The continent of Australia, where nearly 25 million people live, "has recorded its first day of no local cases of Covid-19 in almost five months," reports the BBC: Zero cases were reported in the 24 hours between 20:00 on Friday and 20:00 on Saturday - the first time this has happened since 9 June. The state of Victoria - epicentre of Australia's second wave - recorded zero cases for the second day in a row after a 112-day lockdown.

Health officials say more restrictions may be eased in the coming days. "Thank you to all of our amazing health & public health workers & above all else the Australian people," Health Minister Greg Hunt said on his Twitter account.
Australia combined lockdowns with "proactive testing and tracing," the article reports, adding that in addition Victoria "imposed some of the severest stay-at-home and curfew rules in the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: An enormous coral reef has been found at the northern tip of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the first such discovery in 120 years, scientists say. At 500m (1,640ft) high, the reef is taller than New York's Empire State Building and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Scientists on a 12-month mission found the structure, detached from the Great Barrier Reef off Cape York, last week. They were conducting 3D mapping of the sea floor in the area. A team aboard a research vessel owned by the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), a non-profit group based in California, used an underwater robot to explore the reef.

The reef is the first of its kind to be found in the region since the late 1800s, scientists said. There are known to be seven other tall reefs in the region, including the one at Raine Island -- the world's most important green sea turtle nesting area. While the reef is bedded to the ocean floor off North Queensland, it is detached, meaning it is not part of the main body of the Great Barrier Reef. Described as "blade-like," the reef is 1.5km wide (one mile), then rises 500m to its shallowest depth of only 40m below the sea surface. Researchers are expected to continue surveying the northern Great Barrier Reef until 17 November.

"TCP/IP doesn't work at interplanetary distances," 77-year-old Vinton Cerf tells Quanta magazine. "So we designed a set of protocols that do." Specifically, bundle protocols: a disruption/delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocol with nodes that can also store information: A data packet traveling from Earth to Jupiter might, for example, go through a relay on Mars, Cerf explained. However, when the packet arrives at the relay, some 40 million miles into the 400-million-mile journey, Mars may not be oriented properly to send the packet on to Jupiter. "Why throw the information away, instead of hanging on to it until Jupiter shows up?" Cerf said. This store-and-forward feature allows bundles to navigate toward their destinations one hop at a time, despite large disruptions and delays...

So, a couple decades after conceiving of bundle protocols, is the interplanetary internet up and running?

We don't have to build the whole thing and then hope somebody uses it. We sought to get standards in place, as we have for the internet; offer those standards freely; and then achieve interoperability so that the various spacefaring nations could help each other. We're taking the next obvious step for multi-mission infrastructure: designing the capability for an interplanetary backbone network. You build what's needed for the next mission. As spacecraft get built and deployed, they carry the standard protocols that become part of the interplanetary backbone. Then, when they finish their primary scientific mission, they get repurposed as nodes in the backbone network. We accrete an interplanetary backbone over time.

In 2004, the Mars rovers were supposed to transmit data back to Earth directly through the deep space network — three big 70-meter antennas in Australia, Spain and California. However, the channel's available data rate was 28 kilobits per second, which isn't much. When they turned the radios on, they overheated. They had to back off, which meant less data would come back. That made the scientists grumpy. One of the JPL engineers used prototype software — this is so cool! — to reprogram the rovers and orbiters from hundreds of millions of miles away. We built a small store-and-forward interplanetary internet with essentially three nodes: the rovers on the surface of Mars, the orbiters and the deep space network on Earth. That's been running ever since.

We've been refining the design of those protocols, implementing and testing them. The latest protocols are running back-and-forth relays between Earth and the International Space Station... We did another test at the ISS where the astronauts were controlling a little robot vehicle in Germany.

1.76 million people live in the 983,482 square kilometer (379,725 square mile) state of South Australia. This weekend Australia's national broadcaster made a big announcement: South Australia's renewable energy boom has achieved a global milestone. The state once known for not having enough power has become the first major jurisdiction in the world to be powered entirely by solar energy.

