The U.S. Commerce Department said on Thursday it is considering new rules that would impose restrictions on Chinese drones that would restrict or ban them in the United States citing national security concerns. From a report: The department said it was seeking public comments by March 4 on potential rules to safeguard the supply chain for drones, saying threats from China and Russia "may offer our adversaries the ability to remotely access and manipulate these devices, exposing sensitive U.S. data."

China accounts for the vast majority of U.S. commercial drone sales. In September, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the department could impose restrictions similar to those that would effectively ban Chinese vehicles from the United States and the focus will be on drones with Chinese and Russian equipment, chips and software. She told Reuters in November she hopes to finalize the rules on Chinese vehicles by Jan. 20. A decision to write new rules restricting or banning Chinese drones will be made by the administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who takes over on Jan. 20.

Apple is offering rare discounts of up to 500 yuan ($68.50) on its latest iPhone models in China, as the U.S. tech giant moves to defend its market share against rising competition from domestic rivals like Huawei. From a report: The four-day promotion, running from Jan. 4-7, applies to several iPhone models when purchased using specific payment methods, according to its website.

The flagship iPhone 16 Pro with a starting price of 7,999 yuan and the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a starting price of 9,999 yuan will see the highest discount of 500 yuan. The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will receive a 400 yuan reduction. The discounts come as consumers remain cautious with spending amid China's slowing economy and deflationary pressures, with the country's consumer inflation hitting a five-month low in November.

Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85% to attract more enterprise users and strengthen its position in China's competitive AI market. CNBC reports: The Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm's cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, said in a WeChat post that it's offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images. [...] Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.

It's not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to incentivize businesses to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price reductions of as much as 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. More recently, in May, the company reduced prices on its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% in a bid to boost demand. [...] In Alibaba's case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT. In May, the company said its Qwen models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users.

Venezuela's Supreme Court on Monday fined TikTok $10 million for failing to prevent viral challenges allegedly linked to the deaths of three children. It also ordered the platform to establish a local office to oversee content compliance with national laws. The Associated Press reports: Judge Tania D'Amelio said TikTok had acted in a negligent manner and gave it eight days to pay the fine [...]. The judge did not explain how Venezuela would force TikTok, whose parent company is based in China, to pay the fine. Venezuela has blocked dozens of websites in previous years for not complying with regulations set by its telecommunications commission.

In November, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro blamed TikTok for the death of a 12-year-old girl who allegedly died after participating in a TikTok challenge that involved taking tranquilizer pills and not falling asleep. Venezuela's Education Minister Hector Rodriguez also said last month that a 14-year-old died after taking part in a TikTok challenge that involved sniffing substances. And on Nov. 21, Venezuela's attorney general blamed video challenges on TikTok for the death of a third child.

In 2025, China plans to start building a demonstration thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert. IEEE Spectrum reports: The 10-megawatt reactor project, managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), is scheduled to be operational by 2030, according to an environmental-impact report released by the Academy in October. The project follows a 2-MW experimental version completed in 2021 and operated since then. China's efforts put it at the forefront of both thorium-based fuel breeding and molten-salt reactors. Several companies elsewhere in the world are developing plans for this kind of fuel or reactor, but none has yet operated one. Prior to China's pilot project, the last operating molten-salt reactor was Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which ran on uranium. It shut down in 1969.

