An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: TikTok users would still risk having personal data exposed to hacking and espionage by China even if the Biden administration forges a security agreement designed to spare the video platform from a total US ban. That's the conclusion of former national security officials and other experts as the Justice Department reviews an accord that would keep the popular video-streaming app, which is owned by China's ByteDance, accessible to its millions of US users. TikTok has been under US scrutiny since 2019 over concerns that Chinese actors might tap those users' information for espionage or other harmful purposes. "They built the whole system in China," said Stewart Baker, a national security lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. "Unless they're going to rebuild the system in the United States at great expense, sooner or later, when something goes wrong, there's going to turn out to be only one engineer who knows how to fix it. And he or she is likely to be in China." This analysis of the agreement is based on interviews with former national security officials, lawyers who have worked on similar deals and experts who have studied data security, social media platforms and telecommunications companies. There's no indication a decision has been made. TikTok is routing all its US user traffic through servers maintained by Oracle and the database giant is auditing the app's algorithms. Still, additional restrictions on how US user data is stored and accessed will be necessary -- and might not resolve US security concerns no matter how strong a deal looks on paper, the experts said. The experts' skepticism is shared by Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he's aware of the conversations around TikTok and couldn't give details. Nonetheless, he said the company has "a big mountain to climb with me to prove the case that it can really be safe." Warner said China has a bad track record on protecting users' privacy. "They've shown repeatedly the ability to create this surveillance state that ought to scare the dickens out of all of us." He added that it's much harder today to wall off TikTok's data technically or ban it outright than it was five or six years ago as the popularity of the app has surged. "The burden of proof that you can really segregate American data, particularly if the code is still being written in China -- that would be a tough case to make." Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, said that while the company would not comment on the specifics of its discussions with the US government, "We are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns." Oberwetter said that while some employees based in China would have access to public data posted by users, they would not have access to private user information, and their use of the public data -- including videos and comments -- would be very limited.

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Prime Minister Liz Truss announced on Thursday that she would resign, just days after her new finance minister reversed virtually all of her planned tax cuts, sweeping away a free-market fiscal agenda that promised a radical policy shift for Britain but instead plunged the country into weeks of economic and political turmoil. From a report: "I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected," she said in brief remarks outside Downing Street. She said she had informed King Charles III that she was resigning as leader of the Conservative Party, and that she would remain leader and prime minister until a successor is chosen within a week. Her departure, after only six weeks in office, was a shockingly rapid fall from power, and throws her Conservative Party into further disarray, following the messy departure of Boris Johnson from Downing Street over the summer. The announcement came minutes after Ms. Truss held an unscheduled meeting with Graham Brady, the head of a group of Conservative lawmakers known as the 1922 Committee that plays an influential role in selecting the party leader. Ms. Truss's political viability had become tenuous after her proposals for broad unfunded tax cuts roiled markets and sent the pound's value plunging. She suffered a grave blow on Monday, when her newly appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said that the government was undoing the last vestiges of Ms. Truss's tax proposals. Financial Times adds: She will go down in history as Britain's shortest-serving prime minister, her government having collapsed in the wake of its failed "mini" budget of last month, which contained $50.6bn of unfunded tax cuts and triggered turmoil in the sterling and gilt markets.

