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Under the new laws, which are scheduled to come into effect in about one year, children in Australian under the age of 16 will be banned from setting up accounts on popular social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

Multiple opinion polls have shown the vast majority of Australian voters are supportive of the new laws in principle, with a YouGov survey released on Tuesday finding 77% were in favor of the ban.

Tech companies themselves will be responsible for enforcing the ban, with the threat of fines of up to A$50 million ($32.4 million) if they fail to take action. The legislation does not specify how the sites will verify the age of users.

The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Corp., drilling into everything from the company’s cloud computing and software licensing businesses to cybersecurity offerings and artificial intelligence products.

After more than a year of conducting informal interviews with competitors and business partners, antitrust enforcers have crafted a detailed request to force Microsoft to turn over information, according to people familiar with the matter. The demand, which is hundreds of pages long, has been sent to the company after FTC Chair Lina Khan signed off, said one of the people.

FTC antitrust lawyers are set to meet with Microsoft competitors next week to gather more information about the Redmond, Washington-based company’s business practices, according to two other people familiar with the plans who like the others asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

Microsoft and the FTC declined to comment.

On Monday, X filed an objection in The Onion’s bid to buy InfoWars out of bankruptcy. In the objection, Elon Musk’s lawyers argued that X has “superior ownership” of all accounts on X, that it objects to the inclusion of InfoWars and related Twitter accounts in the bankruptcy auction, and that the court should therefore prevent the transfer of them to The Onion.

The legal basis that X asserts in the filing is not terribly interesting. But what is interesting is that X has decided to involve itself at all, and it highlights that you do not own your followers or your account or anything at all on corporate social media, and it also highlights the fact that Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends. In the filing, X’s lawyers essentially say—like many other software companies, and, increasingly, device manufacturers as well—that the company’s terms of service grant X’s users a “license” to use the platform but that, ultimately, X owns all accounts on the social network and can do anything that it wants with them.

A Chinese commercial vessel that has been surrounded by European warships in international waters for a week is central to an investigation of suspected sabotage that threatens to test the limits of maritime law—and heighten tensions between Beijing and European capitals.

Investigators suspect that the crew of the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier—225 meters long, 32 meters wide and loaded with Russian fertilizer—deliberately severed two critical data cables last week as its anchor was dragged along the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles.

Their probe now centers on whether the captain of the Chinese-owned ship, which departed the Russian Baltic port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15, was induced by Russian intelligence to carry out the sabotage. It would be the latest in a series of attacks on Europe’s critical infrastructure that law-enforcement and intelligence officials say have been orchestrated by Russia.

The Supreme Court signaled it may take up a case that could determine whether Internet service providers must terminate users who are accused of copyright infringement. In an order issued today, the court invited the Department of Justice's solicitor general to file a brief "expressing the views of the United States."

In Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications, the major record labels argue that cable provider Cox should be held liable for failing to terminate users who were repeatedly flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads. There was a mixed ruling at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the appeals court affirmed a jury's finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement but reversed a verdict on vicarious infringement "because Cox did not profit from its subscribers' acts of infringement."

That ruling vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Cox and Sony are both seeking a Supreme Court review. Cox wants to overturn the finding of willful contributory infringement, while Sony wants to reinstate the $1 billion verdict.

The Supreme Court asking for US input on Sony v. Cox could be a precursor to the high court taking up the case. For example, the court last year asked the solicitor general to weigh in on Texas and Florida laws that restricted how social media companies can moderate their platforms. The court subsequently took up the case and vacated lower-court rulings, making it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment.

Elon Musk confirmed that posts containing links in their main text are deprioritized on X in a revelation that renews criticism that the platform is restricting the visibility of and access to external sources of information.

User Paul Graham, who has nearly two million followers, blasted “Twitter’s biggest flaw” was the “deprioritization of tweets with links in them” in a complaint posted on Sunday.

In reply, Musk suggested a workaround: “Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, is set to rule on the ad tech dispute without a jury. She expressed some skepticism Monday toward both the Justice Department’s and Google’s lines of argument.

She asked Teitelbaum why prosecutors did not call a small business or other advertiser as a witness if they were one of the main groups harmed by Google’s conduct. Teitelbaum said small advertisers interact with Google through the intermediary of advertising agencies, so they relied on the testimony of such firms.

As for Google, Brinkema admonished Dunn when she tried to use internal Google emails to establish Google executives’ frame of mind, reminding her that Google’s flouting of court orders to retain all relevant documents as evidence in the case meant that these record-based arguments from Google might be discounted in the eyes of the court.

“You’re a little bit in dangerous territory,” Brinkema said. “We don’t know all of what they were thinking or saying.”

Qualcomm Inc.’s interest in pursuing an acquisition of Intel Corp. has cooled, according to people familiar with the matter, upending what would have likely been one of the largest technology deals of all time.

