Six months ago Republican Senator Josh Hawley proposed legislation banning downloads of TikTok in the U.S. But this week he told the Wall Street Journal that "TikTok and its dark-money cronies are spending vast amounts of money to kill these bills."

The newspaper argues that TikTok's "friends" in the U.S. government — backed by billionaire financier Jeff Yass — "helped stall attempts to outlaw America's most-downloaded app." Yass's investment company, Susquehanna International Group, bet big on TikTok in 2012, buying a stake in parent company ByteDance now measured at about 15%. That translates into a personal stake for Yass of 7% in ByteDance. It is worth roughly $21 billion based on the company's recent valuation, or much of his $28 billion net worth as gauged by Bloomberg.

Yass is also one of the top donors to the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that rallied Republican opposition to a TikTok ban. Yass has donated $61 million to the Club for Growth's political-spending arm since 2010, or about 24% of its total, according to federal records. Club for Growth made public its opposition to banning TikTok in March, in an opinion article by its president, at a time when sentiment against the platform among segments of both parties was running high on Capitol Hill... With many Democrats already skeptical of a ban, the whittling away of Republican support killed momentum for several bills, including the bipartisan Restrict Act backed by the Biden administration...

TikTok's own lobbying efforts in Washington have included hundreds of meetings and other contacts, according to a person familiar with the matter. One of its main arguments to Republicans has been that a majority of ByteDance's shareholders are Americans, and some are well-connected conservatives, this person said. The lobbying appears to have helped push House Republican lawmakers to back away from the idea of a ban on TikTok and focus instead on legislation that would put new legal protections in place for users' personal data...

The Biden administration hasn't indicated any change in its effort to ban the app or force its sale. It could still try to use executive powers to ban it, or force a sale to remove Chinese control. But without legislation, analysts say those orders could be overturned in court.

America's Department of Defense recently exercised a contract option with X-energy, a private nuclear reactor engineering company, seeking "a thorough analysis of design options" for a transportable micro nuclear reactor. The Department says its ultimate goal is "a reactor design which is ready for licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for both commercial ventures and military resiliency."

Their announcement also notes that additional work is already underway by another company, BWX Technologies, on a prototype micro reactor: "Due to their extraordinary energy density, nuclear reactors have the potential to serve multiple critical functions for meeting resiliency needs in contested logistical environments," said Dr. Jeff Waksman, Project Pele program manager. "By developing two unique designs, we will provide the Services with a broad range of options as they consider potential uses of nuclear power for both Installation and Operational energy applications in the near future."

The Defense Department uses approximately 30 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day — levels that are only expected to increase due to anticipated electrification of the vehicle fleet and maturation of future energy-intensive capabilities. A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that does not add to the Defense Department's fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments...

"The Strategic Capabilities Office specializes in adapting commercial technology for military purposes," said Jay Dryer, director. "By nurturing and developing multiple micro reactor designs, SCO will not just provide options for the military Services, but will also help jumpstart a truly competitive commercial marketplace for micro reactors."

The use of AI in the economy presents many unanswered questions for policymakers though there is some evidence that it could improve labor productivity, according to Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. From a report: "The impact of AI on the economy and monetary policy will depend on whether AI is just another app or something more profound," Cook said in remarks prepared for delivery at the National Bureau of Economic Research's conference on artificial intelligence in Toronto Friday. "Empirical evidence is still patchy, but there is work showing that generative AI improves productivity in a variety of settings."

Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed's board, was among central bank officials who on Wednesday voted unanimously to hold rates steady in a range of 5.25% to 5.5%. President Joe Biden named Cook as a governor on the board last year. She was endorsed for a full 14-year term in a 51-47 Senate vote earlier this month. Cook predicted that greater use of AI will be similar to the spread of computation in the workplace and could present "a difficult transition for some workers. [...] Any large change in the labor force will generate disruptions and challenges that will need to be addressed to help workers adapt and thrive."

The Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to restrict Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers from easily accessing US telephone numbers. Over the past several years, robocallers have exploited VoIP providers to inundate US citizens with unwanted calls, many of which come from falsified numbers. Previously, the regulations allowed VoIP services relatively uncomplicated access to US phone numbers. ArsTechnica: But under rules adopted by the FCC yesterday, VoIP providers will face some extra hurdles. They will have to "make robocall-related certifications to help ensure compliance with the Commission's rules targeting illegal robocalls," and "disclose and keep current information about their ownership, including foreign ownership, to mitigate the risk of providing bad actors abroad with access to US numbering resources," the FCC said. The FCC order will take effect 30 days after it's published in the Federal Register. A public draft of the order was released ahead of the FCC meeting.

In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said "we cannot expect perfection" from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.

Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.

Brazilian engineer Luiz Andre Barroso, who ripped up the rulebook at Google, has died. His radical ideas for data centers laid the foundations for cloud computing. Wired: Luiz Andre Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley's development of cloud computing.

Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of "the data center as a computer," which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.

Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google's infrastructure organization, says Barroso left an indelible imprint at the company whose contributions to the industry are countless. "We lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader," she writes in a statement on behalf of the company.

FrankOVD writes: Google is being sued by a widow who says her husband drowned in September 2022 after Google Maps directed him over a collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina. Google failed to correct its map service despite warnings about the broken bridge two years before the accident, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by Alicia Paxson in Wake County Superior Court. Philip Paxson "died tragically while driving home from his daughter's ninth birthday party, when he drove off of an unmarked, unbarricaded collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina while following GPS directions," the complaint said.

The Snow Creek Bridge reportedly collapsed in 2013 and wasn't repaired. Barricades were typically in place but "were removed after being vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck," according to The Charlotte Observer. The lawsuit has five defendants, including Google and its owner Alphabet. The other defendants are James Tarlton and two local business entities called Tarde, LLC and Hinckley Gauvain, LLC. Tarlton and the two businesses "owned, controlled, and/or were otherwise responsible for the land" containing the bridge, the lawsuit said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has been trying to publicly pressure Apple into adopting the GSMA's RCS (Rich Communications Service) messaging protocol for a long time now, with nothing to show for it. As a matter of fact, Apple CEO Tim Cook seemed to completely dismiss the idea when he answered a question on the subject by saying that consumers should buy their moms an iPhone. Google and its Android platform aren't giving up that easily and they've just released a snarky ad to continue criticizing Apple's preferred messaging platform.

The ad's called "iPager" and mimics Apple's marketing language to reveal a retro-styled beeper, indicating that Apple's behind the curve with its chosen messaging platform. The spot states that the iPager uses "outdated messaging tech" to "text with Android," citing many of the perceived disadvantages of sticking with SMS technology when communicating with Android phones. Google didn't invent this comparison whole-cloth, as the 30-year-old SMS tech actually dates back to old-school pagers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: DuckDuckGo, a privacy-centric search engine founded about 15 years ago, has languished with a small market share as consumers face difficulties switching from Google when the behemoth is the default option on computer screens, the upstart's founder said in an antitrust trial. Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo currently has about a 2.5% share of the market for search in the US, said CEO Gabriel Weinberg, and conducts about 100 million searches a day globally. In comparison, Google conducts several billion searches daily.

Weinberg said about 30% to 40% of DuckDuckGo's users have a "strong preferenceâ for privacy and that most of the company's users switch over from Google." The company considers Google to be "far and away" its biggest competitor. "Switching is way harder than it needs to be," Chief Executive Officer Gabriel Weinberg said in federal court on Thursday. "There's just too many steps."

At an event today focused on AI and security tools and new Surface devices, Microsoft announced that Windows 11 users will soon be able to take better advantage of passkeys, the digital credentials that can be used as an authentication method for websites and apps. From a report: Once the expanded passkeys support rolls out, Windows 11 users will be able to create a passkey using Windows Hello, Windows' biometric identity and access control feature. They'll then be able to use that passkey to access supported webs or apps using their face, fingerprint or PIN. Windows 11 passkeys can be managed on the devices on which they're stored, or saved to a mobile phone for added convenience.

