OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as "sponsored" and visually separated from ChatGPT's organic responses.

OpenAI says the ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, and advertisers receive only aggregate performance data like view and click counts rather than access to individual conversations. Users under 18 do not see ads, and ads are excluded from sensitive topics such as health, mental health, and politics. Free-tier users can opt out of ads in exchange for fewer daily messages.

Further reading: Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a 'Space To Think'.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans' tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon's tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.

That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business -- has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers.

Also helping, though less important: The law's expanded breaks for businesses research and development expenses. The company has long been criticized by Democrats for paying little in tax, and it appeared to be bracing for criticism in the wake of the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com -- the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal's broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller. Marszalek plans to debut the site during a Super Bowl ad this weekend, offering a personal "AI agent" that lets consumers send messages, use apps and trade stocks. The previous domain sale record was nearly $50 million for Carinsurance.com, per GoDaddy.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has acquired his AI startup xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, ahead of what would be the largest initial public offering in history. SpaceX pegged its own valuation at $1 trillion -- a markup from the $800 billion it commanded in a December secondary stock sale -- and priced xAI at $250 billion based on a recent $20 billion funding round that valued the two-year-old AI company at $230 billion.

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen told investors on a call Monday that shares in the combined company would be priced at $527 and that xAI shares would convert into SpaceX stock at a roughly seven-to-one exchange rate. The company is still targeting a June IPO expected to raise as much as $50 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29 billion listing in 2019.

Musk said the least expensive way to do AI computation within two to three years will be in space. "Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment," he wrote. SpaceX filed last Friday for permission to launch up to a million satellites into Earth's orbit. xAI merged with Musk's social media platform X last March in a $113 billion deal, and Tesla announced a $2 billion investment in xAI last week.

The owners of Leica Camera AG -- Austrian billionaire Andreas Kaufmann and private equity giant Blackstone -- are considering a sale of a controlling stake in the German camera maker in a deal that could value the company at about $1.2 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

HSG, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, and Altor Equity Partners are among a handful of bidders. The Kaufmann family could re-invest following a transaction. Leica traces its roots roughly 150 years to Ernst Leitz's microscope company and was publicly traded on the Frankfurt stock exchange until the Kaufmann family took it private in 2012.

Remember that lawsuit questioning WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption? Thursday Bloomberg reported those allegations had been investigated by special agents with America's Commerce Department, "according to the law enforcement records, as well as a person familiar with the matter and one of the contractors." Similar claims were also the subject of a 2024 whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the records and the person, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified out of concern for potential retaliation. The investigation and whistleblower complaint haven't been previously reported...

Last year, two people who did content moderation work for WhatsApp told an investigator with Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security that some staff at Meta have been able to see the content of WhatsApp messages, according to the agent's report summarizing the interviews. [A spokesperson for the Bureau later told Bloomberg that investigator's assertions were "unsubstantiated and outside the scope of his authority as an export enforcement agent."] Those content moderators, who worked for Meta through a contract with the management and technology consulting firm Accenture Plc, also alleged that they and some of their colleagues had broad access to the substance of WhatsApp messages that were supposed to be encrypted and inaccessible, according to the report. "Both sources confirmed that they had employees within their physical work locations who had unfettered access to WhatsApp," wrote the agent... One of the content moderators who told the investigator she had access said she also "spoke with a Facebook team employee and confirmed that they could go back aways into WhatsApp (encrypted) messages, stating that they worked cases that involved criminal actions," according to the document...

The investigator's report, dated July 2025, described the investigation as "ongoing," includes a case number and dubs the inquiry "Operation Sourced Encryption..." The inquiry was active as recently as January, according to a person familiar with the matter. The inquiry's current status and who may be the defined target are both unclear. Many investigations end without any formal accusations of wrongdoing...

