Facebook could be forced to sell gif creation website Giphy after an investigation by the UK competition regulator found its takeover could harm competition among social media companies and the digital advertising market. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an in-depth investigation earlier this year into Facebook's acquisition of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, after identifying a number of concerns about the $400m deal which was struck last year.

The CMA said in its provisional findings that "our initial view [is] that the only effective way to address the competition issues that we have identified is for Facebook to sell Giphy, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer." The watchdog found that Facebook's ownership of Giphy, which it aims to integrate with its Instagram social media site, could lead to it stopping supplying gifs to other social media sites. Or Facebook could demand more user data from Giphy's social media customers to continue to get access to its gifs, increasing the company's already "significant" market power. "Millions of people share gifs every day with friends, family and colleagues, and this number continues to grow," said Stuart McIntosh, chair of the independent inquiry group investigating the deal. "Giphy's takeover could see Facebook withdrawing gifs from competing platforms or requiring more user data in order to access them."

Several users from Zambia have taken to Twitter informing the general public that WhatsApp has been restricted in the country amidst ongoing general elections holding today. From a report: The president and parliamentary elections culminate in a face-off between current President Edgar Lungu and opposition Hakainde Hichilema. Internet monitoring organization Netblocks further corroborated these reports adding that multiple internet providers in Zambia had restricted access to the American social messaging platform. Some of these networks include Zambian government-owned Zamtel, Airtel Zambia, Liquid Telecom, and MTN. Just this week, reports circulated that the Zambian government had threatened to shut down the internet if Zambians "failed to use the cyberspace during this year's election correctly." The reports say the government intended to go through with its plans from Thursday, the polling day, till Sunday, when vote counts are expected to have ended.

Google has banned SafeGraph, a location data firm whose investors include a former head of Saudi intelligence, Motherboard reported Tuesday. From a report: The ban means that any apps working with SafeGraph had to remove the offending location gathering code from their apps. SafeGraph markets its data to government entities and a wide range of industries, but it also sells the data on the open market to essentially anyone. The news signals Google's continued crackdown on location data firms who sometimes, in violation of Google's policies, pay app developers to include their data harvesting code and then sell the collected data to companies or government agencies. "They are willing to sell extremely fine-grained data and anyone with a credit card can start buying it," Zach Edwards, a researcher who has closely followed the supply chain of various sources of data, told Motherboard in an email last year, when both he and Motherboard were separately investigating SafeGraph.

SafeGraph collected at least some of its location data by having app developers embed the company's code, or software development kit (SDK), into their own apps. Those apps would then track the physical location of their users, which SafeGraph would repackage and then sell to other parties. Google confirmed to Motherboard it told app developers in early June they had seven days to remove SafeGraph's SDK from their apps. If they didn't do this, Google told Motherboard the apps may face enforcement. This can mean removal from the Play Store itself. Beyond its own data, SafeGraph also offers customers the chance to buy related data sets from other providers to enrich the location information, such as the names of property owners in the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from FedScoop: The Department of Defense has awarded a task order worth up to $979 million over a five-year period to Peraton to counter misinformation from U.S. adversaries. The contractor will provide services to U.S. Central Command and its mission partners with operational planning, implementation and assessment services. Peraton has undertaken such work for Central Command since 2016 under its counter-threat messaging support program, and according to the company, the latest contract represents a doubling of work already scheduled to be carried out under the program.

Commenting on the contract, Tom Afferton, president of Peraton's cyber missions sector, said: "Since 2016, Peraton has executed campaigns to promote regional security and stability. Our ability to provide the U.S. government with insight, expertise, and influence helps ensure the safety of Americans, our allies, and the more than 550 million people under U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility, spanning three continents and 20 nations." The award comes after Peraton earlier this month won an IT infrastructure contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which could be worth up to $497 million over seven years. The Virginia company will provide infrastructure-as-a-managed service for storage and computing infrastructure facilities across the U.S. and globally. Announcing the award, Peraton said it will deliver an enterprise-scale solution that integrates on-premise infrastructure with the VA's enterprise cloud architecture.

Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn't without collateral damage as many regular Internet users without a VPN now report "missing content" on Netflix. TorrentFreak reports: There is a flurry of complaints on social media from users whose VPN services were suddenly 'blocked' by Netflix. Previously, these people couldn't play any content while using a VPN. That changed last year. Now, VPN users can still see Netflix originals while other content is hidden and blocked. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-less-annoying-to-vpn-users-now-but-some-titles-are-hidden-200618/

Netflix doesn't explain which IP addresses are blocked and why, but the most recent efforts are much broader than before. This issue was brought to our attention by WeVPN, which noticed that the updated geo-fencing system is blocking its residential IP addresses. These IP addresses are assigned to common consumer ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. While it makes sense for Netflix to put an end to these workarounds, there appears to be some collateral damage. "The collateral damage is that you have hundreds of thousands of legitimate residential Netflix subscribers blocked from accessing Netflix's local country full catalog from their home," a WeVPN spokesperson informs us. While we are unable to verify how many people are facing issues, it is clear that the measures are spilling over to regular subscribers.

While Netflix hasn't released an official comment on the situation, the company is aware of the problems. One user who complained on Twitter, got the advice to contact their ISP to see if their IP address is associated with proxy or VPN use. This is a peculiar suggestion, as the blocking is taking place on Netflix's end. WeVPN told us that the company is experimenting with a solution, which appears to function for now. CyberGhost and Private Internet Access, which were also affected by Netflix's new blockades, say they managed to route around it within a day. In an update, a Netflix spokesperson said that the company is not banning all content for VPN and proxy services. Netflix originals are still available and the streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library.

Stardock has a new app for Windows 11 that brings back the classic appearance of the Windows Start menu. The Verge reports: "This first beta is designed to regain some of the lost functionality in the current Windows 11 Start menu," says Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO. "We have a lot of exciting new features planned to make the Start menu not just more accessible but also more useful to companies and power users." Start11 includes a configuration UI that will support future Start menu designs, according to Stardock. While the previous Start10 app aimed to bring back the classic Windows 7 Start menu to Windows 10, Start11 will go further in future to add extra features to the Windows 11 Start menu. The Start11 beta is available today, priced at $4.99, and offers the choice between a Windows 7-style Start menu or a more modern one that brings back some of the classic style and features of the Start menu.

The White House-backed infrastructure bill now moving toward Senate approval divvies up $65 billion in broadband funding in ways that largely please the big cable and telecom companies. Axios reports: The bipartisan infrastructure bill would devote funding to both broadband deployment and adoption.

The deployment side includes:
- $42.45 billion in grants to states to be used for broadband projects with speeds of at least 100/20 mbps, to be first spent in locations without high-speed internet.
- $2 billion each to support a rural broadband construction program called ReConnect run by USDA and to the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program from NTIA.
- $1 billion in grants to build so-called "middle mile" infrastructure to connect local providers to the larger internet access point.

On the adoption side:
- $14.2 billion to provide a $30-a-month voucher to low-income Americans to pay for internet service, replacing the current $50-a-month Emergency Broadband Benefit program but increasing the number of Americans who will be eligible and giving consumers more choice on how to spend the benefit.
- Requiring that providers who receive money from the state grants offer a low-cost plan, although the bill does not specify a price.
- $2.75 billion for digital inclusion grants, such as projects to improve digital literacy or online skills for seniors.

Why telecom likes it: The bill doesn't include measures that President Biden championed as part of his early infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan. The bill will prioritize funding broadband in areas that lack high-speed service, so existing providers will largely avoid the threat of a government-backed competitor, and the money will be available to a larger pool of providers than just those who offer fiber service. While municipal broadband projects could still receive funding, those networks will not be prioritized when the money is allocated, as Biden's plan originally proposed, and the bill will not eliminate state laws that restrict municipal broadband projects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday night, the US Senate passed an amendment that would limit the plug-in vehicle federal tax credit. Currently, tax payers are eligible for a tax credit of up to $7,500 based on the size of the vehicle's battery for the first 200,000 plug-in vehicles from a given automaker. But Republican Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska introduced a non-binding amendment to the $3.5 trillion budget bill that would means-test this tax credit, restricting it to tax payers with incomes below $100,000.

