FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today thanked Congress for preventing the U.S. government from enforcing net neutrality rules. "The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session," reports Ars Technica. "Democrats won a vote to reverse the repeal in the Senate but weren't able to get enough votes in the House of Representatives before time ran out." From the report: "I'm pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation," Pai said in a statement marking the deadline passage today. Pai claimed that broadband speed improvements and new fiber deployments in 2018 occurred because of his net neutrality repeal -- although speeds and fiber deployment also went in the right direction while net neutrality rules were in place. "Over the past year, the Internet has remained free and open," Pai said, adding that "the FCC's light-touch approach is working." Pai didn't mention a recent case in which CenturyLink temporarily blocked its customers' Internet access in order to show an ad or a recent research report accusing Sprint of throttling Skype (which Sprint denies).

Tesla is cutting its car prices in the United States by $2,000 to combat a cut in a federal tax credit for its buyers. "Tesla triggered the tax credit phase-out in July when it became the first car maker in the United States to sell more than 200,000 plug-in vehicles," reports CNN. "The government designed the credit to be phased out for each automaker once it reaches that milestone." From the report: Before that benchmark, Tesla buyers were entitled to a tax credit of $7,500 for purchasing a plug-in electric car. But as of January 1, Tesla buyers will only get half that credit, or $3,750, for the next six months. The credit falls to $1,875 in July, and then disappears in 2020. The tax credit phase-out comes just as Tesla was preparing to sell a $35,000 version of its Model 3 sedan, the first time it will be taking aim at the price-conscious mass market. CEO Elon Musk said in an interview on "60 Minutes" that he expects the lower-priced version of the Model 3 to be available in five to six months.

Tesla also reported strong production and sales for the just completed fourth quarter. Total sales were up 8% and Model 3 sales were up even more, about 13%, to 63,150 vehicles. That works out to an average of about 4,900 Model 3s per week in the quarter, putting it in range of its goal of 5,000 Model 3's a week.

In case you needed another reminder that Fortnite was the biggest game of 2018, esports star Ninja says he racked up millions of dollars playing it last year. From a report: Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, told CNN in a story Monday that he made nearly $10 million last year playing Fortnite: Battle Royale. Blevins has more than 12.5 million followers on game streaming service Twitch and more than 20 million subscribers on streaming giant YouTube. The professional gamer told CNN he made most of his fortune from advertisers on YouTube and Twitch, as well as from video game tournaments and sponsors like Samsung and Red Bull. The famous Fortnite gamer snatched the spotlight when he broke a Twitch viewing record in March. Blevins streamed himself and rapper Drake playing duo in Fortnite, which more than 600,000 people watched live at its peak.

Why would you go with the smaller brand, faced with those offerings from tech's behemoths? Or, at the previous displays, why not just buy the cheaper models? Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian: That's the challenge for many consumer electronics firms. Not how to make things, or how to distribute them and get them in front of potential buyers. It's how to make a profit. Out of Fitbit, GoPro, Parrot and Sonos -- each operating in different parts of the consumer electronics business -- only the latter made an operating profit in the last financial quarter, and all four have made a cumulative operating loss so far this year. Making a profit in hardware has always been difficult. By contrast, in software, all the significant costs are in development; reproduction and distribution are trivial -- a digital copy is perfect, and the internet will transport 0s and 1s anywhere, effectively for free. If your product is free and ad-supported, you don't even need anti-piracy measures; you want people to copy it and use it. Software companies typically have gross margins of around 80%, and operating profits of 40% or so.

In hardware, though, the world now seems full of companies living by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's mantra that "your [profit] margin is my opportunity". Indeed, Amazon is one of the reasons why long-term profit is more elusive: it provides a means for small startups to distribute products without formal warehousing arrangements, and compete with bigger businesses at lower cost. That, together with the rise of a gigantic electronic manufacturing capability in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, about an hour's drive north of Hong Kong, has made the modern hardware business one where only those with huge reserves of capital and brand recognition can hope to thrive.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A common belief among tech industry insiders is that Silicon Valley has dominated the internet because much of the worldwide network was designed and built by Americans. Now a growing number of those insiders are worried that proposed export restrictions could short-circuit the pre-eminence of American companies in the next big thing to hit their industry, artificial intelligence.

In November, the Commerce Department released a list of technologies, including artificial intelligence, that are under consideration for new export rules because of their importance to national security. Technology experts worry that blocking the export of A.I. to other countries, or tying it up in red tape, will help A.I. industries flourish in those nations -- China, in particular -- and compete with American companies.

"The number of cases where exports can be sufficiently controlled are very, very, very small, and the chance of making an error is quite large," said Jack Clark, head of policy at OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco. "If this goes wrong, it could do real damage to the A.I. community." The export controls are being considered as the United States and China engage in a trade war. The Trump administration has been critical of the way China negotiates deals with American companies, often requiring the transfer of technology to Chinese partners as the cost of doing business in the country. And federal officials are making an aggressive argument that China has stolen American technology through hacking and industrial espionage.

A popular weather app built by a Chinese tech conglomerate has been collecting an unusual amount of data from smartphones around the world and attempting to subscribe some users to paid services without permission, according to a London-based security firm's research. From a report: The free app, one of the world's most-downloaded weather apps in Google's Play store, is from TCL Communication Technology Holdings, of Shenzhen, China. TCL makes Alcatel- and BlackBerry -branded phones, while a sister company makes televisions. The app, called "Weather Forecast --World Weather Accurate Radar," collects data including smartphone users' geographic locations, email addresses and unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers on TCL servers in China, according to Upstream Systems, the mobile commerce and security firm that found the activity. Until last month, the app was known as "Weather -- Simple weather forecast."

The weather app also has attempted to surreptitiously subscribe more than 100,000 users of its low-cost Alcatel smartphones in countries such as Brazil, Malaysia and Nigeria to paid virtual-reality services, according to Upstream Systems. The security firm, which discovered the activity as part of its work for mobile operators, said users would have been billed more than $1.5 million had it not blocked the attempts.

A research group in Japan has developed an inexpensive, large-scale and flexible thermoelectric generator (FlexTEG) that has high mechanical reliability and can convert heat into electricity efficiently. The findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. From a report: Thermoelectric conversion is one of the most attractive techniques for converting low-temperature (150C or lower) waste heat into electric power. However, widespread adoption of this technology has been hampered by a lack of suitable packaging techniques for thermoelectric generation modules that can operate in the 100-150C range. In addition, the production cost of modules for generating power at room temperature was prohibitive.

In the present study, scientists at Osaka University, Japan, have developed a method to manufacture thermoelectric generation modules in a cost-efficient manner while preserving the conversion efficiency of the modules. They mounted small thermoelectric semiconductor chips on a flexible substrate and were able to achieve reliable and stable adhesion of the electrical contacts between the chips and the flexible substrate. They called their invention FlexTEG.