countries, and having some colleagues on legacy contracts based at home in the UK,” an anonymous worker told The Register. The concerns echo those of employees from other large firms who say they were ushered back to in-person work before their employers procured sufficient office space. Amazon, for example, started requiring all corporate employees to work in-office…

A document that was first issued in 2009 would seem an unlikely candidate for making news in 2025. Yet the past few weeks have seen a steady stream of articles about an analysis first issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early years of Obama’s first term: the endangerment finding on greenhouse gasses. The basics of the document are almost mundane: greenhouse gases are warming the climate, and this will have negative consequences for US citizens. But it took a Supreme Court decision to get written in the first place, and it has played a role in every…

A 55-year-old software developer faces up to 10 years in prison for deploying malicious code that sabotaged his former employer’s network, allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. The US Department of Justice announced Friday that Davis Lu was convicted by a jury after “causing intentional damage to protected computers” reportedly owned by the Ohio- and Dublin-based power management company Eaton Corp. Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate “realignment” in 2018 that “reduced his responsibilities,” the DOJ said. His efforts to sabotage their network began that…

Rogers found that because “the threshold question of whether a charitable trust was created remains a toss-up, Musk has not demonstrated likelihood of success on the merits sufficient to obtain an injunction.” Trial expedited to fall 2025 Musk’s lawsuit also names OpenAI investor and partner Microsoft as a defendant and alleges that the companies violated antitrust law “based on the alleged issuance of a so-called ‘fund no competitors’ edict issued by OpenAI and Microsoft allegedly commanding OpenAI investors to avoid investing in any competitor.” But Rogers’ ruling said the lawsuit “has not actually alleged, or provided evidence of, an actual…

Ahead of the first-ever White House Crypto Summit Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve that a factsheet claimed delivers on his promise to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” Trump’s order requires all federal agencies currently holding bitcoins seized as part of a criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceeding to transfer those bitcoins to the Treasury Department, which itself already has a store of bitcoins. Additionally, any other digital assets forfeited will be collected in a separate Digital Assets Stockpile. But while Trump likely anticipates that bitcoin fans will be over…

A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies’ scheduled release dates. According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and shared copies widely online. He also supposedly sold the actual stolen discs on e-commerce sites, the DOJ alleged. Hale has been charged with…

But David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings. For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said. “It has all this information there,” Seubert said. “I don’t even necessarily need to hear it,” he continued, adding, “just seeing the physicality of it,…

“If Mr. Musk has taken actions in his federal role that will benefit his financial interests without receiving appropriate waivers and approvals, he may have violated the criminal conflict of interest statute,” the senators alleged. That ethics law, they said, “prohibits special government employees from participating “personally and substantially” in any particular matter that would have a “direct and predictable effect” on his or her financial interest, they said. So far, the senators said, the Trump administration has only given vague assurances of Musk’s and DOGE’s compliance with ethics laws. It also remains unclear how much of DOGE remains under…

Don’t be “technology-blind,” broadband group says The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society criticized what it called “Trump’s BEAD meddling,” saying it would “leave millions of Americans with broadband that is slower, less reliable, and more expensive.” The shift to a “technology-neutral” approach should not be “technology-blind,” the advocacy group said. “Fiber broadband is widely understood to be better than other Internet options—like Starlink’s satellites—because it delivers significantly faster speeds, is more reliable due to its resistance to interference (from weather, foliage, terrain, etc), has higher bandwidth capacity, and offers symmetrical upload and download speeds, making it ideal for activities…

On Tuesday, Donald Trump finally made it clear to Congress that he wants to kill the CHIPS and Science Act—a $280 billion bipartisan law Joe Biden signed in 2022 to bring more semiconductor manufacturing into the US and put the country at the forefront of research and innovation. Trump has long expressed frustration with the high cost of the CHIPS Act, telling Congress on Tuesday that it’s a “horrible, horrible thing” to “give hundreds of billions of dollars” in subsidies to companies that he claimed “take our money” and “don’t spend it,” Reuters reported. “You should get rid of the…

The government’s 2024 request also sought to have Google’s investment in AI firms curtailed even though this isn’t directly related to search. If, like Google, you believe leadership in AI is important to the future of the world, limiting its investments could also affect national security. But in November, Mehta suggested he was open to considering AI remedies because “the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines” is rapidly shifting the search market. This perspective could be more likely to find supporters in the newly AI-obsessed US government with a rapidly changing…

