Thursday America's FDA "raised concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities" in patient monitors from China-based medical device company Contec "that could allow unauthorized individuals to access and potentially manipulate those devices," reports Reuters. The patient monitors could be remotely controlled by unauthorized users or may not function as intended, and the network to which these devices are connected could be compromised, the agency warned. The FDA also said that once these devices are connected to the internet, they can collect patient data, including personally identifiable information and protected health information, and can export this data out of the healthcare delivery environment.

The agency, however, added that it is currently unaware of any cybersecurity incidents, injuries, or deaths related to these identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The FDA's announcement says "The software on the patient monitors includes a backdoor, which may mean that the device or the network to which the device has been connected may have been or could be compromised." And it offers this advice to caregivers and patients: If your health care provider confirms that your device relies on remote monitoring features, unplug the device and stop using it. Talk to your health care provider about finding an alternative patient monitor.

If your device does not rely on remote monitoring features, use only the local monitoring features of the patient monitor. This means unplugging the device's ethernet cable and disabling wireless (that is, WiFi or cellular) capabilities, so that patient vital signs are only observed by a caregiver or health care provider in the physical presence of a patient. If you cannot disable the wireless capabilities, unplug the device and stop using it. Talk to your health care provider about finding an alternative patient monitor.
A detailed report from CISA describes how a research team "created a simulated network, created a fake patient profile, and connected a blood pressure cuff, SpO2 monitor, and ECG monitor peripherals to the patient monitor. Upon startup, the patient monitor successfully connected to the simulated IP address and immediately began streaming patient data..." to an IP address that hard-coded into the backdoor function. "Sensor data from the patient monitor is also transmitted to the IP address in the same manner. If the routine to connect to the hard-coded IP address and begin transmitting patient data is called, it will automatically initialize the eth0 interface in the same manner as the backdoor. This means that even if networking is not enabled on startup, running this routine will enable networking and thereby enable this functionality

Star Wars star Mark Hamill, science fiction author William Gibson, XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe, and The Onion have joined millions of others bringing Bluesky's user count to 30 million, reports CNET. In fact Bluesky has added over 14 million users in the last three months, and for a few days in early November was adding over one million users a day. "That rate equals about 12 new users per second. The 30 million user mark compares to 9 million users in September."

But meanwhile Meta's social media site Threads — launched 19 months ago — "now has 320 million monthly active users," reports TechCrunch, "up from 300 million last month. The app had 275 million monthly active users in [early] November." That's a 16% grow rate in just three months. In comparison, Bluesky is experiencing a slowdown in growth, with an increase of less than 10% month-over-month in December 2024, following a remarkable 189% growth in November, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Bluesky now has a total of 26.44 million users. Additionally, Zuckerberg noted that Threads is adding more than 1 million daily signups [while presenting fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday].

A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger takes a deep dive into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, exploring how former Air Force pilot Jim Sachs transformed a lackluster Windows 95 screensaver into a 25-year digital phenomenon. PC Gamer reports: The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sach's pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

Despite being removed from app stores and facing a potential U.S. ban, TikTok has regained nearly 90% of its user traffic, according to Cloudflare Radar. "DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains has continued to recover since service restoration, and is currently about 10% lower than pre-shutdown level," said David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare. CNBC reports: The data from Cloudflare shows that, for the most part, TikTok has managed to maintain the bulk of its users and creators in the U.S. despite going offline for about 14 hours and remaining off of the Apple or Google app stores.

As for its alternatives, Cloudflare's data shows a spike in traffic the day of the temporary ban, with levels remaining steadily higher in the following week. Traffic for alternatives began to grow a week ahead of the expected shutdown, driven by the increased popularity of RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, Belson said.

But traffic to TikTok alternatives peaked on Jan. 19, the day TikTok returned online, he added. "DNS traffic fell rapidly once the shutdown ended, and has continued to slowly decline over the last week and a half," Belson said.

Google is enhancing Android 16's Linux Terminal app to support graphical Linux applications, so Android Authority decided to put it to the test by running Doom. From the report: The Terminal app first appeared in the Android 15 QPR2 beta as a developer option, and it still remains locked behind developer settings. Since its initial public release, Google pushed a few changes that fixed issues with the installation process and added a settings menu to resize the disk, forward ports, and backup the installation. However, the biggest changes the company has been working on, which include adding hardware acceleration support and a full graphical environment, have not been pushed to any public releases.

Thankfully, since Google is working on this feature in the open, it's possible to simply compile a build of AOSP with these changes added in. This gives us the opportunity to trial upcoming features of the Android Linux Terminal app before a public release. To demonstrate, we fired up the Linux Terminal on a Pixel 9 Pro, tapped a new button on the top right to enter the Display activity, and then ran the 'weston' command to open up a graphical environment. (Weston is a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, a modern display server protocol.)

