ToplinePresident Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday temporarily pausing the federal ban on TikTok, after access to the app was restored before he even took office, but while companies like Oracle have willingly put the app back online, Apple and Googles app stores still havent restored TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps yetand they could open themselves to legal liability if they do.TikTok is seen in the Apple app store on a phone on March 13, 2024 in New York City. Getty ImagesKey FactsTikTok restored access to U.S. users Sunday afternoon following a brief outage, after a federal law took effect that bans companies from hosting TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps unless ByteDance divests from the apps, which the Chinese-owned company so far hasnt.The company said it restored access as a result of President Trumps effortseven though he hadnt taken office yetand Trump then signed an executive order Monday that directs his Justice Department not to enforce the law for 75 days, in order to give his administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown.Companies that handle TikToks U.S. user data, including Oracle and Akamai, restored access to the app in order to put it back online, according to NPR, but the app still has not yet been restored to Apple and Googles app stores, meaning U.S. users cannot download or update TikTok.Neither Apple nor Google have responded to requests for comment on whether they plan to restore access to TikTok or other ByteDance-owned apps, though Apple has published a webpage informing U.S. users the company is obligated to follow the law banning TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps, and thus users cannot download or update them.The companies refusal thus far to make TikTok available again is in line with predictions from legal experts before the law took effect, as they suggested any assurances from Trump that he wouldnt enforce the policy likely wouldnt be enough to get companies like Apple and Google to comply, given they could still face legal liability if Trump were to reverse course and start enforcing the ban.University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein wrote for Lawfare Tuesday that Trumps assurances not to enforce the law offers minimal security for companies who violate it by restoring access to TikTok, noting Trump could change his mind at any time or selectively enforce against companies that fall from political favor and the laws five-year statute of limitations means future presidential administrations can still pursue violations of the law.Can I Update The Tiktok App If Its Not On The App Store?Its still unclear if or when Apple and Google could put TikTok back on their app stores. If a circumstance arises in which Trump keeps the law on pause indefinitely and TikTok stays online but cant be updated or downloaded, users will likely eventually stop being able to use TikTok, as the app will get increasingly obsolete without the ability to update it.Which Bytedance Apps Are No Longer On The App Store?According to Apple, the list of apps owned by ByteDance or its subsidiaries that the company has taken off its App Store include TikTok, TikTok Studio, TikTok Shop Seller Center, CapCut, Lemon8, Hypic, Lark - Team Collaboration, Lark - Rooms Display, Lark Rooms Controller, Gauth: AI Study Companion and MARVEL SNAP.Why Cant Apple And Google Put Tiktok Back Online?Rozenshtein noted for Lawfare theres a murky history of defendants avoiding legal consequences because of orders declaring something is legalas courts have ruled both for and against those defendantsbut concluded companies face risks for putting TikTok back online. While there are some instances where courts have been more lenient, major companies like Apple and Google would face greater scrutiny for going against the federal law and just relying on Trumps statements, Rozenshtein argued. Courts are hesitant to be too lenient when it comes to executive orders like this, Rozenshtein noted, given that doing so could set a precedent suggesting presidents can just overturn laws as much as they want by issuing orders saying they wont be enforced.Will Oracle And Akamai Face Penalties For Restoring Tiktok?While Trump and his Justice Department arent going to punish companies who restored access to TikTok any time soon, Rozenshtein suggested those companies could still face legal liability should Trump change his mind or during the next presidential administration. Companies could particularly be targeted for the decision to put TikTok back online even before Trump took office, as Rozenshtein noted the companies have minimal defensive options for restoring service then. Trump was still a private citizen at the time, so his statements promising to keep the app legal didnt carry any legal weight, Rozenshtein noted. Oracle and Akamai have not yet responded to requests for comment about their decisions to restore service.Big Number$850 billion. Thats how much companies that have restored access to TikTok could potentially face in fines should the government decide to enforce the TikTok ban and punish them for enabling access to the app. The law allows a $5,000 