An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off. But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, allowing the tech giant -- and by extension law enforcement -- to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes. The case involved several people suspected of fraud related to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in Guam, a U.S. island in the Pacific. Local news outlet Pacific Daily News covered the case last year, reporting that a warrant had been served to Microsoft in relation to the suspects' hard drives. Kandit News, another local Guam news outlet, also reported in October that the FBI requested the warrant six months after seizing the three laptops encrypted with BitLocker. [...] Microsoft told Forbes that the company sometimes provides BitLocker recovery keys to authorities, having received an average of 20 such requests per year.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that's tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory. [...] Known for its heated toilet seats, the maker of washlets has for decades been part of the semiconductor and display supply chain via its advanced ceramic parts and films. Its electrostatic chucks -- which it began mass producing in 1988 -- are used to hold silicon wafers in place during chipmaking while helping to control temperature and contamination, according to the company. The company's new domain business accounted for 42% of its total operating income in the fiscal year ended March 2025, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

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Just watched Darkest Hour, a biopic of Winston Churchill, as he became prime minister and had to decide whether to surrender or fight Mr Hitler as they called him. I had seen it of course when it came out, but it's especially appropriate to our times. I'm glad the NATO's are resisting the US. We have to all work together to keep democracy alive, not just in our own countries, but around the world. If ever there was a time when working together mattered more than it does today, I sure can't think of it.

Global hiring remains 20% below pre-pandemic levels and job switching has hit a 10-year low, according to a LinkedIn report, and new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate hiring fell 8% in the last academic year and employers now receive 140 applications for each vacancy, up from 86 per vacancy in 2022-23. US data from the New York Federal Reserve shows unemployment among recent college graduates aged 22-27 stands at 5.8% versus 4.1% for all workers. Recruiter Reed had 180,000 graduate job postings in 2021 but only 55,000 in 2024. In a survey of Reed clients last year, 15% said they had reduced hiring because of AI. London mayor Sadiq Khan said the capital will be "at the sharpest edge" of AI-driven changes and that entry-level jobs will be first to go.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That's nearly three times the maximum for typical salaried workers in the US. While they've existed for decades serving a workforce that often struggled to earn enough to max out those contributions, wealth planners like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Betterment are now racing to tap into burgeoning demand from a newer, and wealthier cohort: Post-pandemic contractors and self-employed DIY savers looking to shelter more income, grow assets tax-deferred or tax-free, all with the click of a button. The pitch is simple: Because of a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers effectively contribute twice to their 401(k)s -- once as an employee on their own behalf and then again as a business owner making matching contributions. The platforms take care of the paperwork and clients get institutional-level tax planning and investment flexibility. More than three-quarters of America's record 36 million small businesses now have just a single employee, the owner. Cerulli Associates projects that total 401(k) plans in the U.S. will surpass 1 million by 2030, and the fastest growth is expected in sub-$5 million "micro" accounts.

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After years of Western governments raising alarms about Chinese automotive overcapacity and erecting tariff barriers, an unexpected pivot is now underway as major economies cautiously open their markets to Chinese electric vehicles, Bloomberg writes. Beijing itself has started acknowledging the problem at home. Chinese regulators last week warned of "severe penalties" for automakers defying efforts to rationalize pricing in the country's car market, and earlier this month a government ministry urged battery makers to curtail expansion and cutthroat competition. The European Union imposed steep tariffs on Chinese EV imports in 2024 and is now considering replacing them with minimum import price agreements. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney last week decided to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs annually at a 6.1% tariff rate, removing a 100% surtax. Germany announced this week that its $3.5 billion EV subsidy program will be open to all manufacturers including Chinese brands. Germany's environment minister Carsten Schneider dismissed concerns during a January 19 press conference: "I cannot see any evidence of this postulated major influx of Chinese car manufacturers in Germany, either in the figures or on the roads." BYD registered an eightfold increase in sales in Germany last year and pulled ahead of Tesla, though Volkswagen still registered around 2,300 vehicles for every one BYD sold.

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Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out fossil fuels at 29%. The shift is especially important with the bloc's alternative to Russian LNG -- Washington -- becoming increasingly unreliable and willing to weaponize economic tools. The US Commerce Secretary threw shade at the bloc's renewable push during Davos, warning that China uses net zero goals to make allies "subservient" by controlling battery and critical mineral supply chains. Still, renewables now provide nearly half of EU power, with wind and solar outpacing all fossil sources in more than half of member countries. "The stakes of transitioning to clean energy are clearer than ever," the Ember report's author said.

