Even though Windows 10 is still getting the Copilot AI love, the fact remains that it will no longer receive updates as of its end-of-support date, October 14, 2025, as noted in Microsoft's IT Pro Blog post. Still, to ensure companies — and potentially individual consumers later — have ample time to prepare for the eventual upgrade, Microsoft will soon offer an Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 10.

Much like the similar program made for Windows 7, organizations can buy Extended Security Updates for Windows 10 — now locked at version 22H2 — by way of a yearly subscription, with the maximum extended life being three years, i.e. up to October 14, 2028. Note that the program only covers critical and important security updates, and that there will be no technical support beyond these patches.

An alternative solution to the above is to migrate the Windows 10 PCs to Windows 11 in the cloud, by way of Windows 365 subscription. That way, the actual Windows 10 system in these machines will benefit from the Extended Security Updates at no extra cost, but still only for three years maximum.

Of course, Microsoft would much rather you just upgrade to Windows 11 one way or another, but as pointed out by Ars Technica, this time the tech giant plans on extending the ESU program to individuals. This wasn't the case with Windows 7's ESU program, which goes to show that Microsoft is well aware of Windows 10's dominance even today — as much as 68.02 percent, versus just 26.63 percent for Windows 11, according to Statcounter (as of November 2023). Stay tuned for further details and pricing later.

Apple, which usually plays safe when it comes to new standards, already surprised us with Qi2 compatibility on its iPhone 15, but it turns out that Cupertino has more up its sleeve. As spotted by 9to5Mac and some users, the release notes for iOS 17.2 RC (release candidate) state that this update adds "Qi2 charger support for all iPhone 13 models and iPhone 14 models." This means that said iPhone models should support up to 15W of wireless charging with Qi2-certified chargers, though the release notes stopped short at confirming the power specs. We'll be able to find out when iOS 17.2 rolls out for the general public — likely in a few days' time.

Until now, 15W input on these iPhone models was only possible through MagSafe-certified chargers, whereas the cheaper MagSafe-compatible ones are limited to 7.5W. With Qi2's matching performance, consumers will be offered more affordable choices when it comes to 15W wireless chargers, as manufacturers won't need to pay the Apple premium for MagSafe certification.

Qi2 was first announced at CES 2023, with its main highlight being its MagSafe-like wireless fast charging standard — even for Android devices. This uses "Magnetic Power Profile" to ensure compatibility across phones and chargers. While the output is currently capped at 15W, future iterations will "significantly" raise charging levels past 15W, according to the WPC (Wireless Power Consortium). We've been told to expect a slew of Qi2-compatible accessories — including some from Anker — arriving by the holidays, and I'm sure that it'll also become a theme at CES 2024 next month.

With the Biden administration's continued attempt to limit Chinese battery components in US electric vehicles, Tesla has now announced that two of its models won't qualify for the full $7,500 federal tax credit as of January 1, 2024. As pointed out by our sister site TechCrunch, Tesla's website currently has a top banner claiming that tax credit "reductions likely for certain vehicles in 2024," urging customers to "take delivery by 12/31" in order to qualify for the full claim. A link in the banner toggles a message that specifies which two models are likely to be affected:

"Customers who take delivery of a qualified new Tesla and meet all federal requirements are eligible for a tax credit up to $7,500. Tax credit will reduce to $3,750 for Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive and Model 3 Long Range on Jan 1, 2024. Take delivery by Dec 31 to qualify for full tax credit."

According to the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) rules, vehicles using battery components that are 50 percent made or assembled in the US qualify for the first half of the tax credit, i.e. $3,750. The cars can only get the remaining half of the credit if their manufacturer sources at least 40 percent of their critical minerals from the US or its free trade partners, which don't include China. If a company meets one or the other standard, the vehicle gets a half credit.

However, with the latest proposal on IRA credit rules issued on December 1, the Biden administration wants to further tighten the clean vehicle tax credit requirements by targeting FEOCs (Foreign Entity of Concern), which include China, Russia, North Korea and Iran:

"Beginning in 2024, an eligible clean vehicle may not contain any battery components that are manufactured or assembled by a FEOC, and, beginning in 2025, an eligible clean vehicle may not contain any critical minerals that were extracted, processed, or recycled by a FEOC."

Back in June, the cheapest Tesla car, the rear-wheel drive Model 3, was able to switch from half the tax credit to full credit, likely due to a change in supplier or materials to meet the guidelines. While the latest reversal still offers half the credit, this may eventually be zeroed next year, unless Tesla is willing to source batteries from other countries — which are likely more expensive.

Back in August, Meta unveiled its multimodal AI translation model, SeamlessM4T, which supports nearly 100 languages for text and 36 for speech. With an updated "v2" architecture, the tech giant is now expanding on this tool to make conversational translations more spontaneous and expressive — the latter a missing key to an authentic conversation across languages.

