A former Chinese official who fled to the U.S. says Beijing has used advanced surveillance technology from U.S. companies to track, intimidate, and punish him and his family across borders. ABC News reports: Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang was recuperating from cancer on a Korean resort island when he got an urgent call: Don't return to China, a friend warned. You're now a fugitive. Days later, a stranger snapped a photo of Li in a cafe. Terrified South Korea would send him back, Li fled, flew to the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for asylum. But even there -- in New York, in California, deep in the Texas desert -- the Chinese government continued to hunt him down with the help of surveillance technology.

Li's communications were monitored, his assets seized and his movements followed in police databases. More than 40 friends and relatives -- including his pregnant daughter -- were identified and detained, even by tracking down their cab drivers through facial recognition software. Three former associates died in detention, and for months shadowy men Li believed to be Chinese operatives stalked him across continents, interviews and documents seen by The Associated Press show.

The Chinese government is using an increasingly powerful tool to cement its power at home and vastly amplify it abroad: Surveillance technology, much of it originating in the U.S., an AP investigation has found. Within China, this technology helped identify and punish almost 900,000 officials last year alone, nearly five times more than in 2012, according to state numbers. Beijing says it is cracking down on corruption, but critics charge that such technology is used in China and elsewhere to stifle dissent and exact retribution on perceived enemies.

Outside China, the same technology is being used to threaten wayward officials, along with dissidents and alleged criminals, under what authorities call Operations "Fox Hunt" and "Sky Net." The U.S. has criticized these overseas operations as a "threat" and an "affront to national sovereignty." More than 14,000 people, including some 3,000 officials, have been brought back to China from more than 120 countries through coercion, arrests and pressure on relatives, according to state information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dozens of Ukrainian civilians filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest US chip firms of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths last year. Their complaints alleged that for years, Texas Instruments (TI), AMD, and Intel have ignored public reporting, government warnings, and shareholder pressure to do more to track final destinations of chips and shut down shady distribution channels diverting chips to sanctioned actors in Russia and Iran.

Putting profits over human lives, tech firms continued using "high-risk" channels, Ukrainian civilians' legal team alleged in a press statement, without ever strengthening controls. All that intermediaries who placed bulk online orders had to do to satisfy chip firms was check a box confirming that the shipment wouldn't be sent to sanctioned countries, lead attorney Mikal Watts told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday, according to the Kyiv Independent. "There are export lists," Watts said. "We know exactly what requires a license and what doesn't. And companies know who they're selling to. But instead, they rely on a checkbox that says, 'I'm not shipping to Putin.' That's it. No enforcement. No accountability." [...]

Damages sought include funeral expenses and medical costs, as well as "exemplary damages" that are "intended to punish especially wrongful conduct and to deter similar conduct in the future." For plaintiffs, the latter is the point of the litigation, which they hope will cut off key supply chains to keep US tech out of weapon systems deployed against innocent civilians. "They want to send a clear message that American companies must take responsibility when their technologies are weaponized and used to commit harm across the globe," the press statement said. "Corporations must be held accountable when its unlawful decisions made in the name of profit directly cause the death of innocents and widespread human suffering." For chip firms, the litigation could get costly if more civilians join, with the threat of a loss potentially forcing changes that could squash supply chains currently working to evade sanctions. "We want to make this process so expensive and painful that companies are forced to act," Watts said. "That is our contribution to stopping the war against civilians."

Phoebe Gates, Bill Gates' youngest daughter, has raised $30 million for the AI shopping app she built in her Stanford dorm room with classmate Sophia Kianni. The app is called Phia and is pitched as a way to simplify price comparison and secondhand shopping. "Its AI-powered search engine -- available as an app and as a browser extension for Chrome and Safari -- pulls listings from more than 40,000 retail and resale sites so users can compare prices, surface real-time deals, and determine whether an item's cost is typical, high or fair," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The app has reached 750,000 downloads in eight months and is valued at $180 million. From the report: Gates told Elle that when she first floated the idea to her parents, they urged her to keep it as a side project -- advice she followed by enrolling in Stanford's night program after moving to New York and finishing her degree in 2024. "They were like, 'Okay, you can do this as a side thing, but you need to stay in school.' I don't think people would expect that from my family, to be honest," she said.