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Intel is being taken to court in Massachusetts over its proposals to build a distribution and logistics warehouse on the site of its defunct R&D offices and chip factory that closed in 2013. The Register reports: At the heart of this showdown are claims by townsfolk that Intel has not revealed to the surrounding community what exactly it intends to build, and that the land is supposed to be used for industry and manufacturing yet it appears a huge commercial warehouse will be built instead. The x86 giant has spent years trying to figure out what to do the campus -- whether to salvage it for production or research, or to sell it to a developer. It came close to securing a buyer earlier this year. The site in question is at 75 Reed Road in Hudson, Massachusetts, which holds a special place in computer history. It was the home of Digital Equipment Corporation's R&D and chip manufacturing before Intel took over the land and facility following a patent battle with DEC in 1997. Intel continued R&D at the site and kept it producing chips until it threw the towel in, leaving the location open to options. Ultimately, the site was up for sale with Intel planning to demolish the 40-year-old main buildings while offloading the land. However, the chipmaker, perhaps in response to a revitalization of American semiconductor manufacturing funded by CHIPS Act government subsidies, decided it wants to remake the property into a distribution and logistics and storage facility -- something that might sound innocuous but has the nearby community up in arms. Further, Intel doesn't have to use the redeveloped site for its own purposes at all: it can, and probably will, market the facility to a future tenant. And it can breeze through planning law requirements without having to reveal the full scope of traffic, pollution, and other impacts due to its status as a "logistics" facility. And that is what really has the locals enraged. Crucially, the site is adjacent to two retirement villages with 286 units and a childcare center. As a former R&D and manufacturing facility, neighboring communities understood the scope of traffic and resource impacts of such a factory. [...] The even bigger problem is that this represents another example of a large tech company wheedling its way through local restrictions to build community-damning facilities, said Michael Pill, the lawyer representing both retirement condo facilities and the childcare center in their legal challenge [PDF] to Intel. "What Intel has done here is something deeply unpleasant that grows out of its desire to dump the property without any thought to the community where they were once an important pillar of manufacturing," Pill told The Register. "There is a pattern of development in which big companies come sailing into towns, saying they'll build million-plus square foot facilities with hundreds of loading docks and all the planning is done on spec." In response to the lawsuit, Intel's lawyers said in a filing that the proposed changes are subject to approval by the town: "Because the proposed redevelopment is a permitted use in the zoning district, the project will require site plan review from the town of Hudson planning board."

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Transparent wood promises to be an environmentally friendly substitute for glass or plastic used for making car windshields, see-through packaging and biomedical devices, according to a study. Phys.Org reports: Originally fabricated in 1992 by German scientist Siegfried Fink and since improved upon by other researchers, transparent wood is made by removing the lignin content in wood and replacing it with transparent, plastic materials. Lignin is a naturally occurring biopolymer which supports plant tissue; unlike plastics it can biodegrade and is non-toxic. According to the authors, production of transparent wood using sodium chlorite to remove lignin from wood and infiltrating it with epoxy infiltration had far less environmental impacts than commonly used methods that rely on the use of methacrylate polymer. The end-of-life analysis suggests that, transparent wood is less environmentally friendly than glass but is still better than producing polyethylene, indicating the need to improve the production technology, the authors said. "Transparent wood is mostly developed using thin slices of wood, and has good strength as that of regular wood but is lighter in weight. The scope for imparting multiple and advanced properties through the incorporation of specialized materials makes it a unique bio-based substrate for versatile applications," said Anish M. Chathoth, an assistant professor at Kerala Agricultural University's College of Forestry, in India.

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Last week, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. "Officials suggested that a combination of climate change and some kind of crustacean health crisis might be to blame," reports TIME Magazine. "But that's only part of the story, says Wes Jones, the Fisheries, Research, and Development Director for the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation." The most immediate cause of their death: "a mass cannibalism frenzy." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: To understand what really happened in the icy depths of Alaska's Bering Sea this year means going back to 2017, when fishermen started reporting an unprecedented population explosion of juvenile snow crabs -- what is called, in crabber speak, a "recruit." The population boom continued into 2018 and 2019, creating what Jones says was the largest recruitment event on record. Jones is something of a local piscine historian. He can quote fishery statistics going back 30 years in the same way a Red Sox fan might quote batting averages. At the time the young crabs were too small for a legal harvest -- juvenile snow crabs take four to five years to mature -- but there were enough of them for seasoned crabbers to start the count-down to huge hauls starting in 2022. In the meantime, Bering Sea temperatures, which usually hover around freezing, were on the rise, spiking several degrees between 2017-2019. Unlike mammals, who use less energy when temperatures rise, cold-water fish and crustaceans speed up their metabolism. The faster the crabs grow and expend energy, the faster they have to replace it, says Jones. Some of the crabs may have headed north into cooler Russian waters, but most seem to have stayed put. "All of a sudden you had this huge number of little crabs coming up, eating themselves out of house and home," says Jones. "Then the water warmed, which meant they had to eat more." It was a double whammy, he says, and the results were inevitable for a hungry, omnivorous species that has run out of its usual food source: "They basically cannibalized each other."