"For the past several years, we've been committed to working with our industry partners and the FIDO Alliance to further the passwordless future with passkeys," Microsoft wrote in a blog post this morning. "Passkeys are the cross-platform, cross-ecosystem future of accessing websites and applications." Microsoft began rolling out support for passkey management several months ago in the Windows Insider dev channel, but this marks the capability's general availability.

Microsoft will release its next big Windows 11 update, 23H2, on September 26th. The update will include the new AI-powered Windows Copilot feature, a redesigned File Explorer, a new Ink Anywhere feature for pen users, big improvements to the Paint app, native RAR and 7-zip file support, a new volume mixer, and much more. From a report: Windows Copilot is the headline feature for the Windows 11 23H2 update, bringing the same Bing Chat feature straight to the Windows 11 desktop. It appears as a sidebar in Windows 11, allowing you to control settings on a PC, launch apps, or simply answer queries. It's integrated all over the operating system, too: Microsoft executives demoed using Copilot to write text messages using data from your calendar, navigation options in Outlook, and more. This is also Microsoft's latest attempt to deliver a digital assistant inside Windows after the company shut down the Cortana app inside Windows 11 last month.

It might be more successful this time, particularly as it's powered by the same technologies behind Bing Chat, so you can ask real questions and get answers (that might not always be accurate) in return. [...] Microsoft is also adding native RAR and 7-zip support to Windows 11 with this update. That means you'll be able to easily open files like tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and many others using the libarchive open-source project that's now built into Windows 11. Microsoft is also planning to provide support for creating these file formats in 2024.

Waymo announced a "tour across Los Angeles" that allows curious residents the opportunity to ride in fully autonomous vehicles as the Alphabet-owned company begins to lay the groundwork for the launch of a commercial robotaxi service. The Verge reports: Waymo says it will make six multi-week "tour stops" in LA neighborhoods where people can hail a self-driving car without anyone in the front seat. Interested Angelenos can snag early access tickets at several pop-up events throughout the city or sign up for a waitlist. Once they receive a ticket, riders can use Waymo's fully driverless vehicles for free within the service area for one week during the allotted time.

The tour is as follows: Santa Monica and Venice Beach October 11th-November 18th; Century City November 20th-December 17th; West Hollywood December 17th-January 7th; Mid City January 8th-23rd; Koreatown January 24th-February 8th; and Downtown LA February 9th-March 3rd. Waymo's operational design domain -- the area in which its robotaxis are programmed to travel -- stretches from the West Side to Downtown LA, an area that's larger than San Francisco but smaller than its coverage in Phoenix.

At the Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain, the Linux Foundation this week announced the launch of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation. The group's mission is to deliver "an open standard accelerator programming model that simplifies development of performant, cross-platform applications." From a report: The foundation's founding members include the likes of Arm, Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. The company most conspicuously missing from this list is Nvidia, which offers its own CUDA programming model for working with its GPUs. At its core, this new foundation is an evolution of the oneAPI initiative, which is also aimed to create a new programming model to make it easier for developers to support a wide range of accelerators, no matter whether they are GPUs, FPGAs or other specialized accelerators. Like with the oneAPI spec, the aim of the new foundation is to ensure that developers can make use of these technologies without having to delve deep into the specifics of the underlying accelerators and the infrastructure they run on.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A few lucky WhatsApp beta testers got a surprising treat this week: the company appears to be testing a version of its iOS app that is also optimized for the iPad. As first spotted by WABetaInfo, version 23.19.1.71 of WhatsApp's TestFlight app includes the new iPad app as well. From what we can see in screenshots, the iPad app works exactly like you'd expect. You connect to it by scanning a QR code the same way you'd link your account to any other device. You'll see a list of your conversations on the left and your current chat on the right. It's pretty much the iOS app, but instead of seeing one pane at a time, you see both. It almost makes you wonder what took so long, especially when WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said all the way back in January of 2022 that "we'd love to do it."

