hackingbear shares a report from the Associated Press: As the threat of a TikTok ban looms, U.S. TikTok users are flocking to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu -- making it the top downloaded app in the U.S. Xiaohongshu, which in English means "Little Red Book" is a Chinese social media app that combines e-commerce, short video and posting functions, enticing mostly Chinese young women from mainland China and regions with with a Chinese diaspora such as Malaysia and Taiwan who use it as a de-facto search engine for product, travel and restaurant recommendations, as well as makeup and skincare tutorials. After the justices seemed inclined to let the law stand, masses of TikTok users began creating accounts on Xiaohongshu, including hashtags such as #tiktokrefugee or #tiktok to their posts. " I like your makeup," a Xiaohongshu user from Beijing comments one of the posts by Alexis Garman, a 21-year-old TikTok user in Oklahoma with nearly 20,000 followers, and Garman thanks them in a reply. A user from the southwestern province of Sichuan commented "I am your Chinese spy please surrender your personal information or the photographs of your cat (or dog)." "TikTok possibly getting banned doesn't just take away an app, it takes away jobs, friends and community," Garman said. "Personally, the friends and bond I have with my followers will now be gone." Xiaohongshu doesn't even have an English user interface. Reuters reports: In only two days, more than 700,000 new users joined Xiaohongshu, a person close to the company told Reuters. Xiaohongshu [which was founded in 2013 and is backed by investors such as Alibaba, Tencent and Sequoia], did not immediately respond to a request for comment. U.S. downloads of RedNote were up more than 200% year-over-year this week, and 194% from the week prior, according to estimates from app data research firm Sensor Tower. The second most-popular free app on Apple's App Store list on Tuesday, Lemon8, another social media app owned by ByteDance, experienced a similar surge last month, with downloads jumping by 190% in December to about 3.4 million.

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Parallels Desktop now supports running 64-bit x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs through its proprietary emulation engine, enabling users to run traditional Windows and Linux distributions. However, performance is said to be "really slow." How-To Geek reports: The latest Parallels Desktop 20.2 update adds early support for x86 emulation on Apple Silicon, allowing traditional x86 PC operating systems to work on newer Mac computers. There were already apps like UTM that could do it (most of them are based on QEMU), but this feature uses Parallels' "proprietary emulation engine" paired with Apple's built-in hypervisor. [...] Parallels on Apple Silicon can now "run existing x86_64 Windows 10, Windows 11*, Windows Server 2019/2022, and some Linux distributives with UEFI BIOS via Parallels Emulator." You can also create new Windows 10 21H2 and Windows Server 2022 virtual machines if needed. There are some big limitations. You can only run 64-bit x86 operating systems -- sorry, FreeDOS fans -- but those 64-bit operating systems can run 32-bit applications. There's also no support for USB devices, nested virtualization (so WSL2 won't work), or the Parallels hypervisor. Performance will also be "really slow," since x86 instructions have to be translated to ARM. The company said, "Windows boot time is about 2-7 minutes, depending on your hardware. Windows operating system responsiveness is also low."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The number of deaths in the U.S. is expected to exceed the number of births by 2033, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) annual 30-year projection of the U.S. population released on Monday. That estimation comes seven years earlier than what the CBO estimated in its 30-year population outlook released last year. At that time, in January 2024, the CBO projected deaths to outpace births by 2040. The CBO's 2025 report projected lower population growth over the next three decades than it did in its 2024 demographic outlook. The CBO's population estimate for 2025 is 350 million, a slight increase from the 346 million it predicted for 2025 last year. But its projection for 2054 -- 372 million people -- has decreased since last year, when the CBO projected the population would be 383 million in 2054. The rate of growth projected over the next three decades -- 0.2 percent -- is significantly slower than the rate seen in the prior five decades, from 1975 to 2024, when the population grew at 0.9 percent. The growth rate over the next three decades is also expected to slow. From 2025 to 2035, the population is expected to grow an average of 0.4 percent a year. From 2036 to 2055, however, the growth rate is projected to be 0.1 percent. The CBO attributes this projected slow rate of growth to a variety of factors, including lower fertility, an aging population and lower immigration.

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The Australian Open has introduced a project called AO Animated -- "near-live, commentated coverage of the Australian Open, free to anyone across the world via YouTube, enhanced via a stream of comments from a like-minded online community," reports The Guardian. Blending real-world data with virtual avatars, the animated coverage has garnered significant viewer interest, especially among gamers and tech enthusiasts. From the report: [I]t's no surprise a project called AO Animated has taken off at this year's grand slam tournament at Melbourne Park. The catch? The players, ball and court are all computer-generated. That hasn't dissuaded hundreds of thousands of viewers from tuning into this vision of the Australian Open, featuring video game-like avatars but using real-world data in an emerging category of sports broadcasting helping tennis reach new fans. The loophole allows the Australian Open to show a version of live events at the tournament on its own channels, despite having sold lucrative exclusive broadcast rights to partners across the globe. The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men's final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024. The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. "Limb tracking is complex, you've got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton," he said. "It's not as seamless as it could be -- we don't have fingers -- but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes." The data from sensors on the court is ingested and fed into a system that can produce the graphic reproduction with a two-minute delay. The same commentary and arena noises that would otherwise be heard on the television -- as well as interstitial vision direct from the broadcast -- are synced with the virtual representation of the match.

