China Watch Mail Bag: Penny For Your Thoughts?

Enlarge / With just 222 miles of range, you can't venture far off-grid in the Subaru Solterra. (credit: Subaru) Over the years, Subaru has generated a cult following in the US, making its name with all-wheel drive powertrains and a go-anywhere attitude. Cars like the rally-bred WRXes and STIs did a lot of work here, but lately, Subaru has seemed to go in the opposite direction, phasing out fun drives like the STI lineup in favor of volume-movers like the Ascent and bloated versions of existing models such as the Subaru Wilderness editions. Its first electric vehicle is perhaps even less in character.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino) As expected, broadband industry lobby groups have sued the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to nullify net neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Lobby groups representing cable, telecom, and mobile Internet service providers sued the FCC in several US appeals courts last week.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Last month, we looked into some of the most incorrect, dangerous, and downright weird answers generated by Google's new AI Overviews feature. Since then, Google has offered a partial apology/explanation for generating those kinds of results and has reportedly rolled back the feature's rollout for at least some types of queries. But the more I've thought about that rollout, the more I've begun to question the wisdom of Google's AI-powered search results in the first place.

Enlarge / The Recall feature as it currently exists in Windows 11 24H2 preview builds. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Microsoft’s Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs come with quite a few new AI and machine learning-driven features, but the tentpole is Recall. Described by Microsoft as a comprehensive record of everything you do on your PC, the feature is pitched as a way to help users remember where they’ve been and to provide Windows extra contextual information that can help it better understand requests from and meet the needs of individual users. This, as many users in infosec communities on social media immediately pointed out, sounds like a potential security nightmare.

Enlarge / Tesla will have to rely on its Dojo supercomputer for a while longer after CEO Elon Musk diverted 12,000 Nvidia GPU clusters to X instead. (credit: Tesla) Elon Musk is yet again being accused of diverting Tesla resources to his other companies. This time, it's high-end H100 GPU clusters from Nvidia.

Enlarge (credit: Courtesy of NYU Langone) Surgeons in New York have removed a pig kidney less than two months after transplanting it into Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman with kidney failure who also needed a mechanical heart pump. The team behind the transplant says there were problems with the heart pump, not the pig kidney, and that the patient is in stable condition. Pisano was facing heart and kidney failure and required routine dialysis.