TikTok's endless scroll of irresistible content, tailored for each person's tastes by a well-honed algorithm, has helped the service become one of the world's most popular apps. Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful [1]are likely illegal . From a report:

> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok's infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an "addictive design" that violated European Union laws for online safety. The service poses potential harm to the "physical and mental well-being" of users, including minors and vulnerable adults, the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's executive branch, said in a statement.

>

> The findings suggest TikTok must overhaul the core features that made it a global phenomenon, or risk major fines. European officials said it was the first time that a legal standard for social media addictiveness had been applied anywhere in the world. "TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service," the European Commission said in a statement.



[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/business/tiktok-addictive-design-europe.html

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a sweeping plan to shore up the country's auto industry and [1]accelerate its electric vehicle transition , the latest in a series of moves to reduce Canada's deep economic dependence on the United States as American tariffs continue to batter the sector.

The plan includes financial incentives for carmakers to invest in Canada, a new tariff credit scheme for manufacturers like General Motors and Toyota, and the reintroduction of EV buyer rebates. Canada will also enact stricter vehicle emissions standards and has set a goal of EVs comprising 90% of car sales by 2040. Carney at the same time scrapped a 2023 EV sales mandate introduced by former PM Justin Trudeau that automakers had called too costly.

The announcements follow a deal last month with China to ease tariffs on Chinese EVs and an agreement with South Korea to encourage Korean car manufacturing in Canada. Roughly 90% of Canadian-made vehicles are exported to the US, and thousands of auto workers have lost their jobs since Trump imposed 25% tariffs on Canadian cars and parts last year.



[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgd2j80klmo

Bitcoin has fallen roughly 44% from its October peak, and while the drawdown isn't crypto's deepest ever on a percentage basis, Bloomberg's Odd Lots newsletter [1]lays out a case that this is the industry's worst winter yet . The macro backdrop was supposed to favor Bitcoin: public confidence in the dollar is shaky, the Trump administration has been crypto-friendly, and fiat currencies are under perceived stress globally. Yet gold, not Bitcoin, has been the safe haven of choice.

The "we're so early" narrative is dead -- crypto ETFs exist, barriers to entry are zero, and the online community that once rallied holders through downturns has largely hollowed out. Institutional adoption arrived but hasn't lifted existing tokens like ETH or SOL; Wall Street cares about stablecoins and tokenization, not the coins themselves. AI is pulling both talent and miners toward data centers. Quantum computing advances threaten Bitcoin's encryption. And MicroStrategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies, once steady buyers during the bull run, are now large holders who may eventually become forced sellers.



[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-05/10-reasons-this-is-the-worst-crypto-winter-ever

Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the [1]most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months , a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat.

Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real.

Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide.

Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000.



[1] https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/elon-musk-on-space-gpus-ai-optimus

Google's Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series [1]since its surprise launch last year , is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026.

Eric Kay, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company's Taipei office, saying Google is "working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem" and that [2]announcements are coming "very soon." Nothing is the only OEM to have publicly confirmed it's working on support, though Qualcomm has also hinted at enabling the feature on Snapdragon-powered phones.



[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/1732245/you-can-finally-airdrop-files-between-android-and-iphone-starting-with-pixel-10

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-airdrop-expansion-3638222/

The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as [1]a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams .

Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.



[1] https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-trials-european-open-source-communications-software/

A federal court in California has ruled that YouTube creators who use stream-ripping tools to download clips for reaction and commentary videos [1]may face liability under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions -- a decision that could reshape how one of the platform's most popular content genres operates.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi of the Northern District of California denied a motion to dismiss in Cordova v. Huneault, a creator-versus-creator dispute, finding that YouTube's "rolling cipher" technology qualifies as an access control measure under section 1201(a) even though the underlying videos are freely viewable by the public. The distinction matters because it separates the act of watching a video from the act of downloading it.

The defense had argued that no ripping tools were actually used and that screen recording could account for the copied footage. Judge DeMarchi allowed the claim to proceed to discovery regardless, noting that the plaintiff had adequately pled the circumvention allegation. The ruling opens a legal avenue beyond standard copyright infringement for creators who want to go after rivals. Reaction channels have long leaned on fair use as a blanket defense, but plaintiff's attorney Randall S. Newman told TorrentFreak that circumventing copy protections under section 1201 is a separate violation unaffected by any fair use finding.



