Business Insider reports: Twitter on Saturday briefly took new action to stem the spread of President Donald Trump's false tweets about his loss in the 2020 election. Replies and likes were disabled on several of Trump's tweets Saturday morning before Twitter the company reversed course hours later, telling Business Insider the change was made "inadvertently...."

"We try to prevent a Tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people, so we've disabled most of the ways to engage with it," the label said. But hours after, just before 10 a.m., with no public statement from Twitter, it appeared to have changed course, allowing users to like the tweets after first presenting a large warning that the contents of the post were disputed.

"We inadvertently took action to limit engagements on the labeled Tweet you referenced," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider on Saturday. "This action has been reversed, and you can now engage with the Tweet, but in line with our Civic Integrity Policy it will continue to be labeled in order to give more context for anyone who might see the Tweet."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook said it has linked an advanced hacking group widely believed to be sponsored by the government of Vietnam to what's purported to be a legitimate IT company in that country. The so-called advanced persistent threat group goes under the monikers APT32 and OceanLotus. It has been operating since at least 2014 and targets private sector companies in a range of industries along with foreign governments, dissidents, and journalists in South Asia and elsewhere. It uses a variety of tactics, including phishing, to infect targets with fully featured desktop and mobile malware that's developed from scratch. To win targets' confidence, the group goes to great lengths to create websites and online personas that masquerade as legitimate people and organizations.

Earlier this year, researchers uncovered at least eight unusually sophisticated Android apps hosted in Google Play that were linked to the hacking group. Many of them had been there since at least 2018. OceanLotus repeatedly bypassed Google's app-vetting process, in part by submitting benign versions of the apps and later updating them to add backdoors and other malicious functionality. FireEye published this detailed report on OceanLotus in 2017, and BlackBerry has more recent information here. On Thursday, Facebook identified Vietnamese IT firm CyberOne Group as being linked to OceanLotus. The group lists an address in Ho Chi Minh city.

Email sent to the company seeking comment returned an error message that said the email server was misconfigured. A report from Reuters on Friday, however, quoted a person operating the company's now-suspended Facebook page as saying: "We are NOT Ocean Lotus. It's a mistake." At the time this post went live, the company's website was also unreachable. An archive of it from earlier on Friday is here.

On Thursday, Google announced a new setting that lets people limit the alcohol- and gambling-related ads they come across. Gizmodo reports: Per the announcement, the feature will first roll out for YouTube ads in the U.S., before globally expanding to ads across YouTube and Google search in "early 2021." Countries that already have legal limitations on ads in these sorts of categories -- like say, Norway or Sweden -- won't see any change in their policies as a result, Google added. Up until this point, people who saw one of these ads had the option to "mute" them, which would keep that specific ad from cropping up across Google's properties, or any of the countless web publishers that Google partners with. On top of that, it also kept users from seeing any ads that Google deemed "similar" to the ad in question, either because they looked the same, or were from the same advertiser.

This new feature, Google explained, is an "extra step" that puts more choice in the user's hands. In reality, though, it's closer to something of a half-step. Google doesn't quite qualify what it means by "limiting" these ads in the blog post, but it's safe to assume that some will still slip through. That means Google could still pocket the money made from an addict being served ads for a substance or behavior they're trying to avoid, but the numbers will be "significantly reduced," according to the company. "While our intent is to be able to block all ads from a given category, there are certain ads that can be difficult to categorize," a Google spokesperson said in an email, giving the example of an ad for an airline featuring a flight attendant serving champagne. "We want to be fully transparent so we're using 'see fewer ads' rather than 'see no ads' or 'block ads' to appropriately set expectations that while significantly reduced, people may still see ads related to a selected category," the spokesperson added. "But of course, we'll continue to work to get as close as possible to blocking all ads within a selected category."