Perhaps more significantly, Sen. Fischer's amendment also restricts the tax credit to EVs that cost less than $40,000. Consequently, the only battery EVs that will still be eligible for the tax credit will be the Hyundai Ioniq Electric ($34,250), Hyundai Kona EV ($38,565), Mini Cooper SE ($30,750), and the Nissan Leaf S Plus ($39,220). Chevrolet's Bolt EV and Bolt EUV are both below the price threshold, but in 2019 the automaker sold its 200,000th plug-in vehicle, at which point the tax credit began to phase out. The amendment passed, 51-48. Senator Fischer took to Twitter to say that "everyday Americans are living paycheck to paycheck because of the sharp rise in costs due to #Bideninflation. We shouldn't be subsidizing luxury vehicles for the rich using money from hard-working taxpayers." (Inflation is mostly being driven by high prices for used cars, which in turn is a result of the chip shortage.)

The New York City Police Department has spent over $159 million on surveillance systems and maintenance since 2007 without public oversight, according to newly released documents. Engadget reports: The Legal Aid Society (LAS) and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) obtained the documents from the NYPD, which include contracts with vendors. They show that the NYPD has spent millions on facial recognition, predictive policing tech and other surveillance systems. The NYPD made the purchases through a Special Expenses Fund. It didn't need to gain the approval of the NYC Council or other city officials before signing the contracts, as Wired reports.

STOP and other privacy groups lobbied for the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which passed last year and requires the NYPD to disclose details about its public surveillance infrastructure. The Special Expenses Fund was shut down after the legislation passed. LAS and STOP threatened legal action if the NYPD didn't detail its surveillance practices. Among the documents are contracts for Palantir, American Science and Engineering (which provides x-ray vans that can detect weapons in vehicles 1,500 feet away) and Idemia Solutions, which provides biometric services such as facial recognition. The NYPD also signed a contract with KeyW Corporation for Stingray cell tower simulators.

Today, Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic -- two new wearables that are "the fruits of Samsung's smartwatch collaboration with Google," writes Becca Farsace via The Verge. From the report: The Watch 4 Classic starts at $349 for the Bluetooth model, rising to $399 for the LTE model, while the Watch 4 is a little less expensive with a starting price of $249 (or $299 with LTE). Both are available to preorder today, and ship August 27th. The big difference between the two models is that the Watch 4 Classic has one of those physical rotating bezels that we've liked so much on Samsung's previous smartwatches, while if you opt for the standard Watch 4, there's a touch-sensitive bezel accessible by swiping at the edges of the screen. The Watch 4 Classic is also made of a more premium stainless steel rather than the aluminum you'll find on the Watch 4. On the right of both watches are a pair of control buttons.

External differences aside, internally both watches share a lot of the same specs. They're both powered by the same 5nm Exynos W920 processor Samsung detailed yesterday, paired with 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Battery capacity varies between sizes, but Samsung reckons you'll average around 40 hours of battery life regardless of model. There's LTE on select models, but if you were hoping for 5G, you'll be disappointed -- Samsung says it doesn't think it's worth it because the amount of data smartwatches process is too small.

But the biggest departure from Samsung's previous smartwatches is that the Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic aren't running its own Tizen operating system. Instead, their software is the result of a collaboration between Samsung and Google, which was announced in May. Samsung is branding the watches' operating system as "Wear OS Powered by Samsung" although Google has called it Wear OS 3. But either way, the hope is that it combines the best of Tizen with the best of Wear OS. On Samsung's watches specifically, the interface you're looking at is One UI Watch, which is effectively Samsung's skin sitting on top of Wear OS. Think of it as Samsung's One UI software on phones, which works with Google's Android. It gives the Watch 4's interface a similar look and feel to Samsung's previous Tizen-powered watches. Google has promised its collaboration with Samsung will lead to a host of high-level benefits for Wear OS, like improved battery life, faster loading apps, and smoother animations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A bipartisan trio of senators introduced a bill that would rein in app stores of companies they said exert too much market control, including Apple and Alphabet's Google. Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar teamed up with Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn to sponsor the bill, which would bar big app stores from requiring app providers to use their payment system. It would also prohibit them from punishing apps that offer different prices or conditions through another app store or payment system.

