An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Biden administration finalized a new rule that would effectively ban all Chinese vehicles from the US under the auspices of blocking the "sale or import" of connected vehicle software from "countries of concern." The rule could have wide-ranging effects on big automakers, like Ford and GM, as well as smaller manufacturers like Polestar -- and even companies that don't produce cars, like Waymo. The rule covers everything that connects a vehicle to the outside world, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite components. It also addresses concerns that technology like cameras, sensors, and onboard computers could be exploited by foreign adversaries to collect sensitive data about US citizens and infrastructure. And it would ban China from testing its self-driving cars on US soil. "Cars today have cameras, microphones, GPS tracking, and other technologies connected to the internet," US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement. "It doesn't take much imagination to understand how a foreign adversary with access to this information could pose a serious risk to both our national security and the privacy of U.S. citizens. To address these national security concerns, the Commerce Department is taking targeted, proactive steps to keep [People's Republic of China] and Russian-manufactured technologies off American roads." The rules for prohibited software go into effect for model year 2027 vehicles, while the ban on hardware from China waits until model year 2030 vehicles. According to Reuters, the rules were updated from the original proposal to exempt vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds, which would allow companies like BYD to continue to assemble electric buses in California. The Biden administration published a fact sheet with more information about this rule. "[F]oreign adversary involvement in the supply chains of connected vehicles poses a significant threat in most cars on the road today, granting malign actors unfettered access to these connected systems and the data they collect," the White House said. "As PRC automakers aggressively seek to increase their presence in American and global automotive markets, through this final rule, President Biden is delivering on his commitment to secure critical American supply chains and protect our national security."

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The Justice Department now enters a second Trump administration with less authority to pursue a president than it has had in half a century.

An international commission made the case for focusing on body fat quantity and the illnesses people experience.

A week after announcing performance-based job cuts similar to those at Meta, Microsoft said it also plans to pause hiring in part of its consulting unit. CNBC reports: The changes by the U.S. consulting division are meant to align with a policy by the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions organization, which has about 60,000 employees, according to a page on Microsoft's website. The changes are in place through the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year ending in June. To reduce costs, Microsoft's consulting division will hold off on hiring new employees and back-filling roles, consulting executive Derek Danois told employees in the memo. Careful management of costs is of utmost importance, Danois wrote. The memo also instructs employees to not expense travel for any internal meetings and use remote sessions instead. Additionally, executives will have to authorize trips to customers' sites to ensure spending is being used on the right customers, Danois wrote. Additionally, the group will cut its marketing and non-billable external resource spend by 35%, the memo says. Further reading: Companies Deploy AI To Curb Hiring as 'Cost Avoidance' Gains Ground

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Diplomats expressed cautious optimism on Tuesday that an agreement between Israel and Hamas may be within reach. But they also warned that it was not signed yet.

Combine a powerful incentive and a credible military threat to dislodge him and his cronies.

ChatGPT can now schedule reminders and recurring tasks -- but only if you're a ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Pro subscriber. TechCrunch reports: With tasks, users can set simple reminders with ChatGPT such as, "Remind me when my passport expires in six months," and the AI assistant will follow up with a push notification on whatever platform you have tasks enabled. Users can also now set recurring requests to ChatGPT, such as, "Every Friday, give me a weekend plan based on my location and the weather forecast," or "Give me a news briefing every day at 7 a.m." [...] Users can access tasks by selecting "4o with scheduled tasks" from a dropdown menu in ChatGPT. From there, they can send ChatGPT a message telling the AI assistant what reminder or action they want to create. At times, OpenAI says ChatGPT may suggest certain tasks based on chats. Users can set and manage tasks by chatting with the AI assistant on any platform, or through a dedicated tasks manager tab that's only available on the web app. Through the tasks feature, ChatGPT can now browse the web on a set schedule, but it will not run continuous searches in the background or make purchases. For example, you could instruct ChatGPT to check once a month for concert tickets to see your favorite artist in your area, but you can neither tell the AI assistant to alert you the moment the tickets go live, nor can ChatGPT buy tickets for you. That said, it's a step toward those [agentic] systems.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Texas has sued (PDF) one of the nation's largest car insurance providers alleging that it violated the state's privacy laws by surreptitiously collecting detailed location data on millions of drivers and using that information to justify raising insurance premiums. The state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, said the lawsuit against Allstate and its subsidiary Arity is the first enforcement action ever filed by a state attorney general to enforce a data privacy law. It also follows a deceptive business practice lawsuit he filed against General Motors accusing the car manufacturer of misleading customers by collecting and selling driver data. In 2015, Allstate developed the Arity Driving Engine software development kit (SDK), a package of code that the company allegedly paid mobile app developers to install in their products in order to collect a variety of sensitive data from consumers' phones. The SDK gathered phone geolocation data, accelerometer, and gyroscopic data, details about where phone owners started and ended their trips, and information about "driving behavior," such as whether phone owners appeared to be speeding or driving while distracted, according to the lawsuit. The apps that installed the SDK included GasBuddy, Fuel Rewards, and Life360, a popular family monitoring app, according to the lawsuit. Paxton's complaint said that Allstate and Arity used the data collected by its SDK to develop and sell products to other insurers like Drivesight, an algorithmic model that assigned a driving risk score to individuals, and ArityIQ, which allowed other insurers to "[a]ccess actual driving behavior collected from mobile phones and connected vehicles to use at time of quote to more precisely price nearly any driver." Allstate and Arity marketed the products as providing "driver behavior" data but because the information was collected via mobile phones the companies had no way of determining whether the owner was actually driving, according to the lawsuit. "For example, if a person was a passenger in a bus, a taxi, or in a friend's car, and that vehicle's driver sped, hard braked, or made a sharp turn, Defendants would conclude that the passenger, not the actual driver, engaged in 'bad' driving behavior," the suit states. Neither Allstate and Arity nor the app developers properly informed customers in their privacy policies about what data the SDK was collecting or how it would be used, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit violates Texas' Data Privacy and Security Act (DPSA) and insurance code by failing to address violations within the required 30-day cure period. "In its complaint, filed in federal court, Texas requested that Allstate be ordered to pay a penalty of $7,500 per violation of the state's data privacy law and $10,000 per violation of the state's insurance code, which would likely amount to millions of dollars given the number of consumers allegedly affected," adds the report. "The lawsuit also asks the court to make Allstate delete all the data it obtained through actions that allegedly violated the privacy law and to make full restitution to customers harmed by the companies' actions."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions. To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators. The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In The Quantified Society I coin the term "indicatorism": a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we're sometimes busier with "scoring" and "producing" than with "understanding." As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world's oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