Norman Abramson, one of the pioneers behind wireless networks, has died at 88. The cause was skin cancer that had metastasized to his lungs, his son, Mark, said. The New York Times reports: Professor Abramson's project at the University of Hawaii was originally designed to transmit data to schools on the far-flung Hawaiian islands by means of a radio channel. But the solution he and his group devised in the late 1960s and early '70s would prove widely applicable; some of their technology is still in use in today's smartphones, satellites and home WiFi networks. The technology they created allowed many digital devices to send and receive data over that shared radio channel. It was a simple approach that did not require complex scheduling of when each packet of data would be sent. If a data packet was not received, it was simply sent again. The approach was a departure from telecommunications practices at the time, but it worked.

The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet. "The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated," said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On Wednesday, a Facebook data scientist departed the social networking company after a two-year stint, leaving a farewell note for their colleagues to ponder. As part of a team focused on "Violence and Incitement," they had dealt with some of the worst content on Facebook, and they were proud of their work at the company. Despite this, they said Facebook was simply not doing enough. "With so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more sisyphean than it already is," the employee wrote in their "badge post," a traditional farewell note for any departing Facebook employee. "It also makes it embarrassing to work here."

Using internal Facebook data and projections to support their points, the data scientist said in their post that roughly 1 of every 1,000 pieces of content -- or 5 million of the 5 billion pieces of content posted to the social network daily -- violates the company's rules on hate speech. More stunning, they estimated using the company's own figures that, even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was "deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook." (After this article was published, Facebook VP of integrity Guy Rosen disputed the calculation, saying it "incorrectly compares views and content." The employee addressed this in their post and said it did not change the conclusion.)

The sentiments expressed in the badge post are hardly new. Since May, a number of Facebook employees have quit, saying they were ashamed of the impact the company was having on the world or worried that the company's inaction in moderating hate and misinformation had led to political interference, division, and bloodshed. Another employee was fired for documenting instances of preferential treatment of influential conservative pages that repeatedly spread false information. But in just the past few weeks, at least four people involved in critical integrity work related to reducing violence and incitement, crafting policy to reduce hate speech, and tracking content that breaks Facebook's rules have left the company. In farewell posts obtained by BuzzFeed News, each person expressed concerns about the company's approach to handling US political content and hate speech, and called out Facebook leadership for its unwillingness to be more proactive about reducing hate, incitement, and false content. In the wake of the 2020 US Election, Facebook's "election integrity" team, which was charged with "helping to protect the democratic process" and reducing "the spread of viral information and fake accounts," was recently disbanded as a stand-alone unit. Company leadership also reportedly shot down a proposal from the company's integrity teams to throttle the distribution of false and misleading election content from prominent political accounts, like President Donald Trump's.

Apple has started building its own cellular modem for future devices, a move that would replace components from Qualcomm, Apple's top chip executive told staff on Thursday. From a report: Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, made the disclosure in a town hall meeting with Apple employees, according to people familiar with the comments. "This year, we kicked off the development of our first internal cellular modem which will enable another key strategic transition," he said. "Long-term strategic investments like these are a critical part of enabling our products and making sure we have a rich pipeline of innovative technologies for our future." A cellular modem is one of the most important parts of a smartphone, enabling phone calls and connection to the internet via cellular networks. Srouji said the $1 billion acquisition of Intel's modem business in 2019 helped Apple build a team of hardware and software engineers to develop its own cellular modem.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More recent Nvidia graphics cards have a proprietary feature called Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and while it's often been touted as a powerful new rendering tool, the results have sometimes been underwhelming. Some of this is down to the oddly mixed-message around how DLSS was rolled-out: it only works on more recent Nvidia cards that are still near the cutting edge of PC graphics hardware⦠but DLSS is designed to render images at lower resolutions but display them as if they were rendered natively at a higher resolution. If you had just gotten a new Nvidia card and were excited to see what kind of framerates and detail levels it could sustain, what DLSS actually did sounded counterintuitive. Even games like Control, whose support of DLSS was especially praised, left me scratching my head about why I would want to use the feature. On my 4K TV, Control looked and ran identically well with and without DLSS, so why wouldn't I just max-out my native graphics settings instead rather than use a fancy upscaler? Intellectually, I understood the DLSS could produce similarly great looking images without taxing my hardware as much, but I neither fully believed it, nor had I seen a game where the performance gain was meaningful.