Thorium-232, found in igneous rocks and heavy mineral sands, is more abundant on Earth than the commonly used isotope in nuclear fuel, uranium-235. But this weakly radioactive metal isn't directly fissile -- it can't undergo fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei that produces energy. So it must first be transformed into fissile uranium-233. That's technically feasible, but whether it's economical and practical is less clear. The attraction of thorium is that it can help achieve energy self-sufficiency by reducing dependence on uranium, particularly for countries such as India with enormous thorium reserves. But China may source it in a different way: The element is a waste product of China's huge rare earth mining industry. Harnessing it would provide a practically inexhaustible supply of fuel. Already, China's Gansu province has maritime and aerospace applications in mind for this future energy supply, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Scant technical details of China's reactor exist, and SINAP didn't respond to IEEE Spectrum's requests for information. The Chinese Academy of Sciences' environmental-impact report states that the molten-salt reactor core will be 3 meters in height and 2.8 meters in diameter. It will operate at 700 C and have a thermal output of 60 MW, along with 10 MW of electricity. [...] But many challenges come along with thorium use. A big one is dealing with the risk of proliferation. When thorium is transformed into uranium-233, it becomes directly usable in nuclear weapons. "It's of a quality comparable to separated plutonium and is thus very dangerous," says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. If the fuel is circulating in and out of the reactor core during operation, this movement introduces routes for the theft of uranium-233, he says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the U.S. Treasury Department earlier this month and stole documents from its workstations, according to a letter to lawmakers that was provided to Reuters on Monday. The hackers compromised a third-party cybersecurity service provider and were able to access unclassified documents, the letter said, calling it a "major incident."

According to the letter, hackers "gained access to a key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users. With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able override the service's security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users." After being alerted by cybersecurity provider BeyondTrust, the Treasury Department said it was working with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI to assess the hack's impact. Developing...

German electric air taxi company Volocopter has filed for bankruptcy protection, the latest in a string of similar startups to hit financial turbulence. From a report: Volocopter is one of the more well-funded electric air taxi startups, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars over nearly a decade with backing from major automakers like Germany's Mercedes-Benz and China's Geely.

While microplastics seem to be everywhere, CNN reports that scientists in China "have come up with a possible solution: a biodegradable sponge made of squid bones and cotton" (which contain two organic compounds "known for eliminating pollution from wastewater...") They then tested the sponge in four different water samples, taken from irrigation water, pond water, lake water and sea water, and found it removed up to 99.9% of microplastics, according to a study published last month in Science Advances... The sponge created by the Wuhan researchers was able to absorb microplastics both by physically intercepting them and through electromagnetic attraction, the study said.

Previously studied methods for absorbing plastics tend to be expensive and difficult to make, limiting their scalability. Last year, researchers in Qingdao, China developed a synthetic sponge made of starch and gelatin designed to remove microplastics from water, though its efficacy varied depending on water conditions. The low cost and wide availability of both cotton and squid bones mean [the Chinese researchers' sponge] "has great potential to be used in the extraction of microplastic from complex water bodies," according to the study.

Shima Ziajahromi, a lecturer at Australia's Griffith University who studies microplastics, called the squid-cotton-sponge method "promising" and said it could be an effective way to "clean up the high risk and vulnerable aquatic ecosystem." However, the study's authors did not address whether the sponge can remove microplastics that sink to the sediment, which is the majority of microplastics in our waters, said Ziajahromi, who was not involved in the study. Another "critical issue" is the proper disposal of the sponges, Ziajahromi said. "Although the material is biodegradable, the microplastics it absorbs need to be disposed of properly," she said. "Without careful management, this process risks transferring microplastics from one ecosystem to another."

Ultimately, Ziajahromi added, minimizing plastic pollution is in the first place should remain a "top priority."

A ninth U.S. telecommunications company has been compromised in a Chinese espionage campaign that targeted private communications, particularly around Washington D.C., White House Deputy National Security Adviser Anne Neuberger said Friday.

The intrusion, part of the "Salt Typhoon" operation that previously hit eight telecom firms, allowed hackers to access customer call records and private messages. While the total number of affected Americans remains unclear, many targets were government officials and political figures in the Washington-Virginia area.

The annual defense policy bill signed by President Joe Biden Monday evening allocates $3 billion to help telecom firms remove and replace insecure equipment in response to recent incursions by Chinese-linked hackers. From a report: The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act outlines Pentagon policy and military budget priorities for the year and also includes non-defense measures added as Congress wrapped up its work in December. The $895 billion spending blueprint passed the Senate and House with broad bipartisan support.

The $3 billion would go to a Federal Communications Commission program, commonly called "rip and replace," to get rid of Chinese networking equipment due to national security concerns. The effort was created in 2020 to junk equipment made by telecom giant Huawei. It had an initial investment of $1.9 billion, roughly $3 billion shy of what experts said was needed to cauterize the potential vulnerability.

