Policy – Page 9

DeepSeek is “TikTok on steroids,” senator warns amid push for government-wide ban

AI, app ban, CCP, china, china mobile, Chinese Communist Party, DeepSeek, FCC, government ban, Policy / Kris Guyer / February 6, 2025

But while the national security concerns require a solution, Curtis said his priority is maintaining “a really productive relationship with China.” He pushed Lutnick to address how he plans to hold DeepSeek—and the CCP in general—accountable for national security concerns amid ongoing tensions with China.

Lutnick suggested that if he is confirmed (which appears likely), he will pursue a policy of “reciprocity,” where China can “expect to be treated by” the US exactly how China treats the US. Currently, China is treating the US “horribly,” Lutnick said, and his “first step” as Commerce Secretary will be to “repeat endlessly” that more “reciprocity” is expected from China.

But while Lutnick answered Curtis’ questions about DeepSeek somewhat head-on, he did not have time to respond to Curtis’ inquiry about Lutnick’s intentions for the US AI Safety Institute (AISI)—which Lutnick’s department would oversee and which could be essential to the US staying ahead of China in AI development.

Viewing AISI as key to US global leadership in AI, Curtis offered “tools” to help Lutnick give the AISI “new legs” or a “new life” to ensure that the US remains responsibly ahead of China in the AI race. But Curtis ran out of time to press Lutnick for a response.

It remains unclear how AISI’s work might change under Trump, who revoked Joe Biden’s AI safety rules establishing the AISI.

What is clear is that lawmakers are being pressed to preserve and even evolve the AISI.

Yesterday, the chief economist for a nonprofit called the Foundation for the American Innovation, Samuel Hammond, provided written testimony to the US House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, recommending that AISI be “retooled to perform voluntary audits of AI models—both open and closed—to certify their security and reliability” and to keep America at the forefront of AI development.

“With so little separating China and America’s frontier AI capabilities on a technical level, America’s lead in AI is only as strong as our lead in computing infrastructure,” Hammond said. And “as the founding member of a consortium of 280 similar AI institutes internationally, the AISI seal of approval would thus support the export and diffusion of American AI models worldwide.”

DeepSeek is “TikTok on steroids,” senator warns amid push for government-wide ban Read More »

DOJ agrees to temporarily block DOGE from Treasury records

department of government efficiency, department of justice, doge, elon musk, Policy, Treasury Department / Rejus Almole / February 5, 2025

Elez reports to Tom Krause, another Treasury Department special government employee, but Krause doesn’t have direct access to the payment system, Humphreys told the judge. Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Group and is also viewed as a Musk ally.

But when the judge pressed Humphreys on Musk’s alleged access, the DOJ lawyer only said that as far as the defense team was aware, Musk did not have access.

Further, Humphreys explained that DOGE—which functions as part of the executive office—does not have access, to the DOJ’s knowledge. As he explained it, DOGE sets the high-level priorities that these special government employees carry out, seemingly trusting the employees to identify waste and protect taxpayer dollars without ever providing any detailed reporting on the records that supposedly are evidence of mismanagement.

To Kollar-Kotelly, the facts on the record seem to suggest that no one outside the Treasury is currently accessing sensitive data. But when she pressed Humphreys on whether DOGE had future plans to access the data, Humphreys declined to comment, calling it irrelevant to the complaint.

Humphreys suggested that the government’s defense in this case would focus on the complaint that outsiders are currently accessing Treasury data, seemingly dismissing any need to discuss DOGE’s future plans. But the judge pushed back, telling Humphreys she was not trying to “nail” him “to the wall,” but there’s too little information on the relationship between DOGE and the Treasury Department as it stands. How these entities work together makes a difference, the judge suggested, in terms of safeguarding sensitive Treasury data.

According to Kollar-Kotelly, granting a temporary restraining order in part would allow DOGE to “preserve the status quo” of its current work in the Treasury Department while ensuring no new outsiders get access to Americans’ sensitive information. Such an order would give both sides time to better understand the current government workflows to best argue their cases, the judge suggested.

If the order is approved, it would remain in effect until the judge rules on plantiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction. At the hearing today, Kollar-Kotelly suggested that matter would likely be settled at a hearing on February 24.

DOJ agrees to temporarily block DOGE from Treasury records Read More »

Robocallers posing as FCC staff blocked after robocalling real FCC staff

FCC, Policy, robocalls / Kris Guyer / February 5, 2025

A not-very-successful robocall scheme

You can ignore robocalls from FCC “Fraud Prevention Team,” which doesn’t exist.

Credit: Getty Images | PhonlamaiPhoto

Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. “On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers,” the FCC said.

The calls used an artificial voice that said, “Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with you. If you are available to speak now please press one. If you prefer to schedule a call back please press two.”

You may not be surprised to learn that the FCC does not have any “Fraud Prevention Team” like the one mentioned in the robocalls, and especially not one that demands Google gift cards in lieu of jail time.

“The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau believes the purpose of the calls was to threaten, intimidate, and defraud,” the agency said. “One recipient of an imposter call reported that they were ultimately connected to someone who ‘demand[ed] that [they] pay the FCC $1,000 in Google gift cards to avoid jail time for [their] crimes against the state.'”

The FCC said it does not “publish or otherwise share staff personal phone numbers” and that it “remains unclear how these individuals were targeted.” Obviously, robocallers posing as FCC employees probably wouldn’t intentionally place scam calls to real FCC employees. But FCC employees are just as likely to get robocalls as anyone else. This set of schemers apparently only made about 1,800 calls before their calling accounts were terminated.

