Prosecutors in Taiwan issued an arrest warrant [non-paywalled source] for the chief executive officer of the Chinese smartphone company OnePlus, stepping up the island's efforts to block China's tech players from recruiting Taiwanese talent. From a report: The Shilin district prosecutors office issued the warrant for CEO and co-founder Pete Lau and indicted two Taiwanese citizens who worked for him, according to an indictment by the office. OnePlus, a niche player whose phones run on a customized version of Android, is suspected of illegally recruiting more than 70 engineers in Taiwan. The autonomous territory has stepped up its efforts to stop Chinese companies from raiding workers, who are often coveted because of their technical knowledge and experience. The Taiwanese officials put such limitations in place because they say recruiting from the semiconductor sector and other tech operations could jeopardize national security.

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Electric vehicles are more likely to be fixed at the roadside than petrol or diesel cars despite public fears to the contrary, according to new breakdown data from the AA. From a report: New research from Autotrader and the AA, carried out in December among more than 2,000 consumers, found 44% of respondents are concerned about the risk of breakdowns or roadside repairs when considering switching to an EV. Concern was highest among drivers aged 75 and over, with 56% saying they were worried. The North East recorded the highest level of concern at 52%, while women were slightly more likely to express reservations than men - 46% versus 41%. Even so, AA call-out data indicates EVs are more likely to be successfully repaired at the roadside than a 12-volt battery in a petrol or diesel car. Separately, industry data continues to indicate growing readiness to service electric cars. A recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) survey of aftermarket businesses found 81.2% of UK workshops are already equipped to work on EVs, according to the campaign partners.

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Analyst Ben Thompson, sharing the experience of watching an NBA game on the Vision Pro: When I started the broadcast [on Apple Vision Pro's immersive view of the Bucks vs. Lakers NBA game] I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste. Here's the thing that you don't seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it's an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it's worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse. [...] I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing. The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop [...]

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Mercedes-Benz is pausing the roll-out of Drive Pilot, an "eyes off" conditionally automated driving feature that was available in Europe and the US. From a report: As first reported by German publication Handelsblatt, the revised S-Class will not have the Level 3 system when it arrives at the end of this month. Mercedes was one of the first automakers to offer a Level 3 driving system to its customers when it launched Drive Pilot with the electric EQS sedan and the gas-powered S-Class in the fall of 2023. At up to 40mph in traffic jam situations on highways, Drive Pilot provided hands-free, eyes-off driving that allows the driver to look away from the road at something else, like a game or a movie. It was big leap up from hands-free Level 2 systems -- Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) included -- which still require the driver to be in full control, looking ahead and paying attention while the system is active. But now Mercedes says it is temporarily scrapping the feature, citing middling demand and the high production costs of developing the technology.

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The Federal Communications Commission is letting Verizon lock phones to its network for longer periods, eliminating a requirement to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. From a report: The change will make it harder for people to switch from Verizon to other carriers. The FCC today granted Verizon's petition for a waiver of the 60-day unlocking requirement. While the waiver is in effect, Verizon only has to comply with the CTIA trade group's voluntary unlocking policy. The CTIA policy calls for unlocking prepaid mobile devices one year after activation, while devices on postpaid plans can be unlocked after a contract, device financing plan, or early termination fee is paid. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another carrier's network. While Verizon was previously required to unlock phones automatically after 60 days, the CTIA code says carriers only have to unlock phones "upon request" from consumers. The FCC said the Verizon waiver will remain in effect until the agency "decides on an appropriate industry-wide approach for the unlocking of handsets."

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America's largest power-grid operator, PJM, which delivers electricity to 67 million people across a 13-state region from New Jersey to Kentucky, is approaching a supply crisis as AI data centers in Northern Virginia's "Data Center Alley" consume electricity at an unprecedented rate. The nonprofit expects demand to grow by 4.8% annually over the next decade. Mark Christie, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said the reliability risk that was once "on the horizon" is now "across the street." Dominion Energy, the utility serving parts of Virginia, has received requests from data-center developers requiring more than 40 gigawatts of electricity -- roughly twice its Virginia network capacity at the end of 2024. Older power plants are going out of service faster than new ones can be built, and the grid could max out during periods of high demand, forcing rolling blackouts during heat waves or deep freezes. In November, efforts to establish new rules for data centers stalled when PJM, tech companies, power suppliers and utilities couldn't agree on a plan. Monitoring Analytics, the firm that oversees the market, warned that unless data centers bring their own power supply, "PJM will be in the position of allocating blackouts rather than ensuring reliability."

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Python Software Foundation: We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year partnership with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to contribute a landmark total of $1.5 million to support the foundation's work, with an emphasis on Python ecosystem security. This investment will enable the PSF to make crucial security advances to CPython and the Python Package Index (PyPI) benefiting all users, and it will also sustain the foundation's core work supporting the Python language, ecosystem, and global community. Anthropic's funds will enable the PSF to make progress on our security roadmap, including work designed to protect millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. Planned projects include creating new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, improving on the current process of reactive-only review. We intend to create a new dataset of known malware that will allow us to design these novel tools, relying on capability analysis. One of the advantages of this project is that we expect the outputs we develop to be transferable to all open source package repositories. As a result, this work has the potential to ultimately improve security across multiple open source ecosystems, starting with the Python ecosystem.

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Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, died Tuesday. He was 68. From a report: His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. "I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer," he said. In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, "Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain." Sprung from Adams' days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million. Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.