For just over an hour on Sunday, October 11, 100 percent of energy demand was met by solar panels alone.

"This is truly a phenomenon in the global energy landscape," Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Audrey Zibelman said. "Never before has a jurisdiction the size of South Australia been completely run by solar power, with consumers' rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent." Large-scale solar farms, like the ones operating at Tailem Bend and Port Augusta, provided the other 23 per cent.

Any excess power generated by gas and wind farms on that day was stored in batteries or exported to Victoria via the interconnector.
South Australia is where Elon Musk installed Tesla's giant Powerpack battery as part of a massive solar and wind farm.

Researchers from Australia have discovered that the widely acclaimed mineral perovskite can be used to transform the solar industry through cheaper and more efficient photovoltaics. The Independent reports: Perovskite, which is forged deep within the Earth's mantle, has been hailed for its unprecedented potential to convert sunlight into electricity. Researchers have already improved its sunlight-to-energy efficiency from around 3 per cent to over 20 per cent in the space of just a few years. "It's unbelievable, a miracle material," Z. Valy Vardeny, a materials science professor from the University of Utah, said about perovskite in 2017. At the time it was thought that it would be at least 10 years before it reached a point that the material could be used in commercial solar cells, however the latest breakthrough could see the wide uptake of the technology much sooner. "It was one of those unusual discoveries that you sometimes hear about in science," said Dr Hall from the University of Melbourne.

With the help of researchers at the University of Sydney, the scientists were able to use computational modeling to solve the problem of instability within the material when exposed to sunlight. The unlikely solution was to undo the disruption caused by light at lower intensities by focussing the light into a high-intensity beam. Dr Hall added: "What we've shown is that you can actually use the material in the state that you want to use it, for a solar cell - all you need to do is focus more light onto it." The research could also have significant implications for data storage, with perovskites offering a way to dramatically increase a device's potential capacity. The study has been published in the journal Nature Materials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It's about the size of Tesla Inc.'s Powerwall, but can store up to three times as much energy over a longer period. That's the promise of a new hydrogen-based energy-storage system for homes and businesses being developed by Australian startup Lavo Hydrogen Technology Ltd. The technology, developed with scientists at the University of New South Wales, uses power from rooftop solar panels to produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis. The gas is stored in a metal hydride container and converted back into electricity when needed using a fuel cell.

Australia's world-beating rooftop-solar take-up rates make it an ideal early market, said Lavo Chief Executive Officer Alan Yu. The unit will go on sale from November, with installations starting in June 2021, subject to final approvals. The company plans to sell 10,000 units a year by 2022. At about triple the price of a Powerwall, the Lavo unit's main selling point will be its ability to store more energy for longer. Each system will initially cost A$34,750 ($24,620) and will be able to hold 40 kilowatt-hours of power -- enough to supply an average household for more than two days, according to the company. Tesla's Powerwall holds about 13.5 kilowatt-hours. Lavo's Yu acknowledged that the higher cost of the system might initially limit interest to energy-technology enthusiasts initially, but he also sees it as a solution for small off-grid rural villages to replace diesel generators or a compact solution for communities and homes cut off from the main grid by natural disasters such as bushfires.

A publicly-funded social network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation "has been proposed as one possible response if Facebook and Google limit services in Australia when the mandatory news code becomes law this year," reports the Guardian: Facebook has warned it will block Australians from sharing news if the landmark plan to make digital platforms pay for news content becomes law. Google has been running a public campaign against the code and launched an international campaign targeting YouTube users when the government announced it would force the company to pay news publishers for content... The proposal for a platform hosted by the ABC is among a raft of risk mitigation proposals in a report commissioned by the Centre for Responsible Technology, "Tech-Xit: Can Australia survive without Google and Facebook?"