The FCC described the scheme yesterday when it announced a proposed fine of $4,492,500 against Telnyx, the voice service provider accused of carrying the robocalls. The FCC alleges that Telnyx violated “Know Your Customer (KYC)” rules by providing access to calling services without verifying the customers’ identities. When contacted by Ars today, Telnyx denied the FCC’s allegations and said it will contest the proposed fine.

The “MarioCop” accounts

The robocalling scheme lasted two days. On February 6, 2024, Telnyx accepted two new customers calling themselves Christian Mitchell and Henry Walker, who provided street addresses in Toronto and email addresses with the domain name “mariocop123.com.” The robocallers apparently used fake identities and paid for Telnyx service in Bitcoin.

The Telnyx customers who placed the robocalls are referred to as “MarioCop accounts” in the FCC’s Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture (NAL) issued against Telnyx. Telnyx flagged one of the accounts in the course of its “routine examination of new users” and terminated the account on February 7 after determining the calls violated its terms and conditions and acceptable use policy. Telnyx also reported the account to the FCC.

Telnyx is based in Chicago. It offers a service that lets callers “build a custom AI voice bot” and a voice API that “makes it simple to make, receive and control voice calls with code.” Telnyx is also a VoIP provider that says it “holds carrier status in 30+ countries around the world” and offers “local calling in over 80 countries and PSTN [Public Switched Telephone Network] replacement in 45+ markets.”

The FCC subpoenaed Telnyx for information about the calls, and the resulting records showed that one MarioCop account placed 1,029 calls between February 6 and February 7. The other account placed 768 calls on February 6.

The FCC also subpoenaed Telnyx for information that might identify the callers and “determined that the very limited identifying information Telnyx collected from its customers was false.” They used physical addresses in Canada, including one that turned out to be a Sheraton hotel, and IP addresses from Scotland and England.

“The @mariocop123.com domain is not associated with any known business; a website using the same domain was created in February 2024 and remains undeveloped,” the FCC said. The FCC notes that both MarioCop accounts may have been operated by the same person.

FCC: Telcos must know their customers

Telnyx “accepted the names and physical addresses at face value, without any further requests for corroboration or independent verification,” the FCC forfeiture order said. Neither applicant provided a telephone number.

The FCC alleged that Telnyx didn’t do enough “to discern whether the limited amount of identifying information its customer provided was legitimate and it overlooked obvious discrepancies in the information it collected… Becoming Telynyx’s customer and gaining access to outbound calling services that allowed origination of hundreds of calls (more than 1,000 calls from the First MarioCop Account) was as simple as making up a fake name and address and acquiring a non-free email address.”

The FCC notice continued:

Our rules require Telnyx to know its customers. Yet it did not know who the MarioCop Account holders were. We therefore conclude that Telnyx apparently violated section 64.1200(n)(4) of our rules by allowing the First MarioCop Account and the Second MarioCop Account access to outbound calling services without actually knowing the true identities of the account holders. By extension, we believe we could likely find that Telnyx apparently violated our rules with regards to every customer it onboarded using the same process as it did for the MarioCop Accounts. We decline to do so here absent further investigation.

Telnyx will have an opportunity to respond to the allegations and argue that it shouldn’t be fined. In some cases, the FCC and the telecom reach a settlement for a lower amount.

Telnyx CEO David Casem told Ars today that “Telnyx is surprised by the FCC’s mistaken decision to issue a Notice of Apparent Liability stating an intent to impose monetary penalties. The Notice of Apparent Liability is factually mistaken, and Telnyx denies its allegations. Telnyx has done everything and more than the FCC has required for Know-Your-Customer (‘KYC’) and customer due diligence procedures.”

We also sent a message to the email addresses used by the MarioCop accounts and will update this article in the unlikely event that we receive a response.

Telnyx defends response, citing quick shutdown

Casem said the FCC hasn’t previously demanded “perfection” in stopping illegal traffic. “Since bad actors continuously find ways to avoid detection, the FCC has historically expected providers to take reasonable steps to detect and block them,” he told Ars. “Yet the FCC now seeks to impose substantial monetary penalties on Telnyx for limited unlawful calling activity that Telnyx not only did not originate but swiftly blocked within a matter of hours.”

Casem said that “there has been no allegation of subsequent recurring activity” and urged the FCC to “reconsider what can only be viewed as an improper effort to impose an unprecedented zero-tolerance requirement on providers through enforcement action, in the absence of any defined rules informing providers what is expected of them.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in yesterday’s announcement that he is pleased with the “bipartisan vote in favor of this nearly $4.5 million proposed fine” and that it “continues the FCC’s longstanding work to stop bad actors.”

Anna Gomez, a Democratic member of the FCC, said that Carr’s office accepted her request for a change designed to encourage telecoms to report potential violations to the FCC. “It is important that service providers work quickly and closely with the FCC to identify and stop illegal traffic before it makes its way to consumers. I value self-reporting from industry actors on potential violations of our rules, and I am grateful the Office of Chairman Carr accepted our edits to this NAL to encourage self-reporting,” Gomez said.

There was a dissenting vote from Republican Commissioner Nathan Simington, but not because of the facts specific to this case. Because of a recent Supreme Court ruling limiting the power of federal agencies, Simington has vowed to vote against any fine imposed by the commission until its legal powers are clear.

