Julianne Pepitone from IEEE Spectrum writes about the uncertain future of ham radio. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Will the amateur airwaves fall silent? Since the dawn of radio, amateur operators -- hams -- have transmitted on tenaciously guarded slices of spectrum. Electronic engineering has benefited tremendously from their activity, from the level of the individual engineer to the entire field. But the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, with its ability to easily connect billions of people, captured the attention of many potential hams. Now, with time taking its toll on the ranks of operators, new technologies offer opportunities to revitalize amateur radio, even if in a form that previous generations might not recognize. The number of U.S. amateur licenses has held at an anemic 1 percent annual growth for the past few years, with about 7,000 new licensees added every year for a total of 755,430 in 2018. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission doesn't track demographic data of operators, but anecdotally, white men in their 60s and 70s make up much of the population. As these baby boomers age out, the fear is that there are too few young people to sustain the hobby.

This question of how to attract younger operators also reveals deep divides in the ham community about the future of amateur radio. Like any large population, ham enthusiasts are no monolith; their opinions and outlooks on the decades to come vary widely. And emerging digital technologies are exacerbating these divides: Some hams see them as the future of amateur radio, while others grouse that they are eviscerating some of the best things about it. No matter where they land on these battle lines, however, everyone understands one fact. The world is changing; the amount of spectrum is not. And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it. One of the key debates in ham radio is its main function in the future: Is it a social hobby? A utility to deliver data traffic? And who gets to decide? "Those questions have no definitive or immediate answers, but they cut to the core of the future of ham radio," writes Pepitone. "Loring Kutchins, president of the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc. (ARSFi) -- which funds and guides the 'global radio email' system Winlink -- says the divide between hobbyists and utilitarians seems to come down to age."

"Younger people who have come along tend to see amateur radio as a service, as it's defined by FCC rules, which outline the purpose of amateur radio -- especially as it relates to emergency operations," Kutchins (W3QA) told Spectrum last year. Kutchins, 68, expanded on the theme in a recent interview: "The people of my era will be gone -- the people who got into it when it was magic to tune into Radio Moscow. But Grandpa's ham radio set isn't that big a deal compared to today's technology. That doesn't have to be sad. That's normal."

"Ham radio is really a social hobby, or it has been a very social hobby -- the rag-chewing has historically been the big part of it," says Martin F. Jue (K5FLU), founder of radio accessories maker MFJ Enterprises, in Starkville, Miss. "Here in Mississippi, you get to 5 or 6 o' clock and you have a big network going on and on -- some of them are half-drunk chattin' with you. It's a social group, and they won't even talk to you unless you're in the group."

Charter is raising the "Broadcast TV" fee it imposes on cable plans from $13.50 to $16.45 a month starting in August. "Charter has raised the fee repeatedly -- it stood at $9.95 in early 2019 before a series of price increases," reports Ars Technica. "It $16.45 a month, the fee will cost customers an additional $197.40 per year." From the report: Charter says the Broadcast TV fee covers the amount it pays broadcast television stations (e.g. affiliates of CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox) for the right to carry their channels. But for consumers, it is essentially a hidden fee because Charter's advertised TV prices don't include it. Charter imposes a smaller Broadcast TV fee on its streaming TV plans, but is raising that charge from $6 to $8.95 a month, Stop the Cap wrote. Charter is also raising the base price of its TV service. "Spectrum's most popular TV Select package is expected to increase $1.50/month to $73.99/month," Stop the Cap wrote. "Customers on a promotional pricing plan will not see this rate increase until their promotional pricing expires."

The Broadcast TV fee change will apparently apply even to customers who are on promotional deals that lock in a price for a set amount of time. Charter told us that promotional prices apply to the "package price," which "will not change until the end of their promotional period." But Charter said that the "Broadcast TV Service Charge is separate from the TV package price," so it can go up regardless of whether a customer is still on a promotional deal. For comparison, Comcast's Broadcast TV fee is $14.95 a month.

Google announced that Android is seeing the fastest adoption rates of any version of Android. The Verge reports: According to Google, Android 10 was installed on 100 million devices five months after its launch in September 2019 â" 28 percent faster than it took the company to reach a similar milestone for Android Pie. Google credits the faster adoption rate to improvements the company has been making over the years, like Android Oreo's Project Treble and Android 10's Project Mainline, which makes it easier for hardware companies to create new updates.