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Pixelfed has launched its mobile app for iOS and Android, solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Instagram. The move also comes at a pivotal moment, as a potential Supreme Court ban on TikTok could drive users to explore other social media platforms. Pixelfed is ad-free, open source, decentralized, defaults to chronological feeds and doesn't share user data with third parties. Engadget reports: The platform launched in 2018, but was only available on the web or through third-party app clients. The Android app debuted on January 9 and the iOS app released today. Creator Daniel Supernault posted on Mastodon Monday evening that the platform had 11,000 users join over the preceding 24 hours and that more than 78,000 posts have been shared to Pixelfed to date. The platform runs on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers several other decentralized social networks in the fediverse, such as Mastodon and Flipboard. The iOS and Android apps are available at their respective links. Further reading: Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed

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OpenAI's "reasoning" AI model, o1, has exhibited a puzzling behavior of "thinking" in Chinese, Persian, or some other language -- "even when asked a question in English," reports TechCrunch. While the exact cause remains unclear, as OpenAI has yet to provide an explanation, AI experts have proposed a few theories. From the report: Several on X, including Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, alluded to the fact that reasoning models like o1 are trained on datasets containing a lot of Chinese characters. Ted Xiao, a researcher at Google DeepMind, claimed that companies including OpenAI use third-party Chinese data labeling services, and that o1 switching to Chinese is an example of "Chinese linguistic influence on reasoning." "[Labs like] OpenAI and Anthropic utilize [third-party] data labeling services for PhD-level reasoning data for science, math, and coding," Xiao wrote in a post on X. "[F]or expert labor availability and cost reasons, many of these data providers are based in China." [...] Other experts don't buy the o1 Chinese data labeling hypothesis, however. They point out that o1 is just as likely to switch to Hindi, Thai, or a language other than Chinese while teasing out a solution. Other experts don't buy the o1 Chinese data labeling hypothesis, however. They point out that o1 is just as likely to switch to Hindi, Thai, or a language other than Chinese while teasing out a solution. Rather, these experts say, o1 and other reasoning models might simply be using languages they find most efficient to achieve an objective (or hallucinating). "The model doesn't know what language is, or that languages are different," Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, told TechCrunch. "It's all just text to it." Tiezhen Wang, a software engineer at AI startup Hugging Face, agrees with Guzdial that reasoning models' language inconsistencies may be explained by associations the models made during training. "By embracing every linguistic nuance, we expand the model's worldview and allow it to learn from the full spectrum of human knowledge," Wang wrote in a post on X. "For example, I prefer doing math in Chinese because each digit is just one syllable, which makes calculations crisp and efficient. But when it comes to topics like unconscious bias, I automatically switch to English, mainly because that's where I first learned and absorbed those ideas." [...] Luca Soldaini, a research scientist at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, cautioned that we can't know for certain. "This type of observation on a deployed AI system is impossible to back up due to how opaque these models are," they told TechCrunch. "It's one of the many cases for why transparency in how AI systems are built is fundamental."

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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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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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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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Meta is cutting roughly 5% of its staff through performance-based eliminations and plans to hire new people to fill their roles this year, according to a company memo. From a report: As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs. "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the note posted to an internal message board and reviewed by Bloomberg News. "We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year," he said, "but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

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U.K. public sector and critical infrastructure organizations could be banned from making ransom payments under new proposals from the U.K. government. From a report: The U.K.'s Home Office launched a consultation on Tuesday that proposes a "targeted ban" on ransomware payments. Under the proposal, public sector bodies -- including local councils, schools, and NHS trusts -- would be banned from making payments to ransomware hackers, which the government says would "strike at the heart of the cybercriminal business model." This government proposal comes after a wave of cyberattacks targeting the U.K. public sector. The NHS last year declared a "critical" incident following a cyberattack on pathology lab provider Synnovis, which led to a massive data breach of sensitive patient data and months of disruption, including canceled operations and the diversion of emergency patients. According to new data seen by Bloomberg, the cyberattack on Synnovis resulted in harm to dozens of patients, leading to long-term or permanent damage to their health in at least two cases.

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Tech workers at major U.S. companies are earning thousands of dollars by referring job candidates they've never met, creating an underground marketplace for employment referrals at firms like Microsoft and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg. One tech worker cited in the report earned $30,000 in referral bonuses after recommending over 1,000 strangers to his employer over 18 months, resulting in more than six successful hires. While platforms like ReferralHub charge up to $50 per referral, Goldman Sachs and Google said such practices violate their policies. Google requires referrals to be based on personal knowledge of candidates.

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