The proposed platform would connect the community without harvesting data in the way Google and Facebook do, and could rely on the wide reach of the ABC across local, regional and national communities, as well as the trust the invested in the institution by the public. "An ABC platform which engages the community, allows for a genuine exchange and influence on decision making, and applying principles of independent journalism and storytelling would provide real value to local communities starved of civic engagement," the report says. "[We should] develop viable alternatives to Google and Facebook, such as national online social platform hosted through the ABC..."

The report argues the arrival of the mandatory news code is a chance to push back against the profit or surveillance imperative of the tech giants and look for alternatives. "Google and Facebook's response to the ACCC mandatory news code has placed in stark relief our national over-reliance on them," the director of the Australia Institute's Centre for Responsible Technology, Peter Lewis, said. "This analysis shows that two global corporations that play a dominant role in our civic and commercial institutions are prepared to threaten to withdraw those services to protect their own commercial self-interest."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A new insurance index from the Swiss Re Institute has found just over half of all global GDP -- nearly 42 trillion US dollars -- is dependent on goods and services provided by the natural world. In many places around the world, however, that sturdy foundation is turning to sand. The report, referred to as the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Index, shows a fifth of the world's countries currently stand on fragile ecological ground, with more than a third of their land disrupted by human activity. That's 39 countries with ecosystems that could be at risk of collapse, largely due to widespread declines in biodiversity, whether that be from deforestation, farming, mining, run-off, invasive species, or a decline in pollinators.

The index was designed to give governments and businesses a benchmark for the state of local ecosystems important to their economies, in the hope that the data can help inform relevant insurance solutions for communities at risk. Developing nations in the index with large agricultural sectors -- like Kenya, Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nigeria -- are particularly at risk due to their GDP's reliance on natural resources, but "densely populated and economically important regions" such as Southeast Asia, Europe, and America are also exposed to risk despite their economic diversification. Among the top of the rankings sit Australia and South Africa, which are also among the world's largest economies, and are both also dealing with water scarcity, pollination, and coastal protection issues. "For all 195 nations, researchers assessed the state of 10 'ecosystem services,' such as intact habitat, air quality, water security, soil fertility, coastal protection, erosion, and timber provision," the report adds. "Nearly a third of the countries -- exactly 60 in total -- were found to have ecosystems in a fragile state on more than 20 percent of their land. Only 41 countries had intact ecosystems covering the same expanse of land."

"This index doesn't necessarily mean these ecosystems or the economies that rely on them are doomed, but if we keep tracking the way we are, human activity could very well lead to tipping points and abrupt ecosystem collapse."

The Great Barrier Reef, one of the earth's most precious habitats, lost half of its coral populations in the last quarter-century, a decline that researchers in Australia said would continue unless drastic action is taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. From a report: Researchers studied coral colonies along the length of the reef between 1995 and 2017 and found that almost every coral species had declined. Colony sizes were smaller; there were fewer "big mamas," or older large corals that produce baby corals; and there were fewer of those babies, which are vital to the reef's future ability to breed. "Our results show the ability of the Great Barrier Reef to recover -- its resilience -- is compromised compared to the past, because there are fewer babies, and fewer large breeding adults," Dr. Andy Dietzel, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The study was published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr. Dietzel and other researchers from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Queensland, Australia, measured changes in colony sizes as a way of understanding the capacity of corals to breed. Bleaching -- a process in which corals expel algae and turn white as water temperatures rise -- contributed to steep losses of coral colonies in the northern and central Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017. The southern part of the reef was also exposed to record-setting temperatures in early 2020, according to the researchers, who cited climate change as one of the major drivers of disturbances to the reef. "There is no time to lose," the researchers said in their statement. "We must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions ASAP." "We used to think the Great Barrier Reef is protected by its sheer size -- but our results show that even the world's largest and relatively well-protected reef system is increasingly compromised and in decline," one of the researchers, Terence Hughes, said in a statement. The decline of "branching and table-shaped corals," which provide critical habitats for fish, was especially pronounced, the researchers said.