WhatsApp on its website says it does, in some instances, allow information about messages to be seen by the company. If someone reports a user or group for problematic messages, "WhatsApp receives up to five of the last messages they've sent to you" and "the user or group won't be notified," the company says. In those cases, WhatsApp says it receives the "group or user ID, information on when the message was sent, and the type of message sent (image, video, text, etc.)." Former contractors outlined much broader access. Larkin Fordyce was an Accenture contractor who the report says an agent interviewed about content moderation work for Meta. Fordyce told the investigator he spent years doing this work out of an Austin, Texas office starting as early as the end of 2018. He said moderators eventually were granted their own access to WhatsApp, but even before that they could request access to communications and "the Facebook team was able to 'pull whatever they wanted and then send it,'" the report states...

The agent also gathered records that were filed in the whistleblower complaint to the SEC, according to his report, which doesn't describe the materials... The status of the whistleblower complaint is unclear.
Some key points from the article:

• "The investigative report seen by Bloomberg doesn't include a technical explanation of the contractors' claims."

• "A spokesperson for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, said the contractors' claims are impossible."

• One contractor "said that there was little vetting" of foreign nationals hired to do content moderation for Meta, saying this granted them "full access to the same portal to review" content moderation cases

Early Friday "there were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET," reports Reuters. But that's down "from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector." Reuters points out the outage affected antivirus software Microsoft Defender and data governance software Microsoft Purview, while CRN notes it also impacted "a number of Microsoft 365 services" including Outlook and Exchange online: During the outage, Outlook users received a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email. Users did not have the ability to send and receive email through Exchange Online, including notification emails from Microsoft Viva Engage, according to the vendor. Other issues that cropped up include an inability to send and receive subscription email through [analytics platform] Microsoft Fabric, collect message traces, search within SharePoint online and Microsoft OneDrive and create chats, meetings, teams, channels or add members in Microsoft Teams...

As with past cloud outages with other vendors, even after Microsoft fixed the issues, recovery efforts by its users to return to a normal state took additional time... Microsoft confirmed in a post on X [Thursday] at 4:14 p.m. ET that it "restored the affected infrastructure to a (healthy) state" but "further load balancing is required to mitigate impact...." The company reported "residual imbalances across the environment" at 7:02 p.m., "restored access to the affected services" and stable mail flow at 12:33 a.m. Jan. 23. At that time, Microsoft still saw a "small number of remaining affected services" without full service stability. The company declared impact from the event "resolved" at 1:29 p.m. Eastern. Microsoft sent out another X post at 8:20 a.m. asking users experiencing residual issues to try "clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation...."

Microsoft said in an admin center update that [Thursday's] outage was "caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure." Furthermore, Microsoft noted that during "ongoing efforts to rebalance traffic" it introduced a "targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process, which incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure." US itek's David Stinner said it appears that Microsoft did not have enough capacity on its backup system while doing maintenance on its main system. "It looks like the backup system was overloaded, and it brought the system down while they were still doing maintenance on the main system," he said. "That is why it took so many hours to get back up and running. If your primary system is down for maintenance and your backup system fails due to capacity issues, then it is going to take a while to get your primary system back up and running."
"This was not Microsoft's first outage of 2026," the article notes, "with the vendor handling access issues with Teams, Outlook and other M365 services on Wednesday, a Copilot issue on Jan. 15 plus an Azure outage earlier in the month..."

BrianFagioli writes: The New York Stock Exchange, owned by Intercontinental Exchange, is developing a platform for trading tokenized versions of U.S. listed stocks and ETFs around the clock, pending regulatory approval. The system would combine the NYSE's existing matching engine with blockchain-based settlement, enabling 24x7 trading, instant settlement, and fractional share purchases priced in dollar amounts. Shares would remain fully regulated securities, with dividends and voting rights intact, rather than cryptocurrencies, even though the backend would run on blockchain-style infrastructure.

