TikTok changed its policies earlier this year on sharing user data with governments as the company negotiated with the Trump Administration to continue operating in the United States. The company added language allowing data sharing with "regulatory authorities, where relevant" beyond law enforcement. Until April 25, 2025, TikTok's website stated the company would notify users before disclosing their data to law enforcement. The policy now says TikTok will inform users only where required by law and changed the timing from before disclosure to if disclosure occurs. The company also softened its language from stating it "rejects data requests from law enforcement authorities" to saying it "may reject" such requests. TikTok declined to answer repeated questions from Forbes about whether it has shared or is sharing private user information with the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The timing difference prevents users from challenging subpoenas before their data is handed over.

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Apple's effort to reinvent the iPad by adding a giant foldable screen has hit development hurdles, potentially delaying the planned launch. Bloomberg: The company has been working on the device -- projected to cost around $3,000 -- for several years and had most recently aimed for a 2028 release. But engineering challenges tied to weight, features and display technology have pushed its potential debut to 2029 or later, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is working with Samsung Display Co. to develop the roughly 18-inch panel for the device, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work isn't public. The screen minimizes the crease seen on foldable displays, matching an approach that Apple is also using with its upcoming foldable iPhone. The iPad project is part of a broader push to bring more innovative devices to market. Apple just introduced its first new iPhone design in years -- the ultrathin $999 Air model -- and is working on everything from smart glasses to a tabletop robot device.

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France and Spain are calling on the European Union to stick with plans to ban combustion engine cars in the bloc after 2035, at odds with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of a meeting of leaders in Brussels this week. From a report: The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, is currently reviewing rules designed to accelerate the automotive sector's green transition. Merz has called on the bloc to give up its 2035 deadline to help Germany's troubled car industry. France and Spain "hope that the upcoming review will preserve the 2035 cap and the environmental ambition of the CO2 emissions trajectory that underpins it," a paper presented to climate ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday, and seen by Bloomberg says. "This revision should in no way call into question the zero emissions exhaust target in 2035."

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OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas on Tuesday, an AI-powered web browser that CEO Sam Altman described as "smooth" and "quick" during a livestream announcement. The browser is available globally on macOS while versions for Windows, iOS, and Android are expected soon. Atlas includes memory features that personalize the browsing experience and an agent mode that allows ChatGPT to perform tasks such as booking reservations and flights or editing documents. Users can manage these stored memories through the browser's settings and can open incognito windows. The browser displays a split-screen view by default when users click links from search results. The view shows both the webpage and the ChatGPT transcript simultaneously. Atlas also offers webpage summarization and a feature called "cursor chat" that allows users to select text and have ChatGPT revise it inline.

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Apple lashed out at the European Union's attempts to tame the power of Silicon Valley in the most far-reaching legal challenge of the bloc's Big Tech antitrust rules. From a report: The iPhone maker's lawyer Daniel Beard told the General Court in Luxembourg on Tuesday that the Digital Markets Act "imposes hugely onerous and intrusive burdens" at odds with Apple's rights in the EU marketplace. The DMA came onto the EU's books in 2023 and is designed to clip the wings of the world's largest technology platforms with a slew of dos and don'ts. But over recent months, the law has also drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump and plagued EU-US trade talks. Apple -- seen as the biggest renegade against the EU's crackdown -- challenged the law on three fronts: EU obligations to make rival hardware work with its iPhone, the regulator's decision to drag the hugely profitable App Store under the rules, and a decision to probe whether iMessage should have faced the rules, which it later escaped.

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London police finally understand why 80,000 phones disappeared from the city's streets last year. The answer involves budget cuts [non-paywalled source] that hollowed out British policing in the 2010s, the arrival of electric bikes that made theft easy, and a lucrative black market in China where stolen British phones retain full functionality. The Metropolitan Police discovered an industrial-scale operation in December when officers traced a woman's iPhone to a Heathrow warehouse on Christmas Eve. Boxes labeled as batteries and bound for Hong Kong contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones. The police arrested two men in their thirties in September as suspected ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China. The epidemic took root after Conservative-led austerity measures reduced police numbers and budgets. In 2017 the Metropolitan Police announced it would stop investigating low-level crimes to focus resources on serious violence and sexual offenses. Thieves on rented electric bikes began mounting sidewalks to snatch phones at high speed while wearing balaclavas and hoods. Police data shows only 495 people were charged out of 106,000 phones reported stolen between March 2024 and February 2025. Thieves earn up to $401 per device. The phones sell for up to $5,000 in China because Chinese network providers do not subscribe to the international blacklist for stolen devices.