Although it wasn’t previously reported, Apple’s appeal was filed last month at about the time it withdrew ADP from the UK, the Financial Times wrote today. Snoopers’ Charter Backdoors demanded by governments have alarmed security and privacy advocates, who say the special access would be exploited by criminal hackers and other governments. Bad actors typically need to rely on vulnerabilities that aren’t intentionally introduced and are patched when discovered. Creating backdoors for government access would necessarily involve tech firms making their products and services less secure. The order being appealed by Apple is a Technical Capability Notice issued by the…

President Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect today, and the White House increased a tariff on China from 10 to 20 percent in an executive order. Canada, Mexico, and China announced retaliatory moves, and stock markets sank globally. Industry groups and companies have warned the Trump tariffs will raise prices for cars, groceries, consumer technology, and other products. Canada was hit with a 10 percent tariff on energy exports to the US, while other Canadian exports are subject to the 25 percent tariff. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would impose 25 percent tariffs on…

Currently, TSMC only builds its most advanced chips in Taiwan. But when the most advanced US fabs are operational, they’ll be prepared to manufacture “tens of millions of leading-edge chips” to “power products like 5G/6G smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and AI datacenter servers,” the Commerce Department said in 2024. TSMC has not confirmed the WSJ’s report but provided a statement: “We’re pleased to have an opportunity to meet with the President and look forward to discussing our shared vision for innovation and growth in the semiconductor industry, as well as exploring ways to bolster the technology sector along with our customers.”…

Thorn also recommends more research into how young people use blocking and reporting to combat threats online. Stroebel told Ars that she wants to better understand why kids choose to block versus report in certain circumstances. She’s worried that kids overwhelmingly choose to block users sharing fake nudes, rather than reporting the attack and prompting a broader platform response that could help minimize harm to more users. It’s also concerning, she said, to think that particularly young users who feel imminently in danger may wrongly expect that reporting a fake nude triggers immediate action. Other changes tech companies could consider…

Cable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs. The subscribers “were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices,” said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber “of Altice’s intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order,” and telling the notified subscribers that they have 30 days to seek relief from the court. If subscribers do not object within a month, Altice must…

“It’s hard to go higher than being this kind of a second-in-charge or second-in-popularity to Trump,” Zelinsky said. On Reddit and X, Zelinsky analyzed messages from Musk followers who truly believed that Dogecoin price hikes are Musk’s “gift” propelling Dogecoin to become not just the “currency of Earth” but the currency of Mars. That’s the real fantasy that makes Musk such a charismatic figure, Zelinsky suggested. “If we keep believing in the coin and everything we should make it stand for, we will be chilling on Mars,” one Musk follower said. “Forget about the effing moon, Elon Musk is taking…

In South Korea, where AI-generated deepfake porn has been criminalized, an “emergency” was declared and hundreds were arrested, mostly teens. But most countries don’t yet have clear laws banning AI sex images of minors, and Europol cited this fact as a challenge for Operation Cumberland, which is a coordinated crackdown across 19 countries lacking clear guidelines. “Operation Cumberland has been one of the first cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM), making it exceptionally challenging for investigators, especially due to the lack of national legislation addressing these crimes,” Europol said. European Union member states are currently mulling a rule…

Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, “You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.” Mozilla also took heat from users after a Mozilla employee solicited feedback in a connect.mozilla.org discussion forum. “This isn’t a question of messaging…

Streaming ads could get muzzled, too As you may have noticed—either through the text of this article or your own ears—The Calm Act doesn’t apply to streaming services. And because The Calm Act doesn’t affect commercials viewed on the Internet, online services providing access to broadcast channels, like YouTube TV and Sling, don’t have to follow the rules. This is despite such services distributing the same content as linear TV providers. For years, this made sense. The majority of TV viewing occurred through broadcast, cable, or satellite access. Further, services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video used to be considered…

The price of bitcoin hit a record high of $109,114.88 during intraday trading on January 20, the day of President Trump’s inauguration, but has plummeted since and went as low as $83,741.94 during today’s trading. That’s a 23.3 percent drop from the intraday record to today’s low, though it was back over $84,000 as of this writing. Bitcoin had been above $100,000 as recently as February 7, and was over $96,000 on Monday this week. Bitcoin’s drop is part of a wider rout in which over $800 billion of nominal value “has been wiped off global cryptocurrency markets in recent…