“While the conduct described in this NAL is particularly egregious and certainly worth enforcement action, I continue to believe that the Supreme Court’s decision in Jarkesy prevents me from voting, at this time, to approve this or any item purporting to impose a fine,” Simington said.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Robocallers posing as FCC staff blocked after robocalling real FCC staff Read More »

Internet Archive played crucial role in tracking shady CDC data removals

CDC, cdc data, censorship, Centers for Disease Control, Donald Trump, Internet Archive, Policy / Paul Patrick / February 4, 2025

Internet Archive makes it easier to track changes in CDC data online.

When thousands of pages started disappearing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website late last week, public health researchers quickly moved to archive deleted public health data.

Soon, researchers discovered that the Internet Archive (IA) offers one of the most effective ways to both preserve online data and track changes on government websites. For decades, IA crawlers have collected snapshots of the public Internet, making it easier to compare current versions of websites to historic versions. And IA also allows users to upload digital materials to further expand the web archive. Both aspects of the archive immediately proved useful to researchers assessing how much data the public risked losing during a rapid purge following a pair of President Trump’s executive orders.

Part of a small group of researchers who managed to download the entire CDC website within days, virologist Angela Rasmussen helped create a public resource that combines CDC website information with deleted CDC datasets. Those datasets, many of which were previously in the public domain for years, were uploaded to IA by an anonymous user, “SheWhoExists,” on January 31. Moving forward, Rasmussen told Ars that IA will likely remain a go-to tool for researchers attempting to closely monitor for any unexpected changes in access to public data.

IA “continually updates their archives,” Rasmussen said, which makes IA “a good mechanism for tracking modifications to these websites that haven’t been made yet.”

The CDC website is being overhauled to comply with two executive orders from January 20, the CDC told Ars. The Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government requires government agencies to remove LGBTQ+ language that Trump claimed denies “the biological reality of sex” and is likely driving most of the CDC changes to public health resources. The other executive order the CDC cited, the Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing, would seemingly largely only impact CDC employment practices.

Additionally, “the Office of Personnel Management has provided initial guidance on both Executive Orders and HHS and divisions are acting accordingly to execute,” the CDC told Ars.

Rasmussen told Ars that the deletion of CDC datasets is “extremely alarming” and “not normal.” While some deleted pages have since been restored in altered versions, removing gender ideology from CDC guidance could put Americans at heightened risk. That’s another emerging problem that IA’s snapshots could help researchers and health professionals resolve.

“I think the average person probably doesn’t think that much about the CDC’s website, but it’s not just a matter of like, ‘Oh, we’re going to change some wording’ or ‘we’re going to remove these data,” Rasmussen said. “We are actually going to retool all the information that’s there to remove critical information about public health that could actually put people in danger.”

For example, altered Mpox transmission data removed “all references to men who have sex with men,” Rasmussen said. “And in the US those are the people who are not the only people at risk, but they’re the people who are most at risk of being exposed to Mpox. So, by removing that DEI language, you’re actually depriving people who are at risk of information they could use to protect themselves, and that eventually will get people hurt or even killed.”

Likely the biggest frustration for researchers scrambling to preserve data is dealing with broken links. On social media, Rasmussen has repeatedly called for help flagging broken links to ensure her team’s archive is as useful as possible.

Rasmussen’s group isn’t the only effort to preserve the CDC data. Some are creating niche archives focused on particular topics, like journalist Jessica Valenti, who created an archive of CDC guidelines on reproductive rights issues, sexual health, intimate partner violence, and other data the CDC removed online.

Niche archives could make it easier for some researchers to quickly survey missing data in their field, but Rasmussen’s group is hoping to take next steps to make all the missing CDC data more easily discoverable in their archive.

“I think the next step,” Rasmussen said, “would be to try to fix anything in there that’s broken, but also look into ways that we could maybe make it more browsable and user-friendly for people who may not know what they’re looking for or may not be able to find what they’re looking for.”

CDC advisers demand answers

The CDC has been largely quiet about the deleted data, only pointing to Trump’s executive orders to justify removals. That could change by February 7. That’s the deadline when a congressionally mandated advisory committee to the CDC’s acting director, Susan Monarez, asked for answers in an open letter to a list of questions about the data removals.

“It has been reported through anonymous sources that the website changes are related to new executive orders that ban the use of specific words and phrases,” their letter said. “But as far as we are aware, these unprecedented actions have yet to be explained by CDC; news stories indicate that the agency is declining to comment.”

At the top of the committee’s list of questions is likely the one frustrating researchers most: “What was the rationale for making these datasets and websites inaccessible to the public?” But the committee also importantly asked what analysis was done “of the consequences of removing access to these datasets and website” prior to the removals. They also asked how deleted data would be safeguarded and when data would be restored.

It’s unclear if the CDC will be motivated to respond by the deadline. Ars reached out to one of the committee members, Joshua Sharfstein—a physician and vice dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement at Johns Hopkins University—who confirmed that as of this writing, the CDC has not yet responded. And the CDC did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on the letter.

Rasmussen told Ars that even temporary removals of CDC guidance can disrupt important processes keeping Americans healthy. Among the potentially most consequential pages briefly removed were recommendations from the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Those recommendations are used by insurance companies to decide who gets reimbursed for vaccines and by physicians to deduce vaccine eligibility, and Rasmussen said they “are incredibly important for the entire population to have access to any kind of vaccination.” And while, for example, the Mpox vaccine recommendations were eventually restored unaltered, Rasmussen told Ars that she suspects that “one of the reasons” preventing interference currently with ACIP is that it’s mandated by Congress.