The first of the two new features is "SeamlessExpressive" which, as you can tell by the name, ports your expressions over to your translated speech. These include your pitch, volume, emotional tone (excitement, sadness or whispers), speech rate and pauses. Considering how translated speeches had always sounded robotic until now, this breakthrough is potentially a game-changer — both in our daily lives and also in content production. Supported languages include English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Chinese, though the demo page is missing Italian and Chinese at the time of writing this article.

The second feature is "SeamlessStreaming," which starts translating a speech while the speaker is still talking, thus allowing others to hear a translation faster. There's still a short latency of just under two seconds, but at least you won't have to wait until someone finishes a sentence. According to Meta, the challenge here is that different languages have different sentence structures, so it had to develop an algorithm dedicated to studying partial audio input, in order to decide whether there's enough context to start generating a translated output, or whether to keep listening.

Meta's latest development on this "Seamless Communication" suite seems to be an impressive one — more so than the mobile interpreter tools offered by the likes of Google and Samsung. There's no word on when the public will be able to utilize these new features, but I can already imagine Meta baking them into its smart glasses some day, making them even more practical than ever.

We've seen Huawei's surprising strides with its recent smartphones — especially the in-house 7nm 5G processor within, but apparently the company has been working on something far more significant to bypass the US import ban. According to a new Bloomberg investigation, a Shenzhen city government investment fund created in 2019 has been helping Huawei build "a self-sufficient chip network." 

Such a network would give the tech giant access to enterprises — most notably, the three subsidiaries under a firm called SiCarrier — that are key to developing lithography machines. Lithography, especially the high-end extreme ultraviolet flavor, would usually have to be imported into China, but it's currently restricted by US, Netherlands and Japan sanctions. Huawei apparently went as far as transferring "about a dozen patents to SiCarrier," as well as letting SiCarrier's elite engineers work directly on its sites, which suggests the two firms have a close symbiotic relationship.

Bloomberg's source claims that Huawei has hired several former employees of Dutch lithography specialist, ASML, to work on this breakthrough. The result so far is allegedly the 7nm HiSilicon Kirin 9000S processor fabricated locally by SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), which is said to be about five years behind the leading competition (say, Apple Silicon's 3nm process) — as opposed to an eight-year gap intended by the Biden administration's export ban.

Huawei's Mate 60, Mate 60 Pro, Mate 60 Pro+ and Mate X5 foldable all feature this HiSilicon chip, as well as other Chinese components like display panels (BOE), camera modules (OFILM) and batteries (Sunwoda). Huawei having its own network of local enterprises would eventually allow it to rely less on imported components, and potentially even become the halo of the Chinese chip industry — especially in the age of electric vehicles and AI, where more chips are needed than ever (as much as NVIDIA would like to deal with China). That said, Huawei apparently denied that it had been receiving government help to achieve this goal.

Given Huawei's seeming progress, and the fact that China has been pumping billions into its chip industry, the US government will just have to try harder.

Montana's unprecedented state-wide ban of Chinese short-video app, TikTok, was supposed to take effect on January 1, 2024, but as reported by Reuters, US District Judge Donald Molloy issued a preliminary injunction just one month ahead to block said ban. This means that for now, ByteDance and app stores are allowed to continue serving TikTok to users within the Montana state, without being fined $10,000 daily from the start date of the ban.

The judge was quoted saying the ban "oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users" — echoing the legal challenge filed by five TikTok creators on the day after the bill was signed back in May, as well as another lawsuit filed by the platform's owner, ByteDance, later on in the same month. It was also questionable as to whether Google and Apple could have effectively enforced such a state-wide ban on their app stores.  

The relevant bill was originally drafted based on claims that this Chinese app would share US users' personal data with the Chinese government, to which ByteDance had long denied since the presidency of Donald Trump. "TikTok US user data is stored in the US, with strict controls on employee access," the company claimed back in August 2020 — and again via a new "transparency" push earlier this year, with reference to "Project Texas" for safeguarding US user data with help from Oracle. 

To date, no other US state had passed a bill to bar TikTok. The outcome of Montana's case may hold the key to this Chinese app's fate across the rest of the country.

Following Sam Altman's rollercoaster of a return as OpenAI's CEO, the company announced that it will now include Microsoft as a non-voting observer on its board. The question remains as to why the firm's largest investor wasn't on its board in the first place, but this seems to be somewhat addressed for now, at least. Altman is joined by co-founder Greg Brockman who resumes his role as President, whereas Mira Murati, who very briefly served as interim CEO throughout the drama, will return to her role as CTO.

The announcement also confirms a new board consisting of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor (chair), former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and original member Adam D'Angelo, who is also Quora's co-founder and CEO. It was earlier rumored that Altman's exit was partly influenced by D'Angelo's seeming conflict of interest, as OpenAI was developing a potential competitor to Quora's Poe service — the latter offers OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, along with several other text-generating AI models.

D'Angelo's presence on OpenAI's new board came as a surprise, and Altman took to X to address the elephant in the room. "Quora is a large customer of OpenAI and we found it helpful to have customer representation on our Board." The exec added that D'Angelo "has always been very clear... about the potential conflict and doing whatever he needed to do," including offering to leave the board, if necessary. As to why the original board wanted Altman out, he said "it is clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and members of the board."

