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Apple rushed five planeloads of iPhones from India to the U.S. in just three days to beat new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, Times of India reported Monday, citing sources. The urgent shipments during the final week of March aimed to avoid the 10% reciprocal tariff that took effect on April 5. The stockpiling will allow Apple to maintain current pricing temporarily. "The reserves that arrived at lower duty will temporarily insulate the company from the higher prices that it will need to pay for new shipments," the Indian daily cited a source as saying. The Trump administration also announced a 26% reciprocal tariff to be implemented on April 9, potentially accelerating Apple's manufacturing shift away from China. India offers a significant tariff advantage, with Indian exports facing a 26% tariff to the U.S. compared to 54% on Chinese goods. Further reading: India's Economic Chess Against Twin US Economic Threats.

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ULA wins $5.4B and Blue Origin $2.4B

The US will spend $5.9 billion on Elon Musk's SpaceX in the name of national security. United Launch Alliance (ULA) follows with $5.4 billion, and Blue Origin is set to receive $2.4 billion.…

President Donald Trump signaled a potential diplomatic opening amid his aggressive tariff strategy on Monday, threatening China with an additional 50% tariff while simultaneously offering other nations a path to negotiate lower trade barriers. The ultimatum to Beijing demands China withdraw a 34% increase by April 8, 2025, or face supplementary tariffs effective April 9, which would push total levies on Chinese goods to 104% or higher. Trump has already imposed a 20% tariff over fentanyl concerns and a 34% tariff related to trade issues. "Negotiations with other countries, which have requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately," Trump wrote on social media, marking a shift from the administration's previously unyielding stance.

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We're on a roadmap to nowhere. Come on inside

Opinion Nvidia has just shown off its vision of the near future in the shape of its Blackwell Ultra. Aptly for a company that helps gamers explore dystopian science-fiction hellscapes, Nvidia's actual future involves vast, heat-soaked stacks of silicon, guzzling energy by the half-gigawatt.…

A court has blocked a British government attempt to keep secret a legal case over its demand to access Apple user data. From a report: The UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a special court that handles cases related to government surveillance, said the authorities' efforts were a "fundamental interference with the principle of open justice" in a ruling issued on Monday. The development comes after it emerged in January that the British government had served Apple with a demand to circumvent encryption that the company uses to secure user data stored in its cloud services. Apple challenged the request, while taking the unprecedented step of removing its advanced data protection feature for its British users. The government had sought to keep details about the demand -- and Apple's challenge of it -- from being publicly disclosed. Apple has regularly clashed with governments over encryption features that can make it difficult for law enforcement to access devices produced by the company. The world's most valuable company last year criticized UK surveillance powers as "unprecedented overreach" by the government.

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After 23 years, the privacy plumber has finally arrived to clean up this mess

A 23-year-old side-channel attack for spying on people's web browsing histories will get shut down in the forthcoming Chrome 136, released last Thursday to the Chrome beta channel.…

Microsoft's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company has deliberately chosen to build AI models "three or six months behind" cutting-edge developments, citing cost savings and more focused implementation. "It's cheaper to give a specific answer once you've waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier," Suleyman told CNBC. "That's actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models." Microsoft owns substantial Nvidia GPU capacity but sees no need to develop "the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first," as it would be "very, very expensive" and create unnecessary duplication, Suleyman said. Despite its $13.75 billion investment in OpenAI, Microsoft added the startup to its list of competitors in July 2024. OpenAI subsequently announced a partnership with Oracle on its $500 billion Stargate project, departing from exclusive reliance on Microsoft's Azure cloud. "Look, it's absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft," Suleyman said, while stressing the partnership with OpenAI would continue "until 2030 at least."

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Last month's secret hearing comes to light

Details of Apple's appeal against the UK's so-called "backdoor order" will now play out in public after the Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds.…

By putting services in scope, €18 trillion trade bloc looks to focus tech sector minds

Speaking ahead of today's extraordinary meeting of the European Union's trade minister, a spokesperson for the French government was clear that the trading bloc's response to blanket tariffs on goods could include services, bringing US tech giants within its scope.…

Scientists "demonstrated a promising step toward using a person's own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers" at America's National Institutes of Health (or NIH), reports the Washington Post. But the results were published in Nature Medicine on Tuesday — "the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs..." The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results "remarkable" because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person's own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers. Until now, cell-based immunotherapy has worked mainly on blood cancers, such as leukemia, but not the solid cancers that seed tumors in the breast, brain, lungs, pancreas and GI tract... But the progress arrives at a sad time for science — and for patients, said the leader of the work, NIH immunotherapy pioneer Steven Rosenberg. Two patients' treatments using the experimental therapy had to be delayed because NIH's capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns. Those occurred even before major layoffs took place Tuesday... The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded to an email asking about clinical trial delays with a statement: "NIH and HHS are complying with President Trump's executive order." It's "a very exciting study," said Patrick Hwu, president of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Finding ways to tailor this cell-based immunotherapy approach to common solid tumors that cause the vast majority of cancer deaths has remained a major scientific challenge... Rosenberg and colleagues first tried to create tumor infiltrating lymphocytes [or "TILs"] using the method that worked in melanoma for 18 patients with GI cancers that had spread. It failed completely. In a second iteration, his team sequenced the mutations present in each patient's tumor and used that information to sift out and expand the TILs that could home in on that patient's specific tumor cells. The results were far from a triumph, but provided a clue — this time, three of 39 patients' tumors shrank. In the last stage of the trial, the scientists added a drug called pembrolizumab that takes the brakes off immune cells. This time, eight of the 34 patients responded. "Right now, only a few labs in the country can do what they just did," Hwu said. While Rosenberg is already working "to refine and improve upon the results," he told the Post that two scientists involved in the specialized process of preparing the cells to treat patients were fired in the probationary purge. "We've had to slow down our work and delay the treatment of some patients...." And there's also dramatically fewer people now who can purchase research materials, which the Post says it "making it slower and more difficult to obtain supplies."