fine per user and TikTok says its app is used by more than 170 million U.S. users, though likely not all of them have accessed the app since the law took effect. Apple and Google would likely face smaller fines if they reinstated TikTok and were punished for it, as those fines would only be calculated based on the number of people who downloaded or updated the app, versus who actually used the app.Will Trump Get Bytedance To Sell Tiktok?ByteDance has so far not given any public indication that its willing to sell TikToks U.S. assets, with TikTok previously arguing that doing so would not be logistically feasible. It remains to be seen if that public position will change now that the law has formally taken effect, and Trump has threatened to levy additional tariffs on imports from China if the countrys government refuses to approve a sale of TikToks U.S. assets. China blocking the deal would be a certain hostility and well put tariffs of 25, 30, 50%, even 100%, Trump told reporters Monday, also arguing the U.S. should own a 50% stake in TikToks U.S. operations. Experts cited by The Washington Post before Trumps inauguration suggested China would only be likely to cut a deal with Trump on TikTok as part of broader political negotiations between the two governments, though the countrys government did not rule out the possibility of a sale Monday. For such actions as corporate operations and acquisitions, we always believe that they should be decided independently by companies based on market principles, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in a statement.Key BackgroundThe federal law outlawing TikTok took effect Sunday following a last-minute court battle as TikTok challenged the ban, which led to the Supreme Court upholding the federal law in a unanimous ruling. While TikTok has argued the law violates its First Amendment rights, Congress passed the law with bipartisan support last year, arguing taking action against the app was necessary due to the national security threat posed by ByteDances Chinese ownership. TikTok has long denied any links to the Chinese government or wrongdoing, though Forbes has reported on numerous concerns involving the app, including TikTok spying on journalists, promoting Chinese propaganda that criticized U.S. politicians, mishandling user data and tracking sensitive words. Trump signaled he planned to take action against the TikTok ban shortly before taking office, though it was still unclear what steps he would take until Sunday, when Trump said he planned to issue an executive order pausing the ban. The president has justified his support for TikTok in part because of his own popularity on the app, though his move to keep the app online marks an about-face from his first term, when he issued an executive order banning TikTok that was later overturned in court.Further Reading

By Billy PerrigoJanuary 21, 2025 2:21 PM ESTThe world needs whistleblowers, perhaps now more than ever. But whistleblowing has never been more dangerous.Jennifer Gibson has seen this problem develop up close. As a whistleblower lawyer based in the U.K., she has represented concerned insiders in the national security and tech worlds for more than a decade. Shes represented family members of civilians killed by Pentagon drone strikes, and executives from top tech companies whove turned against their billionaire bosses.But for todays whistleblowers, Gibson says, both the stakes and the risks are higher than ever. President Trump has returned to the White House and wasted no time using the might of the state to retaliate against perceived enemies. This time, Trump boasts the support of many of Silicon Valleys richest moguls, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who have overhauled their social-media platforms to his benefit. Meanwhile, tech companies are racing to build AI superintelligence, a technology that could turbocharge surveillance and military capabilities. Politics and technology are converging in an environment ripe for abuses of power.Gibson is at the forefront of a group of lawyers trying to make it safer for conscientious employees to speak out. Shes the co-founder of Psst, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded in September and designed to collectivize whistleblowing.On Monday, to coincide with Trumps inauguration, Psst launched what it calls the safe: a secure, online deposit box where tech or government insiders can share concerns of potential wrongdoing. Users can choose to speak with a pro-bono lawyer immediately, anonymously if they prefer. Or they can ask Pssts lawyers to do nothing with their information unless another person turns up with similar concerns. If that second party emerges, and both give their consent, Psst is able to match the two together to discuss the issue, and potentially begin a lawsuit. Gibson says the aim is to overcome the first mover problem in whistleblowing: that even if several insiders privately share the same concerns, they may never find out about each other, because nobody wants to risk everything by being the first to speak up. The chances are, if you're a tech worker concerned about what the company is doing, others are concerned as well, Gibson says. But nobody