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President Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee will apply only to new visa applicants outside the country, the government confirmed in new guidance on Monday. From a report: That means that under the new policy, employers won't need to pay the fee for anyone already living in the U.S., such as international students. The new guidance: Under the new guidance published on Monday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the $100,000 fee will apply only to new applicants living outside the country. Employers will need to pay the fee after their prospective employee's visa is approved, allowing them to move to the U.S. Previously, the White House had said the fee would apply to all new visa applicants, except those who work for companies or industries that have secured a special waiver. In 2024, roughly 54% of the 141,000 new H-1B visas issued went to immigrants who were already in the U.S. on a different visa type, according to government statistics. If that trend holds, the new fee wouldn't apply to over half of the applicants.

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Filipino workers in Manila are remotely operating robots that restock convenience store shelves across Tokyo. The partnership represents a new economic model where physical labor can be offshored through telepresence. Around 60 workers at Astro Robotics monitor the machines and intervene when problems occur about 4% of the time. They earn between $250 and $315 per month. Japan faces severe labor shortages but has resisted expanding immigration. Offshoring the work through robots solves this while dramatically reducing costs. Filipino workers are also training the AI systems designed to eliminate the need for human operators entirely. Tokyo-based Telexistence has collected extensive data from its workers and is providing it to a San Francisco startup building fully autonomous robots. The combination of automation and offshoring creates what one University of Michigan professor called a "double whammy" for workers in developed nations. It also exploits workers in developing countries who build the tools meant to replace them. The market for AI agents is expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030. Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years.

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Amazon executives believe the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 workers in the United States by 2027 through robotic automation. Internal documents viewed by The New York Times show the automation would save approximately 30 cents on each item the company picks, packs and delivers. The documents reveal that executives told Amazon's board last year they hoped automation would allow the company to flatten its U.S. workforce growth over the next decade. Amazon expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That projection translates to more than 600,000 positions Amazon would not need to fill. Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana last year as a template for future facilities. The site uses a thousand robots and employed a quarter fewer workers than it would have without automation. The company plans to replicate this design in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027. A facility in Stone Mountain, Georgia currently employs roughly 4,000 workers. After a planned robotic retrofit, internal analyses project it will process 10% more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees. The documents show Amazon's robotics team has set a goal to automate 75% of its operations.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate. As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.

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A Court of Accounts report written before Sunday's theft of crown jewels from the Louvre revealed the museum's security systems were outdated and inadequate [non-paywalled source]. The report noted a lack of basic CCTV equipment across multiple wings. Cameras had mainly been installed only when rooms were refurbished due to repeated postponements of scheduled modernization. In the Denon wing where the Apollo Gallery was targeted, a third of rooms had no CCTV cameras. Three-quarters of rooms in the Richelieu wing and nearly two-thirds in the Sully wing lacked cameras. The thieves were caught on camera at one point but were masked and impossible to identify, according to Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The alarm system activated when thieves cut open display cases, but they threatened staff who left the area. Culture minister Rachida Dati confirmed new CCTV cameras would be installed. President Macron had earmarked $186.30 million to upgrade the Louvre's security systems under a renaissance plan launched in June.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company has lost all access to China's market after U.S. export restrictions eliminated what was once a 95% share. Speaking in an interview with Citadel Securities, Huang questioned the wisdom of policies that cost America one of the world's largest markets. The Biden Administration imposed rules in 2022 to restrict exports of Nvidia's most advanced AI chips to China. The Trump Administration blocked additional chip sales in April and later granted export licenses for certain Nvidia and AMD chips in exchange for 15% of revenues. Chinese regulators responded by telling domestic tech companies to avoid Nvidia chips designed to meet U.S. export requirements. Beijing also placed strict limits on exports of rare earths. Huang noted that about half the world's AI researchers are in China and called it a mistake not to have them build AI on American technology.