Calls to replenish the fund have increased recently in the wake of two hacking campaigns by China, dubbed Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, that saw hackers insert malicious code in U.S. infrastructure and break into at least eight telecom firms. The bill also includes a watered down requirement for the Defense Department to tap an independent third-party to study the feasibility of creating a U.S. Cyber Force, along with an "evaluation of alternative organizational models for the cyber forces" of the military branches.

fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: The International Space Station had to fire thrusters from a docked spacecraft last month to avoid a piece of debris that has been circling the globe for the nearly 18 years since the Chinese government blasted apart one of its own satellites in a weapons test. The evasive maneuver was the second in just six days for the space station, which has four NASA astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts aboard. That is the shortest interval ever between such actions, illustrating the slowly worsening problem of space junk in orbit. Debris is an increasingly vexing issue not only for NASA, but also for companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb seeking to protect the thousands of small satellites they send into space to provide high-speed internet. The debris cloud from China's 2007 destruction of the Fengyun 1C satellite remains one of the most persistent threats in orbit, with about 3,500 fragments still posing collision risks to spacecraft. Since 2020, the ISS has performed 15 debris-avoidance maneuvers.

The evasive maneuver was performed after a Space Force warning. According to the report, Space Force now tracks over 47,200 objects in orbit, issuing approximately 23 daily collision warnings -- up from just six per day five years ago.

Vietnam's Decree 147 mandates social media users on platforms like Facebook and TikTok to verify their identities and requires tech companies to store and share user data with authorities upon request, sparking concerns over increased censorship, self-censorship, and threats to free expression. Furthermore, the decree imposes restrictions on gaming time for minors and limits livestreaming to verified accounts. It becomes effective on Christmas Day. The Guardian reports: Decree 147, as it is known, builds on a 2018 cybersecurity law that was sharply criticized by the US, EU and internet freedom advocates who said it mimics China's repressive internet censorship. [...] Critics say that decree 147 will also expose dissidents who post anonymously to the risk of arrest. "Many people work quietly but effectively in advancing the universal values of human rights," Ho Chi Minh City-based blogger and rights activist Nguyen Hoang Vi told AFP.

She warned that the new decree "may encourage self-censorship, where people avoid expressing dissenting views to protect their safety -- ultimately harming the overall development of democratic values" in the country. Le Quang Tu Do, of the ministry of information and communications (MIC), told state media that decree 147 would "regulate behavior in order to maintain social order, national security, and national sovereignty in cyberspace." [...]

Human Rights Watch is calling on the government to repeal the "draconian" new decree. "Vietnam's new Decree 147 and its other cybersecurity laws neither protect the public from any genuine security concerns nor respect fundamental human rights," said Patricia Gossman, HRW's associate Asia director. "Because the Vietnamese police treat any criticism of the Communist party of Vietnam as a national security matter, this decree will provide them with yet another tool to suppress dissent."

The Biden administration has launched a Section 301 investigation into China's semiconductor industry, citing concerns over non-market practices, supply chain dependencies, and national security risks. The Hill reports: In a fact sheet, the White House said China "routinely engages in non-market policies and practices, as well as industrial targeting, of the semiconductor industry" that harms competition and creates "dangerous supply chain dependencies."

The Biden administration said the Office of the United States Trade Representative would launch a Section 301 investigation to examine China's targeting of semiconductor chips for dominance, an effort to see whether the practices are unfairly hurting U.S. trade and take potential action. The investigation will broadly probe Chinese nonmarket practices and policies related to semiconductors and look at how the products are incorporated into industries for defense, auto, aerospace, medical, telecommunications and power. It will also examine production of silicon carbide substrates or other wafers used as inputs for semiconductors. The probe launches four weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. "The effort could offer Trump a ready avenue to begin imposing some of the hefty 60% tariffs he has threatened on Chinese imports," notes Reuters.