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever was a former board member who allegedly led the ouster of Altman. The exec later openly admitted that he "deeply regret my participation in the board's actions" (with Elon Musk begging for attention in his thread), and he had since voiced his support for Altman's return as CEO. In his open message, Altman says "I harbor zero ill will towards him," and that his team is figuring out a way to let Sutskever continue his work at OpenAI.

In the same official announcement, OpenAI's new Chair, Taylor, assured that the company will "enhance the governance structure," and put together "an independent committee of the Board to oversee a review of the recent events," for the sake of the organization's stability.

Following X's alleged ad controversy involving antisemitic content, it is now Meta's turn to be put under the spotlight for its content algorithm. According to an experiment conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Instagram’s Reels video service would serve "risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos" to test accounts that exclusively followed teen and preteen influencers — namely young gymnasts and cheerleaders. These sort of ads were supposed to be forbidden on Meta's platforms.

To make matters worse, such salacious content was also mixed in with ads representing notable US brands like Disney, Walmart, Pizza Hut, Bumble, Match Group and even The Wall Street Journal itself. The report added that the Canadian Centre for Child Protection achieved similar results with its own tests separately.

While Walmart and Pizza Hut apparently declined to comment, Bumble, Match Group, Hims (retailer of erectile-dysfunction drugs) and Disney have since either pulled their ads from Meta or pressed the firm to address this issue. Given the earlier controversy on X, advertisers are obviously even more sensitive about the type of content shown next to their ads — especially for Disney which was affected by both X and now Instagram. 

In response, Meta told its clients that it was investigating, and that it "would pay for brand-safety auditing services to determine how often a company’s ads appear beside content it considers unacceptable." However, the firm stopped short at providing a timetable nor detail on future prevention.

While one could say that such tests don't necessarily represent real user experience (as tech companies tend to argue with), Instagram's tendency to aggregate child sexualization content was a known problem internally — even before the launch of Reels, according to current and former Meta employees interviewed by the WSJ.

The same group of people suggested that an effective solution would require revamping the algorithms responsible for pushing related content to users. That said, internal documents seen by the WSJ suggested that Meta made it difficult for its safety team to apply such drastic changes, as traffic performance is apparently more important for the social media giant.

According to Reuters and Bloomberg, TikTok's parent company ByteDance is winding down its gaming arm, including the Nuverse brand, with "hundreds" of jobs likely to be affected. This spells yet more trouble for the Chinese tech giant following the layoffs in its VR division, Pico, earlier this month (Meta says hi, apparently). Nuverse, acquired by ByteDance in 2017, is the publisher of notable titles including Marvel Snap, Ragnarok X: Next Generation and One Piece: Blood Routes, as well as the developer of Crystal of Atlan, Earth: Revival and more. The company is allegedly seeking divestment from existing titles, while they remain in service for the time being.

Despite the seeming success of these games, iFeng Tech's sources claim that ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo had earlier criticized the gaming arm for its lack of focus and misallocation of resources. 21st Century Business Herald also reports that when it comes to revenue, the Douyin (the Chinese counterpart of TikTok) and ad businesses still overshadow that of the gaming division within ByteDance, according to a source close to the matter. Moonton, another gaming subsidiary acquired by ByteDance in 2021, has apparently been seeking a buyer as well since earlier this month.

Tech site 36Kr claims that as many as around 700 employees across ByteDance's gaming business group are impacted by this restructuring, with all but two in-development projects already terminated. The likes of Tencent, NetEase and MiHoYo may eventually benefit from ByteDance's seeming defeat, but it's also a cautionary tale for these local competitors bound by China's ever-changing gaming regulations.

As OnePlus approaches its 10th anniversary in December, it's launching a new flagship phone in Shenzhen, China at 2:30PM on December 5 (local time) to mark the occasion. The brand's official China website revealed the upcoming OnePlus 12 with a striking resemblance to its predecessor, though the camera island's color now matches that of the body — much like the similar-looking Ace 2 Pro. In addition to the glossy white and classic matt black options, the updated green design will come in what appears to be a matt marble look, as opposed to the previous plain glossy finish. 

According to our sister site Yahoo Tech HK, OnePlus has already shared some key specs over multiple Weibo posts earlier. These include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor (no surprises there), a new Sony LYT-808 sensor for the 50-megapixel main camera and a 64-megapixel periscopic telephoto camera — both with Hasselblad's magical touch, as usual. Other tidbits include a 2K display panel from China's BOE, the iconic alert slider, wireless charging, infrared remote and touch optimization under rainfall — another feature inherited from the Ace 2 Pro.

OnePlus

Little else is known about the OnePlus 12 for now, but we'll know more in about a week's time. As for the rest of you outside China, OnePlus has told Engadget that a global launch date will be announced on December 15. Stay tuned as we keep a close eye on the latest development.