An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo announced on Wednesday it plans to expand testing of its autonomous driving technology in over 10 new cities in 2025. After testing the Waymo Driver in multiple cities, the company says the technology is adapting successfully to new environments, leading to the expansion. In addition to ongoing trips to Truckee, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Upstate New York and Tokyo, the expansion includes testing in San Diego and Las Vegas, with more cities yet to be announced.

"During these trips, we'll send a limited fleet of vehicles to each city, where trained human autonomous specialists will be behind the wheel at all times," a spokeswoman for Waymo said. The testing will begin with manual driving through the densest and most complex parts of each city, including city centers and freeways. Waymo plans to send less than 10 vehicles to each city, where they will be manually driven around for a couple of months, according to The Verge, which first reported the news.

The U.S. Copyright Office declared Wednesday that the use of AI tools to assist in the creative process does not undermine the copyright of a work. Variety: The announcement clears the way for continued adoption of AI in post-production, where it has become increasingly common, such as in the enhancement of Hungarian-language dialogue in "The Brutalist."

Studios, whose business model is founded on strong copyright protections, have expressed concern that AI tools could be inhibited by regulatory obstacles. In a 41-page report [PDF], the Copyright Office also reiterated that human authorship is essential to copyright, and that merely entering text prompts into an AI system is not enough to claim authorship of the resulting output.

New Zealand has relaxed its visitor visa rules to attract so-called "digital nomads" in a bid to boost tourism and the economy. From a report: Visitor visas will now allow people to work remotely for a foreign employer while they are visiting New Zealand for up to 90 days. The visa can be extended up to nine months but visitors may need to pay tax during this time. Economic growth minister Nicola Willis said making it easier for digital nomads -- people who work remotely while travelling -- to work in New Zealand, will boost the country's appeal as a destination. The visa would extend to influencers, as long as they are being paid by an overseas company.

Google has appealed a record $4.5 billion EU antitrust fine to the European Court of Justice, arguing that the European Commission's decision punished its innovation and imposed unfair penalties for agreements requiring pre-installation of its apps on Android devices. Reuters reports: Google's appeal to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union comes two years after a lower tribunal sided with the European Commission which said the company used its Android mobile operating system to quash rivals. The lower court trimmed the fine to 4.1 billion euros.

"Google does not contest or shy away from its responsibility under the law, but the Commission also has a responsibility when it runs investigations, when it seeks to reshape markets and second-guess pro-competitive business models, and when it imposes multi-billion-euro fines," Google lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the court. "In this case, the Commission failed to discharge its burden and its responsibility and, relying on multiple errors of law, punished Google for its superior merits, attractiveness and innovation," he said. The final ruling is expected in the coming months and cannot be appealed.

The Federal Communications Commission will abandon a proposal that would have banned mandatory internet service charges for apartment and condominium residents. FCC Chair Brendan Carr halted the Biden-era plan that sought to prevent landlords from requiring tenants to pay for specific broadband providers. Housing industry groups said they welcomed the decision, arguing bulk billing arrangements help secure discounted rates. They claim these agreements can reduce internet costs by up to 50%. However, public interest advocates, who backed the original proposal, contend that landlords don't always pass these savings to tenants.

Companies are planning smaller raises this year, according to a new survey of chief financial officers from Gartner. From a report: It's become harder to find a job, particularly in the white-collar world. So employers are far less worried about people quitting and don't need to do as much to get workers to stick around. "Nobody is talking about the Great Resignation anymore," says Randeep Rathindran, a vice president in the finance practice at Gartner. The vast majority of employers, 94%, are still planning raises this year, per Gartner, which surveyed 300 CFOs and finance executives. The amounts are just smaller now. The share of CFOs planning to raise average employee compensation by 4% or more in 2025 fell to 61% from 86% in 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: TechCrunch gathered data from several sources and found similar trends. In 2024, 966 startups shut down, compared to 769 in 2023, according to Carta. That's a 25.6% increase. One note on methodology: Those numbers are for U.S.-based companies that were Carta customers and left Carta due to bankruptcy or dissolution. There are likely other shutdowns that wouldn't be accounted for through Carta, estimates Peter Walker, Carta's head of insights. [...] Meanwhile, AngelList found that 2024 saw 364 startup winddowns, compared to 233 in 2023. That's a 56.2% jump. However, AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli has a fairly optimistic take, noting that winddowns "are still very low relative to the number of companies that were funded across both years."

