When you tune into a National Basketball Association game after the league restarts its season on July 30 following a shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic, things will look a little different. From a report: There won't be empty stands and fake crowd noises like we saw this week at the season openers for Major League Baseball. Instead the NBA will invite fans to attend virtually, displaying their real-time heads in the stands using massive screens and Microsoft software. The social-distanced fan experience, which the NBA and Microsoft announced Friday, will be displayed on 17-foot screens installed on the game court, designed to reproduce the look of otherwise standard stadium seating. Microsoft will use its Teams software's new Together Mode to pipe the faces of up to 300 fans into the "seats." The fans will need to have special tickets to participate.

An anonymous reader shares a reporrt: Apple last month introduced the new "Find My" Network Accessory Program, built to allow third-party products to work with Apple's own Find My app. While Apple's AirTags have yet to be formally announced, this program was seen as a way for Apple to level the playing field with competing Bluetooth location trackers, like Tile, and avoid accusations of Apple monopolizing the market. n a new report today by The Washington Post, there are more aspects to this program that haven't been previously detailed, including far stricter rules for third-party companies using the Find My app. According to an anonymous developer who shared a secret 50-page PDF from Apple about Find My, customers who use Apple's app to locate a device will be barred from using third-party services simultaneously.

Although the details remain sparse, this suggests that while you will be able to link a Tile tracker to Find My and use Apple's app to locate a lost wallet, for example, you would then be prevented from using Tile's own app to do the same. Additionally, because of Apple's restrictions to "always allow" location access, every outside company will have to ask each Apple user for permission to obtain their location, which is a notable hindrance for item location apps. Another issue pointed out by developers is their limited access to the iPhone's Bluetooth antenna and other Apple hardware. While the Find My app can use these pieces of hardware whenever it needs to, third-party software can only use the Bluetooth antenna within certain thresholds, and if the developers go beyond that Apple cuts their access off and prevents the software from working. Notably, according to these developers, Apple does not inform them what the specific threshold is.

More than a thousand Twitter employees and contractors as of earlier this year had access to internal tools that could change user account settings and hand control to others, Reuters is reporting citing two former employees said, making it hard to defend against the hacking that occurred last week. From the report: Twitter and the FBI are investigating the breach that allowed hackers to repeatedly tweet from verified accounts of the likes of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Twitter said on Saturday that the perpetrators "manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials" to log into tools and turn over access to 45 accounts. here On Wednesday, it said that the hackers could have read direct messages to and from 36 accounts but did not identify the affected users.

U.S. officials and scientists unveiled a plan this week to pursue what they called one of the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century: building a quantum Internet. From a report: Speaking in Chicago, one of the main hubs of the work, they set goals for forging what they called a second Internet -- one that would function alongside the globe's existing networks, using the laws of quantum mechanics to share information more securely and to connect a new generation of computers and sensors. Quantum technology seeks to harness the distinct properties of atoms, photons and electrons to build more powerful computers and other tools for processing information. A quantum Internet relies on photons exhibiting a quantum state known as entanglement, which allows them to share information over long distances without having a physical connection.

David Awschalom, a professor at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, called the Internet project a pillar of the nation's quantum-research program. "It's the birth of a new technology. It's becoming a global competition. Every major country on earth has launched a quantum program ... because it is becoming clearer and clearer there will be big impacts," he said in an interview. The United States' top technology rival, China, is investing heavily in quantum technology, a field that could transform information processing and confer big economic and national security advantages to countries that dominate it. Europe is also hotly pursuing the research. The Energy Department and its 17 national labs will form the backbone of the project.

An internal program at Google known as "Android Lockbox" can give the company's employees access to information about how Android users interact with popular, non-Google apps and services, according to a new report in The Information. The Verge: The program, which works via Google Mobile Services, means that employees can reportedly see "sensitive" data about other apps, including how often they're opened and for how long they're used. Sources claim this information has been used to keep tabs on rivals to Google's Gmail service or to monitor Facebook and Instagram usage. Google is also thought to have used it to plan the launch of its TikTok competitor, Shorts. The Information notes that Google's employees have to request permission to see this data in some cases, and that these requests are sometimes denied.

The report comes as Google's business is facing an intense amount of antitrust scrutiny in the US. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is due to testify in Congress; the company is facing an antitrust investigation by almost every US state, and the Justice Department is reportedly planning to file an antitrust case of its own. Although these investigations are believed to be focusing on the company's search and ad businesses, discoveries about possible unfair Android business practices are unlikely to be welcomed. The Information reports that Android Lockbox gets its most useful information when users agree to share information with Google as part of the Android setup process. Users are told that this data allows Google to offer a more personalized experience, but The Information says it also provides data for competitive research.