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JPMorgan Chase's chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum pushed back hard on Tuesday against President Donald Trump's proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates, calling the measure "very bad for consumers" and "very bad for the economy" during a call with reporters. The proposed one-year cap, which Trump has said he wants implemented starting January 20, sent banking stocks tumbling last week and prompted financial groups to mount a defense. Barnum said JPMorgan would have to "change the business significantly and cut back" if the cap takes effect, adding that he believes the policy would produce "the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants." Wall Street analysts remain skeptical the proposal will survive, noting that only Congress can enact such a measure. The average credit card interest rate in November stood at 20.97%, according to Federal Reserve data. Financial industry groups have countered that a 10% cap would result in millions of American households and small businesses losing access to credit entirely. A banking industry body called the potential impact "devastating."

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Moxie Marlinspike, the engineer who created Signal Messenger and set a new standard for private communications, is now trialing Confer, an open source AI assistant designed to make user data unreadable to platform operators, hackers, and law enforcement alike. Confer relies on two core technologies: passkeys that generate a 32-byte encryption keypair stored only on user devices, and trusted execution environments on servers that prevent even administrators from accessing data. The code is open source and cryptographically verifiable through remote attestation and transparency logs. Marlinspike likens current AI interactions to confessing into a "data lake." A court order last May required OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT user logs including deleted chats, and CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that even psychotherapy sessions on the platform may not stay private.

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Meta has begun laying off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division as the company redirects resources away from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and smartphone features. The cuts amount to roughly 10% of Reality Labs' 15,000-person workforce, according to an internal post from CTO Andrew Bosworth reviewed by Bloomberg. Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021, and top executives discussed budget cuts as deep as 30% for the metaverse group in December. Meta plans to continue developing its Horizon metaverse platform, but the focus will shift almost exclusively to mobile phones rather than the fully immersive VR headsets the company originally envisioned.

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Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a "community first" initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clear departure from past practices; Microsoft has previously accepted tax abatements for data centers in Ohio and Iowa. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company has been developing the initiative since September. Residential power prices in data center hubs like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio jumped 12-16% over the past year, faster than the U.S. average. Three Democratic senators launched an investigation last month into whether tech giants are raising residential bills. Microsoft also pledged a 40% improvement in water efficiency by 2030 and committed to replenishing more water than it uses in each district where it operates.

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22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing. Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race. And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".

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Microsoft has abruptly retired the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, a free platform that IT administrators have relied on to deploy Windows operating systems and applications for more than two decades. The retirement, reports the Register, came with "immediate" notice, meaning no more fixes, support, security patches, or updates, and the download packages may be removed from official distribution channels.

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Norway has released its December and full year 2025 automotive sales numbers and the world's leading EV haven has broken records once again. The country had previously targeted an end to fossil car sales in 2025, and it basically got there. From a report: In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 -- a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time -- but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go. At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back. But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don't act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal -- which means Europe's former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable)

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that -- by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain. These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily on Thursday. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the dunes and creates the perfect foundation for future plant growth. This is the first time in human history that microbes are being used on a massive scale to reshape natural landscapes. As the "Great Green Wall" -- China's massive multi-decade initiative to plant trees and fight desertification -- expands to include efforts in Africa and Mongolia, the unprecedented geoengineering technology could one day transform the face of our planet. This artificial "crusting" technique was developed by scientists at a research station in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, located in northwest China on the edge of the Tengger Desert, according to China Science Daily.

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60 years ago today, ABC aired the first episode of its live-action Batman television series, introducing Adam West as the deadpan Caped Crusader in what became a pop culture phenomenon blending high-camp humor and cliffhanger thrills. The mid-season replacement ran for 120 episodes over three seasons before ending in March 1968.

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Doctors say they have achieved the previously impossible -- restoring sight and preventing blindness in people with a rare but dangerous eye conditon called hypotony. From a report: Moorfields hospital in London is the world's first dedicated clinic for the disorder and seven out of eight patients given the pioneering treatment have responded to the therapy, a pilot study shows. One of them -- the first-ever -- is Nicki Guy, 47, who is sharing her story exclusively with the BBC. She says the results are incredible: "It's life-changing. It's given me everything back. I can see my child grow up. "I've gone from counting fingers and everything being really blurry to being able to see." Currently, she can see and read most lines of letters on an eye test chart. She is one line away from what is legally required for driving - a massive change from being partially sighted, using a magnifying glass for anything close up and having to navigate around the house and outside largely using memory. "If my vision stays like this for the rest of my life it would be absolutely brilliant. I may not ever be able to drive again but I'll take that!" she says. With hypotony, pressure within the eyeball becomes dangerously low, leading it to cave in on itself.

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The dramatically larger corner radius Apple introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe has pushed the invisible resize hit target for windows mostly outside the window itself -- roughly 75% of the 19Ã--19 pixel clickable area now lies beyond the visible boundary. In previous macOS versions, about 62% of that resize target would fall inside the window corner. Apple removed the visible resize grippy-strip from window corners in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in July 2011. The visual indicator had served two purposes: showing users where to click and signaling whether a window could be resized at all. Users since then have relied on muscle memory and the reasonable assumption that clicking near the inside corner would initiate a resize. DaringFireball's John Gruber advice: don't upgrade to macOS 26, or downgrade if you already have. he wrote Monday: "Why suffer willingly with a user interface that presents you with absurdities like window resizing affordances that are 75 percent outside the window?"

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A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration -- an independent network of researchers -- evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies. The biological mechanisms overlap considerably with antidepressants. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins," said Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa added that exercise triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which he calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain." Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in depression guidelines globally, though Fabiano noted it remains underutilized. The meta-analysis found that combining aerobic exercise and resistance training appeared more effective than aerobic exercise alone, and that 13 to 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms. Light to moderate exercise proved as beneficial as vigorous workouts, at least initially.

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