Cyberpunk 2077 converted me. DLSS is a miracle, and without it there's probably no way I would ever have been happy with my graphics settings or the game's performance. I have a pretty powerful video card, an RTX 2080 TI, but my CPU is an old i5 overclocked to about 3.9 GHz and it's a definite bottleneck on a lot of games. Without DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 was very hard to get running smoothly. The busiest street scenes would look fine if I were in a static position, but a quick pan with my mouse would cause the whole world to stutter. If I was walking around Night City, I would get routine slow-downs. Likewise, sneaking around and picking off guards during encounters was all well and good but the minute the bullets started flying, with grenades exploding everywhere and positions changing rapidly, my framerate would crater to the point where the game verged on unplayable. To handle these peaks of activity, I had to lower my detail settings way below what I wanted, and what my hardware could support for about 80 percent of my time with the game. Without DLSS, I never found a balance I was totally happy with. The game neither looked particularly great, nor did it run very well. DLSS basically solved this problem for me. With it active, I could run Cyberpunk at max settings, with stable framerates in all but the busiest scenes.

In a joint security alert published this week, the US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned about increased cyber-attacks targeting the US K-12 educational sector, often leading to ransomware attacks, the theft of data, and the disruption of distance learning services. From a report: "As of December 2020, the FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC continue to receive reports from K-12 educational institutions about the disruption of distance learning efforts by cyber actors," the alert reads. "Cyber actors likely view schools as targets of opportunity, and these types of attacks are expected to continue through the 2020/2021 academic year," it added.

But of all the attacks plaguing the K-12 sector (kindergarten through twelfth-grade schools), ransomware has been a particularly aggressive threat this year, CISA and the FBI said. "According to MS-ISAC data, the percentage of reported ransomware incidents against K-12 schools increased at the beginning of the 2020 school year," the two agencies said. "In August and September, 57% of ransomware incidents reported to the MS-ISAC involved K-12 schools, compared to 28% of all reported ransomware incidents from January through July," they said.

Twitter has been doubling down on video services within its app, building out Twitter Live and recently launching Fleets so that users can share more moving media alongside their pithy 180-word observations, links and still photos. But in the process, it appears that it may also be streamlining its bigger stable of services. From a report: Code in the Twitter app indicates that Periscope -- the live video broadcasting app that launched a thousand fluttering hearts -- may be headed into retirement. Date and other details are still unknown, but super-sleuth developer Jane Machun Wong found a line in Twitter's app code that indicated a link to a shutdown notice for Periscope (which currently does not go to a live link). There are no shutdown references in any of the code in the currently obtainable version of the Persicope app, Wong told us, but she also pointed out that the two apps do share some code -- indeed there are integrations between the two Twitter-owned apps -- and "I guess [that] is how the text in the screenshot got slipped into Twitter," she said.

Ammalgam shares a report from The Redmond Cloud: Starting this month, Microsoft will begin forcing some users to upgrade to Windows 10 version 1909 or version 2004 if they don't update their PC manually. This is coming after Microsoft announced that it's ending support for Windows 10 version 1903, including Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro. If you're on Windows 10 version 1903, you'll be force upgraded to version 1909 later this month. If you're on Windows 10 version 1909, you'll be forcefully upgraded to Windows 10 version 2004 (May 2020 Update) by the spring of next year. If you're still using last year's Windows 10 versions, it's better to attempt the upgrade manually. [...] The process is expected to start this week and expand over the course of the next month before Windows 10 version 21H1 update is ready for production channels.