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Digital Connectivity Forum lays out climate goals, but enforcement is strictly optional

A group of UK telecoms operators has signed a joint letter calling on their suppliers to do more on emissions targets to help combat climate change, but they face little pressure to comply.…

With weeks to meet terms of settlement agreement, engineers in Redmond still don't have a product to show CISPE

Microsoft has weeks to produce a multi-tenant hybrid cloud for service providers in Europe – a failure to do this or to even out alleged anti-competitive pricing for its software licenses could again put it in a legal dogfight with smaller rivals.…

ONS acknowledges it might be a costly decision in the long run

The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) is slowing migration away from legacy systems in response to budget limitations set by HM Treasury.…

The graybeard wasn't doing a great job and morale improved once he left. How would you handle this?

Who, Me? It's hard to confront the start of a working week, but each Monday morning, The Register tries to keep the weekend fun going for another few minutes by delivering a fresh edition of Who, Me? It's the column in which we take your tales of your most ticklish moments at work and share them for the amusement and/or education of your fellow readers.…

Brain rot — the inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on a phone — afflicts "plenty of people," writes the New York Times' lead consumer technology writer. [Alternate URL here.] He's suffering from it too — "These days, it's tough to even finish a book." But is the answer just avoiding distractions with a stripped-down $600 phone "that barely does anything"? For a week he tested the Light Phone III... The newest version, which began shipping in March and is set for a broader release in July, can place calls, send texts, take photos, show map directions, play music and podcasts and not do much else. There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there's no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn't even email... There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town. It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks. But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and overall I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door. Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features. For example, his old smartphone supported virtual phone-based passes for mass transit and speedy access to his gym. (And his friends made phone of the Light Phone's photos.) But at least never felt tempted to check his email when out to dinner. "While I admire the goal of the Light Phone, my experience demonstrates there's nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including getting around town, working, paying for things and controlling home appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones. "This Light Phone experiment reminded me of glamping: paying a lot to have an artificially crummier experience."

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Plan to standardize consent dialogs aims to lighten burden on devs, users, reviewers

Mozilla plans to make life easier for developers of Firefox browser Add-ons, aka extensions, by reducing the burden of presenting custom consent dialogs to those installing extensions.…

Says they’re done right as they don’t lean so far left

Meta has debuted the first two models in its Llama 4 family, its first to use mixture of experts tech.…

Fixed it the next day but a few lucky folk may have dodged a five percent Copilot price hike

Exclusive Microsoft published inaccurate price lists for some of its products on, of all days, April the 1st.…

"Gen Z is rediscovering Tumblr — a chaotic, cozy corner of the internet untouched by algorithmic gloss and influencer overload..." writes Fast Company, "embracing the platform as a refuge from an internet saturated with influencers and algorithm fatigue." Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users and accounts for 60% of new sign-ups, according to data shared with Business Insider's Amanda Hoover, who recently reported on the platform's resurgence. User numbers spiked in January during the near-ban of TikTok and jumped again last year when Brazil temporarily banned X. In response, Tumblr users launched dedicated communities to archive and share their favorite TikToks... To keep up with the momentum, Tumblr introduced Reddit-style Communities in December, letting users connect over shared interests like photography and video games. In January, it debuted Tumblr TV — a TikTok-like feature that serves as both a GIF search engine and a short-form video platform. But perhaps Tumblr's greatest strength is that it isn't TikTok or Facebook. Currently the 10th most popular social platform in the U.S., according to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr is dwarfed by giants like Instagram and X. For its users, though, that's part of the appeal. First launched in 2007, Tumblr peaked at over 100 million users in 2014, according to the article. Trends like Occupy Wall Street had been born on Tumblr, notes Business Insider, calling the blogging platform "Gen Z's safe space... as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers." Tumblr was also "one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013... then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale. "That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z..." "Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021... Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them. The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr... And Tumblr still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working, you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14... Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, [says Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr]. "We've had ups and downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place that we've been in 18 years," he says... And following media companies (including Business Insider) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to train on Tumblr posts. "The social internet is fractured," the article argues. ("Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than influence....") But in a world where megaplatforms "flatten our online experiences and reward content that fits a mold," the article suggests, "smaller communities can enrich them."

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PLUS: Qualcomm acquires Vietnamese AI outfit; China claims US hacked winter games; India's browser challenge winner disputed; and more

Asia In Brief Asian nations and tech companies are trying to come to terms with the USA’s new universal import tariffs and additional “reciprocal tariffs”.…