[1] https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-videos-can-violate-the-dmca-court-rules/

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced that astronauts on the upcoming Crew-12 and Artemis II missions will be allowed to carry iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and to the Moon -- a reversal of long-standing agency rules that had left crews relying on a 2016 Nikon DSLR and decade-old GoPros for the historic lunar flyby.

Isaacman framed the move as part of a broader push to challenge what he called bloated qualification requirements, where hardware approvals get mired in radiation characterization, battery thermal tests, outgassing reviews and vibration testing. "That operational urgency will serve NASA well as we pursue the highest-value science and research in orbit and on the lunar surface," he [1]wrote .



[1] https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2019259382962307393

The CIA has [1]shut down The World Factbook , one of its oldest and most recognizable public-facing intelligence publications, ending a run that began as a classified reference document in 1962 and evolved into a freely accessible digital resource that drew millions of views each year.

The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, the publication first went unclassified in 1971, was renamed a decade later, and moved online at CIA.gov in 1997. It served researchers, news organizations, teachers, students and international travelers. The site hosted more than 5,000 copyright-free photographs, some donated by CIA officers from their personal travel. Every page now redirects to a farewell announcement.



[1] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

Anthropic on Thursday released [1]Claude Opus 4.6 , its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company's AI tools have already [2]spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors.

The new model improves on Opus 4.5's coding abilities, the company said -- it plans more carefully, sustains longer agentic tasks, handles larger codebases more reliably, and catches its own mistakes through better debugging. It is also the first Opus-class model to feature a 1M token context window, currently in beta.

On GDPval-AA, an independent benchmark measuring performance on knowledge-work tasks in finance, legal and other domains, Opus 4.6 outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5.2 by roughly 144 Elo points. Anthropic also introduced agent teams in Claude Code, allowing multiple agents to work in parallel on tasks like codebase reviews. Pricing remains at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens.



[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6

[2] https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/1810206/as-software-stocks-slump-investors-debate-ais-existential-threat

Automattic and the Internet Archive have released a free, open-source WordPress [1]plugin that automatically detects broken outbound links on a site and [2]redirects visitors to archived Wayback Machine copies instead of serving them a 404 error.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, which launched last fall and is available on WordPress.org, runs in the background scanning posts for dead links, checking for existing archived versions, and requesting new snapshots when none exist. It also archives a site's own posts whenever they are updated. If the original link comes back online, the plugin stops redirecting.

Pew Research has found that 38% of the web has disappeared over the past decade, and WordPress powers more than 40% of websites online.



[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/internet-archive-wayback-machine-link-fixer/

[2] https://blog.archive.org/2026/02/04/inside-the-new-wayback-machine-plugin-for-wordpress/

Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will [1]push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the 2030s .

The vertical laser, developed over six years and already working in WD's labs, emits light straight down onto the disk rather than from the edge, delivering more thermal energy while occupying less vertical space -- enabling areal densities up to 10 TB per platter, up from today's 4 TB, and room for additional platters in the same enclosure. WD's first commercial HAMR drives arrive in late 2026 at 40-44 TB on an 11-platter design, ramping into volume production in 2027. A 12-platter platform follows in 2028 at 60 TB, and WD expects to hit 100 TB by around 2030.



[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western-digital-details-14-platter-3-5-inch-hamr-hdd-designs-with-140-tb-and-beyond

Amazon plans to use AI to [1]speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report:

> At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a closed beta program in March, inviting industry partners to test its AI tools. The company expects to have results to share by May. [...] Amazon is leaning on its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, for help and plans to work with multiple large language model providers to give creators a wider array of options for pre- and post-production filmmaking.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/amazon-plans-use-ai-speed-up-tv-film-production-2026-02-04/

Spotify is planning to let premium subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. [1]buy hardcovers and paperbacks directly through its app starting this spring, partnering with Bookshop.org to handle pricing, inventory and fulfillment.

The Swedish streaming company, which entered the audiobook market in 2022, will also introduce a feature called Page Match that lets users scan a page from a physical book or e-reader and jump to the exact spot in the audiobook edition. Spotify will earn an undisclosed affiliate fee on each purchase.