Microsoft has made available two different Windows 10 test builds today, one of which includes the promised x64 app emulation for Arm, among other features. ZDNet reports: The RS_Prerelease build 21277 -- which ultimately is expected to be designated as the "Cobalt" branch -- includes the features Microsoft had previously been testing but removed at the end of October. This includes the updated emoji picker, redesigned touch keyboard, voice typing, theme-aware splash screens and more. It also provides the aforementioned Arm emulation support. Currently, Windows on Arm natively supports Arm apps, including ARM64 versions. But so far, only 32-bit Intel (x86) apps are supported in emulation. This lack of x64 emulation has limited the number of apps that can run on Windows on Arm devices, since apps that are 64-bit only have only been available on Windows on Arm (WoA) devices if and when developers created native versions of them. As of now, these x64 Arm apps also can run in emulation. More details on the x64 Arm emulation preview functionality are in this Microsoft post.

An anonymous reader shares an article that's part of the Future Agenda, a series from Slate in which experts suggest specific, forward-looking actions the new Biden administration should implement. Here's an excerpt: Consumers in the U.S. face an infuriating lack of transparency when it comes to purchasing broadband services. Bills are convoluted, featuring complex pricing schemes. Roughly 7 in 10 U.S. adults surveyed by Consumer Reports who have used a cable, internet, or phone service provider in the past two years said they experienced unexpected or hidden fees. Unsurprisingly, 96 percent of those who had experienced hidden fees found them annoying. (To the other 4 percent: Are you OK?) We've been here before. In 1990, a similar crisis of consumer confidence prompted one Cabinet secretary to decry that "as consumers shop they encounter confusion and frustration." He said the market had become "a Tower of Babel, and consumers need to be linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see." While this diagnosis could apply almost word-for-word to today's broadband market, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan was talking about the grocery store. The solution then offers a ready-made formula for how the incoming Biden administration can help consumers now: add a label.

Before regulatory changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s culminating in the 1994 adoption of the now-iconic Nutrition Facts panel, consumers were faced with a variety of hard-to-understand food labels peddling often-misleading information. While labels were required to list calories, serving sizes, and other nutritional information, including such a label was voluntary except when a company made nutritional claims about a food (such as "low in fat" or "high in vitamins"), or a food contained added nutrients. Without standards for what nutritional claims actually meant, and with no uniform nutrition label with which to compare products, consumers were left to decipher labels that were, according to the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, "at best, confusing and, at worst, deceptive economically and potentially harmful." Today, it's difficult to imagine not having the ability to read straightforward facts about the nutrition content of our food and comparison shop between competing products.

The same could be true for broadband. As far back as 2010, our organization has been advocating for the adoption of a broadband nutrition label. In fact, labeling is such a common-sense measure that it has been adopted in the broadband context before. In 2016, the FCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau together rolled out their version of the "broadband nutrition label." "Broadband Facts" resembles Nutrition Facts, emulating a disclosure method the American public is already familiar with. It breaks down a plan's cost and performance, including all additional fees and taxes, so that people don't have to dig through complicated terms of service and contracts to find simple information.

Google is making it even easier to work with Microsoft Office files, with the company now allowing users to directly edit attached Office files in Gmail, much like it already allows with Google Docs or Sheets files. The Verge reports: Now, you can directly open and edit an Office file using the Google Docs editor just by clicking on it -- just like you would a native Google Doc. But the new editing function doesn't convert Office files into Google Docs, instead preserving the original file format. Gmail will allow users to respond to the original email and include the now-updated file (still in an Office file format) without first requiring that they download and then re-attach the updated file.

Google is also working to help ensure that Office files work more smoothly in Google Docs, with the company launching a new Macro Converter add-on for Google Workspace that's designed to help users and organizations import their macros from Excel to Sheets more easily. Similarly, Google is working on adding better document orientation and image support to Google Docs, allowing for documents with both horizontally and vertically oriented pages, along with images placed behind text and watermarks (although the new image features won't be available until next year.)

