Month: January 2023

The CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23rd. Chew will discuss the app’s privacy and data security measures, its impact on kids and ties to China (where parent company ByteDance is headquartered). This is Chew’s first appearance in front of a congressional panel. TikTok’s security and relationship with Chinese authorities have drawn the attention of US officials over the last few years. However, as CNBC reported, discussions between the US and TikTok appear to have stalled.

The relationship has been a precarious one for several years. The company has tried to assuage concerns by storing US user data on domestic Oracle servers and deleting such data from its own servers in the US and Singapore. However, other stories, like TikTok having to fire four employees (two each in China and the US) who accessed the data of several journalists, aren’t helping. They were said to be looking for the sources of leaks to reporters.

Also in December, a mammoth spending bill passed by lawmakers included a ban of TikTok from federal government-owned devices. However, the relationship has thawed since its nadir during the Trump administration, when the president pushed for the social network to shed its US assets. That, of course, never happened.

– Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• High school calculators are back, thanks to the Internet Archive’s Calculator Drawer

• San Francisco asks California regulators to halt or slow the rollout of driverless taxis

• Ford slashes Mustang Mach-E prices by up to $5,900

• The best smart scales for 2023

• Hitting the Books: High school students have spent a decade fighting Baltimore’s toxic legacy

• What to expect from Samsung’s February Unpacked event

Samsung’s profits plunged in 2022 due to weak smartphone demand

Chip sales were down, too.

Samsung has revealed a sharp decline in profit for 2022, mainly due to the weak demand for its chips and smartphones, the company’s main moneymakers. The Korean tech giant has posted KRW 302.23 trillion (US$245.4 billion) in annual revenue, which is a new record high for the company, in its latest earnings report. Its operating profit, however, was down KRW 8.5 trillion (US$6.9 billion) from the year before. Sales for Samsung’s more affordable phones went down, and while flagship sales held up to market expectations, they’re still lower than in previous quarters. The company expects demand for mass-market smartphones to weaken even further in 2023 “due to persistent macroeconomic conditions.” That’s not great news when the company is holding its first Unpacked event of 2023 tomorrow.

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Nothing Phone 2 to launch in US later this year

Carl Pei says the upcoming flagship will be “more premium” than the Phone 1.

Engadget

Nothing’s Carl Pei has confirmed the company’s second phone will launch in the US later this year. He described the 2023 flagship as “more premium” than the Nothing Phone 1, which probably means it’ll be more expensive, too. In an interview with Inverse, Pei said the Phone 2’s US launch would be Nothing’s top priority this year. Pei added that American carrier demands (“red tape”) were the main reason Nothing didn’t launch the Phone 1 in the US.

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China’s biggest search engine may launch a ChatGPT rival in March

Baidu’s service will allow users to get conversation-like search results.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Chinese search giant Baidu aims to introduce a ChatGPT-like AI service that gives users conversational results, according to a Bloomberg report. Open AI’s ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm, thanks to its ability to answer fact-based questions, write in a human-like way and even create code. Microsoft invested $1 billion in Open AI back in 2019, and reportedly plans to incorporate aspects of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. It’s the big thing – even Google reportedly sees the technology as a threat to its search business and plans to accelerate the development of its own conversational AI technology.

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