T-Mobile Offers Free Starlink Satellite Texting Beta Until July #1798



T-Mobile is rolling out its Starlink satellite texting feature in beta, which is free until July. Compatible iPhone and Android users, even on rival networks, can apply. After July, premium T-Mobile plans will include it, while others can subscribe for $10–$20 per month. Limited spots are available.

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Elon Musk-Led Group Makes $98.4 Billion Bid for Control Of OpenAI



A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, upping the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday.

The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI.

“It was time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by by Toberoff “We will make sure that happens.”

Altman responded to Musk on X writing, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” using the previous name for the Musk-owned social-media platform and moving the decimal point in the billionaire’s bid for OpenAI one space to the left.

The New York Times reported: A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, according to two people familiar with the bid, elating a yearlong tussle for control of the company between Mr. Musk and OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.

The consortium includes Vy Capital and Tai, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, as well as the Hollywood power-broker Ari Emanuel and other investors, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are ongoing.

OpenAI declined to comment on the bid. The company has not yet seen the bid, according to a person familiar with OpenAI’s potential response.

Mr. Musk was one of OpenAI’s co-founders and one of its initial investors but left after a power struggle. Mr. Musk also created his own A.I company to compete head on with Mr. Altman’s company.

The unsolicited offer landed as OpenAI was set to complete a $40 billion fund raising deal that would nearly double the high-profile company’s valuation from just four months ago.

TechCrunch reported: A team of investors led by Elon Musk submitted a $97.6 billion bid to purchase OpenAI on Monday. The news comes by way of Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, who confirmed the reporting with The Wall Street Journal.

The unsolicited bid is the latest escalation by Musk in his war with co-founder Sam Altman, with whom he cofounded OpenAI with numerous other individuals back in 2015. 

Musk is already embroiled in a legal dispute with OpenAI, filing a 2024 injunction against its effort to transition away from nonprofit status. The Musk-led team is positioning the move as a bid to retain the organizations initial open source focus.

In my opinion, The fight between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over OpenAI might become a big problem for the both of them.


Elon Musk Denies Potential TikTok Bid



After being touted as a potential buyer earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied interest in acquiring TikTok’s US operations, PCMag reported.

“I have not put in a bid for TikTok,” Musk said at a conference hosted by German Billionaire Mathias Döpfner. He added that he doesn’t have any plans for what I would do if I had TikTok,” claiming that he doesn’t use and isn’t familiar with the platform.

The X owner added: “I do not require companies in general; it’s quite rare,” calling the 2022 acquisition of the company previously called Twitter (now X) “unusual.”

Under a law signed by President Biden last year, TikTok was ordered to divest its US operation on national security grounds. That was supposed to have been done by Jan. 19, but TikTok fought the ban in court. It lost at all levels, but President Trump — who started the TikTok ban issue himself in 2020 — gave the company a 75-day reprieve when he returned to office.

TechCrunch reported: Elon Musk recently said he is “not chomping at the bit to acquire TikTok.”

Musk made those remarks during an interview at the WELT Economic Summit on January 28. 

The interview came after President Donald Trump delayed a law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it banned in the United States. At the time, there were reports that the Chinese government was open to a deal in which Musk would require the app.

Trump even told reporter that he’d like to see Musk or Oracle chairman Larry Ellison acquire TikTok; he’s also signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund that could purchase a stake in the app.

But Musk claimed that he wasn’t interested, flatly stating “I have not put in a bid for TikTok.”

“I don’t have any plans for what I would do if I had TikTok,” he said in the interview. “I guess I would look at the algorithm and try to decide: How helpful or useful is this algorithm? And what can we do to shift the algorithm to be more productive and ultimately be beneficial to humanity?”

New York Post reported: Elon Musk has no interest in purchasing TikTok’s American business from Chinese Company ByteDance according to new public comments.

In a recently released video interview at the WELT Economic Summit, the DOGE chief said he doesn’t use the app and could not find a motivation to pursue a purchase.

“I have not actually put in a bid for TikTok, I don’t have any plans for what I wold do if I had TikTok,” Musk told the German forum.

Musk went on to say that he does not generally purchase companies and only does so when he can see an altruistic reason.

“I do not acquire companies that’s quite rare. Acquiring Twitter, now called X, was highly unusual. I usually build companies from scratch,” Musk said.

In my opinion, it certainly sounds like Elon Musk doesn’t want to acquire TikTok at this time.


TikTok Advises Android Users In The US To Sideload The App



If you need to download and install TikTok in the US, you can do so on Android even though the app isn’t back in the Play Store yet. In a tweet, the TikTok Policy account has announced that the service has made Android Package Kits available for download through its official web site. Engadget reported.

Companies don’t typically endorse sideloading, but TikTok is, of course, a special case.

The app briefly went offline on January 19 before a law banning it in the US — unless its parent company ByteDance sells it to an owner based in the country — took effect. Under that law, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store are required to remove its listing if they don’t want to get slapped with a fine amounting to $5,000 for every user in the US who downloads the app. 

It didn’t take a full day before TikTok restored access to its service, but it’s app has yet to reappear on Google’s and Apple’s stores in the US.

The Verge reported: TikTok is now offering US downloads of the Android version of the app on its own website, the company announced last night. With the change, Android users in the United States now have an easy way to download or update the app for the first time since Google removed it from Google Play last month in response to a US ban on the app.

You can download both TikTok and TikTok Lite, a version of the app designed to work with lower internet connections. Once that’s done, you can install or update the app just by opening the file and approving its installation.

Like Apple, Google requires app makers to follow certain rules to be listed on the Play Store — rules TikTok isn’t necessarily bound to when offering the download on its own.  A TikTok help page claims that, nevertheless, the app “remains safe and secure.”

