Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan helped turn Google into an ad giant. Now they're starting over with a service whose only customers are its users. From a report: A new search engine? One that people have to pay to use? At first blush, it may seem like a textbook example of a startup idea destined never to get anywhere. By definition, any new search engine competes with Google, whose 90 percent-plus market share leaves little oxygen for other players. And we've been accustomed to getting our search for free since well before there was a Google -- which might make paying for it sound like being expected to purchase a phone book. But Neeva is indeed a new search engine, officially launching today, that carries a subscription fee.

Though it's extremely similar to Google in many respects -- with a few twists of its own -- it dumps the web giant's venerable ad-based business model in the interest of avoiding distractions, privacy quandaries, and other compromises. It's free for three months -- long enough for users to grow accustomed to it without obligation -- and $4.95 a month thereafter. Apps for iPhones and iPads, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Brave, are part of the deal. Neeva may have a certain whiff of improbability about it, but its cofounders, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan, are the furthest thing from naifs. Two long-time Google executives with more than a quarter-century of experience at the web giant between them, they have an insider's understanding of how it operates. Moreover, about 30 percent of the roughly 60-person staff they've assembled at Neeva consists of ex-Googlers, including Hall-of-Famers such as Udi Manber (a former head of Google search) and Darin Fisher (one of the inventors of Chrome). They've also secured $77.5 million in funding, including investments from venture-capital titans Greylock and Sequoia.

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that total investments in Starlink would reach between $5 billion and $10 billion before the satellite internet venture achieves positive cash flow. From a report: Over the lifetime of the project, total investments could run to $20-$30 billion, the Tesla CEO told the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "It's a lot, basically," Musk said in a video interview from California.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Google stopped prioritizing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format in its Top News carousel last month. This means website owners no longer need to publish an extra set of pages written in the AMP format. Instead sites need to meet what Google calls "Core Web Vitals." This sounds like great news. As a long-time critic of Google AMP, I wish I could say that Google AMP is over and done with, but I'm not convinced. As I wrote years ago when it launched, Google's AMP is bad -- bad in a potentially web-destroying way. It's bad for how the web is built, it's bad for publishers of credible online content, and it's bad for consumers of that content. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google. Unfortunately, the same can be said of Core Web Vitals.

[...] Before I get into why AMP's replacement might be worse, it would help to back up and define what AMP is, because things have changed since it launched. AMP is now an open-source web component framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. See Google anywhere in that sentence? No, no you don't. Google has distanced itself from AMP considerably over the years, but it hasn't given up control. Google AMP began with the stated goal of speeding up the web. The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers. That sounds good. It's not hard to see how well-meaning people would get behind that idea. The problem is that being fast isn't what makes the web great. It's part of it, but it's not the most important part.

[...] Now AMP is no longer required of publishers, those of us shouting about how this is bad can just shut up now, right? Unfortunately, there are problems with AMP's replacement as well. And those problems go right back to what was wrong with AMP in the first place: Google is in charge of it. As web developer Ethan Marcotte points out: "While the shift to Core Web Vitals is a step in the right direction, it also means that Google alone determines what a 'great page experience' means." Currently it means your page should mostly load in 2.5 seconds. That's not a very high bar to be honest, but it is still a bar and the web does not do bars. Worse, that requirement might change tomorrow. Marcotte makes it clear that he thinks deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing, but I'm not so sure that's true. Neither, it seems, is Marcotte, who goes on to note that Google has "taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight."

Facebook shares posted their biggest intraday gain in two months after it won a dismissal of two antitrust cases, pushing its market value above $1 trillion for the first time. The social-media giant jumped as much as 4.4%, the most since April 29 after a judge granted Facebook's request to dismiss the complaints filed last year by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. Reader phalse phace writes: A federal court on Monday dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust complaint against Facebook, dealing a major setback for the agency's complaint that could have resulted in Facebook divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.

"Although the Court does not agree with all of Facebook's contentions here, it ultimately concurs that the agency's complaint is legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed," reads the filing from U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims -- namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services." The court dismissed the complaint, not the case, meaning the FTC could file its complaint once again.

Neowin: Microsoft today released the first-ever Windows 11 build to Insiders in the Dev channel, bringing build 22000.51. While most of the announced features made it to the build, there are a few missing ones such as support for Android apps. The firm also posted a few known issues for the release. In addition to the build, the company has also posted clarification about the confusion surrounding the minimum system requirements.

