Even though Twitter hit 186 million monetizable daily active users between April and June (up 34 percent year-over-year), it had an operating loss of $124 million during the quarter as ad revenue slowed. "With that in mind, the company says it's looking into other revenue streams beyond advertising, which could include some form of subscriptions," reports Entrepreneur. From the report: CEO Jack Dorsey said on an earnings call Thursday that "you will likely see some tests this year" of different approaches. He noted that he has "a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter," however. "We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business," Dorsey said. It's unclear what types of revenue-driving products and subscription services Twitter has in mind. Without speculating too much, we could see an option to remove ads from the platform for a monthly fee, for instance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: In mid-2019, researchers at Facebook began studying a new set of rules proposed for the automated system that Instagram uses to remove accounts for bullying and other infractions. What they found was alarming. Users on the Facebook-owned Instagram in the United States whose activity on the app suggested they were Black were about 50 percent more likely under the new rules to have their accounts automatically disabled by the moderation system than those whose activity indicated they were white, according to two current employees and one former employee, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the media. The findings were echoed by interviews with Facebook and Instagram users who said they felt that the platforms' moderation practices were discriminatory, the employees said.

The researchers took their findings to their superiors, expecting that it would prompt managers to quash the changes. Instead, they were told not share their findings with co-workers or conduct any further research into racial bias in Instagram's automated account removal system. Instagram ended up implementing a slightly different version of the new rules but declined to let the researchers test the new version. It was an episode that frustrated employees who wanted to reduce racial bias on the platform but one that they said did not surprise them. Facebook management has repeatedly ignored and suppressed internal research showing racial bias in the way that the platform removes content, according to eight current and former employees, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss internal Facebook business. The lack of action on this issue from the management has contributed to a growing sense among some Facebook employees that a small inner circle of senior executives -- including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs and communications, and Joel Kaplan, vice president of global public policy -- are making decisions that run counter to the recommendations of subject matter experts and researchers below them, particularly around hate speech, violence and racial bias, the employees said. Facebook did not deny that some researchers were told to stop exploring racial bias but said that it was because the methodology used was flawed.

"We are actively investigating how to measure and analyze internet products along race and ethnic lines responsibly and in partnership with other companies," Facebook spokeswoman Carolyn Glanville added, noting that the company established a team of experts last year, called Responsible AI, focused on "understanding fairness and inclusion concerns" related to the deployment of artificial intelligence in Facebook products.

KFC announced that it will test chicken nuggets made with 3D bioprinting technology in Moscow, Russia, this fall. Business Insider reports: The chicken chain has partnered with 3D Bioprinting Solutions to create a chicken nugget made in a lab with chicken and plant cells using bioprinting. Bioprinting, which uses 3D-printing techniques to combine biological material, is used in medicine to create tissue and even organs. The 3D-printed chicken nuggets will closely mimic the taste and appearance of KFC's original chicken nuggets, according to the press release. KFC expects the production of 3D-printed nuggets to be more environmentally friendly than the production process of its traditional chicken nuggets. The fall release will mark the first debut of a lab-grown chicken nugget at a global fast-food chain like KFC.

MojoKid writes: Word across a number of business and tech press publications tonight is that NVIDIA is reportedly pursuing a possible acquisition of Arm, the chip IP juggernaut that currently powers virtually every smartphone on the planet (including iPhones), to a myriad of devices in the IoT and embedded spaces, as well as supercomputing and in the datacenter. NVIDIA has risen in the ranks over the past few years to become a force in the chip industry, and more recently has even been trading places with Intel as the most valuable chipmaker in the United States, with a current market cap of $256 billion. NVIDIA has found major success in consumer and pro graphics, the data center, artificial intelligence/machine learning and automotive sectors in recent years, meanwhile CEO Jensen Huang has expressed a desire to further branch out into the growing Internet of Things (IoT) market, where Arm chip designs flourish. However, Arm's current parent company, SoftBank, is looking for a hefty return on its investment and Arm reportedly could be valued at around $44 billion, if it were to go public. A deal with NVIDIA, however, would short-circuit those IPO plans and potentially send shockwaves in the semiconductor market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Smartwatch and wearables maker Garmin has shut down several of its services today to deal with a ransomware attack that has encrypted its internal network and some production systems. The company is currently planning a multi-day maintenance window to deal with the attack's aftermath, which includes shutting down its official website, the Garmin Connect user data-syncing service, and even some production lines in Asia. In messages shared on its website and Twitter, Garmin said the same outage also impacted its call centers, leaving the company in the situation of being unable to answer calls, emails, and online chats sent by users. The incident didn't go unnoticed today and has caused lots of headaches for the company's customers, most of which rely on the Garmin Connect service to sync data about runs and bike rides to Garmin's servers, all of which have been down today. Some Garmin employees are attributing the incident to a new strain of ransomware that appeared earlier this year, called WastedLocker, though this has not yet been verified.