We also went ahead and enabled hardware acceleration beforehand as well as installed Chocolate Doom, a source port of Doom, to see if it would run. Doom did run, as you can see below. It ran well, which is no surprise considering Doom can run on literal potatoes. There wasn't any audio because an audio server isn't available yet, but audio support is something that Google is still working on.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Meta is in talks to move its incorporation from Delaware to Texas or other states. Reuters reports: The social media giant has talked to Texas officials about the potential changes, WSJ said, adding that the discussions predate President Donald Trump's new administration. The paperwork change would not relocate its corporate headquarters.

A Meta spokesperson said that it does not plan on shifting its corporate headquarters out of Menlo Park, California, but declined to comment on reincorporation when contacted by Reuters. Texas is perceived by some businesses as having a more favorable legal and regulatory environment, particularly in areas such as taxation and corporate governance, which can be attractive to companies looking to cut costs and streamline operations.

The Swiss canton ("state") of Basel-Stadt fixed a tax flyer typo by buying the incorrect domain and setting up a redirect, avoiding a $100,000 reprint cost. TechCrunch reports: As Swiss news outlet SRF reports, the Basel tax administration printed fliers that were supposed to include a URL to file taxes online. However, the Swiss country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of ".ch" was omitted, leaving just the Basel-Stadt suffix of ".bs" -- which just happens to be the ccTLD of the Bahamas.

A spokesperson for Basel-Stadt's department of finance told SRF that it would cost the equivalent of around $100,000 to print and send out a batch of new flyers, so it was a no-brainer to fork out $1,000 to administer the new domain instead.

Apple has canceled a project to build advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices, Bloomberg reported Friday, marking the latest setback in its effort to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers. From the report: The company shuttered the program this week, according to people with knowledge of the move. The now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn't public.

The project had been seen as a potential way forward after the weak introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, a $3,499 model that was too cumbersome and pricey to catch on with consumers. The hope was to produce something that everyday users could embrace, but finding the right technology -- at the right cost -- has proven to be a challenge.

Google users have discovered that adding curse words to search queries disables the company's AI-powered overview feature. While Google's Gemini AI system typically avoids profanity, inserting expletives into search terms bypasses AI summaries and delivers traditional web results instead. Users can also disable AI overviews by adding "-ai" or other text strings after a minus sign to their queries.

DeepSeek has emerged as the leading open-source AI model developer, surpassing Meta's Llama and Mistral, after releasing its latest model V3 with breakthrough cost efficiencies, research and consultancy firm SemiAnalysis reported on Friday.

The Chinese startup, backed by hedge fund High-Flyer, reached this milestone through innovations in Multi-head Latent Attention technology, which cut inference costs by 93.3% versus standard methods. Despite offering services below cost to gain market share, its performance matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-4.

Apple has filed an emergency motion [PDF] for a stay in the Google antitrust trial, warning that it faces "clear and substantial irreparable harm" if barred from participating in the case's remedies phase. The motion, filed on January 30, 2025, comes after Judge Amit Mehta denied Apple's request for limited intervention earlier in the week.

Apple -- which makes more than $20 billion a year from Google to use the Android-maker's search engine on Safari -- argues that the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) proposed remedy -- which includes a prohibition on "any contract between Google and Apple in which there would be anything exchanged of value" --would prevent it from negotiating agreements that benefit millions of users. Without the ability to fully participate, Apple contends it will be left as a "mere spectator" while the government pursues restrictions that directly impact its business interests.

The company asserts that intervention is necessary to develop evidence, participate in discovery, and cross-examine witnesses regarding its market role and incentives. Apple also seeks access to trial records while its appeal is pending, including witness lists, depositions, and discovery materials, to ensure it can respond effectively if granted party status.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a "photonic" quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits -- information encoded in light. In practice, this means combining and recombining laser beams on multiple chips using lenses, fibers, and other optics according to an algorithm. Xanadu's computer is designed in such a way that the answer to an algorithm it executes corresponds to the final number of photons in each laser beam. This approach differs from one used by Google and IBM, which involves encoding information in properties of superconducting circuits.

Aurora has a modular design that consists of four similar units, each installed in a standard server rack that is slightly taller and wider than the average human. To make a useful quantum computer, "you copy and paste a thousand of these things and network them together," says Christian Weedbrook, the CEO and founder of the company. Ultimately, Xanadu envisions a quantum computer as a specialized data center, consisting of rows upon rows of these servers. This contrasts with the industry's earlier conception of a specialized chip within a supercomputer, much like a GPU. [...]