Google announced today that it is opening access to more contributors to participate in Road Mapper, a tool where you can add missing roads to Google Maps in areas of the world that need it most. TechCrunch reports: Road Mapper is an invite-only platform where people participate in challenges, drawing roads located in areas with a large population, yet have a significant amount of road network missing from Google Maps. Users draw road geometry using satellite images. The drawings then go through a review process and, if accepted, will be live on Google Maps in a few days. Those interested in joining Road Mapper can fill out Google's online form. Plus, top contributors that have mapped the most roads can now refer up to five contributors via the Road Mapper Referral form. Google's blog post notes that its contributors have mapped more than 1.5 million kilometers of roads, enabling more than 200 million people to navigate with Google Maps. That's pretty impressive considering Road Mapper only launched two years ago.

Google Bard is getting support for Extensions today, incorporating essential apps like Google Maps, YouTube, Hotels, and Flights to simplify data retrieval and accelerate the creative process. Android Police reports: This integration ensures that users can seamlessly amalgamate data from myriad sources, thereby accelerating your creative process or just making it easier to accomplish basic tasks across the board. These tools were originally teased at I/O before their wider release today. The company posted an excellent explainer of how this works on its YouTube channel.

With today's update, you can now sync Bard with your Gmail, Docs, and Drive. This capability ensures that the AI collaborates with your personal content, making data retrieval and summarization more fluid. With the enhancement of the Google It button, Bard's responses can be cross-checked with Google Search, instilling greater trust in AI-generated data. Additionally, conversations initiated by others via Bard can be continued in your account, emphasizing collaborative creativity. You can learn more about Google Bard Extensions here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Controversial UK legislation that brings in a new regime of content moderation rules for online platforms and services -- establishing the comms watchdog Ofcom as the main Internet regulator -- has been passed by parliament today, paving the way for Royal Assent and the Online Safety Bill becoming law in the coming days. Speaking during the bill's final stages in the House of Lords, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay reiterated that the government's intention for the legislation is "to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, particularly for children." Following affirmative votes as peers considered some last stage amendments he added that attention now moves "very swiftly to Ofcom who stand ready to implement this -- and do so swiftly."

The legislation empowers Ofcom to levy fines of up to 10% (or up to 18 million pounds whichever is higher) of annual turnover for violations of the regime. The Online Safety (nee Harms) Bill has been years in the making as UK policymakers have grappled with how to response to a range of online safety concerns. In 2019 these efforts manifested as a white paper with a focus on rules for tackling illegal content (such as terrorism and CSAM) but also an ambition to address a broad sweep of online activity that might be considered harmful, such as violent content and the incitement of violence; encouraging suicide; disinformation; cyber bullying; and adult material being accessed by children. The effort then morphed into a bill that was finally published in May 2021. [...]

In a brief statement the UK's new web content sheriff gave no hint of the complex challenges that lie ahead -- merely welcoming the bill's passage through parliament and stating that it stands ready to implement the new rulebook. "Today is a major milestone in the mission to create a safer life online for children and adults in the UK. Everyone at Ofcom feels privileged to be entrusted with this important role, and we're ready to start implementing these new laws," said Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom's CEO. "Very soon after the Bill receives Royal Assent, we'll consult on the first set of standards that we'll expect tech firms to meet in tackling illegal online harms, including child sexual exploitation, fraud and terrorism." Beyond specific issues of concern, there is over-arching general worry over the scale of the regulatory burden the legislation will apply to the UK's digital economy -- since the rules apply not only to major social media platforms; scores of far smaller and less well resourced online services must also comply or risk big penalties.