Layoffs.fyi found a contradicting trend: 85 tech companies shut down in 2024, compared to 109 in 2023 and 58 in 2022. But as founder Roger Lee acknowledges, that data only includes publicly reported shutdowns "and therefore represents an underestimate." Of those 2024 tech shutdowns, 81% were startups, while the rest were either public companies or previously acquired companies that were later shut down by their parent organizations. So many companies got funded in 2020 and 2021 at heated valuations with famously thin diligence, that it's only logical that up to three years later, an increasing number couldn't raise more cash to fund their operations. Taking investment at too high of a valuation increases the risk such that investors won't want to invest more unless business is growing extremely well. [...]

Looking ahead, Walker also expects we'll continue to see more shutdowns in the first half of 2025, and then a gradual decline for the rest of the year. That projection is based mostly on a time-lag estimate from the peak of funding, which he estimates was the first quarter of 2022 in most stages. So by the first quarter of 2025, "most companies will have either found a new path forward or had to make this difficult choice." "Tech zombies and a startup graveyard will continue to make headlines," said Dori Yona, CEO and co-founder of SimpleClosure. "Despite the crop of new investments, there are a lot of companies that have raised at high valuations and without enough revenue."

AmiMoJo shares a report: Two hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, in the latest landmark in the campaign to reinvent Britain's working week. Together the companies employ more than 5,000 people, with charities, marketing and technology firms among the best-represented, according to the latest update from the 4 Day Week Foundation. Proponents of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an earlier economic age.

Joe Ryle, the foundation's campaign director, said that the "9-5, five-day working week was invented 100 years ago and is no longer fit for purpose. We are long overdue an update." With "50% more free time, a four-day week gives people the freedom to live happier, more fulfilling lives," he continued. "As hundreds of British companies and one local council have already shown, a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for both workers and employers."

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs.

Goldman Sachs suggests the development could reshape competition by lowering barriers to entry for startups. Founded in 2023 by former hedge fund executive Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's open-source models have gained traction with its mobile app topping charts across major markets. DeepSeek's latest AI model had sparked over $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks Monday, before even the U.S. market opened.

The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...)

But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep." The internet-connected bassinet... reliably comforted her 1-month-old — just as it had her first child — until it started charging $20 a month for some abilities, including one that keeps the bassinet's motion and sounds at one level all night. The level-lock feature previously was available without a fee. "It all felt really intrusive — like they went into our bedroom and clawed back this feature that we've been depending on...." When the Snoo's maker, Happiest Baby, introduced a premium subscription for some of the bassinet's most popular features in July, owners filed dozens of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau, coordinated review bombs and vented on social media — saying the company took advantage of their desperation for sleep to bait-and-switch them...

Happiest Baby isn't the only baby gear company that has rolled out a subscription. In 2023, makers of the Miku baby monitor, which retails for up to $400, elicited similar fury from parents when it introduced a $10 monthly subscription for most features. A growing number of internet-connected products have lost software support or functionality after purchase in recent years, such as Spotify's Car Thing — a $90 Bluetooth streaming device that the company announced in May it plans to discontinue — and Levi's $350 smart jacket, which let users control their phones by swiping sensors on its sleeve...