“Countries including Brazil, India, Israel, and the UAE are eminently capable of ramping up investments aimed at securing new ways to access increased computing capacity,” the Brookings Institute said. “Preventing companies in middle-tier countries from relying on the US to supply computing chips is a surefire way to push them into building non-US alliances that include stronger technology ties with China.” The rule could also complicate the global AI landscape in ways the US may not anticipate, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization, forecast last week. It could “breed resentment, not cooperation”…

WordPress software, Keller’s complaint explained, “has long been promised to be free and available to everyone forever.” This promise propelled WordPress’ popularity to, by its own estimates, “encompass more than 40 percent of all websites in the world,” his complaint said. In the 10 years Keller used WPE, he never had any issues accessing the WordPress ecosystem, and he thought WordPress had guaranteed that it would stay that way—especially since WPE’s use of the trademark appeared to be “expressly permitted on the WordPress foundation website.” But in the past few years, WPE’s business has substantially grown, Keller explained, attracting big…

More state bills are expected Morrow told Ars he is concerned about his bill facing opposition from Internet providers, though he noted Comcast already offers a low-cost plan in Vermont that “just needs to be advertised better.” Morrow said he modeled his bill on the New York law and that he is optimistic about its passage. “I am optimistic, but there is a lot going on right now, so it is certainly not guaranteed,” he said. More state bills are expected. “A number of states will consider stepping into the vacuum left by the FCC and the courts deciding that…

Chegg is suing Google parent Alphabet over claims the search engine’s artificial intelligence summary tool has hit its revenues, leading the US-listed educational technology group to weigh up a sale of the business. California-based Chegg, which provides study tools for students, filed the complaint on Monday claiming that Google AI Overviews, which presents users with summary answers to their queries, serves to keep users on Google’s own site. Chief executive Nathan Schultz said the search giant’s AI search changes had “unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees.” He added this was “materially…

“To broadband ISPs and their friends complaining about the New York law and proposed Massachusetts laws mandating a low-income broadband service offering: you asked for complete deregulation at the federal level and you got it. This is the consequence,” Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband, wrote today. Sohn called on ISPs to join with consumer advocates to support a federal law guaranteeing “limited but meaningful oversight over broadband… Until then, my colleagues and I will go to every state that will listen to ensure that Internet users are protected from anticompetitive and anticonsumer practices.” AT&T…

“The plaintiffs have made a clear showing that they are likely to suffer irreparable harm without injunctive relief,” the order said. “DOGE affiliates have been granted access to systems of record that contain some of the plaintiffs’ most sensitive data—Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, income and assets, citizenship status, and disability status—and their access to this trove of personal information is ongoing. There is no reason to believe their access to this information will end anytime soon because the government believes their access is appropriate.” The American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.8 million teachers and nurses,…

On Monday, Apple announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years. This is the “largest-ever” spending commitment that Apple has made in the US, supporting “a wide range of initiatives” focused on artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing, advanced research and development, and worker training. About 20,000 jobs will be created over those four years, Apple said, “of which the vast majority will be focused on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, and AI and machine learning.” Apple’s plans include building a 250,000-square-foot server-manufacturing facility in Houston—which will open in 2026 and “play a key…

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. Ten new electric vehicle battery factories are on track to go online this year in the United States. This includes large plants from global battery giants such as Panasonic, Samsung, and SK On, and automakers such as Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Stellantis, and Toyota. If they all open in 2025, the country’s EV battery manufacturing capacity is poised to grow to 421.5 gigawatt-hours per year, an increase of 90 percent from the end of 2024,…

In the 1990s, Lane, as NSF director, ushered in the requirement that, in addition to intellectual merit, reviewers should consider a grant proposal’s “broader impacts.” In general, he said, the aim was to encourage science that would benefit society. The broader impacts requirement remains today. Among other options, researchers can fulfill it by including a project component that increases the participation of women, underrepresented minorities in STEM, and people with disabilities. They can also meet the requirement by promoting science education or educator development, or by demonstrating that a project will build a more diverse workforce. The Senate committee turned…