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Google plans to let Pixel smartphone enthusiasts test out the company's next handset ahead of its public introduction. From a report: Google has invited members of its "Superfans" group to apply to test future Pixel hardware, asking entrants to profess their knowledge and passion for the brand in hopes of being able to beta test forthcoming products. Consumer tech companies often let small groups of customers try out unreleased products under strict secrecy to gather feedback during development. But it's incredibly rare for a company of Google's size to do it with something as high-profile as the Pixel lineup. The search giant will select 15 people from the pool of entrants, and winners must all sign a non-disclosure agreement to receive devices, according to official rules for the contest reviewed by Bloomberg News. "The Trusted Tester program is an opportunity to provide feedback and help shape a Pixel phone currently in development," the document reads.

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An anonymous reader writes: "Hoisted by their own GPTards." That's how Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun described the blowback after OpenAI researchers did a victory lap over GPT-5's supposed math breakthroughs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis added, "this is embarrassing." The Decoder reports that in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil declared that "GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdos problems and made progress on 11 others." ("Erdos problems" are famous conjectures posed by mathematician Paul Erdos.) However, mathematician Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, said Weil's post was "a dramatic misrepresentation" -- while these problems were indeed listed as "open" on Bloom's website, he said that only means, "I personally am unaware of a paper which solves it." In other words, it's not accurate to claim GPT-5 was able to solve previously unsolved problems. Instead, Bloom wrote, "GPT-5 found references, which solved these problems, that I personally was unaware of."

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The Sims is in a period of transition -- and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today's update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game "will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset." The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more than 50 updates since then. EA says that starting today players will no longer be able to spend real money in the game, and that it will be delisted on both iOS and Android tomorrow before the servers shut down completely next year, making it entirely unplayable.

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China says it has uncovered what it describes as irrefutable evidence of American government cyber attacks targeting the National Time Service Center. The Ministry of State Security said the National Security Agency exploited vulnerabilities in employees' mobile phones beginning March 25, 2022, and later used stolen login credentials to access the center's computers starting April 18, 2023. The facility in Xi'an provides high-precision timekeeping service for the government, civil society, and various industries. It also supplies data used to calculate international standard time. Chinese authorities said investigators found that private servers worldwide were employed to conceal the attacks' origin. The accusations emerge against a backdrop of mutual cyber-espionage claims between Washington and Beijing. Western governments and companies have repeatedly blamed Chinese hackers for intrusions in recent years.

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An electronic eye implant has restored reading ability to patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a form of dry age-related macular degeneration. Results published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 84% of trial participants regained the ability to read letters, numbers, and words after receiving the Prima device. The microchip measures two millimetres by two millimetres and is implanted beneath the center of the retina. Patients wear augmented reality glasses containing a camera that projects images onto the chip. The device converts light into electrical pulses transmitted to the brain. Frank Holz, the study's lead author and chair of ophthalmology at the University Hospital of Bonn, called the implant "a paradigm shift in treating late-stage age-related macular degeneration." Mahi Muqit, a consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, said the trial enabled "meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before." The procedure takes less than two hours and requires intensive rehabilitation. Science Corporation, which manufactures the device, has applied for clinical authorization in the United States and Europe.

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Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts, a study has found. The New York Times: For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80%. [non-paywalled source.] In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines. The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place -- dropping to 0.93% between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46% between 2012 and 2015. That's a 36% reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43% drop in peanut allergies. The study also found that eggs overtook peanuts as the No. 1 food allergen in young children. The study did not examine what infants ate, so it does not show that the guidelines caused the decline. Still, the data is promising. While all food allergies can be dangerous, 80% of people never outgrow one.

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India will need as much as $21 trillion to achieve its climate goals and lift its population out of poverty, according to a draft government plan seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The estimate offers a first glimpse of how the country intends to live up to its target of net zero emissions by 2070. The updated scenario implies hitting peak emissions in 2045, which is a decade earlier than the current trajectory. India is already being severely battered by the fallout of climate change, as deadly floods and heat waves become more destructive each year. But the need to mitigate the emissions that feed climate change has historically been at odds with India's priorities of economic growth and energy security, with the latter still mostly provided through coal. The new plan shows India will seek to achieve climate and economic development goals simultaneously, with low-carbon options envisaged for much of its yet-to-be-built residential and industrial infrastructure.

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Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT's Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.

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