Seventeen consumer protection and tech advocacy groups cited Happiest Baby and Car Thing in a letter urging the FTC to create guidelines that ensure products retain core functionality without the imposition of fees that did not exist when the items were originally bought.
The Times notes that the bassinets are often resold, so the subscription fees are partly to cover the costs of supporting new owners, according to Happiest Baby's vice president for marketing and communications. But the article three additional perspectives:

• "This new technology is actually allowing manufacturers to change the way the status quo has been for decades, which is that once you buy something, you own it and you can do whatever you want. Right now, consumers have no trust that what they're buying is actually going to keep working." — Lucas Gutterman, who leads the Public Interest Research Group's "Design to Last" campaign.

• "It's a shame to be beholden to companies' goodwill, to require that they make good decisions about which settings to put behind a paywall. That doesn't feel good, and you can't always trust that, and there's no guarantee that next week Happiest Baby isn't going to announce that all of the features are behind a paywall." — Elizabeth Chamberlain, sustainability director at iFixit.

• "It's no longer just an out-and-out purchase of something. It's a continuous rental, and people don't know that." — Natasha Tusikov, an associate professor at York University

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok's parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authorized to speak about the proposal. The person said Perplexity's proposal was revised based off of feedback from the Trump administration. If the plan is successful, the shares owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said. The government also would not get a seat on the new company's board.

Under the plan, ByteDance would not have to completely cut ties with TikTok, a favorable outcome for its investors. But it would have to allow a "full U.S. board control," the person said.

Under the proposal, the China-based tech company would contribute TikTok's U.S. business without the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app, according to a document seen by the Associated Press.

A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."

"[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft." Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's web infrastructure... "The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. "ByteDance wouldn't completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership...." Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, according to the source involved in the discussions, who said Oracle is interested in a TikTok stake "in the tens of billions," but the rest of the deal is in flux...

Under a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, TikTok must execute what is known as "qualified divestiture" from ByteDance in order to stay in business in the U.S... A congressional staffer involved in talks about TikTok's future, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said binding legal agreements from the White House ensuring ByteDance cannot covertly manipulate the app will prove critical in winning lawmakers' approval. "A key part is showing there is no operational relationship with ByteDance, that they do not have control," the Congressional staffer said. "There needs to be no backdoors where China can potentially gain access...."

Chinese regulators, who have for years opposed the selling of TikTok, recently signaled that they would not stand in the way of a TikTok ownership change, saying acquisitions "should be independently decided by the enterprises and based on market principles." The statement, at first, does not seem to say much, but negotiators in the White House believe it indicates that Beijing is not planning to block a deal that gives American investors a majority-stake position in the company.
"Meanwhile, Apple and Google still have not returned TikTok to app stores..."

2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup"
2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas"

"Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production."

"Back in 2020, electric vehicle maker Canoo snagged a $2.4 billion valuation before it had shipped a single car," remembers SFGate. "Now, just months after yanking its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Texas, the company has gone belly-up." In its four-year span as a public company, Canoo battled investor lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission charges, executive departures and a mixed reception of its cars. Auto tech blogger Steven Symes recently likened Canoo's cargo-style van to an "eraser on wheels."
"Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public," notes TechCrunch. "Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries." In the years since it went public, [Canoo] made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners — some paying — willing to trial the vehicles. The U.S. Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.

TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550."

Another example from The New York Times: An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That's about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok.
Business Insider reports the search term iPhone TikTok "yielded more than 45,000 results" on eBay...

"For years, renewable energy proponents have hoped to build a U.S. electric grid powered by wind, solar, geothermal and — to a lesser extent — nuclear power..." writes the Washington Post. In America's power markets "the economics of clean energy are strong," with renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel plants in many jurisdictions.