The firm starts off by acknowledging that there has been confusion caused by the PC Health Check tool, something that was updated late last week after negative feedback from users about the lack of clarity on Windows 11 compatibility. It says that the tool was "not fully prepared to share the level of detail or accuracy you expected from us on why a Windows 10 PC doesn't meet upgrade requirements," which is why the company is taking down the tool to address the feedback, adding that the tool will be "back online" later in the fall, closer to the general availability of Windows 11. In a blog post, the company adds: [...] Using the principles above, we are confident that devices running on Intel 8th generation processors and AMD Zen 2 as well as Qualcomm 7 and 8 Series will meet our principles around security and reliability and minimum system requirements for Windows 11. As we release to Windows Insiders and partner with our OEMs, we will test to identify devices running on Intel 7th generation and AMD Zen 1 that may meet our principles.

New research by two leading scientists says some dire warnings of environmental damage from technology are overstated. From a report: The giant tech companies with their power-hungry, football-field-size data centers are not the environmental villains they are sometimes portrayed to be on social media and elsewhere. Shutting off your Zoom camera or throttling your Netflix service to lower-definition viewing does not yield a big saving in energy use, contrary to what some people have claimed. Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers.

Those are the conclusions of a new analysis by Jonathan Koomey and Eric Masanet, two leading scientists in the field of technology, energy use and the environment. Both are former researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Mr. Koomey is now an independent analyst, and Mr. Masanet is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (Mr. Masanet receives research funding from Amazon.) They said their analysis, published earlier this month as a commentary article in Joule, a scientific journal, was not necessarily intended to be reassuring. Instead, they said, it is meant to inject a dose of reality into the public discussion of technology's impact on the environment. The surge in digital activity spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, the scientists said, has fueled the debate and prompted dire warnings of environmental damage. They are concerned that wayward claims, often amplified by social media, could shape behavior and policy.

There are some big announcements on DuckDuckGo's blog at SpreadPrivacy.com:

• "Our apps have been downloaded more than 50 million times over the last 12 months, more than all prior years combined...

• "Spurred by the increase in DuckDuckGo app usage, over the last 12 months our monthly search traffic increased 55% and we grew to become the #2 search engine on mobile in many countries including in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. (StatCounter/Wikipedia)."

• "We don't track our users so we can't say for sure how many we have, but based on market share estimates, download numbers, and national surveys, we believe there are between 70-100 million DuckDuckGo users."

• "We're excited to start rolling out additional privacy features to our all-in-one privacy bundle. In a few weeks, DuckDuckGo Email Protection will be available in beta which will give users more privacy without having to get a new inbox. Later this summer, app tracker blocking will be available in beta for Android devices, allowing users to block app trackers and providing more transparency on what's happening behind the scenes on their device. Before the end of the year, we also plan to release a brand-new desktop version of our existing mobile app which people can use as a primary browser."

They're now pulling in over $100 million a year in revenue, "giving us the financial resources to continue growing rapidly," and at the end of 2020 they also landed a "mainly secondary investment" of over $100 million from a long list of investors (which included Tim Berners-Lee as well as Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor).

One thing they're doing with their money is spreading the word about online privacy — by purchasing billboard, radio, and TV ads in 175 different markets across the U.S., with more marketing blitzes now planned soon for Europe and other countries around the world.

"When U.S. law enforcement officials need to cast a wide net for information, they're increasingly turning to the vast digital ponds of personal data created by Big Tech companies via the devices and online services that have hooked billions of people around the world," reports the Associated Press: Data compiled by four of the biggest tech companies shows that law enforcement requests for user information — phone calls, emails, texts, photos, shopping histories, driving routes and more — have more than tripled in the U.S. since 2015. Police are also increasingly savvy about covering their tracks so as not to alert suspects of their interest... In just the first half of 2020 — the most recent data available — Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft together fielded more than 112,000 data requests from local, state and federal officials. The companies agreed to hand over some data in 85% of those cases. Facebook, including its Instagram service, accounted for the largest number of disclosures.

Consider Newport, a coastal city of 24,000 residents that attracts a flood of summer tourists. Fewer than 100 officers patrol the city — but they make multiple requests a week for online data from tech companies. That's because most crimes — from larceny and financial scams to a recent fatal house party stabbing at a vacation rental booked online — can be at least partly traced on the internet. Tech providers, especially social media platforms, offer a "treasure trove of information" that can help solve them, said Lt. Robert Salter, a supervising police detective in Newport.

"Everything happens on Facebook," Salter said. "The amount of information you can get from people's conversations online — it's insane."

