Apple released new figures Friday, highlighting user adoption of iOS 18. Released in public form back in September 2024, the mobile operating system is now installed on 68% of compatible devices. That number jumps to 78% on iPhones released in the last four years.

As for the remaining iPhones out there, 19% are running iOS 17, and 13% are using an earlier version. Similarly, 19% of iPhones released in the last four years are  currently running iOS 17.

The figure drops to 5% with earlier iOS builds — understandable, given the overall percentage of those devices that shipped with either iOS 17 or 18, along with early adopters’ propensity to keep their devices running the latest OS updates. As 9 to 5 Mac points out, the figures presented are similar to those Apple issued in 2024 around iOS 17 adoption.

The company’s small model approach to generative AI, Apple Intelligence, was the marquee feature for iOS 18. That arrived with the operating system’s first major update, 18.1, with additional features arriving with 18.2. The current public version is 18.2.1. Of course, Apple Intelligence has had some stumbles out of the gate, including one that required the company to roll back News notification summaries.

iPadOS 18’s adoption figures, meanwhile, are markedly lower than its mobile counterpart. Currently, 53% of all iPads are running iPadOS 18. That figure jumps to 63% for those released in the last four years.

• QNAP said it addressed six flaws in its Hybrid Backup Sync tool
• The flaws stemmed from rsync, an open-source file syncing tool
• Users are advised to update their HBS immediately

QNAP has addressed half a dozen vulnerabilities affecting its Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) software.

In a security advisory, the company noted the vulnerabilities were discovered in rsync, an open source file synchronization tool used to transfer and sync files between systems. It supports local and remote operations via SSH, and minimizes data transfer with incremental updates. Many backup solutions use rsync, including Duplicity, Bacula, Rclone, and others.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects to spend as much as $65 billion on AI in 2025 as part of a “massive effort” to further the company’s AI ambitions. Part of the plan includes a Louisiana data center that Zuckerberg says “is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” he wrote on Threads today.

The announcement reads like a response to the big AI data center news touted by competitors earlier this week. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump joined OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison as they announced Project Stargate, a $500 billion joint venture that will build sprawling AI data centers in Texas and other parts of the country. City documents seen by Bloomberg suggest the Texas data center will be as big as New York’s Central Park.

Zuckerberg said he expects to end the year with over 1.3 million GPUs, while “significantly” growing the company’s AI team. “This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D [research and development] efforts.”

In the days leading up to the TikTok ban in the U.S. on Sunday, U.S. users flooded the Chinese app RedNote, which offered a similar experience to their favorite short-form video app. The app, which is listed in the U.S. App Store under its Chinese name Xiaohongshu, quickly became the No. 1 free app in the U.S. But after Trump paused the ban, use of RedNote in the U.S. rapidly declined. By Monday, RedNote had lost over half its daily active users in the U.S. after reaching a high of 32.5 million daily actives on the day of the ban.

According to digital market intelligence company Similarweb, RedNote’s daily active users in the U.S. declined by 54% on Monday when enforcement of the ban was put on hold. President Trump offered TikTok a 75-day extension of the deadline, allowing TikTok more time to negotiate a deal that would keep it alive in the U.S.

App intelligence provider Sensor Tower saw a similar trend as the week continued. Per its estimates, the average U.S. mobile daily active users for RedNote from January 20 to 22 declined by roughly 17% compared with the week prior (January 13 to 19).

TikTok users had originally joined RedNote en masse to send a message to lawmakers and Meta alike. According to one report, also citing Sensor Tower data, some 700,000 U.S. users flocked to RedNote within two days as the ban deadline approached. By Thursday, Similarweb said that RedNote had reached 3.4 million daily active users across iOS and Android in the U.S., a 133.8% week-over-week increase.

The U.S. users joining RedNote were signaling that the government’s fears of the “national security threat” poised by a Chinese-owned app with access to U.S. users’ personal data was not a concern to them. In addition, they wanted to demonstrate that would rather join another Chinese app than return to Instagram to use Reels.