The complexities associated with acquiring all of Intel has made a deal less attractive to Qualcomm, said some of the people, asking not to be identified discussing confidential matters. It’s always possible Qualcomm looks at pieces of Intel instead or rekindles its interest later, they added.

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Apple is facing an uphill battle to release its own artificial intelligence models for iPhones and other products in China, with a top Beijing official warning that foreign companies will confront a “difficult and long process” to win approval unless they partner with local groups.

Apple chief Tim Cook arrived in China on Monday for his third visit of the year as the company tries to navigate the country’s complex regulatory regime and bring its Apple Intelligence to devices sold in the country.

In recent months, the US group has been holding talks with Chinese tech companies to help power Apple Intelligence in the country. Last month it began rolling out the suite of AI features in the US on iPhones and other devices.

Apple has also considered running its own large language models in China, according to two people familiar with the matter.

But a top Chinese tech regulator told the Financial Times that foreign groups such as Apple would face a lengthy and complex approval process to run their own models and indicated partnering with locals was their best option.

The high-ranking official at the Cyberspace Administration of China said it would be a comparatively “simple and straightforward approval process” for foreign device makers to use already vetted LLMs from Chinese groups.

Threads and rival BlueSky are competing to attract disenchanted X users following the 2024 election.

Bluesky said last week it now has more than 20 million users. The app's usage grew more than 5x in the two weeks following the election, per Similarweb. By the numbers: On November 14th, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said Threads added more than 15 million new signups since the start of the month.

According to the new data, another 20 million new signups have been added in the past 11 days. The app is now going on three months of more than one million signups per day, Stone said. Reality check: Bluesky is still tiny compared to Threads and X.

The U.S. government is granting Intel INTC -3.34%decrease; red down pointing triangle up to $7.87 billion to help fund new chip plants in four states, the largest award in the Biden administration program aimed at reviving American chip-making.

The funds are less than the $8.5 billion estimated for Intel in the preliminary award in March. That is because of previously announced funding of up to $3 billion to build secure facilities producing microchips for U.S. military and intelligence applications, according to senior administration officials.

The grant money, set aside under 2022’s Chips Act, aims to fund a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing to counteract any future supply-chain disruptions such as happened during the Covid era, and address growing geopolitical tensions with China. Much of the world’s chip production has shifted to Asia in recent decades, leaving the U.S. with around 12% of the world’s manufacturing in 2020.

Leo's Pick for 11/27/24

Starting in 1949, the Pillsbury Bake-Off was a sensation, inviting the nation’s home cooks to submit their best recipes—using Pillsbury flour, of course—for a cash prize and national acclaim. The Tunnel of Fudge, from Mrs. C.J. Helfrich of Houston, was merely the runner-up in the ’66 competition, but it went proto-viral, thanks to a thick, fudgy core that runs through the center of the cake, achieved through Helfrich’s canny use of powdered frosting mix. Nordic Ware, the company that made Bundt pans, had considered discontinuing the unpopular model—until the Tunnel of Fudge. “Demand for the pan skyrocketed,” New York Times food writer Kim Severson said. Soon, they were manufacturing 30,000 pans a day.

A tentative proposal to tax cryptocurrency mining to raise funds for climate action took off during a United Nations climate conference that’s set to come to a close today.

A levy on energy-hungry crypto mining, at $0.045 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity used, could generate $5.2 billion in revenue annually, according to a report released last week by the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, led by Kenya, Barbados, and France.

China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.

“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.

Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.

“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.

Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

Weeks after federal regulators announced a “click-to-cancel” rule for subscription businesses, a New York judge has ruled that SiriusXM made it too difficult for customers to end their service.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank’s ruling, issued Thursday, upheld elements of a lawsuit filed against the satellite audio firm in 2023 by New York Attorney General Letitia James. In a post on X after Frank’s ruling, she wrote that the company “illegally forced people to go through a long and burdensome process to simply cancel their subscriptions. We sued SiriusXM to protect people’s wallets, and now, SiriusXM must simplify its cancellation process and stop taking advantage of New Yorkers.”

Leaders of the top telecommunications companies were summoned to the White House on Friday to discuss a security problem that has been roiling the government: how to expel Chinese hackers from the deepest corners of the nation’s communications networks.

The meeting in the Situation Room came after weeks in which officials grew increasingly alarmed by what they had uncovered about the hack.

They now believe the hackers from a group called “Salt Typhoon,” closely linked to China’s Ministry of State Security, were lurking undetected inside the networks of the biggest American telecommunications firms for more than a year.

They have learned that the Chinese hackers got a nearly complete list of phone numbers the Justice Department monitors in its “lawful intercept” system, which places wiretaps on people suspected of committing crimes or spying, usually after a warrant is issued.