The Supreme Court has permitted a law banning the app if Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest ownership. The law takes effect on January 19th.
TikTok ban: all the news on the app’s shutdown in the US
The Verge
TikTok says it’s going offline in the US
TikTok says it is officially going dark in the United States now that a federal ban of the app is going into effect. Around 6 PM Pacific time, the app began notifying people in the US, including Verge staffers, with a message that says the ban will “make our services temporarily unavailable.”
The company warned on Friday that it would be forced to go dark if the Biden administration didn’t give assurances to its service providers, like Apple and Google, which can be fined thousands of dollars per US user of TikTok once the ban goes into effect. In response, the Biden administration called TikTok’s threat to go offline a “stunt” and said the situation should be taken up by the incoming Trump administration.
Trump has indicated he plans to extend the deadline for the ban by 90 days via an executive order once he is sworn in on January 20th, though it’s not clear if he will have the power to save TikTok now that it is officially banned. The law that was upheld by the Supreme Court states that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, must sell its ownership stake in the app for it to continue operating in the US.
Developing…
Genshin Impact’s developer to pay $20 million fine to settle FTC charges
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Friday that Genshin Impact developer Cognosphere has agreed to a $20 million settlement and several restrictions on how it sells its loot boxes and manages children’s personal data. According to the FTC, the company “actively marketed” its loot boxes to children and misled players about their odds of winning prizes.
Cognosphere allegedly also “deceived children and other users about the real costs of in-game transactions,” by requiring them to buy virtual money that involved multiple currency exchanges. Players often spent “hundreds of dollars on prizes they stood little chance of winning,” according to Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine. For years, loot boxes have been likened to a form of legal gambling.
The complaint, filed by the Department of Justice, also accuses the Genshin Impact developer of marketing to kids using approaches like posts on social media channels and in-game banners. The company then allegedly collected their personal information in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule. Once the settlement is approved, the company is required to delete any data for children under 13 whose parents haven’t consented to their data being collected.
Other requirements of the settlement include that Cognosphere must offer an option to buy loot boxes directly and not just through virtual money. It’s also forbidden from misrepresenting pricing, features, and winning odds for loot boxes, and it must disclose exchange rates for multi-tiered virtual currency.
Microsoft opens testing for Windows AI search
Microsoft is testing AI-powered Windows search in a new dev channel build for Windows 11 Insider testers. Announced in October, it uses semantic indexing to let users search for local files using more casual language. Like other Microsoft AI features, you’ll need a Copilot Plus PC to use it.
The feature applies whether you’re using search boxes in Settings, File Explorer, or the taskbar. And you don’t need to be connected to the internet for it to work, thanks to the NPU chips on Copilot Plus computers. For now, AI search is limited to Windows settings and files with image and text formats that include JPEG, PNG, PDF, TXT, and XLS.
Image: Microsoft
Microsoft says that search only works for files in locations you’ve chosen to index. Users can tweak those locations using options found under Settings > Privacy & security > Searching Windows, or turn on “Enhanced” to index their whole machine. The company adds that the feature will eventually expand to include cloud data such as that stored in OneDrive.
AI-powered Windows search “will gradually roll out to Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs,” Microsoft writes, with support for Intel or AMD Copilot Plus computers later. The feature will work for machines set to Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish languages.
Image: Microsoft
In addition to the new search, the build also includes AI writing tools offered by Click to Do, a feature that lets you choose from context-sensitive menus of options when you hold the Windows key down and left-click on your screen. Now, when you click a block of text and select Rewrite, there’s a “Refine” option that can correct grammar for you.
The Biden White House says TikTok’s threat to go dark is a ‘stunt’
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called TikTok’s threat to “go dark” tomorrow a “stunt,” and said there is no reason that TikTok or any other companies should take any actions under the ban before the Trump administration is sworn in Monday morning, several news outlets are reporting.
“It is a stunt, and we see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump Administration takes office on Monday,” MSNBC quotes Jean-Pierre as saying. “We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration. So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”
The statement comes one day after TikTok threatened to go offline if the Biden administration doesn’t offer reassurance that companies like Apple and Google won’t be held liable for defying the ban, which the Supreme Court upheld yesterday. Company CEO Shou Chew also appealed to Donald Trump, saying the company is “grateful” for his support of the platform.
Trump said that a “90-day extension is something that will be most likely done” during an interview with Meet The Press moderator Kristen Welker for NBC News. That followed reporting earlier this week that the incoming President plans to issue an executive order doing so.
Given that the ban’s deadline is up before he’s sworn in, it’s not clear whether Trump can actually extend it. He can choose not to enforce the ban, just as Biden says he will, but that still leaves Apple and Google to decide if Trump’s word is worth the legal risk that would come with defying the ban by leaving the app available for download.