Her father dropped out of Harvard University in 1975 to launch Microsoft. Kianni even paused her degree temporarily "to learn, as quickly as possible, as much as we could about the industry that we would be operating in," she told Vogue. Bill Gates has not invested in the company, though he has publicly supported its mission.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is also getting improved translation quality across dozens of languages and some Duolingo-like learning features.

The latest version of Google's live translation is built on Gemini and initially rolled out earlier this year. It supports smooth back-and-forth translations as both on-screen text and audio. Beginning a live translate session in Google Translate used to require Pixel Buds, but that won't be the case going forward. Google says a beta test of expanded headphone support is launching today in the US, Mexico, and India.

The audio translation attempts to preserve the tone and cadence of the original speaker, but it's not as capable as the full AI-reproduced voice translations you can do on the latest Pixel phones. Google says this feature should work on any earbuds or headphones, but it's only for Android right now. The feature will expand to iOS in the coming months. [...] The new translation model, which is also available in the search-based translation interface, supports over 70 languages.

Major automakers have urged Washington to prevent Chinese government-backed automakers and battery manufacturers from opening U.S. manufacturing plants, warning the industry's future is at stake. From a report: The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Stellantis and other major automakers, sounded the alarm and said Congress and the Trump administration needed to act.

"China poses a clear and present threat to the auto industry in the U.S.," the group wrote in a statement for a U.S. House hearing on Chinese vehicles. The group also said lawmakers should maintain the U.S. Commerce Department's prohibition on importing information and communications technology and services from China that effectively bars the import of vehicles from Chinese manufacturers. "No amount of investment by automakers and battery manufacturers operating inside the U.S. can counter a China that is enabled by subsidies to chronically oversupply around the world. This is a recipe for dumping that Congress and the Trump Administration must prevent from happening inside the U.S.," the auto industry group said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Reddit has filed a challenge against Australia's under-16s social media ban in the high court, lodging its case two days after implementing age restrictions on its website. The company said in a Reddit post on Friday that while it agreed with protecting people under 16, the law "has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences."

Reddit said there was an "illogical patchwork" of platforms included in the ban. "As the Australian Human Rights Commission put it, 'There are less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights.'" Reddit argued it was a forum primarily for adults without the traditional social media features the government has "taken issue with."

Reddit was challenging the law on the grounds it infringed on the implied freedom of political communication. It was also seeking to challenge whether Reddit could be considered an age-restricted social media platform under the legislation. It said it was not seeking to challenge the law to avoid compliance, and had implemented age-assurance measures since Wednesday. The company said the vast majority of Redditors were adults, and advertising wasn't targeted to children under 18. The Apple app store age rating for Reddit is 17+. "Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online," Reddit said. "So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts."

During the company's first "Autonomy & AI Day" event today, Rivian unveiled a major autonomy push featuring custom silicon, lidar, and a "large driving model." It also hinted at a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe. TechCrunch reports: Rivian said it will expand the hands-free version of its driver-assistance software to "over 3.5 million miles of roads across the USA and Canada" and will eventually expand beyond highways to surface streets (with clearly painted road lines). This expanded access will be available on the company's second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs. It's calling the expanded capabilities "Universal Hands-Free" and will launch in early 2026. Rivian says it will charge a one-time fee of $2,500 or $49.99 per month.

"What that means is you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address to where you're going, and the vehicle will completely drive you there," Scaringe said Thursday, describing a point-to-point navigation feature. After that, Rivian plans to allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. "This gives you your time back. You can be on your phone, or reading a book, no longer needing to be actively involved in the operation of vehicle." Rivian's driver assistance software won't stop there; the EV maker laid out plans on Thursday to enhance its capabilities all the way up to what it's calling "personal L4," a nod to the level set by the Society of Automotive Engineers that means a car can operate in a particular area with no human intervention.

