WeChat, China's most popular messenger app, on Tuesday denied storing users' chat histories, after a top businessman was quoted in media reports as saying he believed Tencent was monitoring everyone's account. From a report: " WeChat does not store any users' chat history. That is only stored in users' mobiles, computers and other terminals," WeChat said in a post on the social media platform. "WeChat will not use any content from user chats for big data analysis. Because of WeChat's technical model that does not store or analyse user chats, the rumour that 'we are watching your WeChat everyday' is pure misunderstanding." More than 900 million people use WeChat.

An anonymous reader shares a report: There's more on PornHub than pornography. People are using the streaming-video site -- a sort of YouTube for pornography where users can upload and watch adult videos -- to stream pirated copies of high-profile titles like the Broadway musical Hamilton and Disney's animated movie Zootopia. Where YouTube has been fighting for years to keep pornography off its site, PornHub now finds itself in the position of having to purge its platform of videos that are decidedly safe for work. The full, 75-minute first act of the historical, Tony Award-winning play, Hamilton -- with its original cast, including creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda -- is on PornHub, one Twitter user discovered. As the most sought after ticket in town, the play just set a new high-water mark (paywall) for Broadway after taking in $3.8 million at the box office for the week ending Dec. 24.

Several Indian smartphone manufacturers including Micromax, Intex and Lava plan to unveil a slew of Android smartphones priced around $30 in the coming weeks, Indian news outlet FactorDaily reported on Tuesday. These handsets would run Android Oreo Go, a lite version of Google's mobile operating system first unveiled last year. The report sheds light on India's smartphone market: With cheap smartphones, Google and the phone vendors hope to ride the wave of mass scale internet access on mobile phones in India. From a monthly consumption of 20 crore (200 million) GB of data about 16 months ago, Indians now consume over 150 crore (1.5 billion) GB a month making the country No. 1 among mobile data consuming countries. Much of this change is credited to aggressive data pricing plans by Reliance Jio, which launched services in September 2016.

An anonymous reader writes, citing a report: The first eclipse of 2018 will be a lunar one that comes at the very end of the month, on Jan. 31. It will be a total eclipse that involves the second full moon of the month, popularly referred to as a Blue Moon. Such a skywatching event hasn't happened for more than 150 years. The eclipse will take place during the middle of the night, and the Pacific Ocean will be turned toward the moon at the time. Central and eastern Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand and most of Australia will get a fine view of this moon show in the evening sky. Heading farther west into western Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the eclipse will already be underway as the moon rises.

From a report: Google has updated its Maps policies to ban certain business reviews left by former employees. In a new section of the Google Maps "User Contributed Content Policy," Google now labels reviews "about a current or former employment experience" as a "conflict of interest." Originally, only current employees were barred under the policy. The new rules, quoted below, went into effect on December 14.

The New York Times: Older people report higher levels of contentment or well-being than teenagers and young adults. The six elders put faces on this statistic. If they were not always gleeful, they were resilient and not paralysed by the challenges that came their way. All had known loss and survived. None went to a job he did not like, coveted stuff she could not afford, brooded over a slight on the subway or lost sleep over events in the distant future. They set realistic goals. Only one said he was afraid to die. Gerontologists call this the paradox of old age: that as people's minds and bodies decline, instead of feeling worse about their lives, they feel better (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). In memory tests, they recall positive images better than negative; under functional magnetic resonance imaging, their brains respond more mildly to stressful images than the brains of younger people. John Sorensen, who liked to talk, brought cheer to every conversation, even those about wanting to die. Helen Moses and Ping Wong knew exactly what they wanted: for Ms Moses, it was her daughter and Mr Zeimer; for Ms Wong, it was mah-jongg and the camaraderie it entailed, even if the other players spoke a different dialect or followed the rules of a different home region. Mr Jones, Ms Willig and Mr Mekas all spent their energy on the things they could still do that brought them satisfaction, not on what they had lost to age.

Bitcoin is already having a bad year. From a report: For the first time since 2015, the cryptocurrency began a new year by tumbling, extending its slide from a record $19,511 reached on Dec. 18. The virtual coin traded at $13,440 as of 3:55 p.m. in New York, down 6.1 percent from Friday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's also a fall from the $14,156 it hit Sunday, according to coinmarketcap.com, which tracks daily prices. Bitcoin got off to a much stronger start last year, and then kept that momentum going, eventually creating a global frenzy for cryptocurrencies. In a sign of its phenomenal price gain in 2017, it rose 3.6 percent on the first day of 2017 to $998, data from coinmarketcap.com show. It ended the year up more than 1,300 percent.

The UK's recycling industry says it doesn't know how to cope with a Chinese ban on imports of plastic waste. From a report: Britain has been shipping up to 500,000 tonnes of plastic for recycling in China every year, but now the trade has been stopped. At the moment the UK cannot deal with much of that waste, says the UK Recycling Association. Its chief executive, Simon Ellin, told the BBC he had no idea how the problem would be solved in the short term. "It's a huge blow for us... a game-changer for our industry," he said. "We've relied on China so long for our waste... 55% of paper, 25% plus of plastics. "We simply don't have the markets in the UK. It's going to mean big changes in our industry." China has introduced the ban from this month on "foreign garbage" as part of a move to upgrade its industries.