Forbes reported: More bad news for tens of millions of U.S. TikTok users today, as its suddenly better to be an Android users than an iPhone user. But given reports that eBay was listing TikTok enable iPhones for tens of thousands of dollars, this is a cheaper way to get your fix.

TikTok has been absent on Apple App Store and Google’s Play Store since the short-lived ban last month. While users can use installed apps almost as usual, there have been no new installs or updates. This is a nightmare for those changing phones but also a security issue, with no updates available to fix bugs or vulnerabilities.

Bad news for iPhone users, though. With no stateside sideloading, there’s no way for TikTok to do the same for them. The App Store blackout continues. 

In my opinion, it appears that it might take some time before Apple users can expect to access TikTok on their iPhones.


UK Demands Ability To Access Apple Users’ Encrypted Data



The UK government had demanded that Apple create a backdoor in its encrypted cloud service, in a confrontation that challenges the US tech firm’s avowed stance on protecting user privacy, The Guardian reported.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Home Office had issued a “technical capability notice” under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence.

The demand, issued last month, relates to Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) service, which heavily encrypts personal data uploaded and stored remotely in Apple’s cloud servers, according to the Post, which said this was a “blanket” request that applied to any Apple user worldwide. 

The ADP service uses end-to-end encryption, a form of security that means only the account holder can decrypt the files and no one else can — including Apple.

Apple declined to comment. However, in a submission to parliament last year, it flagged its concerns about the IPA, saying it provided the government with “authority to issue secret orders requiring providers to break encryption by inserting backdoors into their software products.”

Reuters reported: Britain has ordered Apple to give it unprecedentedly broad access to encrypted user data stored on Apple’s data cloud, the Washington Post newspaper reported on Friday.

The UK government’s “technical capability notice” requires blanket access rather than merely assistance to access a specific account, the paper reported, citing unnamed sources.

Governments routinely ask technology companies for user data to crack criminal cases, but Britain’s’ sweeping demand, issued last month, has no known precedent in major democracies, the Post said.

Britain issues such notices under its Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which combined with various existing powers on intercepting and obtaining communications. 

While security officials say data encryption features make it harder to catch criminals, tech companies have long guarded their users’ right to privacy.

The Verge reported: Apple has been ordered by the UK government to create a backdoor that would give security officials access to users’ encrypted iCloud backups. If implemented, British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not jut Brits, and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their inscription was compromised.

Apple’s iCloud backups aren’t encrypted by default, but the Advanced Data Protection option was added in 2022, and must be enabled manually. It uses end-to-end encryption so that not even Apple can access encrypted files. 

In response to the order, Apple is expected to comply to stop offering Advanced Data Protection in the UK. This wouldn’t meet the UK’s demand for access to files shared by global users, however.

In my opinion, I don’t see why the UK government wants to gather encrypted data from Apple’s users. What are they hoping to find?


Lawmakers Push To Ban DeepSeek App From U.S. Government Devices



Lawmakers plan to introduce a bill Thursday that would ban DeeSeek’s chatbot application from government-owned devices, over new security concerns that the app could provide user information to the Chinese government, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The legislation written by Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, is echoing a strategy that Congress use to ban Chinese-controlled TikTok from government devices, which marked the beginning of the effort to block the company from operating in the U.S. 

“This should be a no-brainer in terms of actions we should take to immediately prevent our enemy from getting information from our government,” Gottheimer said.

The chatbot app, however, has intentionally hidden code that could send user login information to China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company that has been banned in the U.S., according to an analysis by Ivan Tsarynny, chief executive of Feroot Security, which specializes in data protection and cybersecurity. Tsarynny;s analysis was published earlier by the Associated Press.

“Our personal information is being sent to China, there is no denial, and the DeepSeek tool is collecting everything that American users connect to it,” Tsarynny said in an interview.

ArsTechnica reported: Lawmakers are now pushing to immediately ban the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek on government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chines Communist Party (CCP) may have built a backdoor into DeepSeek to access Americans’ sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.

DeepSeek shocked the world when it debuted last month. Rumored to rival OpenAI o1 reasoning model despite costing significantly less to develop, DeepSeek’s open source model is free to download. That propelled its popularity, making DeepSeek the most-downloaded app in the U.S.

TikTok has been banned on government devices since 2022, and Donald Trump is currently trying to work out a deal to save the app after TikTok was briefly blocked nationwide. As national security fears around TikTok swirl, one Senator, John Curtis (R-Utah) warned yesterday that DeepSeek is “TikTok on steroids” while questioning Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary.

ABC News reported: Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) is demanding swift action after ABC News’ exclusive reporting about hidden links in DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence tool that could potentially send data to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company.

“I think we should ban DeepSeek from all government devices immediately. No one should be allowed to downloaded it onto their device,” Gottheimer, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News.

A new bill Gottheimer proposed on Thursday is called the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act” and it would require the Office of Management and Budget to develop guidelines within 60 days for the removal of DeepSeek from federal technologies, with exceptions for law enforcement and national security-related activity.

In my opinion, DeepSeek could pose a danger to the lawmakers in the U.S House and Senate. Hopefully, this app will be removed from lawmaker’s phones.

 


USPS Reverses China Parcel Ban Amid Tariff Confusion #1797



Today, I explore a significant shake-up in international shipping. Just hours after the U.S. Postal Service halted parcels from China, it suddenly reversed course. This move follows President Trump’s new tariffs and the elimination of a key duty exemption used by major retailers like Temu and Shein. What does this mean for businesses, consumers, and the economy? My advice to those waiting to buy something is not to delay!

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