A Facebook engineer said in a farewell video that the company was "failing" to mitigate harm and has "enshrined that failure in our policies." From a report: Max Wang, a Boston-based former engineer who claimed in the recording obtained and published by BuzzFeed News that he joined Facebook in 2011, said he didn't think CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company leaders were acting in malice. "But that does not mean their actions are not going to harm people," Wang said. He added that he did not believe Facebook was "paying enough attention to the raw human needs of the people who use our platform." The company is "trapped by our ideology of free expression," he said. Of particular concern to Wang was how the platform handled -- or didn't handle -- a controversial post by President Trump where he commented, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," about protesters in Minneapolis. Facebook opted not to take any action and left the post up, despite Twitter adding a label to the tweeted version for "glorifying violence." Wang said Zuckerberg's comments at a company meeting discussing the post felt like "gaslighting."

T-Mobile is preparing to make support for Voice over LTE a requirement for all new devices, according to a report Thursday. The move was reportedly detailed in internal T-Mobile documents obtained by Android Police. From a report: The requirement won't mean much for users at first, but as of January 2021, "T-Mobile will require all devices connecting to our nationwide 4G LTE and 5G networks to be VoLTE compatible." That means that older-gen devices that don't include support for the IP-based voice network won't be able to use T-Mobile at all. Further reading: AT&T Tells Customers To Upgrade Their Phones To Avoid Losing Voice Calls -- Two Years Early.

Georgia Tech researcher Mark Riedl didn't expect that his machine learning model "Weird A.I. Yankovic," which generates new rhyming lyrics for existing songs would cause any trouble. But it did. From a report: On May 15, Reidl posted an AI-generated lyric video featuring the instrumental to Michael Jackson's "Beat It." It was taken down on July 14, Reidl tweeted, after Twitter received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice for copyright infringement from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents major and independent record companies. "I am fairly convinced that my videos fall under fair use," Riedl told Motherboard of his AI creation, which is obviously inspired by Weird Al's parodies. Riedl said his other AI-generated lyric videos posted to Twitter have not been taken down.

Riedl has contested the takedown with Twitter but has not received a response. Twitter also did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment. The incident raises the question of what role machine learning plays when it comes to the already nuanced and complicated rules of fair use, which allows for the use of a copyrighted work in certain circumstances, including educational uses and as part of a "transformative" work. Fair use also protects parody in some circumstances. Riedl, whose research focuses on the study of artificial intelligence and storytelling for entertainment, says the model was created as a personal project and outside his role at Georgia Tech. "Weird A.I. Yankovic generates alternative lyrics that match the rhyme and syllables schemes of existing songs. These alternative lyrics can then be sung to the original tune," Riedl said. "Rhymes are chosen, and two neural networks, GPT-2 and XLNET, are then used to generate each line, word by word."

The UK and US have accused Russia of launching a weapon-like projectile from a satellite in space. Joe2020 shares a report: In a statement, the head of the UK's space directorate said: "We are concerned by the manner in which Russia tested one of its satellites by launching a projectile with the characteristics of a weapon." The statement said actions like this "threaten the peaceful use of space." The US has previously raised concerns about this Russian satellite. In his statement, Air Vice Marshal Harvey Smyth, head of the UK's space directorate, said: "Actions like this threaten the peaceful use of space and risk causing debris that could pose a threat to satellites and the space systems on which the world depends. We call on Russia to avoid any further such testing. We also urge Russia to continue to work constructively with the UK and other partners to encourage responsible behaviour in space."

If you want to sell books during a pandemic, it turns out that one of the best places to do it is within easy reach of eggs, milk and diapers. From a report: When the coronavirus forced the United States into lockdown this spring, stores like Walmart and Target, which were labeled essential, remained open. So when anxious consumers were stocking up on beans and pasta, they were also grabbing workbooks, paperbacks and novels -- and the book sales at those stores shot up. "They sell groceries, they sell toilet paper, they sell everything people need during this time, and they're open," said Suzanne Herz, the publisher of Vintage/Anchor. "If you're in there and you're doing your big shop and you walk down the aisle and go, 'Oh, we're bored, and we need a book or a puzzle,' there it is." Big-box stores do not generally break out how much they sell of particular products, but people across the publishing industry say that sales increased at these stores significantly, with perhaps the greatest bump at Target. In some cases there, according to publishing executives, book sales tripled or quadrupled.

Dennis Abboud is the chief executive of ReaderLink, a book distributor that serves more than 80,000 retail stores, including big-box and pharmacy chains. He said that in the first week of April, his company's sales were 34 percent higher than the same period the year before. "With the shelter in place, people were looking for things to do," he said. "Workbooks, activity books and just general reading material saw a big increase."