As ordinary people have become increasingly dependent on Big Tech services to help manage their lives, American law enforcement officials have grown far more savvy about technology than they were five or six years ago, said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. That's created what Cohn calls "the golden age of government surveillance." Not only has it become far easier for police to trace the online trails left by suspects, they can also frequently hide their requests by obtaining gag orders from judges and magistrates. Those orders block Big Tech companies from notifying the target of a subpoena or warrant of law enforcement's interest in their information — contrary to the companies' stated policies...

Nearly all big tech companies — from Amazon to rental sites like Airbnb, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and service providers like Verizon — now have teams to respond...
Cohn says American law is still premised on the outdated idea that valuable data is stored at home — and can thus be protected by precluding home searches without a warrant. At the very least, Cohn suggests more tech companies should be using encryption technology to protect data access without the user's key.

But Newport supervising police detective Lt. Robert Salter supplied his own answer for people worried about how police officers are requesting more and more data. "Don't commit crimes and don't use your computer and phones to do it."

Jalopnik reports: A new United Kingdom-based study conducted by CarGurus confirms a trend that's been popping up lately: most drivers aren't confident in sharing the road with fully-autonomous vehicles. The site surveyed just over 1,000 automobile owners in the UK to understand their thoughts regarding self-driving cars, making sure to balance respondents by race, income, gender, and more. The study showed that, overall, 36 percent of respondents were concerned about the development of self-driving cars, with another 35 percent identifying as neutral and 30 percent as excited.

41 percent of respondents said they would not be comfortable in any self-driving car scenario, whether they were the one behind the wheel or they were sharing the road with autonomous delivery vehicles...

Ultimately, CarGurus offers a few points that sum up the sentiment of the survey:

- More people are concerned about autonomous vehicles than they are excited. It'll take more convincing and safety assurances to get people involved.

- Most buyers would rather have driver assistance features but still be in charge.
On the bright side, the study also found that people were at least excited about having a car that could steer into a parking spot by itself.

The Houston Chronicle reports: The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a "lawless no-man's-land" and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children.

The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook's messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims. The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009.

Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message. Essentially, they said, Facebook is immune to these types of lawsuits. The majority wrote, "We do not understand Section 230 to 'create a lawless no-man's-land on the Internet' in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking... Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it," the opinion said. "Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking."

The justices explained that Congress recently amended Section 230 to add the possibility of civil liability for websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws. They said under the amended law states may protect residents from internet companies that knowingly or intentionally participate in human trafficking through their action or inaction..... Annie McAdams, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a groundbreaking decision. This is the first case to beat Facebook on its argument that it had immunity under Section 230, she said.

Writing on CNN, an American historian looks at the Supreme Court's recent 8-1 ruling in favor of the free-speech rights of Brandi Levy, who as a 14-year-old cheerleader had posted a photo to Snapchat cursing out her school and its cheerleading program. But the historian also suggests where this ruling came up short: In recent decades the Court has sought to widen public schools' parental and paternalist reach, shrinking the sphere of students' free speech rights... In Levy's case, she was using social media off-campus, outside of school hours, to express a criticism of an extracurricular activity. If her school could control that speech, then there would be very little space left for Levy to express herself.

Yet the Court took too modest an approach to students' rights. The Mahanoy decision was much narrower than the lower court's. The Third Circuit had ruled that the school had no right to interfere with off-campus speech, a decision that would have significantly expanded students' rights. In Mahanoy, the Court ruled that schools may still regulate student speech off-campus, depending on the circumstances (though did not lay out a framework for those circumstances, leaving that to future court decisions)...

[P]ublic schools are more properly (if less creatively) understood as, well, the schools of democracy, where students are taught and guided and given an opportunity to test out the rights of citizenship. Social media have become an integral part of students' public identity — indeed, of many adults' public identity. Students should be taught about the inevitable permanence of ephemeral speech. A Snapchat snap, an Instagram story, a Twitter fleet, all designed to disappear, can easily be made permanent. Levy thought she was making a relatively private, fleeting statement, only to find it memorialized in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

But students should also have more speech protections, be allowed to criticize the institutions in which they spend so much of their time — and be largely free of their school's oversight when they are beyond the schoolhouse gates.

Slashdot reader thegarbz writes: While a lot of focus has been on the TPM requirements for Windows 11, Microsoft has since updated its documentation to provide a complete list of supported processors. At present the list includes only Intel 8th Generation Core processors or newer, and AMD Ryzen Zen+ processors or newer, effectively limiting Windows 11 to PC less than 4-5 years old.