Xanadu's 12 qubits may seem like a paltry number next to IBM's 1,121, but Tiwari says this doesn't mean that quantum computers based on photonics are running behind. In his opinion, the number of qubits reflects the amount of investment more than it does the technology's promise. [...] Xanadu's next goal is to improve the quality of the photons in the computer, which will ease the error correction requirements. "When you send lasers through a medium, whether it's free space, chips, or fiber optics, not all the information makes it from the start to the finish," he says. "So you're actually losing light and therefore losing information." The company is working to reduce this loss, which means fewer errors in the first place. Xanadu aims to build a quantum data center, with thousands of servers containing a million qubits, in 2029. The company published its work on chip design optimization and fabrication in the journal Nature.

A bipartisan group of legislators has reintroduced the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025, aiming to mandate AM radio in all new vehicles at no additional cost. Adweek reports: The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act was first introduced in May 2023. It continued to take on new co-sponsors through the fall of 2024. It was reintroduced as the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 with 62 cosponsors. Upper Midwest senators showing support for the bill include Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer R-North Dakota, and Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, DFL- Minnesota.

If enacted, the bill would require the Department of Transportation to issue a rule requiring new vehicles to maintain access to broadcast AM radio at no additional cost to the consumer and provide small vehicle manufacturers at least four years after the date DOT issues the rule to comply. The act also requires automakers to inform consumers, during the period before the rule takes effect, that the vehicles do not maintain access to broadcast AM radio. "With 82 million Americans tuning in each month, AM radio delivers more than just emergency alerts," says the National Association of Broadcasters in a news release. "It connects communities through hyper-local content, including news, weather and diverse cultural programming," according to a news release from the National Association of Broadcasters."

At an all hands meeting inside Meta Thursday, the company's co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he was increasingly careful about what he says internally at Meta. From a report: "Everything I say leaks. And it sucks, right?," Zuckerberg said. Meta made changes to the question-and-answer section of the company all hands meeting because of the leaks, Zuckerberg said, according to meeting audio obtained by 404 Media. "I want to be able to be able to talk about stuff openly, but I am also trying to like, well, we're trying to build stuff and create value in the world, not destroy value by talking about stuff that inevitably leaks," he said.

So rather than take direct questions, the company used a "poll" system, where questions asked beforehand were voted on so that "main themes" of questions were addressed. "There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I'm not going to talk about those. But I think it'll be good. You all can give us feedback later," he added. "Maybe it's just the nature of running a company at scale, but it's a little bit of a bummer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website's own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov's datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

"Some of [the entries link to] actual data," Cushman told 404 Media. "And some of them link to a landing page [where the data is hosted]. And the question is -- when things are disappearing, is it the data it points to that is gone? Or is it just the index to it that's gone?" For example, "National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Water Temperature Data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2005 to 2019," a NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov but can be found on one of NOAA's websites by Googling the title. "Stetson Flower Garden Banks Benthic_Covage Monitoring 1993-2018 -- OBIS Event," another NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov and also appears to have been deleted from the internet. "Three Dimensional Thermal Model of Newberry Volcano, Oregon," a Department of Energy resource, is no longer available via the Department of Energy but can be found backed up on third-party websites. [...]

Data.gov serves as an aggregator of datasets and research across the entire government, meaning it isn't a single database. This makes it slightly harder to archive than any individual database, according to Mark Phillips, a University of Northern Texas researcher who works on the End of Term Web Archive, a project that archives as much as possible from government websites before a new administration takes over. "Some of this falls into the 'We don't know what we don't know,'" Phillips told 404 Media. "It is very challenging to know exactly what, where, how often it changes, and what is new, gone, or going to move. Saving content from an aggregator like data.gov is a bit more challenging for the End of Term work because often the data is only identified and registered as a metadata record with data.gov but the actual data could live on another website, a state .gov, a university website, cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft or any other location. This makes the crawling even more difficult."

Phillips said that, for this round of archiving (which the team does every administration change), the project has been crawling government websites since January 2024, and that they have been doing "large-scale crawls with help from our partners at the Internet Archive, Common Crawl, and the University of North Texas. We've worked to collect 100s of terabytes of web content, which includes datasets from domains like data.gov." [...] It is absolutely true that the Trump administration is deleting government data and research and is making it harder to access. But determining what is gone, where it went, whether it's been preserved somewhere, and why it was taken down is a process that is time intensive and going to take a while. "One thing that is clear to me about datasets coming down from data.gov is that when we rely on one place for collecting, hosting, and making available these datasets, we will always have an issue with data disappearing," Phillips said. "Historically the federal government would distribute information to libraries across the country to provide greater access and also a safeguard against loss. That isn't done in the same way for this government data."