wants to be first.Pssts model doesnt negate all the dangers of whistleblowing. Even if multiple insiders share concerns through its safe, they still face the prospect of retaliation if they eventually speak out. The safe is end-to-end encrypted, but a lawyer has access to the decryption key; an adversary could sue Psst in an attempt to obtain it. Because its browser-based, Pssts safe is marginally more vulnerable to attack than an app like Signal. And while information stored in the safe is protected by legal privilege, thats only a protection against entities who respect legal norms. Gibson acknowledges the limitations, but argues the status quo is even riskier. We need new and creative ways of making it easier and safer for a larger number of people to collectively speak out, she says. If we continue to rely on the shrinking group of people willing to blow up their careers to disclose wrongdoing, she adds, were going to be in a lot of trouble, because there arent going to be enough of them.In her previous role at the whistleblower protection group The Signals Network, Gibson worked on providing independent legal and psychosocial support to Daniel Motaung, a Meta whistleblower who first shared his story in TIME. Before turning her focus to the tech industry, Gibson spent 10 years at the U.K.-based human-rights group Reprieve, where her title was Head of Extrajudicial Killings. She focused on U.S. military drone strikes in the war on terror, which reports indicate had a higher civilian death rate than Washington publicly admitted. I spent 10 years watching national security whistleblowers risk everything and suffer significant harm for disclosing information that the American public, and quite frankly the world, had a right to know, Gibson says. In my opinion, we as civil society failed to really protect the whistleblowers who came forward. We tried to get accountability for the abuses based on the information they disclosedand many of them went to jail with very little media attention.Gibson also noticed that in cases where whistleblowers came forward as a group, they tended to fare better than when they did so alone. Speaking out against a powerful entity can be profoundly isolating; many of your former colleagues stop talking to you. One of Pssts first cases is representing a group of former Microsoft employees who disclosed that the tech giant was pitching its AI to oil companies at the same time as it was also touting its ability to decarbonize the economy. The benefit of that being a group of whistleblowers was the company can't immediately identify who the information came from, so they can't go after one individual, Gibson says. When you're with a collective, even if you're remaining anonymous, there are a handful of people you can reach out to and talk to. You're in it together.Pssts safe is based on Hushline, a tool designed by the nonprofit Science & Design Inc., as a simpler way for sources to reach out to journalists and lawyers. Its a one-way conversation system, essentially functioning as a tip-line. Micah Lee, an engineer on Hushline, says that the tool fills a gap in the market for an encrypted yet accessible central clearinghouse for sensitive information. It still fills an important need for the type of thing that Psst wants to do, he says. [But] its filling a space that has some security and usability tradeoffs. For follow-up conversations, users will have to move over to an encrypted messaging app like Signal, which is marginally safer because users dont have to trust the server that a website is hosted on, nor that your own browser hasnt been compromised.For now, Pssts algorithm for detecting matches is fairly simple. Users will be able to select details about their industry, employer, and the subject of their concerns from several drop-down boxes. Then Psst lawyers, operating under legal privilege, check to see if there is a match with others. Gibson expects the systems capabilities to evolve. Shes sketched out a blueprint for another version that could use closed, secure large language models to perform the matching automatically. In theory, this could allow whistleblowers to share information with the knowledge that it would only ever be read by a human lawyer in the case that a different person had shared similar concerns. The idea is to remove me from the process so that even I don't see it unless there's a match, Gibson says.At the same time, technological advancements have made it easier for governments and tech companies to clamp down on whistleblowing by siloing information, installing monitoring software on employees phones and computers, and using AI to check for anomalous behaviors. Pssts success will depend on whether tech and government insiders trust it enough in this environment to begin depositing tips. Even if the system works as intended, whistleblowers will need extraordinary courage to come forward. With tech and government power colliding, and with AI especially getting more and more powerful, the stakes couldnt be higher. We need to understand what is happening inside of these frontier AI labs, Gibson says. And we need people inside those companies to feel protected if they feel like they need to speak out.