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from the Washington Times: Breaking with the United States, Canada has agreed to cut its 100% tariff [back to 6.1%] on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. He said there would be an initial annual cap of 49,000 vehicles on Chinese EV exports to Canada, growing to about 70,000 over five years. Prior to the 100% tariff, China exported about 41,000 vehicles to Canada in 2023. In exchange, China will reduce its total tariff on canola seeds, a major Canadian export, from 84% to about 15%, he told reporters. Carney said China has become a more predictable partner to deal with than the U.S, the country's neighbor and longtime ally.

[hackingbear writes: "After helping the U.S. arrest Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who was later released without admitting guilty by the Biden administration after bickering with China, Canada had followed the U.S. in putting tariffs of 100% on EVs from China and 25% on steel and aluminum under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Carney's predecessor."] China responded by imposing duties of 100% on Canadian canola oil and meal and 25% on pork and seafood. It added a 75.8% tariff on canola seeds last August. Collectively, the import taxes effectively closed the Chinese market to Canadian canola, an industry group has said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China is pulling the plug on a key advantage held by high-frequency traders, removing servers dedicated to those firms out of local exchanges' data centers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou are among those that have ordered local brokers to shift servers for their clients out of data centers run by the bourses, according to the people, who said the move was led by regulators. The change doesn't only affect high-frequency firms but they are likely to feel the biggest impact. The Shanghai Futures Exchange has told brokers they need to get equipment for high-speed clients out by the end of next month, while other clients need to do so by April 30, the people said.

The clampdown will hit China's army of domestic high-frequency firms but will also impact a swathe of global firms that are active in the country. Citadel Securities, Jane Street Group and Jump Trading are among the foreign firms whose access to servers is being affected, the people said, asking not to be named as the matter is private.

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on an ongoing debate within the Linux kernel development community about whether documentation should explicitly address AI-generated code contributions, and his position is characteristically blunt: stop making it an issue. The Linux creator was responding to Oracle-affiliated kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes, who had argued that treating LLMs as "just another tool" ignores the threat they pose to kernel quality. "Thinking LLMs are 'just another tool' is to say effectively that the kernel is immune from this," Stoakes wrote.

Torvalds disagreed sharply. "There is zero point in talking about AI slop," he wrote. "Because the AI slop people aren't going to document their patches as such." He called such discussions "pointless posturing" and said that kernel documentation is "for good actors." The exchange comes as a team led by Intel's Dave Hansen works on guidelines for tool-generated contributions. Stoakes had pushed for language letting maintainers reject suspected AI slop outright, arguing the current draft "tries very hard to say 'NOP.'" Torvalds made clear he doesn't want kernel documentation to become a political statement on AI. "I strongly want this to be that 'just a tool' statement," he wrote.

Microsoft has canceled plans to impose a daily limit of 2,000 external recipients on Exchange Online bulk email senders. From a report: The change was announced in April 2024, when Microsoft said that it would add new External Recipient Rate (ERR) limits starting January 2025 to fight spam, with plans to begin enforcing the limit on cloud-hosted mailboxes of existing tenants between July and December 2025.

As explained last year, this new Mailbox External Recipient Rate Limit was designed to prevent Microsoft 365 customers from abusing Exchange Online resources and to restrict unfair usage. However, on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that the Exchange Online bulk emailing rate limit is being canceled indefinitely, following negative customer feedback.

Ritchie Torres has introduced a bill to ban government officials from using insider information to trade on political prediction markets like Polymarket. The bill was prompted by reports that traders on Polymarket made large profits betting on Nicolas Maduro's removal, raising suspicions that some wagers were placed using material non-public information. "While such insider trading in capital markets is already illegal and often prosecuted by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, online prediction markets are far less regulated," notes Axios. From the report: Rep. Ritchie Torres' (D-N.Y.) three-page bill, a copy of which was obtained by Axios, is called the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026. It would ban federal elected officials, political appointees and bureaucrats from making insider trades on prediction sites sites such as Polymarket. Specifically, the bill prohibits such government officials from trading based on information that is not publicly available and that "a reasonable investor would consider important in making an investment decision." [...] It's not clear if House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would put Torres' bill to a vote in the House or if President Trump would sign it. "We're looking at the specifics of the bill, but we already ban the activity it cites and are in support of means to prevent this type of activity," said Elisabeth Diana, a spokesperson for the prediction website Kalshi.