Seemingly ACIP could be weakened by the new administration, Rasmussen suggested. She warned that Trump’s pick for CDC director, Dave Weldon, “is an anti-vaxxer” (with a long history of falsely linking vaccines to autism) who may decide to replace ACIP committee members with anti-vaccine advocates or move to dissolve ACIP. And any changes in recommendations could mean “insurance companies aren’t going to cover vaccinations [and that] physicians will not recommend vaccination.” And that could mean “vaccination will go down and we’ll start having outbreaks of some of these vaccine-preventable diseases.”

“If there’s a big polio outbreak, that is going to result in permanently disabled children, dead children—it’s really, really serious,” Rasmussen said. “So I think that people need to understand that this isn’t just like, ‘Oh, maybe wear a mask when you’re at the movie theater’ kind of CDC guidance. This is guidance that’s really fundamental to our most basic public health practices, and it’s going to cause widespread suffering and death if this is allowed to continue.”

Seeding deleted data and doing science to fight back

On Bluesky, Rasmussen led one of many charges to compile archived links and download CDC data so that researchers can reference every available government study when advancing public health knowledge.

“These data are public and they are ours,” Rasmussen posted. “Deletion disobedience is one way to fight back.”

As Rasmussen sees it, deleting CDC data is “theft” from the public domain and archiving CDC data is simply taking “back what is ours.” But at the same time, her team is also taking steps to be sure the data they collected can be lawfully preserved. Because the CDC website has not been copied and hosted on a server, they expect their archive should be deemed lawful and remain online.

“I don’t put it past this administration to try to shut this stuff down by any means possible,” Rasmussen told Ars. “And we wanted to make sure there weren’t any sort of legal loopholes that would jeopardize anybody in the group, but also that would potentially jeopardize the data.”

It’s not clear if some data has already been lost. Seemingly the same user who uploaded the deleted datasets to IA posted on Reddit, clarifying that while the “full” archive “should contain all public datasets that were available” before “anything was scrubbed,” it likely only includes “most” of the “metadata and attachments.” So, researchers who download the data may still struggle to fill in some blanks.

To help researchers quickly access the missing data, anyone can help the IA seed the datasets, the Reddit user said in another post providing seeding and mirroring instructions. Currently dozens are seeding it for a couple hundred peers.

“Thank you to everyone who requested this important data, and particularly to those who have offered to mirror it,” the Reddit user wrote.

As Rasmussen works with her group to make their archive more user-friendly, her plan is to help as many researchers as possible fight back against data deletion by continuing to reference deleted data in their research. She suggested that effort—doing science that ignores Trump’s executive orders—is perhaps a more powerful way to resist and defend public health data than joining in loud protests, which many researchers based in the US (and perhaps relying on federal funding) may not be able to afford to do.

“Just by doing things and standing up for science with your actions, rather than your words, you can really make, I think, a big difference,” Rasmussen said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Internet Archive played crucial role in tracking shady CDC data removals Read More »

$42B broadband grant program may scrap Biden admin’s preference for fiber

access, and Deployment, BEAD program, Broadband Equity, Policy / Mike M. / February 4, 2025

US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been demanding an overhaul of a $42.45 billion broadband deployment program, and now his telecom policy director has been chosen to lead the federal agency in charge of the grant money.

“Congratulations to my Telecom Policy Director, Arielle Roth, for being nominated to lead NTIA,” Cruz wrote last night, referring to President Trump’s pick to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Roth’s nomination is pending Senate approval.

Roth works for the Senate Commerce Committee, which is chaired by Cruz. “Arielle led my legislative and oversight efforts on communications and broadband policy with integrity, creativity, and dedication,” Cruz wrote.

Shortly after Trump’s election win, Cruz called for an overhaul of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which was created by Congress in November 2021 and is being implemented by the NTIA. Biden-era leaders of the NTIA developed rules for the program and approved initial funding plans submitted by every state and territory, but a major change in approach could delay the distribution of funds.

Cruz previously accused the NTIA of “technology bias” because the agency prioritized fiber over other types of technology. He said Congress would review BEAD for “imposition of statutorily-prohibited rate regulation; unionized workforce and DEI labor requirements; climate change assessments; excessive per-location costs; and other central planning mandates.”

Roth criticized the BEAD implementation at a Federalist Society event in June 2024. “Instead of prioritizing connecting all Americans who are currently unserved to broadband, the NTIA has been preoccupied with attaching all kinds of extralegal requirements on BEAD and, to be honest, a woke social agenda, loading up all kinds of burdens that deter participation in the program and drive up costs,” she said.

Impact on fiber, public broadband, and low-cost plans

Municipal broadband networks and fiber networks in general could get less funding under the new plans. Roth is “expected to change the funding conditions that currently include priority access for government-owned networks” and “could revisit decisions like the current preference for fiber,” Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Reducing the emphasis on fiber could direct more grant money to cable, fixed wireless, and satellite services like Starlink. SpaceX’s attempt to obtain an $886 million broadband grant for Starlink from a different government program was rejected during the Biden administration.

$42B broadband grant program may scrap Biden admin’s preference for fiber Read More »

“Zero warnings”: Longtime YouTuber rails against unexplained channel removal

censorship, content moderation, deceptive content, online bans, Policy, spam, youtube / Kris Guyer / February 3, 2025

Artemiy Pavlov, the founder of a small but mighty music software brand called Sinesvibes, spent more than 15 years building a YouTube channel with all original content to promote his business’ products. Over all those years, he never had any issues with YouTube’s automated content removal system—until Monday, when YouTube, without issuing a single warning, abruptly deleted his entire channel.