But the Post spoke to the "electricity modeling" director at nonpartisan clean energy think tank Energy Innovation, who offered this assessment. "The technology is ready, and the financial services are ready — but the question nobody really put enough thought into was, could the government keep up? And at the moment, the answer is no." [R]enewable developers say that the new technologies are stymied by complicated local and federal regulations, a long wait to connect to the electricity grid, and community opposition... "The U.S. offshore wind business is at a very nascent stage versus Europe or China," Rob Barnett, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in an email. "With the new permitting pause, it's doubtful much progress for this emerging industry will be made...." After the Inflation Reduction Act passed, Rhodium Group — an independent clean energy research firm — estimated that between 2023 and 2025, on average, the country would add between 36 and 46 gigawatts of clean electricity to the grid every year. Late last year, however, the group found that the country only installed around 27 gigawatts in 2023. The U.S.'s renewable growth is now expected to fall on the low end of that range — or miss it entirely.

"It actually is really hard to build a lot of this stuff fast," said Trevor Houser, partner in climate and energy at Rhodium Group. As a result, Rhodium found, the country only cut carbon emissions by 0.2 percent in 2024... A significant amount of this lag has come from wind power, where problems with supply chains and getting permits and approval to build has put a damper on development. But solar construction is also on the low end of what experts were expecting...

Developers point to lags in the interconnection queue — a system that gives new solar, wind or fossil fuel projects permission to connect to the larger electricity grid. According to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it can now take nearly 3 years for a project to get through the queue. The grid operator that covers the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, PJM, had over 3,300 projects in its queue at the end of 2023. The vast majority of these applications are for renewables — more than the entire number of active wind farms in the nation... There are possible solutions. Some developers hope to reuse old fossil fuel sites, like coal plants, that are already connected to the grid — bypassing the long queue entirely. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has instated new rules to make it easier to build transmission lines.
Part of the problem is that wind and solar facilities "sometimes need to be built hundreds or even thousands of miles away" — requiring long transmission lines. Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of EDP Renewables North America, tells the Post that in America, "The grid that we have was never designed to handle this kind of load." And yet last year just 255 miles of new transmission line were built in the U.S., according to the American Clean Power Association. And Ganapathy also complains that approval for a new renewable energy project takes "anywhere between six to eight years" — which makes developers hesitant to build. "Why are we taking a big risk of a massive investment if I will not be able to sell the electrons?"

The end result? The Washington Post writes that "Experts once hoped that by the end of the decade the United States could generate up to 80 percent of its power with clean power... Now, some wonder if the country will be able to reach even 60 percent."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. auto safety agency said on Friday it is reconsidering a landmark rule from the administration of former President Joe Biden requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would delay the effective date to March 20 to give the new Trump administration time to further review the regulation.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen and other automakers, last week filed suit to block the rule, saying the regulation is "practically impossible with available technology." The group asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the rule, saying the requirement that cars and trucks must be able to stop and avoid striking vehicles in front of them at up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph) is unrealistic. It unsuccessfully asked NHTSA last year to reconsider the rule. Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver."

"Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected."

According to the NHTSA, the rule will save at least 360 lives annually and prevent more than 24,000 injuries.

Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as "collectibles." From a report: "It's like a baseball card or a stamp," Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump's explosively popular memecoin. "People buy it because they want to commemorate something."

The famous venture capitalist's comments touched on a long-running debate about the crypto industry in general: how exactly to treat different digital assets. Some argue that digital assets are securities, which are tradable financial assets like stocks. But others say they're commodities, or raw materials that can be bought and sold, like gold and wheat. The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. "There's a few different categories here, so defining the market structure is important," said Sacks.

Walgreens Boots Alliance has ended a $200 million digital display venture with startup Cooler Screens after widespread technical failures and poor revenue, removing thousands of smart screens from its store freezer doors [non-paywalled link]. The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports.

Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian cut data feeds to over 100 Chicago-area stores in December 2023 during a contract dispute, prompting Walgreens to obtain a restraining order. Walgreens completed removal of 10,300 screens from 700 stores in August 2024, replacing them with traditional glass doors. The screens generated just $215 per door annually, less than half the contractual minimum, according to Walgreens. Nearly $50 million worth of custom-made screens now sit unused in a Texas warehouse.

Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.

Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."