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says YouTube has for months allowed scammers to use his name and likeness as part of a phony bitcoin giveaway similar to the one that was quickly extinguished by Twitter last week. Scammers used images and video of Wozniak, who left Apple in 1985, to convince YouTube users that he was hosting a live giveaway and anyone who sent him bitcoins will get double the number back, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in state court in San Mateo County, California. "But when users transfer their cryptocurrency, in an irreversible transaction, they receive nothing back," Wozniak said. From a report: The scam also uses the names and images of other tech celebrities, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, according to the suit. YouTube has been "unresponsive" to Wozniak's repeated requests to take down the fraudulent videos, he said. By contrast, Twitter reacted "that same day" after the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and high-profile users were hacked last week as part of a similar phony bitcoin giveaway, he said. "YouTube has been unapologetically hosting, promoting, and directly profiting from similar scams." Wozniak sued along with 17 other alleged victims of the scam. They are asking the court to order YouTube and its parent company Alphabet to immediately remove the videos and to warn users about the scam giveaways. They are also seeking compensatory and punitive damages.

Some companies regret sharing information with tech giant and its Alexa Fund. From a report: When Amazon.com's venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd, it gained access to the technology startup's finances and other confidential information. Nearly four years later, in April, Amazon's cloud-computing unit launched an artificial-intelligence product that does almost exactly what DefinedCrowd does, said DefinedCrowd founder and Chief Executive Daniela Braga. The new offering from Amazon Web Services, called A2I, competes directly "with one of our bread-and-butter foundational products" that collects and labels data, said Ms. Braga. After seeing the A2I announcement, Ms. Braga limited the Amazon fundâ(TM)s access to her company's data and diluted its stake by 90% by raising more capital. Ms. Braga is one of more than two dozen entrepreneurs, investors and deal advisers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal who said Amazon appeared to use the investment and deal-making process to help develop competing products.

In some cases, Amazon's decision to launch a competing product devastated the business in which it invested. In other cases, it met with startups about potential takeovers, sought to understand how their technology works, then declined to invest and later introduced similar Amazon-branded products, according to some of the entrepreneurs and investors. An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn't use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products. Dealing with Amazon is often a double-edged sword for entrepreneurs. Amazon's size and presence in many industries, including cloud-computing, electronic devices and logistics, can make it beneficial to work with. But revealing too much information could expose companies to competitive risks.

Having launched preliminary 5G services using millimeter wave hardware in late 2018, AT&T has technically been operating a 5G network for a year and a half -- but between the "5G+" network's few connection points and extremely limited hardware support, most people in the U.S. couldn't actually use it. Today, AT&T says its low band 5G network is officially available nationwide, reaching a potential 205 million customers across 395 coverage markets. From a report: The carrier is also making 5G service available to a wider range of customers at no additional charge. On a positive note, AT&T is now the second U.S. carrier with a nationwide 5G network, joining T-Mobile, which launched a similarly large offering in December 2019 using long distance but slow low band towers. But T-Mobile's low band 5G peaks at speeds around 225Mbps, nowhere near the 2Gbps peaks seen in Verizon's all but unusably small 5G network, while promising only a 20% improvement over 4G speeds on average. AT&T's low band 5G network is expected to deliver comparable performance but is using a technology called DSS to dynamically split prior 4G spectrum between 4G and 5G phones as user demand fluctuates.

Facebook has agreed to pay a total of $650 million in a landmark class action lawsuit over the company's unauthorized use of facial recognition, a new court filing shows. From a report: The filing represents a revised settlement that increases the total payout by $100 million and comes after a federal judge balked at the original proposal on the grounds it did not adequately punish Facebook. The settlement covers any Facebook user in Illinois whose picture appeared on the site after 2011. According to the new document, those users can each expect to receive between $200 and $400 depending on how many people file a claim.

The case represents one of the biggest payouts for privacy violations to date, and contrasts sharply with other settlements such as that for the notorious data breach at Equifax -- for which victims are expected to received almost nothing. The Facebook lawsuit came about as a result of a unique state law in Illinois, which obliges companies to get permission before using facial recognition technology on their customers.

Google is getting serious about competing with Amazon in online shopping -- just like it did in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. The New York Times: But in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grip America, the push to create an online shopping marketplace to compete with Amazon has taken on new urgency as consumers are avoiding stores and turning to the internet to fill more of their shopping needs. On Thursday, Google announced that it would take steps to bring more sellers and products onto its shopping site by waiving sales commissions and allowing retailers to use popular third-party payment and order management services like Shopify instead of the company's own systems. Currently, commissions on Google Shopping range from a 5 percent to 15 percent cut depending on the products.

Google is usually the starting point for finding information on the internet, but that is often not the case when consumers are searching for a product to buy. More consumers in the United States are turning first to Amazon to find products that they plan to purchase. This has allowed Amazon to build a rapidly growing advertising business, which is a threat to Google's main financial engine. Google's seven-year battle to take on Amazon has had more lows than highs. In 2013, it started a shopping service called Google Shopping Express, offering free same-day delivery. It offered $95 annual memberships for faster delivery and it tried delivering groceries. Google eventually scrapped the efforts. Google Express evolved into an online shopping mall filled with top retailers like Target and Best Buy. In 2017, it added Walmart to its virtual mall, but the partnership was short-lived. Last year, Google ditched Google Express for Google Shopping and introduced a buy button to allow shoppers to use credit cards stored with the company to complete the transaction without leaving the search engine.