On Friday, a Coinbase executive declared the “war against crypto” over—”at least as it applies to Coinbase.” According to Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to drop its lawsuit against the largest US cryptocurrency exchange as the agency shifts to embrace Donald Trump’s new approach to regulating cryptocurrency in the US. The SEC sued Coinbase in 2023, accusing Coinbase of “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency” and “failing to register the offer and sale of its crypto asset staking-as-a-service program.” “Since at…

Elon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowdsourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X. Community Notes are supposed to be added to posts to limit misinformation spread after a broad consensus is reached among X users with diverse viewpoints on what corrections are needed. But Musk now claims a “fix” is needed to prevent supposedly outside influencers from allegedly gaming the system. “Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media,” Musk wrote on X. “Working to fix this.” Musk’s…

You might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number “666” is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers. Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or “sightings,” depending on your persuasion—many of these have been faked), and he wants to make Bigfoot the “official cryptid” of the state. His bill notes that California already has many official symbols, including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word “Eureka” (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing…

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” Apple said. “Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.” For UK Apple users, some data can still be encrypted. iCloud Keychain and Health, iMessage, and FaceTime will remain end-to-end encrypted by default. But other iCloud services will not be encrypted, effective immediately, including iCloud Backup, iCloud Drive, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Safari Bookmarks, Siri Shortcuts, Voice memos, Wallet passes, and…

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a public inquiry into alleged censorship online, saying it wants “to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.” “Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was chosen by President Trump to lead the commission. “This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.” The FTC announcement said that…

The White House fact sheet said the goal of this provision is to ensure that the president and attorney general “interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.” John Bergmayer, legal director of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said Trump’s order is based on a “unitary executive” theory that “has made its way from the fringes of academia to the halls of power.” “In this latest Executive Order, the Trump regime purports to seize for itself the power Congress delegated to independent regulatory agencies, and as written, declares the White House’s interpretation of…

“As all lawyers know (or should know), it has been documented that AI sometimes invents case law, complete with fabricated citations, holdings, and even direct quotes,” his letter said. “As we previously instructed you, if you use AI to identify cases for citation, every case must be independently verified.” While Harry Surden, a law professor who studies AI legal issues, told Reuters that “lawyers have always made mistakes,” he also suggested that an increasing reliance on AI tools in the legal field requires lawyers to increase AI literacy to fully understand “the strengths and weaknesses of the tools.” (A July…

PC-manufacturer Acer has said that it plans to raise the prices of its PCs in the US by 10 percent, a direct response to the new 10 percent import tariff on Chinese goods that the Trump administration announced earlier this month. “We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” said Acer CEO Jason Chen in an interview with The Telegraph. “We think 10 percent probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.” These price increases won’t roll out right away, according to Chen—products shipped from China before the…

Poison pill another option OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and created an additional “capped profit” entity in 2019. Any profit beyond the cap is returned to the nonprofit, OpenAI says. That would change with OpenAI’s planned shift to a for-profit public benefit corporation this year. The nonprofit arm would retain shares in the for-profit arm and “pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.” Before making his offer, Musk asked a federal court to block OpenAI’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit. The Financial Times article suggests that new voting rights for the nonprofit…

“The executive does not have the authority to change policies simply because they don’t like them,” Blanchard said at a virtual briefing for reporters on Friday. “Congress makes the law, not the president and certainly not Elon Musk,” she said, referring to the billionaire donor whom Trump has deputized to cut government spending. Feeling the freeze Across the country, the spending freeze has thrown into chaos the environmental, resilience and community improvement programs that Congress authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among the efforts on hold: clean drinking water, air monitoring, hurricane recovery and electric school buses. “Real…

A Verizon or AT&T customer can use T-Mobile Starlink by activating a second eSIM on their device. “They will technically be assigned a T-Mobile number, but that’s just to provision the device to access the constellation. And then the second eSIM can connect whenever the user loses coverage,” a T-Mobile spokesperson told Mobile World Live. T-Mobile suggested that international roaming will be available with other carriers that also partner with Starlink. T-Mobile said a “growing alliance” of telcos “aims to provide reciprocal roaming for all participating carriers.” Participating carriers so far include ones in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Chile,…