From a report: Come CES, LG will be letting attendees get up close with its new 88-inch 8K OLED display, which is both the largest and the highest-resolution OLED panel to date. But as far as specs go, that's all we have for now. Previously, the largest OLED screen size was 77 inches, and it "only" came in 4K. While this combination is currently offered to consumers by the likes of LG Electronics, Sony and Panasonic, they all source their large OLED panels from LG Display.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Happy Public Domain Day, every-some of you! In New Zealand and Canada, published works by artists who died in 1967 -- Rene Magritte, Dorothy Parker, John Coltrane, and many others -- have entered the public domain; Kiwis and Canadians can now freely distribute, perform, and remix a wealth of painting, writing, and music. In Europe, work published by artists who died in 1947 are now public domain. In the United States, well, we get nothing for the 20th year in a row, with one more to go. Our public domain drought is nearly old enough to drink. American copyrights now stretch for 95 years. Since 1998, we've been frozen with a public domain that only applies to works from before 1923 (and government works). Jennifer Jenkins is a clinical professor of law at Duke Law School, which hosts the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. In an email she explained what changed and why nothing has entered American public domain for two decades. "Until 1978, the maximum copyright term was 56 years from the date of publication -- an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years," she wrote. "In 1998, Congress added 20 years to the copyright term, extending it to the author's lifetime plus 70 years, or 95 years after publication for corporate 'works made for hire.'"

Artificial Intelligence is now being used to scan millions of pictures taken by Google Street View to glean insights like income or voting patterns, The New York Times reports. In a Stanford project, computers scanned millions of pictures of parked cars to predict voting patterns and pollution. From the report: The Stanford project gives a glimpse at the potential. By pulling the vehicles' makes, models and years from the images, and then linking that information with other data sources, the project was able to predict factors like pollution and voting patterns at the neighborhood level. "This kind of social analysis using image data is a new tool to draw insights," said Timnit Gebru, who led the Stanford research effort. The research has been published in stages, the most recent in late November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the end, the car-image project involved 50 million images of street scenes gathered from Google Street View. In them, 22 million cars were identified, and then classified into more than 2,600 categories like their make and model, located in more than 3,000 ZIP codes and 39,000 voting districts.

Internet companies should face a tax punishment for failing to deal with the threat of terrorism in the UK, security minister Ben Wallace has said. From a report: Mr Wallace said firms such as Facebook, Google and YouTube were too slow to remove radical content online, forcing the government to act instead. While tech firms were "ruthless profiteers," governments were spending millions policing the web, he added. Facebook said Mr Wallace was wrong to say it put profits before safety. YouTube said violent extremism was a "complex problem" and addressing it was a "critical challenge for us all." In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Wallace said tech giants were failing to help prevent the radicalisation of people online. "Because content is not taken down as quickly as they could do," he claimed, "we're having to de-radicalise people who have been radicalised. That's costing millions."

Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material. From a report: Sites that do not remove "obviously illegal" posts could face fines of up to 50m euro ($60m). The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about law-breaking material. Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law's provisions. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be the law's main focus but it is also likely to be applied to Reddit, Tumblr and Russian social network VK. Other sites such as Vimeo and Flickr could also be caught up in its provisions.

Alarmed by the proliferation of false content online, state lawmakers around the country are pushing schools to put more emphasis on teaching students how to tell fact from fiction. From a report: Lawmakers in several states have introduced or passed bills calling on public school systems to do more to teach media literacy skills that they say are critical to democracy. The effort has been bipartisan but has received little attention despite successful legislation in Washington state, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Mexico. Several more states are expected to consider such bills in the coming year, including Arizona, New York and Hawaii.

Advocates say the K-12 curriculum has not kept pace with rapid changes in technology. Studies show many children spend hours every day online but struggle to comprehend the content that comes at them. For years, they have pushed schools to incorporate media literacy -- including the ability to evaluate and analyze sources of information -- into lesson plans in civics, language arts, science and other subjects.

NBC asked 15 "top science and tech leaders" for their predictions for 2018. Despite arguments that technology has "created a monster," one anonymous reader sees their answers as a reason for hope: NBC notes the detection of gravitational waves in 2017 (predicted almost a century ago by Einstein) and the creation of genetically modified human embryos. And a professor of molecular medicine at The Scripps Research Institute points out that in 2018, more than 10 different medical conditions are now also moving forward in gene-editing clinical trials, including rare eye diseases, hemophilia, and sickle cell anemia. He predicts that in 2018, deep machine learning "will start to take hold in the clinic, first in ways to improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency of doctors' workflow."

Former ICANN head Esther Dyson predicts we'll also begin using big data not only to reduce healthcare costs, but also social problems like unemployment, depression, and crime. "With big data, and more data available through everything from health records and fitness apps to public data such as high school graduation rates and population demographics, we are increasingly able to compare what happens with what would have happened without a particular intervention...with luck, some communities will lead by example, and policy-makers will take note."

The head of the atmospheric science program at the University of Georgia notes that already, "We now have technology in place to provide significant lead time for landfalling hurricanes, potentially tornadic storms, and multi-day flood events." And Dr. Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, predicts that in 2018 "it's possible that a replacement for Pluto will be found," while an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History adds that in 2018 the European Space Agency's Gaia Mission will determine "distances to over a billion stars and velocities for several million," creating "an exquisitely detailed 3D map of our home galaxy."