Tech companies' worst nightmare ahead of Donald Trump's election has already come true, as the US and China are now fully engaged in a tit-for-tat trade war, where China claims it expects to be better positioned to withstand US blows long-term.

Trump has claimed that Americans must take their "medicine," bearing any pains from tariffs while waiting for supposed long-term gains from potentially pressuring China—and every other country, including islands of penguins— into a more favorable trade deal. On Monday, tech companies across the US likely winced when Trump threatened to heap "additional" 50 percent tariffs on China, after China announced retaliatory 34 percent tariffs on US imports and restricted US access to rare earth metals.

Posting on Truth Social, Trump gave China one day to withdraw tariffs to avoid higher US tariffs.

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After giving CinemaCon attendees a sneak peek last week, Paramount Pictures has publicly released the trailer for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning , the eighth installment of the blockbuster spy franchise starring Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, and a sequel to the events that played out in 2023's Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning .

This may, or may not, end up being Cruise's last film in the franchise; everyone's being pretty cagey about that question. But the trailer certainly gives us everything we've come to expect from the Mission: Impossible films: high stakes, global political intrigue, and of course, lots and lots of spectacular stunt work, including Cruise hanging precariously mid-air from a 1930s Boeing Stearman biplane.

(Spoilers for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning below.)

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A second unvaccinated child has died of measles in Texas, according to state health officials and the hospital in Lubbock, Texas, that treated the child.

“We are deeply saddened to report that a school-aged child who was recently diagnosed with measles has passed away," a representative for UMC Health System in Lubbock said in a statement emailed to Ars Technica. "The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized. It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions. This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination."

US Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. identified the child as 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand . Media reports indicated that she died early Thursday morning .

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A White House investigation has reportedly identified the mistakes that led to a journalist being added to a Signal text chain in which bombing plans were discussed hours before the strikes occurred.

As previously reported, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz last month invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed a plan for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. Waltz publicly claimed that Goldberg's number was "sucked in" to his phone and added to a different person's contact information without his knowledge.

A report published yesterday by The Guardian said a forensic review by the White House IT office "found that Waltz's phone had saved Goldberg's number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October." The Guardian reported:

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Nintendo's barrage of Switch announcements over the last two weeks have also come with changes to the way Nintendo treats physical and digital copies of games.

Digital games can now become " virtual game cards ," facilitating slightly more flexible sharing of digitally purchased games between multiple Switch systems owned by the same person or family of people. And physical copies of games can now be either traditional game cards—little bits of plastic with the game stored on a flash memory chip inside—or "Game-Key cards," which look the same from the outside but don't actually have any game data stored on them.

A Game-Key card has a "key" stored on it that prompts a download of the game data from Nintendo's servers the first time you insert it. From then on, the game behaves like a cross between a digital download and a physical game—all of the game's content has to be on the console's internal storage or a microSD Express card, but you need to have the Game-Key card inserted before the game will launch.

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It's well-established that, on the whole, Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. For instance, an analysis from 2022 found that the average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada's, which was 82.3 years. And this was before the pandemic, which only made things worse for the US.

Perhaps some Americans may think that this lower overall life-expectancy doesn't really apply to them if they're middle- or upper-class. After all, wealth inequality and health disparities are huge problems in the US. Those with more money simply have better access to health care and better health outcomes. Well-off Americans live longer, with lifespans on par with their peers in high-income countries, some may think.

It is true that money buys you a longer life in the US. In fact, the link between wealth and mortality may be stronger in the US than in any other high-income country. But, if you think American wealth will put life expectancy in league with Switzerland, you're dead wrong, according to a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine .

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As AI hype permeates the Internet, tech and business leaders are already looking toward the next step. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a machine with human-like intelligence and capabilities . If today's AI systems are on a path to AGI, we will need new approaches to ensure such a machine doesn't work against human interests.

Unfortunately, we don't have anything as elegant as Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Researchers at DeepMind have been working on this problem and have released a new technical paper (PDF), which you can download at your convenience.

It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm."

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When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as well as some of the basic security that underpins it.

When Google uses the term E2EE in this context, it means that an email is encrypted inside Chrome, Firefox, or just about any other browser the sender chooses. As the message makes its way to its destination, it remains encrypted and can’t be decrypted until it arrives at its final destination, when it’s decrypted in the recipient's browser.

Giving S/MIME the heave-ho

The chief selling point of this new service is that it allows government agencies and the businesses that work with them to comply with a raft of security and privacy regulations and at the same time eliminates the massive headaches that have traditionally plagued anyone deploying such regulation-compliant email systems. Up to now, the most common means has been S/MIME , a standard so complex and painful that only the bravest and most well-resourced organizations tend to implement it.

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Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. In these communications, meaning is something more than just a sum of individual calls—a trait known as non-trivial compositionality, which we once thought was uniquely human.

To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. For the first time, we have a glimpse into what bonobos mean when they call to each other in the wild.

Context is everything

The key idea behind distributional semantics is that when words appear in similar contexts, they tend to have similar meanings. To decipher an unknown language, you need to collect a large corpus of words and turn those words into vectors—mathematical representations that let you place them in a multidimensional semantic space. The second thing you need is context data, which tells you the circumstances in which these words were used (that gets vectorized, too). When you map your word vectors onto context vectors in this multidimensional space, what usually happens is that words with similar meaning end up close to each other. Berthet and her colleagues wanted to apply the same trick to bonobos’ calls. That seemed straightforward at first glance, but proved painfully hard to execute.

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