But while those numbers are impressive, Google's post is notably missing some crucial information, like what percentage of Android devices are running Android 10 -- a number that's sure to be lower than Google would like. In fact, Google has effectively stopped publishing the breakdown percentage of which Android devices are running which version of Android entirely, following a similar announcement last August that looked back at Android 9 Pie adoption rates. (At the time, Android Pie had been installed on 22.6 percent of Android devices ahead of the release of Android 10.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook is considering imposing a ban on political ads on its social network in the days leading up to the U.S. election in November, according to people familiar with the company's thinking. The potential ban is still only being discussed and hasn't yet been finalized, said the people, who asked not to be named talking about internal policies. A halt on ads could serve as a defense against misleading election-related content spreading widely right as people prepare to vote. Still, there are also concerns that an ad blackout could hurt "get out the vote" campaigns, or limit a candidate's ability to respond widely to breaking news or new information.

Facebook doesn't fact-check ads from politicians or their campaigns, a point of contention for many lawmakers and advocates, who say the policy means ads on the platform could be used to spread lies and misinformation. The social-media giant has been criticized in recent weeks by civil rights groups that say it doesn't do enough to remove efforts to limit voter participation, and a recent audit of the company found Facebook failed to enforce its own voter suppression policies when it comes to posts from U.S. President Donald Trump. Hundreds of advertisers are currently boycotting Facebook's advertising products as part of a protest against its policies.

Google announced plans this week to ban ads that promote stalkerware, spyware, and other forms of surveillance technology that can be used to track other persons without their specific consent. From a report: The change was announced this week as part of an upcoming update to Google Ads policies, set to enter into effect next month, on August 11, 2020.

Examples of products and services that advertisers won't be able to promote via Google Ads anymore include:
1. Spyware and technology used for intimate partner surveillance including but not limited to spyware/malware that can be used to monitor texts, phone calls, or browsing history;
2. GPS trackers specifically marketed to spy or track someone without their consent;
3. Promotion of surveillance equipment (cameras, audio recorders, dash cams, nanny cams) marketed with the express purpose of spying.

The French Parliament unanimously agreed this week to introduce a nationwide age verification system for pornography websites, months after President Emmanuel Macron pledged to protect children against such content. From a report: Macron made the protection of children against adult content online a high-profile issue well before the coronavirus crisis hit. In January, tech companies, internet services providers and the adult movies industry signed a voluntary charter, pledging to roll out tools to help ensure minors don't have access to pornographic content. Within a broader law on domestic violence, the Senate decided in June to introduce an amendment requiring pornography websites to implement an age verification mechanism.

In order to enforce the law, the French audiovisual regulator CSA will be granted new powers to audit and sanction companies that do not comply -- sanctions could go as far as blocking access to the websites in France with a court order. The choice of verification mechanisms will be left up to the platforms. But lawmakers have suggested using credit card verification -- a system first adopted by the U.K., which mulled similar plans to control access to pornography but had to drop them in late 2019 because of technical difficulties and privacy concerns. Italy also approved a similar bill in late June, which raised the same concerns over its feasibility and compliance with the EU laws.

The Trump administration plans to finalize regulations this week that will bar the U.S. government from buying goods or services from any company that uses products from five Chinese companies including Huawei, Hikvision and Dahua, Reuters reported Friday, citing a U.S. official said. From the report: The rule, which was prompted by a 2019 law, could have far-ranging implications for companies that sell goods and services to the U.S. government since they will now need to certify they do not use products from Dahua or Hikvision, even though both are among the top sellers of surveillance equipment and cameras worldwide. The same goes for two-way radios from Hytera and telecommunications equipment or mobile devices like smartphones from Huawei or ZTE. Any company that uses equipment or services in their day-to-day operations from these five companies will no longer be able to sell to the U.S. government without obtaining a U.S. government waiver. Further reading: 'UK Faces Mobile Blackouts if Huawei 5G Ban Imposed By 2023.'