EV startup Canoo has filed for bankruptcy
Canoo announced yesterday it is ceasing operations “immediately” and that it has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Delaware. The EV startup estimates in its filing that its assets are worth $126 million and that it owes over $164 million to its creditors, TechCrunch noted yesterday.
Now, the US will appoint “a Bankruptcy Trustee to oversee the liquidation of the Company’s assets and the distribution of proceeds to creditors,” Canoo writes. The company says it chose to file after failing to get support from either the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office or foreign investors.
Canoo had signaled its dire situation last month when it idled its Oklahoma operations and put its employees on a “mandatory unpaid break.” Before that, it had lost a steady stream of executives, including all of its founders.
“We are truly disappointed that things turned out as they did,” Canoo chairman and CEO Tony Aquila said in the announcement before thanking various government and business entities Canoo has dealt with. Those dealings have included producing shuttles for NASA’s Artemis crew and an agreement to build 4,500 electric delivery vans for Walmart.
Instagram Reels can be 3 minutes long now
Instagram will now let you upload Reels that are up to 3 minutes long, doubling the 90-second limit the platform had in place before, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced today.
He credits today’s change to users’ feedback saying that the 90 seconds “is just too short.” That’s a big turnaround for Mosseri, who said in July last year that the platform wouldn’t pursue longform videos because it could compromise the platform’s “core identity to connect people with friends.”
It also comes as TikTok, which started allowing 3-minute videos in 2021, is gearing up to go dark on Sunday in response to an imminent US ban.
Instagram has been slow to bump the length of Reels — it’s been more than two years since it started allowing minute-and-a-half videos. The company has tested extending the limit to as much as 10 minutes but has held off on rolling that out, leaving the ability to post long videos to non-Reels posts.
Donald Trump appears to have launched a meme coin
Donald Trump has launched a new meme coin, according to posts from his X and Truth Social accounts last night. The posts, which have come just days before Trump’s inauguration, were initially met with suspicion by many that his accounts had been hacked.
Skeptics highlighted by Decrypt last night pointed to several red flags, such as that the millions of dollars seeding the project came from Binance and Gate, which only serve overseas customers. The coin’s website credits the project to the same group behind Trump’s NFTs, as noted by Cointelegraph, which reports that sources close to Trump’s family confirmed the announcements’ legitimacy.
Both posts remain up as of this morning.
Screenshot: X
The idea that Trump would debut a meme coin is no big surprise, given his multiple NFT collections and his introduction of a crypto platform last year. He has made cryptocurrency a big part of his new agenda and has assembled a crypto and AI-focused tech policy team led by “crypto czar” David Sacks. Trump also plans to issue an executive order naming crypto a “national imperative or priority” after he’s inaugurated next week, Bloomberg reported ahead of the weekend.
Severance’s creators explain the art of a great cliffhanger
After a long wait, Severance is back. Season 2 premiered on Apple TV Plus on January 17th, more than two years after the first season wrapped up. The wait was particularly hard because of how the season 1 finale ended — a massive cliffhanger that would completely upend the lives of almost everyone in this sci-fi thriller. Cliffhangers are a tricky business. They can help keep viewers interested in whatever comes next, but they can also be frustrating, seeming to withhold information purely for the purpose of keeping people hooked.
Severance has managed this balancing act well so far, and I had the chance to talk to some of the creative team behind the show — creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and star Adam Scott — about how they’ve pulled it off. “Honestly it’s just sort of guessing in your mind,” Stiller tells The Verge. “You try to think about what the stakes are that we’ve established, and hopefully you’ve earned it by the end.”
One of the trickiest parts for Severance, at least early on, was that the team wasn’t really sure how audiences would react. It’s a weird show that follows a group of office workers who have their brains surgically altered to separate their…
The mad dash to protect environmental data from Donald Trump
With Donald Trump stepping back into office, advocates are warning that access to important environmental and public health datasets could be at risk.
Information about climate change vanished from federal websites under Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called climate change “a hoax.” Now, federal agencies could face deep staff and budget cuts overseen by Trump cronies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The proposed cuts not only threaten what kind of data the government shares but also whether it can collect and organize it at all.
Federal agencies gather all kinds of data — from air quality readings to research on extreme weather events. Researchers and advocates have been scrambling to save as much data as they can, a skill they honed during Trump’s first term. Even so, relying on outdated information has its pitfalls. Gaps in government data collection or maintenance could leave city planners and community groups stuck with an incomplete picture of the risks posed by pollution and climate change in their area.
“The funding, the…