There were several reasons why so many U.S. TikTok users made this decision. Some found the ban hypocritical, given that Meta had profited off their user data for years, many said in their videos, while others simply didn’t care if China had their data or not.

As one popular TikTok sound put it, “You’re telling me the Chinese government has access to all of my personal data and what they chose to do with that information is psychologically manipulate me via algorithmic content into reading smutty books about fairies.”

(The sound references the fantasy books loved by the readers in TikTok’s sizable “BookTok” community, such as Sarah J. Maas’s “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series. In other words, they didn’t see TikTok as any sort of threat.)

As the TikTokers engaged on RedNote, surprising cultural exchanges began to occur.

Users asked each other about the cost of living in their area, while Chinese and U.S. users alike wanted to know if their government had characterized the other society accurately. U.S. users, for instance, asked about China’s social credit system, while RedNote’s Chinese users asked if it was true that many Americans had to work two jobs to pay their bills. Food, healthcare, and the accuracy of U.S. TV movies and shows, like “Friends,” were among the numerous topics discussed.

However, RedNote’s position as a top app in the U.S. was a trend that isn’t likely to last, at least as long as TikTok is available. For one, RedNote is localized in Mandarin, prompting many to turn to Duolingo to study the language. The language-learning app saw a 216% spike in U.S. usage, it said. However, learning a new language is challenging — and many users may have given up in time.

In addition, unlike TikTok, RedNote is focused on the Chinese market. TikTok benefitted from being a global app — something TikTok itself pointed out when arguing in the Supreme Court about why it would no longer be the same if forced to sell.

Ahead of the ban, TikTok’s U.S. daily active users surged to a record high for the past year, as 106.8 million users on iOS and Android engaged with the app on Sunday.

• The FBI’s missive follows three previous ones in as many years
• Statement is aimed at educating businesses and warding off domestic collaborators
• Suggested remedies include employing endpoint protection on computer systems and checking applications for “typos and unusual nomenclature”

The FBI has claimed North Korean IT workers are extorting US companies which have hired them by leveraging their access to steal source code.

In a statement, the agency warned domestic and international firms employees turned threat actors, “facilitate cyber-criminal activities and conduct revenue-generating activity” using stolen data “on behalf of the regime.”

When the US Food and Drug Administration opened the door for hearing aids to be sold over the counter in 2022, I was all in. Prescription hearing aids are criminally expensive, and several OTC models have proven that you don’t need to visit a hearing aid shop in a mall to get a product that gets the job done. I’ve tested 38 hearing aids to date, and 29 have been available over the counter. All of my favorite hearing aid products have been OTC models. Until now.

Starkey is a major name in the hearing aid business, and it’s not some white-label company that slaps a logo on someone else’s product (an epidemic in this industry). Starkey has been around since 1967, and while it no longer designs or manufactures its own digital signal processing chips, it is intimately involved with hearing aid development—and famously brags that it has outfitted everyone from Ronald Reagan to Mother Teresa with its hearing aids.

Now, with its new Edge AI RIC RT hearing aids, Starkey takes a position at the very top of the heap in product quality and performance thanks in large part to a new audio processor that includes an integrated neural processing unit—just like our laptops and phones. Starkey says this is the only NPU-powered hearing aid line on the market.

Receiver in Canal

There’s nothing particularly inventive about the way the Edge AI RIC RT (which stands for “receiver in canal, rechargeable with telecoil”) looks, built on the classic, teardrop-shaped behind-the-ear design, though it is available in your choice of seven colors. Each aid weighs 2.62 grams, which is competitive for a behind-the-ear hearing aid. (To compare, the Jabra Enhance Select 500 weighs 2.56 grams.) A single button on the back of each aid controls volume: down on the left aid, up on the right aid.

As these are prescription aids, you’ll need an audiologist to fit and tune them. Rather than sending me to a local doctor, Starkey took the unusual step of flying its chief hearing health officer, Dave Fabry, to my home to complete this task. Fabry brought a suitcase full of equipment to re-create what the doctor’s office experience would normally be like, only at my dining table. Afterward, he gave me a training session on the aids and walked me through the My Starkey app, just like a standard audiologist.