Howells told The Times that he envisions cleaning up the site and turning it into a park, but the council’s analysis seems to suggest that wouldn’t be a suitable use. Additionally, the council noted that there aren’t viable alternative sites for the solar farm, which, therefore, must be built on the landfill site or else potentially set back the city’s climate goals. If Howells can’t turn the landfill into a park, he suggested that he could simply clear it out so that it can be used as a landfill again. But the Newport council does not appear to be entertaining…

In December, MDOT issued a new call for proposals for building up to 29 additional highway charging stations, expecting stable federal support. At the time, senior MDOT officials told Inside Climate News they were confident in the program’s security since it was authorized under law. But Trump’s funding pause has upended those plans. “The Maryland Department of Transportation is moving forward with its obligated NEVI funding and is awaiting new guidance from the U.S. Department of Transportation to advance future funding rounds,” said Carter Elliott, a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore, in an emailed statement. The Moore administration reaffirmed its…

Carpenter, for his part, insisted that he was never willing to give the flash drive to Palmer or to show him its contents. He told Olson in his letter that he merely “took a quick look at the flash drive,” and after finding “content on the flash drive [that] was clearly personal in nature,” he made a “complete re-format of the flash drive.” And yet somehow, people around town knew about the whole situation and even appeared to possess the pictures. Olson sued both Carpenter and Palmer for unlawful search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The courts rule The…

“An official website of the United States government,” reads small text atop the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website that Elon Musk’s team started populating this week with information on agency cuts. But you apparently don’t have to work in government to push updates to the site. A couple of prankster web developers told 404 Media that they separately discovered how “insecure” the DOGE site was, seemingly pulling from a “database that can be edited by anyone.” One coder couldn’t resist and pushed two updates that, as of this writing, remained on the DOGE site. “This is a joke of…

Condé Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement” by using news articles to train its large language model. “Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence (‘AI’) service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing,” said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces…

However, Ranjan found that Tiger lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. It is not clear that Tiger’s symptoms were caused by working with lead-covered cables, and everyone is exposed to lead to some degree, the ruling said. “Given the naturally occurring lead levels in the environment and in our bodies, and the fact that individuals exposed to lead may not develop any lead-related conditions or symptoms at all, mere exposure to lead—and the mere presence of lead in one’s body—isn’t a concrete injury,” Ranjan wrote. Verizon said in September 2023 that at sites described in the Wall Street Journal article,…

All of these plaintiffs had personal data “improperly disclosed to DOGE representatives in a manner completely divorced from the legitimate purposes for which it was maintained and in violation of their privacy rights,” the lawsuit said. The plaintiffs are said to be “concerned that the breach may well result in serious personal, social, and economic harm, from being targeted for harassment and threats to doxxing, swatting, and identity theft.” Military veterans worried about data access Plaintiff Donald Martinez of Colorado served in Iraq for the Army and now receives Social Security disability insurance and other government benefits. “Especially because of…

NHTSA has not directly confirmed if the dataset is being changed to remove this data or if other “minor corrections” were needed. More will be revealed once the dataset comes back online, supposedly within the next few days. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst for iSeeCars.com, which offers a car search engine and uses FARS data to help buyers steer clear of the “most dangerous” vehicles on US roads, told Ars that NHTSA’s public silence on the missing data means industry stakeholders don’t really know right now how FARS data might be changing. “We can only speculate regarding NHTSA curtailing access…

“Irrational removal” In his opinion, Bates cited the declarations from Stephanie Liou, a physician who works with low-income immigrant families and an underserved high school in Chicago, and Reshma Ramachandran, a primary care provider who relies on CDC guidance on contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases in her practice. Both are board members of Doctors for America. Liou testified that the removal of resources from the CDC’s website hindered her response to a chlamydia outbreak at the high school where she worked. Ramachandran, meanwhile, testified that she was left scrambling to find alternative resources for patients during time-limited appointments. Doctors for…

However, it could bode well that all the authors involved in the nature report were publicly nominated and that the questions their report answers were chosen following several rounds of public comment periods. If an already engaged portion of the public is genuinely concerned about how the loss of nature impacts their lives, the findings could perhaps be eagerly met, with or without the US government’s stamp of approval. The public may even be seeking more clarity outside of government by the time the report is released, as Jenks’ and Dewey’s analysis suggested that Trump’s executive orders seem to contradict…