The European Union has opened up the .eu internet registry for a new owner, offering a five-year contract to oversee its 3.6 million domain names from October 2022. From a report: The EC's Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technologies announced the rebid last week and its director of future networks, Pearse O'Donohue, has been pushing the issue to the DNS industry -- including personally contacting registry operators to encourage them to apply. It is just the latest in a series of rebids for major internet address spaces in recent years -- several of which have been shrouded in claims of corruption, backroom deals and legal threats, including Colombia's .co, India's .in and Australia's .au domains. In the worst example, Colombia's technology minister was accused of cutting a secret deal with US corporation Afilias ahead of its retender: an accusation that gained credence when the Colombian government's own documents contained unexplained references to a different Afilias contract. The government's documents also showed it has used the wrong registration figures for its own internet space and had skewed the process to favor Afilias. Afilias ended up withdrawing from the bid and the contract was re-awarded to US-based Neustar.

Members of the intelligence-sharing alliance Five Eyes, along with government representatives for Japan and India, have published a statement over the weekend calling on tech companies to come up with a solution for law enforcement to access end-to-end encrypted communications. From a report: The statement is the alliance's latest effort to get tech companies to agree to encryption backdoors. The Five Eyes alliance, comprised of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have made similar calls to tech giants in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Just like before, government officials claim tech companies have put themselves in a corner by incorporating end-to-end encryption (E2EE) into their products. If properly implemented, E2EE lets users have secure conversations -- may them be chat, audio, or video -- without sharing the encryption key with the tech companies. Representatives from the seven governments argue that the way E2EE encryption is currently supported on today's major tech platforms prohibits law enforcement from investigating crime rings, but also the tech platforms themselves from enforcing their own terms of service. Signatories argue that "particular implementations of encryption technology" are currently posing challenges to law enforcement investigations, as the tech platforms themselves can't access some communications and provide needed data to investigators.

Google "has decided to freeze plans to launch its curated News Showcase in Australia over claims the draft News Media Bargaining Code is 'unworkable'," reports Engadget: Google still objected to what it called a "must include, must pay" approach in the code where it not only has to pay news outlets it links to, but is obligated to carry those outlets for free. The company argued it would deal with payment demands that would "not [be] financially sustainable" for any firm. It also argued that the code was too broad and could prove costly if there's a claimed violation, with Google potentially paying up to 10 percent of its Australian revenue for a single infraction.
"We believe these conditions could be amended to make it a fair and workable code," Google argues in its blog post, "a code that can work together with commercial deals and programs like News Showcase."

"The agreements we have signed in Australia and around the world show that not only are we willing to pay to license news content for a new product, but that we are able to strike deals with publishers," Google argues in its blog post, "without the draft code's onerous and prescriptive bargaining framework and one-sided arbitration model."

Engadget notes that Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission "previously said that a Google open letter decrying the code 'contains misinformation,' and that the company wouldn't be required to charge for free services or share data with news organizations like the letter suggested."

At least 14m tonnes of plastic pieces less than 5mm wide are likely sitting at the bottom of the world's oceans, according to an estimate based on new research. From a report: Analysis of ocean sediments from as deep as 3km suggests there could be more than 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the world's ocean than there is floating at the surface. Australia's government science agency, CSIRO, gathered and analysed cores of the ocean floor taken at six remote sites about 300km off the country's southern coast in the Great Australian Bight. Researchers looked at 51 samples and found that after excluding the weight of the water, each gram of sediment contained an average of 1.26 microplastic pieces. Microplastics are 5mm or less in diameter and are mostly the result of larger plastic items breaking apart into ever smaller pieces. Stemming the tide of plastic entering the world's waterways and ocean has emerged as a major international challenge. Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at CSIRO and a co-author of the research published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, told the Guardian that finding microplastic in such a remote location and at such depths "points to the ubiquity of plastics, no matter where you are in the world."