After that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will be looking at competing with the likes of Waymo. "While our initial focus will be on personally owned vehicles, which today represent a vast majority of the miles driven in the United States, this also enables us to pursue opportunities in the ride-share space," he said. To help accomplish these lofty goals, Rivian has been building a "large driving model" (think: an LLM but for real-world driving), part of a move away from a rules-based framework for developing autonomous vehicles that has been led by Tesla. The company also showed off its own custom 5nm processor, which it says will be built in collaboration with both Arm and TSMC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company's AI tools are infringing Disney's copyrights "on a massive scale." According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate's intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a "large corpus" of Disney's works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google's image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters -- they couldn't do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing "copies of its protected works" to consumers. So all those memes you've been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn't like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars. The company calls on Google to immediately stop using Disney content in its AI tools and create measures to ensure that future AI outputs don't produce any characters that Disney owns. Disney is famously litigious and has an army of lawyers dedicated to defending its copyrights. The nature of copyright law in the US is a direct result of Disney's legal maneuvering, which has extended its control of iconic characters by decades. While Disney wants its characters out of Google AI generally, the letter specifically cited the AI tools in YouTube. Google has started adding its Veo AI video model to YouTube, allowing creators to more easily create and publish videos. That seems to be a greater concern for Disney than image models like Nano Banana. "We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them," Google said in a statement. "More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content."

The cease and desist letter arrives at the same time the company announced a content deal with OpenAI. Disney said it's investing $1 billion in OpenAI via a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters.

Google's Chrome team has built an experimental browser called Disco that takes a query or prompt, opens a cluster of related tabs, and then generates a custom application tailored to whatever task the user is trying to accomplish. The browser launched Thursday as an experiment in Google's Search Labs.

GenTabs, the core feature powering Disco, are information-rich pages created by Google's Gemini AI models -- ask for travel tips and the system builds a planner app; ask for study help and it creates a flashcard system. Disco -- named partly for fun and partly as shorthand for "discovery" -- started as a hackathon project inside Google before catching the team's imagination.

Parisa Tabriz, who leads the Chrome team, said that Disco is not intended as a general-purpose browser and is not an attempt to cannibalize Chrome. The experiment aims to test what happens when users move from simply having tabs to generating personalized, curated applications on demand. The capability relies on features in the recently launched Gemini 3, which can create one-off interactive interfaces and build miniature apps on the fly rather than just returning text or images.

Uber has discontinued its monthly electric vehicle bonuses for drivers in the United States and Canada, marking the latest in a series of rollbacks from a company that once pledged to pour $800 million into helping its drivers transition away from gasoline-powered cars. The ride-hailing giant had previously eliminated its $1-per-ride EV perk last year, replacing it with monthly bonuses that required drivers to complete 200 rides. Those monthly payments are now gone too.

The company is far behind its self-imposed climate targets. Uber had pledged to reach 100% EVs in London by 2025 and across North America and Europe by 2030. Current figures paint a different picture: roughly 40% of miles in London come from EVs, while Europe sits at about 15% and North America at just 9%. The company's emissions have nearly doubled over the past three years and now exceed Denmark's total carbon footprint. Uber executives acknowledged to Bloomberg that they will likely miss their green targets. The company has doled out $539 million of its $800 million pledge through the end of 2024. Meanwhile, Uber's operating profits are set to double this year, and the company recently committed $20 billion to stock buybacks.

Opera has opened its AI-powered browser Neon to the public after a couple of months of testing, and anyone interested in trying it will need to pay $19.90 per month. The Norway-based company first unveiled Neon in May and launched it in early access to select users in October. Like Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas, and The Browser Company's Dia, Neon bakes an AI chatbot into its interface that can answer questions about pages, create mini apps and videos, and perform tasks. The browser uses your browsing history as context, so you can ask it to fetch details from a YouTube video you watched last week. The subscription also grants access to AI models including Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.1.

NASA has lost contact with its MAVEN Mars orbiter after it passed behind Mars. When it remerged from behind the planet, the spacecraft never resumed communications. SpaceNews reports: MAVEN launched in November 2013 and entered orbit around Mars in September 2014. The spacecraft's primary science mission is to study the planet's upper atmosphere and interactions with the solar wind, including how the atmosphere escapes into space. That is intended to help scientists understand how the planet changes from early in its history, when it had a much thicker atmosphere and was warm enough to support liquid water on its surface.