“What a ‘nice’ way to start a week!” Pavlov posted on Bluesky. “Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to ‘spam and deceptive policies.’ Which is the biggest WTF moment in our brand’s history on social platforms. We have only posted demos of our own original products, never anything else….”

Officially, YouTube told Pavlov that his channel violated YouTube’s “spam, deceptive practices, and scam policy,” but Pavlov could think of no videos that might be labeled as violative.

“We have nothing to hide,” Pavlov told Ars, calling YouTube’s decision to delete the channel with “zero warnings” a “terrible, terrible day for an independent, honest software brand.”

“We have never been involved with anything remotely shady,” Pavlov said. “We have never taken a single dollar dishonestly from anyone. And we have thousands of customers that stand by our brand.”

Ars saw Pavolov’s post and reached out to YouTube to find out why the channel was targeted for takedown. About three hours later, the channel was suddenly restored. That’s remarkably fast, as YouTube can sometimes take days or weeks to review an appeal. A YouTube spokesperson later confirmed that the Sinesvibes channel was reinstated due to the regular appeals process, indicating perhaps that YouTube could see that Sinesvibes’ removal was an obvious mistake.

Developer calls for more human review

For small brands like Sinesvibes, even spending half a day in limbo was a cause for crisis. Immediately, the brand worried about 50 broken product pages for one of its distributors, as well as “hundreds if not thousands of news articles posted about our software on dozens of different websites.” Unsure if the channel would ever be restored, Sinesvibes spent most of Monday surveying the damage.

Now that the channel is restored, Pavlov is stuck confronting how much of the Sinesvibes brand depends on the YouTube channel remaining online while still grappling with uncertainty since the reason behind the ban remains unknown. He told Ars that’s why, for small brands, simply having a channel reinstated doesn’t resolve all their concerns.

“Zero warnings”: Longtime YouTuber rails against unexplained channel removal Read More »

Tariffs may soon spike costs of cars, household goods, consumer tech

auto industry, Canada, china, Donald Trump, mexico, Policy, tariffs, us-china trade war / Mike M. / February 3, 2025

“A little pain”: Trump finally admits tariffs heap costs on Americans.

Canadian and American flags are seen at the US/Canada border March 1, 2017, in Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Credit: DON EMMERT / Staff | AFP

Over the weekend, President Trump issued executive orders heaping significant additional tariffs on America’s biggest trading partners, Canada, China, and Mexico.

To justify the tariffs—”a 25 percent additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent additional tariff on imports from China”—Trump claimed that all partners were allowing drugs and immigrants to illegally enter the US. Declaring a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Trump’s orders seemed bent on “downplaying” the potential economic impact on Americans, AP News reported.

But very quickly, the trade policy sparked inflation fears, with industry associations representing major US firms from many sectors warning of potentially derailed supply chains and spiked consumer costs of cars, groceries, consumer technology, and more. Perhaps the biggest pain will be felt by car buyers already frustrated by high prices if car prices go up by $3,000, as Bloomberg reported. And as Trump eyes expanding tariffs to the European Union next, January research from the Consumer Technology Association showed that imposing similar tariffs on all countries would increase the cost of laptops by as much as 68 percent, game consoles by up to 58 percent, and smartphones perhaps by 37 percent.

With tariffs scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, Mexico moved fast to negotiate a one-month pause on Monday, ABC News reported. In exchange, Mexico promised to “reinforce” the US-Mexico border with 10,000 National Guard troops.

The pause buys Mexico a little time to convince the Trump administration—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and potentially Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick—to strike a “permanent” trade deal, ABC News reported. If those talks fall through, though, Mexico has indicated it will retaliate with both tariff and non-tariff measures, ABC News reported.

Even in the best-case scenario where no countries retaliate, the average household income in 2025 could drop by about $1,170 if this week’s new tariffs remain in place, an analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale forecast. With retaliation, average income could decrease by $1,245.

Canada has already threatened to retaliate by imposing 35 percent tariffs on US goods, although that could change, depending on the outcome of a meeting this afternoon between Trump and outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Currently, there’s seemingly tension between the Trump administration and Trudeau, however.

On Saturday, Trudeau called Trump’s rationale for imposing tariffs on Canada—which Trudeau noted is responsible for less than 1 percent of drugs flowing into the US—”the flimsiest pretext possible,” NBC News reported.

This morning, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, reportedly criticized Canada’s response on CNBC. While Mexico is viewed as being “very, very serious” about Trump’s tariffs threat, “Canadians appear to have misunderstood the plain language of the executive order and they’re interpreting it as a trade war,” Hassett said.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to lower prices of groceries, cars, gas, housing, and other goods, AP News noted. But on Sunday, Trump clearly warned reporters while boarding Air Force One that tariffs could have the opposite effect, ABC News reported, and could significantly worsen inflation the longer the trade policy stands.

“We may have short term, some, a little pain, and people understand that, but, long term, the United States has been ripped off by virtually every country in the world,” Trump said.

Online shoppers, car buyers brace for tariffs

In addition to imposing new tariffs on these countries, Trump’s executive orders also took aim at their access to the “de minimus” exemption that allows businesses, including online retailers, to send shipments below $800 into the US without being taxed. That move could likely spike costs for Americans using popular Chinese retail platforms like Temu or Shein.

Before leaving office, Joe Biden had threatened in September to alter the “de minimus” rule, accusing platforms like Temu or Shein of flooding the US with “huge volumes of low-value products such as textiles and apparel” and making “it increasingly difficult to target and block illegal or unsafe shipments.” Following the same logic, it seems that Trump wants to exclude Canada, China, and potentially Mexico from the duty-free exemption to make it easier to identify illegal drug shipments.