"I found this predatory abuse of Apple and Google so deeply offensive on so many levels," Blumenthal said in an interview Wednesday. "Their power has reached a point where they are impacting the whole economy in stifling and strangling innovation." Blumenthal said he expected companion legislation in the House of Representatives "very soon."

Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see different changes in pay if they switch to working from home permanently, with long commuters hit harder, according to a company pay calculator seen by Reuters. From a report: It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley, which often sets trends for other large employers. Facebook and Twitter also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity.

Alphabet's Google stands out in offering employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move. But in practice, some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address. "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from," a Google spokesperson said, adding that pay will differ from city to city and state to state. One Google employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, typically commutes to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time, according estimates by the company's Work Location Tool launched in June.

Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest high-end foldable smartphones on Wednesday with lower prices than last year's offerings in a push to expand foldable demand beyond niche devices. From a report: The tech giant priced its 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Fold3 with 7.6-inch main screen to start at $1,799.99 in the United States, and clamshell Galaxy Z Flip3 at $999.99 - down from the launch prices of last year's models at $1,999 and $1,380, respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 will launch on August 27 starting in markets such as the United States and Europe.

"There's definitely demand for bigger screens as people consume more media content, and foldables are the only form that makes big screens very portable... the price hurdle is the issue," said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities. Foldable phones, with about 8.6 million units expected to be shipped this year, are expected to account for just 0.6% of estimated 1.447 billion smartphones to be shipped. However, that is more than double the 3 million foldables shipped in 2020, and Samsung will lead the market with over 88% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. Besides price drops that analysts said could help capture more demand in the United States and perhaps China, Samsung's foldable unveiled on Wednesday touted lighter, thinner and improved design, durability, and compatibility with a stylus, which could absorb users of Samsung's Galaxy Note phablets whose key feature is the "S Pen".

You may not have heard of "Corporate Memphis," but you've almost certainly seen it. From a report: The illustration style can be found in the trendiest direct-to-consumer subway ads, within the app you use to split restaurant tabs or on the 404 page that attempts to counter your frustration with cutesiness. In fact, Corporate Memphis has become so synonymous with tech marketing that some illustrators simply know it as the "tech aesthetic." But Corporate Memphis has also become a victim of its own success. The once-whimsical, fresh style now feels safe and antiseptic. More conspicuous iterations of it get roasted online, if they get noticed at all; one popular tweet asks, "Why does every website landing page look like this now?" Illustrators are just as often tired of Corporate Memphis, but tech companies continue to commission it.

So why can't tech wean itself off of Corporate Memphis? Part of it has to do with the practical aesthetic considerations that gave rise to the style. But Corporate Memphis has primarily stuck around because tech executives continue to overlook the value of illustration, according to several of the illustrators interviewed for this story. Illustration work is increasingly awarded to the lowest bidder on gig platforms, using tools designed to standardize output. For the few companies that recognize the value of illustration, however, investing in creative talent has paid considerable dividends -- just not in ways that are easily measured.

Though you might assume children are the most tech-savvy generation out there, it turns out there's an area where they're just as behind as adults: passwords. From a report: National Institute of Standards and Technology released research on Wednesday showing that even though kids are taught best practices for creating passwords, they're not following them. NIST surveyed more than 1,500 children, ages 8 to 18, and found that, for example, 87% of high schoolers use the same password for everything. Depending on age group (45% of high schoolers versus 23% of elementary school kids), many share passwords with friends. Researchers suggested that those surveyed don't see password sharing as risky behavior, but rather a matter of building friendships and trust. "The end goal of this research is to better support children and provide recommendations that can be used to provide guidance to them, parents and educators," NIST researcher Yee-Yin Choong said in a statement.

Tim Bray, formerly at Amazon and Google, argues that too many popular consumer app have unexpectedly gotten worse in recent years. In an essay, where he has cited Apple's Photos and Movie apps, Economist app, and MLB as examples, he offers an explanation for why the quality of apps is getting worse: It's obvious. Every high-tech company has people called "Product Managers" (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold. That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted.