Regardless of what else they might be doing, the indirect costs pay for various critical campus services, including at research hospitals. Suddenly having that amount slashed would create a major budgetary shortfall that will be hard to cover without shutting programs down. The resulting damage to research campuses in their states was one of the harms cited by the states that joined the suit as part of their effort to establish standing. The other was the harm caused by the general slowdown in biomedical research that the policy will trigger, which the states argue will delay the availability of treatments…

Separately, a CenturyLink customer named David Stromberg in Bellevue, Washington, told us that his phone service had been out since September 16. He repeatedly scheduled repair appointments, but the scheduled days went by with no repairs. “Every couple weeks, they do this and the tech doesn’t show up,” he said. “Quick” fixes As far as we can tell, there weren’t any complex technical problems preventing CenturyLink from ending these outages. Once the public relations department heard from Ars, CenturyLink sent technicians to each area, and the customers had their services restored. On the afternoon of January 24, we contacted CenturyLink…

Canada has already threatened to retaliate by imposing 35 percent tariffs on US goods, although that could change, depending on the outcome of a meeting this afternoon between Trump and outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Currently, there’s seemingly tension between the Trump administration and Trudeau, however. On Saturday, Trudeau called Trump’s rationale for imposing tariffs on Canada—which Trudeau noted is responsible for less than 1 percent of drugs flowing into the US—”the flimsiest pretext possible,” NBC News reported. This morning, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, reportedly criticized Canada’s response on CNBC. While Mexico is…

Republicans and ISPs have objected to the NTIA’s enforcement of the legal mandate that Internet providers receiving federal funds offer at least one “low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers.” Although this requirement is part of the law that created BEAD, Republicans and ISPs say the Biden NTIA went too far when it urged states to set a fixed rate of $30 per month for the low-cost service option. At the Federalist Society event, Roth said that “requiring states to choose a state-wide, low-income rate is just one of the ways they’ve imposed extralegal requirements. There’s also climate change regs,…

The United Kingdom issued a secret order requiring Apple to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data, The Washington Post reported today, citing people familiar with the matter. UK security officials “demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud,” the report said. “The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies.” Apple and many privacy advocates have repeatedly criticized…

Microsoft declined to comment, but allegedly the DOGE employees are “using AI software accessed through Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to pore over every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses,” one source told the Post. The lawsuit noted that several DOE employees have tried to block DOGE’s access by raising red flags up the command chain, but DOE leadership directly instructed lower-level employees to grant DOGE access, the same source alleged. A big concern is that DOGE funneling education data into AI systems will cause sensitive data to be stored in a…

Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. “On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers,” the FCC said. The calls used an artificial voice that said, “Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with…

Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was “illegal,” authors alleged. And Bashlykov’s warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024. Meta allegedly concealed seeding Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as…

But while the national security concerns require a solution, Curtis said his priority is maintaining “a really productive relationship with China.” He pushed Lutnick to address how he plans to hold DeepSeek—and the CCP in general—accountable for national security concerns amid ongoing tensions with China. Lutnick suggested that if he is confirmed (which appears likely), he will pursue a policy of “reciprocity,” where China can “expect to be treated by” the US exactly how China treats the US. Currently, China is treating the US “horribly,” Lutnick said, and his “first step” as Commerce Secretary will be to “repeat endlessly” that…

Elez reports to Tom Krause, another Treasury Department special government employee, but Krause doesn’t have direct access to the payment system, Humphreys told the judge. Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Group and is also viewed as a Musk ally. But when the judge pressed Humphreys on Musk’s alleged access, the DOJ lawyer only said that as far as the defense team was aware, Musk did not have access. Further, Humphreys explained that DOGE—which functions as part of the executive office—does not have access, to the DOJ’s knowledge. As he explained it, DOGE sets the high-level priorities that these…

It’s been a confusing 24 hours at the US Postal Service (USPS) after the Trump administration imposed new tariffs on China that eliminated a loophole allowing low-value Chinese packages into the US duty-free. On Tuesday, the USPS abruptly stopped accepting all inbound packages from Hong Kong and China. This briefly halted personal shipments from China, as well as online deliveries from China-based companies. That included blocking orders from online marketplaces increasingly popular with Americans like Alibaba, Temu, and Shein, as well as China-based retailers selling cheap goods on Amazon. But by Wednesday morning, the USPS reversed the temporary policy, posting…