Notably absent from the list is the Intel Core i7-7820HQ, the processor used in Microsoft's current flagship $3500+ Surface Studio 2. This has prompted many threads on Reddit from users angry that their (in some cases very new) Surface PC is failing the Windows 11 upgrade check.
The Verge confirms: Windows 11 will only support 8th Gen and newer Intel Core processors, alongside [Intel's 2016-era] Apollo Lake and newer Pentium and Celeron processors. That immediately rules out millions of existing Windows 10 devices from upgrading to Windows 11... Windows 11 will also only support AMD Ryzen 2000 and newer processors, and 2nd Gen or newer [AMD] EPYC chips. You can find the full list of supported processors on Microsoft's site...

Originally, Microsoft noted that CPU generation requirements are a "soft floor" limit for the Windows 11 installer, which should have allowed some older CPUs to be able to install Windows 11 with a warning, but hours after we published this story, the company updated that page to explicitly require the list of chips above.

Many Windows 10 users have been downloading Microsoft's PC Health App (available here) to see whether Windows 11 works on their systems, only to find it fails the check... This is the first significant shift in Windows hardware requirements since the release of Windows 8 back in 2012, and the CPU changes are understandably catching people by surprise.

Microsoft is also requiring a front-facing camera for all Windows 11 devices except desktop PCs from January 2023 onwards.
"In order to run Windows 11, devices must meet the hardware specifications," explains Microsoft's official compatibility page for Windows 11.

"Devices that do not meet the hardware requirements cannot be upgraded to Windows 11."

Former TikTok employees say ByteDance, the social media app's Chinese parent company, has access to TikTok's American user data and is closely involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development. CNBC reports: A former TikTok recruiter remembers that her hours were supposed to be from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., but more often than not, she found herself working double shifts. That's because the company's Beijing-based ByteDance executives were heavily involved in TikTok's decision-making, she said, and expected the company's California employees to be available at all hours of the day. TikTok employees, she said, were expected to restart their day and work during Chinese business hours to answer their ByteDance counterparts' questions. This recruiter, along with four other former employees, told CNBC they're concerned about the popular social media app's Chinese parent company, which they say has access to American user data and is actively involved in the Los Angeles company's decision-making and product development. These people asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the company. The former employees who spoke to CNBC said the boundaries between TikTok and ByteDance were so blurry as to be almost non-existent.

Most notably, one employee said that ByteDance employees are able to access U.S. user data. This was highlighted in a situation where an American employee working on TikTok needed to get a list of global users, including Americans, who searched for or interacted with a specific type of content -- that means users who searched for a specific term or hashtag or liked a particular category of videos. This employee had to reach out to a data team in China in order to access that information. The data the employee received included users' specific IDs, and they could pull up whatever information TikTok had about those users. This type of situation was confirmed as a common occurrence by a second employee. TikTok downplayed the importance of this access. But one cybersecurity expert said it could expose users to information requests by the Chinese government.

Direction and approvals for all kinds of decision-making, whether it be minor contracts or key strategies, come from ByteDance's leadership, which is based in China. This results in employees working late hours after long days so they can join meetings with their Beijing counterparts. TikTok's dependence on ByteDance extends to its technology. Former employees said that nearly 100% of TikTok's product development is led by Chinese ByteDance employees. The lines are so indistinct that multiple employees described having email addresses for both companies. One employee said that recruiters often find themselves looking for candidates for roles at both companies.

Famed software engineer Miguel de Icaza confirmed on Twitter that you will be able to sideload Android APKs in Windows 11. Android Authority reports: Yesterday, Microsoft surprised us all by announcing that Windows 11 will support native Android app installation. Using the Microsoft Store, you'll be able to search for, install, and use Android apps right on your PC. This is possible through an integration of the Amazon App Store. However, a big question loomed over the announcement: would you be able to sideload Android APKs on Windows 11? Sideloading apps would allow you to install Android programs from outside the Microsoft Store, which would give you a much larger potential library.

It seems the answer to that question is "yes," at least according to famed engineer Miguel de Icaza. Miguel is responsible for numerous software projects, including GNOME, and currently works at Microsoft. However, his Twitter bio explicitly says "Working at Microsoft, not speaking for them," so we need to take this news with some skepticism. Of course, it's not quite clear how sideloading Android APKs on Windows 11 will work. Will you be able to simply download an APK as you would an EXE, double-click it, and install it? Or will there be some sort of workaround protocol? We'll need to wait to see how this develops.