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A Toronto man posed as a pilot for years in order to fool airlines into giving him hundreds of free flights, prosecutors have alleged, in a case that has prompted comparisons to the Hollywood thriller Catch Me If You Can. From a report: Authorities in Hawaii announced this week that Dallas Pokornik, 33, had been charged with wire fraud after he allegedly fooled three major US carriers into giving him free tickets over a span of four years. Airlines typically offer standby tickets to their own staff and those with rival airlines as a way of ensuring the broader industry can effectively move employees across continents. According to court documents, Pokornik was a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, but then used an employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets, "which he in fact knew to be fraudulent at the time it was so presented." The only Toronto-based airline, Porter, told reporters it was "unable to verify any information related to this story." On one occasion, Pokornik is alleged to have requested a jumpseat in an aircraft's cockpit, which are normally reserved for off-duty pilots, even though he was not a pilot and did not have an airman's certificate. Federal rules prohibit the cockpit jumpseats from being used for leisure travel.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China's Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen. It was reported in December that one of Apple's assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line information and manufacturing data linked to Apple. The specific company targeted, the scope of the breach, and its operational impact were unclear until now. The attack was first revealed on RansomHub's dark web leak site on December 15, 2025, where the group claimed it had encrypted internal Luxshare systems and exfiltrated large volumes of confidential data belonging to the company and its customers. The attackers warned that the information would be publicly released unless Luxshare contacted them to negotiate, and accused the company of attempting to conceal the incident. According to the attackers' claims, the exfiltrated material includes vital files such as detailed 3D CAD product models and high-precision geometric files, 2D manufacturing drawings, mechanical component designs, circuit board layouts, and internal engineering PDFs. The group added that the large archives include Apple product data as well as information belonging to Nvidia, LG, Tesla, Geely, and other major clients.

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AI assistants could if they wanted drive all of us crazy in different ways. Advertising squared.

Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT's "data consent" option in August to test whether the AI tool's functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently deleted and his project folders emptied without any warning or undo option, he wrote in a post on Nature. Bucher, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber paying $20 per month, had used the platform daily to draft grant applications, prepare teaching materials, revise publication drafts and create exams. He contacted OpenAI support, first receiving responses from an AI agent before a human employee confirmed the data was permanently lost and unrecoverable. OpenAI cited "privacy by design" as the reason, telling Nature it does provide a confirmation prompt before users permanently delete a chat but maintains no backups. Bucher said he had saved partial copies of some materials, but the underlying prompts, iterations, and project folders -- what he describes as the intellectual scaffolding behind his finished work -- are gone forever.

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Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company's own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have taken it, and dozens now work at Anthropic. But Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants. Hume redesigned the test, making it harder. Then Claude Opus 4.5 matched even the best human scores within the two-hour time limit. For his third attempt, Hume abandoned realistic problems entirely and switched to abstract puzzles using a strange, minimal programming language -- something weird enough that Claude struggles with it. Anthropic is now releasing the original test as an open challenge. Beat Claude's best score and ... they want to hear from you.

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Apple has accused the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp. MacPaw, the developer behind Setapp, said it would shut down the marketplace next month because of "still-evolving and complex business terms that don't fit Setapp's current business model." The EC is preparing to say that Apple has not rolled out changes to address key issues concerning its business terms and their complexity, according to remarks seen by Bloomberg. Apple said it disputes this finding. The company said it submitted a formal compliance plan in October proposing to replace its $0.59 per-install fee structure with a 5% revenue share, but the commission has not responded. "The European Commission has refused to let us implement the very changes that they requested," Apple said. The company also claimed there is no demand in the EU for alternative app stores and disputed that Setapp is closing because of its actions.

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Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting "a large portion of the company." One video engineer claimed "almost everyone" was laid off, "including the entire video team," and another software engineer said he lost his job alongside "a gigantic amount of the company." This marks Vimeo's second round of layoffs in less than six months. The company cut 10% of its workforce in September, just one week before Bending Spoons announced its acquisition plans. Bending Spoons has a history of post-acquisition layoffs at companies including WeTransfer, Filmic, and Evernote.

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The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was considering some type of narrow, limited engagement with W.H.O. global networks that track infectious diseases, including influenza. As a W.H.O. member, the United States long sent scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in international decision-making about which strains to include in the flu vaccine. A W.H.O. meeting on next year's vaccine is scheduled for February. The official said the Trump administration would soon disclose how or whether it will participate. On Thursday, the administration said that all U.S. government funding to the organization had been terminated, and that all assigned federal employees and contractors had been recalled from its Geneva headquarters and its offices worldwide.

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