Diana added that the "activity from the past few days" did not occur on their platform.

The world's best-performing stock is turning into a cautionary tale for investors chasing outsized returns from the AI boom. From a report: Little-known until recently even within its home market of India, RRP Semiconductor Ltd. became a social-media obsession as its shares surged more than 55,000% in the 20 months through Dec. 17 -- by far the biggest gain worldwide among companies with a market value above $1 billion.

That's despite posting negative revenue in its latest financial results, reporting just two full-time employees in its latest annual report, and boasting only a tenuous link to the semiconductor spending boom after shifting away from real estate in early 2024. A mix of online hype, a tiny free float and India's swelling base of retail investors drove 149 straight limit-up sessions, even as exchange officials and the company itself cautioned investors.

The rally is now showing signs of strain -- and regulators are taking a closer look. The Securities and Exchange Board of India has begun examining the surge in RRP's shares for potential wrongdoing, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The $1.7 billion stock, recently restricted by its exchange to trading just once a week, has fallen by 6% from its Nov. 7 peak.

A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world's quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world's largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. The battle is the latest chapter in a decadeslong contest among secretive ultrafast trading firms, which have pursued a relentless quest for minuscule speed advantages.

A group of high-frequency trading firms has exploited the practice to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, says Mosaic Finance, a French firm that has complained to Eurex and European regulators. "An arms race is OK, but you must use legal weapons," said Hugues Morin, founder of Mosaic. Eurex says Mosaic's claims are baseless.

[...] High-speed traders often seek to capture fleeting differences between prices of related assets, making quick response times critical. If benchmark Euro Stoxx 50 index futures rise, for example, contracts tied to Germany's DAX will usually follow. A first mover will be able to buy DAX futures before they tick higher, then sell out at a higher price -- a strategy that can add up to big profits over time. The maneuver that prompted Mosaic's spat with Eurex can improve reaction times by about 3.2 nanoseconds, according to the French firm, which calls it "corrupted speculative triggering," or CST for short.

The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said.

Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this "mandatory blanket license" would lower compliance costs for AI firms while ensuring that writers, musicians, artists, and other rights holders are compensated when their work is scraped to train commercial models. [...]

The eight-member committee, formed by the Indian government in late April, argues the system would avoid years of legal uncertainty while ensuring creators are compensated from the outset. Defending the system, the committee says in a 125-page submission (PDF) that a blanket license "aims to provide an easy access to content for AI developers reduce transaction costs [and] ensure fair compensation for rightsholders," calling it the least burdensome way to manage large-scale AI training. The submission adds that the single collecting body would function as a "single window," eliminating the need for individual negotiations and enabling royalties to flow to both registered and unregistered creators.

To build three-wheeled, solar electric vehicles, Aptera has now launched its "validation" vehicle assembly line, reports the San Diego Business Journal.

"The validation line will set a technical foundation for the company's eventual low-volume assembly line, ensuring that manufacturing processes are optimized and refined, particularly for the company's composite body structure." To date, Aptera has produced three validation vehicles, two of which are in use driving around the San Diego region, with plans to build another 10 in the coming weeks as progress continues on the validation manufacturing line. "You learn things when you start to put miles on vehicles, putting 10s of thousands of miles on these validation vehicles and learning a lot from the durometer of the suspension, ride quality, spring rates and braking pressure," Aptera co-founder and co-CEO Chris Anthony said. "We've been able to incorporate a lot of the usability stuff back, but also, just as we've gone through the process of building these, a lot of order-of-operation stuff that's educated us on what's going to make for the best initial assembly lines," he added....