Facebook is being investigated in Germany for linking usage of its Oculus VR headset to having a Facebook account. TechCrunch reports: Germany's Federal Cartel Office (aka, the Bundeskartellamt) said today that it's instigated abuse proceedings against Facebook to examine the linkage between Oculus VR products and its eponymous social network. In a statement, its president, Andreas Mundt, said: "In the future, the use of the new Oculus glasses requires the user to also have a Facebook account. Linking virtual reality products and the group's social network in this way could constitute a prohibited abuse of dominance by Facebook. With its social network Facebook holds a dominant position in Germany and is also already an important player in the emerging but growing VR (virtual reality) market. We intend to examine whether and to what extent this tying arrangement will affect competition in both areas of activity."

Reached for comment on the FCO Oculus proceeding, a Facebook spokesperson sent us this statement: "While Oculus devices are not currently available for sale in Germany, we will cooperate fully with the Bundeskartellamt and are confident we can demonstrate that there is no basis to the investigation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Brave Software, maker of the Brave Web browser, is introducing a news reader that's designed to protect user privacy by preventing parties -- both internal and third party -- from tracking the sites, articles, and story topics people view. Brave Today, as the service is called, is using technology that the company says sets it apart from news services offered by Google and Facebook. It's designed to deliver personalized news feeds in a way that leaves no trail for Brave, ISPs, and third parties to track. The new service is part of Brave's strategy of differentiating its browser as more privacy-friendly than its competitors'.

Key to Brave Today is a new content delivery network the company is unveiling. Typically, news services use a single CDN to cache content and then serve it to users. This allows the CDN or the service using it to see both the IP address and news feed of each user, and over time, that data can help services build detailed profiles of a person's interests. The Brave Today CDN takes a different approach. It's designed in a way that separates a user's IP address from the content they request. One entity offers a load-balancing service that receives TLS-encrypted traffic from the user. The load balancer then passes the traffic on to the CDN that processes the request.

The load balancer knows the user's IP address but, because the request is encrypted, has no visibility into the content the user is seeking. The CDN, meanwhile, sees only the request but has no way of knowing the IP address that's making it. Responses are delivered in reverse order. To prevent the data from being combined, Brave says that it will use one provider for load balancing and a different one for content delivery. To prevent the load-balancing provider from using the size of the requests and responses to infer the contents of the encrypted data, the service will also use a technique called padding, which adds characters to the plaintext before it's encrypted. The CDN uses several other techniques to preserve the anonymity of users. Among them: stripping out various headers that could be used to identify the person making the request. Furthermore, Brave is also taking steps to shield user information from its own employees. "... [T]he company has configured its account with the load-balancing provider to restrict access to its logging resources," reports Ars. "The load-balancing provider also doesn't provide the ability for customers to use the proxy protocol to inject the requester's IP address into outgoing requests. In case that changes, however, Brave has also entered into a contract with the load balancer that restricts access to logs or use of the protocol, even if Brave asks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Mastercard Inc said on Thursday it was ending the use of its cards on Pornhub after its investigation confirmed the presence of unlawful content on the sex videos site. Pornhub said on Tuesday it had banned video downloads and was allowing only certain partner accounts to upload content after a New York Times column reported that many videos posted on the adult website depicted sexual assault of children. The newspaper column had also described some videos on the site as recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. Pornhub has denied the allegations. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman asked Visa Inc to follow suit. UPDATE: Following Mastercard's termination, an official Visa account tweeted: "Given the allegations of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub's acceptance privileges pending the completion of our ongoing investigation. We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network."

"These actions are exceptionally disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history," Pornhub said in a statement. "Unverified users are now banned from uploading content -- a policy no other platform has put in place, including Facebook, which reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years. In comparison, the Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub over the last three years. This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods."

Apple has moved its self-driving car unit under the leadership of top artificial intelligence executive John Giannandrea, who will oversee the company's continued work on an autonomous system that could eventually be used in its own car, Bloomberg reports. From the report: The project, known as Titan, is run day-to-day by Doug Field. His team of hundreds of engineers have moved to Giannandrea's artificial intelligence and machine-learning group, according to people familiar with the change. Previously, Field reported to Bob Mansfield, Apple's former senior vice president of hardware engineering. Mansfield has now fully retired from Apple, leading to Giannandrea taking over.

Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning before being promoted to Apple's executive team as a senior vice president later that year. He ran Google's machine-learning and search teams before that. At Apple, in addition to the car project, he is in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple's products. Mansfield initially retired from Apple in 2012, only to return for less than a year as its senior vice president in charge of chip technology. Mansfield stepped down from that role in 2013 and then remained as a part-time consultant.

Joel Hruska, writing at ExtremeTech: It's not just a question of whether top-end hardware is available, but whether midrange and last-gen hardware is selling at reasonable prices. If you want to go AMD, be aware that Ryzen 5000 CPUs are hard to find and the 6800 and 6800 XT are vanishingly rare. The upper-range Ryzen 3000 CPUs available on Amazon and Newegg are also selling for well above their prices six months ago. If you want to build an Intel system, the situation is a little different. A number of the 9th and 10th-gen chips are actually priced at MSRP and not too hard to find. The Core i7-9700K has fallen to $269, for example, and it's still one of Intel's fastest gaming CPUs. At that price, paired with a Z370 motherboard, you could build a gaming-focused system, so long as you don't actually need a new high-end GPU. The Core i7-10700K is $359, which isn't quite as competitive, but it squares off reasonably well against chips like the 3700X at $325. Amazon and Newegg both report the 3600X selling for more, at $400 and $345, respectively.

But even if these prices are appealing, the current GPU market makes building a gaming system much above lower-midrange to midrange a non-starter. Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago. Not every GPU has been kicked into the stratosphere, but between the cards you can't buy and the cards you shouldn't buy, there's a limited number of deals currently on the market. Your best bet is to set up price alerts on specific SKUs you are watching with the vendor in question. There is some limited good news, though: DRAM and SSDs are both still reasonably priced. DRAM and SSD prices are both expected to decline 10-15 percent through Q4 2020 compared with the previous quarter, and there are good deals to be had on both. [...] Power supply prices look reasonable, too, and motherboard availability looks solid. If you don't need to buy a GPU right now and you're willing to or prefer to use Intel, there's a more reasonable case to be made for building a system. But if you need a high-end GPU and/or want a high-end Ryzen chip to go with it, you may be better off shopping prebuilt systems or waiting a few more months.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than one billion people in India today have a mobile connection, thanks in part to the proliferation of low-cost Android smartphones and the world's cheapest mobile data plans in recent years. This scale was unimaginable just three decades ago, when India had fewer than 2.5 million telephones in the country. One of the earliest and most pivotal efforts that expanded the reach of telephones in the country took place in the late 1980s. That was when the Indian government backed the idea of setting up telephone booths, or public call offices, across cities and towns. No longer did people need to buy expensive telephones, or pay exorbitant fees and bills. A person could just walk to a nearby mom and pop store, place a call for a couple of cents and move on.

On Wednesday, India's cabinet approved a proposal that seeks to replicate the decades-old strategy -- and its success -- with democratizing Wi-Fi in the world's second-largest internet market. India's IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the government will launch PM WANI (Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface) to "unleash a massive network in the country." The neighborhood stores that served as public call offices could now be public data offices, he said. To make the program a success, the government will not charge any license or registration fee, he said.

The Federal Communication Commission ordered carriers to remove network equipment that poses a security risk, taking another step aimed at China's Huawei and ZTE. From a report: The agency in a 5-0 vote also said it would establish a list of proscribed equipment, and it set up a program to reimburse carriers for replacing suspect gear that will start once Congress devotes an estimated $1.6 billion. The agency said the actions, which affect providers that take federal subsidies, implement a law Congress passed in March. The FCC, Congress and President Donald Trump's administration are confronting China on a range of issues including trade and the novel coronavirus. The FCC accuses Huawei and ZTE of posing a risk of espionage, an allegation each denies. Last year the agency said subsidies can't be used to buy gear from Huawei or ZTE.