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Meet Crimson Storage, the world's largest single-phase battery, which is now live in the California desert. Electrek reports: Crimson Storage is also the second-largest energy storage project currently in operation of any configuration. The 350 megawatt (MW)/1400 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery storage project, which sits on on 2,000 acres west of Blythe in Riverside County, broke ground in 2021. Canadian Solar oversaw construction and provided the battery energy storage systems, and Axium Infrastructure and solar and storage developer Recurrent Energy will be Crimson Storage's long-term owners. Residential homes are usually served by a single-phase power supply, and this project, on average, is expected to store and dispatch enough electricity to power more than 47,000 homes each year. Crimson Storage holds two long-term contracts with local utilities: a 200 MW/800 MWh 14-year and 10-month contract with Southern California Edison, and a 150 MW/ 600MWh 15-year contract with Pacific Gas and Electric.

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The Apple TV HD (also called the fourth-generation Apple TV) is no longer available in Apple's US store after the addition of an updated Apple TV 4K yesterday. Ars Technica reports: The Apple TV HD debuted in 2015, and it was the first Apple TV to run tvOS, with its own App Store. Up until its discontinuation this week, it included a now-aging A8 chip (the one from the iPhone 6). By contrast, the new Apple TV 4K has the A15 chip found in the iPhone 13; it's dramatically faster. The 2015 model was also the first to introduce Apple's controversial touch-based remote, which was radically redesigned in response to user feedback in recent years. Apple introduced the first iteration of the Apple TV 4K in 2017, but the company continued to offer the Apple TV HD alongside it in its store as a cheaper option compared to the 4K model, which currently starts at $129 -- still much more expensive than the dongles and set-top boxes most people use to stream to their TVs. At present, you can't even find the Apple TV HD in Apple's refurbished store, so this appears to mark the end-of-life for the non-4K Apple TV. It's not too surprising, though; 4K TVs have been a hit. More than half of United States households had a 4K TV as of last summer, and the percentage has been growing substantially year over year.

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BMW says it will make batteries for its electric vehicles at a factory in South Carolina in the latest move by a major automaker to localize EV production in the United States. The Verge reports: The German company plans to invest $1.7 billion in the US, including $1 billion for EV production at BMW's Spartanburg plant and $700 million for a new battery-assembly facility in nearby Woodruff. By 2030, BMW says it will have at least six electric models in production in the US. Establishing a US-based EV plant will allow BMW's upcoming line of plug-in vehicles to qualify for the federal EV tax credit. BMW said it is partnering with Envision AESC on its plans for a dedicated battery plant in South Carolina. The Japan-based energy company will produce round lithium-ion battery cells specifically designed for BMW's next-gen EV platform. When it's completed, the battery factory will have an annual capacity of 30 gigawatt-hours (GWh). BMW has also announced plans to build EV production facilities in Europe and China to meet demand. The company currently has several electric models for sale, including the i4 sedan and iX SUV.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: [AT&T] was fined $23 million for bribing a state lawmaker's ally in order to secure a key policy vote. According to a deferred prosecution agreement, the vote in question was a 2017 vote on Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) legislation that would have eliminated AT&T's obligation to continue to provide landline service to all state residents. AT&T of course wants to be free of having to provide dated landlines. Consumer groups are quick to note many of those landlines are used by old people who often can't afford (or don't understand how to use) cellular service, leaving them cut off from essential services and 911. They were also paid for on the back of millions in taxpayer subsidies, suggesting that taxpayers should have some say in the matter. Instead of just making its case, AT&T used an intermediary lobbying firm to deliver $22,500 to former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan to influence his vote: "AT&T allegedly used a lobbying firm as an intermediary to make the payment and disguise its true purpose. US Attorney John Lausch's office filed a one-count criminal information in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, charging AT&T Illinois with using an interstate facility to promote legislative misconduct. Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza was indicted on five charges as a result of the same investigation."