Temu and Shein did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. But both platforms in September told Ars that losing the duty-free exemption wouldn’t slow their growth. And both platforms have shifted business to keep more inventory in the US, CNBC reported.

Canada is retaliating, auto industry will suffer

While China has yet to retaliate to defend such retailers, for Canada, the tariffs are considered so intolerable that the country immediately ordered tariffs on beverages, cosmetics, and paper products flowing from the US, AP News reported. Next up will be “passenger vehicles, trucks, steel and aluminum products, certain fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, dairy products, aerospace products, and more.”

If the trade wars further complicate auto industry trade in particular, it could hurt US consumers. Carmakers globally saw stocks fall on expectations that Trump’s tariffs will have a “profound impact” on the entire auto industry, CNBC reported. And if tariffs expand into the EU, an Oxford Economics analysis suggested, the cost of European cars in the US market would likely increase while availability decreases, perhaps crippling a core EU market and limiting Americans’ choice in vehicles.

EU car companies are already bracing for potential disruptions. A spokesperson for Germany-based BMW told CNBC that tariffs “hinder free trade, slow down innovation, and set a negative spiral in motion. In the end, they are detrimental to customers, making products more expensive and less innovative.” A Volkswagen spokesperson confirmed the company was “counting on constructive talks between the trading partners to ensure planning security and economic stability and to avoid a trade conflict.”

Right now, Canada’s auto industry appears most spooked by the impending trade war, with the president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, Flavio Volpe, warning that Canada’s auto sector could “shut down within a week,” Bloomberg reported.

“At 25 percent, absolutely nobody in our business is profitable by a long shot,” Volpe said.

According to Bloomberg, nearly one-quarter of the 16 million cars sold in the US each year will be hit with duties, adding about $60 billion in industry costs. Seemingly the primary wallet drain will be car components that cross the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders “as many as eight times during production” and, should negotiations fail, could be getting hit with tariffs both ways. Tesla, for example, relies on a small parts manufacturer in Canada, Laval Tool, to create the molds for its Cybertruck. It already costs up to $500,000 per mold, Bloomberg noted, and since many of the mold components are sourced from Canada currently, that cost could go up at a time when Cybertruck sales already aren’t great, InsideEVs reported.

Tariffs “necessary”

William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former US trade official, told AP News that Trump’s new tariffs on raw materials disrupting the auto industry and others don’t seem to “make much economic sense.”

“Historically, most of our tariffs on raw materials have been low because we want to get cheaper materials so our manufacturers will be competitive … Now, what’s he talking about? He’s talking about tariffs on raw materials,” Reinsch said. “I don’t get the economics of it.”

But Trump has maintained that tariffs are necessary to push business into the US while protecting national security. Industry experts have warned that hoping Trump’s tariffs will pressure carmakers to source all car components within the US is a “tough ask,” as shifting production could take years. Trump seems unlikely to back down any time soon, instead asking already cash-strapped Americans to be patient with any rising costs potentially harming businesses and consumers.

“We can play the game all they want,” Trump said.

But to countries threatening the US with tariffs in response to Trump’s orders, it likely doesn’t feel like a game. According to AP News, the Ministry of Commerce in China plans to file a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization for the “wrongful practices of the US.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Tariffs may soon spike costs of cars, household goods, consumer tech Read More »

FCC demands CBS provide unedited transcript of Kamala Harris interview

60 minutes kamala harris, cbs 60 minutes, Policy / Paul Patrick / January 31, 2025

The Federal Communications Commission demanded that CBS provide the unedited transcript of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that is the subject of a complaint to the FCC and a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump.

CBS News on Wednesday received a letter of inquiry in which the FCC requested “the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds” of the Harris interview, The New York Times reported today. “We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” a CBS News spokesperson told media outlets.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr repeatedly echoed Trump’s complaints about alleged media bias before the election and has taken steps to punish news broadcasters since Trump promoted him to the chairmanship. Complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations were dismissed under former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, but Carr reversed those dismissals in his first week as chair. Carr also ordered investigations into NPR and CBS.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, criticized what she called Carr’s “latest action to weaponize our broadcast licensing authority.”

“This is a retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable,” Gomez said today. “It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions. The Communications Act clearly prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcasters and the First Amendment protects journalistic decisions against government intimidation. We must respect the rule of law, uphold the Constitution, and safeguard public trust in our oversight of broadcasters.”

CBS considers settling Trump lawsuit

Trump sued CBS over the Harris interview, and executives at CBS owner Paramount Global have held settlement talks with Trump representatives. “A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” The New York Times wrote.

FCC demands CBS provide unedited transcript of Kamala Harris interview Read More »

Treasury official retires after clash with DOGE over access to payment system

department of government efficiency, elon musk, Policy / Kris Guyer / January 31, 2025

“This is a mechanical job—they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur was quoted as saying. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda… You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”

The Trump administration previously issued an order to freeze funding for a wide range of government programs, but rescinded the order after two days of protest and a judge’s ruling that temporarily blocked the funding freeze.

Trump ordered cooperation with DOGE

The Trump executive order establishing DOGE took the existing United States Digital Service and renamed it the United States DOGE Service. It’s part of the Executive Office of the President and is tasked with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Trump’s order said that federal agencies will have to collaborate with DOGE. “Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization,” the order said. “Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, in coordination with the USDS Administrator and to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards.”

The Post writes that “Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the US government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration.”