[1] https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-02-05/bookshop-partnership-page-match-announcement/

The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter's seized iPhone [1]because it was in Lockdown Mode , a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records. 404Media:

> The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.

>

> "Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device," the court record reads, referring to the FBI's Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson's devices.

>

> The FBI raided Natanson's home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson's, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.



[1] https://www.404media.co/fbi-couldnt-get-into-wapo-reporters-iphone-because-it-had-lockdown-mode-enabled/

Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction market, accused a small data startup called Juice Reel of "extortion" after a stock analyst used the company's transaction-level data to argue that prediction market users lose money faster than gamblers on traditional betting apps -- [1]then walked the allegation back hours later .

The equity research analyst Jordan Bender at Citizens found that the bottom quarter of prediction market users lost about 28 cents of every dollar wagered in their first three months, compared to roughly 11 cents per dollar on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings. Kalshi's head of communications told Bloomberg the report was "flat-out wrong" and called the data an extortion attempt. Juice Reel CEO Ricky Gold said Kalshi had actually pressured him to tell Bloomberg the data was inaccurate. Kalshi later issued an updated statement saying it continued to dispute the findings but "after further review, we don't believe the intention was extortion." The company did not provide any data to counter the analysis.



[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-04/kalshi-claims-extortion-then-recants-in-prediction-markets-gambling-feud

Sony announced last month that it plans to pass control of its home entertainment division -- including the two-decade-old Bravia television brand -- [1]to Chinese electronics group TCL through a joint venture in which TCL would hold a 51% stake. The Japanese company was long ago overtaken in sales by South Korea's Samsung and LG and now holds just 2% of the global television market. Sony stopped making its own LCD screens in 2011.

Chinese companies [2]supplied 71% of television panels made in Asia last year, according to TCL, and less than 10% are now produced in Japan and Korea. TCL is close to overtaking Samsung as the world's largest television maker. Sony retains valuable intellectual property in image rendering, and the Bravia brand still carries consumer recognition, but its OLED screens are already supplied by Samsung and LG. The company has been shifting toward premium cameras, professional audio, and its entertainment businesses in film, music, and games -- areas where intellectual property is less exposed to Chinese manufacturing scale.



[1] https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/01/20/1356253/sony-is-ceding-control-of-tv-hardware-business-to-chinas-tcl

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/283ed0a2-48d1-4358-9021-decae9a61541

[1]alternative_right writes:

> The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their [2]independence from individual providers and 'foreign' legal spheres . The Technical University of Munich was involved in the development.

>

> In September and October 2025, the IT Department already conducted a first comprehensive test. Out of a total of 2780 municipal application services, 194 particularly critical ones were selected and evaluated based on five categories. The analysis already showed a high degree of digital sovereignty: 66% of the 194 evaluated services reached the highest levels (SDS 1 and 2), only 5% reached the critical level 4, and 21% reached the most critical level 5. The SDS evaluates not only technical dependencies but also legal and organizational risks.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right

[2] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Munich-makes-digital-sovereignty-measurable-with-its-own-score-11164230.html

BMW may have [1]retreated from its controversial plan to [2]charge monthly fees for heated seats , but the German automaker is [3]pressing ahead with subscription-based vehicle features through its ConnectedDrive platform.

A company spokesperson told The Drive that BMW "remains fully committed" to ConnectedDrive as part of its global aftersales strategy. Features requiring data connectivity will likely carry recurring fees.



[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/07/1545202/bmw-drops-controversial-heated-seats-subscription-to-refocus-on-software-services

[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/07/12/1616236/bmw-starts-selling-heated-seat-subscriptions-for-18-a-month

[3] https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-even-after-heated-seat-debacle

Valve has [1]pushed back the launch of its Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller hardware from its original Q1 2026 window to a vaguer "first half of the year" target, blaming the ongoing memory and storage shortage that has been squeezing the tech industry.

The company said in a post today that rising component prices and limited availability forced it to revisit both its shipping schedule and pricing plans. Valve had previously indicated the Steam Machine would be priced at the entry level of the PC space.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/games/874196/valve-steam-machine-frame-controller-delay-pricing-memory-crisis