"Departing President Joe Biden has already imposed a 50% U.S. tariff on Chinese semiconductors that starts on Jan. 1. His administration also has tightened export curbs on advanced artificial intelligence and memory chips and chipmaking equipment."

Sweden has accused China of denying a request for Swedish prosecutors to board a Chinese ship that has been linked to the cutting of two undersea cables in the Baltic despite Beijing pledging "cooperation" with regional authorities. From a report: The Yi Peng 3 left the waters it had been anchored in since last month on Saturday -- despite an ongoing investigation. The ship was tracked sailing over the two fibre-optic cables, one between Sweden and Lithuania, and the other linking Helsinki and Germany, at around the time that they were cut on 17 and 18 November in Swedish territorial waters close to the Swedish islands of Gotland and Oland.

For more than a month afterwards it was anchored in the Kattegat strait between Sweden and Denmark where it was being observed by multiple countries and was boarded by Swedish police and other authorities last week. The ship tracking site VesselFinder showed the Yi Peng 3 heading north out of the strait on Saturday and on Monday China confirmed the ship had left in order to "ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of the crew." The Swedish foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said on Monday that China had not cooperated with Sweden's request to allow Swedish prosecutors onboard.

Honda sketched plans for a drawn-out deal that amounts to a takeover of Nissan in all but name, as Japan's automakers struggle to keep up in an increasingly competitive global car industry. From a report: The two announced a tentative agreement Monday to set up a joint holding company that will aim to list shares in August 2026. While their executives called the transaction a merger, Honda will take the lead in forming the new entity and nominate a majority of its directors.

Nissan's partner Mitsubishi may also participate in the deal. Honda and Nissan both are having trouble contending with ascendant domestic automakers in China, which surpassed Japan as the world's largest car-exporting nation last year and is pulling further ahead in 2024. Honda Chief Executive Officer Toshihiro Mibe spoke to the level of level of difficulty ahead for the companies when he said during a press conference that their goal is to be competitive by 2030.

A series of drone sightings over U.S. military bases "has renewed concerns that the U.S. doesn't have clear government-wide policy for how to deal with unauthorized incursions that could potentially pose a national security threat," reports CNN: "We're one year past Langley drone incursions and almost two years past the PRC spy balloon. Why don't we have a single [point of contact] who is responsible for coordination across all organizations in the government to address this?" the recently retired head of US Northern Command and NORAD, Gen. Glen VanHerck, told CNN. "Instead, everybody's pointing their fingers at each other saying it's not our responsibility...." Over a period of six days earlier this month, there were six instances of unmanned aerial systems, or drones, entering the airspace of the Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton in California, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN, adding that they posed "no threat to installation operations and no impact to air and ground operations." There have also been incidents in the last month at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey; Naval Weapons Station Earle, New Jersey; and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. A Chinese citizen, who is a lawful permanent resident of the US, was recently arrested in connection to the California incident.

The drone incidents are "a problem that has been brewing for over a decade and we have basically failed to address it," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Rob Spalding, who previously served as the chief China strategist for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council. It's unclear what specifically the drones could be doing — the intent could be anything from attempting to gather intelligence on the base or testing its defenses and response time, to gaining a better understanding of how the bases work, or they could simply be harmless hobbyists flying drones too close to restricted areas... Despite the incursions and the risk they could pose, officials say there is no coordinated policy to determine what agency leads the response to such activity, or how to determine where the drones originate.

CNN reported this week that government agencies have struggled to keep pace with the development of drones and drone technology, particularly by adversaries like China, though legislation is being discussed and the Pentagon just recently released its strategy for countering unmanned systems... The two heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Jack Reed and Roger Wicker, sounded the alarm in a Washington Post op-ed at the beginning of 2024 that the US "lacks adequate drone detection capability" and that agencies "lack clear lines of authority about which agency is responsible for stopping these incursions."