On Thursday, Musk visited the General Services Administration headquarters in Washington, DC, The New York Times reported. The Department of Government Efficiency’s account on X stated earlier this week that the GSA had “terminated three leases of mostly empty office space” for a savings of $1.6 million and that more cuts are planned. In another post, DOGE claimed it “is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations, all consistent with the President’s Executive Orders.”

“Mr. Musk’s visit to the General Services Administration could presage more cost-cutting efforts focused on federal real estate,” the Times wrote. “The agency also plays a role in federal contracting and in providing technology services across the federal government.”

Treasury official retires after clash with DOGE over access to payment system Read More »

Dell risks employee retention by forcing all teams back into offices full-time

Biz & IT, dell, Policy, return-to-office / Paul Patrick / January 31, 2025

In a statement to Ars, Dell’s PR team said:

“We continually evolve our business so we’re set up to deliver the best innovation, value, and service to our customers and partners. That includes more in-person connections to drive market leadership.”

The road to full RTO

After Dell allowed employees to work from home two days per week, Dell’s sales team in March became the first department to order employees back into offices full-time. At the time, Dell said it had data showing that salespeople are more productive on site. Dell corporate strategy SVP Vivek Mohindra said last month that sales’ RTO brought “huge benefits” in “learning from each other, training, and mentorship.”

The company’s “manufacturing teams, engineers in the labs, onsite team members, and leaders” had also previously been called into offices full-time, Business Insider reported today.

Since February, Dell has been among the organizations pushing for more in-person work since pandemic restrictions lifted, with reported efforts including VPN and badge tracking.

Risking personnel

Like other organizations, Dell risks losing employees by implementing a divisive mandate. For Dell specifically, internal tracking data reportedly found that nearly half of workers already opted for remote work over being eligible for promotions or new roles, according to a September Business Insider report.

Research has suggested that companies that issue RTO mandates subsequently lose some of their best talent. A November research paper (PDF) from the University of Pittsburgh, Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business researchers that cited LinkedIn data found this particularly true for “high-tech” and financial firms. The researchers concluded that average turnover rates increased by 14 percent on average after companies issued RTO policies. This research, in addition to other studies, has also found that companies with in-office work mandates are at risk of losing senior-level employees especially.

Some analysts don’t believe Dell is in danger of a mass exodus, though. Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at Technalysis Research, told Business Insider in December, “It’s not like I think Dell’s going to lose a whole bunch of people to HP or Lenovo.”

Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said he believes RTO would be particularly beneficial to Dell’s product development.

Still, some workers have accused Dell of using RTO policies to try to reduce headcount. There’s no proof of this, but broader research, including commentary from various company executives outside of Dell, has shown that some companies have used RTO policies to try to get people to quit.

Dell declined to comment about potential employee blowback to Ars Technica.

Dell risks employee retention by forcing all teams back into offices full-time Read More »

Trump’s FCC chair investigates NPR and PBS, urges Congress to defund them

brendan carr, npb, PBS, Policy / Tim Belzer / January 30, 2025

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS in a move that Democrats described as an attempt to intimidate the media.

“I am writing to inform you that I have asked the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau to open an investigation regarding the airing of NPR and PBS programming across your broadcast member stations,” Carr wrote in a letter yesterday to the leaders of NPR and PBS.

Carr alleged that NPR and PBS are violating a federal law prohibiting noncommercial educational broadcast stations from running commercial advertisements. “I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” Carr wrote. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”

Carr’s letter did not provide any specific examples of underwriting announcements that might violate the law, but said the “announcements should not promote the contributor’s products, services, or businesses, and they may not contain comparative or qualitative descriptions, price information, calls to action, or inducements to buy, sell, rent, or lease.”

Carr: Defund NPR and PBS

Carr pointed out that NPR and PBS member broadcast stations are licensed by the FCC. He also stated his opposition to government funding for NPR and PBS, though he acknowledged that isn’t up to the FCC. Carr wrote:

For your awareness, I will be providing a copy of this letter to relevant Members of Congress because I believe this FCC investigation may prove relevant to an ongoing legislative debate. In particular, Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming. For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.

To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.

The FCC’s Democratic commissioners, Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks, issued statements denouncing the investigation. “This appears to be yet another Administration effort to weaponize the power of the FCC. The FCC has no business intimidating and silencing broadcast media,” Gomez said.

Trump’s FCC chair investigates NPR and PBS, urges Congress to defund them Read More »

Copyright Office suggests AI copyright debate was settled in 1965

adobe, AI, AI art, Artificial Intelligence, copyright, copyright law, Copyright Office, Hugging Face, Policy / Paul Patrick / January 30, 2025

Most people think purely AI-generated works shouldn’t be copyrighted, report says.

Ars used Copilot to generate this AI image using the precise prompt the Copyright Office used to determine that prompting alone isn’t authorship. Credit: AI image generated by Copilot

The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works.

“Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change,” the Copyright Office said.

More than 10,000 commenters weighed in on the guidance, with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protections for artists as AI technologies advance and the line between human- and AI-created works seems to increasingly blur.

But the Copyright Office insisted that the AI copyright debate was settled in 1965 after commercial computer technology started advancing quickly and “difficult questions of authorship” were first raised. That was the first time officials had to ponder how much involvement human creators had in works created using computers.

Back then, the Register of Copyrights, Abraham Kaminstein—who was also instrumental in codifying fair use—suggested that “there is no one-size-fits-all answer” to copyright questions about computer-assisted human authorship. And the Copyright Office agrees that’s still the case today.