Aptera made its public debut on October 16, with the company's executive team participating in the Nasdaq closing bell ceremony that evening. Shares of SEV have hovered between $6.50 and $8.50 for much of the company's first month on the exchange. The company's equity line of credit also took effect in mid-November... expected to aid in Aptera generating at least a portion of the $65 million the company has said it will need to complete validation manufacturing and begin low-volume production for customers. Aptera previously raised some $135 million from more than 17,000 investors in what the company touts as the most successful crowdfunding effort of all time, but Anthony argued Aptera will soon need to invest larger sums of capital to scale its production needs.

"Publicly listing the company gives us a lot more funding mechanisms to get into production," he said. "So just having access to the public markets, public liquidity and the kind of instruments and tools that banks offer to public companies, it just seemed like now is the right time." Alongside the IPO, Aptera made its formal transition to a Public Benefit Corporation, giving the company a legal obligation to consider its effect on employees, communities and customers in addition to the profit motives of its shareholders.
California's state government also awarded Aptera $21 million "to support its push toward scaled manufacturing," the article points out.

It also notes that Aptera's vehicles "are technically classified as motorcycles rather than standard passenger cars, presenting a potentially cheaper alternative for consumers on the hunt for an electric vehicle."

On Dec. 2, QuickTime turned 34, and despite its origins in Apple's chaotic 1990s (1991 to be exact), "it's still the backbone of video on our devices," writes Macworld's Jason Snell. That includes MP4 and Apple's immersive video formats for Vision Pro. From the report: By the late '80s and early '90s, digital audio had been thoroughly integrated into Macs. (PCs needed add-on cards to do much more than issue beeps.) The next frontier was video, and even better, synchronized video and audio. There were a whole lot of challenges: the Macs of the day were not really powerful to decode and display more than a few frames per second, which was more of a slideshow than a proper video. Also, the software written to decode and encode such video (called codecs) was complex and expensive, and there were lots of different formats, making file exchange unreliable.

Apple's solution wasn't to invent entirely new software to cover every contingency, but to build a framework for multimedia creation and playback that could use different codecs as needed. At its heart was a file that was a container for other streams of audio and video in various formats: the QuickTime Movie, or MOV.

[...] QuickTime's legacy lives on. At a recent event I attended at Apple Park, Apple's experts in immersive video for the Vision Pro pointed out that the standard format for immersive videos is, at its heart, a QuickTime container. And perhaps the most ubiquitous video container format on the internet, the MP4 file? That standard file format is actually a container format that can encompass different kinds of audio, video, and other information, all in one place. If that sounds familiar, that's because MPEG-4 is based on the QuickTime format.

Thirty-four years later, QuickTime may seem like a quaint product of a long-lost era of Apple. But the truth is, it's become an integral part of the computing world, so pervasive that it's almost invisible. I'd like to forget most of what happened at Apple in the early 1990s, but QuickTime definitely deserves our appreciation.

"The internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images and video," argues the site for a new browser extension called Slop Evader. It promises to use Google's search API "to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022" — the day ChatGPT launched — "so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."

404 Media calls it "a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free." Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry's unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called "generative AI" — despite widespread criticism and the wider public's distaste for it. "This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we're in," Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. "I've been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022...."

Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives of seven different sites where slop has become commonplace, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won't be able to find anything time-sensitive or current — including this very website, which did not exist in 2022. The experience is simultaneously refreshing and harrowing, allowing you to browse freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time — nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists.

Of course, the tool's limitations are part of its provocation. Brain says she has plans to add support for more sites, and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo's search indexing instead of Google's. But the real goal, she says, is prompting people to question how they can collectively refuse the dystopian, inhuman version of the internet that Silicon Valley's AI-pushers have forced on us... With enough cultural pushback, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of having synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the ability to filter out AI images in search earlier this year)... But no matter what form AI slop-refusal takes, it will need to be a group effort.