It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML. Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you've imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.

China signaled its push to regulate sweeping parts of the economy, which has jolted markets, will be deep and sustained over the next five years. From a report: In a statement late Wednesday published by the State Council, China said it will "actively" work on legislation in areas including national security, technological innovation as well as anti-monopoly, in order to improve the legal framework "much-needed for governing the country." Law enforcement will be strengthened in sectors ranging from food and drugs to education tutoring where people's immediate interests are at stake, the council said.

WhatsApp users will finally be able to move their entire chat history between mobile operating systems -- something that's been one of users' biggest requests to date. From a report: The company today introduced a feature that will soon become available to users of both iOS and Android devices, allowing them to move their WhatsApp voice notes, photos, and conversations securely between devices when they switch between mobile operating systems.

The feature WhatsApp introduced today works with Samsung devices and Samsung's own transfer tool, known as Smart Switch. Today, Smart Switch helps users transfer contacts, photos, music, messages, notes, calendars, and more to Samsung Galaxy devices. Now, it will transfer WhatsApp chat history, too. WhatsApp showed off the new tool at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, and announced Samsung's newest Galaxy foldable devices would get the feature first in the weeks to come. The feature will later roll out to Android more broadly. WhatsApp didn't say when iOS users would gain access.

Ron Miller, writing for TechCrunch: Most people probably don't realize just how much our devices are time driven, whether it's your phone, your laptop or a network server. For the most part, time keeping has been an esoteric chore, taken care of by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. While these devices served their purpose, a couple of Facebook engineers decided there had to be a better way. So they built a new more accurate time keeping device that fits on a PCI Express (PCIe) card, and contributed it to the Open Compute Project as an open source project. At a basic level, says Olag Obleukhov, a production engineer at Facebook, it's simply pinging this time-keeping server to make sure each device is reporting the same time.

"Almost every single electronic device today uses NTP -- Network Time Synchronization Protocol -- which you have on your phone, on your watch, on your laptop, everywhere, and they all connect to these NTP servers where they just go and say, 'what time is it's and the NTP server provides the time," he explained. Before Facebook developed a new way of doing this, there were basically two ways to check the time. If you were a developer, you probably used something like Facebook.com as a time checking mechanism, but a company like Facebook, working at massive scale, needed something that worked even when there wasn't an internet connection.

Companies running data centers have a hardware device called Stratum One, which is a big box that sits in the data center, and has no other job than acting as the time keeper. Because these time-keeping boxes were built by a handful of companies over years, they were solid and worked, but it was hard to get new features. What's more, companies like Facebook couldn't control the boxes because of their proprietary nature. Obleukhov and his colleague research scientist, Ahmad Byagowi began to attack the problem by looking for a way to create these devices by building a PCIe card with off-the-shelf parts that you could stick into any PC with an open slot.

A key House of Representatives panel has pressed for a report to study the use of artificial intelligence to analyze prisoners' phone calls. "But prisoners' advocates and inmates' families say relying on AI to interpret communications opens up the system to mistakes, misunderstandings and racial bias," reports Reuters. From the report: The call for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to further explore the technology, to help prevent violent crime and suicide, accompanies an $81 billion-plus spending bill to fund the DOJ and other federal agencies in 2022 that the Appropriations Committee passed last month. The technology can automatically transcribe inmates' phone calls, analyzing their patterns of communication and flagging certain words or phrases, including slang, that officials pre-program into the system. A House Democratic aide said in an emailed statement they were encouraging the DOJ "to engage with stakeholders in the course of examining the feasibility of utilizing such a system."

Several state and local facilities across the country have already started using the tech, including in Alabama, Georgia and New York. The House panel wants the DOJ to look into potentially leveraging the technology for federal use and to identify gaps or shortcomings in the information it produces. Privacy groups say the technology could amplify racial bias in the justice system and unfairly subject prisoners to unaccountable artificial intelligence. Proponents dispute such criticisms, saying the tech is a vital time-saving tool for law enforcement and does not target specific groups.