The Register's Dan Robinson reports: Google promised a decade of updates for its Chromebooks in 2023 to stop them being binned so soon after purchase, but many are still set to reach the end of the road sooner than later. The appliance-like laptop devices were introduced by megacorp in 2011, running its Linux-based ChromeOS platform. They have been produced by a number of hardware vendors and proven popular with buyers such as students, thanks to their relatively low pricing. The initial devices were designed for a three-year lifespan, or at least this was the length of time Google was prepared to issue automatic updates to add new features and security fixes for the onboard software.

Google has extended this Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date over the years, prompted by irate users who purchased a Chromebook only to find that it had just a year or two of software updates left if that particular model had been on the market for a while. The latest extension came in September 2023, when the company promised ten years of automatic updates, following pressure from the US-based Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The advocacy organization had recommended this move in its Chromebook Churn report, which criticized the devices as not being designed to last.

PIRG celebrated its success at the time, claiming that Google's decision to extend support would "save millions of dollars and prevent tons of e-waste from being disposed of." But Google's move actually meant that only Chromebooks released from 2021 onward would automatically get ten years of updates, starting in 2024. For a subset of older devices, an administrator (or someone with admin privileges) can opt in to enable extended updates and receive the full ten years of support, a spokesperson for the company told us. This, according to PIRG, still leaves many models set to reach end of life this year, or over the next several years. "According to my research, at least 15 Chromebook models have already expired across most of the top manufacturers (Google, Acer, Dell, HP, Samsung, Asus, and Lenovo). Models released before 2021 don't have the guaranteed ten years of updates, so more devices will continue to expire each year," Stephanie Markowitz, a Designed to Last Campaign Associate at PIRG, told The Register.

"In general, end-of-support dates for consumer tech like laptops act as 'slow death' dates," according to Markowitz. "The devices won't necessarily lose function immediately, but without security updates and bug patches, the device will eventually become incompatible with the most up-to-date software, and the device itself will no longer be secure against malware and other issues."

A full ist of end-of-life dates for Chromebook models can be viewed here.

Google is offering U.S. employees in its Platforms & Devices division a voluntary exit program with severance packages, following last year's merger of its Pixel hardware and Android software teams.

The program affects staff working on Android, Chrome, Google Photos, Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest products, according to a memo from Senior Vice President Rick Osterloh. The move comes after the hardware division cut hundreds of roles last January when it reorganized into a functional model. Google said the program aims to retain employees committed to the combined organization's mission, though it does not coincide with any product changes.

Nearly 90% of Oracle Java customers are looking to abandon the software maker's products following controversial licensing changes made in 2023, according to research firm Dimensional Research.

The exodus reflects growing frustration with Oracle's shift to per-employee pricing for its Java platform, which critics called "predatory" and could increase costs up to five times for the same software, Gartner found. The dissatisfaction runs deepest in Europe, where 92% of French and 95% of German users want to switch to alternative providers like Bellsoft Liberica, IBM Semeru, or Azul Platform Core.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites. Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill. [...]

Lofgren's bill (PDF) would impose site-blocking requirements on broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million. The bill has exemptions for VPN services and "similar services that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers"; DNS providers that offer service "exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols"; and operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities. Lofgren released a summary of the bill explaining how copyright owners can obtain blocking orders. "A copyright owner or exclusive licensee may file a petition in US District Court to obtain a preliminary order against a foreign website or online service engaging in copyright infringement," the summary said.

For non-live content, the petition must show that "transmission of a work through a foreign website likely infringes exclusive rights under Section 106 [of US law] and is causing irreparable harm." For live events, a petition must show that "an imminent or ongoing unauthorized transmission of a live event is likely to infringe, and will cause irreparable harm." The proposed law says that after a preliminary order is issued, copyright owners would be able to obtain orders directing service providers "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order." Judges would not be permitted to "prescribe any specific technical measures" for blocking and may not require any action that would prevent Internet users from using virtual private networks.Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge described the bill as a "censorious site-blocking" measure "that turns broadband providers into copyright police at Americans' expense."

"Rather than attacking the problem at its source -- bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court -- Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry has decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship," Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. "Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites accused of copyright infringement. More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers results in global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on one individual's filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we've seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries."

NordVPN has introduced NordWhisper, a new protocol designed to bypass VPN blocks in restrictive countries like Russia and India by making VPN traffic appear like regular internet activity. Gizmodo reports: NordVPN claims to have found a way to make traffic from its service look normal, though admits that it may not always work perfectly. It also says the NordWhisper protocol may introduce more latency. The protocol is rolling out first to users on Windows, Linux, and Android. Support for other platforms will come in the future.