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The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday that it has deleted malware planted on more than 4,200 computers by a group of criminal hackers who were backed by the People's Republic of China. From a report: The malware, known as "PlugX," affected thousands of computers around the globe and was used to infect and steal information, the department said. Investigators said the malware was installed by a band of hackers who are known by the names "Mustang Panda" and "Twill Typhoon."

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A Google engineer has warned that a major shift in web browser caching is upending long-standing performance optimization practices. Browsers have overhauled their caching systems that forces websites to maintain separate copies of shared resources instead of reusing them across domains. The new "double-keyed caching" system, implemented to enhance privacy, is ending the era of shared public content delivery networks, writes Google engineer Addy Osmani. According to Chrome's data, the change has led to a 3.6% increase in cache misses and 4% rise in network bandwidth usage.

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Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature, while just 10 species account for half of all published research, according to a new analysis published on bioRxiv. The study of over 43,000 bacterial species found that E. coli dominates with 21% of all publications, followed by human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus. Microbes crucial for human health and Earth's ecosystems remain largely unexplored, University of Michigan biologist Paul Jensen reported. A new $1-million project by non-profit Align to Innovate aims to help close this gap by studying 1,000 microbes under varying conditions.

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More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates have signed an open letter calling for "moonshot" efforts to ramp up food production before an impending world hunger catastrophe. From a report: The coalition of some of the world's greatest living thinkers called for urgent action to prioritise research and technology to solve the "tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand." Big bang physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson; Nobel laureate chemist Jennifer Doudna; the Dalai Lama; economist Joseph E Stiglitz; Nasa scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig; Ethiopian-American geneticist Gebisa Ejeta; Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank; Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize for literature winner; and black holes Nobel physicist Sir Roger Penrose were among the signatories in the appeal coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food prize laureate and US special envoy for global food security. Citing challenges including the climate crisis, war and market pressures, the coalition called for "planet-friendly" efforts leading to substantial leaps in food production to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. The plea was for financial and political backing, said agricultural scientist Geoffrey Hawtin, the British co-recipient of last year's World Food prize. [...] The world was "not even close" to meeting future needs, the letter said, predicting humanity faced an "even more food insecure, unstable world" by mid-century unless support for innovation was ramped up internationally.

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Programmers have found ways to run the 1993 first-person shooter Doom on an array of unexpected platforms, and now a PDF file joins that list. Developer ading2210's DoomPDF project shows the game operating within a document format primarily designed for static content display. The creator says he drew inspiration from pdftris, another PDF-based game port by Thomas Rinsma.

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Five wildfires in Los Angeles have already burned more than 10,000 structures, threatening to upend California's fragile balance between climate risk and home insurance. The Palisades Fire has damaged or destroyed more than 5,000 buildings in an area that liability experts had previously identified as one of three particularly vulnerable regions in the state. JPMorgan Chase estimates insured damages could reach $20 billion, positioning this as likely the costliest wildfire in U.S. history. The crisis comes as California's insurance market struggles, with seven of the 12 biggest home insurers having limited their coverage in the state over the past two years. The state-backed insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, now faces exposure of up to $458 billion, while holding only $200 million in surplus cash reserves and $2.5 billion in reinsurance. Gusts of up to 100 miles per hour have fanned the flames, with more than 57,000 structures in severe danger and more than 150,000 people under evacuation.

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The 27-year-old musician Alexandre Kantorow has rapidly received worldwide attention. That hasn’t changed his approach to making music.

Now is the time for the United States to build on its historic success supporting Ukraine, not squander it.

“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the report said.

The bureau did not interview an ex-wife of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for defense secretary before the findings on his background check were presented to senators.

His influence is partly the result of a very online political establishment, and partly thanks to a right-leaning media that is hostile to Keir Starmer’s Labour government.