If you've been following along with Intel's troubles moving away from its 14nm process to 10nm over the years, you probably won't be surprised to learn that the company is now having trouble getting its 7nm process off the ground. From a report: On its Q2 earnings call this week, Intel revealed that it's pushing back its previously planed 7nm rollout by six months -- and that yields for the process are now a year behind schedule. This means that Intel can't produce 7nm chips in an economically viable way at the moment. Intel originally expected to catch up with AMD's 7nm chips in 2021, but didn't say when in 2021. With these new delays, that puts Intel's 7nm chip debut in 2022, at the earliest. By then, AMD may already be on its Ryzen 6000 5nm chips on Zen 4 architecture, according to its roadmap -- though that's assuming AMD doesn't run into any delays itself.

However, there is some good news on the 10nm front. From Intel's Q2 2020 press release, the company says it's "accelerating its transition to 10nm products this year" and growing its portfolio of 10nm-based Intel Core processors. That includes its Tiger Lake chips and its first 10nm-based server CPU Ice Lake. Additionally, Intel said it "expects to deliver a new line of client CPUs (code-named Alder Lake), which will include its first 10nm-based desktop CPU, and a new 10nm-based server CPU (code-named Sapphire Rapids)." Intel originally announced its 10nm chips in 2015, but confirmed it was having yield issues and other problems that July.

The EU has demanded that Google make major concessions relating to its $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-tracking company Fitbit if the deal is to be allowed to proceed imminently, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Ars Technica reports: EU regulators now want the company to pledge that it will not use that information to "further enhance its search advantage" and that it will grant third parties equal access to it, these people said. Brussels insiders said that a refusal by Google to comply with the new demands would probably result in a protracted investigation, adding that such a scenario could ultimately leave the EU at a disadvantage. "It is like a poker game," said a person following the case closely. "In a lengthy probe, the commission risks having fewer or no pledges and still having to clear the deal." They added that the discussions over the acquisition were "intense," and there was no guarantee that any agreement between Brussels and Google would be reached.

Google had previously promised it would not use Fitbit's health data to improve its own advertising, but according to Brussels insiders, the commitment was not sufficient to assuage the EU's concerns nor those of US regulators also examining the deal. Google declined to comment on the specifics of its latest discussions with the European Commission but pointed to an earlier statement saying, "Throughout this process we have been clear about our commitment not to use Fitbit health and wellness data for Google ads and our responsibility to provide people with choice and control with their data. "Similar to our other products, with wearables, we will be transparent about the data we collect and why. And we do not sell personal information to anyone."

According to a new lawsuit first reported by Bloomberg, Tesla alleges that four of its former workers took highly sensitive proprietary information as they left to work for the rival EV startup Rivian. The Verge reports: Tesla even claims Rivian is "knowingly encouraging" this behavior, and it is seeking unspecified punitive damages for what it alleges is "despicable, wanton, oppressive, willful, malicious, [and] duplicitous" conduct. Rivian calls the allegations "baseless." The lawsuit, filed late last week, names four former Tesla employees and Rivian as defendants, though Tesla says it has identified additional people who may have also stolen and brought confidential company information to the EV startup. Tesla says two of the named defendants admitted to taking confidential information. One is Tami Pascale, who was a senior manager in Tesla's staffing department. Tesla says that one day after Pascale signed Rivian's offer letter, she "took at least ten confidential and proprietary documents from Tesla's network," including candidate lists, information about where the automaker finds potential hires, and a "detailed internal write-up of an executive level candidate." Tesla says Pascale initially denied this when confronted by the company's investigative team in early July, but that she ultimately "confessed to taking the confidential and proprietary documents." Pascale allegedly did not agree to delete the files, though, and the company claims she still has her work laptop. Tesla says she shared the screen of her phone with one of the company's investigators, and that when she was asked to search for the company's name, "numerous files" were visible, but Pascale "abruptly ended the session."

Jessica Siron, who was a manager in Tesla's environmental, health, and safety department, allegedly sent documents to her personal Gmail account three days after signing an offer letter from Rivian. Tesla claims Siron initially denied doing this when confronted by its investigative team, but that she admitted to sending one document when pressed. Tesla's complaint is light on details about Rivian's knowledge or encouragement of any wrongdoing, save for the case of Kim Wong, who was a staff recruiter at Tesla up until just a few weeks ago. Tesla claims Wong was contacted by a Rivian hiring manager who told her "Rivian did not have the recruiting templates, structures, formulas, or documents that would be needed" to grow the startup's recruiting efforts, according to the complaint. The same day as that conversation, Tesla says Wong sent "at least sixteen highly confidential recruiting documents from Tesla's network to her Gmail account," including confidential Powerpoint presentations that contained details about the automaker's recruiting and hiring process, as well as salary information.

