When the newly-minted chair of a congressional antitrust committee calls you out, it’s probably time to start worrying. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Rhode Island Representative David N. Cicilline has called on the Federal Trade Commission to look into Facebook’s behavior for potential antitrust violations, citing TechCrunch’s own reporting that the company […]
View More Why a top antitrust lawmaker thinks it’s time to break up FacebookCategory: Government
Snap is under NDA with UK Home Office discussing how to centralize age checks online
Snap is under NDA with the UK’s Home Office as part of a working group tasked with coming up with more robust age verification technology that’s able to robustly identify children online. The detail emerged during a parliamentary committee hearing as MPs in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) questioned Stephen Collins, […]
View More Snap is under NDA with UK Home Office discussing how to centralize age checks onlineVisa policies threaten innovation but aren’t stopping hiring abroad
The growing intensity of the US visa approval process has made it more difficult for companies to attract, support and retain foreign talent. However, recruiters are still sourcing talent from abroad at an increasing clip. According to a recent, roughly 30-page, report published by Envoy – the corporate workforce immigration management platform – US corporate […]
View More Visa policies threaten innovation but aren’t stopping hiring abroadDevin Nunes wants to sue Twitter over mean tweets from parody account of his mom
California Representative Devin Nunes announced that he will file a $250,000 lawsuit against Twitter, alleging that the company engages in “explicit censorship” and has allowed critics to defame him on the platform. Simultaneously complaining that Twitter silences its critics while asking Twitter to silence his critics is a curious legal strategy, but really it’s par […]
View More Devin Nunes wants to sue Twitter over mean tweets from parody account of his momIntel and Cray are building a $500 million ‘exascale’ supercomputer for Argonne National Lab
In a way, I have the equivalent of a supercomputer in my pocket. But in another, more important way, that pocket computer is a joke compared with real supercomputers — and Intel and Cray are putting together one of the biggest ever with a half-billion-dollar contract from the Department of Energy. It’s going to do exaflops!
View More Intel and Cray are building a $500 million ‘exascale’ supercomputer for Argonne National LabBeto O’Rourke could be the first hacker president
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has revealed he was a member of a notorious decades-old hacking group. The former congressman was a member of the Texas-based hacker group, the Cult of the Dead Cow, known for inspiring early hacktivism in the internet age and building exploits and hacks for Microsoft Windows. The group used the […]
View More Beto O’Rourke could be the first hacker presidentApple addresses Spotify’s claims, but not its demands
Two days after Spotify announced that it had filed a suit against Apple with the European Commission over anticompetitive practices, Apple today issued its own response of sorts. In a lengthy statement on its site called “Addressing Spotify’s Claims”, Apple walks through and dismantles some of the key parts of Spotify’s accusations about how the App Store […]
View More Apple addresses Spotify’s claims, but not its demandsBipartisan bill proposes oversight for commercial facial recognition
On Thursday, Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz and Missouri Senator Roy Blunt introduced a bill designed to offer legislative oversight for commercial applications of facial recognition technology. Known as the Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act, the bill would obligate companies to inform consumers about any use of facial recognition and proposes limiting companies from freely sharing […]
View More Bipartisan bill proposes oversight for commercial facial recognitionKamala Harris wants to bring the US Digital Service to local governments, with a $65M budget
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who has already announced her presidential campaign, has introduced a bill that would double down on one of the rare successful tech upgrade programs in the government today: the U.S. Digital Service. Ultimately she wants this quietly effective program to go from federal to state and local level, and command a much larger $65 million yearly budget.
View More Kamala Harris wants to bring the US Digital Service to local governments, with a $65M budgetUK asks competition watchdog to put adtech market review top of its to-do list
The UK government has written to the country’s competition authority to ask the watchdog to respond to concerns about the lack of transparency in the digital advertising market and carry out a formal market study “as soon as possible”. In a letter to the Competition and Markets Authority, chancellor Philip Hammond writes that the online […]
View More UK asks competition watchdog to put adtech market review top of its to-do listFacebook won’t store data in countries with human rights violations — except Singapore
As soon as Mark Zuckerberg said in a lengthy 3,225-word blog post to not build datacenters in countries with poor human rights, he had already broken his promise. He chose to ignore Singapore, which the Facebook founder had only months earlier posted about, declaring the microstate home to the company’s first datacenter in Asia to […]
View More Facebook won’t store data in countries with human rights violations — except SingaporeOpportunity’s last Mars panorama is a showstopper
The Opportunity Mars Rover may be officially offline for good, but its legacy of science and imagery is ongoing — and NASA just shared the last (nearly) complete panorama the robot sent back before it was blanketed in dust.
View More Opportunity’s last Mars panorama is a showstopper