Why it matters: Havok, the Irish-based software maker whose physics engine can be found in countless blockbuster games, has published its first new technology demo on YouTube in a decade. The dynamic destruction demo focuses on Havok's particle physics engine; the company also has tools that help developers with in-game navigation and clothing-based physics. The scene opens in an underground cave where debris starts raining down around a humanoid figure as a siren blares in the background. Tunnels with spikes and skull traps populate the middle of the demo, while explosions at the end provide an escape route for our hero. In total, the teaser runs a minute and a half long.The clip was launched in conjunction with the release of Havok 2024.2, and is no doubt being used to demonstrate to devs what is possible with their physics tech. Havok's latest includes support for larger worlds, continued enhancements to CMake support, and performance improvements across all products, among other upgrades. The full changelog is available over on Havok's website.Founded in 1998, Havok boasts a rich history of collaboration with industry giants such as Bethesda, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, and many others. Intel purchased the outfit in 2007 for $110 million, but it was Microsoft that ended up with the company following its 2015 acquisition from Intel.Despite changing hands multiple times, Havok has managed to remain relevant through it all. Hundreds of games have licensed its technology over the years. In addition to classics like Half-Life 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Heavy Rain, and Halo 3, Havok's physics engine is also featured in newer games such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Helldivers 2, and Mortal Kombat 1.To be fair, the demo is not the first video posted by Havok in the past decade. A 30-minute presentation on the evolution of physics was shared on the YouTube account three months ago. Havok also published a lesson on integrating third-party tech into Unreal Engine 5 in April 2024. // Related Stories

Choose your answer and the correct choice will be revealed. Correct Answer:Ctrl + Shift + EscapeAnd now, for some contextCtrl + Shift + Escape is the Windows shortcut that directly opens the Task Manager with no additional input. This is a quick and efficient way to access the Task Manager for troubleshooting or managing applications. Alternatively, the widely recognized shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Delete also provides access to the Task Manager. However, this shortcut brings up a menu with additional options, such as locking your PC, switching users, logging off, or shutting down.For those who frequently use keyboard shortcuts, here are some other timeless and highly useful Windows shortcuts:Lock your PC: Windows key + LMinimize all windows: Windows key + MMinimize the active window: Windows key + Down ArrowClose the active window or exit the current app: Alt + F4Display properties for the selected item: Alt + EnterSwitch to the most recently used window: Alt + TabRename the selected item: F2Keyboard shortcuts like these can significantly improve productivity and streamline everyday tasks.Want to discover even more time-saving shortcuts? Check out our Shortcut Extravaganza feature for tips and tricks across a variety of platforms and operating systems.

Table of ContentsTable of ContentsSniper Elite: Resistance January 30Citizen Sleeper 2 January 31Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders January 21Flock January 22Gigantic: Rampage Edition January 22Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess January 22Magical Delicacy January 22Tchia January 22The Case of the Golden Idol January 22Starbound January 22Eternal Strands January 28Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap January 28Shady Part of Me January 29BothSniper Elite: Resistance andCitizen Sleeper 2 are making their way to Game Pass before the end of the month, along with a slew of other must-play titles. Although games come and go from the service, Game Pass rarely adds as many notable games at once as it has this month. January is host to several day-one releases, as well as several updates and DLC that promise to change up your most-played games.RebellionFew games can compare themselves to the Sniper Elite franchise in terms of gameplay. Combining stealth and tactical combat, Sniper Elite: Resistanceisnt just a sniping sim. Youll have to think carefully about your targets and find the right way to line up your shot without being targeted.Recommended VideosThe original Citizen Sleeper was one heck of an RPG, andCitizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector builds on that formula with an amnesiac android with a busted body. Find a ship, find a crew, keep flying. Its like cyborgFirefly,kind of and thats incredibly exciting.Please enable Javascript to view this contentLonely Mountain: Snow Riders is a follow up to Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a Trials-like experience that has you master the mountain trails on skis, racing against other players in online multiplayer or trying to set the best time possible. Lonely Mountain: Snow Ridersis available today on Game Pass.Annapurna InteractiveFlock is what happens when you give sheep the ability to fly. Okay, theyre not technically sheep, but this multiplayer co-op title is about wrangling adorable flying critters. Its low-stakes and cozy, a great way to pass time with friends that isnt overly competitive.No, this isnt the Rampage youre thinking of.Gigantic: Rampage Edition is a 5v5 MOBA shooter that tasks you with taking down the other teams Guardian at the same time they seek to obliterate yours.Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess puts you in the shoes of Soh, a warrior asked to protect the Shrine Maiden Yoshiro from hordes of enemies. It combines tower-defense style gameplay with hordes of enemies that you have to carve through to meet your objective, with permanent upgrades available outside of combat.A cute game about exploration and cooking, Magical Delicacy is a cozy platformer that has you explore your village and surrounding landscape in search of ingredients. Villagers will request specific dishes, and its up to you to find them. Be warned:Magical Delicacy might be cozy, but it poses quite a bit of challenge.Tchia January 22Kepler InteractiveA more traditional open-world romp, Tchia is an open-world game where you must rescue your father from an evil tyrant. The gorgeous art style and physics-driven gameplay make exploration a treat. The game itself is inspired by the Pacific island of New Caledonia, so it has a fair helping of cultural influence, too.With a unique and unsettling art style,The Case of the Golden Idol is a murder mystery where the player has to hunt for clues and make their own conclusions about what exactly happened to the victims.If youre a fan ofTerraria,thenStarbound is the game for you. It has a greater focus on exploration instead of combat, but the gameplay is quite similar. In many ways,Starbound is something of a spiritual successor.Eternal Strands is a new fantasy title from studio Yellow Brick Games, founded by veterans of critically-acclaimed franchises like Mass Effect, Dragon Age,andAssassins Creed. This is a day one release where you fight massive creatures to keep the world from crumbling.Robot EntertainmentAnother day one release,Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap is much like the other entries in the franchise tower defense meets third-person shooter. It will test your skills as waves of enemies try to overrun your location, but you have a huge array of weapons at your disposal.Shady Part of Me January 29This narrative-driven title isnt a long experience, but its one that will stick with you. A young girl and her shadow go on a poetic journey in dreamscape environments with plenty of twists and turns along the way.Editors Recommendations

Newly-leaked images from tipster Evan Blass suggest the iPhone SE 4 might come with the Dynamic Island after all. Blass also shared code snippets that indicate several more yet-to-be-released Apple products, including the 11-inch iPad Air with M3, the 13-inch iPad Air with M3, the iPad 11th generation, and the iPhone SE 4th generation. Blass followed up his initial post with supposed visual assets for the devices, and notably enough, the iPhone SE 4 shows a Dynamic Island.The Dynamic Island is faint. If you want to get a better look at it, we suggest making the image full-screen. Blass said he had color-corrected the image to make it more visible. However, Blass specifically stated that he had edited the image to make it more visible, so its confirmed that, in this image at least, the phone has the island.Evan BlassThe iPhone SE 4 and the iPhone 16 look eerily similar to one another, with both devices sporting the A18 chip, 8GB of RAM, Apple Intelligence, and much more. The iPhone SE has traditionally been a more budget-friendly model, but a price hike isnt out of the question especially when you take all of these other factors into consideration.Recommended VideosIn fact, there are enough similarities between the two that 9to5Mac actually suggested the phone might be called the iPhone 16E, rather than the iPhone SE 4.Please enable Javascript to view this contentThis news contradicts earlier leaks that insisted the iPhone SE 4 would only have a notch, versus the Dynamic Island. While its inclusion is a welcome surprise, it also makes sense. As our own Jesse Hollington pointed out, the notch will be virtually obsolete later this year when the iPhone 14 stops being sold, so why would Apple want to give it another bump on a new phone?The iPhone SE 4 is still quite a ways off from release, so take these early details with a grain of sand. Details are likely to change before the device is fully completed.Editors Recommendations