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Former Celsius executive Aaron Iovine has joined JPMorgan Chase & Co as executive director of digital assets regulatory policy, according to his LinkedIn profile, days after the bank's Chief Executive Jamie Dimon blasted cryptocurrencies as fraud and decentralized ponzi schemes. Reuters reports: Iovine was head of policy and regulatory affairs at bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, which he left in September after an eight-month stint. Celsius filed for bankruptcy in July, as risk assets including bitcoin were crushed by monetary policy tightening. Crypto markets were also squeezed by the collapse of major tokens TerraUSD and Luna in May. Mr. Iovine said he has "focused on developing policies that foster responsible innovation while emphasizing consumer protection and regulatory oversight" and has worked on issues related to crypto licensing, anti-money-laundering requirements and cybersecurity standards.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot -- a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet -- has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work -- pulled from the training data -- to suggest code snippets to users? Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements. Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there's been a strong response to news of his investigation. "Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source," he wrote. "We're hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found -- that it's not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. "But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author's copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We're looking at all these issues." GitHub's documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain "undesirable patterns" and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report. Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. "What Microsoft's GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable," he said. "Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses." Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, "AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve." He added: "An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms -- or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?"

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Waymo, Alphabet's driverless-vehicle unit, plans to expand its robo-taxi service to Los Angeles, the third region where it will be offered. From a report: The company will follow the same playbook for the service, called Waymo One, that it has elsewhere, according to an announcement Wednesday. Local employees will try the program first, followed by so-called "trusted testers" who sign nondisclosure agreements, followed by unaccompanied, paying members of the public. Waymo One is already open to the general public in the Phoenix metro area and is in the advanced testing stage in the more crowded downtown areas of Phoenix and San Francisco.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Torontonians now have another way to get cannabis without having to wait too long for it to show up, as Uber Eats is offering deliveries in the city starting today. Uber Eats has teamed up with cannabis marketplace Leafly to offer residents swift weed delivery from local, licensed retailers. Uber Eats claims this is a world first for a "a major third-party delivery platform." Users in Ontario have been available to order weed through the app since last November, but until now items were only available for pickup. If you're in the city and feel the need to take the edge off, you can select the cannabis category or search for one of the retailers (Hidden Leaf Cannabis, Minerva Cannabis and Shivaa's Rose are the first three to sign up). You'll receive a warning that you need to be of legal age, which is 19 in Ontario, to view the products. After you place an order and the retailer confirms it, one of the retailer's own licensed "budtenders" will deliver your items. As is the case with alcohol orders, the delivery person will verify your age and level of sobriety before handing over the goods.

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What secrets does the inside of the Pixel Watch hold? iFixit -- Google's new repair partner -- tore down Google's first self-branded smartwatch to see exactly how this thing was put together. From a report: Like us, iFixit came away with strong "first generation" vibes. The good news is that it does not look impossible to replace the display. The usual bit of heat and prying pops the top off, but the less-than-ideal layout means you'll have to remove the battery, too, since the connector is buried under the soft battery pouch. A display replacement is a real concern here, considering the entire top half of the watch is glass. If you bang the watch against something or drop it, there's a good chance you'll shatter the all-glass corners. [...] iFixit took a good amount of time in the four-minute video to call Google's internal construction "ugly." After cracking open the front, iFixit's Sam Goldheart noted, "Right away, it's obvious we're in Android country. The silver battery pouch and Kapton tape are almost a shock after all our Apple teardowns," later adding that the welds holding together the haptic feedback buzzer were "kind of ugly."