Fabry also outfitted me with custom eartips molded to fit the exact shape of my ear canals. (This type of service would be at the discretion of your audiologist.) This is a simple process that involves jamming putty into your ears and waiting for it to harden. This putty can then be used to create a bespoke eartip that fits perfectly—although the usual collection of open and closed eartips in various sizes are also included in the box.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company plans to significantly up its capital expenditures this year as it aims to keep pace with rivals in the cutthroat AI space.

In a Facebook post Friday, Zuckerberg said that Meta expects to spend $60 billion-$80 billion on CapEx in 2025, primarily on data centers and growing the company’s AI development teams. That projected range is around double the $35 billion-$40 billion Meta spent on CapEx last year.

Zuckerberg also wrote that Meta plans to bring around one gigawatt of compute online this year, roughly the amount of power consumed by 750,000 average homes, and expects the company’s data centers to pack over 1.3 million GPUs by year-end.

Meta’s investments come as AI rivals pour billions into their own infrastructure projects. Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in 2025, while OpenAI is contributing to a joint venture, Stargate, that could yield it hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of data center resources.

Now that Netflix has unveiled which titles will be leaving in February 2025, take this as your sign to get a head start on catching the best Netflix movies before it’s too late. But while Netflix doesn’t tend to remove a huge amount of titles each month (which is a good thing), there are always one or two gems thrown into the mix that I know I’ll miss dearly. As for this month, those movies are Pearl (2022) and Stand By Me (1986), but there are plenty new additions on the way to make up for it, looking at everything coming to Netflix in February.

When it comes to Netflix series, I find that these are less prone to being axed from Netflix’s library. This month, only two TV shows (Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Mindy Project) are being removed compared to over 30 movies, so with that said, you can’t say that Netflix isn’t one of the best streaming services when it comes to TV content.

Everything leaving Netflix in February 2025

Under the executive order, DOGE teams, which “will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney” will be dispatched to various agencies. They will be granted “access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” ostensibly with the goal of streamlining data sharing across federal agencies.

A former USDS employee who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity called the repurposing of the Digital Service an “A+ bureaucratic jiu-jitsu move.” But, they say, they’re concerned that DOGE’s access to sensitive information could be used to do more than just streamline government operations.

“Is this technical talent going to be pointed toward using data from the federal government to track down opponents?” they ask. “To track down particular populations of interest to this administration for the purposes of either targeting them or singling them out or whatever it might end up being?”

Got a Tip?

Are you a current or former employee with the US Digital Services or another government agency impacted by DOGE? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact Vittoria Elliott at vittoria_elliott@wired.com or securely at velliott88.18 on Signal.

It appears, however, that the first order of DOGE is to weed out people in agencies that might push back on the Trump administration’s agenda, starting with existing USDS staff, and hire new people.

“DOGE teams have a lawyer, an HR director, and an engineer. If you were looking to identify functions to cut, people to cut, having an HR director there and having a lawyer say, ‘Here’s what we’re allowed to do or not do,’ would be one way that you would facilitate that,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, noting that DOGE’s potential access to federal employee data could put “them in some sort of crosshairs to be fired.”

When Musk took over Twitter, he brought in outside help from his close circle as well as his other companies to transform the company, a move he appears to be repeating.

Who exactly is going to be part of DOGE is a particularly thorny issue because there are technically two DOGEs. One is the permanent organization, the revamped USDS—now the US DOGE Service. The other is a temporary organization, with a termination date of July 4, 2026. Creating this organization means the temporary DOGE can operate under a special set of rules. It can sequester employees from other parts of the government, and can also accept people who want to work for the government as volunteers. Temporary organizations can also hire what are known as special government employees—experts in a given field who can bypass the rigors of the regular federal hiring processes. They’re also not subject to the same transparency requirements as other government employees.

In the best case scenario, this would allow DOGE to move quickly to address issues and fast track necessary talent, as well as build systems that make government services more seamless by facilitating the flow of information and data. But in the worst case, this could mean less transparency around the interests of people working on important government projects, while enabling possible surveillance.