WAR OF THE WEIGHTS Cutting-edge Chinese reasoning model rivals OpenAI o1and its free to download DeepSeek R1 is free to run locally and modify, and it matches OpenAI's o1 in several benchmarks. Benj Edwards Jan 21, 2025 1:28 pm | 56 Credit: Wong Yu Liang Credit: Wong Yu Liang Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI's o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks.Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller "DeepSeek-R1-Distill" versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. These distilled models are based on existing open source architectures like Qwen and Llama, trained using data generated from the full R1 model. The smallest version can run on a laptop, while the full model requires far more substantial computing resources.The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights modelswhich can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardwarehave lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what's possible with publicly available AI models."They are SO much fun to run, watching them think is hilarious," independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars in a text message. Willison tested one of the smaller models and described his experience in a post on his blog: "Each response starts with a <think>...</think> pseudo-XML tag containing the chain of thought used to help generate the response," noting that even for simple prompts, the model produces extensive internal reasoning before output.Simulated reasoning in actionThe R1 model works differently from typical large language models (LLMs) by incorporating what people in the industry call an inference-time reasoning approach. They attempt to simulate a human-like chain of thought as the model works through a solution to the query. This class of what one might call "simulated reasoning" models, or SR models for short, emerged when OpenAI debuted its o1 model family in September 2024. OpenAI teased a major upgrade called "o3" in December.Unlike conventional LLMs, these SR models take extra time to produce responses, and this extra time often increases performance on tasks involving math, physics, and science. And this latest open model is turning heads for apparently quickly catching up to OpenAI.For example, DeepSeek reports that R1 outperformed OpenAI's o1 on several benchmarks and tests, including AIME (a mathematical reasoning test), MATH-500 (a collection of word problems), and SWE-bench Verified (a programming assessment tool). As we usually mention, AI benchmarks need to be taken with a grain of salt, and these results have yet to be independently verified. A chart of DeepSeek R1 benchmark results, created by DeepSeek. Credit: DeepSeek TechCrunch reports that three Chinese labsDeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI's Kimihave now released models they say match o1's capabilities, with DeepSeek first previewing R1 in November.But the new DeepSeek model comes with a catch if run in the cloud-hosted versionbeing Chinese in origin, R1 will not generate responses about certain topics like Tiananmen Square or Taiwan's autonomy, as it must "embody core socialist values," according to Chinese Internet regulations. This filtering comes from an additional moderation layer that isn't an issue if the model is run locally outside of China.Even with the potential censorship, Dean Ball, an AI researcher at George Mason University, wrote on X, "The impressive performance of DeepSeek's distilled models (smaller versions of r1) means that very capable reasoners will continue to proliferate widely and be runnable on local hardware, far from the eyes of any top-down control regime."Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 56 Comments

Artists visualisation of the gas giant planet WASP-127bESO/L. CaladaA vast alien planet has blistering winds racing around its equator at nearly 30 times the speed of sound on Earth.Lisa Nortmann at the University of Gttingen, Germany, and her colleagues used the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe WASP-127b, a giant gas exoplanet more than 500 light years from Earth. It is slightly larger than Jupiter but is one of the least dense planets we know of. AdvertisementThe team expected to see a light signal from the planets atmosphere that had one distinct peak, but instead found two separate peaks.I was a little bit confused, says Nortmann. But with a little bit more careful data analysis, it became clearer that there are two signals. I was quite excited my first thought was immediately that it has to be some sort of super-rotating wind.The researchers concluded that the two peaks came from rapid winds in a jet stream around the planets equator, with half the wind moving towards Earth and the other half moving away from it. The wind, which appears to be made up of water and carbon monoxide, seems to be moving at 33,000 kilometres per hour, making it the fastest wind ever measured on a planet. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month.Sign up to newsletterWere talking about 9 kilometres per second. The wind speed on even Jupiter is like a few hundred metres per second, so this is really an order of magnitude larger, says Vivien Parmentier at the University of Oxford.You wouldnt be able to feel these extreme speeds if you were in this wind, because it would be moving around you at the same speed, he says. But you would experience temperature differences of hundreds of degrees over a matter of hours, as the winds moved from the hot side of the planet, which is permanently facing its star, to its cold side, which sits in constant darkness.The researchers dont know why WASP-127b has such extreme winds, but Nortmann says the planet has certain special properties, such as its low density and its wonky orbit around its star, that could play a role. However, no clear connection has been established between those facts and the particularly strong winds.Journal reference:Astronomy & Astrophysics DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202450438Topics:exoplanets