John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Feel free to file Google's release this week of an update to their iPad Gmail app with support for split-screen multitasking under "better late than never," but this is so late it borders on the absurd. It's like the difference between showing up fashionably late and showing up a week after the party. Split-screen multitasking was introduced for the iPad back in 2015 with iOS 9. Five years to add support for a foundational element of the iPad user experience. And an email client is near the top of the list of the type of apps where someone would want to use split-screen. Five years. Google makes a lot of software with terrible user experiences for users who have poor taste. Their iOS software, in particular, has for the most part never suggested that it was designed by people who like -- or even use -- iOS. It's the blind leading the blind. But yet the Gmail app is currently the number one free app in the Productivity category in the App Store.

On the surface, it's tempting to blow this off. To each their own. Whatever floats their boat. Who cares if millions of iPad users are satisfied using an email client that is a poor iPad app, so long as actual good iPad email clients are available to those who do care? But what about those stuck using the Gmail app not because they want to, but because they have to? Who can help them but Apple? I worry that it's not tenable in the long run to expect Apple to continue striving to create well-crafted -- let alone insanely great -- software when so many of its users not only settle for, but perhaps even prefer, software that is, to put it kindly, garbage. There have always been popular Mac and iPhone apps that are objectively terrible apps -- where by "popular" I mean much-used, not much-loved. But what made Apple users Apple users is that they complained vociferously if they had to use a terrible app. Word 6 was a sack of dog shit Microsoft dropped off and set aflame on Mac users' porch, but we all knew it was a flaming bag of dog shit, and even those of us who didn't even use Word were angry about it because it was an insult.

I worry that this sort of "Who cares, it's better than nothing" attitude has seeped into Apple itself, and explains how we wound up with barely modified iPad apps shipping as system apps on the Mac. But more than anything I worry that this exemplifies where Apple has lost its way with the App Store. What exactly is the point of running a strict approval process for apps if not, first and foremost, to ensure that they're good apps? An iPad email app that doesn't support split-screen multitasking for five years is, by definition, not a good app. I'd like to see all the vim, vigor, and vigilance Apple applies to making sure no app on the App Store is making a dime without Apple getting three cents applied instead to making sure there aren't any scams or ripoffs, and that popular apps support good-citizen-of-the-platform features within a reasonable amount of time after those features are introduced in the OS. I don't know exactly how long "reasonable" is, but five fucking years for split-screen support ain't it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The PC industry bounced back in the second quarter of 2020 after its weakest quarter in years mostly due to shelter-in-place orders prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. According to both Gartner and IDC, PC shipments grew year-over-year in the second quarter -- the former says shipments totaled 64.8 million units (a 2.8 percent increase from Q2 2019), while IDC says global shipments reached 72.3 million units, which is 11.2 percent higher compared to the same period last year.

Both organizations attribute the growth to PC production ramping up after supply chains were disrupted in the first quarter and to strong demand, now that more people need computers to work or study from home. "After the PC supply chain was severely disrupted in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the growth this quarter was due to distributors and retail channels restocking their supplies back to near-normal levels," Gartner research director Mikako Kitagawa said. The mobile PC or laptop segment did very well, in particular, due to people's remote learning and working needs. However, both organizations are skeptical that the demand would continue beyond 2020. Gartner and IDC also noted that traditional PC shipments exceeded expectations in the U.S. and in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. "HP and Lenovo topped the list of PC vendors worldwide, with Dell coming in third for both IDC and Gartner," adds Engadget.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lithium-ion batteries play a central role in the world of technology, powering everything from smartphones to smart cars, and one of the people who helped commercialize them says he has a way to cut mass production costs by 90% and significantly improve their safety. Hideaki Horie, formerly of Nissan Motor Co., founded Tokyo-based APB Corp. in 2018 to make "all-polymer batteries" -- hence the company name. The making of a cell, every battery's basic unit, is a complicated process requiring cleanroom conditions -- with airlocks to control moisture, constant air filtering and exacting precision to prevent contamination of highly reactive materials. The setup can be so expensive that a handful of top players like South Korea's LG Chem Ltd., China's CATL and Japan's Panasonic Corp. spend billions of dollars to build a suitable factory.