European governments have "systematically" shrunk their railways and starved them of funding while pouring money into expanding their road network, a report has found. The Guardian: The length of motorways in Europe grew 60% between 1995 and 2020 while railways shrank 6.5%, according to research from the German thinktanks Wuppertal Institute and T3 Transportation. For every $1 governments spent building railways, they spent $1.7 building roads. "This is a political choice," said Lorelei Limousin, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, which commissioned the report. "We see the consequences today with the climate, but also with people who have been left without an alternative solution to cars."

The report found the EU, Norway, Switzerland and the UK spent $1.6tn between 1995 and 2018 to extend their roads -- but just $0.99tn to extend their rail networks. In the four years that followed (2018-21), the average gap in investment in rail and road decreased from 66% to 34%. During that time, seven countries invested more in rail than roads -- Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the UK -- while the rest spent more on roads than rail.

Agility Robotics is wrapping up construction of a factory in Salem, Oregon, where it plans to mass produce its first line of humanoid robots, called Digit. Each robot has two legs and two arms and is engineered to maneuver freely and work alongside humans in warehouses and factories. CNBC reports: The 70,000-square-foot facility, which the company is calling the "RoboFab," is the first of its kind, according to Damion Shelton, co-founder and CEO of Agility Robotics. COO Aindrea Campbell, who was formerly Apple's senior director of iPad operations and an engineering manager at Ford, told CNBC that the facility will have a 10,000 unit annual max capacity when it's fully built out and will employ more than 500 people. For now, though, Agility Robotics is focused on the installation and testing of its first production lines.

Funded by DCVC and Playground Global among venture investors, Agility Robotics beat would-be competitors to the punch, including Tesla with its Optimus initiative, by completing development of production prototype humanoid robots and standing up a factory where it can mass produce them. Shelton told CNBC that his team developed Digit with a human form factor so that the robots can lift, sort and maneuver while staying balanced, and so they could operate in environments where steps or other structures could otherwise limit the use of robotics. The robots are powered with rechargeable lithium ion batteries.

One thing Digit lacks is a five-fingered hand -- instead, the robot's hands look more like a claw or mitten. [...] Digit can traverse stairs, crouch into tight spaces, unload containers and move materials onto or off of a pallet or a conveyor, then help to sort and divide material onto other pallets, according to Agility. The company plans to put the robots to use transporting materials around its own factory, Campbell said. Agility's preferred partners will be first to receive the robots next year, and the company is only selling -- not renting or leasing -- the systems in the near term.

Meta is ending support for two first party original Oculus Quest launch titles next year without explanation. UploadVR reports: The company sent out emails to all owners of Bogo and Dead And Buried II on Friday to inform them that these apps will "end services" and "no longer be supported" after 15 March 2024, five years after they launched. The Meta Quest platform policies require developers to give customers at least 180 days notice before shutting down an app, so this appears to be Meta complying with its own policy.

Bogo was a free virtual pet app designed as a demo of Oculus Quest's wireless room scale tracking and hand controllers. It's one of the few VR apps that adapts to the size of your playspace, keeping the interactable area reachable for small rooms while encouraging physical walking for those with larger rooms. Bernie Yee, a former Meta manager who hired and led the 'Oculus REX' team that developed Bogo (as well as Dreamdeck, Toybox, First Contact, and First Steps), lamented the death of Bogo on X, tagging Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth to ask that it be preserved on App Lab. Yee was let go in the first wave of layoffs in November last year, alongside multiple of the REX team. [...] While Meta hasn't commented on the decision, the use of now-obsolete SDKs and the lack of a team to update the app likely contributed to the decision to kill it, but it's not clear why it couldn't have been demoted to App Lab.

Dead and Buried II on the other hand was a $20 multiplayer shooter - one of the first FPS games available on the Oculus Quest. It launched with two game modes, a team vs team 'Shootout' and a free-for-all 'Deathmatch'. An update just under a year later added three new modes: a 1vs1 'Quickdraw' mode and two co-op modes, Survival and Horde. Given Dead and Buried II is a multiplayer title, Meta may be sunsetting so it no longer has to maintain the servers and related online services, as it also did with the much more popular Echo Arena back in August.