MAVEN additionally serves as a communications relay, using a UHF antenna to link the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the Martian surface with the Deep Space Network. NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft also serve as communications relays for the rovers, but are both significantly older than MAVEN. The spacecraft has suffered some technical problems in the past, notably with its inertial measurement units (IMUs) used for navigation. In 2022, MAVEN switched to an "all-stellar" navigation system to minimize the use of the IMUs.

MAVEN has enough propellant to maintain its orbit through at least the end of the decade. NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, though, zeroed out funding for MAVEN, which cost $22.6 million to operate in 2024. MAVEN was one of several missions "operating well past the end of prime mission" the proposal would terminate, despite MAVEN's role as a communications relay.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple on Wednesday released its annual list of the most downloaded apps and games for the year. For the U.S. market, OpenAI's ChatGPT topped the ranks of free iPhone apps (not including games) with the most installs in 2025. The AI app was followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google's Gemini. ChatGPT made it to No. 4 last year, but the top spot was taken by Chinese shopping app Temu. In 2023, the AI app didn't make the top-10 list despite being released on the iPhone in May 2023 to a strong debut.

A startup called Operation Bluebird is petitioning the US Patent and Trademark Office to strip X Corp of the "Twitter" and "tweet" trademarks, hoping to relaunch a new Twitter with the old brand, bird logo, and "town square" vibe. "The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.'s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark," the petition states. "The TWITTER bird was grounded." Ars Technica reports: If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)

Michael Peroff, an Illinois attorney and founder of Operation Bluebird, said that in the intervening years, more Twitter-like social media networks have sprung up or gained traction -- like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. But none have the scale or brand recognition that Twitter did prior to Musk's takeover. "There certainly are alternatives," Peroff said. "I don't know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could."

Similarly, Peroff's business partner, Stephen Coates, an attorney who formerly served as Twitter's general counsel, said that Operation Bluebird aims to recreate some of the magic that Twitter once had. "I remember some time ago, I've had celebrities react to my content on Twitter during the Super Bowl or events," he told Ars. "And we want that experience to come back, that whole town square, where we are all meshed in there." "Mere 'token use' won't be enough to reserve the mark," said Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law professor and expert in trademark law. "Or [X] could defend if it can show that it plans to go back to using Twitter. Consumers obviously still know the brand name. It seems weird to think someone else could grab the name when consumers still associate it with the ex-social media site of that name. But that's what the law says."

EU regulators say Google's Play Store changes still don't meet fairness rules and are preparing a potentially hefty 2026 fine unless Google makes deeper concessions. Reuters reports: Google Play has been in the European Commission's crosshairs since March, with regulators singling out technical restrictions preventing app developers from steering users to other channels for cheaper offers. Another issue is the service fee charged by Google for facilitating an app developer's initial acquisition of a new customer via Google Play which the regulator said goes beyond what is justified.

Tweaks to Google Play announced in August to make it easier for app developers to direct customers to other channels and choose a fee model are still falling short, the people said, with the EU antitrust regulator viewing Apple's recent changes to its App Store as a benchmark. [...] Google can still offer to make more changes before regulators impose a fine, likely in the first quarter of the next year, the people said, adding that the timing of any sanction can still change. "We continue to work closely with the European Commission in its ongoing investigation but have serious concerns that further changes would put Android and Play users at risk of malware, scams and data theft. Unlike iOS, Android is already open by design," a Google spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this "mandatory blanket license" would lower compliance costs for AI firms while ensuring that writers, musicians, artists, and other rights holders are compensated when their work is scraped to train commercial models. [...]

The eight-member committee, formed by the Indian government in late April, argues the system would avoid years of legal uncertainty while ensuring creators are compensated from the outset. Defending the system, the committee says in a 125-page submission (PDF) that a blanket license "aims to provide an easy access to content for AI developers reduce transaction costs [and] ensure fair compensation for rightsholders," calling it the least burdensome way to manage large-scale AI training. The submission adds that the single collecting body would function as a "single window," eliminating the need for individual negotiations and enabling royalties to flow to both registered and unregistered creators.