Horie's innovation is to replace the battery's basic components -- metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes -- with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as "buttering toast." It allows for 10-meter-long battery sheets that can be stacked on top of each other "like seat cushions" to increase capacity, he said. Importantly, the resin-based batteries are also resistant to catching fire when punctured. In March, APB raised $74 million, which is tiny by the wider industry's standards but will be enough to fully equip one factory for mass production slated to start next year. Horie estimates the funds will get his plant in central Japan to 1 gigawatt-hour capacity by 2023.

Bytedance said it's evaluating changes to the corporate structure of its TikTok business as U.S. concerns grow over the parent company's Chinese origins. Bloomberg reports: Executives are discussing options such as creating a new management board for TikTok and establishing a separate headquarters for the app outside of China to distance its operations from Beijing, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Short-video and music app TikTok currently doesn't have its own headquarters separate from Bytedance, which was founded in China and is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. TikTok is considering a number of locations for a global base, the person familiar with the plans said, asking not to be named discussing information that's not public. Its five largest offices are in Los Angeles, New York, London, Dublin and Singapore. "We will move forward in the best interest of our users, employees, artists, creators, partners, and policy makers," TikTok said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: In the last few years, semiconductor manufacturing has become more prevalent and accessible, with MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) technology now having advanced to a point that we can design speakers with characteristics that are fundamentally different from traditional dynamic drivers or balanced armature units. xMEMS' "Montara" design promises to be precisely such an alternative. xMEMS is a new start-up, founded in 2017 with headquarters in Santa Clara, CA and with a branch office in Taiwan. To date the company had been in stealth mode, not having publicly released any product till today. The company's motivations are said to be breaking decades old speaker technology barriers and reinventing sound with new innovative pure silicon solutions, using extensive experience that its founders have collected over years at different MEMS design houses.

The manufacturing of xMEMS' pure silicon speaker is very different to that of a conventional speaker. As the speaker is essentially just one monolithic piece manufactured via your typical lithography manufacturing process, much like how other silicon chips are designed. Due to this monolithic design aspect, the manufacturing line has significantly less complexity versus voice coil designs which have a plethora of components that need to be precision assembled -- a task that is quoted to require thousands of factory workers. The company didn't want to disclose the actual process node of the design, but expect something quite crude in the micron range -- they only confirmed that it was a 200mm wafer technology. Besides the simplification of the manufacturing line, the MEMS speaker features higher consistency membrane movement which allows higher responsiveness and lower THD for activate noise cancellation, compared to a more variable voice coil design. The speaker's frequency response covers the full range from 10Hz to up to 20KHz, and the design is said to be able to compete with planar magnetic designs, promising to have only 0.5% THD at 200Hz -- 20KHz.

"As these speakers are capacitive piezo-driven versus current driven, they are able to cut power consumption to fractions of that of a typical voice coil driver, only using up 42uW of power," adds AnandTech.

schwit1 writes: Indian troops will not be allowed to use some of the world's most well-known applications. The move goes further than for civilians when the government banned 59 apps, including TikTok, from general use. According to India Today, the Indian Army on Wednesday asked its personnel to delete 89 apps from their phones, including apps such as Facebook, Truecaller, Instagram and games like PUBG. "The latest instruction comes as a bid to plug leakage of sensitive national security information from phones of armed forces personnel," the report says. "The Army has set July 15 as the deadline for the security forces personnel to remove the 89 apps from their phones."

Apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and YouTube are O.K. as long as the personnel don't reveal their army background on the platforms.

tlhIngan writes: For those worried that the transition Apple is doing to ARM-based Macs will drop Thunderbolt, Apple has stated that they will continue to support Thunderbolt. This was a worry since Thunderbolt is primarily an Intel design (formerly known as Light Peak) with Apple collaboration, and that none of Apple's ARM based devices support it (not even the ARM Developer Transition Kit).

AI researchers have created a language-model testing tool that discovers major bugs in commercially available cloud AI offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yesterday, a paper detailing the CheckList tool received the Best Paper award from organizers of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference. From a report: NLP models today are often evaluated based on how they perform on a series of individual tasks, such as answering questions using benchmark data sets with leaderboards like GLUE. CheckList instead takes a task-agnostic approach, allowing people to create tests that fill in cells in a spreadsheet-like matrix with capabilities (in rows) and test types (in columns), along with visualizations and other resources. Analysis with CheckList found that about one in four sentiment analysis predictions by Amazon's Comprehend change when a random shortened URL or Twitter handle is placed in text, and Google Cloud's Natural Language and Amazon's Comprehend makes mistakes when the names of people or locations are changed in text. "The [sentiment analysis] failure rate is near 100% for all commercial models when the negation comes at the end of the sentence (e.g. 'I thought the plane would be awful, but it wasn't'), or with neutral content between the negation and the sentiment-laden word," the paper reads.

The new lightweight and royalty-free AVIF image format is coming to web browsers. Work is almost complete on adding AVIF support to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. From a report: The new image format is considered one of the lightest and most optimized image compression formats, and has already gained praise from companies such as Netflix, which considers it superior to existing image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and even the newer WebP. The acronym of AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. As its name hints, AVIF is based on AV1, which is a video codec that was developed in 2015, following a collaboration between Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org (who also worked with Mozilla). At the time, the three decided to pool their respective in-house video codecs (VPX, Thor, and Daala) to create a new one (AV1) that they planned to offer as an open-source and royalty-free alternative to all the commercial video codecs that had fragmented and clogged the video streaming market in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Day traders on viral video app TikTok are encouraging people to speculate on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. Based on an old Internet meme -- an overly sincere and whimsically grammar-challenged Shiba Inu dog -- the digital coin was developed as a Bitcoin-spinoff in 2013, after which it quickly rose to prominence as a gag. From a report: The shenanigans of the cryptocurrency-pumpers appear to be working, at least for now. The price of Dogecoin has nearly doubled since July 6th, rising 95% to $0.00448 from $0.0023, according to data from OnChainFX, a cryptocurrency data tracker. The price of Dogecoin peaked in January 2018 at $0.013 before promptly crashing. It appears a flood of stuck-at-home market hypers is behind the push to hype the cryptocurrency. "Go invest in Dogecoin, make me rich," wrote one pumper. "They cant stop us all," encouraged another. Yet one more: "worth it. i swear #stocks #coins #dogecoin #money"

Google's campus security system subjected Black and Latinx workers to bias and prompted complaints to management, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the situation, leading the company to scrap a key part of the approach. From a report: The internet giant encouraged employees to check colleagues' ID badges on campus, and asked security staff to do the same. This went beyond the typical corporate office system where workers swipe badges to enter. The policy was designed to prevent unauthorized visitors and keep Google's open work areas safe. But some staffers told management that Black and Latinx workers had their badges checked more often than other employees, according to the people, who experienced this themselves or saw friends and colleagues go through it. As a result, these employees felt policed on campus in a similar way that they are under suspicion elsewhere in life, said the people, who weren't authorized to speak publicly about the issue. It's an example of the unconscious, or overlooked, biases that make working in Silicon Valley harder for minorities, the people added.

Australian and British privacy regulators opened a joint probe into Clearview AI, saying they want to examine how the company's facial-recognition technology uses people's data, just days after the company suspended operations in Canada. From a report: The Australian Information Commissioner and the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office said they will focus on the company's use of "scraped" data and biometrics of individuals. Clearview is facing growing scrutiny of the billions of images it has scraped from social media platforms and how the New York-based company shares those with law enforcement agencies. It suspended a contract with its last Canadian client, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, after regulators there said they were investigating allegations Clearview collected personal information without consent and shared it with police. Clearview will cooperate with the U.K. and Australian regulators, Chief Executive Officer Hoan Ton-That said in a statement. The company searches publicly available photos from the Internet in accordance with applicable laws, he said.

Tesla's Elon Musk said the carmaker is on the verge of developing technology to render its vehicles fully capable of driving themselves, repeating a claim he's made for years but been unable to achieve. From a report: The chief executive officer has long offered exuberant takes on the capabilities of Tesla cars, even going so far as to start charging customers thousands of dollars for a "Full Self Driving" feature in 2016. Years later, Tesla still requires users of its Autopilot system to be fully attentive and ready to take over the task of driving at any time. Tesla's mixed messages have drawn controversy and regulatory scrutiny. In 2018, the company blamed a driver who died after crashing a Model X while using Autopilot for not paying attention to the road. Documents made public last year showed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had issued multiple subpoenas for information about crashes involving Tesla vehicles, suggesting the agency may have been preparing a formal investigation of Autopilot.