President Trump signed an executive order on Monday giving TikTok 75 more days to operate in the US.The move came after TikTok briefly shut down to comply with a divest-or-ban law.Legal analysts say Trump's order may not be enough to bring TikTok back to US app stores.TikTok is back online for existing US users after briefly going dark over the weekend to comply with a divest-or-ban law.But it's still gone from US app stores. The app may face an uphill battle to get back there despite President Trump's executive order on Monday granting TikTok and its partners 75 more days to operate without drawing the ire of the Justice Department.Trump's executive order directed the attorney general to send a letter to TikTok's service providers telling them they would not face liability related to the law, which required TikTok's owner, ByteDance, to separate from its US assets by January 19. ByteDance did not follow through on that requirement.Even with Trump's assurance of non-enforcement, the general counsels at Apple or Google's parent company Alphabet may be too risk-averse to add TikTok back to their stores, legal analysts told Business Insider.The divest-or-ban law, if enforced, could imposehundreds of billions of dollars in fineson service providers that don't cut ties with TikTok and other ByteDance apps, a terrifying prospect for any company lawyer. A letter from the attorney general promising they won't act on the law may not cut it."If I were the GC of Alphabet or Apple, I don't think a letter would assuage my fears," said G.S. Hans, a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School who last year joined an amicus brief opposing the divest-or-ban law.However, he added: "The heads of those companies may differ with their legal counsel and potentially even override them."The executive order contains language that might raise red flags for in-house lawyers, too, said Matthew Schettenhelm, a litigation and policy analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.In section three of the executive order, for example, the document states that nothing in the order shall "impair or otherwise affect" the "authority granted by law to an executive department or agency," which seems to undercut the idea that the attorney general would never take action under any circumstance, Schettenhelm said."The whole thing is a recipe for a legal mess," Schettenhelm said. "It, therefore, shouldn't make service providers feel comfortable about violating a law tied to such massive liability exposure."While legal teams at Apple and Google may not be rushing to bring TikTok back to their stores, the stakes for TikTok are different. The company needs to be in app stores to sign up new users and send technical updates to its existing ones. Without those updates, the quality of its app would likely degrade over time.Apple and Google may still decide to play ballOther legal analysts were more bullish about the possibility that TikTok could return to app stores following Trump's order.Aram Gavoor, associate dean for academic affairs at the George Washington University Law School, thought the order would offer an effective "safe harbor" to TikTok's partners, including the app stores. He was not concerned about the apparent contradiction in the third section of the order, describing that language as a "boilerplate.""Once that attorney general letter is transmitted and received, you have a safe harbor to continue hosting that app on your store," Gavoor said. "It's almost like the IRS issuing a no-action letter for a taxpayer within a given tax year. This conduct is not unlawful, and therefore, that's a basis upon which you can engage in continued lawful conduct."Apple and Google have not indicated yet whether they will add TikTok back to their app stores after Trump's order. Neither company responded to a request for comment; Google earlier declined to comment.This weekend, as it removed TikTok and other ByteDance apps from its store, Apple wrote in a statement that it was "obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates," which included complying with the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.The White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Sunday, TikTok and some US tech companies ignored a TikTok ban law at the urging of Donald Trump.Trump wasn't president at the time. Once he became president, he