The Guardian reports: "Green hydrogen" made with wind and solar electricity could become the cheapest form of what the Australian government has described as a "transformative fuel" much faster than expected, analysts believe. Chinese manufacturers have reported making systems to create hydrogen with renewable energy for up to 80% less than official Australian estimates from just two years ago.

Energy analysts said it suggested green hydrogen was likely to leapfrog hydrogen made with gas and coal as the most cost-effective form of the energy before the end of the decade, and by the time an industry could be developed at scale... Germany has dedicated more than A$15bn of Covid-19 stimulus spending to developing a domestic hydrogen industry, and has agreed with Australia to undertake a joint feasibility study into its potential as an energy source. The European Commission recently launched a strategy that positions green hydrogen as central to the continent's goal to reach "climate neutrality" — net zero emissions — by 2050...

The hope is that hydrogen will prove an emissions-free alternative to coal and gas in industries that operate at incredibly high temperatures.

Roger Cochetti directed internet public policy for IBM from 1994 through 2000 and later served as Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy Officer for VeriSign and Group Policy Director for CompTIA. This week he warned about signs "that the once open, global internet is slowly being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets." And, while these separate American, Chinese, Russian, Australian, European, British, and other "internets" may decide to have some things in common with each other, the laws of political gravity will slowly pull them further apart as interest groups in each country lobby for their own concerns within their own country. Moreover, we will probably see the emergence of a global alternate internet before long...

As background, it's important to recognize that — by almost any measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network control or standards bodies (and those that aren't there likely lie elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users (around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70% of the internet's controls and services... China's ability to control the internet experience within its bordersx` between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical) means to control internet content within their borders. This legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for a government to substantially shut down the internet within a territory...

The first major step in the introduction of a new, China-centric internet may have taken place last year when China introduced to the UN's International Telecommunications Union a proposal for a new type of protocol that would connect networks in a way comparable to, but different from, the way that the internet protocols have done. This was quickly dubbed China's New IP, and it has been the subject of major controversy as the nations and companies decide how to react. Whether a new Chinese-centric internet is based on a new series of protocols or is simply based on a new set of internet domain names and numbers, it seems likely that this alternate internet will give national governments quite a bit more control over what happens within their territories than does the global, open internet. This feature will attract quite a few national governments to join in — not least Russia, Iran and perhaps Turkey and India.

The combined market power of those participating countries would make it difficult for any global internet business to avoid such a new medium. The likely result being two, parallel global computer inter-networking systems... which is pretty much what Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google plans to pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their news over the next three years, its CEO said on Thursday. The move could help it win over a powerful group amid heightened regulatory scrutiny worldwide. CEO Sundar Pichai said the new product called Google News Showcase will launch first in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae. It will be rolled out in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and other countries. About 200 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada and Germany have signed up to the product.

"This financial commitment -- our biggest to date -- will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience," Pichai said in a blog post. The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices. "This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them," Pichai said. The product builds on a licensing deal with media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany in June, which also drew a lukewarm response from the European Publishers Council. Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.

misnohmer writes: In 2019, the Australian site of Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, has been closed to tourists "after the Anangu people said it was being trashed by visitors eroding its surface, dropping rubbish and polluting nearby waterholes," according to CNN. Parks Australia has now has asked Google to remove all imagery of the site uploaded by the community, as per the wishes of the Uluru's owners -- the Anangu Aboriginal people. Google agreed. "Google is "supportive of this request and is in the process of removing the content," Parks Australia said in a statement. "Parks Australia alerted Google Australia to the user-generated images from the Uluru summit that have been posted on their mapping platform and requested that the content be removed in accordance with the wishes of Anangu, Uluru's traditional owners, and the national park's Film and Photography Guidelines," the statement added.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Gizmodo Australia reports: On Thursday, users on 4chan posted what they claimed was the source code of Windows XP. Posting an image of a screenshot allegedly of the source code in front of Window's XP iconic Bliss background, one user wrote 'sooooo Windows XP Source code leaked'. Another Redditor helpfully has uploaded the code as a torrent, assisting in its spread. While there is no confirmation that this code is definitely Windows XP, independent researchers have begun to pick through the source code and believe it stands up to scrutiny.

