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Chinese automakers may not be able to sell their electric vehicles in the United States due to steep tariffs and software restrictions, but they have found an alternative path to American eyeballs through a coordinated campaign targeting car influencers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The effort, the Verge reports, is largely organized by DCar Studio, a platform that invites US-based creators to Los Angeles to test-drive vehicles from brands like BYD, Geely and Xiaomi. DCar is actually Dongchedi, a car trading platform owned by TikTok parent ByteDance that raised $600 million on a $3 billion valuation in 2024. The strategy appears aimed at building global brand awareness rather than direct US sales. Mark Greeven, professor at IMD Business School, told The Verge that American influencers still shape opinions across the Western world. "The charm offensive is to work with American influencers about Chinese EV cars because we still have a dominant opinion in the Western world, which is formed by English-speaking influential figures on social media," he said. Several creators told The Verge they have heard rumors of undisclosed payments for positive coverage.

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The Justice Department has reached an agreement to settle an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, a real estate software company that the government accused of enabling landlords to collude to raise rents. From a report: Using RealPage software, landlords shared information about their rents and occupancy rates with the company, after which an algorithm suggested what to charge renters. The government's suit, which was joined by several state attorneys general, accused RealPage of taking the confidential information and suggesting rents higher than those in a free market. Under the settlement proposal, which requires approval by a federal judge overseeing the case in the Middle District of North Carolina, RealPage's software could no longer use information about current leases to train its algorithm. Nonpublic data from competing landlords would also be excluded when suggesting rents. "Competing companies must make independent pricing decisions, and with the rise of algorithmic and artificial intelligence tools, we will remain at the forefront of vigorous antitrust enforcement," said Gail Slater, who leads the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, in a news release.

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schwit1 writes: Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, tops a ranking that is increasingly dominated by Asia: the world's most populated city. It edged out Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, and Japan's Tokyo to earn the title in a new United Nations report. [PDF] With an estimated population of nearly 42 million residents, Jakarta soared from 33rd place in the previous rankings, in 2018, that were topped by Tokyo. It's followed by Dhaka, with 36 million, which the report says is "expected to become the world's largest city by mid-century."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: CISA has warned that state-backed snoops and cyber-mercenaries are actively abusing commercial spyware to break into Signal and WhatsApp accounts, hijack devices, and quietly rummage through the phones of what the agency calls "high-value" users. In an alert published Monday, the US government's cyber agency said it's tracking multiple miscreants that are using a mix of phishing, bogus QR codes, malicious app impersonation, and, in some cases, full-blown zero-click exploits to compromise messaging apps which most people assume are safe. The agency says the activity it's seeing suggests an increasing focus on "high-value" individuals -- everyone from current and former senior government, military, and political officials to civil society groups across the US, the Middle East, and Europe. In many of the campaigns, attackers delivered spyware first and asked questions later, using the foothold to deploy more payloads and deepen their access.

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Two coal plants in Mumbai (in India) that were scheduled to close last year continue operating after the state government of Maharashtra reversed shutdown decisions in late 2023 and extended the life of at least one facility by five years. The largest single factor the Indian conglomerate Tata cited in its petition for an extension was increased energy demand from data centers. The Guardian reports that Amazon operated 16 data centers in Mumbai last year. The company's official website lists three "availability zones" for the city. Amazon's Mumbai colocation data centers consumed 624,518 megawatt hours of electricity in 2023. That amount could power over 400,000 Indian households for a year. Residents of Mahul live a few hundred metres from one coal plant. Earlier this year doctors found three tumours in the brain of a resident's 54-year-old mother. Studies show people who live near coal plants are much more likely to develop cancer. By 2030 data centers will consume a third of Mumbai's energy, according to Ankit Saraiya, chief executive of Techno & Electric Engineering. Amazon's colocation data centers in Mumbai bought 41 diesel generators as backup. A report in August by the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy identified diesel generators as a major source of air pollution in the region.

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Learn more about using Google products like Gemini, Search, Shopping, Pixel and more over the holidays.

Learn more about using Google products like Gemini, Search, Shopping, Pixel and more over the holidays.

We recently released a new agentic calling feature in the U.S. where you can ask Google to call local businesses for you to gather information about what’s available nea…

You’ll now get more creative control in Flow with new refinement and editing capabilities.You’ll now get more creative control in Flow with new refinement and editing capabilities.

NTFSPLUS Driver Updated As It Works Toward The Mainline Kernel  Phoronix

Nvidia pushed back against investor concerns about Google's competitive positioning in AI on Tuesday after the chipmaker's shares tumbled 4.4% and erased nearly $200 billion in market cap on fears that Alphabet's tensor processing units were gaining ground against its dominance in AI computing. The company said it was "delighted by Google's success" but asserted that it continues to supply chips to Google. Nvidia said it remains "a generation ahead of the industry" as the only platform that runs every AI model and operates everywhere computing is done. The statement came after investors reacted to the release of Google's Gemini 3 large language model last week. The model was trained using TPUs rather than Nvidia chips. A report in The Information on Monday said Google was pitching potential clients including Meta on using TPUs in their data centers rather than Nvidia's chips. Nvidia said its platform offers "greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs," referring to application-specific integrated circuits like Google's TPUs that are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. Google's TPUs have until now only been available for customers to rent through its cloud computing service. Nvidia has lost more than $800 billion in market value since it peaked above $5 trillion less than a month ago.

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I tried out Nitrux 5, so you don’t have to  XDA

This Linux distro is seeing record downloads as people flee Windows  How-To Geek

The abstract of a paper on NBER: This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time and (ii) students' educational trajectories. Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Following students over time, we find no significant effects on primary and secondary completion, academic performance in secondary school, or university enrollment. Survey data indicate that computer access significantly improved students' computer skills but not their cognitive skills; treated teachers received some training but did not improve their digital skills and showed limited use of technology in classrooms, suggesting the need for additional pedagogical support.

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The brain goes through five distinct phases in life, with key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, scientists have revealed. From a report: Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells. Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that the brain stays in the adolescent phase until our early thirties when we "peak." They say the results could help us understand why the risk of mental health disorders and dementia varies through life. The brain is constantly changing in response to new knowledge and experience -- but the research shows this is not one smooth pattern from birth to death. Some people will reach these landmarks earlier or later than others -- but the researchers said it was striking how clearly these ages stood out in the data. These patterns have only now been revealed due to the quantity of brain scans available in the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Black Friday Deals for Linux Users 2025 [Continually Updated With New Entries]  It's FOSS

Google’s seventh-gen Tensor Processing Unit is here! Learn what makes Ironwood our most powerful and energy-efficient custom silicon to date.Google’s seventh-gen Tensor Processing Unit is here! Learn what makes Ironwood our most powerful and energy-efficient custom silicon to date.

We’re bringing “The Thinking Game" to the Google DeepMind YouTube channel.

Improved Upstream Kernel Support For TUXEDO Laptops Being Worked On  Phoronix

An anonymous reader shares a report: Solid-state drives sitting unpowered in drawers or storage can lose data over time because voltage gradually leaks from their NAND flash cells, and consumer-grade drives using QLC NAND retain data for about a year while TLC NAND lasts up to three years without power. More expensive MLC and SLC NAND can hold data for five and ten years respectively. The voltage loss can result in missing data or completely unusable drives. Hard drives remain more resistant to power loss despite their susceptibility to bit rot. Most users relying on SSDs for primary storage in regularly powered computers face little risk since drives typically stay unpowered for only a few months at most. The concern mainly affects creative professionals and researchers who need long-term archival storage.

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Hammerspace bangs IO500 performance bell with its standard software  Blocks and Files