According to new research from Strategy Analytics, half the world's entire population now owns a smartphone in June 2021. Some 4 billion people use a smartphone today. It has taken 27 years to reach this historic milestone. From a report: Yiwen Wu, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, "We estimate the global smartphone user base has risen dramatically from just 30k people in 1994 to 1.00 billion in 2012, and a record 3.95 billion today in June 2021. With an estimated 7.90 billion people in total on the planet in June 2021, it means 50% of the whole world now owns a smartphone. It has taken 27 years to reach this historic milestone."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four days after the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, a member of the "Not My President" Facebook group wrote in a post, "remember, our founding fathers were seen as terrorist [sic] and traitors." A fellow group member commented, "I'll fight for what's right, this corruption has to be stopped immediately." Three months later, Facebook recommended the group to at least three people, despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's repeated promise to permanently end political group recommendations on the social network specifically to stop amplifying divisive content.

The group was one of hundreds of political groups the company recommended to its users in The Markup's Citizen Browser project over the past five months, several of which promoted unfounded election fraud claims in their descriptions or through posts on their pages. Citizen Browser consists of a paid nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically send us data from their Facebook feeds. In a four month period, from Feb. 1 to June 1, the 2,315 members of the Citizen Browser panel received hundreds of recommendations for groups that promoted political organizations (e.g., "Progressive Democrats of Nevada," "Michigan Republicans") or supported individual political figures (e.g., "Bernie Sanders for President 2020," "Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz," "Philly for Elizabeth Warren"). In total, just under one-third of all panelists received a recommendation to join at least one group in this category.

Google has started warning users when they search for a topic that is likely to have poor results, as part of its effort to tackle "data voids" on the search engine. From a report: The new warning was spotted by Renee DiResta, an academic who studies misinformation at Stanford University. "It looks like these results are changing quickly," Google will now caution users. "If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources. First time I've seen this response from Google Search," DiResta said. "Positive step to communicating that something is newsy/breaking (my search was for a breaking culture war story), and highlighting that facts are not all known or consensus on what happened is still being formed."

While social media is regularly linked with misinformation, researchers have long cautioned that search engines can be powerful tools for spreading falsehoods. Data voids, search engine queries that have little to no results, can often lead to fringe claims being given undue prominence -- a particular concern for breaking news. In a blogpost, Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, said: "We've trained our systems to detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn't yet weighed in. We'll now show a notice indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources might be available."

The highly reliable Apple leaker known as "Kang" and a number of other unspecified leakers have reportedly received warnings from lawyers representing Apple. From a report: According to posts on Kang's Weibo account, Apple recently commissioned a law firm to send admonitory letters to a number of leakers. The letter purportedly cautioned leakers that they must not disclose information about unreleased Apple projects because it may give Apple's competitors valuable information and "mislead customers, because what is disclosed may not be accurate." Apple purportedly grabbed screenshots of Kang's Weibo as evidence, which included him talking about problems he experienced with the iPhone, product release dates, and purchase suggestions for his followers, as well as more casual posts. Kang went on to give his personal opinion on the situation. Kang explained that since "I have never published undisclosed product pictures" or sold his information, Apple must take exception to "riddles and dreams" about its undisclosed projects.

Apple leaks vaguely characterized as "dreams" have been popularized in recent years by leakers such as "L0vetodream," providing some insiders with a fun mechanism to hint at Apple's future plans without giving too much away. Even "dreaming will violate their confidentiality mechanism," according to Kang, who said that under Apple's logic "if I have a dream, Apple's competitors will obtain effective information." "Without sending pictures or leaking pictures, I am still used as a target," he said. Kang commented that "I won't post riddles and dreams in the future," suggested that he will be deleting some previous posts on social media, and expressed the need to "tone back" posting about Apple since "talking will be audited."

Amazon's cloud services giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting into the encrypted messaging business. From a report: The company has just announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr -- a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. It claims to be the only "collaboration service" that meets security criteria set out by the NSA. AWS will continue operating Wickr as is, and offer its services to AWS customers, "effective immediately," notes a blog post from Stephen Schmidt, the VP and CISO for AWS, announcing the news. Financial terms were not disclosed in the short announcement. Wickr had raised just under $60 million in funding according to PitchBook data (it also notes a valuation of under $30 million but that seems to be a very old estimate).

An anonymous reader shares a report: By this point in the internet's history, most of us have come to terms with the fact that accessing the web involves giving up information about ourselves every time we visit a website. Mozilla thinks we can do better, and so it's launching Rally, a data-sharing platform and plugin the company claims is the first-of-its-kind in the browser space. With Rally, Mozilla says it hopes to make a case for an equitable market for data, "one where every party is treated fairly" and "where people understand the value of their data." In practice, Rally will allow you to share your browsing data with computer scientists and sociologists studying the web. Out of the gate, they'll be a single study from Princeton University that seeks to understand how people find, consume and share news about politics and COVID-19. At some point later, Beyond the Paywall from Stanford University will examine the economics needed for a more sustainable news landscape.