The Windows XP source code is not the only code which might have leaked. A screenshot of the torrent files contains files and folders named, Xbox, Windows Research Kernel, MS DOS 6.0, Windows NT 3.5 and 4 source code, Windows Embedded and CE and many others. If true, that could spell a disaster for Microsoft because large chunks of Windows XP source code are still used in Windows 10, and as for Open Source, this leak could become a boom for Wine development because Microsoft is notorious for having a great number of internal APIs and various hacks in their APIs which make it difficult to reimplement them properly.

Australia's national public broadcaster ABC reports: A Chinese company with links to Beijing's military and intelligence networks has been amassing a vast database of detailed personal information on thousands of Australians, including prominent and influential figures. A database of 2.4 million people, including more than 35,000 Australians, has been leaked from the Shenzhen company Zhenhua Data which is believed to be used by China's intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security. Zhenhua has the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.

Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs. It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours. While much of the information has been "scraped," some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles.

The company is believed to have sourced some of its information from the so-called "dark web". One intelligence analyst said the database was "Cambridge Analytica on steroids", referring to the trove of personal information sourced from Facebook profiles in the lead up to the 2016 US election campaign. But this data dump goes much further, suggesting a complex global operation using artificial intelligence to trawl publicly available data to create intricate profiles of individuals and organisations, potentially probing for compromise opportunities.

Zhenhua Data's chief executive Wang Xuefeng, a former IBM employee, has used Chinese social media app WeChat to endorse waging "hybrid warfare" through manipulation of public opinion and "psychological warfare"....
The database was leaked to a US academic, who worked with Canberra cyber security company Internet 2.0 and "was able to restore 10 per cent of the 2.4 million records for individuals...

"Of the 250,000 records recovered, there are 52,000 on Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indian, 9,700 British, 5,000 Canadians, 2,100 Indonesians, 1,400 Malaysia and 138 from Papua New Guinea."

"President Donald Trump said Saturday he's given his 'blessing' to a proposed deal that would see the popular video-sharing app TikTok partner with Oracle and Walmart and form a U.S. company," reports CBS News: Mr. Trump has targeted Chinese-owned TikTok for national security and data privacy concerns in the latest flashpoint in the rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. The president's support for a deal comes just a day after the Commerce Department announced restrictions that if put in place could eventually make it nearly impossible for TikTok's legions of younger fans to use the app. Mr. Trump said if completed the deal would create a new company likely to be based in Texas...

TikTok said Oracle and Walmart could acquire up to a cumulative 20% stake in the new company in a financing round to be held before an initial public offering of stock, which Walmart said could happen within the next year. Oracle's stake would be 12.5%, and Walmart's would be 7.5%, the companies said in separate statements. The deal will make Oracle responsible for hosting all TikTok's U.S. user data and securing computer systems to ensure U.S. national security requirements are satisfied. Walmart said it will provide its ecommerce, fulfillment, payments and other services to the new company. "We are pleased that the proposal by TikTok, Oracle, and Walmart will resolve the security concerns of the U.S. administration and settle questions around TikTok's future in the U.S.," TikTok said in a statement.
"According to a source close to the matter, ByteDance would keep the rest of the shares," reports a public TV station in Australia. "But since the Chinese company is 40 per cent owned by American investors, TikTok would eventually be majority American-owned."

Today America's Treasury Department told CBS that the deal still needs to close with Oracle and Walmart, and those documents and conditions then need to be approved by government regulatory. But because of today's announcement, "the department said Saturday that it will delay the barring of TikTok from U.S. app stores until Sept. 27 at 11:59 p.m."