signed an order that's supposed to put the law on hold.Does Trump have that power? It's unclear. That's a problem for tech companies.Here's a 2025 conundrum for Big Tech companies: Do they follow the president's orders? Or do they follow the law?That's what the likes of Apple, Google, and Oracle are grappling with following a chaotic weekend that saw TikTok voluntarily shut itself down in the US, then re-start less than a day later, claiming that "President Trump" said it was OK to do so.A couple problems with that argument: Donald Trump wasn't president of the United States this weekend Joe Biden was still in the White House. And yes: Trump immediately signed an executive order after he once again became president on Monday, telling TikTok and other tech companies to ignore a law that says TikTok can't operate in the US while it's owned by a Chinese company. But it's far from clear how much weight Trump's order holds.So in the very near term, attorneys and executives at tech companies need to decide if they're willing to take Trump's word, or if they need additional assurances.At the moment, it looks like Oracle, controlled by Trump backer Larry Ellison, is going with Trump's assurances, and is providing cloud services that are keeping TikTok running in the US. Apple and Google, which used to distribute TikTok via their app stores, don't seem convinced: TikTok disappeared from their stores on Sunday and has yet to return. That means US users can have all the TikTok they want, but it prevents TikTok from updating the app for maintenance and repairs something that could eventually cause problems over time. (I've asked Oracle for comment; Google declined to comment and Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.)One possible out for Google and Apple: Trump has ordered his attorney general, who seems likely to be Pam Bondi, to send letters to Apple, Google, and other providers giving them the all clear to ignore the law. But Bondi isn't attorney general yet, and even when Apple et al get that letter, it's not clear if it will be enough to satisfy them.I'm not going to get into the weeds about the nature of executive orders vs. laws or whether Trump's claim that he can at least temporarily override a law because of national security concerns would hold up in court. Suffice it to say that there isn't any clarity about any of this: Even Trump allies like Sen. Tom Cotton and Speaker Mike Johnson have put out statements that seem to conflict with Trump's statements.The point is that no one can say, with a straight face, that they have 100% confidence about whether a law, passed overwhelmingly by Congress last year and upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court decision last week, is binding. That's an astonishing place for us to be.It's also not one that we can pin completely on Trump. In his last days in office, Biden also said he wouldn't enforce the law he signed last year though he did it via anonymous officials speaking to reporters, and eventually his press secretary, and not via an official order. At the same time, some Democrats who voted for the bill last spring, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, spent the past few days arguing that the sell-or-ban law they approved should be delayed.But Trump is taking the uncertainty and super-charging it: In social media statements and a press conference he held Monday, he seemed to suggest that the US government itself might end up owning TikTok. Or that maybe it would be American companies that own half the operation. He also argued that TikTok's Chinese ownership really doesn't matter, since the US already uses lots of other stuff made in China, like "telephones." And that even if China is snooping on US users, that probably also doesn't matter because TikTok is mostly used by kids, and, "If China's going to get information about young kids I dunno. To be honest, I think we have bigger problems than them."It's worth watching all three minutes of this White House press conference clip, just to get a sense of how off-the-cuff Trump seems to be treating the whole thing. Imagine running a trillion-dollar company and being forced to decipher this: @dailymail President Donald Trump shared his views on TikTok as he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on inauguration day. #news #tiktokban #trump #donaldtrump original sound - Daily Mail We have been here before, of course. America and the rest of the world spent much of the first Trump administration trying to figure out if Trump really meant what he was saying, or if he could actually act on what he was saying, and whether he'd change his mind a little while later.One big difference this time around: Tech executives, along with many other US leaders, are scrambling to tell Trump how supportive they are of his presidency this time. But it's one thing to praise Trump, or cut him a check, or to be conspicuously on-camera during his inauguration. Trusting that his say-so is good enough to get you out of trouble for violating a law if that's what actually happens is brand-new ground.