Rivian's associate general counsel, according to Tesla, took a "cavalier attitude" toward the accusations and "claimed that taking confidential information was common in the industry." Rivian tells The Verge it disagrees with this framing. "In good faith, we discussed with Tesla the seriousness with which we take any allegation. This document misrepresents a conversation between counsel," the spokesperson said. Tesla says in the lawsuit that it was able to figure all this out because its investigative team "recently acquired sophisticated electronic security monitoring tools." If this sounds familiar, it's because a similar fight broke out in 2017 between Alphabet's Waymo and Uber, where Waymo accused Anthony Levandowski of stealing troves of data about self-driving cars and conspiring with then-CEO Travis Kalanick to shepherd that data to Uber. It was eventually settled in early 2018.

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.

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.

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."

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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Foreign manipulation campaigns on social media can be spotted by looking at clues in the timing and length of posts and the URLs they contain, researchers have found. Now researchers say they have developed an automated machine learning system -- a type of artificial intelligence -- that can spot such posts, based on their content. Writing in the journal Science Advances, the team report how they carried out their work using posts from four known social media campaigns that targeted the U.S., attributed to China, Russia and Venezuela.

After training the system on a subset of the data, the team explored five different questions. These included whether the machine learning system could tell apart posts from trolls and those linked to normal activity, and whether feeding the system with troll posts from one month would allow it to spot posts made during the following month by new troll accounts. The results show that the approach worked well, with the posts flagged by the system generally coming from trolls. However, not all troll posts were identified by the system. The team also found differences in the system's performance depending on the country behind the campaign, with Chinese activity easier to spot than Russian activity. "In terms of the Venezuelan campaigns, our performance is near-perfect; close to 99% accurate," said one of the researchers. "In terms of the Chinese one, our performance is around 90%, 91%. The Russian was the most complicated and most sophisticated campaign: our performance was around 85%."

In a new report on Science Advances, Minwoo Choi and a team of scientists in Electronic Engineering and Materials Science in the Republic of Korea, developed a wearable, full-colour OLED display using a two-dimensional (2-D) material-based backplane transistor. Phys.Org reports: They engineered an 18-by-18 thin-film transistor array on a thin molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) film and transferred it to an aluminium oxide (Al2O3)/polyethylene terephthalate (PET) surface. Choi et al. then deposited red, green and blue OLED pixels on the device surface and observed excellent mechanical and electrical properties of the 2-D material. The surface could drive circuits to control the OLED pixels to form an ultrathin, wearable device.

In this work, Choi et al. developed a large-area MoS2 TFT array to operate 324 pixels in a 2-inch RGB OLED, in which the full-color display demonstrated an active-matrix configuration. The RGB OLEDs were made of different optoelectronic characteristics, therefore the team designed the backplane TFTs to control each color pixel. The experimental setup was promising as a wearable display and functioned steadily on human skin without adverse effects. The team used heterogenous material designs to form optoelectronics in the present work. [...] The low stiffness of the ultrathin device prevented the deterioration of optical and electrical properties during substantial mechanical deformation reflexes -- after its transfer to a human hand. Based on the current-voltage characteristics (I-V), the current level did not change during skin shrinkage or skin stretching exercises and the on-state also did not fluctuate during active-matrix display operation. While the device stability is still in development, the team aim to conduct further engineering to improve the MoS2 film for practical applications as a wearable, full-color AMOLED display.

Misleading and harmful online content about Covid-19 has spread "virulently" because the UK still lacks a law to regulate social media, an influential group of MPs has said. From a report: The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee urged the government to publish a draft copy of promised legislation by the autumn. It follows suggestions the Online Harms Bill might not be in force until 2024. The group's chairman said tech firms could not be left to self-regulate. "We still haven't seen correct legislative architecture put in place, and we are still relying on social media companies' consciences," said Julian Knight. "This just is not good enough. Our legislation is not in any way fit for purpose, and we're still waiting. What I've seen so far has just been quite a lot of delay." Google and Facebook have said they have invested in measures to tackle posts that breach their guidelines. But the report has already been welcomed by the children's charity NSPCC. "The committee is right to be concerned about the pace of legislation and whether the regulator will have the teeth it needs," said Andy Burrows, its head of child safety online policy.