Qualcomm has acquired RISC-V startup Ventana to strengthen its CPU ambitions beyond mobile, "reinforcing its commitment and leadership in the development of the RISC-V standard and ecosystem," the company said in a press release. CRN Magazine reports: The San Diego-based company said Ventana's expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the Arm and x86 instruction set architectures, will enhance its CPU engineering capabilities and complement "existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Qualcomm, which has already been using RISC-V for some products outside the PC and server markets, said Ventana's contributions will boost its "technology leadership in the AI era across all businesses," indicating the broad impact expected by this acquisition. "We believe the RISC-V instruction set architecture has the potential to advance the frontier on CPU technology, enabling innovation across products," Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning, edge solutions and data center for Qualcomm, said in a statement. "The acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems marks a pivotal step in our journey to deliver industry-leading RISC-V-based CPU technology across products."

Further reading: Qualcomm Is Buying Arduino, Releases New Raspberry Pi-Esque Arduino Board

Meta's newly recruited AI "superstars" have developed an us-versus-them mentality against the company's longtime executive leadership, creating internal friction over whether the team should focus on catching up to rivals like OpenAI and Google or improving Meta's core advertising and social media businesses. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg hired in June to be chief AI officer, leads a team called TBD Lab from a siloed space next to Zuckerberg's office. In meetings this fall, Wang privately told people he disagreed with chief product officer Chris Cox and chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, according to the New York Times.

Cox and Bosworth wanted Wang's team to use Instagram and Facebook data to train Meta's new foundational AI model for improving feeds and advertising. Wang pushed back, arguing the goal should be catching up to rival models before focusing on products. TBD Lab researchers view many Meta executives as interested only in the social media business, while the lab's ambition is to create "godlike A.I. superintelligence." Bosworth was recently asked to slash $2 billion from Reality Labs' proposed budget for next year to fund Wang's team -- a claim Meta disputes.

Nvidia has developed location verification technology that could determine which country its AI chips are operating in, Reuters reports, citing a source, a capability that may help address ongoing concerns about the smuggling of advanced semiconductors to restricted markets like China. The feature, which Nvidia has demonstrated privately in recent months but has not released, would be an optional software tool that customers install. It taps into the confidential computing capabilities of Nvidia's GPUs and uses the time delay in communicating with Nvidia-run servers to approximate a chip's location.

The technology will first be available on Nvidia's newest Blackwell chips, though the company is examining options for its older Hopper and Ampere generations. U.S. lawmakers and the White House have pushed for location verification measures as the Department of Justice has brought criminal cases against smuggling rings allegedly attempting to move more than $160 million worth of Nvidia chips to China.

Congress quietly removed provisions that would have let the U.S. military fix its own equipment without relying on contractors, despite bipartisan and Pentagon support. The Register reports: The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release. [...]

According to PIRG's press release on the matter, elected officials have been targeted by an "intensive lobbying push" in recent weeks against the provisions. House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and ranking Democrat Adam Smith (D-WA), responsible for much of the final version of the bill, have received significant contributions from defense contractors in recent years, and while correlation doesn't equal causation, it sure looks fishy. [Isaac Bowers, PIRG's federal legislative director] did tell us that he was glad that the defense sector's preferred solution to the military right to repair fight -- a "data as a service" solution -- was also excluded, so the 2026 NDAA isn't a total loss for the repairability fight. "That provision would have mandated the Pentagon access repair data through separate vendor contracts rather than receiving it upfront at the time of procurement, maintaining the defense industry's near monopoly over essential repair information and keeping troops waiting for repairs they could do quicker and cheaper themselves," Bowers said in an email.

An aide to the Democratic side of the Committee told The Register the House and Senate committees did negotiate a degree of right-to-repair permissions in the NDAA. According to the aide and a review of the final version of the bill, measures were included that require the Defense Department to identify any instances where a lack of technical data hinders operation or maintenance of weapon systems, as well as aviation systems. The bill also includes a provision that would establish a "technical data system" that would "track, manage, and enable the assessment" of data related to system maintenance and repair. Unfortunately, the technical data system portion of the NDAA mentions "authorized repair contractors" as the parties carrying out repair work, and there's also no mention of parts availability or other repairability provisions in the sections the staffer flagged -- just access to technical data. That means the provisions are unlikely to move the armed forces toward a new repairability paradigm.