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A Russian lawmaker on Wednesday urged state institutions to stop using WhatsApp messenger and the industry ministry sought to promote domestically produced software as Russia tries to wean itself off Western technology. From a report: WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms was found guilty of "extremist activity" in Russia in March and later added to financial monitoring agency Rosfinmonitoring's list of "terrorists and extremists." Meta's lawyer in court has said Meta was not carrying out extremist activity and was against Russophobia. Russia blocked Meta's Facebook and Instagram in March, objecting to restrictions on Russian media and some posts permitted by users in Ukraine. Widely used among Russians, WhatsApp has always remained available, but Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament's committee on information policy, on Wednesday said he personally would be deleting the app and recommended a wider ban.

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SpaceX has introduced Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it's installed in. From a report: "Starlink can deliver up to 350Mbps to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable Internet at the same time," the company said. "With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities." Starlink said the airplane service will use a "low-profile Aero Terminal" with "an electronically steered phased array antenna, which enables new levels of reliability, redundancy and performance." It has a "simplified design" that "enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks," Starlink says. The service hardware also includes two wireless access points. There's a one-time hardware cost of $150,000, not including installation. "The installation can be performed by your current maintenance organization or Starlink can recommend experienced and qualified installers," Starlink says.

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Microsoft is building an Xbox mobile store to directly offer games on mobile devices, challenging Apple and Google. The software giant first hinted at a "next-generation" store it would "build for games" earlier this year but has now quietly revealed details of the plans in filings with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). From a report: The CMA is currently investigating the $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition and has asked Microsoft for context. In its filings, Microsoft says a big motivation for the purchase is to help build out its mobile gaming presence. Its plans for this space apparently include creating an Xbox mobile gaming platform and store. Here's what the company says in the filings: "The transaction will improve Microsoft's ability to create a next generation game store which operates across a range of devices, including mobile as a result of the addition of Activision Blizzard's content. Building on Activision Blizzard's existing communities of gamers, Xbox will seek to scale the Xbox Store to mobile, attracting gamers to a new Xbox Mobile Platform. Shifting consumers away from the Google Play Store and App Store on mobile devices will, however, require a major shift in consumer behavior. Microsoft hopes that by offering well-known and popular content, gamers will be more inclined to try something new."

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Uber is launching a dedicated advertising arm in a push to cash in on a captive audience and tap the higher-margin revenue stream. From a report: The new division encompasses ad offerings on Uber's ride-hailing and food-delivery apps. On Uber Eats, for example, brands will be able to pay for sponsored listings, prominent placing on the homepage or checkout, and featured menu items. Uber also rolled out Journey Ads, a new service that runs advertisements for ride-share users while they wait for their driver and during their trip. More than 40 brands have partnered with Uber to run Journey Ads, including NBCUniversal and Heineken NV, Uber said in a statement on Wednesday. The move expands Uber's prior efforts to monetize an audience of 122 million monthly active users.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: We've said it before, and we'll say it again: USB-C is confusing. A USB-C port or cable can support a range of speeds, power capabilities, and other features, depending on the specification used. Today, USB-C can support various data transfer rates, from 0.48Gbps (USB 2.0) all the way to 40Gbps (USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4). Things are only about to intensify, as today the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) published the USB4 Version 2.0 spec. It adds optional support for 80Gbps bidirectional bandwidth as well as the optional ability to send or receive data at up to 120Gbps. The USB-IF first gave us word of USB4 Version 2.0 in September, saying it would support a data transfer rate of up to 80Gbps in either direction (40Gbps per lane, four lanes total), thanks to a new physical layer architecture (PHY) based on PAM-3 signal encoding. For what it's worth, Intel also demoed Thunderbolt at 80Gbps but hasn't released an official spec yet. USB4 Version 2.0 offers a nice potential bump over the original USB4 spec, which introduced optional support for 40Gbps operation. You just have to be sure to check the spec sheets to know what sort of performance you're getting. Once USB4 Version 2.0 products come out, you'll be able to hit 80Gbps with USB-C passive cables that currently operate at 40Gbps, but you'll have to buy a new cable if you want a longer, active 80Gbps.

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