Military installations have the authority to protect themselves and respond to threats, but a former senior military official said that if the drone enters the airspace and subsequently leaves, determining where the drone originated from and what it was doing can be difficult. Military law enforcement typically coordinates with civilian law enforcement off base in that instance, the former official said, but are often limited in what they can do given laws that restrict intelligence collection within US borders. But sources also said the lack of ability to do more also stems at times from a failure to prioritize defense against this kind of activity within the US. The topic is "such a relatively new phenomenon that the law has not caught up and the agencies have not adapted quickly enough," [said one Senate aide familiar with discussions on drone defense and policy].
"The need for Congressional action was made clear in a joint statement this week from the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigations and Federal Aviation Administration," according to the article.

"The agencies said they 'urge Congress to enact counter-UAS legislation when it reconvenes that would extend and expand existing counter-drone authorities to identify and mitigate any threat that may emerge.'"

The Associated Press reports that in Albania (population: 2,402,113), "children comprise the largest group of TikTok users in the country, according to domestic researchers."

But "Albania's prime minister said Saturday the government will shut down the video service TikTok for one year, blaming it for inciting violence and bullying, especially among children" after "the stabbing death of a teenager in mid-November by another teen after a quarrel that started on TikTok." There has been increasing concern from Albanian parents after reports of children taking knives and other objects to school to use in quarrels or cases of bullying promoted by stories they see on TikTok. TikTok's operations in China, where its parent company is based, are different, "promoting how to better study, how to preserve nature ... and so on," according to Rama. Albania is too small a country to impose on TikTok a change of its algorithm so that it does not promote "the reproduction of the unending hell of the language of hatred, violence, bullying and so on," Rama's office wrote in an email response to The Associated Press' request for comment. Rama's office said that in China TikTok "prevents children from being sucked into this abyss."
TikTok told the Associated Press it "found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have in fact confirmed videos leading up to this incident were being posted on another platform, not TikTok...."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Malaysia has agreed to resume the search for the wreckage of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, its transport minister said on Friday, more than 10 years after it disappeared in one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

[...] MH370's last transmission was about 40 minutes after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. The pilots signed off as the plane entered Vietnamese air space over the Gulf of Thailand and soon after its transponder was turned off. "Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin," Transport Minister Anthony Loke told a press conference. "We hope this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families."

Further reading: Could Sea Explosions Finally Locate the 2014 Crash Site of Flight MH370?

Chinese TVs, once dismissed as "cheap and low-quality," are making strides in the premium market, overtaking Samsung, the world's top TV manufacturer. From a report: TCL, a leading Chinese TV brand, surpassed Samsung in the 80-inch and larger TV market for the first time in the second quarter. Another Chinese electronics company, Hisense, is closely trailing Samsung in this market.

TCL maintained the lead in the 80-inch and larger TV market in the third quarter with a 23% market share( based on shipments), surpassing Samsung Electronics for the second consecutive quarter, according to market research firm Omdia on Dec. 19.

Samsung's share fell from 26% in the third quarter of last year to 19% this year. Hisense is also closing in on Samsung, narrowing the market share gap from 11 percentage points to just 1.65 points over the past year. LG Electronics is facing similar challenges, losing its third-place market share position to Hisense last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Hackers aligned with the Chinese government have infiltrated U.S. telecommunications infrastructure so deeply that it allowed the interception of unencrypted communications on a number of people, according to reports that first emerged in October. The operation, dubbed Salt Typhoon, apparently allowed hackers to listen to phone calls and nab text messages, and the penetration has been so extensive they haven't even been booted from the telecom networks yet. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued guidance this week on best practices for protecting "highly targeted individuals," which includes a new warning (PDF) about text messages.

"Do not use SMS as a second factor for authentication. SMS messages are not encrypted—a threat actor with access to a telecommunication provider's network who intercepts these messages can read them. SMS MFA is not phishing-resistant and is therefore not strong authentication for accounts of highly targeted individuals," the guidance, which has been posted online, reads. Not every service even allows for multi-factor authentication and sometimes text messages are the only option. But when you have a choice, it's better to use phishing-resistant methods like passkeys or authenticator apps. CISA prefaces its guidance by insisting it's only really speaking about high-value targets. The telecommunications hack mentioned above has been called the "worst hack in our nation's history," according to Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA).