Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the long-shot presidential candidate from Hawaii, is suing Google for infringing on her free speech (alternative source) when it briefly suspended her campaign's advertising account after the first Democratic debate in June. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in a federal court in Los Angeles, is seeking damages of at least $50 million. It's believed to be the first time a presidential candidate has sued a major technology firm. The New York Times reports: Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign's advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters. After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its website at the top of search results for her name. The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at "a disproportionately high rate" when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates. Ms. Gabbard and her campaign are seeking an injunction against Google from further meddling in the election and damages of at least $50 million.

Apple is officially acquiring Intel's smartphone modem business for $1 billion, the two companies announced today. As rumored earlier this week, the move "would jump-start the iPhone maker's push to take control of developing the critical components powering its devices." The Verge reports: The acquisition means that Apple is now well on the way to producing its own 5G modems for its smartphones, rather than having to rely on Qualcomm for the hardware. Developing its own modems has the potential to deliver big benefits for Apple. In particular, it would no longer be subject to the patent licensing terms of Qualcomm, which were the source of the two companies' lengthy legal dispute. In the past, Apple has accused Qualcomm for charging "disproportionately high" fees in patent royalties, which it was accused of forcing companies to agree to if they want access to its hardware as part of a "no license -- no chips" policy.

The talks with Intel to acquire its modem business are understood to have started last summer, according to the WSJ, when Intel's new CEO Bob Swan arrived with a focus on cleaning up the company and addressing its loss-making segments. Acquiring another business to develop an in-house competitor is a tactic Apple has used at least once before when it spent $300 million to acquire part of Dialog, a company that previously supplied Apple with power management chips for its phones. The time of the acquisition, which included 300 employees, was Apple's biggest ever in terms of headcount.

Stock trading service Robinhood has admitted this week to storing some customers' passwords in cleartext, according to emails the company has been sending to impacted customers. From a report: "On Monday night, we discovered that some user credentials were stored in a readable format within our internal system," the company said. "We resolved the issue, and after thorough review, found no evidence that this information was accessed by anyone outside our response team." Robinhood is now resetting passwords out of an abundance of caution, despite not finding any evidence of abuse. A company spokesperson told ZDNet via phone call that not all Robinhood users were impacted, but could not reveal the exact number.

Atlanta's mayor put a pause on the city's issuance of permits for smartphone-based electric scooter rentals Thursday following two recent deaths. From a report: The city had come under pressure from activists in recent days who had protested on Atlanta's streets after a man riding a scooter was run over by a city transit bus. The executive order from Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms stops short of removing scooters from the city's streets.

"Across the nation, municipalities are dealing with the sudden and unforeseen impact these devices have had on our communities," Bottoms said in a press release. "While some municipalities have banned the devices altogether, the City of Atlanta acted in good faith to work with the private sector to explore innovative solutions to ease existing commuting strains," said Bottoms. "However, as Atlanta has seen two scooter related deaths, this complex issue requires a more thorough and robust dialogue."

Building on a burgeoning ecosystem, Google today debuted a new, faster way to visit pages from Google Images on the web: Swipe to Visit. Courtesy AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), when you select an image in Search on a supported smartphone, you'll see a preview of the website header at the bottom of the screen. From a report: Swiping up will load the corresponding page instantly. Swipe to Visit uses AMP's prerender capability to show previews, so webpages displayed count as pageviews. Better still, publishers who already support AMP don't need to take additional action for their sites to appear in Swipe to Visit on Images. In the coming weeks, they'll be able to track the resulting traffic in a dedicated module within Search Console's performance report for Images.

Amazon's home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a "portal" that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows. From a report: The agreement also requires police to "keep the terms of this program confidential." Dozens of police departments around the country have partnered with Ring, but until now, the exact terms of these partnerships have remained unknown. A signed memorandum of understanding between Ring and the police department of Lakeland, Florida, and emails obtained via a public records request, show that Ring is using local police as a de facto advertising firm. Police are contractually required to "Engage the Lakeland community with outreach efforts on the platform to encourage adoption of the platform/app." In order to partner with Ring, police departments must also assign officers to Ring-specific roles that include a press coordinator, a social media manager, and a community relations coordinator.

Apple has spent nearly a decade dramatically expanding its use of solar energy across the United States, and the effort has paid off. From a report: The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) reports today that Apple now has the most installed solar capacity of any U.S. company, followed by Amazon, as both companies vaulted over prior industry leaders Target and Walmart. But there's a catch. In the Solar Means Business 2017 report, Apple ranked fourth behind both of the top brick-and-mortar retailers and Prologis, an industrial warehouse company, while Amazon ranked tenth, below such retailers as Kohls, Costco, Ikea, and Macy's.

The SEIA's just-published 2018 report showed Apple and Amazon surging as measured by megawatts of installed solar capacity, with Apple at 393.3MW to Amazon's 329.8MW. Target jumped from 203.5MW in 2017 to 229.7MW in 2018, and Walmart from 149.4MW to 208.9MW, but the year-over-year gains from their digital-first competitors were comparatively huge.

For those of us who live in places where driving directions are available at our fingertips, it might be surprising to learn that millions of miles of roads around the world have yet to be mapped. From a blog post: For more than 10 years, volunteers with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project have worked to address that gap by meticulously adding data on the ground and reviewing public satellite images by hand and annotating features like roads, highways, and bridges. It's a painstaking manual task. But, thanks to AI, there is now an easier way to cover more areas in less time". With assistance from Map With AI (a new service that Facebook AI researchers and engineers created) a team of Facebook mappers has recently cataloged all the missing roads in Thailand and more than 90 percent of missing roads in Indonesia. Map With AI enabled them to map more than 300,000 miles of roads in Thailand in only 18 months, going from a road network that covered 280,000 miles before they began to 600,000 miles after. Doing it the traditional way -- without AI -- would have taken another three to five years, estimates Xiaoming Gao, a Facebook research scientist who helped lead the project.

"We were really excited about this achievement because it has proven Map With AI works at a large scale," Gao says. Starting today, anyone will be able to use the Map With AI service, which includes access to AI-generated road mappings in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, with more countries rolling out over time. As part of Map With AI, Facebook is releasing our AI-powered mapping tool, called RapiD, to the OSM community. RapiD is an enhanced version of the popular OSM editing tool iD. RapiD is designed to make adding and editing roads quick and simple for anyone to use; it also includes data integrity checks to ensure that new map edits are consistent and accurate. You can find out more about RapiD at mapwith.ai.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg warned investors Wednesday that the company might need to further slow or temporarily halt its 737 Max production. Boeing has continued to build the 737 Max, its bestselling jet, although at a slower pace. The plane has been grounded since mid-March because of two fatal crashes that killed more than 300 people. Boeing hopes to get approval for the plane to fly again sometime early in the fourth quarter. Muilenburg said any further delays in approval to fly the 737 Max again could jeopardize its production. A further slowdown or temporary shutdown of 737 Max production is "not something we want to do, but an alternative that we have to prepare for," Muilenburg told investors on a conference call. He said the company needs to prepare for that "to make sure we've covered all scenarios." "Boeing is working on a software fix to a safety system which is believed to have caused the two crashes," reports CNN. "But it says it won't be able to present that fix to aviation authorities until September at the earliest, and it hopes to have a certification flight in October."

From there, regulators will need to approve the plane for flight. So it's possible the Boeing 737 Max won't be cleared to fly again until at least late this year.

In an effort to gain an elusive trading edge, some of the world's biggest hedge funds have been snapping up large swaths of alternative data from Fitbits, Rokus, Teslas and employment websites like Glassdoor. Bloomberg reports: Spotting trends and patterns in consumer habits is big business, part of a global market for big data, that a JPMorgan Chase report said could reach more than $200 billion by next year. Still, there's no guarantee all that information will lead to riches. It needs to be scrubbed, organized and aggregated to be of any use. WiFi and Bluetooth connections have become so ubiquitous they're often taken for granted. But hedge funds have become keenly interested in tracking devices that connect to the internet.

Capturing signals they emit can show "when and where new things appear in the world,"; said Hugh O'Connor, director of data sourcing and partnerships at Eagle Alpha, which gathers alternative data for the finance industry. Firms can keep tabs on the number of Roku video-streaming devices or Fitbit fitness trackers being used, the length of time consumers spend on them and their approximate locations. Similarly, if you buy a Tesla Model 3 car and use its Bluetooth-enabled media, a data provider can capture when your new ride is hitting the road. There's been "incredible demand" from some of the world's largest asset managers for this type of information. Hedge funds are also pulling data from mobile phones as they can reveal, in real time, the number of people carrying devices at a particular location. "This can shed light on how many -- or few -- people are frequenting a retailer, supermarket or fast-food joint," the report says. They're also scraping the web to create bespoke collections of public data. "Some examples include pricing trends on airline flights or hotels, inventory figures for products offered on coupon website Groupon, or sales posted for merchandise on Amazon.com," reports Bloomberg.

Additionally, social media sites and credit card data help shed some light on what consumers are thinking. Employment data is also very insightful. "If a tech giant suddenly starts seeking talent from the health-care industry, for example, that could suggest it has a new product or service in the works," reports Bloomberg. "A spike in the removal of job postings from a company's website could signal corporate distress."

Samsung said it has made the necessary improvements to fix the Galaxy Fold and put it back on sale. The April launch of the device was postponed after early reviewers reported broken screens; it's now scheduled to go on sale in September. From a report: "Samsung has taken the time to fully evaluate the product design, make necessary improvements and run rigorous tests," the company said in a statement. Improvements include extending a protective layer to make it clear it is not meant to be removed, as well as strengthening the hinge area with new protection caps. One explanation for the broken screens appears to have been that some reviewers removed a film which they thought was a typical protective layer that came with the phone when first bought.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now six-and-a-half-years away from "First Plasma," officials announced. Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the next stage in the evolution of nuclear energy as a means of generating emissions-free electricity. The section recently installed -- the cryostat base and lower cylinder -- paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core. The entire project is now 65% complete, the officials said. "Manufactured by India, the ITER cryostat is 16,000 cubic meters," ITER officials said in a release. "Its diameter and height are both almost 30 meters and it weighs 3,850 tons. Because of its bulk, it is being fabricated in four main sections: the base, lower cylinder, upper cylinder, and top lid."

With TVs now delivering images faster than movies, TV manufacturers have tried to make up for that discrepancy via a digital process called motion smoothing. Whether you've realized it or not, you've likely watched a movie in motion smoothing, as it's now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. Bilge Ebiri from Vulture says that while this feature was well-intentioned, "most people hate it." He argues: "Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you're watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film." From the report: Motion smoothing is unquestionably a compromised way of watching films and TV shows, which are meticulously crafted to look and feel the way they do. But its creeping influence is so pervasive that at the Cannes Film Festival this May -- the same Cannes Film Festival that so valorizes the magic of the theatrical experience and has been feuding with Netflix for the past two years -- the fancy official monitors throughout the main festival venue had left motion smoothing on.

That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."

Facebook said on Wednesday that new data privacy rules and forthcoming privacy-focused product changes would slow its revenue growth and significantly raise expenses, driving down its shares in after-hours trade even as quarterly revenue topped estimates. Reuters reports: The outlook came soon after the company agreed to pay $5 billion to settle a data privacy probe and disclosed that it faces a new U.S. government antitrust investigation. On Wednesday, Facebook's chief financial officer, Dave Wehner, told analysts that the FTC settlement would require "significant investment" in people and technology. He said ad revenue would be affected by new privacy laws rolling out globally, changes in privacy rules by the operating systems on which Facebook relies, and the company's tweaking its own services. Facebook "earned $16.9 billion in revenue, up 28% from a year ago," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The company posted $2.6 billion in profit, or $0.91 a share, reflecting a one-time $2 billion charge as part of its $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission announced earlier on Wednesday, and an accounting change regarding tax deductions for stock-based compensation. Without those two charges, the company would have earned $1.99 a share, beating analysts' expectations of $1.88."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The most common way public agencies protect our identities is anonymization. This involves stripping out obviously identifiable things such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, and so on. Data sets are also altered to be less precise, columns in spreadsheets are removed, and "noise" is introduced to the data. Privacy policies reassure us that this means there's no risk we could be tracked down in the database. However, a new study in Nature Communications suggests this is far from the case. Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Louvain have created a machine-learning model that estimates exactly how easy individuals are to reidentify from an anonymized data set. You can check your own score here, by entering your zip code, gender, and date of birth.

On average, in the U.S., using those three records, you could be correctly located in an "anonymized" database 81% of the time. Given 15 demographic attributes of someone living in Massachusetts, there's a 99.98% chance you could find that person in any anonymized database. The tool was created by assembling a database of 210 different data sets from five sources, including the U.S. Census. The researchers fed this data into a machine-learning model, which learned which combinations are more nearly unique and which are less so, and then assigns the probability of correct identification.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Justice Department plans to approve the T-Mobile/Sprint merger as part of a settlement involving the sale of spectrum licenses, wholesale access, and a prepaid wireless business to Dish Network, The Wall Street Journal reported today. "The companies have spent weeks negotiating with antitrust enforcers and each other over the sale of assets to Dish to satisfy concerns that the more than $26 billion merger of the No. 3 and No. 4 wireless carriers by subscribers would hurt competition," the Journal wrote, citing people familiar with the matter. As a result of those negotiations, the DOJ is "poised to approve" the merger and could announce a settlement with T-Mobile and Sprint "as soon as this week, but the timing remains uncertain," the Journal wrote. Even if the DOJ approves the merger, T-Mobile and Sprint will still have to defend it in court because of a lawsuit filed against them by 13 states and the District of Columbia. The Wall Street Journal report said the pending settlement "provides for Dish to acquire prepaid subscribers" but didn't say whether those will come from Boost. "Boost's involvement seems likely, given that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's approval of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger is contingent on the divestiture of Boost Mobile and a guarantee that Boost will have access to the T-Mobile/Sprint network," reports Ars Technica.

"Dish would also get a multiyear agreement to use the wireless companies' network while it builds dedicated infrastructure," the Journal wrote. The report didn't say how much spectrum Dish will get.

RED's Hydrogen One phone had a rocky rollout to say the least, and founder Jim Jannard has offered a partial explanation while announcing the first details on the device's successor. From a report: In a post on the Hydrogen-focused H4Vuser.net website, Jannard blames the Hydrogen One's unnamed Chinese ODM (original design manufacturer) for having "significantly under-performed" and making it "impossible" to fix the issues with the phone. Now Jannard's attention is on the Hydrogen Two as well as a long-promised camera module that will work with both phones. The Hydrogen Two is being designed "virtually from scratch" in partnership with a new ODM that is "clearly more capable of building and supporting the product we (and our customers) demand," Jannard says.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Because of the convoluted nature of licensing agreements and the vagaries of corporate competition, what's on Netflix is substantively different than what's available on Hulu or Amazon Prime. Different still are the network-specific streamers, like the up-and-comers HBO Max and Disney+, and the more niche offerings, like Shudder, Kanopy, Mubi, and Criterion. All of them have the same aim, which is to lock up intellectual property to keep people streaming. It's a lot! Plex, a company that sells media server software, has found itself in the strange position of being the answer to that problem. It has two components: the piece of software that organizes media on your computer's hard drive and the client-side program that lets you and your friends and family stream that content from wherever you are on just about any device.

It's clean. It's beautiful. It is extraordinarily simple to use. It looks a little like Netflix. Except, all of the content is custom, tailored by the person running the server. In the company's words, both pieces of its software are "the key to personal media bliss." What Plex doesn't say, however, is how that bliss is achieved. Because what's on Plex servers is populated by people, most of the commercial content you'd find there is probably pirated. And this is the main tension of using Plex: while the software itself is explicitly legal, the media that populates its customer-run servers is not -- at least the stuff protected by copyright law. The company, of course, doesn't condone this particular use of its software.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will have to personally answer to federal regulators under an agreement to settle a privacy case with the Federal Trade Commission that includes a $5 billion penalty for the giant social media company, the agency announced Wednesday. From a report: Separately, Facebook will pay $100 million to settle a case with the Securities and Exchange Commission for making misleading disclosures about the risk that users' data would be misused, the SEC said. Under the FTC agreement, Zuckerberg will be required to submit quarterly compliance reports directly to the federal regulators and to Facebook's board of directors. If the Facebook co-founder or "designated compliance officers" violate the agreement, they could be subject to civil and criminal penalties, the FTC said.

"There's no way that the CEO can bury his head in the sand," James Kohm, head of the FTC's enforcement unit, told NPR. "There's no ostrich defense." According to FTC investigators, Facebook violated the terms of its 2011 settlement with the agency, in which it promised to protect user data from broad sharing with third-party apps. The company also committed new violations, they said. Kohm described two major incidents in which Facebook effectively lied to users. First, the company solicited phone numbers, saying they were being collected to verify users' identity if a password needed to be reset. Millions of people trusted the company, and then Facebook took those phone numbers and used them not just for security, but also for advertising purposes, the FTC said.

Many of us have given up on the idea of carrying around a dedicated work phone. After all, why bother when you can get everything you need on your personal smartphone? Here's one reason: Your work account might be spying on you in the background. From a column: When you add a work email address to your phone, you'll likely be asked to install something called a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile. Chances are, you'll blindly accept it. (What other choice do you have?) MDM is set up by your company's IT department to reach inside your phone in the background, allowing them to ensure your device is secure, know where it is, and remotely erase your data if the phone is stolen. From your company's perspective, there are obvious security reasons for installing an MDM on an employee's phone. But for employees, it's difficult to tell what these invisible profiles are collecting behind the scenes, as they provide people at your company with invisible control over your device. That's why when it comes to your phone, no matter how much you trust your IT department, it's a good idea to keep work and pleasure separate.

MDM profiles, paired with device management tools, allow companies to track employee phones in a single dashboard. They can mitigate security breaches or potential harm from a rogue employee; if you work for a law firm, say, and your boss worries you're leaking sensitive emails from your smartphone, they could remotely wipe your data. MDM profiles can also force you to use a long password on your device, rather than a simple PIN, among other policies.