“Very few bright-line rules are possible,” the Copyright Office said, with one obvious exception. Because of “insufficient human control over the expressive elements” of resulting works, “if content is entirely generated by AI, it cannot be protected by copyright.”

The office further clarified that doesn’t mean that works assisted by AI can never be copyrighted.

“Where AI merely assists an author in the creative process, its use does not change the copyrightability of the output,” the Copyright Office said.

Following Kaminstein’s advice, officials plan to continue reviewing AI disclosures and weighing, on a case-by-case basis, what parts of each work are AI-authored and which parts are human-authored. Any human-authored expressive element can be copyrighted, the office said, but any aspect of the work deemed to have been generated purely by AI cannot.

Prompting alone isn’t authorship, Copyright Office says

After doing some testing on whether the same exact prompt can generate widely varied outputs, even from the same AI tool, the Copyright Office further concluded that “prompts do not alone provide sufficient control” over outputs to allow creators to copyright purely AI-generated works based on highly intelligent or creative prompting.

That decision could change, the Copyright Office said, if AI technologies provide more human control over outputs through prompting.

New guidance noted, for example, that some AI tools allow prompts or other inputs “to be substantially retained as part of the output.” Consider an artist uploading an original drawing, the Copyright Office suggested, and prompting AI to modify colors, or an author uploading an original piece and using AI to translate it. And “other generative AI systems also offer tools that similarly allow users to exert control over the selection, arrangement, and content of the final output.”

The Copyright Office drafted this prompt to test artists’ control over expressive inputs that are retained in AI outputs. Credit: Copyright Office

“Where a human inputs their own copyrightable work and that work is perceptible in the output, they will be the author of at least that portion of the output,” the guidelines said.

But if officials conclude that even the most iterative prompting doesn’t perfectly control the resulting outputs—even slowly, repeatedly prompting AI to produce the exact vision in an artist’s head—some artists are sure to be disappointed. One artist behind a controversial prize-winning AI-generated artwork has staunchly defended his rigorous AI prompting as authorship.

However, if “even expert researchers are limited in their ability to understand or predict the behavior of specific models,” the Copyright Office said it struggled to see how artists could. To further prove their point, officials drafted a lengthy, quirky prompt about a cat reading a Sunday newspaper to compare different outputs from the same AI image generator.

Copyright Office drafted a quirky, lengthy prompt to test creative control over AI outputs. Credit: Copyright Office

Officials apparently agreed with Adobe, which submitted a comment advising the Copyright Office that any output is “based solely on the AI’s interpretation of that prompt.” Academics further warned that copyrighting outputs based only on prompting could lead copyright law to “effectively vest” authorship adopters with “rights in ideas.”

“The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectable ideas,” the guidance said. “While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.”

Hundreds of AI artworks are copyrighted, officials say

The Copyright Office repeatedly emphasized that most commenters agreed with the majority of their conclusions. Officials also stressed that hundreds of AI artworks submitted for registration, under existing law, have been approved to copyright the human-authored elements of their works. Rejections are apparently expected to be less common.

“In most cases,” the Copyright Office said, “humans will be involved in the creation process, and the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship.”

For stakeholders who have been awaiting this guidance for months, the Copyright Office report may not change the law, but it offers some clarity.

For some artists who hoped to push the Copyright Office to adapt laws, the guidelines may disappoint, leaving many questions about a world of possible creative AI uses unanswered. But while a case-by-case approach may leave some artists unsure about which parts of their works are copyrightable, seemingly common cases are being resolved more readily. According to the Copyright Office, after each decision, it gets easier to register AI works that meet similar standards for copyrightability. Perhaps over time, artists will grow more secure in how they use AI and whether it will impact their exclusive rights to distribute works.

That’s likely cold comfort for the artist advocating for prompting alone to constitute authorship. One AI artist told Ars in October that being denied a copyright has meant suffering being mocked and watching his award-winning work freely used anywhere online without his permission and without payment. But in the end, the Copyright Office was apparently more sympathetic to other commenters who warned that humanity’s progress in the arts could be hampered if a flood of easily generated, copyrightable AI works drowned too many humans out of the market.

“We share the concerns expressed about the impact of AI-generated material on human authors and the value that their creative expression provides to society. If a flood of easily and rapidly AI-generated content drowns out human-authored works in the marketplace, additional legal protection would undermine rather than advance the goals of the copyright system. The availability of vastly more works to choose from could actually make it harder to find inspiring or enlightening content.”

New guidance likely a big yawn for AI companies

For AI companies, the copyright guidance may mean very little. According to AI company Hugging Face’s comments to the Copyright Office, no changes in the law were needed to ensure the US continued leading in AI innovation, because “very little to no innovation in generative AI is driven by the hope of obtaining copyright protection for model outputs.”

Hugging Face’s Head of ML & Society, Yacine Jernite, told Ars that the Copyright Office seemed to “take a constructive approach” to answering some of artists’ biggest questions about AI.

“We believe AI should support, not replace, artists,” Jernite told Ars. “For that to happen, the value of creative work must remain in its human contribution, regardless of the tools used.”

Although the Copyright Office suggested that this week’s report might be the most highly anticipated, Jernite said that Hugging Face is eager to see the next report, which officials said would focus on “the legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works, including licensing considerations and the allocation of any potential liability.”

“As a platform that supports broader participation in AI, we see more value in distributing its benefits than in concentrating all control with a few large model providers,” Jernite said. “We’re looking forward to the next part of the Copyright Office’s Report, particularly on training data, licensing, and liability, key questions especially for some types of output, like code.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.